YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Bouaziz

lines on the record: 94
first: 2025-10-22
most recent: 2025-10-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you so much for taking the time. And by the way, I think you're the first podcast I do in a while. So I don't know if that means that I'm back to less working, but I don't think so.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe we were jinxing it. I think my daughter realized that anything was not going to happen for now. So she decided to sleep through the night. But no, look, we were very lucky that my wife has a nice mat live policy and we're able to be with her and she's three months old. She's like changed how I view the word in many different ways. She definitely is a very life-changing moment. I never realized what people really meant by this, but in the back of your head, it's like the thinking about the small moments you're going to get to spend with her is a big deal. So I think your brother probably would have tips for me more than the opposite. But the one thing I would say is this is where remote work actually shines, right? Like actually get to see her every day and a lot more, I think, than the average dad.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not yet. My parents and my wife's parents are super helpful. She's so little. I want to spend time with her. That's the perk of remote work. I'm seeing her truly grow up, which is very unique. And I very value this in a way that most people can't understand.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To invest into the relationship you have there. And you can create, going back to brand awareness, I think a very, very strong brand where hopefully one day people will tell you, well, I fucking love my payroll software. Like Dill is the place I want to be hired on is the place I want to be paid. And that gets me excited, right? Like building the first truly global brand that you love as an end user to get paid on. And that really shares your value and understands your moments is like what in the long term of the business gets me excited.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, the way I think about our business, which a lot of people find super boring, I actually think this is why you passed. Not because you don't think there's a lot of potential into payroll, but because you think it's a boring business. I don't think it's boring because the way I think about this, and this is what really drives me, right? When I think about payroll, HR, I think about such significant moment in the life of people. It's where you get your paycheck. It's where you get your pay slips, your mortgage letter, your business visa, your payments, right? It's where you submit your expenses. So it's like a place that you interact with all the time in very unique key moments and events in your life. And it's super disregarded, right? I've never had someone come up to me and tell me, I fucking love my payroll software. It's the best thing I've ever used, right? And I'm like, when you're in such critical moments of the life cycle of people, new jobs, like uncertainty, you can build such a strong relationship with your end users if you actually can.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ask him, not me. Sadly, they invested in every competitor you can think of. I have a great relationship with the team. Honestly, I think...”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He cares about funders in a way that's very rare and he understands the businesses a lot more deeply than a lot of board members want to. And I saw that firsthand, right? I mean, Alfred is on the board of Kaushi and Tariq is a very close friend. And I think the impact Alfred has had on the business is very significant. Same thing for DoorDash and others. I think he's the right mix of sweet, sharp, and well-advised person that has seen things before. And I think he was an operator before as well.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he's going to love this. I really, really love Alfred Lin from Sequoia. He's going to be sad about that one. He passed on my seed round when I had no idea what I was doing. Me and Shrew met him in a coffee shop right after YC. And I've just learned to know him over the years and just like, I actually think he's one of the best investor in the world.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the mentality of the funder there is really good. Good people, honest people that truly care about building great companies and great product. There are those tall giants that are sweet at the same time. They're in an ecosystem where it reminds me in many ways of the Israeli ecosystem where it's a very tight-knit community. If you look at the successful Swedish founders as well, right? Like the Klaranas of the word or the Spotify's of the word, like Daniel, Sebastian, they kind of paved the way for those founders to be able to build great companies. And I think they really capitalized on this in the way that no one has before.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he's the right mix of clear thinker, first principle, and at the same time relentless. He's got that hands-on fire, that someone that has built a 4,000 plus people company usually loses. And on the same spirit, I don't know if you know Fred from VOI, but those two guys, I've been falling in love with Swedish tech recently. I think a lot of people have, but I've been falling in love for the last few years. And those are two of the people that I've met that I'm I know are gonna either take those companies to huge numbers or build new businesses that are gonna be significant.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he was one of the most underrated fundraisers I ever knew. And then the guy just turned the hit around like fucking crazy. And he's not one of the most hype companies in the world. So, you know what? I've actually learned to love two founders that I think are some of the most underrated founders in the world. And I think their companies are amazing and everything they'll touch in the future will be just as amazing. I don't know if you know them, but the first one is Johannes from Cree.