Chris Lee

Head of Sales @deel

[Chris Lee @techcontrarian]

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.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

You are far more dangerous to your startup than competitors are. A hundred times more startups die from poor execution by their founders than are killed by competitors.

[Chase Passive Income @chasedownleads]

Elon Musk didn’t become a trillionaire until age 54

Relax, you still have time

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

For the first time, contractors can get paid, hold, earn and spend, all inside the same app 💸

Introducing the Deel stablecoin wallet: hold earnings in DLUSD, earn rewards, spend anywhere, with no crypto exchange, separate accounts, or lost value in transit.

Launching in Latin America today, with APAC, MENA, and Africa to follow.

Coming soon for employees! 👀

Thanks to our partners at @Stablecoin, @privy_io, @tempo, @Morpho, and @Sentora for making this possible.

Read more in the comments 👇

[Chris Lee @techcontrarian]

Excellent article

[Fryd Wiatrowski @frydwia]

https://t.co/xMP6wGowz6

[Chris Lee @techcontrarian]

@WizLikeWizard Ugh hello — I got you! @WizLikeWizard

[Chris Lee @techcontrarian]

@maxmarchione 😂

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

"If people aren't paying for our product, it's not a good enough product."

is something a lot of startups/companies need to understand

[Chris Lee @techcontrarian]

@WillManidis @nico_laqua Perhaps ScienceIO would have been a $1B outcome and not $140M outcome had you grinded harder @WillManidis

Don’t bash the pursuit the collective pursuit to accomplish something great. The performative nature will only attract like-minded individuals

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

It’s not about cargo culting, it’s about increasing your surface area for ambition. If you want to do something world historic, something big, then sometimes the symbolism behind actions signifies something - there’s a reason why signs on the side of the building matter, why beauty has value, why symbols predate history. And the symbolism behind going all in, behind doing big things, makes it such that when important decisions arise, when there’s a fork in the road in which one may choose a more defined path with little variance and ensured profit or a path with uncapped upside and more variance that is harder to pull off, the latter is more likely to be chosen. And those small decisions to be more ambitious, to care more, to respond to that annoying customer service question at 2 am even when you don’t want to, compound and in a nonlinear way make an important company, an important outcome, more likely. If you’re doing anything at all, you might as well do it right. Nor if you notice is it prescriptive that one must go all in on startups or anything else, but right now, most young builders are told that it’s morally wrong to go all in, and that deserves pushback, because being a bit more “hardcore” is a valid option that worked for lots of important “founders”, from Hernan Cortes to Napoleon to Bill Gates. Others probably accomplished just as much enjoying leisure, like Carnegie, and that’s great! But shaming those going all in is a symptom of cultural nihilism.

[Chris Lee @techcontrarian]

Excited to talk GTM for startups this Thursday. If you're a Founder trying to hire your first sales rep, or trying to get your first 10 customers, I'd love to meet you there!

[Corgi @UseCorgi]

We're excited to announce our second speaker event with @deel this Thurs!

Location: @slashapp offices
Topic: Early GTM 🎙️

Speakers:

@Jackyhuang, Founder @hardlaunching 
@adilmania, Founder @siliconmania 
@MelisaSeah, Head of Storytelling @reve (formerly YouTube and Google)
@techcontrarian, Head of Sales, Americas @ Deel

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

The new kit has launched.

To celebrate the launch of Arsenal's new kit, and Deel becoming the official sleeve partner next season, we're giving away a signed squad shirt 🔴⚪️

Retweet and comment below for your chance to win.

Winners will be announced on 21st May!!

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

https://t.co/0VSAPmjuNz

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

For years, we hit the same wall everyone else did.

You automate a few steps. Then complexity wins. And your best people are back to doing work that should run itself. That's what we set out to fix - not for our customers first, but for ourselves.

I'm proud to introduce Akai by Deel.
Akai is an interconnected system of agents that learns your workflows, automates every step, and gets smarter with every run - auditably, on any system.

Today, 100% of Deel's operations teams, across Finance, Tax, Treasury, Benefits, and HR, run on Akai. The results stopped us in our tracks:
→ 100,000+ cases handled automatically every month
→ 8,000+ hours of payment processing - now background tasks
→ Reconciliation that took 20+ days - now done in minutes
→ 100% automation in areas we couldn't reach after years of coding
→ 91,000+ manual hours saved every single month

Now, every team is now building agents themselves. No developers. No IT tickets. Just the people who know the work, running it. That's the ceiling we broke.

Now we're opening it up. With built-in voice, transactions across any payment method, and the ability to process and analyse any document or dataset - out of the box.

Your first agents could be running by tomorrow! Get early access at https://t.co/mMBMmX4fMT

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

Deel has acquired Sastrify, a leading AI-powered SaaS procurement & management platform.

Pumped to welcome Sven Lackinger, Max Messing, and the whole Sastrify team!

This is the 14th acquisition we've done at Deel.
Maybe good opp to speak about how we think about M&A:

- Don't make a deal unless it's a "hell yes"
Deals that didn't go very well were those that we were 70-85% certain. Aim for 85-99% certainty. There's enough information out there. Everything must make sense: product, roadmap, financials, and people.
You can't hope to convert hundreds of people into your culture. We go for those who already operate like we do.
Sven, Max, and their team are outstanding. We're lucky to now have them as colleagues.

- Acquire for expertise & accelerate time to market.
In 2019, we started going down the legal rabbit hole of hiring abroad. How to set up entities in other countries, different regulatory environments concerning payroll, gross-to-net salary calculations, tax compliance.
It took us 5 years of building to have an operationally great product. We can't pretend to do the same in 6 months for other products. People like Sven and Max -who have obsessed over theirs for 5-15- years are invaluable.

- We want to own 100% of the customer experience.
We started Deel IT with devices. Now we're expanding into the full software lifecycle - licenses, renewals, spend optimization. Customers want to use less vendors; it's simpler. And the more things we own at Deel, the more details we can be in.

- Integration time can get halved by doing the right things.
At Deel, we follow a simple process that cut integration time by 50%+ without adding extra risk.
Step 1: Rebuild frontend inside Deel while keeping the backend running underneath. v1 live within a month.
Step 2: Put that v1 in the hands of sales org so the 9–12 month ramp to selling comfort starts on day one.
Step 3: In parallel, engineering rebuilds the full backend natively and migrates all customers over 3–12 months.
Step 4: By month 12, the product is fully native and the sales team is already trained.

- AI is compressing the timeline even more.
The hardest part of M&A has always been rewriting backends, migrating data, and stitching systems together.
But engineers are shipping code at 4x the pace of two years ago. What used to be the bottleneck in every acquisition isn't one anymore.
And the faster you integrate, the faster you realize the synergies and compound your advantage.

- The only good deal is one where both sides look back five years later and say they're happy it happened.

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

Wednesday! 👀

The most ambitious launch in @deel's history. It's reshaped the company from the ground up and is the biggest internal breakthrough we've had.

I can't wait for you to see it.

[Chris Lee @techcontrarian]

@thejoekauffman @deel @Bouazizalex Two legends in the Finance industry

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

https://t.co/GLJ52o4rVO

[Shuo Wang @shuooo]

You crushed it at Coachella @SnoopDogg 🔥

So epic to have your support for global teams and payroll @deel 💜

One of the best marketing geniuses in the world

Big things coming soon…🍦

[Chris Lee @techcontrarian]

Nothing surprises me these days

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: Allbirds stock, $BIRD, surges over +200% after announcing they are pivoting from shoes to AI.