Startups Decoded

Chris Lee joined Deel when it was doing $1M ARR. Today it's past $1B+.
He didn't just watch that happen, he made hiring, firing, and org design decisions that either cleared the path or slowed everything down. That's what this conversation is really about.
Most founders build their sales team reactively. They wait until it hurts, then hire fast and hope for the best. Chris runs a 600-person sales org with 65+ managers and 14 direct reports — and in 5.5 years, he hasn't had a single director leave regrettably. That number tells you everything about how he thinks about people.
Episode outline
The $1M ARR starting point: What the early Deel sales motion looked like.
Hiring philosophy at scale: Why great people hire great people.
Fire fast: The real cost of keeping the wrong person in place too long.
Scaling through thresholds: What breaks at $10M, $500M, and $1B ARR.
AI and the future sales org: How systems thinking is becoming the defining skill for sales leaders.
The Pitch: How 10 global startups won $1M in investment from Deel
The Ghostbuster role: The emerging function nobody has a title for yet, finding broken things and fixing them.
Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
Presented by Deel: If you're at the stage of making your first or fiftieth hire — and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing about. They're supporting Startups Decoded for good reason. LEARN MORE.
Chris Lee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/techcontrarian/
Chris was one of Deel’s earliest sales hires. He helped build the revenue engine that took Deel to $1B+ ARR in under three years. Today he runs Sales for the Americas. He's seen every stage of that growth from the inside into the machine it became.
Andy Walsh - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/
2× exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (750,000 downloads + Top 2% globally).
Access All Areas.
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Web: startupsdecoded.com
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Music Credit
“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia)
Disclaimer
The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Founders do not know how to convert their network.
Andy Walsh sits down with Kyle Kane, co-founder of onSpark AI, the world's first AI-powered partnership engine. Kyle Kane built $2B in partnership revenue for some of the biggest names in music and brands before realizing the same broken pattern kept killing deals: founders had the right relationships and no system to turn them into money.
Kyle breaks down what a partnership engine actually looks like, why most founders confuse networking with revenue strategy, and how OnSpark is using AI to fix the part of the funnel nobody wants to talk about. The conversation covers borrowed gravity, partnership autopsies, and the one mindset shift that separates founders who close from founders who collect contacts.
EPISODE OUTLINE
From Shakira tours to Samsung deals — Kyle's path from signed songwriter at seventeen to driving $2B in brand partnership revenue
Networking is not a growth strategy — why collecting handshakes produces nothing measurable
The two wounds that kill deals — lack of self-worth and lack of trust
Borrowed gravity — how founders without celebrity access can use the same logic
The Drake tour that almost ended him — eight million dollars, 26,000 pre-sold tickets, and a promoter who disappeared with the refund
Presented by Deel If you're making your first or fiftieth hire — and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing. They're supporting Startups Decoded this season for good reason. LEARN MORE.
Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
Andy Walsh
2x exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (Top 2% globally). Andy helps founders sharpen judgment and integrate brand, product, and growth into a clear path to scale.
Kyle Kane
Co-founder of onSpark AI — the world's first AI-powered partnership engine, backed by Martell Ventures. Kyle has driven over $2B in partnership revenue for clients and brands, and now builds the tools that make that possible at scale. He works with founders, creators, agencies, and operators who want to stop chasing cold leads and start building partnerships that actually convert.
Access All Areas.
Subscribe: Substack
Connect: LinkedIn
Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X
Web: startupsdecoded.com

Music Credit "Neptuno" – Phondupe (Album: Onykia)
The Studio : Filmed on location at 28th&Park. A content & production studio for New York's visionary Builders, Investors, Artists, Musicians, & Creators to amplify their voice & share bold stories. Use the code "Decoded" for 25% off your first booking.

Brad Bowery sat down with Andy Walsh to unpack what founders should be thinking about as they begin hiring, and why the global talent pool is more accessible than most realize.
Brad has built local teams as a founder and global teams as an operator at Zendesk and now Deel, where he leads Global VC and PE Partnerships.
In this episode we explore;
The real friction of global hiring: compliance, classification, and when contractor status blows up
PEO versus EOR, explained plainly
What a 10-person startup can learn from how the fastest-growing companies think about talent infrastructure
If your next hire could define the next 18 months, this one is worth your time.
Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
Presented by Deel: If you’re making your first or fiftieth hire, and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing. They’re supporting Startups Decoded for good reason. LEARN MORE.
Subscribe now
Brad Bowery
Brad Bowery has spent his career at the intersection of startups and scale — founder, operator, and now head of Global VC and PE Partnerships at Deel. Before Deel, he scaled Zendesk’s startup program. Prior to that, he co-founded two renewable energy startups, SRECTrade (acquired by Xpansiv) and Pace Avenue, and later took on roles leading people operations at the drone startups Lily Robotics. Stanford MBA. Brown grad. Still holds the school pole vault record.
Andy Walsh
2× exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (500,000 downloads + Top 2% globally).
The Studio
​Filmed on location at 28th&Park. A content & production studio for New York’s visionary Builders, Investors, Artists, Musicians, & Creators to amplify their voice & share bold stories. Use the code “Decoded” for 25% off your first booking. Find out more!