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you should read Arlosut in Delaware. Three years of a poor way of competing in the market. You should have a read. A lot of those things are tied to old stories and old demons and were in the crossroad, but it's okay. It's not deterring us and we're able to perform for our customers. So it's all that matters”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like fighting people in product and go to market. I want you to kick my ass because you build a better product. But I'm going to give you a run up for your money because I'm pretty decent at building good products. So I love the fight when it comes to fighting through who is going to serve our customer better. And I think there's some amazing companies in our space building that way. And all of the money that flew into this space and the quality of the people that we have just makes it a super, super interesting fight. Other fights, just not my style. I'm not a very litigious person.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really changed my mind on being much more prepared across different topics. So we had policy situations, litigations, like PR, right? And I think a lot of those things there showed and exposed a lot of things in the company that we hadn't thought about, right? Like I don't exactly wake up thinking, we need to be really strong at policy. Oh, we need to be really strong at litigation. So we're much more prepared and we're consistently thinking about where do we need to reinforce ourselves, which is external to purely product and customers experience, which maybe we didn't do as much before.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The good thing is everybody is super aligned. We just want the best for the business, the best for our shareholders, the best for our employees, having people that you can look at in the eye and tell the truth at because anyway you trust each other is a huge advantage. And by the way, people don't realize that sure my co-founder is like my sister. I have three sisters. So I wouldn't say the sister that I never had, but she's my fourth sister in many way. And a lot of people like to think about funding companies with people as marriage. I think about a bit more as family for the sake of my wife being happy. And, you know, I think this type of relationship is super critical. And the more trust you can establish, the better. And if it's trust that was given by nature even better, if not, you know, you need to build that type of trust over time.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like too much risk. You're like, okay, we'll try. We try for two months. And then I came back and I said, open the entities, which he pushed back on until he decided not to. And today our employer of record product generates, I think, over 25, 30 million dollars a month, right? So best decision for the business ever.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many times actually we disagreed all the time. He hates that story, but the biggest thing he disagreed on with me, which actually was the best decision we ever made as a company, was building up our infrastructure for our employer of record product. Basically, the way employer of record work is we enable you as a company to be able to hire anyone anywhere without having a local entity. We have local entities all around the world and we employ people on your behalf. As a more risk-averse person and acting CFO at the time looked at the business and told us, hey, if you actually own the infrastructure, you take on so much liability. Let's work with partners, which was how the old school model was. And at the beginning, I pushed back and I said, you know, partners, they work on Windows Vista. They don't have the same care for customers. They don't understand service the way I think about service, the way you think about service, which is service of today. It's not going to work. And when you CFO,”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the hierarchy is thankfully my dad kind of looks at the business and understands that I'm leading it and allows me to, despite sometimes his very strong opinions, allows me to make the mistakes that I want to make.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love working with my dad. Honestly, not a lot of negative things with working with my dad. I think the best thing is wholeheartedly trust him and he's able to drive a lot of decisions in a way that comes with experience that I don't have. I'd say if you want to say one negative thing is like a lot of people have a strong misconception of working with family, at least in the United States, which was like a little weird to me. But most of the people that know us very well, they understand the dynamics between the two of us and how we work. And the closer you are to us, the more you understand how valuable the relationship really is.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that as long as I'm the best person to run this business, no matter whether it's public or private, I would like to be the one running it.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's just about being ready, like, if our infrastructure is ready, if our compliance is ready, if our leadership team is ready, which I'm just reiterating from my last answer, then we'll consider going out. That's kind of our plan.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's more. There is like socks compliance infrastructure. There's some leadership hires we need to have in place in order to be able to go out. There's things to be done there. And my take is you want to have like four or five clean quarters with your executing before you go public as well, right? So there's a couple different things at play here.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that OIC founders are more and more international and they move to the Bay Area. So by design, I think a lot of them understand the value of DIL straight away and want to hire from back home. But the truth is now we do everything. We do US Bureau, we do HR, we kind of like the full stack solution for early stage funders as well. So I think our market share there is pretty high.