Head of Sales @deel
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2019
- Tweets756
- Following752
- Followers721
- Likes1.1K
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Bucket List: Take a company from $1M to $1B ARR ✅
I’m proud of what we’ve built at @deel . Growth like this doesn’t come from luck—it takes a vision for the future, world-class talent across every team, and a culture that refuses to settle for mediocrity. This starts at the top: @Bouazizalex @shuooo
Over the last 6 years, we got a lot right. But we made plenty of mistakes too. I keep thinking, if we had done just a few things differently, we could’ve grown even faster.
I’ve been quiet on social for the past year. Now feels like the right time to start sharing more—wins, missteps, and everything in between. Hopefully, others can learn from it.
First video drops next week. Follow along if you’re building.
This is 🎯
My tinfoil hat theory on Jensen situation.
Bear in mind, the only way Jensen gets ousted is if there is a BAD smoking gun, possibly around a crime.
A theory:
> honeypot Chinese spy-CEO girl gets Jensen
> she buys GPUs for megaspeed
> those GPUs ultimately go to China
> JH figures it out; tries to stop
> CCP tells him, “ha, gotcha b!tch” and blackmails him into continuing
> pressures JH to ship more GPUs
> JH has Nvidia ship said GPUs and tells team to not look too closely
> JH starts defending China as a potential customer publicly (see Dwarkesh pod below)
> CIA figures out what’s happening
[Note: Trump mentioned on 60 Minutes interview the US discovered a major AI CEO breaking the law. Trump threatened him with prosecution if he didn’t get onboard Team USA ASAP. “Do you like wearing orange?”]
> This is Jensen
> JH shuts down honeypot relationship and related GPU shipments
> China says, “No. If you don’t ship, we will destroy you.”
> Stuck between US legal system and Chinese blackmail, JH risks calling China’s bluff
> China does initial leak on JH honeypot affair. JH denies it to Nvidia board (6-12 months ago)
> US CIA / DoJ knows he did it
> China is not bluffing
> China sees anti-AI blue wave at last week’s US ballot box (which it helped catalyze) and decides now is the time to hit Jensen
> Leaks the story aggressively. Kill three birds with one stone: take out blackmail target; disrupt important AI leader; feed AOC’s oligarch AI wet dream
> Nvidia board forced to investigate. Discovers JH a) lied; b) broke the law; and c) had an affair with Nvidia employee
> Nvidia board doesn’t want to fire him but almost has to, especially if he knowingly broke the law
AND SO HERE WE ARE.
Critical question for $NVDA board is did JH knowingly do something illegal. Because everything else falls in a “policy violation” bucket that can be managed without termination.
But if he broke major laws, the board is trapped, barring USG intervention.
We shall see.
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Chris Lee retweeted
If a company isn’t going from zero to 1 billion in under a month, they simply aren’t going to make it and should give up.
Chris Lee retweeted
In a weird way, everybody is rooting for you. When you go to a job interview, the interviewer wants you to be amazing so they don’t have to look anymore. when you go on a date, the person wants to have an amazing date with you. If you make a piece of content, people want to see amazing pieces of content and they have no problem if it’s yours.
the instant you get into the mindset that people want you to do well, your entire world gets better. And you’ll be shocked to know this pattern keeps repeating in different areas of life.
Chris Lee retweeted
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …
Capitol agenda: Dem gavels are coming for Elon Musk politi.co/4dPcGpd
Chris Lee retweeted
AI has read the whole internet. But it’s never run payroll or a business.
We’re changing that.
Today, we’re launching Emet, our AI lab for model evaluation and training, and Pangaea, our first family of models for global work.
On real payroll tasks, the best AI model fully solves only 49%. Close enough to look right. Wrong enough to break a paycheck.
At Emet, in-country experts define what getting it right looks like. We turn that into public benchmarks and training data, and score every model against them. Ours included.
Pangaea is the first proof. Built on open-weight models and trained with Emet, it gets close to top-model accuracy, up to 3x faster, at a fraction of the cost.
@deel and the payroll teams that joined us bring decades of experience running payroll, HR, and compliance across 150+ countries. Knowledge the internet doesn’t have.
Emet puts it to work for every AI model, not just ours.
This is wild. Works super well on mobile. @olivers_tools you should be collecting email when signing up to build a community and monetize
This quoted post is unavailable.
