This article is part of Fintech Leaders, a newsletter with 90,000+ builders, entrepreneurs, investors, regulators, and students of financial services. I invite you to share and sign up. If you enjoy this conversation, please consider leaving a review on Apple, Spotify, or Youtube.
I sat down with returning guest Dan Westgarth, COO of Deel, the company that’s redefining how businesses hire and pay talent anywhere in the world.
Deel has grown into one of the most valuable private tech companies on the planet. In 2025, they crossed one billion dollars in revenue, achieved a $17 billion valuation, and paid out $22 billion in payroll globally. Dan oversees an organization of 3,300 people across more than 100 countries. Before Deel, he was an early operator at Revolut.
We discussed how Deel built their elite problem-solving team called the Ghostbusters, why they’ve killed one-on-ones, how they’ve integrated more than 10 acquisitions, and the massive bet they’re making on building their own payroll processing engines worldwide.
By the way, Deel is running a huge virtual hiring event this week to fill 300+ Sales/GTM roles for Dan’s team. They are aiming for the Guinness World Record for the largest online hiring event ever. Click Here to register and join on Wednesday, Jan 14, 2026.
How Deel built their elite problem-solving team called the Ghostbusters
“There were certain areas of the business that nobody really wanted to touch, and they were a little bit scared of it, or it was a really complicated problem, and they were kind of referred to as ghosts. We said, you know what, let’s build a team of people that are going to bust the ghosts. Hence, Ghostbusters.”
Mission-Oriented Mercenaries Who Solve Problems Nobody Else Will Touch. Dan leads a team of five or six operators he calls the Ghostbusters, a group that rejects the corporate “chief of staff” title in favor of something that captures what they actually do: tackle the gnarly, cross-functional problems that scare everyone else. These aren’t typical roles. Ghostbusters operate almost autonomously, quantifying problems by impact and pitching Dan directly on what they want to solve.
The profile is paradoxical. Dan describes them as leaning mercenary, yet they can’t be classified that way because they’re deeply mission-oriented. Pure mercenaries would “just go in and upset everybody,” but Ghostbusters cut through organizational politics precisely because teams trust them to actually solve problems. This has resulted in teams across Deel actually begging for Ghostbuster assignments to help them with problems.
One example illustrates the value. A few years ago, Deel’s sales commission process was running entirely on Google Sheets, with rev ops manually downloading data from Salesforce, triaging across spreadsheets, calculating commissions with formulas, and passing results to payroll. The only solution on the table was hiring two or three rev ops specialists, a half-million-dollar fix that would take months given how hard those roles are to fill. Instead, Dan assigned a Ghostbuster team. Within 10 days, they had a working MVP. Within three weeks, it was fully productized and deployed. The Google Sheet was gone!
Performance management at the world’s largest remote-first company
Daily Automated KPIs Create a Trader Mentality Across the Organization
As the largest remote-first company in the world, Deel cannot rely on walking past desks to gauge performance. Dan frames this constraint as an advantage: it forced them to build actual novel measurement infrastructure rather than depending on proximity and gut feel. No off-the-shelf software worked for their needs, so they built their own goals system within Deel Engage, their internal product.
The vision is radical transparency. Every employee, regardless of role, has quantifiable KPIs that automatically query the company database daily. A salesperson can log in and see their revenue target tracking in real time. Customer support agents have composite scores combining response speed, satisfaction ratings, and other factors. These scores are important and they are directly linked to performance compensation. The result is a “hedge fund trader mentality” where people own their numbers daily rather than waiting for quarterly reviews.
Of course exceptions do exist, and qualitative assessments matter too. Deel rates everyone against core values at the end of each quarter. But the foundation is measurement. Five or six years ago, all of this ran on Google Sheets. They tried third-party software but weren’t satisfied with the details. So they built their own system, evolved it through multiple versions, and now have tools they’re proud of, including an internal Wikipedia, treasury management system, and a ticketing system called Workbench.
From one product to ten: Deel’s expansion strategy
Going Global From Day One Created Infrastructure That Made Multi-Product Expansion Possible. Most companies go deep in one market before expanding. Deel went global immediately, which meant their regulatory and tech stacks were optimized for worldwide operations from the start. Simple things like having every country on the onboarding dropdown list, supporting all entity types, and building backend architecture aligned to global needs. This made launching subsequent products and scaling “pretty easy” from an infrastructure perspective.
