The Peel with Turner Novak

Episode: Building the $3B API That Didn’t Exist, Europe’s Regulation Problem
Guest: Marcelo Lebre, Co-founder & President of Remote
Date: January 15, 2026

Overview

This episode features Marcelo Lebre, co-founder and president of Remote, the global payroll and international employment platform that's quietly become a powerhouse in the HR and fintech space. Host Turner Novak and Marcelo trace Remote's unlikely founding journey, discuss the mind-boggling complexity behind international payroll, and critique the regulatory landscape in Europe that stifles innovation. Marcelo shares playbooks on building software for “boring” industries, automating outdated processes, scaling distributed teams, and lessons learned as a founder. The episode balances technical deep-dives with practical leadership insights and personal anecdotes.

Key Topics & Insights

1. The Origin & Scale of Remote

• Remote’s Mission: Streamline international hiring, payroll, and HR compliance for companies, regardless of whether those companies have local entities in target countries. (06:16)
• Scale: "Hundreds of millions. We're about 2,000 people all across the world, fully distributed." – Marcelo Lebre (07:04)
• Culture: Operate in a “boring” but essential space, aiming to build “cool, excellent software in a very boring topic.” (07:29)

2. Why Global Payroll Is So Hard

• The Myth of Simplicity: Payroll isn’t just “wiring money”—it's legal, tax, and regulatory labyrinths in every country. (15:10)

• Edge Cases Everywhere: "70% of the people are edge cases for every government because the laws are made linearly. They are not thought out to be additive... interpretation matters a lot." – Marcelo (19:24)

• Why Most Don’t Automate: Local agents and legacy software, some running on Windows XP in virtual machines, still dominate. “A glorified spreadsheet that has some rules updated once or twice a year.” (23:36)

• Automation & AI:

  • Remote’s competitive edge is exhaustive documentation, allowing AI to generate complex, localized answers for customers.
  • “The moment we had LLMs available… This is pure gold, because we'll just plug it in... can give insanely complex answers to... complex questions.” (30:13)

3. The $3 Billion API (That Didn’t Exist Before)

• Building the Infrastructure:
  • "We spent... half a billion dollars, like $500 million... in investment to build the global infrastructure." (13:38)
  • Created their own APIs for payroll, risk, contractor management, etc., which now power other industry giants, such as Gusto and Workday. (31:52)
• Why No One Had Done It:
  • “There’s no modern infrastructure for payroll, for global payroll... my second realization was, holy shit, I'm going to have to build it.” (15:55)
• Marcelo’s Ego Moment:
  • "We are now that glorious API that I mentioned that did not exist, and now it does." (33:37)
  • Remote powers global payroll for platforms like Gusto, Personio, BambooHR, and Workday.

4. Corporate Espionage & Distractions in the Industry

• Competitive Tensions: Increased competition has led to rumors of spying and dirty tricks.
• Marcelo’s View:
  • “It’s just such a distraction... the upside is very minimum for the infinite downside it can bring.” (08:45)
  • The market is massive – "the world is your TAM" (Total Addressable Market). (09:45)

5. Bootstrapping: Seven Years of Startup Experiments

• Founding Story:

  • Marcelo and Job (co-founder) met through their partners, bonded over geeky conversations, then spent seven years building and abandoning various apps and platforms. (38:17–44:10)

• Customer Lockout & Inspiration:

  • Their own struggles with legal complexity around incorporating, paying taxes, and cross-border payments became the problem Remote would eventually solve. (44:13–47:25)

• COVID as a Catalyst:

  • “We started scaling pre-pandemic. And once the pandemic hit, it just kept going. We had over two months of back-to-back sales calls. We couldn't get bookings, time to book schedule with people.” (49:25)

6. Building & Leading Distributed Teams

• Best Practices for Remote Work (59:25):
  1. Document Everything:
     • "If you are working distributedly, people will not always be online to answer for things. Document everything by default."
     • Remote uses Notion extensively for public and internal documentation.
  2. Asynchronous Work:
     • "You parallelize your work and you're able to do several things at the same time... In your conversation, you recorded a Loom or a video, you send it over."
  3. Make No Assumptions:
     • "You don't know if someone is working at the same time as you are... if you operate based on that assumption, you're going to really waste a lot of time."
  4. Culture Is What You Tolerate:
     • "Just because it's remote. So culture is what you tolerate. Those are three of the core things."
• Nuances By Region:
  • “In some areas of the world, there's a day of the week where people don't work... In some countries, every month the employer has to print out all the things and take to the tax authorities.” (67:20, 68:16)