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Chris Lee retweeted
🏀 Deel is now the official HR and Payroll Partner for the @warriors!
Champions are built on precision, systems that work, and on the details that matter more than anyone realizes.
Golden State gets that, and so do we. Proud to partner with a team that wins the right way.
Excited to invite you all to amazing games, and perhaps see you courtside 👀
Chris Lee retweeted
The US government will give your startup up to $1.55M and take 0% equity.
@NSF's America's Seed Fund is open again after Congress reauthorized it in April.
Three tracks:
- Phase I: up to $305K to prove the idea
- Phase II: up to $1.25M to build it
- Fast-Track: up to $1.55M, both phases in one go
Who can apply:
- US-based startups with 500 or fewer employees
- 51%+ owned by US citizens or permanent residents
- Not majority owned by VCs
- All the work done in the US
How it works:
- Send a 3-page Project Pitch first
- NSF invites the best ones to submit a full proposal
- Next full proposal deadline: Nov 4
Phase I funding rates have run about 10 to 20%. It's work, but nobody takes your cap table.
Application link 👉 seedfund.nsf.gov
Bookmark and tag a tech founder who needs this.
Chris Lee retweeted
We're hiring Deel's first Chief Scientist.
The labs are making models smarter. We're building what comes after: AI that does high-stakes work reliably, at global scale. Payroll that can't be wrong. Agents that act, not just answer.
You'll set the research agenda, build the benchmarks, and stay hands-on, with data on how 150+ countries work and a research-to-production loop measured in weeks.
Reports to the me directly! Know someone? I'd love to chat.
Chris Lee retweeted
Two things matter most when hiring executives or promoting leaders internally:
1. Can they hire exceptional people?
2. Can they solve hard problems?
External executives are usually experienced at building teams, but often lack the context and content depth to solve the hardest problems themselves.
Internal leaders usually get promoted because they’re exceptional problem solvers. The question is whether they can become exceptional at hiring.
The best leaders can do both.
Want to renew your passport? Got married and want to change your last name? You knew it would be a DMV-like experience. Navigate a website built 20 years ago, schedule an appointment a month out, go to physical government office to wait two hours to be called up, etc. Turns out poor user experience, slow speed, and accepted mediocrity was just a skill issue. Incredible to witness what happens when you run a country like a tech company. @jgebbia delivering the equivalent of an Apple keynote on the new america.gov website. 👏👏🇺🇸
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Chris Lee retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: The Sales Machine Behind $17.3B Deel
Co-Founder & CRO Shuo Wang (@shuooo)
$1M → $100M → $1B → $1.5B+ ARR
I sat down with Shuo in the South of France to break down the *sales machine* behind one of tech’s fastest-growing companies.
@deel stats:
› $1.5B+ in revenue
› $17.3B valuation (Ribbit, Coatue, a16z)
› 40,000+ customers
› 15 acquisitions
› Launched Akai, its AI agent platform
(Rumors a crazy new ai product launching soon 👀)
Deel added >$140M ARR in 90 days without increasing headcount by automating~600 Full Time Employees' equivalent in work with Akai
Shuo co-founded Deel alongside Alex Bouaziz (@Bouazizalex), Co-Founder & CEO, in 2019. They built Deel as a global company from day 1. Today, the company helps businesses hire, manage & pay teams around the world.
We also get into:
› Why Shuo thinks founders simply aren't selling enough
› Building & incentivizing a remote sales organization across 120 countries
› How an MIT-trained robotics engineer became CRO
› Shuo and Alex's founder dynamic, going global from day one
› What she's learned from James Dyson & Jeff Bezos
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Shuo Wang, Co-Founder & CRO at Deel
(00:41) How Deel went from $100M to $1B ARR in 3 years
(02:43) Why Deel went global from day one
(03:36) Who uses Deel? From ElevenLabs to Chanel
(04:16) Hot take
(05:15) Why sales is really about systems
(06:18) How to build a winning remote sales team
(07:48) Going global with Snoop Dogg
(08:34) How Shou & Alex divide roles
(09:23) The founder who inspired Shuo
(10:24) The Bezos mindset
(11:36) NEW Hot take
If I were a Senior in High School, I would be considering this alt path to higher education. The current university 4 year bachelor program is outdated. For 1 year, you get to learn from world class operators on how to build companies. This is an incredible opportunity with @a16z : xitter.cf/gaganbiyani/status/210…
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Chris Lee retweeted
Deel’s VCs watching the company add over $140M in ARR in 3 months without hiring a single person
EXCITED TO LAUNCH: Akai (akai.run)
Deel added >$140M ARR in 90 days without increasing headcount by automating~600 Full Time Employees' equivalent in work with Akai.
