rob
1.3K posts
@luke_metro So happy you brought that up, I have a podcast for you
Molly O’Shea@MollySOShea
BREAKING: @deel Hits $1.4B+ ARR Co-founded by CEO Alex Bouaziz (@Bouazizalex) & CRO Shuo Wang (@shuooo), Alex shares their hypergrowth playbook.. Founded in 2019, at only 7 years old: - Deel has scaled to $1.4B+ ARR - Reached a $17.3B valuation - 40K+ customers across 150+ countries - 3+ years of being profitable Deel has rapidly become the #1 platform for hiring & paying employees worldwide. We discuss: • Scaling Deel to $1.4B+ ARR • Serving 40K+ companies across 150+ countries • Deel’s 10+ acquisition M&A strategy • Building a profitable hypergrowth SaaS company • The future of global hiring & distributed teams • How AI agents will transform the workforce Recent Financing: Oct 2025, Deel announced a $300 million Series E funding round, valuing the company at $17.3 billion co-led by Ribbit Capital (@RibbitCapital) as a new investor, alongside long-time partners Andreessen Horowitz (@a16z) & Coatue Management (@coatuemgmt). This was filmed in London February 12, 2026 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO at Deel (02:05) Working with co-founder & CRO Shuo Wang (03:54) What Deel actually does (05:05) Biggest customers (05:54) $17B valuation and latest funding round (06:35) How Deel approaches fundraising (07:50) Hitting $100M ARR and early growth (09:25) Why raise money if you are already profitable? (10:35) Inside the latest funding round (12:03) Why payroll is a huge global opportunity (14:21) How Deel expanded its product stack (15:21) The challenges of hiring globally (16:18) Running a 7,000 person fully remote company (18:29) Tips for building remote teams (19:50) Why Deel went global from day one (22:47) How AI is changing hiring (25:00) Deel’s moat in an AI world (26:19) A question from Micky Malka (26:57) From airlines to oil and gas: who uses Deel (27:58) M&A strategy and integration playbook (34:33) Biggest mistakes companies make with acquisitions (35:56) How to retain founders after acquisitions (36:34) Deel's new CFO (39:09) What it takes to be IPO ready (40:29) How AI could affect Deel’s future (42:55) The "Dubai founder controversy" (46:00) Leading in a competitive market (50:47) The biggest misconception about Deel (53:27) The right people around you (56:51) The "default optimism" (58:33) What’s next for Deel (01:01:05) The future of autonomous agents (01:03:35) Biggest lessons from Shuo (01:06:34) What makes a great salesperson (01:08:32) Partnering with Arsenal
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Weirdly, inventing a fake CEO interview was only the second most dubious reporting tactic in this story!
Eugenia Kuyda@ekuyda
we've reached peak journalism: Vanity Fair wanted to write a feature story about Dario but never got an interview so just asked Claude to make it up
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we've reached peak journalism: Vanity Fair wanted to write a feature story about Dario but never got an interview so just asked Claude to make it up
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We've reached an agreement to acquire Astral.
After we close, OpenAI plans for @astral_sh to join our Codex team, with a continued focus on building great tools and advancing the shared mission of making developers more productive.
openai.com/index/openai-t…
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Anthropic, one of the most innovative companies in the world, is using Qualtrics, which was founded in 2002, as its survey tool for Cowork users.
Anthropic's core business is building the world's leading models, not survey tools. While they could do it, why spend the time and resources?
Hard to imagine a world where companies in-house a significant part of 3rd-party apps, simply because they want to focus on what their business does best.
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@joshpuckett @bluewmist oof yeah. best things in life are (mostly) free.
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Anthropic's AI assistant Claude is being used for everything from life advice to complicated work tasks. But what happens when it's prompted to generate a pitch deck for a startup from a single prompt? CBS News' @laurennfich tried it out.
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@BrianYKim_BYK @Rippling we love helping founders move quickly -- thanks for the feedback brian!