7. Europe’s Regulation Problem

• Marcelo’s Critique:
  • Europe is not one thing, but “a bunch of countries, all of them entirely different.”
  • The EU tries to patch discrepancies with regulation, creating “a union that is essentially a regulatory body." (73:21)
  • “The theory of regulation rarely meets the needs of reality because they are built, drafted by folks that never built anything ever. So it's as if you're a dentist, but you never saw a tooth in your life.” (75:55)
• Impact:
  • “Europe is filled to the brim with innovators...all stifled... regulation that is 20, 30 years old if not more, built for other times, very inflexible and upheld by regulators that do not have any interest in moving.” (77:59)
• Solutions:
  • “Bring in the people on the ground... entrepreneurs, the innovators, the investors.” (83:20)
  • Cites “The Toyota Way” principle of walking the floor, and reducing waste by deletion of rules/processes that add friction. (85:00)

8. Personal Leadership and Growth

• On Making Spreadsheets Disappear:
  • “Humans will evolve at the brink of despair... One day I said, enough is enough. I recorded a Loom. And I said, you have four weeks. In four weeks, I'm going to record myself deleting this." (88:19)
  • Pushed the team out of operational comfort zones; now Remote can onboard employees in hours, not days.
• On Evolution as a Founder:
  • From CTO, to COO, to President — focuses on “filling the voids,” fixing the biggest problems, and then moving on. (97:33)
  • “As a founder, as a leader, you do two things. You either create a void or you fill a void. And sometimes both.” (97:57)

9. Work, Wellness & Longevity

• Marcelo’s Health Routine:
  • Became obsessed after struggling with stress, poor nutrition, chronic fatigue: “I felt tired, endlessly tired, but a fatigue that is chronic almost. And I'm like, this can't be it.”
  • Practices balanced nutrition, avoids sugar and processed foods, tracks biomarkers, frequent checkups, works out intensely, and runs 10K every day. (100:24–107:22)
  • “If I want to work 16, 17 hour days for months on end, I need to work out a lot and eat very well and sleep well, and those are non negotiable.” (103:13)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Payroll Complexity:

  • “HR is payroll, payroll is tax, tax is legal math and legal math is extortion.” – Marcelo Lebre (20:31)

• On Building Modern Payroll:

  • “We are now that glorious API that I mentioned that did not exist, and now it does. And it amplifies our own belief because to be honest, six years ago, anyone talking to us would say, these guys are nuts.” (33:37)

• On Europe’s Innovation Struggle:

  • "The single responsibility principle of the union, European Union, is to regulate. So what do regulators do? They regulate." (75:55)
  • "Europe is filled to the brim with innovators ... all stifled ... because we’re filled with regulation that is 20, 30 years old..." (77:59)

• On Company Culture:

  • “Culture is what you tolerate. Just for the fact that you are distributed. It doesn't mean it's a lifestyle job. ... You really work fucking hard. And that's what you should tolerate — people working fucking hard and not less than that." (63:10)

• On Operational Change:

  • “Humans are great at automating everything around themselves except themselves.” (89:58)

• On Health & Productivity:

  • “I learned that the more I optimize for it, the better I can get. At the end of the day, my biomarkers are great...Right now I'm running 10k every day and working out as well.” (104:36, 107:20)

Timestamps – Key Segments

• 03:17 – Getting to know Marcelo; video games & fatherhood
• 06:16 – What is Remote? Overview of the business and mission
• 13:38–20:31 – The massive complexity and capital required to build a global payroll platform
• 23:36 – Industry reliance on spreadsheets and outdated tools
• 29:40 – How AI and exhaustive documentation gave Remote an edge
• 31:52 – Building the API powering industry giants; partnerships with Gusto and Workday
• 38:17–47:25 – Founding story: from rejected incubators to building Remote
• 49:25 – COVID-19 as a business accelerant
• 59:25–65:00 – Playbook for leading global, distributed teams; async, documentation and culture
• 67:20–71:20 – Unusual, country-specific workplace and payroll customs
• 73:21–87:10 – Deep dive: Europe's regulatory "innovation problem" and Marcelo’s diagnosis
• 88:19 – Spreadsheet purge: driving automation in early Remote
• 97:33 – How Marcelo’s leadership role evolved as Remote scaled
• 100:24–107:22 – Marcelo’s obsession with health & wellbeing
• 110:00–111:14 – Social media, honest founder content, and helping others

Where to Follow Marcelo

• LinkedIn / Twitter/X — Marcelo posts more actively, focusing on candid leadership and founder advice rather than “make believe” highlights. (107:31)

Closing Thoughts

Marcelo and Turner shine light on why building in “boring” regulated global industries can be a uniquely rewarding (and punishing) founder path, how to automate and reimagine “unsolvable” problems, and why culture, both in companies and in politics, is determined not by ideals but by what people tolerate. The episode is a candid and practical masterclass in both the technical and psychological work of founding at scale.