Where it gets complicated is go-to-market. Dan observes that some companies obsess too much about go-to-market, going single country and single product really deep, trying hard for product-market fit, then pivoting when it doesn’t work. Deel went broad, serving different customers around the world across different segments, from SMBs to enterprise. Today they’re multi-product, multi-geography, multi-segment, and even multi-sector. The way they onboard all those different customers is “really, really challenging,” and Dan believes figuring that out is actually the barrier to building a $100 billion company.
Their product-market fit philosophy is simple: launch products that customers want. If one or two customers ask for something, hundreds or thousands probably want it too. That’s exactly how employer of record started. One customer with significant ARR on the table persuaded them to build it. Five years later, it’s one of their biggest products. Their benefits business tells a similar story. Dan recently spoke with a founder who had achieved product-market fit at Series A and was scaling, but felt “almost bad” telling him that Deel’s benefits business was already doing more than $100 million in ARR. Platform amplification is brutal for standalone startups.
Integrating more than 10 acquisitions
No integration is the same, Dan emphasizes. Every acquisition is bespoke. They’ve put together and revised their playbook a hundred times, but still need to flex it every single time. The overarching acquisition strategy has three prongs: acquiring product expertise through acqui-hires where founders become general managers or heads of product; acquiring infrastructure, whether regulatory or technical; and buying revenue at a decent price to integrate, improve margins, and accelerate into new sectors or geographies.
The integration philosophy comes down to cutting through noise. Dan has observed that there are endless opinions and unnecessary complexity about exactly where someone should live organizationally, how they should be compensated, or who they should report to. Often you just need to “tune out all of the noise and make the decision in a very basic, almost dumb, sterile way.”
Overall, Dan has five principles for M&A integration:
1. Always put your people first.
2. Smart decisions where possible, simple decisions where necessary.
3. Don’t try to please everybody.
4. Have a playbook but be ready to adapt it.
5. Make the hard calls quickly.
When deciding who to please, Dan optimizes for the acquisition’s objective. If you’re buying the business for revenue, optimize for customers: what keeps them happiest and retention highest.
Why Deel killed one-on-ones
Meetings Should Only Happen When Necessary, and One-on-Ones Create Artificial Delays.
Dan tells us that at Deel, the C-suite is very much involved in building. This speaks to their “apolitical organization,” where low politics means things move quickly.
The controversial stance: Dan told his direct reports to stop doing one-on-ones. His reasoning is that recurring meetings create holding patterns. People sit on topics until the scheduled slot, which might be six or seven days away. For burning issues, that’s unacceptable. Send a Slack message now. Call the person now. One-on-ones work for deep conversations, but on a transactional level, “just do the thing now and keep it moving.”
Dan’s communication style matches this philosophy. He writes in short form. For deeper explanations, he records video notes and sends them to people. Recipients can listen back, copy the transcript, paste it into their AI of choice, and have it summarized. “That’s the kind of Deel way of doing things.”
Book Recommendations
“Who” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, which Dan describes as a method for hiring effectively at scale. The book offers simple, practical tips and tricks for interview questions and the interview process that have helped Deel build and maintain their team of 7,000 people across more than 100 countries.
The Unfiltered Q&A: Dan Westgarth on Building Deel
Miguel Armaza: I’ve heard you are world class at focusing and committing on execution. How do you stay focused?
Dan Westgarth: Operators have an unlimited list of problems that they could be working on. So quantifying those problems, ordering them by impact, is really the key to staying focused and executing quickly.
Miguel Armaza: When it comes to not just you but your team, how do you get everyone rowing in the same direction?
Dan Westgarth: The understanding behind the why we’re doing something is really important. If people don’t understand why we’ve made a decision or why we’re doing something, they’re not truly bought in and truly motivated. They’ll work hard regardless, but when they understand exactly why we’re doing something and the value that’s going to deliver for the business, that’s when things start to work really fluidly. You kind of have that eureka moment and everything just works and falls into place.
