@theventure: This French immigrant got rejected from Y Combinator twice, then built a $17 billion empire 🌍💰 Alex Bouaziz grows up in Paris watching his father build a software company out of the garage. He gets into MIT, moves to America, and starts applying to YC. He's rejected twice before someone even considers his pitch. He gets in, and arrives with an idea for smart contracts that help freelancers get paid. Three months in, it's going nowhere. Five days before Demo Day, he scraps everything. Then another founder in the program needs to pay a contractor across the globe, drops $8,000 into Alex's platform, and figures it out in minutes. Alex watches it happen. ✓ Tears the product down and spends a week cold-calling every founder in the batch who pays people abroad ✓ Gets 200 contractors onto his new platform one week later ✓ Turns hiring abroad from lawyers, months of paperwork, and a foreign office into a few clicks ✓ Sends his own team around the world to set up Deel's own offices in 150 countries, while every competitor rents third-party firms Rejected twice by YC → smart-contract idea goes nowhere → watches a founder pay someone abroad in minutes → rebuilds around that → 200 contractors in a week → own offices in 150 countries → $22B in salaries a year and a $17.3B valuation. Sometimes the real product is the thing one customer accidentally showed you they needed. What is one customer already using your product for that you never designed it to do? 🤔 #Business #Deel #Tech #Success #Entrepreneur@Deel @Alex Bouaziz

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Monday 27 July 2026 19:33:34 GMT