Dan Westgarth has spent 7 years helping build Deel from a contractor invoicing tool into one of the most valuable HR and payroll platforms in the world, and he did it after cutting his teeth as an early operator at Revolut. As COO, he sits across nearly every function the AI conversation touches: finance, sales, engineering, and the sheer operational load of running a company at global scale.

In this conversation, Dan gets specific on AI and Ops. He walks through the internal tool that takes a bug ticket, writes the fix, and opens its own pull request for an engineer to review. He talks through what he actually looks for when hiring, and the future of SaaS isn't dead, but there is about to be a lot more competition.

We traverse through a funny detour into Dan's own weekend coding habit (his laptop did not enjoy….), a rundown of which AI tool he reaches for and when, and an answer to "what would you build this weekend”

Listen for a leading operator's view of AI adoption at scale

CHAPTERS

00:00 Cold open, the AI agent that writes its own code

00:46 Show intro, Deel's sponsorship, and what's ahead

02:03 Sponsor break, Deel

02:30 What Deel actually does

03:14 Rapid AI hot takes, finance roles, human oversight, hardware, sports, and the World Cup

09:29 Why Deel keeps winning after seven years

10:00 How the product evolved from contractor invoicing to a full HR platform

11:28 What Dan looks for when hiring

13:06 Leaving Revolut for Deel

14:17 Sponsor break, Deel

14:57 The YC Winter 2019 connection

15:49 Setting targets and building momentum

16:43 Where AI helps the sales team, and where it can't

19:20 Should AI handle your email

21:03 AI meeting assistants, pros and cons

22:53 What makes an A+ engineer in 2026

23:37 Inside DCA, Deel's self-writing code agent

25:55 Breaking into new international markets

28:34 B2C versus B2B expansion

30:16 The cost of not using a platform like Deel

33:01 What keeps Dan up at night about AI agents

33:29 Akai, and scaling operations without growing headcount

36:15 Dan's own weekend coding experiment

37:26 Rapid fire, is the SaaS apocalypse real

39:48 The physical Deel Card and crypto payroll

42:23 What is a stablecoin

43:02 Which AI tools Dan actually reaches for

44:51 If Dan built one AI project this weekend

46:45 Closing thoughts and where to find Dan

47:08 Deel's new Arsenal FC sponsorship

48:41 Georgie's weekly AI newsletter