Shuo Wang has spent her career doing what her advisors didn't recommend, and AI is her latest bet

Earlier this year, Deel gave its 7,000 employees Claude access. The rollout went from 100 licenses to 7,000 in one week, fast enough that the Anthropic team reached out to ask what was happening at Deel.

The founder driving that push is working 2 to 3 AM most nights. Shuo Wang, Deel's co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer, told Forbes in a recent interview that she has not felt this level of intensity since Deel was still at Y Combinator. "I feel like it is the early days of Deel all over again," Wang said.

That is an unusual thing for the co-founder of a $1.5 billion ARR company to say. Deel, which Wang co-founded in 2019, is one of the fastest-growing companies in modern tech history. It processes around two million payroll runs each month, moves $2 billion across 150 countries, and serves 40,000 clients from early-stage startups to companies like Verizon. Wang became a billionaire this year, appearing on the Forbes list of America's Richest Self-Made Women.

The AI push is only the latest call Wang has made that most founders wouldn't. She came to Y Combinator on an outsider path, pivoted into an industry VCs consider boring, and built Deel on decisions that ran against the standard playbook: direct entities instead of reselling, breadth instead of focus, an analytical revenue leader taking the CRO seat from pre-seed. She has never done what she was told.

The outsider path

The vocabulary Wang brings to Deel came together in her first month at MIT, when a bus accident nearly cost her her left arm. She had planned to study math, but the accident redirected her trajectory. "At the time I was thinking that if I were to lose my arm totally, what could I do?" Wang said. "I should be able to build a new arm for myself. So that's why I decided to study mechanical engineering."

She spent the rest of MIT in a lab building exoskeletons. Asked what she still uses from that training in her day-to-day at Deel, Wang gave a direct answer. "What I learned from that experience is system thinking and then system building," she said.

The pattern predates MIT, back to when Wang moved from China to the US at 16 without speaking much English. Her mother ran a motorcycle and scooter business, and Wang set up a stall at a local flea market to help sell them. She could barely communicate, but the customers came anyway. "People are very interested, and even without me asking questions or being able to explain, people started to buy," she said.

That flea market gave her what became her first product philosophy: "A good product to the right group of people, it will sell itself."

By the time Wang got to Y Combinator in January 2019 with co-founder Alex Bouaziz, she was already a two-time founder. Her first company, Aeris Clean Tech, had built air quality systems in China and sold to iRobot. The conventional next move after that kind of exit was Stanford business school or a senior operating role, but Wang went to YC.

Choosing the "boring" industry

Wang and Bouaziz got into Y Combinator in January 2019 with a plan to build a crypto payment platform for content creators. "One month later, the crypto market crashed," Wang told Forbes. "No one wanted to get paid in crypto anymore."

They pivoted three times inside the ten-week YC batch. To figure out what to pivot into, Wang and Bouaziz interviewed almost every one of the roughly 200 other companies in their cohort, asking what they actually needed. "We just started to talk with our batchmates because they are our potential customers," Wang said. "How are you hiring people? What platforms are you using? What are some of the pain points? How can Deel help?"

The answer they kept getting back was about paying international workers. Wang was already familiar with the problem from Aeris, where she had worked with international designers and vendors and couldn't find a decent way to pay them. "There's just no really good platform for me to pay the group of vendors that I work with," she said.

The category they landed in was payroll. It is famously difficult to break into, populated by entrenched incumbents, and the work of running payroll compliance across dozens of jurisdictions is unglamorous. Conventional VC wisdom in 2019 was that payroll was a bad first company. Wang and Bouaziz went in anyway.

The initial YC conversations became the product roadmap, and features shipping at Deel in 2026, Wang says, still trace back to those interviews. "Some of our product features and on our product roadmap, I would believe it still goes back to the 2019 experience," she said.

The bets against the playbook

The strategic decisions that followed the YC pivot each broke with a piece of conventional startup wisdom.

