Global from Day One

The reasons to start local have evaporated

Fifty years ago, Shuo Wang notes, a company started in one city because everyone had to be in the same room, and that constraint has simply dissolved. "If you build a company 50 years ago, you started with one city, everyone has to be in person. But today you have Internet, Slack, Microsoft Teams, the communication barrier is much lower. There's no friction. If you are a founder, you should think how my product can serve billions of people, instead of just one city."¹ The structural cost of operating across borders has inverted, which is the ground for her claim that companies should go global far earlier than most do.

Wang lays out the argument as a set of frictions that have fallen away: information is everywhere, so anyone can learn anything online; travel has collapsed, making physical presence cheap when it is needed; communication runs without friction over video and chat; and AI removes the last barrier of language through auto-translation. The conclusion she draws is to build one product and serve many places at once. She describes Deel operationalizing it with a quarterly target of roughly 20 new countries to register and go live, and ties the global frame to the founders being deliberate outsiders to Silicon Valley, so a worldwide view was native rather than bolted on. She also names the ceiling the principle is meant to lift: "If you want to scale fast, it has to serve the majority of the world."¹

Global as a pre-commitment, not a scaling step

Wang adds the operational half of the doctrine from the point where the company reached 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue. She describes planting one-person sales teams in EMEA, APAC, Latin America, and North America "since day one," before product-market fit, when a single global team would have looked like the efficient choice.² "Even though it is very small, just one person to start with. But it helped us to build the infrastructure, build the fundamentals, and when we have this product-market fit in 2020, it is very easy for us to scale to a good magnitude." The framing treats the regional seats as a pre-commitment: overhead that looked wasteful early became the reason a later demand shock could be absorbed rather than missed.

The talent version of the same logic

Alex Bouaziz, Wang's co-founder, applies the same frictions-evaporated reasoning inside the company as well as to its market.³ He argues that exceptional people in cities far from the traditional startup hubs never had a reason to relocate, and that a strong remote job paying above the local rate has no substitute, so building fully remotely widens the accessible talent pool rather than shrinking it. This pairs the market-side and labor-side halves of the doctrine, and connects to gaming-native remote trust as one account of why founders of this generation are comfortable coordinating distributed teams by default.

The cost the principle carries

Both founders' accounts leave a tension in view. Going global early multiplies the compliance surface, since each country carries its own labor law, tax, and benefits rules. The response they describe is to own that complexity, building the regulatory infrastructure as the product rather than treating it as overhead, which means the principle is only viable for a company willing to make the compliance build a core part of what it sells. The narrow-problem, global-surface shape it implies stands in productive tension with the advice to make the problem small and win a single city first, reconciled by keeping the wedge tiny while making the geography wide.