Deel

People who procrastinate are 16% more creative than people who start right away. That's from a study by Jihae Shin and Adam Grant, published in the Academy of Management Journal. Participants were asked to generate new business ideas. Some started right away. Others were given five minutes to play Minesweeper first. Independent evaluators rated the procrastinators' ideas as more creative - as long as the task was already in their head before they delayed. We're taught to start fast, move first, and avoid failure. But research on the most original thinkers shows the opposite: 1. Da Vinci spent 16 years of his life on the Mona Lisa. He kept getting sidetracked — studying optics, dissecting human anatomy, experimenting with how light hits curved surfaces. Those detours changed how he painted light, how he blended shadow, how he built depth without a single visible brushstroke. The delay made the Mona Lisa what it is today. Martin Luther King rewrote his biggest speech past 3am the night before the March on Washington. Still scribbling notes as he waited to go onstage. Eleven minutes into the speech, he abandoned his script entirely. "I have a dream", the four words that defined the civil rights movement, were improvised on the spot. 2. The failure rate is 47% for first movers vs 8% for improvisers. Facebook came after Myspace. Google came after Yahoo. Warby Parker launched after other companies were already selling glasses online. They were slow because they were solving the right problem. 3. Firefox and Chrome users stay 15% longer at their jobs. They also outperform IE and Safari users. It's not the browser. IE and Safari come preinstalled. Those users accepted the default. Chrome and Firefox users questioned it and went looking for something better. That instinct carries over into everything. 4. Warby Parker tested 2,000 names before finding the right one. Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart produced hundreds of compositions to get a handful of masterpieces. Elon Musk was sure the first SpaceX launches would fail. He didn't expect Tesla to succeed. But not trying felt worse than failing. The pattern: originals procrastinate, doubt their ideas, and fail constantly. They just refuse to let any of that be the reason they stop. Insights from Adam Grant's TED Talk on the surprising habits of original thinkers.

Creating is becoming easier. Getting people's attention is getting harder. A breakdown of the data: 1. Books. Weekly e-book releases on Amazon have more than doubled since ChatGPT launched - hitting 292K. The barrier to publishing a book is now 0. The barrier to getting someone to read it has never been higher. 2. Lawsuits. 17% of federal filings are now from people representing themselves. AI didn't just make content creation easier. It made professional services feel optional. People are walking into courtrooms armed with an LLM instead of a lawyer. 3. Music. Deezer went from 10% AI-generated uploads to 44% in a year. Spotify purged 75 million AI tracks - that's half their entire catalog. But almost nobody's listening to any of it. AI music makes up less than 3% of actual streams. The supply exploded. The demand barely moved. 4. Science. ArXiv submissions hit 77,621 in a single quarter. More papers don't mean more breakthroughs. It means more noise for actual breakthroughs to cut through. The pattern is the same everywhere: supply is exploding, attention is fixed. The number of readers, listeners, and reviewers have remained the same, but now we have more stuff competing for the same eyeballs. The new scarce resource isn't the ability to create. It's the ability to cut through the noise.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive takes effect June 7, 2026. Is your compensation infrastructure ready? Swipe through the slides your HR team won't post, but definitely relate to. Here's how to actually fix it ➡️ https://lnkd.in/ewR8fzcb Which slide hit closest to home? Drop a number in the comments. 👇

Money shouldn't lose value on its way to the person who earned it. For workers in volatile-currency markets, the gap between what they earn and what they actually receive isn't a minor inconvenience — it's a real cost of getting paid. Stablecoins fix that. We've seen it firsthand: 10,000 contractors across 100+ countries are already choosing stablecoin payouts on Deel. Today, we're extending it to full-time employees. Your team can now receive part of their net salary in dollar or euro-backed stablecoins — same payday, zero fees, no changes to how you run payroll. You choose how to fund it, they choose how to get paid. Watch our COO, Dan Westgarth, walk through what this means for your team, and read the full story in the comments ➡️ https://lnkd.in/enbeR2g3

The most AI-fluent job seekers right now? They're not who you'd expect. This week in NYC, our chief economist Lauren Thomas gathered a small group of labor economists over dinner – Daniel Zhao (Glassdoor), Guy Berger, Ph.D. (Guild), and Randy Tarnowski (Handshake) – alongside top business and tech reporters to dig into what's actually happening with the Class of 2026. The headline: they're the most AI-fluent cohort ever to enter the workforce. They mention AI on their resumes 9x more than the Class of 2022, and two-thirds of those mentions come from students outside computer science. Bottom line: they're being underestimated. Huge thanks to Daniel, Guy, Randy, and all the reporters who came to think out loud with us! Read the full discussion on Deel Works: https://lnkd.in/ey4WrM9K

100% of Deel's ops teams run on Akai. Before it reached a single external customer, it was already running across every Deel ops function — finance, payroll, HR, compliance, etc. Now we're bringing it to yours. Hear from the teams who used it first. 👇 And see Akai in action during our webinar on May 28. Register here → https://lnkd.in/eeb4QVA3

The best founders don't wait for the world to come to them.  The Pitch by Deel (sponsored by J.P. Morgan) started as a competition. What it became was something harder to put into words — a community of builders who refused to let geography be a barrier to funding. 5 startups who walked away with up to $1M investment and a network that'll last far longer. Zeely – AI Admaker, Smart Bricks, nybl, Acceler8, Alpic — these are the global winners. But every founder who stepped on stage this season won something. This is what happens when you bring the world's best seed-stage talent into the same room. Thank you to everyone who pitched, judged, attended, and cheered. See you at the next one.

What does it look like when companies come together for a kickaround at the iconic Emirates Stadium? 🏟️ Something like this… Motivational team talks, Ray Parlour style. Leadership skills tested beyond the boardroom. And team bonding taken to the next level. We’re still processing. What a winning night!  🏆

You know that work no one wants to own? The downloading. The reformatting. The uploading. The checking. The re-checking. It's not strategic. It's not complex. It's just... tedious. We built Akai by Deel to take it off your team's plate. Record your process once. Akai maps every step, builds the connectors, and deploys interconnected agents that run it end-to-end on any system. No developers. No IT tickets. No integration backlog. And your team stays in control the whole way: review, edit, set rules, pause, and approve before anything runs. The result isn't just time saved. It's an operation that gets smarter the longer it runs—agents that build on each other across your workflows and surface what humans miss. We’ve battle-tested it on Deel's own ops—high-volume, compliance-heavy, globally distributed—before we shipped it to anyone else. You get the result, not the experiment. See how it works live. Webinar May 28. Register here → https://lnkd.in/eeb4QVA3 And sign up for early access to Akai → https://www.akai.run/ Your team, supercharged.