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@Rippling 's new Rippling AI is honestly scary good for company planning as they go more horizontal... plus shocked at how fast the team iterated on feedback I gave a few days ago.
We're taking notes at Kestral on doing this for product teams... props to them.
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@aaalexliu a lot of folks like alex have been working very hard to make this great — and to work the way a company-wide G+A AI analyst should. this is a big launch.
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The hardest part isn't the AI... it's deep, un-throttled, permission-ed plumbing into all of rippling's data and product capabilties
Parker Conrad@parkerconrad
Rippling launched its AI analyst today. I'm not just the CEO - I'm also the Rippling admin for our co, and I run payroll for our ~ 5K global employees. Here are 5 specific ways Rippling AI has changed my job, and why I believe this is the future of G&A software. 🧵 1/n
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Rippling launched its AI analyst today. I'm not just the CEO - I'm also the Rippling admin for our co, and I run payroll for our ~ 5K global employees.
Here are 5 specific ways Rippling AI has changed my job, and why I believe this is the future of G&A software. 🧵 1/n
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Been playing with @Rippling AI this week.
Typed in: "I'm trying to plan an offsite for the team sometime in 2026. Suggest windows of times when the least amount of vacations are taken (based on historic data) and are spaced outside of national holidays and school holidays in the Bay Area." Got a bunch of windows, instantly, from live data.
Software in the AI era is great!
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Anthropic's AI usage by country ranking is basically a "technologically-advanced, wealthy countries doing cool shit" ranking.
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“Give me top 5 financial news in last 24h. Be concise.”
I write it on an index card
Put it in the screenless phone
It gives me what I request
No need for exposure to the poisonous “algorithm”
Personal agents are the future
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"There's something about this culture of young people coming up where they're not afraid of hard work. They're not afraid to pop a Zyn and work at the factory all day."
Why @KTmBoyle is bullish on Zoomers:
"The best quote that summarizes why I'm so bullish on the Zoomers is Alysa Liu after winning her gold. She said, 'I love to struggle. It makes me feel alive.'"
"It's the opposite of the morose theater kid vibes that we got from the millennial generation, where everything was very different in how they operated."
"Like Jack Hughes—they get their teeth knocked out, they come back and say, 'It's not even a question. Of course I got my teeth knocked out. It's hockey.'"
"And that means we're seeing totally different companies than we saw out of the Facebook diaspora—which was very much the Harvard dorm room—I like to work on my computer, I like to build apps. It's a totally different style of founder."
"The next generation is so patriotic and bullish on the American project. I think this generation cares a lot about the country. And it shocked us. @davidu and I talk about this all the time—for some of these young people, they were not born on September 11th. They have no recollection of the things that the millennials remember, or anyone older than us remembers, but they care about the country."
"They look up to people like @elonmusk, to people like Alex Karp. They look up to people who've been doing the hard thing for 20, 30 years and they want to do it too."
"It's a different generation of founder that we've had the privilege of seeing very, very early on. I think the rest of the country is going to define tech and Silicon Valley by these people for the next 10–20 years."
From @nypost
tae kim@firstadopter
“I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive” – Alysa Liu
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When the New Yorker profiled marc andreessen, he basically shut down all discussion of his actual upbringing and instead talked about Charles Schulz. When the author suggested a Rilke poem that could shed light on his situation, "he stared back in absolute horror."
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It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.
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Our cracked team just used Software Factory to rebuild and replace Jira in a little more than a month.
We first spent 3.5 weeks planning. This is Software Factory’s superpower.
It allowed our lead PM, Designer and Architect to thoughtfully describe and detail exactly what they wanted. Software Factory then did the heavy lifting in filling in the blanks and allowing our senior tech folks to sharpen the direction of what they wanted.
Then in 2.5 weeks 2.5 junior devs built a replacement.
This will launch as an updated Planner module inside of Software Factory on Tuesday.
It’s beautiful, clean and super useful.
Try it here: 8090.ai
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