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or even seven years deals because payro is something super stable, something you invest in, not something you change every year, right? It's not the type of software that you want to change on a yearly basis. Being able to show super strong financials where you're like, hey, we're 15, 17% a bita. We're generating profit. We've been generating profit for three years. It's such a strong signal that you can build with us in the future and for the long term. So it made sense for us.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other players in the space are very nuts. I think I told you this before, but when we raise our series A, and maybe you can ask Anish about this, we had raised $4.3 million in our Sidron. We showed up to our series A pitch meeting with Andrew Sen's team, having Bern, I think, 400K a year and a half later. So what I'm trying to say here is as a funding principle, we've always favored sustainable growth. What's important for me is for the business to be sustainable, overgrowth. And then if we can grow as well, amazing. And the reason for that is if I'm a company in HR and I'm burning 300 million dollars a year as a customer, I really would want to put my team on that platform because the uncertainties behind it is pretty big, right? And for me, what's most important is to have a long-term partner that can really scale with me. You know, one thing that's interesting in our go-to-market is as we grew, we started signing like four or five years deals.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we did. Great example. I mean, they're a great team and they brought us licenses in our payment infrastructure. And we're building our Pairway infrastructure, also building our payment infrastructure. They made us win two years in terms of how fast we could get our structure.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're very aboriginistic. I want the best funders to join us if we can acquire them and they're really talented. We've been doing, and there'll be some news about this pretty soon, actually. Consolidation in the market. We're starting to see a lot of companies that raised a lot of money in our space that want to join forces. And we've actually acquired one company that in the UK, a very known company in the UK, in our space, and you'll know about it pretty soon. I'd say decent chance that we'll do a bunch of them. I wouldn't put a specific number on this.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quickly, yeah. We're pretty aggressive on integration. I think integration, we didn't talk about this, is the most important part of doing MA really well. And we've got a team that's really good at it, combining our HR team with our Corb dev team and our operations team. I think we can execute really fast on acquisitions and integrations. If there is reluctance from many parts of the business to integrate, it probably means that it was a bad acquisition.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the ones that didn't work were mainly the ones where we said why not instead of hell yeah so you know they come to us and they are at the end of the line they have some revenue they have something that's adjacent enough for it to be kind of relevant but not in scope enough for me to truly care and you know it's there so you're like why not and I've learned a lot from this so you know we get a decent amount of acquisition inbound if it's not a hell yeah I just don't go for it this anymore and that was like a big lesson for me and we what I will say we've always managed to make the best out of all of those acquisitions so if it wasn't hell yeah we still most of the time got really really great talent out of this that shaped the company in many different ways but now I won't go through the struggle as much I will just hire the person if I like them”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100 million bodies, yeah. I've been more than that, but it's like long term strategy of the company, the quality of the funders, of the people of the product, and how much it helps from an infrastructure perspective, from a gross margin perspective, from an experience perspective, it's probably the Instagram to our Facebook.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they were forced into it from the get go. And we met them and we looked at the product and we said that is probably one of the best product we've ever seen. We're just going to bring it in-house, give them the resources, and just start building out on top of this like all of the infrastructure we really need. One year into this, we've got infrastructure in Singapore, in Canada.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So pay space is an amazing company. We acquired them about a year plus ago. 15-year-old business, three brothers and one brother from another mother, that's how they like to talk about themselves in South Africa. And they basically had been building the payroll infrastructure we wanted to build for the last few years. We looked at every single company in the market, and I have a very aggressive Corp Dev team, as you may realize. And nothing was good. Most of the infrastructure, most of the technology, most of the teams were very weak. And we just stumble upon that team in South Africa that not only understood payroll really well, but were forced to build global payroll because South Africa was such a tiny market that they had to expend to all countries in Africa in order to be able to create a real business that can really scale to their ambition. And without realizing they had built payroll infrastructure that could scale in multiple countries.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to play fair market value. So revenue, growth, quality of the team, growth margins, potential of the business will pay, depending on how, and in that case, adding a full new line of business to deal, which is very critical, right? Not just being core product will pay the right price. We won't overpay. We won't underpay. And we're known to pay the fair price. So if it was between a 50 and 100, I'll go at 75, probably.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you build some other companies, you know, it's a bit different, where actually, if anything, I don't even need the leadership, right? I just want the customers to infra and a few of the things that they have, right? So being very upfront around like, hey, this is what we're going to need just sets you up for a better relationship. This is what I told you before. It's about keeping people happy. I've made the mistake of keeping a funder for a year or two into a business where he wasn't needed anymore. And it's sad. They lose their grid. They lose their effects and it just doesn't work out. So having those conversations, I think, is part of creating a deal where both sides of the equation come out happy.