Gaming-Native Remote Trust

A disposition traced to a childhood

Alex Bouaziz, in conversation with Henrique Dubugras, describes a pattern he sees in his own generation of founders: growing up gaming online, playing with and befriending people they never met in person, left them natively comfortable trusting and building with strangers, and that comfort is the disposition behind remote-first company building.¹ As Bouaziz puts it, "I can feel very friendly with someone and consider them close to me without having met them in real life."

Both founders locate the instinct in a shared childhood of multiplayer games played with strangers, organized around forums and game tags. Bouaziz names League of Legends and Age of Empires alongside a lifelong Nintendo habit; the formative experience, in his telling, is repeatedly cooperating with and forming real bonds with people whose faces he never saw. "I've never had a problem building and working with people I've never met in real life."¹ Dubugras offers a corroborating case from the same generation: he and his co-founder Pedro Franceschi decided to start a company before meeting in person, and a lot of their first engineers he met on gaming forums.

How it showed up at Deel

For Bouaziz this is not nostalgia but a reason he says he believed he could execute Deel. He recounts cold-messaging his first designer on Reddit and working with him for roughly five years, saying he had "never met him for years," and assembling an early team remotely across the UK, Serbia, Ukraine, and Upwork, mostly keeping it together.¹ The whole product, paying and managing people a company may never sit next to, presupposes that distributed work is normal, which is the worldview he says gaming installed. The load-bearing word in his account is trust: the hard part of remote work is not tooling but the willingness to extend real trust to someone you have only ever typed with, and gaming supplied a decade of low-stakes repetitions at exactly that.

Bouaziz frames Deel's full-remote structure, which he describes as thousands of people across many countries, as a deliberate advantage and a hiring reach rather than a pandemic-era concession, a stance he says comes naturally to people for whom "never met in real life" was never a barrier. Because it makes a founder comfortable working with strangers, the disposition also enlarges the hiring pool to the planet rather than the city, which he ties to the case for building global from day one.

The qualifier the founders add

Bouaziz is careful to flag the pattern's limits. He presents it as a trait of a specific internet-native window rather than a universal law, and he is unsure it holds the same way for younger or older cohorts. In his essay-form restatement he repeats the thesis, that some of the people he had the most fun with are people he never met, and that his first Deel employee was hired off a Reddit post and not met for four years, and then immediately adds the honest qualifier: "even for people like me, meeting in person matters. So we invest in it."² The retreats and offsites, in his framing, are the deliberate complement to gaming-native trust rather than a contradiction of it, since trust built without meeting supports bonding more readily than accountability.