Miguel Armaza: I’ve seen firsthand your ability to simplify complex problems and communicate them in a very simplified way that gets the message across. How do you think about doing this?
Dan Westgarth: Most complexity is just noise, legacy assumptions, opinions, edge cases, or sometimes fear of actually making a decision. I found that managers often make complexity because they’re just scared of solving the problem. So we tend to reduce things to its core truth or first principles, and then communicate it simply. Write down the problem statement in its most simple form, and then you can align people around the problem. You can get to mental clarity, and then you can go in and solve it.
Miguel Armaza: One of the most interesting topics I want to hear from you about is this team of Ghostbusters that you lead. Who are the Ghostbusters?
Dan Westgarth: The Ghostbusters are effectively a team of chief of staff type profiles. We never liked the title chief of staff. We found it to be rather corporate. So the story behind the Ghostbusters is as follows: there were certain areas of the business or of operation that nobody really wanted to touch. They were a little bit scared of it, or it was a really complicated problem, and they were referred to as ghosts. And we said, you know what, let’s build a team of people that are going to bust the ghosts. Hence, Ghostbusters.
They’re a team of five or six people who report to me, and they focus on problems that they are able to solve almost independently. They’re typically cross-functional problems. They’re typically pretty gnarly problems, and they do a really good job.
People are candidly asking for the Ghostbusters. I’d even go as far as saying begging for the Ghostbusters. Like, please, please, can you assign me a Ghostbuster for this project?
I’ll give you a really pointed example. We had a sales commission problem a couple of years ago. The sales commission process was essentially running on Google Sheets. We would have somebody from rev ops download different data from Salesforce and then different data from the Deel application, triage this across Google Sheets, use formulas to calculate sales commissions, and then pass it to payroll. It was a really horrible process. And what’s really horrible about it is the people involved or adjacent to the problem didn’t know how to solve it. The solution to the problem was hire more people, specifically more rev ops people. Rev ops is a very challenging topic to hire for. The people are often difficult to get hold of, they have long notice periods, they’re rather expensive, and that just created lead time and more political complexity.
So we said, okay, let’s bring in a Ghostbuster to solve this problem. Within 10 days, we built a working MVP. Within three weeks, that working MVP was fully productized and deployed to the application, and the Google Sheet was deprecated. It was shut down. We went from this really horrible process that nobody really wanted to touch, where the only solution on the table was to hire two or three people which would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even half a million dollars, and instead we brought in a Ghostbuster who solved it end to end within a number of weeks.
Miguel Armaza: I know something that is definitely important to you is your approach to performance management, especially as a fully remote, distributed company. How do you approach it?
Dan Westgarth: We put a lot of emphasis on the process and systems. We’re not able to walk through the office and walk by everyone’s desk and see what’s up, which is actually quite a nice unbiased state to have.
Our problem was a little bit unique in the sense that we’re the largest remote-first company in the world. So we needed to build out tools that worked for us. There was no off-the-shelf software that would do what we wanted. So within Deel Engage, which is a Deel product, we’ve built a goals system. Goals are essentially KPIs, and these KPIs are mostly automated.
Let’s say I’m a salesperson and I have a revenue target. The performance of that KPI automatically queries our database every day. So the person holding that KPI is able to log into the tool and see how they’re tracking towards that goal. It kind of looks like a stock ticker. Hopefully it’s a bull market and it’s going up and in the green. Building out that habit and that mechanism of checking KPIs daily across the organization is really powerful.
Miguel Armaza: Deel has gone from a mono-product company to a 10-product institution in about six to seven years. You were also global from day one. How did that early decision shape your ability to scale?
Dan Westgarth: We started out as a single product business, and I remember moving from single product to two products was terrifying. We were very, very scared and worried about that. We started out as a contractor invoicing platform, and then we moved into employer of record. Since then, we now offer more than 10 different products.
From a geography standpoint, we’ve always been global. We were global from the get-go. Businesses from anywhere around the world could use our product to pay contractors anywhere around the world. I think that was really helpful. It meant that our regulatory stack was almost optimized from the get-go, and similarly, the tech stack was optimized from the get-go. We had simple things like all of those countries on the dropdown list for onboarding, all of the different entity types, the backend architecture aligned to that. So it made launching subsequent products and scaling pretty easy from that perspective.
Where it gets more complicated is the go-to-market perspective. Some companies obsess about go-to-market, and they go single country, single product, really deep, trying really hard to get product-market fit. Sometimes it doesn’t work and they need to pivot. For us, we went very, very broad with that one product into two, serving different customers around the world in different segments, different size customers, SMBs through to enterprise. That was really challenging and still is really challenging.
If you think about today, we’re now multi-product, multi-geography, multi-segment, and even multi-sector. The way that we onboard all of those customers is really, really challenging. I think that’s part of the barrier to building a $100 billion company. Actually figuring all of that out is what’s kind of the barrier.
Miguel Armaza: Deel has acquired more than 10 companies over the last six years, and you’ve personally led many of those integrations. How do you succeed at integrations? That’s arguably the hardest part of M&A.
Dan Westgarth: No integration is the same. That’s for sure. Every single one is bespoke. We put together the playbook and revised it a hundred times, but I found that you need to flex it every single time.
You can never please everyone. And sometimes the really difficult decisions, the really hard decisions, they just need to be dumbed down to a really easy decision. For example, if you’re trying to figure out where to put a person or a team of people, well, if you’re in finance, you live in finance. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t really matter what your specialization is or the history is.
What I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of opinions and unnecessary complexity on exactly where someone should live or how they should be compensated or who they should report to. Often you just need to tune out all of the noise and make the decision in a very basic, almost dumb, sterile way. That has been really, really helpful.
In summary, there are five things that I care about. Number one, always put your people first. Number two, smart decisions where possible, simple decisions where necessary. Number three, don’t try to please everybody. Number four, have a playbook but be ready to adapt it. And number five, make the hard calls quickly.
Miguel Armaza: On not trying to please everybody, how do you decide who to please?
Dan Westgarth: You want to think about the objective. Depending on the theme that the acquisition aligns with, are you buying the business from a revenue and business perspective, or are you buying regulatory infrastructure, or are you buying product expertise? I would optimize for that. So let’s take the first example. You’re buying the business. You’re buying the revenue. Well, you need to optimize for the customers. What’s going to keep the customers the happiest? What’s going to keep the retention the highest?
Miguel Armaza: How big is your organization, and how does your typical day look?
Dan Westgarth: Deel is around 7,000 people, just over. My organization is 3,300 people. We’re in more than 100 countries these days. It’s a mixture of run-the-business operators and change-the-business ops and strategy managers.
My day starts pretty early. I’m definitely an early bird. The first thing I do is probably check my Whoop on my WhatsApp. I like to know my sleep score and my metrics. Then I check my WhatsApp to see if anything urgent has come up through the night. I typically take it pretty easy in the morning for the first 20 or 30 minutes, then go into a pretty standard routine of email and then Slack. I think that’s a really important ritual, not only to respond to everything and keep it moving, but also to look out for unexpected items that are coming your way. Write those down and start to orient your day around that.
After this, it’s pretty regular. A mixture of functional leadership, customer relationship building or maintenance, and then actually building stuff. At Deel, the C-suite is very much involved in building. I think that speaks volumes to our apolitical organization. There’s not a lot of politics at Deel, and that means we can keep things moving quickly and keep building things.
Another thing I’ll highlight is we don’t like meetings at Deel. We think meetings should only happen when necessary. I just told my directs not to do one-on-ones, because people sit on topics until the one-on-one and that just delays things. If there’s a burning topic, send a Slack message now or call the person now, in the moment. Don’t sit on it. You might be waiting seven days or six days for the next one-on-one.
That shocks people a little bit, because some people need the one-on-one for structure. It’s something we don’t like to do. Structure yourself with your notes, keep yourself organized. One-on-ones are good, especially when there are deep things to talk about, but on a transactional level, just do the thing now and keep it moving.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Want more podcast episodes? Join me and follow Fintech Leaders today on Apple, Spotify, Youtube or your favorite podcast app for weekly conversations with today’s global leaders that will dominate the 21st century in fintech, business, and beyond.
Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss big conversations and insights with the giants of Fintech.
