🎙️ New Ep. Daivik Goel | From Bootstrap to Batch, Last-Minute YC Submit & Why Fintech Speed Matters

Hey There,

The newest episode of The Startup Growth Podcast is live!

Daivik Goel is Co-founder & CEO of Shor, a global payroll platform for startups. Traditional EOR providers charge around $7,000 per year to manage an employee earning $20,000 per year. Shor uses automation to reduce costs and embeds payroll actions into Slack and WhatsApp through AI agents, so founders can request tax documents or payment updates without opening another dashboard.

Daivik and co-founder Avi Konduru submitted their YC application at 7:59 PM, one minute before the deadline. After multiple prior rejections, they got an interview, then a follow-up call, then acceptance. They started YC with a crypto payment idea, pivoted five weeks before demo day to global payroll—a problem they'd worked on two years earlier—and shipped contractor payroll within a week. They've since raised funding and are scaling.

Key Topics:

What Shor is: global payroll/EOR rebuilt for startups; automation handles ops, AI teammates deliver docs/actions in Slack/WhatsApp

Cost math that breaks: why legacy EORs charging ~$7k/yr on a $20k salary fail SMB/unit economics—and how Shor attacks the middle

From clever to sellable: pivoted inside YC from crypto/fiat rails to payroll where they had access and clear pain.

Ship speed as strategy: prior fintech muscle let them launch contractor payroll in one week (KYC/KYB, payouts, tax flows)

YC pragmatism: plain-English interviews beat pitch theater; momentum > mockups

& much more

I hope you find this educational content valuable and can apply it in your business. Until next week - keep experimenting, keep scaling, keep building.

David J Phillips

Founder & CEO at Fondo

LinkedIn | Twitter/X