What sets apart winning players in competitive landscape between Panther, Papya, Remote & Deel?

So, some background. For example, the Deel team has been contractor-first since they first began. Their mission has always been to simplify global contracting. They moved into this space because it's a nice opportunity, but they're not the team built for this. The Remote guys come from GitLab, where they used a bunch of these legacy employer of records, had a crappy experience, and they were like, "Let's make sure that, instead of emails back and forth, there's a UI." Papaya doesn't do anything. If you go to Papaya Global's FAQ—to speak through facts rather than opinions—the second question, last time I checked, was basically, "Why do we outsource literally every service that we offer?" They claim it's because "We can have experts do it." They're doing none of the hard work. That's why their Countrypedia is completely out of date about local legislation. They're literally outsourcing compliance.

Panther is doing the hard work, whether that's employment agreements being smart templated, tied to payroll workflows, instant and reliable, including translation, to systematic money movement around the world so that it doesn't cost $500 per person to run an off-cycle payroll, to getting rid of the security deposit. Here's something interesting. Since employers of record take on liability by employing our customers' employees on their behalf, it's standard in our industry to take between one and three months' worth of payroll as a security deposit. While it's technically not an expense, this is money that the customers don't get back until all their employees have left or something, so it's as close to an expense as one can be that's worth several months of burn. So we're innovating on that space too to get rid of the payroll deposit.

Panther's about doing all the hard work so that we can get rid of any reason why any company would ever do this by themselves ever again. Everybody else is a temporary solution, a stop gap: it's so expensive, it's multiple HR systems, it's a nightmare, it's filled with mistakes, people don't get paid on time. You can't mess up payroll. It's like plumbing. Doing things in an automated way over time is the biggest differentiator.

The hard part about it though, to be fair to these other guys, is you don't notice these things as a customer until they fuck up. But when they screw up, it's your employees' payroll. We just won a quarter of a million dollar contract from Deel because they sent an employment agreement to an employee before it was ever approved by the company. They're scaling their manual operations behind the scenes as fast as possible because they're growing really fast. Props to them. But it's really hard to go back in time. Literally there's a quote from Parker Conrad where he's like, "We did this at Zenefits and it was almost impossible to go back, so for Rippling, we just started from day one." That's how we think about building at Panther.