Three founders have asked me some version of this question in the last few months. Their company is a US entity. They live in Canada, or Taiwan, or New Zealand. US payroll doesn't work cleanly for someone who isn't in the US, their accountant has started asking questions they can't answer, and somebody in a founder Slack told them to just use an Employer of Record.

It's a fair question and it comes from a sensible instinct. The answer is usually no.

Patagonia spent over a decade retrofitting living wages into its supply chain. They've made real progress, and it has been enormously expensive and slow. If you're building a company right now, you have something better: a one-time opportunity to build your cost structure on the actual cost of employing people, before the model is set and the retrofit becomes inevitable.