The first was infrastructure. When Deel launched, the incumbent global payroll players operated on a reseller model, contracting with local employer-of-record firms in each country. That approach was faster, cheaper, and had lower operational risk. Deel went the other direction. Wang and Bouaziz built out Deel's own legal entities and banking infrastructure country by country, and today Deel operates close to 450 bank accounts across 120 countries. "The reason is that we always have a backup," Wang told Forbes. "If option A does not work, we always have option B, just because we need to pay people's salaries on time every single month." The direct-infrastructure bet turned Deel into an operating company as much as a software company. It took longer to build than the reseller model, but it gave Deel a compliance edge that the reseller model couldn't match.

The second break was product breadth. Conventional VC wisdom says early-stage companies should pick one product, go deep, and defer expansion until the initial category is dominated. Deel didn't. The company added services aggressively: hiring, IT provisioning, benefits, background checks, immigration, equity issuance. "Every year we add more services, and then we listen to our customers and stay very close to our clients and we develop our products based on their needs," Wang said. "That's part of speed and execution."

That approach came with tension, and when Wang realized a product team had rolled out updates without alignment across sales and enablement, she heard about it after the fact. "How can I not know about this?" she said. Bouaziz built a GM model in response: every product department got a single owner with P&L responsibility. "Instead of having three different owners, let's just have one single owner," Wang said.

The third break was Wang's own role. It is unusual for a non-CEO co-founder to hold an executive seat from pre-seed through billion-dollar ARR; typically an experienced revenue leader gets brought in by the Series B. Wang has been CRO since Deel's pre-seed round, learning on the job and hiring people who knew more than she did about GTM.

The fourth break was brand. Wang is analytically minded, describing revenue planning in terms of pipeline models, conversion rates, and hiring math. And yet in 2026 Deel signed on as jersey sponsor of Arsenal, an unusual brand play for a company whose customers are HR and finance leaders. Deel made it anyway.

"The early days again"

The change getting the most attention inside Deel in 2026 is not a product launch. It’s the internal rebuild around AI that Wang describes as the latest break with convention.

Enterprise AI adoption in most large companies looks like careful piloting, a small group of employees, a defined use case, a phased rollout. Deel deployed access from 100 employees to 7,000 in a single week. "Even the Anthropic team was super surprised, and they reached out to us and asked what is going on with Deel," Wang said.

Engineers got Claude Code. Operations teams got the ability to build their own automated workflows. Sales built go-to-market toolkits with better forecasting and signal visibility. Wang started using Claude herself to prototype product features and give feedback directly to her product team.

"AI today is not only a productivity tool," Wang told Forbes. "Yes, engineers will be able to use AI to build more code, sales will be able to handle more cases, customer support will be able to solve more tickets. But companies start to use AI to build better systems, and then they use AI to build better companies."

She works past midnight most nights now, and starts again around nine. "I feel like AI made me work harder," Wang said. "I actually work up to 2 or 3 AM and then wake up around 9 or 10, and then do that all over again. I'm super excited every single day," she says. "For the past two, almost two quarters, I feel like it is the early days of Deel all over again.”

The next chapter of the product follows from the rebuild: a workforce management system for a mixed workforce of humans and AI agents. "Not only do we manage real human beings today, but also we manage AI agents. How can we help companies be able to manage all their talents, including AI? I think that would be a very interesting challenge," Wang told Forbes.

Wang made the bets she did because the conventional path was not the one that made sense to her. The AI push is the same call in a different form.

The runway

Wang joined the Forbes list of America's Richest Self-Made Women this year. Asked what has changed about her day-to-day, she gave a short answer. "My life really didn't change much," Wang told Forbes. "For me, if I look at my day-to-day, Slack is very important, and then being able to build, being able to solve problems, being able to build systems, those are the things that really excite me."

Deel processes payroll for around two million people every month. There are, by Wang's count, around 800 million workers in the world. For a founder who has spent her career choosing the path her advisors didn't recommend, the runway describes Deel's remaining market and the amount of unconventional work Wang still has ahead.