Access All Areas.
Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
Subscribe: Substack
Connect: LinkedIn
Web: startupsdecoded.com
Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X
Music Credit
“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia)

Most founders think IP protection is something they'll sort out once the business gets traction. That's exactly backwards. By the time it feels urgent, the work already matters, and you're behind.
This conversation cuts through the abstraction. Maria Sinatra is an IP attorney at Venable LLP who works with startups and nationally recognized consumer brands on exactly this problem. Allison Luvera is the founder of Juliet Wine, a category-creating consumer brand that got copied by a company 300 times its size, and had the receipts to do something about it. Together they make the case that your brand is not a marketing asset. It's infrastructure, and you need to own it before someone else does.
Venable LLP is a supporter of Startups Decoded: Venable LLP is a national law firm of 900-plus professionals, with deep expertise in IP law, trademarks, copyright, patents, and brand protection for startups and consumer brands.
Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube

Presented by Deel: If you're at the stage of making your first or fiftieth hire — and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing about. They're supporting Startups Decoded this season for good reason. LEARN MORE.
Maria Sinatra
Is a Partner at Venable LLP specializing in trademark, copyright, and brand protection for startups and nationally recognized consumer brands. She advises companies on protecting and scaling their IP as they grow.
Allison Luvera
Founder and CEO of Juliet Wine and an award-winning entrepreneur and brand builder with 15 years of experience across consumer goods, media, and luxury beverage brands. Her work spans companies including Perrier-Jouët, Martell, Chivas Regal, Vogue, and InStyle.
Andy Walsh
2× exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (500,000 downloads + Top 2% globally).

Access All Areas.
Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
Subscribe: Substack
Connect: LinkedIn
Web: startupsdecoded.com
Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X
Music Credit
“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2
The Studio
​Filmed on location at 28th&Park. A content & production studio for New York’s visionary Builders, Investors, Artists, Musicians, & Creators to amplify their voice & share bold stories. Use the code "Decoded" for 25% off your first booking.

Most companies believe they run on strategy. They actually run on conversations, and those conversations vanish the moment the call ends.
David Shim watched this happen from the inside while running Foursquare, sitting in meetings where half the room was camera off, on mute, essentially absent. He called it Ghost Mode. That observation became the founding insight for Read AI, and it’s a sharper diagnosis of organizational dysfunction than most founders ever put into words.
What David built isn’t just a note-taker. It’s a system of action, one that captures decisions, tracks follow-through, and over time builds a working model of how you think and operate. The digital twin concept he walks through here is the logical endpoint of that: an AI that knows your priorities, your patterns, and your blind spots, and starts filling the gaps before you even notice them.
For founders, the practical takeaway is immediate. Every conversation your team has is institutional memory, and right now most of it is leaking out of your company every single day. This episode is about what it looks like when you actually stop that.
EPISODE OUTLINE
1. From stock ticker to stockbroker at 17
2. Placed, Snap, and the location data bet
3. Foursquare and understanding human behavior at scale
4. The Ghost Mode problem and the founding of Read AI
5. Institutional memory, digital twins, and the system of action
Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
Subscribe now
Presented by Deel. If you’re making your first or fiftieth hire and doing it across borders, Deel is worth knowing. They’re supporting Startups Decoded for good reason. LEARN MORE.
Andy Walsh
2x exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (Top 2% globally). Andy helps founders sharpen judgment and integrate brand, product, and growth into a clear path to scale.
David Shim
Co-Founder and CEO of Read AI, an AI productivity platform that turns meetings, emails, and messages into searchable insights and action. Previously CEO of Foursquare and founder of Placed, acquired by Snap, Shim has spent his career building data and AI-driven companies focused on helping organizations make better decisions.
Access All Areas.
Subscribe: Substack
Connect: LinkedIn
Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X
Web: startupsdecoded.com
The Studio
​Filmed on location at 28th&Park. A content & production studio for New York’s visionary Builders, Investors, Artists, Musicians, & Creators to amplify their voice & share bold stories. Use the code “Decoded” for 25% off your first booking.
Music Credit
“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia)