Deel's story and recent fundraise carries many lessons which I've been privately sharing with many founders I mentor or coach for several years now. And so I think now is the right time to highlight some of them for everyone.

There’s a line buried in a recent interview with Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz that should stop every B2B founder in their tracks.

He’s talking about AI disruption. About whether someone could build a competitor using today’s tools. And he says, almost casually:

“I would be very impressed if someone wants to vibe code payroll in Poland.”

“And when you’re done with Poland, you’re going to have to do it in many other countries.”

That’s a precise description of a moat. And it points to something most of the startup conversation — dominated as it is by Silicon Valley frames — consistently misses.

The Valley has a specific theory of defensibility. It goes like this: build fast, capture market share, then defend with network effects, switching costs, or proprietary data. The tech is the product. The tech is the moat.

It used to be a powerful playbook. It’s also a playbook built for a specific kind of company, in a specific kind of market, by founders with a specific kind of worldview.

When you grow up in San Francisco (or the U.S.), your default market is the United States. A clean, single-language, similar-regulatory-framework market of 330 million people. You build mono-country first because that’s your reality. International comes later, as a feature, once the core is stable. And you usually assume you’ll bulldozer your way into it because of scale and everyone wanting “the American” thing.

That default shapes everything.
The product assumptions.
The hiring assumptions.
The definition of what a “moat” even is.

It also creates blind spots.

Bouaziz is French. Born in Israel. Based in London. His co-founder Shu was born in China.

When they built Deel, they didn’t decide to “go global.” They built global by default — because the world they actually lived in was either global or too small. For them, the question was never “how do we add international support?” It was: “why doesn’t any infrastructure exist for the way the world already works?”

That question led to an insight their US-centric competitors had hard time to see.

Global hiring, as it turns out, isn’t primarily a US company hiring an engineer in Germany. Although Americans like to think that 🙃
It’s a Peruvian company hiring in Chile.
A Nigerian company hiring in Kenya.
It’s the entire world hiring across its own borders — a market that was invisible to anyone anchored in the Silicon Valley mental model.

Forty thousand customers and $1.4B+ ARR later, that insight is beginning to look less like a lucky accident and more like (potentially) structural advantage that compounds.

There’s another telling moment in the interview where Bouaziz describes how the ecosystem reacted to Deel’s growth. He says people tried to invent explanations for it — because they couldn’t reconcile a non-SV founder, not based in the US, not running the Silicon Valley playbook, growing as fast as Deel did.

“How could a company whose CEO is not based in Silicon Valley grow as much as we did?”

The answer, of course, is that the question itself is the bias.

But there’s a second-order effect worth noting. Being an outsider also meant Deel was left alone to execute. No roadshows. No narrative management for the tech press. No distraction from the performance theatre that consumes so many valley-adjacent founders. Just customers, product, and compounding revenue or no payroll money.

Bouaziz didn’t raise outside capital from 2022 until recently. Every round came from investors already close to the business. He wasn’t selling a story to strangers — he was building a company that made the story irrelevant.

Profitability isn’t the point here (maybe a little bit).
It’s the outcome of not playing the SV game.
Spend $300K before your Series A.
Stay profitable for three years while growing from $800M to $1.4B ARR.
When you don’t need the money, you don’t need the narrative. That’s freedom most founders never experience. And many can’t even imagine.

Here’s the uncomfortable question every B2B founder should be sitting with right now: if an AI agent can write my code, design my onboarding, and replicate my UX in a weekend — what exactly is my moat?

For most pure-software plays, the honest answer is: less than you thought.

Deel’s answer is different.
Because the product isn’t primarily software.
The product is operational infrastructure.
Legal entities in every country.
Local payroll licenses that take years to acquire.
Compliance engines built to local law.
Seven thousand people across 120 countries who carry the institutional knowledge that makes the whole thing work.

You cannot vibe code that over the weekend. You cannot prompt-engineer your way to a Polish payroll license. You cannot deploy an agent to build five years of local regulatory relationships in Brazil.

This is what a regulatory moat looks like in practice. Not a single defensible position, but a compounding stack of operational complexity — each layer harder to replicate than the last, each new country entered making the next one slightly easier for Deel and slightly harder for a challenger.

And here’s where it gets interesting in the AI context specifically.

Bouaziz doesn’t see AI as a threat to this model. He sees it as an amplifier. The regulatory infrastructure doesn’t get disrupted by AI — it gets augmented by it.
AI handles the surface layer. The moat is what’s underneath.
His read: Deel could potentially double revenue without increasing headcount, because AI makes their existing operational depth more powerful, not redundant.

That’s a fundamentally different relationship with AI disruption than a pure-software company faces. When the floor of your business is operational complexity that can’t be automated, AI raises the ceiling rather than threatening the foundation.

Everyone will wish soon they had something like this.

European founders have always operated under a specific tax. Multiple jurisdictions from day one. Fragmented (often stupid) regulatory environments. Labour law that varies country to country. The conventional wisdom says this makes European companies slower to scale than their US counterparts.

That framing is worth challenging or maybe embracing.

Yes, regulatory complexity creates friction in the early stages. But it also builds a muscle. Founders who learn to operate across regulatory environments early develop a different kind of commercial instinct — one that’s oriented toward depth, compliance, and local trust rather than speed and surface area.

That muscle, when applied to the right market, becomes a moat.

Deel is the perfect example. But the principle extends.
Any B2B category where the value is delivered inside regulatory, operational, or institutional complexity — fintech, healthtech, legaltech, HR, infrastructure — favours founders who have already learned to think this way.

Silicon Valley will always have advantages. Capital density. Talent density. The network. But the Valley selects for a specific set of insights, in a specific kind of market, for a specific kind of founder.

Some of the most durable B2B businesses of the next decade will be built in markets the Valley can’t see clearly or can’t even reach. By founders who don’t fit the template. Who build global by default because they never had a single home market to start from. Who discover, sometimes by accident, that the thing they were building wasn’t a tech product with international features.

It was infrastructure. — And infrastructure, once laid, is very hard to disrupt.

Deel was founded in 2019. Today it operates in 150+ countries, serves 40,000+ customers, and recently raised at a $17B+ valuation — profitable throughout.

To close this optimistic rant off — Let’s wish Alex Bouaziz and Deel bright future and let’s hope other European companies will follow the playbook of profitable growth rather than VC-fueled hope-for-the-best wheel (which Europe is not built for).

Let's build better,

Pete (aka BFG)