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, why not? It's not a bad thing, right? Like when you get to a point where you've worked for seven, eight years in your business, there's kind of two ways to behave, right? First, we have behaving is acting like you're going to be there for the next five years and then leaving after one year, which I've seen many people do. Or there is just being honest, like, hey, is this what you want to do for the rest of your life? Is this where you want to work? Like if we give you the resources, if we give you the infrastructure, do you want to be here for a long time? And again, you cannot always measure those conversations and you're maybe not always going to get the right honest answer. But I think it's important to have frank and honest conversations here. And like, for example, going back to Huffy, when we acquired Huffy, I was not going to run the IT, right? It's so far out of my scope in terms of truly understanding the business, the buyer, the profile, what we need to build, et cetera, that if you remove Sammy and Michael, it's going to be very tough, right? So the alignment here has to be very package, equity oriented. It has to be very aligned that they're going to be here for a long time.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's situational. Sometimes we make acquisitions where we really want the founder to state, and sometimes we actually don't think the funder is needed. So I'm going to assume you're talking about the part where we do want the funder to stay. And if we do”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, of course. And I think this fundraise is definitely going to be helping on that front and doing more acquisitions. That was one of the reasons we also raised the capital. As you know, venture capital always comes in flavor of what's everybody looking at at the moment, right? So this comes in circles, right? And in cycles, right? So eventually things will shift. And I think the companies that are maybe not AI first or in that AI hype just need to kind of hold tight and make sure that they deliver for their customers and stay close to the customers and kind of rise above the noise. If they can do that, I think they'll come up on the stronger hand. If they cannot do that, and they're amazing, then we're always looking to buy.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have the upper end as the company that's buying, right? So we could be assholes and be like, whatever. I'll just get the best deal possible. But sometimes we'll overoptimize on the outcome of the acquisition down the line versus the best deal we could get.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I have one funding principle on this actually who came to me from my father. So my father in his past life did over 50 plus MNA. That's actually how he grew his business. One thing he taught me on deal making was the only way to get a great deal done if both parties come out of the equation five years later saying we're happy this deal has actually happened. So structuring the deal in a way that's fair for both sides, even if you have the upper hand, making it in a way that like you look back on this and say, hey, you know what? As the founder of the other business, I'm so happy this deal went through is the most important part. So whether it's on retention package, whether it's on like how many people from the team you keep, whether it's on like how brutal you are about the integration, like a lot of the things that go there need to be aligned so that you're optimizing for both sides to be really happy about the deal. And it's not obvious because like a lot of those negotiations transparently.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Willing to try to sell something new because they're curious and they want to. And what happens with acquisition and the way we operate is we basically bring the product, rebuild all of the front end inside of Dill while being connected to the back end of the current company. And that happens in like two months. So we can basically like launch the product that we've just acquired in the space of two months and then give it in the hands of our sales organization so they can start learning how to sell it. In parallel, we're rebuilding the full backend of the product inside of Dill natively. And in the period of depending on how complex the product is, it takes us like three months to 12 months to rebuild the full backend and migrate all of the customers and all of those things in parallel. But in parallel, your sales org start selling your product. The early adopters see DLIT and they start selling it and”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of his very successful. This is why you back them in the first place. It can be a $10 billion company. I think DLIT, so basically what we do with acquisitions, we have quite an interesting playbook. I think that's what most of the investors were mentioning you. What we do is we do two types of acquisitions. We either do acquisitions that are core to our market and then we, in a way, buy the team, buy the revenue, bring them in-house and kind of rip and replace their infrastructure with ours pretty fast. And we're pretty good at this, actually. Or we buy smaller companies that are in adjacent domains that we want to get into. And what we usually do is we don't try to patch things together. We take the founders and we rebuild the full infrastructure from Ground Up. And the way we do this is kind of interesting because it really worked for us. So theory of cells, most salespeople take nine months to a year to be comfortable selling a product. And in that process, you're going to have a couple early adopters, which are actually the best bitpoint in your organization.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it comes to cell, I don't think there is any defocus because if they sell, it works. Then if it works, you'd be the happiest person in the world to give them more resources. If it doesn't work, it's okay. You try it.