Deel has raised $300M at a $17.3B valuation We started about 6 years ago, struggling to even make $10K. I've never shared this before because of how embarrassing our start was. The story of how we went from $1K to $1B and the advice I'd give to my younger self:

1/ Shuo and I were in completely different worlds. She was in China, I was in Israel. Both my parents family emigrated from North Africa with nothing. One of my grandfather use to work at the French subway and the other was an electrician.

I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs but when we arrived in Silicon Valley, we were outsiders.

2/ Our original idea was to ensure freelancers get paid and not ghosted after delivering work. We built an escrow platform where money would be locked upfront and automatically released when milestones were completed.

3/ We pitched Reddit freelancers our milestone-based contracts. Nobody cared. The crushing realization: contractors don't choose payment methods, clients do.

4/ We entered pivot hell. We became a collection agency and I started sending legal letters to companies.

We recovered $7,000 from a $15,000 invoice after my email. The freelancer gave us $1,000. That was a huge WIN.

5/ We thought we'd found product market fit. But we never collected another dollar.

6/ Then a YC batchmate from Sunsama used our product differently. "I like tying contracts to payments and having payment happen as work gets done," he said. "Plus you're giving me contracts out of the box and a way to pay internationally."

7/ He wasn't solving trust issues. He wanted contracts and payments in one place, with proper compliance. We listened to the customer and pivoted to this vision.

8/ Within ten days we had 290 contractors, $5,000 monthly revenue.

9/ This is a real side from my Series A pitch deck. We raised from Andressen when we were at $50K ARR. We thought this is it. This is PMF. This business scaled to $130M.

11/ Thankful for the realization that helping people do contracts is not as big of a pain as helping them hire in a country they're not registered in.

13/ Deel was a remote only company. As it grew, I could see parity between the global payroll problems we were having and our customers also wanted solved. We built Deel for Deel.