An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: … early days, it’s very important to just go back to the basics, build the skeleton before you put on the makeup. So the first question I would ask is, do you have a website? Is it fast? Do the search engine knows that it exists? Okay, great. The next step would be, can people find it? If they can’t find it, do you need to write content to make sure that people can find it? Only after all of those questions are answered, should you then consider, do I have money? Can I put it behind some paid ads to make sure people come to my website? You can’t run a successful paid ads program if you have a website that’s loading in four plus seconds. So really going back to the basics and starting from a good experience at the core and then expanding step-by-step from there.

Lenny: Welcome to Lenny’s Podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today’s most successful products. Today my guest is Meltem Kuran Berkowitz. Meltem is head of growth at Deel, which is arguably the fastest growing SaaS business of all time, possibly even faster than Ramp, which we delved into in a previous episode. They went from $0 in revenue to a mind-boggling$300 million in revenue in three years, while also staying EBITDA positive.

Meltem has led their growth team from the early days. And today leads all their growth efforts, including paid ads, product marketing, content, community, brand and more. Before joining Deel, she was leading marketing efforts at Bench Accounting. In our conversation, Meltem shares how Deel kick started growth through low-cost growth channels like tapping into communities like Reddit and also content and SEO. She also talks about how she evolved her thinking on growth investments as the company grew. She shares a bunch of tactical advice for how to do SEO well, how to do paid ads well, and how to structure your early growth team and prioritize your early investments. She also shares her experience building a culture of speed and optimism and so much more. Enjoy this episode with Meltem Kuran Berkowitz after a short word from our sponsors.

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Meltem, thank you so much for being here, welcome to the podcast.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Thank you for having me, I’m very excited to be here.

Lenny: I’m more excited that you’re here. So you’re head of growth at Deel. For people that aren’t familiar with Deel, can you just give us a sense of what does Deel do briefly? And then also can you just share some stats around the trajectory of Deel? It feels like it’s been this extraordinary journey, and I’m curious just to hear some of the stats of just how extraordinary.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, so Deel is payroll, HR, and compliance platform for global teams. So essentially we help companies expand globally with tools like Deel HR, immigration, employer record hiring, independent contractor hiring, payroll, both global and US. So whether you’re trying to hire someone as a full-time employee in Japan or you’re trying to make sure your contractor in Germany has everything they need on day one, our platform allows you to take care of everything all in one place.

And when I joined Deel, actually that was around July, 2020, we were less than a million dollars in ARR. And then over time, within the first year on January, 2021, we were at $4 million ARR. We finished 2021 with 57 million. April '22, we were looking at a hundred million. And then we started off this year with$295 million in ARR. And what we’re particularly proud of is that we’ve been EBITDA positive. So that’s something that we are very, very proud of on top of the ARR growth.

Lenny: Amazing. And you said that you were super early at Deel. Can you give us a sense of just how early and what that was like?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I was the second hire to the marketing team, and I was I believe either employee 19 or 20 on the overall Deel team.

Lenny: We had the head of product from Ramp on this podcast, and it feels like there’s this little bit of which company grew faster early on in the trajectory of the two, but we don’t have to debate it. It feels like these are maybe the two fastest growing SaaS businesses in history. Does that sound about right?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: That’s true, yeah. So Ramp was the first one to be crowned the fastest growing, and then we took that crown from them. So I think we’re both right, in that at a certain point in time we’ve each been the fastest growing. But they’re amazing.

Lenny: What I want to start with is something that I heard about you, which is that you specialize in cheaper growth channels, and that’s actually the reason that Deel ended up hiring you, is they wanted to find ways to grow cheaply. And so a couple of questions. One is just, what did you find worked really well from that perspective at Deel? And then two, what are today’s maybe cheaper growth channels that you think people are under investing in? Whatever you’re willing to share there, I don’t know if you want to give away all your secrets.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I’m happy to give away all and everything. So I think before we dive into the list of cheap channels, which I will get to, it’s very important to notice, especially in the B2B world, most of the businesses are started because there’s an active problem. And so when you go out to the market and try to answer people’s questions, people don’t want to be sold to, they want their problem solved. So those cheaper channels are often places where people are just trying to get an answer to their question. So whether that be search engine optimization through the articles that you write for people, looking onto Reddit where people are asking these questions in communities, forming partnerships with other groups that are trying to answer these questions, existing communities where other business leaders are connecting with each other and looking at their peers to find answers to shared problems that they’re having, or places like Quora. That’s, when you think about cheap channels, that’s a really good place to start, is just add value to people, answer their questions.

And when you answer their questions and present your solution, if it’s a fit to what they’re looking for, that ends up being a cheap channel for you. You don’t necessarily have to advertise, when you go to Reddit and you set up those keywords to be tracking when people ask certain questions, you’re not paying any money to do that. You’re just seeing, oh, someone has this question, I have the answer to that, here you go. And connecting with them, it takes time. But early on, those were a lot of the things that we invested in.

And I think a lot of people jump that because they think, “Oh, it’s one person here, two people there.” But when you start helping people, that combined with word of mouth, and guess what, these are digital places, you provide one answer and your answer lives out there for other people to repeatedly refine. As long as we’re not talking about a closed Slack community, maybe a conversation happening in DMs. So when I think about cheap channels, I think about where are people asking the questions, that might be Google or that might be Reddit or any other channel, and providing them the answers, so they know that your solution exists.

Lenny: Okay, this is awesome. So this Reddit example is that, which you actually did, you set alerts for when people have questions about HR hiring internationally I imagine, and then had someone go in there and give them some advice?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes, exactly that’s what we did.

Lenny: Wow, I love that.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: It’s important to notice that if you’re looking at a subreddit of about a thousand people, recognize the upper size of this audience, you’re not going to win 5,000 businesses through that Reddit community, but you’re maybe going to win 10% of the people there that are having this problem. So it’s very important when investing in these cheap channels to focus on what’s the upper limit of the audience size.

And also I see a lot of people sometimes go blindly into SEO. They’re like, “We’re just going to write content,” which I’m a huge fan of SEO, happy to discuss that later, but if people aren’t asking this question to Google, you can write all the content you want, it doesn’t matter, nobody’s going to find it.

Lenny: I love this so much, because it connects with something I find again and again, is one of the more effective early growth channels is tapping into an existing community and piggybacking off of what they’ve already built. Airbnb is a little bit of an example where they went to Craigslist. Actually most people pull people off Craigslist, Uber pull people off Craigslist, Lyft, so many companies just piggybacked off Craigslist and built up their own company.

But what you said is so important, which is you can’t just go into a community and be like, “Hey, everyone, check out what I’ve got.” You need to add value to people and add value to the community, otherwise no one’s going to pay attention to you, they’re going to kick you out.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Exactly.

Lenny: And so I think that is a really important insight is if you’re trying to say piggyback off of a community, the most important thing is you need to add value to the community.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, be someone people actually want to talk to.

