Deel and the future of global work
Plus: Last tickets going fast for our event 'I Wish I Knew with Lara Henderson'
Kia ora Caffeinators,
Happy Wednesday arvo. Let’s plenty on in person for you guys in the next few weeks so let’s just get into it!
Here’s what’s brewing in your Daily Shot:
Event: Holding it Together: The Human Side of startups
Event: I Wish I Knew with Lara Henderson
Podpick: NBR Podcast with Simon Shepherd - Who are the dealmakers?
Sponsored: Building Without Borders: Deel and the future of global work
Periodic Labs leaves stealth with half billion seed raise
As always, thank you to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription or simply recommended Caffeine to friends and whānau. We couldn’t do any of this without you.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
Event: Holding it Together: The Human Side of startups - Only halfway through startup week and plenty more great events to head along to. This one tomorrow in particular caught my eye because it tackles the less glamorous and often under discussed parts of being a founder.
Being a founder is tough; relentless pressure, blurred boundaries, and the constant push to deliver. In this session, we’ll get real about the challenges and share practical ways to stay well while building big. From setting boundaries to finding support, join us for honest stories and smart strategies to prevent burnout and stay grounded.
In this honest and practical session, we’ll shine a light on the real mental health challenges founders face and the strategies that actually help. From setting boundaries and building support systems to managing stress and staying connected to purpose, you’ll hear lived experiences from founders who’ve navigated the highs and lows of the journey.
This session isn’t just about wellness, it’s about sustainable leadership, long-term resilience, and building startups that don’t come at the cost of your health
Get your FREE tickets here.
Event: I Wish I Knew with Lara Henderson, PURE MAMA | Powered by +MORE Bay of Plenty - Building a company isn’t a single event – it’s a long game. One with messy middles, unexpected pivots, and the odd “what now?” at 2am.
Join us for our ‘I Wish I Knew’ series, featuring raw and real conversations with successful Kiwi founders who’ve taken the hits, made the calls, and kept showing up. This is about the stuff they wish they knew earlier – the kind of lessons that only come from doing the work (and a few things going sideways).
This event is for founders, early-stage teams and leaders who are serious about growing. We screen all registrations to make sure appropriate criteria is met.
More on our speaker:
When Lara and her sister launched PURE MAMA, growth didn’t come from one big break. It was the accumulation of small plays, sampling, hustling and testing channels, that laid the foundations. Those moves mattered, but over time, they learned that to really scale, the brand needed bigger, more strategic distribution partnerships.
From the start, PURE MAMA was bootstrapped. Both sisters went all in, selling properties, taking family loans, and putting everything they had safeguarded on the line. The sacrifices were significant, but they believed in the vision, and failure was never an option.
The reality of scaling a consumer brand is that proof of concept comes at a cost. Growth doesn’t come from quick wins or chasing trends. It’s built on distribution channels that can stand the test of time and partnerships that deliver both credibility and reach.
For PURE MAMA, that pivotal partnership was MECCA. Landing on their shelves provided immediate authority and opened doors internationally. Today, the vision for PURE MAMA is clear. This is not a trend-driven brand. The focus is on building a heritage business that can compete alongside global beauty giants. That means thinking big, forever hustling, and protecting brand credibility at every step.
The “I Wish I Knew” lesson Lara shares is simple: bet on yourself. Be prepared to sacrifice and think long term. And if you want to win on the global stage, aim straight for the top.
Date and time
Tue, 28 Oct 2025 5:15 PM - 7:00 PM NZDT
Location
+MORE offices, Mount Maunganui
155 Maunganui Road Tauranga, Bay of Plenty Region 3116
Get your tickets here and remember your promo code CAFFEINEFRIENDS
Podpick: NBR Podcast with Simon Shepherd - Who are the dealmakers? - The weather is warming up and so potentially is the market for mergers so I was chuffed to see this episode from Simon Shepherd at NBR come out from behind the paywall to answer the question - what are the big deals and who is behind them? He talks to Jarden’s Silvana Schenone, who has been named as one of the most powerful Australasian dealmakers. Plus M&A lawyer from DLA Piper Reuben Woods explains why he is bullish about the coming year. Listen to the full pod here.
Building Without Borders: Deel and the future of global work
For most of history in business, where you lived defined the limits of what you could do.
Now that constraint is disappearing and the shift will reshape not just hiring, but how entire companies are built. Deel is at the forefront of that change,
Founded in 2019, Deel has grown into one of the most valuable players in HR tech, recently crossing a billion-dollar annual revenue run-rate and supporting more than 35,000 businesses across 150 countries. Its pitch is simple but consequential: let companies hire, pay, and manage people anywhere in the world.
For Shannon Karaka, Deel’s Country Leader & Head of Expansion for AUNZ, a single sentence can sum up much of the mission.
“Talent is everywhere, but opportunity isn’t,” says Karaka.
As Karaka puts it, “We want to create a world where great companies can find the best people, wherever they are and those people don’t have to uproot their lives to find meaningful work.”
Remote work was born out of crisis but Deel sees permanence in what others thought was a blip.
“Ten years ago, remote and hybrid work weren’t a thing,” Karaka says. “Then the pandemic forced everyone into it. Suddenly it was normal. That moment changed how companies think about geography forever.”
The most interesting thing, he argues, isn’t just that work went online - it’s that headquarters stopped being the centre of gravity.