Akai was an internal tool to automate our painfully repetitive operations in Finance, HR, Accounts Payable, and Compliance, etc. We never intended to make this a product.
But we watched revenue per employee grow from $130K to $215K
We built >8k agents that do the work of ~600 employees
It had such a dramatic impact on our business that today we are launching it for everyone.
How it works: Say you're automating payment reconciliation:
1. Record your screen while manually matching a messy transaction and Akai will capture your screen, voice, server requests
2. Akai will see that you pulled unformatted wire transfer info from an archaic bank portal, put it in some excel sheet, checked NetSuite invoices, payment history, and put a ticket on Zendesk
3. Akai reads between the lines and build a workflow + steps + conditional guardrails. It learns tacit edge cases, like resolving malformed invoice references without you writing a single regex
4. Simply connect NetSuite, your ledger, Zendesk, PSPs, and even legacy bank portals with zero API access
5. Run the workflow and tell it what to adjust in plain English: "strip slashes on wire memos and auto-apply partial payments." It adapts instantly
6. Once it works for you, add 100s of colleagues. Your entire payment ops team forks and extends the workflow for new PSPs, secondary ledgers, or regional settlement rules
7. We automated 85% of our payment reconciliation end to end, eliminating 500+ hours of soul-crushing manual grunt work every single week.
Claude Code/Codex can't do this in multiplayer mode. Every person rebuilds the same skill from scratch in their own way.
Deel built Akai to:
1. Understand backend operations edge cases (it had to work for our 7000 person team first)
2. Collaborative across 1000s of employees
3. Self-Learning from millions of runs
4. Optimises cost and gets cheaper every run
We're so confident that we're announcing an Automation Guarantee:
If our engineers can't automate a thousand of hours of work in your first 30 days, you get a full refund.
Book a demo: akai.run if you're an exec at a company with hundreds of employees
This is wild: “Automation Guarantee
If our engineers can't automate a thousand of hours of work in your first 30 days, you get a full refund.”
EXCITED TO LAUNCH: Akai (akai.run)
Deel added >$140M ARR in 90 days without increasing headcount by automating~600 Full Time Employees' equivalent in work with Akai.
Akai was an internal tool to automate our painfully repetitive operations in Finance, HR, Accounts Payable, and Compliance, etc. We never intended to make this a product.
But we watched revenue per employee grow from $130K to $215K
We built >8k agents that do the work of ~600 employees
It had such a dramatic impact on our business that today we are launching it for everyone.
How it works: Say you're automating payment reconciliation:
1. Record your screen while manually matching a messy transaction and Akai will capture your screen, voice, server requests
2. Akai will see that you pulled unformatted wire transfer info from an archaic bank portal, put it in some excel sheet, checked NetSuite invoices, payment history, and put a ticket on Zendesk
3. Akai reads between the lines and build a workflow + steps + conditional guardrails. It learns tacit edge cases, like resolving malformed invoice references without you writing a single regex
4. Simply connect NetSuite, your ledger, Zendesk, PSPs, and even legacy bank portals with zero API access
5. Run the workflow and tell it what to adjust in plain English: "strip slashes on wire memos and auto-apply partial payments." It adapts instantly
6. Once it works for you, add 100s of colleagues. Your entire payment ops team forks and extends the workflow for new PSPs, secondary ledgers, or regional settlement rules
7. We automated 85% of our payment reconciliation end to end, eliminating 500+ hours of soul-crushing manual grunt work every single week.
Claude Code/Codex can't do this in multiplayer mode. Every person rebuilds the same skill from scratch in their own way.
Deel built Akai to:
1. Understand backend operations edge cases (it had to work for our 7000 person team first)
2. Collaborative across 1000s of employees
3. Self-Learning from millions of runs
4. Optimises cost and gets cheaper every run
We're so confident that we're announcing an Automation Guarantee:
If our engineers can't automate a thousand of hours of work in your first 30 days, you get a full refund.
Book a demo: akai.run if you're an exec at a company with hundreds of employees
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