Insiders #4 with Playroll: Why Capital Efficiency Beats Growth at All Costs

Welcome to Employsome Insiders, a series where we sit down with Employer of Record (EOR) founders and operators to dig into the markets, models, and decisions behind the companies shaping global employment. Honest conversations with the people building this industry from the ground up. For this edition, we spoke with Brendon Silver, Co-Founder and CEO of Playroll.

Playroll began inside VAT IT, a leading global VAT recovery business. What started as an internal response to client demand for global employment solutions quickly evolved into a fully independent company. Today Playroll operates a platform that sits between companies and their people – the compliance and workforce infrastructure layer that automates the operational weight of running an EOR. The work that still needs a human gets done inside the platform and clients can engage at whatever level of support they need, from fully self-serve to expert-led.

While many providers in the EOR market have prioritised rapid commercial growth over building the product to back it up, Playroll took a different route. They expanded in a way that prioritized sustained customer quality through first building out strong operational infrastructure in some of the world’s most complex regulatory environments, then expanded into more established markets.

Playroll was not launched as a conventional blank-sheet startup. Its earliest development took place inside VAT IT, the leading global VAT recovery business, where the team was able to validate genuine client demand and test its ideas against a live commercial environment before establishing Playroll as a fully independent company.

“We saw real demand for global employment solutions from the VAT IT client base very early on. Starting inside an established business gave us something most early-stage companies don’t get: a distribution network and a way to test product-market fit before we’d spent years building in the dark.

But once we saw the size of the opportunity, we knew we couldn’t build the right business inside someone else’s infrastructure. We needed to own our product, our processes, and our direction. That decision shaped everything. We didn’t inherit a way of doing things. We built from scratch, which meant we could build it properly.”

Brendon Silver, Co-Founder & CEO of Playroll

That last point is worth sitting with. Some EOR companies that spin out of a parent business carry legacy systems, processes, and assumptions.

Playroll on the other hand, was able to build its tech-enabled operational model independently rather than carrying forward any legacy systems or assumptions. That, plus an existing client base, made finding product-market fit relatively simple. It gave the company complete ownership over its product, processes, and long-term direction from the very beginning.

Playroll’s early operations in some of the world’s most complex regulatory environments forced it to build operational muscle that most global EOR providers avoid entirely.

“Running a compliant EOR starts with understanding that it’s the workforce infrastructure that sits between a company and its people. Compliance is the whole product. Most providers sell an interface and run the compliance work manually underneath. We built something different: compliance at the core, seamless operations enabled by tech.

The parts that need to be manual are still manual. You can’t automate away every compliance judgment call. But in our model, we’ve set up systems that enable our compliance people to do it well, at scale.

We also run a globally distributed company ourselves, so we feel the same friction our customers do. That shapes how we build. Operating in complex markets forced us to build properly from the start, and to think carefully about what tech should handle and what humans should handle. You can’t rely on third parties, and you can’t cut corners on compliance. If you can stay compliant in those markets, you’ve built the foundation to run anywhere.

Most providers avoid that kind of challenge, but it’s formed a foundational element of our DNA. The infrastructure we developed operating in some of the world’s hardest compliance markets is the same infrastructure we’re now scaling into Europe, the U.S., and APAC. The expansion is fast, but the approach is the same: compliance at the core, tech enabling the humans, humans enabling the clients, and clients engaging with us at whatever level they need.”

Brendon Silver, Co-Founder & CEO of Playroll

This is a geographic argument as well as a compliance-and-product argument. The thesis is that if you can stay compliant in high-complexity jurisdictions, with tech that enables your experts rather than papering over them, expansion into easier markets becomes a configuration problem rather than a rebuild. Most EOR providers built for the easy markets first and are now retrofitting for complexity. Playroll did it in the opposite order.

The EOR market has seen massive consolidation over the past two years, with large players acquiring smaller ones and billions in VC funding reshaping the competitive landscape. We asked Brendon how Playroll positions itself in that environment.

“If your EOR provider grows faster than their platform can handle, you’re the one carrying the compliance risk. And in this industry, compliance is the entire product. The moment operational weight outpaces the product, clients are exposed.

We’ve taken a different approach. From day one, we’ve built a capital-efficient business, and the only reason that’s possible is because the platform does the scaling. A lot of what we’ve seen in the market has been distribution first, operations bolted on later, and compliance somewhere down the list. That model breaks the moment a client actually needs you, because every new client adds a linear amount of manual work.