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think having one person running around when you're like 10 people, 20 people trying to sell something is defocusing. The only thing that can be defocusing is if they come and start telling you, you know, for Brazil, I need this specific thing for this country and here you just say like, no, sell what you have. But I really don't think having salespeople in different places is defocusing. And that really helped us move really fast in shaping go to market.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or if she sells. And if they do, amazing, you can ramp up and hire more of them. If they don't, then it's fine. You let them go and change them.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I always tell early stage founders that we did really well, actually, and really helped us. Because if you think about Dill's revenue split today, 50% comes from the US, a little over 35% comes from Europe. And the rest is that kind of rest of the world. And we're growing all parts. One move we did pretty early on is hire salespeople in different GEOs pretty early on just to understand the market. So instead of having like a lot of salespeople just in one country, hiring a few salespeople into other countries and kind of say, go and figure it out was really helpful for us because it really helped us ramp up across all markets really fast and having a strong understanding of what's going to work, what's not going to work, and how we should reshape our strategy. For example, we launched Japan two years into the business. And it didn't work for the first year and a half. And then eventually we changed country leads with all of the learnings from the first one. And now it's doing really well. And all of this kind of happens in parallel where like a lot of people are like, yeah, it's going to defocus you. You shouldn't be doing that. I'm like, hire a sales guys.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is brought by the core AE team when this is an interesting product for the customers. But at the same time, it's a standalone and a LEN product. So you can actually have leads that are only interested in this, and they will be the ones selling it before moving it to a core AE. And we do this across all of the different products. So immigration, global payroll, all of those different products. And an interesting thing is over time, some of your product become mature enough and your organization and your data and your knowledge becomes mature enough that you can bring some of those products into the core team, right? That's like our holy grail is for things to be so smooth that I can bring one of those products into the core team rather than having overlay A's on that front.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, here's an interesting data point for you. I know you love data. 60% of our revenue actually comes from cross-sell today. So cross-sell is actually a big part of what we do. Well, expansion, cross and expansion as well for our customers, right? So we do well and they want to open new countries or they just hire more people and things like that. So the way we've done this is basically, and I think it's pretty similar to like a couple other big organizations like Oracle and others, but it works pretty well for us. We basically have what we call a core salespeople, and they sell the product that we feel are fully mastered inside of the company, right? From an enablement perspective, from like an experience perspective, from like an end-to-end perspective, we feel like we're in full control. Our core is will quickly ramp up and quickly be the best in the market at selling this. And then we have what we call those overlay teams. So it's like our IT business. So we acquired a huffy, for example, a company, a company you invested in, which is doing amazing for us. It's grown almost 100% year on year. It's very specialized, right? And we're building a lot of IT products. So you have an overlap.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not there yet. I'm not there yet. I think for me, what's most important is we've kind of gone through, it's an interesting phase at the company today. We've gone through having two amazing products into having now like 10. And for me, the most important is making that system work amazingly well together. So like I'm not really looking to launch like 10 new products next year. It's not really my thing. It's more like how do we give the best end-to-end HR and payroll experience to our customers? And then when I get into a place where I'm like, okay, we've kind of like killed the market the same way we had for like global payroll EOR, et cetera, then that's when we might make more new bets.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple 100% year on year growth, press profitability is a good sign. When we started, here's another example, right? Like building your own peril engine, like I'm geeking to you about earlier, is like a very bold move, right? It's something that you go like, why would you do this, right? Like pay fit is a unicorn in friends just doing payroll in France. Gusto is a unicorn in the Deccorn in the US, just doing perro in the US, right? So building our own internal infrastructure from ground up with the ambition of rolling out 100 plus countries is like something that most people will look at and go, you're a little crazy. And that's true. It's like a very crazy play, actually. But when you're four years into the business, you're profitable, you're on path to grow really fast. You kind of have”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like basically, with AI automatically create the right ticket, automatically routing it to the right person and cutting the timer 90% in terms of resolution that we can have. That only comes from being able to build a lot of your internal infrastructure and is the dumbest thing to do when you're small, but it's the smartest thing to do, I think, as you scale. And the moment at which we should have started should have been a lot earlier. Because when we knew we were on the path of like, we know where we're going, we can start making longer investments and longer bets. We should have transitioned this a little bit.”
2025-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source