Default Optimism

The value

"Default optimism means we're happy people, we want to hire happy people. People who are optimistic, when problems happen they're trying to figure out solutions instead of saying it's over. Even for the toughest problems, there are solutions we can come up with," says Shuo Wang, describing one of Deel's named culture values alongside speed and care for colleagues.¹

Default optimism is operationalized as a hiring filter rather than a slogan on a wall. Wang and her co-founder personally interviewed the company's first roughly 400 employees out of several thousand screened, looking for happiness, curiosity, and problem-solving instinct on the theory that employees define a company's culture, so the culture has to be set at the point of hire. Roughly 60 to 70 percent of those first employees remained at the company years later, and some of the earliest sales development hires became directors, which the founders read as evidence the filter selects for people who compound rather than plateau.

Wang's own version of the disposition is grounded in hardship rather than naivete: being hit by a campus shuttle as a student and reflecting that she was fortunate it struck her left arm rather than her right, repeated experience as an immigrant outsider, and running parts of the company from her mother's hospital room during her illness. The optimism is framed as a chosen stance under adversity, deliberately paired with high standards so it does not curdle into wishful thinking.

Confirmation and its naming history

Alex Bouaziz corroborates the value and adds its origin story: "When we started Deel, one of our principles, my HR made me change it, was literally 'we try to hire happy people.' We changed it to default optimism."² His stated reasoning is partly personal and partly operational: given how much time cofounders and colleagues spend together, he would rather share that time with someone predisposed to optimism, and under pressure the choice is stark, "do you want the person that defaults into happiness or defaults into sadness? For me it's a no-brainer." He extends the same filter to executive hiring, screening leadership candidates for being grounded, happy, and low-ego given how contested the years ahead are likely to be.

A separate interview adds the naming moment itself: the original principle, "being happy is a weird principle," was changed to default optimism with his cofounder early on, though he says the company embodied it either way.³ He treats a candidate's stated reason for happiness as a signal worth probing directly, asking in interviews whether someone is a happy person or simply projecting confidence out of fear.

Why it matters

Default optimism functions as fuel for organizational speed: a problem-to-solution-to-shipped-fix loop only runs fast if people instinctively believe a solution exists, since pessimists stall the loop at the point of declaring a problem unsolvable. Selecting for the disposition at the hiring stage is also cheaper than trying to enforce it culturally after the fact, once a workforce already contains people who default the other way.