The providers who win long-term will be the ones whose platform can genuinely support both compliance obligations and commercial growth, without one compromising the other. That’s what allows us to onboard clients fast, keep them compliant in every market we operate in, and maintain consistent service quality as we scale, without linearly growing headcount.

Our model has always been responsible growth: only expand as fast as the platform can serve clients well and protect them properly. When you build on solid economics, a real product, and genuine service quality, you’re always in a position to deliver value quickly and take advantage of opportunities when they arise. That’s where our head is right now.”

Brendon Silver, Co-Founder & CEO of Playroll

Companies evaluating EOR providers often end up comparing Playroll against the large global platforms like Deel, Remote, and G-P. We asked Brendon how he thinks about that comparison and where he sees Playroll’s genuine advantages.

“We’re very clear on where we win, and we lean into that.

First, coverage. We operate our own entities across the markets that matter, which means we own the compliance, the payroll, the contracts, and the employment relationship end-to-end. We’re not stitching together third parties or charging a margin on someone else’s coverage. That gives clients a single, consistent offering wherever they hire. Same standards, same service, same accountability.

Second, the platform. It’s built to handle the complexity our coverage exposes – multi-country payroll, local benefits, contracts, compliance workflows – without forcing the client to absorb that complexity themselves. The goal is to make a 30-country workforce feel as simple to manage as a domestic one.

Third, the processes that sit behind it. Onboarding, payroll cycles, compliance reviews, change management – these are run on tight, repeatable processes. That’s what lets us deliver fast response times and no handoffs. And yes, those processes are run by real operators, lawyers, payroll specialists, and compliance experts, but the strength is in how the platform, the people, and the processes work together. None of those three on their own is the answer.

We’re not trying to win on everything. But in the areas that actually matter post-sale, coverage, consistency, and execution, that combination is where we’re very strong.
”

Brendon Silver, Co-Founder & CEO of Playroll

The distinction between “giving you a platform” and “giving you a team” is one we hear frequently from service-led EOR providers.

We asked Brendon which regions Playroll is investing in most heavily right now and whether the strategy is shifting.

“We started in London with a strong European focus. That was our main ICP and where we built our foundation.

We’re now investing more heavily into the US and parts of Asia, so there is a shift in focus. In the US, we’re seeing a structural change in how companies hire. Teams are going international much earlier, but without building internal infrastructure to support it. They don’t want to set up entities or manage multiple providers. They want something that works out of the box. That’s where a lot of the opportunity comes from.

Asia is different. The opportunity there is driven more by complexity, regulatory differences, language, and a lack of standardisation across markets. It’s harder to operate consistently, which raises the bar for providers. So while we’re a global business, the focus going forward is on markets where global hiring is accelerating, but more specifically where the operational gap is still very real.”

Brendon Silver, Co-Founder & CEO of Playroll

The US observation is particularly interesting. American companies that would have hired domestically five years ago are now building distributed international teams from day one, often before they have any internal HR infrastructure to support it. That’s a fundamentally different buyer profile than the traditional “enterprise opening a foreign office” use case, and it favours providers who can deliver a turnkey experience.

One of the biggest complaints we hear from EOR buyers is that what they were sold doesn’t match what they experience after signing. We asked Brendon, from a founder’s perspective, what the industry gets wrong about how it sells EOR.

“EOR is often sold as a clean, simple solution, but in reality, it’s built on a complex value chain with many points of failure. The gap is that most providers sell the outcome, but not the complexity required to deliver it.

Our approach has been simple: own as much of the supply chain as possible, and build the processes to connect it end-to-end. We’ve also invested heavily in agentic AI across our workflows to improve speed and consistency.

This is also why we think about scaling differently. Most of the industry uses AI and automation to scale at the expense of customer experience, stripping out the human layer because it’s cheaper. Our view is the opposite. Complex questions require human support, full stop. So we invest heavily in enabling our people internally so our people have the infrastructure to respond faster and with more context than anyone else in the market.

Smaller, fast-answer queries are where AI earns its place – when a client needs something quickly and doesn’t need a human in the loop. But the hard stuff stays with people. That’s the balance, and it’s what makes the model sustainable as we scale.

The broader industry issue is that at scale, it becomes very difficult to deliver the service level customers were promised.”

Brendon Silver, Co-Founder & CEO of Playroll