Lenny: I love that. Is there a tool that you found for that Reddit strategy of just how to know if someone’s talking about hiring say internationally?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I did a very janky assistant setup, I’m not proud of it, but it works. Someone else out there built it and I just plugged in the keywords we were looking for into it.

Lenny: I know it wasn’t just Reddit, and I’m curious what else you found was worth your time, but how did you figure out that’s where your potential community and potential users were spending time?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Well, I think over time Reddit became the place that you go to when you want peer answers, whether that peer is someone right next to you or someone halfway across the world. So it was a very obvious place for me to go to understand, what’s top of mind for my audience? But also there are so many subreddits, whether it’s founders or HR managers, that people are just asking their community. Because oftentimes they have very specific questions. You can’t just ask that to Google because they have one thing that means that they might not be able to qualify for the exact solution that is what’s most used out there. So Reddit just became the place over the years for people to ask their specific questions semi-anonymously and get answers from their community, and multiple answers to be able to judge which works better versus didn’t. So it was one of the first places that myself and my team went to.

Lenny: And is this something that worked really well, mostly at the beginning to kickstart growth or how early was this? And then how much of your growth would you say came from this sort of strategy early on?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I believe I set up that little keyword tracking within the first day of me starting my role at Deel. So it was very, very early. And we still do this by the way. We still provide answers across Reddit, Quora communities. We’re still out there connecting with people. Over time, of course, it went from maybe being 15% of our funnel to less than 5% of our funnel because the rest of our funnel has grown a lot. But the next number of people that we get to share our solution with through those channels have continued to grow over time.

Lenny: Coming back to something I asked that I want to touch on is, in today’s world are there any cheaper growth channels that you are excited about? Or is it essentially the same idea? Look for where your potential users are and ideally asking questions that you could help answer? Is that roughly how you think about it still?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: That is still roughly how I think about it. I would add social channels to that as well. I think Twitter’s a great place, people ask questions oftentimes, so there are communities. And when someone has answered that question, other people piggyback off of that. But anywhere where someone is asking a question, I would consider to fall into this category of a cheap channel.

Lenny: What’s an example of answering a question in a value-add way versus a maybe less effective way in your experience?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I would say the least effective way would be, “Hey, we’ve solved that problem, check out our website.” Okay, cool, if you have five seconds, do that. But the value-add way would be explaining what the solution to that problem is. Because the reality is there are a lot of people out there who can probably solve this, and then providing your solution, but answer their question first, and then let them decide if they want to come with you or go with someone else. But the whole point of someone asking a question isn’t to be sold a solution. It’s like, “I just need an answer.” So genuinely treat this person like a friend of yours, answer their question, be like, “Yes, it’s doable. No, it’s not doable. Yes, you can do it, but you need to consider X, Y, Z. If you want to learn more about it, you can chat with us.”

Lenny: And these were people on the team or you answering these questions, it wasn’t some automated system?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: It was never automated. It still isn’t today. We would never automate our interactions with people. So early days, it was myself, the other people on my team, our co-founders, which to this day they still do by the way. So it’s a lot of people on the team. Every single person on the team has access to these. And whoever is the first person to jump in will flag it. And sometimes you’ll see on a Twitter, someone will write a question, there’s three people from Deel team has answered. We’re like, “Okay, I think enough of us have provided value here.”

Lenny: That’s amazing. And I’m spending a lot of time on this, but this is such an interesting and important tactic that clearly worked to help you all start and it’s cheap. And most, at least B2B, companies could probably leverage this. So when people are thinking about where to go, maybe do this, you mentioned Twitter, maybe Reddit, maybe Quora. Is there anything else, just like the sphere of potential places founders can go think about whether maybe people are asking questions they could answer there?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, there are a lot of closed communities, so there are still … they could be Slack communities, Discord, places that founders choose to connect with other founders. Or we have partnerships with places like the Y Combinator, where once you go through a certain program or you qualify to be in the club, whatever that club may be, you get to get access to this community where you can talk to other people. So those are considered closed communities. It’s not as easy to gain access to. But if you can find a way to gain access to those communities, they’re also great places to be.

Lenny: And then step number one is add value, right?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes.

Lenny: You can’t just get in the community, “Hey, check out Deel everyone.”

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Otherwise you’ll just get kicked out. You can try not adding value, you’re not going to last very long.

Lenny: Yeah. If you think about the pie chart of how growth happened at Deel early on and then today, what would that roughly look like? What percentage of early growth came through this versus SEO or whatever else worked, and then today? Whatever you can share of where growth comes from.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Today, roughly about I would say 50% of our growth continues to come from what we would consider non-paid channels, through whether it be partnerships, SEO, these kinds of moderations. So early on that was more close to 80% to 90%. But that number has grown. Again, the net number has grown, but the percentage of the overall value has shrunk because other channels have also grown significantly.

Lenny: Awesome. Okay. So let’s talk about SEO. First of all, how important has that been to the success and growth of Deel? And then also just what have you learned about what is important to get SEO right?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah. So I would say for SEO, the biggest mistake people make is they will just shove keywords. They’re like, “Okay, these are the keywords people are searching for, I need to make sure I mention it five times.” Obviously do that, make sure that the content that you wrote answers the question. But the main thing to think about it is, is the Google search over? If someone reads your content, if they typed in something to Google, and then they read the article that you’ve published, are they going back to Google to continue reading more or is the Google search over? Because ultimately that’s what the search engines care about is, I want to make sure this person gets their answer quickest way possible.

So when you think from that perspective, it’s much easier to actually write things that people want to read, and you’re not just meandering and going on and on, shoving a bunch of keywords that people are just like, “I’m bored, I’m bouncing, I’m going somewhere else.”

So asking that question of, is the search over is a really good place to start, instead of just shoving keywords. And our content team is amazing. I would say they’re more of an operational team than they are a creative team. The way they run things, the way they publish the articles, there’s a very clear framework that is used to decide what gets published when and what doesn’t get published by the same token. So all of those things are very important to consider, instead of just being like, “Oh, this keyword has 10,000 monthly visitors, I’m just going to write a bunch of things about that.”

Lenny: What’s an example of a page that you wrote that ends people search and gives them what they need?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: A lot of people wonder what an EOR is because that’s an employer of record. They tend to be confused about exactly what that is. So we do very well in explaining to people what EOR is and isn’t and what its limitations are. Because the first question that you will have after the EOR question’s answered is, okay, what’s the downside? When do I need to not use it? So for us, that’s one of the content pieces that does very well.

Lenny: I’d love to spend more time on this operational element of the SEO team. Maybe one question is just what is that bar that tells you that it’s ready to publish and worth going out versus it’s not ready?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes. So I can’t take credit to this, this is all of our team’s work. But we have this framework that we call the traffic light system. Essentially we go, whenever the team is going to do a content series, they will go and find up to 700 keywords. These are keywords that are related to what we do. So they might be closely related, they might be distant related. And then those set of keywords get ranked by highest volume to the lowest volume. So then you have an Excel sheet, keywords on the left, volume on the right. And then you go one by one. This does take time. And then say, what is the intent of someone searching this keyword?

Is this a university student looking to write an article and they’re never going to become our customer? Or is this someone that is actually looking to solve their existing solution and they are going to become our customer? So with that, you get the green light ones, which is the intent is very high, this person wants our solution. The yellow light is intent, could be they are a 50:50, maybe they’re looking to buy our solution, maybe it’s not soon enough. And then the red is, this person is not looking to buy our solution, they’re just doing this search for any other reason. So when you do that, then you go from the greens, highest volume to the lowest volume, yellows, highest volume to the lowest volume, and oftentimes you never get to the reds.

Lenny: I love that. And then once you have say a keyword, say a green, I guess, it’s a green keyword where it’s high intent and high volume, what is the process to actually put together an article that works for SEO?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: So step one is understanding the search intent. Why is someone typing that? What are they trying to understand? And a part of that is going to Google and figuring out, what is Google servicing today? So one of the examples that I always give people of when you type EOR into Google, it doesn’t give you employer of record, it gives you enhanced oil recovery, because most of the people typing EOR to Google is looking for that solution.

Now, if my team blindly went in and said, “We’re going to rank for EOR,” we’re never going to rank for that because that’s not what Google gives people because that’s not what people have been looking for. So first is understanding, what are people looking for? And creating a content piece that answers those questions. Oftentimes the bottom part of Google where it says, the next questions that you should be asking is a really good place to go to understand, okay, after someone’s done with this search, what’s the next question that they ask? And the next one and the next one.

So figuring out what do people want to get out of this? And then there are a myriad of SEO solutions tools that you can use out there to ensure that the content you’ve written is in a simple enough language that someone with a fifth grade reading level can understand. That you actually did the right things, you put the right keywords in the right places. I almost think of keywords as like, that’s your address, that’s how you give Google, please send people my way. So you can use many tools.

We use Clearscope, we love it. So those are the tools that you use. And then it gets published. And oftentimes those tools will give you a score to say you’re an A plus or you’re a C minus, you need to make your language less sophisticated, currently it’s at university level and we need it to be at fourth grade reading level.

Lenny: What is the structure of the content team at this point, how many people is it, and what are their rough focuses?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Fun fact about our content team, the person that leads it was one of the earliest employees at Deel, I want to say number two or three. So the person there is just so special to our entire company. And so the structure of the content team for us is, it is led by our director of content. We have one person that is in charge of all of the operations. So that is working with our freelancers, making sure that the briefs are sent out, making sure that the fact checking is done on time, that the articles are published on the website, and tracking and everything, they run the machinery on the backend.

And then we have different people focused on different areas of content because you need to have expertise that you build over time to write properly. So we have one person looking after certain product lines, another person would be focusing on [inaudible 00:22:46] behind different product lines. And very recently we’ve set out a team for different types of content because content isn’t just written article, it’s also video, it’s also education. There’s a lot of different types of content that we want to tap into. So now there’s a team that is focused on those new mediums for us.

Lenny: Awesome. So how many people total full-time that run this operation?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Right now the team is about eight people total.

Lenny: And it’s like, I don’t know if it’s exactly 50% of it, something like half of your growth essentially is coming from this team?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes.

Lenny: Is there anything else you found that it’s really important or effective for thinking about making SEO work?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: The biggest mistake people make is SEO is one of those things that, you can try and automate it, you can do a lot of things that save you time, but it never stops being time-consuming. And to do it well, it is going to be time-consuming. So oftentimes people just get over it or they think it’s below them to be going over and doing keyword research and doing all of those things one by one. And that’s oftentimes where people lose out is they try to cut corners. And when you cut corners, you just don’t create a good quality resource. That’s what it comes down to. It’s like, is your resource good quality? Yes or no?

So when you try to just be like, I want to rank and cut all those corners, your content is not going to be great. Nobody’s going to want to read it. And your program is not going to go anywhere. So I think it’s one of those things that people as they become more senior think it’s below them. And I think that’s the biggest mistake.

Lenny: It’s interesting, and that’s exactly the same advice for writing a newsletter, the thing I do. Where if a newsletter isn’t working, it usually means the content isn’t valuable enough to people. It’s such a clear meritocracy of, if it’s useful, people will read it, subscribe, share. And if they’re not, they won’t subscribe. And then Google basically figures that out based on people’s behavior.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes, exactly.

Lenny: To give people a sense of the operation, how many articles are you putting out a month, a day, a week, whatever you can share there?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: We used to put out about 10 articles a week, that’s net new. Whereas now we are doing more of five new articles and five article updates. Because the type of content we write, regulations change, things change all the time, so we need to make sure that even if something was published two years ago, it’s up-to-date. So we have a team that is responsible for continuously fact checking. So we do about five article updates and five net new articles written. And of course we do it across many different languages. So what started off as English only operations is now in other languages as well. So there’s no shortage of work to go around.

Lenny: Something that I go back and forth on a bit is, if SEO is something every company should be doing and will work for them? And in my experience, there’s certain products that are really good for SEO, especially if there’s user generated content or there’s just a bunch of data like say Yelp or Glassdoor, where they can generate tons of pages in all these different ways. Do you have an opinion on what sort of business and company is best suited for SEO? Or is your feeling everyone should probably be doing SEO in some form? And even if it’s not a huge part of your growth strategy, it’ll help.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I don’t think everybody should be doing SEO. I think if you are in a space where people are looking for a solution, you should be doing SEO. But if you are a direct to consumer company selling people lipstick, which I’m a huge buyer of, you probably shouldn’t invest in SEO all that much because people don’t go to Google for that. They go to Instagram, they go to influencers. And even if someone types in the best lipstick of 2023, chances of your website ranking, because you’re not a third party objective comparing to other people, is very low. So it really depends on the solution. But if you are in a space which most B2B products tend to be, that you’re solving an active problem very specifically, then I would say SEO is a good idea. If you’re a consumer good, maybe a little bit less effort should be put towards it.

Lenny: Makes a lot of sense. Going back to the early days, you were hired as head of growth at Deel, there’s a lot of things you could do. I’m curious how you decided where to prioritize your resources and what to do in the early days? Versus what you started doing down the road and what you could almost not worry about early on? What have you learned about that early prioritization exercise?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes. So I would say early days, it’s very important to just go back to the basics, build the skeleton before you put on the makeup. So the first question I would ask is, do you have a website? Is it fast? Do the search engine knows that it exists? Okay, great. The next step would be, can people find it? If they can’t find it, you need to write content to make sure that people can find it.

Only after all of those questions are answered, should you then consider, do I have money? Can I put it behind some paid ads to make sure people come to my website? So going step-by-step. But you can’t run a successful paid ads program if you have a website that’s loading in four plus seconds. So really going back to the basics and starting from a good experience at the core. And then expanding step-by-step from there is how I would suggest everybody starts. And that’s what I would do if I was to get hired all over again.

