What It Takes to Build Product From Zero – Twice
- Aug 9, 2022
- 4 min read
Written by: Ryan Mercer
The new wing of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, a curved structure that rises out of the harbor at Wan Chai, opened in the spring of 1997. On the night of June 30, the hall inside was full of dignitaries, a global broadcast pool, and a stage set for the lowering of one flag and the raising of another. The handover from British to Chinese rule took place there a few hours later. The man who had delivered the building had moved his family from Huddersfield to Hong Kong seven years earlier. His son Pearce was ten.
A year after the family had settled in the city, they moved again, this time to Dubai, in the period when the city was repaving itself on a quarterly cadence. Sheikh Zayed Road was filled with the first generation of skyscrapers that would later define the skyline. The Burj Al Arab was still under construction. Dirt-bike trails outside the city would become city blocks within a single school term.
Whether biographies of this kind explain a career or simply illustrate one is a question for the reader. What can be said is that the operator who has now twice been brought in early to build the product organization of a fast-scaling private technology firm grew up watching cities be built around him. The pattern has not been incidental.
Pearce Dolan’s most recent build is Deel, the global employment platform he joined in September 2020 as employee number twelve and the only product hire on the payroll. He has reported directly to chief executive Alex Bouaziz since. In May, the company closed a $50 million round at a $12 billion valuation. Deel today serves more than 8,000 customers, including Shopify, Coinbase and Dropbox. Its climb from a standing start to $100 million in annual recurring revenue took under twenty months, a pace that ranks at the time of writing as one of the fastest one-to-one-hundred-million runs the software industry has produced.
The first such build was Revolut. He joined the London-based digital bank in January 2018 as the first dedicated, professionally trained product manager the company had hired, an unusual hire at the time and an understaffed function inside a firm already growing at unfamiliar speed. He reported directly to founder and chief executive Nik Storonsky. By April the bank had closed a Series C at a $1.7 billion valuation. By the time Dolan left, in August 2020, the Series D had landed at $5.5 billion. Twelve months after his exit, Revolut closed a Series E at $33 billion, the highest valuation a financial-technology firm has reached in the United Kingdom.
Revolut had been founded in London in 2015 by Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, on the original proposition of letting travelers spend across currencies without the friction of standard bank charges. By the start of 2018 the original premise had outgrown the firm that built it. The product surface was expanding faster than the practices around it. The dedicated product hire was a deliberate move to install the second.
Dolan studied Computer Science with Management at King’s College London, the joint degree that runs the technical syllabus through the Strand campus and the operational one through the business school. His first job after university was at Apple’s London store, during the early years of the iPhone. Apple’s retail organization at that point was, by industry standards, the most exacting consumer electronics environment in the country. The lessons about craft, about what happens to a company when it commits to a standard and refuses to lower it, traveled with him.
The Revolut years were the first compounding chapter. The bank’s headline metrics moved fast and the press wrote a good deal about the features that surfaced quarterly. Underneath the features, the team had been building an operating discipline that did not bend under load, and the British financial-technology sector noticed. By the time of the Series D, the company was the headline operator in the category. The work shipped on the surface was the visible portion of something more durable.
The conversation that took Dolan to Deel happened near the end of his Revolut tenure, in the early stretch of the pandemic. Deel at the time was twelve people working remotely across four time zones. Bouaziz and his co-founder, Shuo Wang, had a contracts product, a small set of paying customers, and a thesis they had been articulating to anyone who would listen, which was that the legal and operational machinery of cross-border employment was the unsolved infrastructure problem at the bottom of the global hiring stack rather than a vertical add-on for human resources software. The thesis sat well with Dolan. He took the call.
Bouaziz and Wang had incorporated the firm in 2019, working remotely from the start, an arrangement that by 2020 had begun to look prescient rather than improvised. The cadence of the early months, by accounts of operators who joined the firm in the same window, was unusually compressed even by the standards of an early-stage startup running into product-market fit.
The work that followed has been historically rapid by any reasonable standard. Whole product lines have been stood up and shipped inside windows the broader software industry, by reasonable benchmarks, would have allotted twice. The customer base has compounded. The product organization has held its early cadence.
The pattern, more than the metrics, is the most useful frame for thinking about Dolan. Twice now, in two of the most rapid corporate ascents the modern technology sector has produced, he has been the operator brought in early to build the foundations of the product organization. The fraternity of operators who have done that once is small. The fraternity that has done it twice is smaller still. The companies, in both cases, have rewarded the trust. Buildings are remembered for the silhouettes that rise above the skyline. The ones that hold are the ones whose foundations were poured before anyone outside was watching.
