Standing center stage in a lime dress and white sneakers, Shuo Wang presses a microphone to her mouth with one hand and gestures assuredly with the other. Speaking at a conference in San Francisco, the Deel cofounder and chief revenue officer is chronicling the growth of her HR software company in an unconventional way: by taking the audience through what she sees as the list of failures in Deel’s history, starting with its earliest days as part of startup incubator Y Combinator 2019.
In Wang’s 2022 talk, titled “How Everything Breaks in Hypergrowth,” she listed all the places where things went awry—scaling the wrong parts of the company at the wrong times, burnout, lags in features and missing out on sales opportunities—and how she helped Deel change course to address them. “I tend to look forward instead of sideways.”