Building for the modal startup workforce
Diving deeper into
Matt Drozdzynski, CEO and co-founder of Plane, on global payroll post-COVID
we can cover over 50% of all of our EOR employees with just two entities, it's a huge long tail type situation.
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Reviewing context
This reveals that Plane is building for the modal startup workforce, not for maximum country depth. In practice, most of a US startup team sits in US payroll, contractor payments, and a few common EOR markets like the UK and Canada, so owning every local entity is less important than making onboarding, contracts, tax forms, approvals, and payroll runs feel like one simple system across the whole team.
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Plane says only 5% to 10% of headcount is usually on EOR for its customers, while 50% is in the US and much of the rest is contractors. That means the operational center of gravity is unified payroll and contractor workflows, not deep coverage in country number 15.
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The trade off is between breadth and vertical integration. Direct EOR entities can improve cost and control in a specific country, but partner coverage lets a platform say yes almost anywhere. Plane chose broad coverage first because customers buy it as an all in one system, not as a Germany only hiring tool.
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This matches the wider market shift. Global payroll leaders first won by turning international contractor and employee payments into software, while domestic payroll and spend platforms are now bundling those features because companies increasingly want one source of truth for everyone they pay.
The next phase is a tighter split between all in one payroll systems and specialist regional EOR vendors. Broad platforms will keep consolidating the common cases into one workflow, while niche players win where local employment rules, banking rails, or language need much deeper country specific handling.