ShieldGeo

The 'Plaid for International Hiring' (a.k.a. Deel)

Elaine describes the idea behind Deel: every startup with 10+ employees was hiring internationally with no good way to manage payroll and compliance, all stuck on a hated incumbent called ShieldGeo. The play was to build a better back-end, going country-by-country like Plaid.

“I started seeing every startup that had 10 employees was starting to hire internationally, and they had to treat them as contractors, and there was no way to manage it. And if I looked under the hood, most companies were using ShieldGeo as the PEO, and everyone hated it— super old school. So I was like, okay, somebody needs to go and build a better ShieldGeo under the hood, do kind of the Plaid model of building the nitty-gritty, going into each country that people in the US hire remotely with and build out the, you know, infrastructure”

Steal thisFind a hated, old-school incumbent that everyone uses 'under the hood' and rebuild it country-by-country, Plaid-style.