Lenny: I love that. So what are some of the steps? So step one is, do you have a website? Step two is make sure the website performs and people can actually have a good time when they’re experiencing it. I imagine part of it is also, do people understand what you do, like tweaking maybe the pitch and the [inaudible 00:28:07]

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes, exactly. And speaking of the pitch, our copy team does an amazing job at this. In the B2B world, it’s very easy to come up with statements that could so easily be applied to another business and it would work just as well on their website. And it sounds good and you and your team feel really good about it. But then if your one-liner can also work for another business, please don’t let that be your one-liner. Make it so that people actually understand what you do. Because right now there’s a lot of statements out there like, ‘we do the complex things so you can focus on what you do best’, what does that mean? And you can give that to 90% of the B2B businesses out there and it would apply to them, which means it’s not good enough.

Lenny: Is there anything that you remember you changed in those early days in terms of the website or the positioning or anything along those lines that was a big improvement?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Our website was hard coded, so the first thing we did with the help of the dev team was to move it to a platform that it was easy for me to access and edit, so that we could continuously A/B test things. And outside of that, we worked really hard on testing a lot of value propositions to explain to people exactly what we do, explain problem first, solution first, and time savings, cost savings, putting a lot of those against each other and rapidly A/B testing.

Lenny: Once you got past that phase, where maybe you started doing some paid ads and other things, where did you find you could invest more resources?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Once we covered the basics of your big four or five ad platforms, we started looking into the long tail places. So those are the platforms that individually never contribute a significant enough chunk for you to individually care about it. But if you add them up, it diversifies your lead flow such that it ends up being about 30% of your overall lead flow that’s coming in. Those could be things like review sites or much smaller outlets that could also run ads, newsletter ads, podcast ads, all of those things.

When you run an individual podcast ad, yeah, you’re probably not going to get 2000 customers from one podcast. But you run 10 of those and then it starts adding up. So really long tail is where we focused on. And we started going very niche with websites that have maybe 50,000, a hundred thousand visitors a month, which isn’t all that much when you’re thinking about your paid ad strategy. But all of those places add up and they’re oftentimes overlooked because they’re not as easy, you have to take the time to set up from scratch to run it on everything. Our paid ads team, they spent just as much time running Facebook and Google ads as they do running those third party, much smaller platform ads. It takes the same effort, but you need to have a diversified source of your leads.

Lenny: Huge fan of podcast ads over here, and maybe this would be a good time to cue the mid-roll ad, maybe, I don’t know, it happens.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Sounds perfect.

Lenny:

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And welcome back. Speaking of podcast ads, something that I find is with that sort of advertising, there’s a direct response component of like, we will drive leads as running an ad like this, and there’s also a awareness, brand building component. I know you’re not a big fan of awareness campaigns and marketing campaigns, especially early on, and so I’d love to get your perspective on why that is and how you think about that sort of investment?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I’m not a huge fan of early awareness campaigns for B2B businesses specifically. So if you are a consumer goods founder, you can skip this part. But the reason I don’t like awareness early on is because to do a proper awareness campaign, it takes time. You need to have teams that are doing the strategy, doing the creative work, and they don’t always hit. You don’t know if they’re always going to resonate or not. And then you look back, and you’ve worked on this thing for a whole month and it hasn’t resonated and you’ve wasted a full month.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Because B2B businesses uniquely are started because there’s a very real need and there’s a lot of people that are ready to convert, first tap into the bottom of the funnel, and then go out and start speaking to the masses. But I promise you it’ll probably take you six to eight months minimum to tap into that bottom of the funnel of people that are ready to convert today before you have to start doing awareness ads out there. That’s not to say never do awareness ads, but it’s oftentimes the shiny, cool thing that you want to do and it just ends up being a waste of time early on. Because people don’t really even understand what you’re doing, you haven’t really even figured out what’s the messaging that resonates, but you’ve done this creative campaign and people are like, “This looks cool, but I’m just going to go ahead and continue looking for a solution for my problem.”

Lenny: Is there an example of a marketing campaign or an awareness campaign that comes to mind that you thought was like, “Okay, this is … if you do it this way, maybe it’s worth doing”?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I’ve seen Notion do a great job with their out-of-home ads. They didn’t do it early on, they started doing it much later in their journey by the time when everybody that was working in tech knew what it was, and it was really to drive home the message continuously rather than to introduce themselves to the world. So by then when you saw that layout on a billboard, it made sense, you’re like, “Oh, I know what they’re talking about.”

Lenny: So what is it about Notion that you think was great, it was timing and then also the actual ad itself you thought was great?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, the ads that I’m recalling right now were showcasing their product interface. So they needed enough time, and this is my obviously hypothesis, if someone from Notion wants to jump in and say that wasn’t the reason why we did this, go ahead, but I think they needed enough time for people to get familiar with the interface. Because Notion has a very specific interface that when you see it, you recognize it, it’s not like any other product. So unless people built that awareness and recognition, doing an out-of-home ad with that layout wouldn’t have made much sense because just with that layout they were able to communicate what product they’re talking about. If they did that day one, people would be like, “What is this thing that I’m looking at?”

Lenny: So we’ve been working through all the ways that Deel has grown, we’ve talked about SEO, community, you mentioned partnerships. Is there anything interesting there to mention around just what partnerships have done?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, I would say it is very important to know who you should partner with. So there’s two groups of partners. People oftentimes end up partnering with any company that has a shared audience. Decent place to start. But just because you share an audience doesn’t mean your audience goes to your partner for guidance when they have this problem.

So in our case, venture capital partners was a huge one because when you get money from a new VC, they ask, they’re like, “Okay, thank you for giving us this money, now we want to expand our team with the money you gave us. What are your other portfolio companies using? What is a platform that you trust that you would recommend?” So people go to their VCs for that kind of question. But there might be another tech company out there that is tapping into the exact audience that we are, but people never go to them to ask that question. So our partnership with them will likely not work just as well. So it’s important to not only recognize the importance of an audience overlap as well as whether or not those people are seen as a trusted resource for the solution you are putting out there.

Lenny: I really love this idea you keep coming back to, which is where are people asking this question that you can help them answer. And to make that even more concrete for people, what are some other examples maybe of questions people ask that Deel can help them with? So that it could help people think about, okay, maybe our product can help them answer these other sorts of questions

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Since the early days, and it continues to happen, compliance is a huge question that gets asked. So when you are an HR leader or a finance leader or a legal leader in a company that works let’s say in America, but you want to hire someone in another country, you don’t know what you don’t know. So it’s very important to have people that know what they’re talking about in context of your country of origin as well as the country that you’re trying to hire from. So compliance has always been a huge part of what we did and what we’ve always answered for people. That’s why we have in-house experts that answer those questions, that constantly provide updates if the answer to that question has changed over time, which regulations constantly change. An answer we provided a week ago may change, and you need to be very proactive in communicating that.

Taxes is another one, especially in the space that we’re in, payroll, hiring. Taxes change from country to country. You need to know when you need to pay what taxes, when you need to not pay them, and what types of work people do. So those are some of the types of questions that get asked.

