I have been using Sonnet 5 for most of my prototyping work, since it gave me a nice balance of token spend and output. Curious to try Sonnet 5.5, new month = new tokens! 🎉
Introducing Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family.
It’s a clear upgrade over Sonnet 5, runs more than 30% faster, and costs up to 30% less for most work.
Deel has little moments of seasonal delight, like this Oktoberfest pretzel throwing you can do on https://t.co/fEqXkZqWeE. Shoutout to our Delight team for creating moments like this 💜
So log in to your Deel web account, have some fun and see if you can beat my high score! 🥨🍻
Day 2 of #ShiftUX: Abby Covert asked "How can we shape our tools?"
Figma beat Sketch through collaboration.
Now AI has us all yapping solo to a buddy that always agrees. Tools won't set us up to collaborate, so we have to.
Can every sprint be a hackathon? 🤝
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
Payroll here. HRIS there. An accountant on call.
That was @cryptio_co's old HR stack.
Deel replaced it with one system. Their VP of People calls it "a world of difference."
Reflecting on day 1 from Shift UX conference and it's clear: our job is to stay human-centered while technology pushes us the other way.
Research matters. Showing up matters. And we can't do it alone. Things are changing for everyone, so lets support each other.
#ShiftUX2026
I love @Neko ! Got my third checkup scheduled in October, can't wait to compare the data year to year in their app. 10000% yes to have this in the employee stack to stay on top of your health! @deel for payroll & benefits is no-brainer of course!
Attended Shift UX (@RosenfeldMedia's 1st UX conf) last week. Best part: they paused the program for group sensemaking panels.
It helped to unpack what we'd just learned, together. Forces you to think, not just absorb.
More conferences need this!
#uxconference#shiftux2026
Deel just launched @get_akai Builds automations by watching your screen, no dev needed, plugs into legacy systems easily.
Favorite part: Insights. One tab shows what needs a look and what's quietly working, org-wide.
Saved us 90k+ hours.
Book a demo: https://t.co/G1MKk7DSzP
Pretty mind blowing numbers thanks to Akai, I love how this was not even intended as an external product initially. But our problems are not unique, every company has manual processes that can benefit from this easy automation solution ✨
EXCITED TO LAUNCH: Akai (https://t.co/mMBMmX4NCr)
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: https://t.co/VESnztdck3 if you're an exec at a company with hundreds of employees
When @realdrbombay started, HR was a mess. Now everything’s covered with Deel—taxes, compliance, even brain freezes. 🥶
Apply to be @SnoopDogg’s International Ice Cream Taster today @ https://t.co/rCNTihz2h1
Designing for AI interactions? I can highly recommend the great collection seen here: https://t.co/zTDYS42lps
The site has an overview of many patterns that show how AI interactions can be made clear to the user. Definitely one of my go-to sites.
#AIDesign#AIUXPatterns
Always a delight when your daily tools get quality of life updates. @figma introduced tab grouping and project folder structures in their desktop app.
Relatively small changes, that make a huge difference organizing my files. Love it! 🥰
You can announce your values, or you can live them.
We asked our team where Deel should give back. They chose @TBBforTalent and @technovation 🙌
Beyond the monetary donation, they also volunteered their own time to these organizations.
Always proud of our Deelers!
With Deel, payday is whenever you say.
Tap Anytime Pay. Send a portion of what you've already earned to where your pay always lands. That's it.
Work, pay, everything in between. In the Deel mobile app.
Available on iOS and Android, link in comments.
We took the world’s sweetest job search to the streets.
From London to LA, local artists have helped us turn our search for @realdrbombay’s Ice Cream Taster into something impossible to miss. 🎨
Part two: Snoop’s Benefits Package 200,000 applicants. One dream job.
What makes @realdrbombay’s Ice Cream Taster role irresistible? Remote flexibility, @snoopdogg as your boss, and "taste testing" in the job description, for starters. 🍦
Retirement is top of mind. It shouldn't be out of sight. 👀
Deel Retirement brings your 401(k) into Deel, connected to payroll—plans powered by @getbasiccapital and @humaninteresthq.
Live in the US today 🇺🇸, UK coming soon 🇬🇧
In search of the best Ice Cream Taster candidate in the world for @realdrbombay, we opened the doors of @SnoopDogg’s LA compound - and hundreds of people showed up to prove they had what it takes.