Sunshine Lake

My first interview with Shuo Wang (@shuooo), Co-Founder & CRO of @Deel. 1:08 Designing Deel To Scale Quickly 3:28 Why Companies Should Go Global Early 7:30 Building Deel’s Sales Team 10:33 Why Shuo Loves Sales 14:44 Pivoting 3 Times During YC & Being Shameless 19:06 Dreaming About Intercom 22:04 Solving Payment Delays Early On 25:11 Joining YC As A Crypto Payment Platform For Content Creators 32:37 How To Make Decisions Before You Have Data 36:30 Why It Was So Painful To Open Corporate Entities During Covid 39:57 Thinking Outside The Box 44:15 Why Covid Was “A Lifetime Opportunity” For Deel 46:11 Deel Speed 47:55 Argentina & Brazil 50:07 Interviewing Deel’s First 400 Employees 51:33 Screening For Happiness 52:59 Creating Ghost Busters (Special Projects Team) 59:16 Having A Co-Founder You Can Rely On 1:03:31 Why Offsites Are Important 1:06:07 Torturing Yourself Into Greatness 1:07:20 Learning How To Run A Business From Her Mom 1:11:26 Growing Up In China With Her Grandparents 1:15:51 Moving To The United States At 16 1:24:13 Building An Air Purifier Company In China 1:30:18 Being An Outsider In Silicon Valley 1:31:08 Focusing On One Product vs. Building Multiple Products 1:32:46 What PMF Was Like At Deel 1:34:46 How Shuo Thinks About Risk 1:37:18 Understand The Problem, Not The Solution 1:42:08 Creating An 11-Star Customer Experience 1:43:44 What Makes Alex Special 1:46:00 Poker 1:46:43 Always Look At The Positives Even In Tough Situations

We just raised an $11M seed to help developers build complex agents across any model and any tool in 5 lines of code. Our round was led by @KindredVentures (@stevejang) and @saga_ventures (@maxaltman, @braveben, @itsthomson). At @DedalusLabs, we believe the future of AI agents isn’t linear or deterministic. Agents should know when to stop, when to branch, when to reattempt a task, and when to pause and ask for context. As a developer, we make your job simple: define the prompt, select the right tools and guardrails, and let your agent run. We were tired of writing hundreds of lines of code and battling Dockerfiles and infra—all for a spaghetti agent that breaks under stress. With Dedalus, you don’t have to do things the hard way. Our open-source SDK supports vendor-agnostic model handoffs, chaining both local and hosted (MCP) tools, and streaming across any provider—all in 5 lines of code. Plus, our cloud infra lets you deploy an MCP server in 3 clicks so anyone can equip their agent with your tools. Let us do the heavy lifting so your agents can fly 🪽 Thank you to our incredible team and our early supporters: @c10n, @habibh from @e14fund, @YazanElBaba from @emergencecap, @donnystalter from @SunshineLakeVC, @karrwinn from @transposevc, @liquid2V, @fpvventures, @forwarddeploy, @AntWilson, @iamcal, @Thom_Wolf, @ashtom, @HazanPrinceton, @tri_dao