So for us, they’re very nitty-gritty and use case specific. The taxes you need to pay for someone who is an engineer that’s a full-time employee might be very different than who is a designer who is a contractor. So those are the kinds of specifics that we get into with people.

Lenny: Got it. So it’s like, how do I pay taxes for an engineer I’m hiring in Turkey? And then you give them, “Here’s the answer,” and then it’s like, “If you just want us to take care of it for you, then go check out Deel.”

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Exactly. Rarely the question is what’s the best payroll solution? It’s like, okay, that’s good to make sure what you’re leaning towards isn’t shit and that other people agree with you. But ultimately it was like you need the best payroll solution because you need to make sure that things aren’t going to go wrong.

Lenny: Speaking of answering questions in content, something that you told me is that you wrote a blog post that the IRS ended up linking to as the definitive answer to a question. And I don’t think this was at Deel, but can you share that story?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes, actually it was at my previous role. And the person who wrote that article is today at Deel. So he came over to join us there too. But yes, it was right around when Covid happened and the US government rolled out the PPP program. And there was a lot of questions about, do I qualify? If I qualify, how do I apply for this?

And at the time the company that I was working for had a lot of customers that were like, “What do I do? I need to gain access to this, but I don’t know what to do.” So the team there took the time to truly understand how the system works, whether you qualify, what to do. And created this resource for our own customers because we just wanted to help them. And then it ended up being such a good resource that it was linked from the IRS’s website being like, “If you have questions, check out this article,” which was a great moment of pride. And it just went to show that when you do your best to answer questions and other people don’t have the time to do it, no matter who it is, they’re going to send people back your way. And it was at the time, it happened to be a big moment of growth.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: It was a very unfortunate instance, we wish we never had to write that, that it never happened. But yeah, that was the story around IRS linking to the company’s resource.

Lenny: That’s the ultimate sign of the question is answered and you’re done with it, the IRS decides to link to it. So you’re saying that was actually a big driver of growth, IRS traffic. I’m curious how many people actually go read that?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: So that was huge for that short duration of a few week time when people were trying to apply for PPP. And then it died out, as did PPP.

Lenny: Makes sense. One last question around paid, and then I want to move on to a different topic. Is there anything you’ve learned about what it takes to be successful at paid growth from your experience at Deel?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, so a few things. Our paid team spends a lot of time on both the messaging aspect of things as well as the optimization. So optimization is the technical way in which you set your bids, make sure that you don’t go over budget, whether or not you can afford that.

And then messaging is making sure that if someone sees your ad, whether it’s on Instagram, Twitter, Google, that it makes sense for them. So creative fatigue is a real thing. When you put an ad out there that works for three weeks, people get tired of seeing that, you need to constantly update that. So our paid team is actually updating the ads we put out there on a monthly basis with the exception of a few Google ads, which need to be straight to the point. So staying ahead of creative fatigue. Making sure that your messaging also keeps up with your product, even if the ad is working really well, you need to make sure that as your product has evolved, so has the messaging alongside that.

And also recognizing, not just looking at the amount of leads that you generated from a campaign, but how many of them actually became a client, and how much money did you actually make from those clients to understand things around payback. Because oftentimes marketers just tend to think about, “Oh, this is a great lead channel and I get so many leads from it.” But then you ask that question to sales teams and they’re like, “Yeah, I’m busy, but none of these are converting.” So it’s really important to look at not just the volume that you bring in, but what is the journey of that volume with your business one year out. How much money do you actually make from them to be able to properly decide how much can I spend to win this customer?

And the way that we’ve done it is we’ve worked with our data team to set up a dashboard that tracks that in real time. We know an average customer that comes from a Facebook ad, at what rate do they converge from a lead to a qualified opportunity to a closed on.? And then on average, how much money do we make from that customer one year out. So that we can decide, is this a worthy channel for us, do we not want to invest there or are we reaching that peak and we can’t continue to invest there.

Lenny: Something that I should mention as we talk through this is we’re talking about all these ways to grow the product, but at the core is a great product that people actually find valuable and want to keep using. And maybe a question there is just how that plays into this whole growth strategy, actually making the product something people want versus all these acquisition channels?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Acquisition channels just straight up don’t work if you have a product that doesn’t live up to the expectation. I think I personally have been very spoiled and lucky because from the day I joined Deel, the product was top-notch. As I was joining an early stage company, I joined right after series A, I was expecting certain things to be duct taped in the back, it happens. And I was like, “Oh no, the engineers and the product team are, if they say a product can do something, it can do that and more.”

So early days of my team pitching Deel was people were like, “I don’t think you guys can do all of that. I don’t believe you.” And it was almost like we had to tamper down our messaging so that people would believe us. But you can be the best marketer in the world, if when people come to your product, even if your sales team does a good job at convincing them to become a customer, because you can do that, if the product doesn’t live up to the expectations, especially in the B2B world where people aren’t going to put up with crappy products, they’re going to leave. That’s going to get out and people are going to know it’s not a worthy product. So that really sits at the core of everything that we do.

I think it’s very easy to take it for granted when you’re at a company that has an awesome product, you’re like, “It is like this all the time.” But one of the things I would encourage anybody looking to join a young company is, ask them what their team breakdown looks like. When I joined Deel, most of the team was product and engineers. So that told me that the core of this business was going to be solid. And then we built out those supporting things like marketing, like sales, like data to surround the product. But if you are talking to an early stage company that’s a B2B product and they have six salespeople and two engineers, their product probably isn’t going to be great for that much longer.

Lenny: Especially if it’s an outsourced dev shop doing the product, they’re like, “Oh, they’ll take care of the product, we’ll just sell it.” Something else that I think is important to talk about is Covid was an important element of your growth. And so I guess, one, is that true? And then two, just what did you lean into and lean out of in terms of growth during Covid to help people discover Deel when they needed it most, which is basically people going remote in a lot of ways in a lot of companies?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: So Covid, actually a lot of people think Deel was started as a response to the pandemic, we actually got started before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened. So as sad as it was, it did force people into a pilot program of the vision that we had for the world. It forced people to work remotely, whether that means you’re working remotely from someone who lives a block away from you or you are working remotely from someone in Germany. So we did benefit from the fact that everybody was at least forced to test out this hypothesis of, does it work to not be in the same room as the people that you’re working with?

And one of the questions that we were getting early on as the Covid was coming to an end was, “Are you worried, Covid is coming to an end, that people aren’t going to use Deel anymore?” And our response to that has always been, we are not a remote work platform, we’re a global work platform. So a lot of these businesses have gone back into offices. We have a lot of customers that asked people to go back to their offices, but now they have offices in Germany and in Canada and in the US and in France. So we were never a remote work company, we were just a global work company.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: And remote work, because there was a lot of news coverage happening around it, we just became synonymous with that. So I do think early on we did benefit from being able to provide that solution. And a lot of people saw the reality of like, “Hey, I work just as well with this person as I did when I was in an office with them. Well, the best person that I’m looking for, the job may not be within my region, so let me go ahead and hire them regardless of where they are.” People got comfortable with that and more and more companies started moving in that direction.

