Company profile · 4 min read
Shor: Transparent global payroll for a founder’s first hires
Shor handles international contractor payroll, EOR hiring, contracts and local-currency payouts with public per-worker pricing.
Cofounder of Lazyweb (a16z Speedrun). Previously grew subscriptions and built native ads at Duolingo. Writes First1000 (90,000+ subscribers).
Published · Updated
Shor is international payroll for founders hiring contractors and employees across borders. It fits an early-stage company that wants one workflow for contracts, compliance, local-currency payouts and an employer-of-record option without signing an annual platform contract.
What it does
Shor’s current site covers contractor onboarding, locally reviewed contracts, W-9/W-8BEN collection, e-signature, payroll and EOR employment. Its product pages show the same dashboard handling a contractor and a full-time employee, with pay scheduled in the worker’s local currency. Shor says the team can set up on one call and run payroll within the week.
The pricing is unusually legible. The documentation pricing page lists $19 per contractor per month, $299 per employee per month for EOR standard markets and $449 for EOR premium markets. Managed payroll on the customer’s own entity is listed at $50–$60 per employee per month in the markets currently covered. Shor also says there are no setup fees, annual contracts or per-payment surcharges, and the homepage shows a flat 2% FX margin for payroll payouts.
That structure makes the decision more concrete than comparing “global payroll” logos. If the company has one contractor in India, the $19 plan is a different purchase from hiring an employee through an EOR in Europe or North America. Coverage is regional and the documentation says contractor availability excludes OFAC-sanctioned jurisdictions, so the country list and legal-employer relationship matter more than the headline price.
Founder context and tradeoffs
The YC profile identifies Daivik Goel and Avi Konduru as founders. Daivik’s public background includes product and engineering work at Tesla and Cisco Meraki and building financial infrastructure; Avi’s includes ML engineering at Kensho and quantitative work at Wells Fargo. The company says it uses local rails and AI agents to make global hiring faster. Those are founder and company descriptions, not a guarantee of payroll execution in every market.
The tradeoff is simplicity versus jurisdictional depth. Shor may be a strong first international-hire layer, but a larger company may need benefits, HRIS, immigration and country-specific support beyond the visible workflow. Ask who is the legal employer, what the worker receives locally and how corrections are handled before moving an existing payroll run.
Editorial take
I would shortlist Shor for a founder hiring a small number of people across several countries and wanting transparent worker-level pricing. It is less compelling if the company already has entities and a mature payroll operation everywhere it hires. The best test is one real country, one worker type and one complete payroll cycle.
Quick facts
| Field | Sourced detail |
|---|---|
| Product | Contractor payroll, EOR hiring and managed payroll |
| Buyers | Startups and founders hiring global teams |
| Public pricing | $19 contractor; $299 EOR standard; $449 EOR premium; $50–$60 own-entity payroll |
| Public operating terms | No setup fee, annual contract or per-payment surcharge claimed |
| Main gate | Country coverage, legal-employer terms, FX and payroll correction handling |
Sources checked
| Source | Checked |
|---|---|
| YC profile | 2026-09-19 |
| Shor homepage | 2026-09-19 |
| Shor pricing | 2026-09-19 |
| Shor documentation | 2026-09-19 |
Cohort context
Shor is listed in Summer 2025. In our 2026-09-18 directory snapshot, 9 of 166 listed companies in that cohort have YC’s primary industry label Fintech (5.4%). This is a current-directory comparison, not an original intake count or a performance ranking. Nine-cohort dataset.
Public website snapshot
Observed 2026-09-19T16:18:23.701Z in raw homepage HTML. This records visible metadata and advertised links, not agent execution or product quality.
| Signal | Homepage observation |
|---|---|
| Product description metadata | Observed |
| Canonical link | Observed |
| H1 or H2 heading | Observed |
| Typed structured data | Observed |
| Docs/developer link | Observed |
| Pricing link | Observed |
| llms.txt link | Not observed in this response |
| Markdown alternate | Not observed in this response |
Public observations · Collection method. Missing links here do not establish that a capability or file is absent elsewhere.
About the author
Cofounder of Lazyweb (a16z Speedrun). Previously grew subscriptions and built native ads at Duolingo. Writes First1000 (90,000+ subscribers).
I cofound Lazyweb and publish Mudpie. This is an owner-written publication, not an independent testing organization. Research notes distinguish observations, sourced reporting and editorial judgment.
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