Marcelo Lebre is the Co-founder and President of Remote, the payroll and international employment company.

Remote is one of the most underrated software companies, last avlued at $3 billion, doing hundreds of millions in revenue, and generating a lot of cash.

Our conversation gets into why payroll is such a hard problem to solve, why so much of the industry still runs on spreadsheets, the edge cases of software meeting the government, and a diagnosis of Europe’s regulation problem.

We also get into the insane story behind trying 8 different startup ideas before Remote, launching in 2019, how COVID changed things overnight, and what he’s learned about building culture and running remote teams.

Thanks to Gillian O’Brien, Villi Iltchev, Andreas Klinger, Masha Bucher, and Marcelo’s co-founder Job for helping brainstorm topics for this.

Try Numeral, the end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance: ⁠https://www.numeral.com⁠

Sign-up for Flex Elite with code TURNER, get $1,000: https://form.typeform.com/to/Rx9rTjFz

Timestamps:

3:22 Gaming with kids

6:05 Hundreds of millions in revenue in the most boring market

8:22 Corporate spies in payroll

14:54 Why payroll taxes are such a hard problem

19:46 Tax gets even more complicated outside the US

23:08 Legacy payroll still runs on manual spreadsheets

29:14 Remote’s unfair advantage in AI

31:40 Building the global payroll API that didn’t exist

38:06 Meeting his co-founder on a double date

42:04 Seven years of failed products before Remote

49:25 Launching Remote in 2019 Cue

52:39 Each year felt like a new apocalypse

59:25 Distributed teams must document everything, master async

1:02:42 Culture is what you tolerate

1:13:05 Europe's regulation problem and why it can't innovate

1:21:18 Why fundraising is so hard in Europe

1:28:23 Deleting spreadsheets to force automation

1:40:25 Burnout, health, fixing the system instead of grinding harder

1:47:57 Writing honestly about the hard parts of building companies

Referenced

Try Remote: https://remote.com/

Careers at Remote: https://remote.com/careers

Remote Handbook: https://remotecom.notion.site/a3439c6ccaac4d5f8c7515c357345c11?v=8bb7f9be662f45da87ef4ab14a42be37

The Toyota Way: https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Management-Principles-Manufacturer/dp/0071392319

The Book of Five Rings: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Five-Rings-Miyamoto-Musashi/dp/1590309847

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Twitter: https://x.com/marcelolebre

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelolebre

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Building the $3B API That Didn’t Exist, Europe’s Regulation Problem | Marcelo Lebre, Co-founder of Remote

The Peel with Turner Novak