Lenny: And is there anything that ended up being really important in terms of helping Deel grow through that? Like a channel that’s just like, “Let’s go big on this channel because it seems to be working really well”? Or is it just word of mouth basically and people are just like, “Oh shit, I really need to solve this problem, my hair’s on fire, what’s out there? Let me go find an answer”?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I wouldn’t say it was word of mouth, maybe very, very early on it was word of mouth, but within the first few months of our operation that stopped being true. Or at least the word of mouth stopped being a smaller percentage of the way in which people discover us. But it’s always that people needed a payroll solution, they needed a way to hire independent contractors overseas, and we just were the answer to that. So we consistently put ourselves in front of them and said, “Hey, if you’re trying to do this, or if you’re already doing it and you’re not doing it legally, we can help you do that legally.”

Lenny: I want to chat about team building, something that I’ve heard you’re exceptional at. And my first question is, early on when you were building the team, the growth team specifically, at Deel, what skills did you find were most important to look for? And what skills and experiences did you find wasn’t as important early on that you could sacrifice and wait until later to get?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Early on one of the first questions I would ask people is, what are the KPIs that you’re willing to commit to? So if someone’s only willing to commit to lead numbers, that’s not good enough. They need to be able to commit to closed one revenue KPRs to really show that they care about the business’s bottom line. So it was those people that were willing to commit to the full funnel.

And also oftentimes people tend to hire from the big companies that they want to become like because the brand name is appealing. But if you’re a team of 35 people, and you’re trying to hire the director of whatever from a huge company, you need to ask the question of, when did this person join that huge company? Did they join when the company was already 5,000 people and from day one they had all the resources at their disposal? Or were they actually one of the earlier employees who helped that growth? Because oftentimes the mistake I see people make is they’ll hire someone from an amazing company that have accomplished amazing things, but they’re not used to operating with 10% of the resources that they had. So they’re not willing to get down and do the dirty work.

And at Deel we have this concept called ‘little hands’. I think it’s loosely translated from French, someone can correct me on that. But it basically means that no matter who you are, where you sit within the organization, you need to be willing to get into the little things and do the nitty-gritty work and not shy away from it. And it’s very important too, whoever we hire at any level, it’s like, “Are you willing to do the tiniest of jobs?” And if the answer is yes, that’s great. And some people are like, “I would build a team for that.” And of course in the future, maybe you should, but that shouldn’t be your first answer. Your first answer should be, “Yes, of course I’ll do that.” And if someone’s not excited about that, then they’re not a good fit for at least a company at our stage right now.

Lenny: That is an amazing expression, little hands. You talked about how you check that people are willing to commit to revenue goals. Is that in the interview or is that … how do you … because won’t everyone just say, “Yeah, yeah, I can commit to anything you need me to commit to, I’m going to go make this work”? How do you get a sense if they’re the kind of person that would do that?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: It happens within the interview process. So one ways to find out is what are the KPIs that they have committed to in the past in their roles. So if they’ve never committed to a revenue goal or a bottom funnel goal and they’re saying they’re willing to commit to it, that’s probably not correct. And I always say, if they haven’t, I say, “What are the KPIs that you have today and what are the KPIs that you think you should have?” Because sometimes they’re just not given those, but they still think they should have been given the more bottom funnel. So that’s something that I would look for in the interview process.

And a really good way to also test for that is, this is more on the case study process, but asking someone to come up with a strategy with $0, with$10,000 and maybe a hundred thousand dollars to see if they’re going to be able to scale with you. And to see how are they thinking about with different levels of spend and what are they willing to commit to at different levels of spend. Because if someone’s throwing up their hands and saying, “At $0, I can only do social media monitoring, we’re not going to get much because that’s what makes sense.” Well, you probably know that they’re not going to be comfortable committing to those bottom of funnel metrics until you give them all the resources that they need.

Lenny: And it sounds like the way you goal teams within Deel also is revenue, growth teams basically have revenue goals. It’s not, like you said, leads or traffic or anything like that.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes. That’s why we’re called growth instead of marketing, we care about the revenue growth. And of course we track leads and SQLs. Those are leading indicators to know whether or not we’re going to hit the ultimate number that we all care about. But at the end of the day, that’s not what we consider success.

Lenny: In terms of team structure, how you thought about structuring the early growth team, what did that look like and what was the reporting lines and buckets of investment?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, so very early on, we always seek to bring in one leader to manage a part of the organization and then let them grow their teams. We don’t love the idea of hiring people based off of a hypothesis that something is going to work. That’s a really good way to have to do layoffs because the plans you thought were going to work didn’t work. So we always hired one person, prove out a theory, and then let them grow their team.

So the first hire we made to the team was actually a product marketing person. To this day they lead our product marketing team, and they were the ones who sit between the product team and the go-to-market teams and really set the messaging. And quickly we realized this person needs more help in setting the messaging, the tone. So then the second person we hired was a very talented copywriter. And that person today leads our creative teams.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: And then the third person we actually hired onto the growth team was a data analyst because the sentiment was we’re not willing to spend a dollar if we don’t know where that money’s going and what it’s doing for us. Which a lot of people would assume that’s a very early hire for … data is too early to hire as number three. But I still think that we did the right thing there. Now we have a whole data team, but back then we didn’t.

So those were the three teams that we started with on top. And then the content person was already at Deel by the time that I joined, so that was the person I mentioned that was early employee. So that’s how we originally set it.

Now the teams have changed. So now we have a different structure, slightly different structure, which is we have regional teams and functional teams. The functional teams are basically subject matter experts. They’re good at what they do and we don’t care where they are based in the world. So those are teams like product marketing, content, community, events, paid advertisements, brand. If we are looking for the best graphic designer in the world, I don’t care where they are, they can sit wherever in the world. They are basically functional teams.

And then we have regional teams. Because we are selling into a lot of different regions, we need to make sure that we have local expertise as well. So we have marketing managers for different key regions for us that then work with our functional teams to bring the strategy to life. So that’s how we’ve set it.

I’ve seen businesses who build out a regional team that has their own paid ads team and their own content team. But what we have found is when you take people away from their group of expertise, so if you take a paid ads person, and if you have a team of paid ads people and you separate those five people and give them to different regions, instead of letting them sit together and be a tight team, the best practice is learning and the leveling up of the skills doesn’t happen as fast as they would if all of the technical roles are sitting together. So we are continuing down the road of functional and regional setup.

Lenny: So say someone in Turkey wants to run paid ads, they convince the paid growth team to invest in resources in growing Turkey?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Exactly. So they would work with our central paid ads team to say I would like to run paid ads in Turkey, this is the audience I want to go after. And then they work together to execute on that strategy.

Lenny: How does that team decide who’s going to get their time, is there a rough approach to that?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: So it depends on the total addressable market in a region, what are the opportunities we’re seeing, what’s the competitive landscape like. So chances are if a market is what we consider to be tier one, and it’s a place that we have seen good growth, we will invest our resources into it. And then along the way we learn and we decide if we’re going to double down or pull back a little bit.

Lenny: Awesome. I want to chat a bit about culture, culture at Deel. We had Jeff from Ramp on, and their culture is described by one word, velocity. Also one of you being the fastest growing business of all time, I’m curious how you’d contrast your culture and broadly how you think about culture at a startup and how you help create the culture at Deel?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, so I would say culture is made up of two components. One is, what do you bring to the company as a team member, and what does the company give back to you? So what we expect the team members to bring to us is, our version of velocity is something that we call ‘Deel speed’, is that we want to make sure that we act with urgency. It doesn’t matter how big the team has grown, we want to act with urgency on behalf of our customers. If a customer has a problem, they’re not going to wait two weeks to get an answer for that. They’re going to get that answer within 24 hours. If we need to build out a product because many customers are asking for it, that product is going to get built in one-tenth the time that any of our competitors will likely build it in.

So ‘Deel speed’ is very, very important for us. And that’s something we expect from our team members who are committing to it. To say, what’s the quickest way I can solve this problem properly? And to repeatedly push themselves to act with urgency.

We also care that we remain positive. We have default optimism because we are in a new space, so if someone’s going to come into Deel and they’re going to be pessimistic and they’re like, “I don’t think that’s going to work for X, Y, Z reasons,” they’re going to just slow things down. We need people to ask the question of, “I think it’s going to work for these four reasons, now let’s see what are the risks associated with it and let’s seek to solve those risks.” That’s again something we expect from our team members.

And then the last one, well, not the last one, but one of the third important ones is, fully giving a shit about your customer. At the end of the day, the product that we have, we are dealing with humans, we’re dealing with their livelihood, the way they get paid, we’re dealing with the way companies hire. It’s so incredibly personal if someone doesn’t get their paycheck on time or if someone gets into legal trouble because their contract wasn’t set up the proper way.

So recognizing that it’s not a software and a platform that we’re trying to make it the best, but it’s like, no, it’s a business trying to pay a human so they can live their lives and the business can continue growing. So that care is something that we need people to bring to the table.

Now in return of those things coming, what we give back as a company is, outside of obviously your pay, your benefits package, et cetera, is we offer people the flexibility to choose how and when they do their job, they get to decide on where they work from, what hours they work. So we basically give people all the freedom to set up their life how they want to as long as they come to the table giving us what they need. So I would say we do have an intense culture, and that’s expected, we share that openly with people. But at the end of the day, that’s also what sets us apart.

Lenny: I love this ‘Deel speed’. Are these core values basically within Deel, these are values that you come back to?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes, exactly. And these are values that we publicly share as well.

Lenny: How early in the lifecycle of the company did you all come up with these values? That’s something that a lot of startups think about is, when should we actually crystallize these values?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: So we came up with them, I believe it was about a year in, but we didn’t sit around the table and say, “What should we call our values?” ‘Deel speed’ was something that our CEO would tell people. He’d be like, “Okay, I want you to do this, but I want you to do it at ‘Deel speed’.” And one of the early jokes was, let’s have company swag that’s Deel speedo and things like that. It’s just like, it was already used so frequently with people that we were just like, “Okay, we keep saying this, let’s also define what it actually is for us and set it in stone and share it with people.” So we did go through that exercise probably about a year in into the company existing, but the culture happened well before we established that.

Lenny: Reminds me, at Airbnb, there was a team that came up with the core values, I think it was four years in probably, and there were six of them. And then a few years later they realized two of them aren’t actually true, they were aspirational. And there was this recognition that values should be who you are not who you hope to be because it just doesn’t click. And so they actually cut those values and they ended up having just four values. And maybe one day they’ll bring them back. And so I think that’s a really good lesson is you want to see who you already are and then just represent them in a really interesting, creative way.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yes, exactly.

Lenny: There’s a version of, what did you call it, default optimism. Airbnb’s version of that was ‘embrace the adventure’, which is just like, this is going to be crazy, just go for it, embrace it, this is what it’s going to be like.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Exactly. And try and see how can I solve this, how can this be done instead of why it won’t work.

Lenny: Yeah, I love that. And this urgency piece comes up again and again in these interviews I’m doing. What I think of is Frank Slootman, I think is his name, the founder of Snowflake, has this book called Amp It Up. All about just how they made Snowflake work. And something he comes back to is just you need to constantly have a sense of urgency because when you don’t, people get bored and they actually end up liking their job less because it’s just like, I don’t really know what I’m doing, things are moving along. And there’s actually a lot of value in moving fast. Jeff talked about this as just like, you have less burnout when people feel like things are getting done and out the door.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, it’s incredibly fulfilling. I look back and sometimes things when, for example, when the SVB was going through the issues they were going through, the entire team had to work on a Sunday to communicate with our customers of like, “No, we’re good, don’t worry about it.” But I remember that Sunday I had to miss out on a theater I was so excited to see, but it just felt like, oh my God, we’re in this, it was like a war room, we’re doing it. And that felt good. I didn’t necessarily show up on Monday feeling already burned out, but it was more like, yes, I felt alive. And I think the right people will feel that way.

Lenny: Yeah, and as long as it’s not constantly for years just endless late nights and weekends.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: It can’t always be war time.

Lenny: I find that those end up being the most memorable, meaningful moments is when you’re working really, really hard on something that you’re excited about. And it has to be something you’re excited about and are proud of.

Last question. I saw on Twitter, you shared this photo of your home office, and it was this incredible view out the window, and then you took a photo facing your desk and it was an ironing board. And two questions there. One is just how did that all happen? And then two, I think you mentioned somewhere that you didn’t even meet a lot of your coworkers for a year and a half after joining Deel, it was very remote forward. So, I’m curious also just how you made remote work work for you in that environment?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Yeah, so I’ll explain the ironing board first. So that was because I was actually visiting my family in Istanbul, and in the setup that we have, there’s one desk. So my husband and I go rock, paper, scissors, and we’ll see who gets the desk and who gets to come up with a secondary solution. And he won the desk, so I had to come up with a creative solution. And because the view behind me was stunning, of the Bosporus, every meeting I joined, people were like, “Wow, I love your view, this is amazing.” And I was like, “Oh, no, no, you guys, I’m sitting on an ironing board right now.” And to me that was both funny, and I wanted to do a reality check with people to be like, “Come on, this is not as glorious as it looks.” But at the same time, it really in that moment I was like, “This is awesome, I work at Deel.”

Previously when I wanted to go visit my family in Istanbul, and I live in Canada, I would have to use my days off to go. And for me it just meant a lot to be able to do my work regardless of where I am. I had a full day of work and meetings and everything. And my work just continued and I was also be able to be with my family. So it was a moment of Deel’s promise coming true in a very real way in my life. And I thought it was hilarious. My dad thought it was so unprofessional that I shared that with the public then. He hasn’t fully wrapped his head around the startup world. So it was just one of those moments of sharing that, yeah, work can be remote and it can be whatever you want it to be. So that’s the the story behind it. In this moment as we’re recording this, I am in a proper home office with a desk and a back supported chair. It changes all the time.

And in terms of, going back to your second question of, early days not meeting the team members. As I said, I joined Deel in July, 2020, pandemic was at its peak, me being based in Canada, Canada had very strict restrictions of, you can’t leave the country, we won’t let you back in. So I had to stay put. And I worked for a year and a half at Deel before for the first time where I met our team members was at a conference in Lisbon. And I showed up and it was this surreal moment because I’ve worked with them for a year and a half, we’d accomplished so much. Our revenue was already way past $50 million and I was seeing these people for the first time. So that was very funny.

But if I look at the early days of Deel, there’s a lot of little stories like that, where we forgot to create swag until we reached a billion dollars. And it was actually when our photo was going to be on the NASDAQ and we wanted to take a team picture that we were like, “Guys, we need to have t-shirts. Can someone please run to a store in New York and print our logo on something?” So a lot of those things just by the nature of being a pandemic business came a little bit later.

But the thing that allowed I think for me in Deel to build the culture early on was, because we all work from home, we’ve been like that from day one. We have the option to go into WeWorks and co-working spaces if that’s something that you choose. But we all get to show up as our very authentic selves. So people have met my pets and my partner well before they would have if I was showing up to an office. So there’s that sincerity that comes with being in someone’s home that we really relied on early on.

And as a company, I never felt the pressure to show up in a certain way or dress up for meetings or anything. So just being able to show up as yourself, and whether you’re an introverted person who never likes to turn on their camera or you’re someone who’s going to be like, “Here, meet my dog.” That just naturally built a team culture and comradery well before we could be together in person.

Lenny: Clearly it has worked out. Meltem, is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: We had a really good conversation. The one thing I would tell people is, most of growth, people assume is very difficult. I’m not necessarily saying it’s easy, but it’s relatively straightforward when you go back to the first principles of just figuring out where are the people at? How can I add value? As long as your product is there to actually bring them value. So I would say people should just recognize that it’s much simpler than they think it is, it just takes a lot of discipline to execute on it, it’s not rocket science.

Lenny: Quite an empowering statement, I love it. With that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I am ready, let’s do this.

Lenny: What are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: From the nonfiction world, How Will You Measure Your Life by Clay Christensen, that’s one I recommend. He takes the business learnings that he’s had and applies it to your life. It’s a very short and easy to get through book. Outside of that, I constantly recommend fiction. I think at one point it became uncool to read fiction that every moment you have needs to be productive and you need to learn something. I don’t care what fiction it is you read, you can read Judy Blume for all I care, but just read fiction, be creative, do something with your brain other than reading nonfiction and learning things all the time.

Lenny: I’ve had to make that shift myself, and it’s been great, but I still get drawn to nonfiction. But good reminder. What are some favorite recent movie or TV shows you’ve loved?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Favorite recent movie, I think along with everybody else, was Oppenheimer. I thought it was great. I do wish they explored a little bit more of why he was the person that drove everybody to excellence. But overall loved the movie. Did not think I could sit through three hours without peeing, but I did. And favorite recent TV show was The Summer I Turned Pretty. I absolutely love it. I don’t care that it’s actually designed for teenagers, I enjoyed every second of it.

Lenny: What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you’re interviewing them?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: What would your siblings say about you? It’s very telling. If they have siblings, if they don’t, I will say, what will your parents say about you? But it’s very telling what you think other people think of you.

Lenny: What do you look for in their answer that gives you a sign that they’re a good candidate or not?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: I look for sincerity and self-awareness. Your siblings are never … I mean, I love my sister, but she’ll probably shit talk me a lot. And being aware of that is very important. If someone was like, “My siblings will say I’m very organized and that I’m the one that brings our family together.” That’s probably a bullshit answer. But if they’re like, “Oh yeah, they’ll say these weird things about me,” that shows a little bit of self-awareness and humbleness that I want to see in a person.

Lenny: What is a favorite product you’ve recently discovered that you really like?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Oh, this is a dangerous one. So two, one was NuStrips, they’re caffeine strips. I find caffeine pills and everything or when I drink coffee is like, accidentally I’ll have 300 milligrams and then I’m buzzing. But these are 50 milligrams each, so it’s very easy to stop yourself. And they don’t taste bad. So those I like for when I just need a little boost.

Lenny: So they’re just strips that you put in your mouth and they give you caffeine?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Like LISTERINE strips.

Lenny: What?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: And you put it on your tongue and then it also doesn’t give you the jitters and it’s just 50 milligrams, which is a very mild cup of coffee.

Lenny: Microdosing caffeine.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Exactly.

Lenny: Beautiful.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: And the second one is, I recently was gifted a personalized library stamp, which I love. Because I love to give books away, so I stamp them with my library stamp. And I like to think that one day in a secondhand bookshop I’m going to run into it.

Lenny: That’s amazing. There’s a camp at Burning Man that’s a library, and you can borrow books and you have to return it in a year, the next year when you come back to Burning Man. Which is amazing. And then there’s a guy that has a megaphone, he is just like, “A book has been returned.” Makes a whole scene about it. What is a favorite life motto that you often come back to or share with other people, either at work or in life?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: The world is run by insecure overachievers. I used to think my insecurity was a downfall and I would just hide it and try to pretend it’s not there. And then someone that I really look up to told that to. I’m like, “Okay, so I’m not the only one.” And it’s just, I do think world is run by a bunch of people that have something to prove for a good reason or not, but it’s better to embrace it than to pretend you’re all confident and you’re just doing this because you’re brilliant.

Lenny: Oh my God, so good. Final question, what is your favorite Canadian food? You live in Canada and thus the question.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Okay, it’s not particularly food, but Caesars, they’re basically Bloody Mary’s with clam juice.

Lenny: Oh, Bloody Caesar, is that what they’re called? Or just Caesar?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: They’re called Caesars.

Lenny: Just Caesar.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: But the American equivalent would be a Bloody Mary. It’s so much better than a Bloody Mary. It’s not vegan. And then the reason I qualify it as food is when you order it in Canada, it comes with pepperoni strips and pickled asparagus, and they’ll shove a whole meal in there. And it’s just amazing and something that America should definitely adapt too.

Lenny: I think I’ve had one, I think I prefer Bloody Marys, but a good pitch for the Caesars. Meltem, thank you so much for being here. We talked about growth strategy, team building, ‘Deel speed’, default optimism, so many things. Really appreciate you making the time. Two final questions, where can folks find you online if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: So they can reach out to me on Twitter at MeltemK, I’m the fastest to respond there. Please don’t reach out to me on LinkedIn, I never respond there. And the way readers can be useful to me is if they, one, we’re always looking for feedback on Deel. If you see something out there that you think could be better, let me know, and I’ll make sure to communicate it to the team, whatever that may be. And also, if anybody has tips that they think I would benefit from or any good fiction book recommendations, I’m always open to them.

Lenny: Amazing. Meltem, thank you again so much for being here.

Meltem Kuran Berkowitz: Thank you so much for having me.

Lenny: Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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