“We’re seeing this new kind of organisation emerging - distributed by design. They might have 30 people in Auckland, ten in San Francisco, five in Singapore. But they still operate as one company. Deel’s infrastructure is what lets that model work at scale.”
For New Zealand founders, that shift is especially powerful.
“Kiwi companies have always punched above their weight,” he says. “Now they can build globally from day one - not by opening offices everywhere, but by plugging into infrastructure that already exists.”
A borderless workforce is exhilarating but messy. Different time zones, different laws, different expectations of what “work” even means.
Karaka says Deel’s mission now includes something more intangible: helping companies stay cohesive when their people are scattered around the planet.
“When you’re fully distributed, you can’t rely on culture just ‘happening’ in the office kitchen,” he says. “You have to design it. That means being intentional about how you communicate, how you recognise people, how you create those moments of connection.”
Even inside Deel, the team had to learn this the hard way.
“We’re 7,000 people with no fixed office. That’s incredible and it’s hard. We had to invent new rituals, new tools, new norms for how we operate. It forced us to be really deliberate about belonging.”
Even by the breakneck standards of SaaS, Deel’s ascent has been staggering from a seed-stage startup in 2019 to a global company valued over $16b in just six years.
“You don’t get that valuation by chasing trends,” Karaka says. “You get there by solving universal problems affecting thousands of companies after solving those problems for yourself. From day one we were global founders from different countries and have now built a platform that connects the world’s largest fully remote workforce. We’re our own greatest customer.”
In Karaka’s view, what drives Deel’s success is providing the invisible scaffolding that allows innovation to happen safely.
“If you look at what holds back a lot of founders, it’s not ambition or product - it’s the admin,” he says. “They can build world-class tech but then hit a wall with visas, payroll, contracts, or compliance.”
That concept of invisible infrastructure extends to the company’s own ethos. Deel doesn’t market itself as a disruptor but rather a quiet constant that other disruptors rely on.
“We’re not the story - the founder is,” Karaka says. “Our job is to make sure the boring stuff never becomes the reason a great company doesn’t scale.”
With thousands of businesses depending on its platform, Deel now holds extraordinary amounts of data about how people work, move, and earn. Karaka says the company treats that responsibility as central to its next phase.
“Trust is the currency of global work,” he says. “When you’re hiring people you’ve never met in person, across borders you’ve never dealt with, trust has to be built into the system, not bolted on afterwards.”
That’s where Deel’s next evolution comes in: using AI and automation not to replace humans, but to create visibility and accountability.
“We’re embedding AI to simplify decisions and surface risks early,” he explains. “You can ask, ‘What do I need to know before I hire in Vietnam?’ and get an instant, compliant answer. That kind of transparency means founders don’t have to guess and talent doesn’t have to worry.”
Deel’s ultimate vision, Karaka says, goes beyond compliance or payroll — it’s about rewriting how work itself is distributed around the world.
“The future of global work isn’t just about remote jobs,” he says. “It’s about access. It’s about a developer in Manila building the same products, at the same level, as someone in San Francisco without having to leave home. It’s about a startup in Auckland hiring the best marketer in Lagos because they’re the best person for the job, not because they’re the closest. What Deel unlocks is equality of opportunity, not just efficiency of hiring.”
He believes this redistribution of opportunity will be one of the defining economic shifts of the next decade. If Deel’s technology has a philosophy, it’s that growth shouldn’t depend on geography.
“The goal isn’t just to make global hiring possible,” Karaka says. “It’s to make it normal. We want a world where where you’re from has nothing to do with what you can achieve.”
He’s optimistic about the role Kiwi startups can play in that transformation.
“New Zealand companies are small, agile, and open-minded. They’re perfectly suited for this kind of borderless thinking. They’ve always had to look outward to grow. Deel just makes that outward step faster and less painful.”
“This isn’t just a software story. It’s about rewriting the rules of how work connects people. The tools are just the means. The mission is to make opportunity global.”
Periodic Labs leaves stealth with half billion seed raise: I know these numbers get a little silly after a certain point but we have another ‘leaving stealth to great fanfare’ story and it’s a doozy. Periodic Labs came out of stealth recently with a gargantuan $300 (USD) million seed round, backed by some of the biggest names in the business, from Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.
I think it’s a particularly fascinated one considering the pedigree of its founders, Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus. The former led a science team at Google Brain and DeepMind which discovered over 2 million new crystals in 2023.
The latter is a former VP of Research at OpenAI and was part of the team which helped create ChatGPT. Their approach to AI is much more grounded, physical and scientific than many other labs. With a pretty ambitious north star.
From the Periodic Labs announcement:
“Our goal is to create an AI scientist.
Science works by conjecturing how the world might be, running experiments, and learning from the results.
Intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient. New knowledge is created when ideas are found to be consistent with reality. And so, at Periodic, we are building AI scientists and the autonomous laboratories for them to operate.”
Hell yeah team. Love to hear it. In a world of infinitely scaling AI slop, bring on the AI scientists.
(Feels like words I may come to regret in some dystopic future but I am willing to take that chance.)
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co
Thanks for writing this, it clarifyes a lot, like trying to stay grounded during a really tricky Pilates pose. Do you think the 'future of global work' will make setting personal boundaries even harder, or could tech actually help prevent burnout?