August 28, 2024 • 43 mins
Tony Jamous started Oyster in January 2020 to use the power of software to address the disequilibrium between the tens of millions of un-filled knowledge worker jobs in the West, with the Billion plus new knowledge workers coming on line in the next 10 years in the developing world.
Connecting the supply to demand, without making people leave their home countries. Making hiring global as easy as hiring local. Bringing amazing job opportunities to people around the world, while making it easy for employers and employees, regardless of their location in the world. A Professional Employment Organization (PEO) on a planetary scale, delivering hundreds of millions of dollars of direct investment to in the form of wages and taxes, to workers in over 180 countries around the world.
Please join me in welcoming Tony Jamous to Work 20XX
After a series of successful startups, including going public and acquisition, Tony found himself financially successful, but felt there was still something missing. Tony took a year to heal himself, to get better, to get healthier. He wanted to create a new organization, hyper diverse, and hyper distributed, using the latest technology to enable people to hire talent from anywhere in the world, and that talent to perform their jobs without having to leave their home communities and move..
Tony describes his leadership style as ‘Sustainable Leadership,’ a human-centric approach, taking care of self first, and your people, which results in a stronger organization, increased engagement, and 100% remote organization of about 600 people living in 70 countries.
In this episode, we dive into the opportunity, the logistics, and the management philosophy Tony is using to create a very unique culture to address one of the largest market miss matches of the next several decades. I am absolutely thrilled to share Tony’s story with you.
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(00:00):
And I’ll count us down.
Yeah.
So we'll go in three, two, one.
Hey welcome backeverybody Jeff Frick here.
Coming to you from the home studiofor another episode of Work 20XX.
And I'm excitedfor this next episode.
This gentleman, he'sbeen in the space for a while.
He started kind of a transformative company,
serendipitously right at the beginning of 2020.
(00:23):
And, and he's living it,
you know, he's he's living the values.
He's really kind ofchanging the world.
And he'sjoining us today
all the way from Cyprusin the Eastern Mediterranean.
He's Tony Jamous, he's the CEO and Co-Founder of Oyster.
Tony, great to see you.
Good to be here Jeff.
Thank you for having me.
Absolutely.
So we had the good pleasureof meeting a little while ago.
(00:45):
And I just found your your story fascinating.
You also are a great sharer.
You've got an open source ethos.
So, you know,people can really find out.
There's no secrets here.This is not secret.
But before we get into it,let's just jump into Oyster 101.
For people that aren't familiarwith Oyster, what's it all about?
Yeah.
So Oyster is a global employment platform.
(01:05):
We help companies anywhereto employ people in any country
without the need of setting up entities,
hiring lawyers, accountants,payroll providers.
We do all of thatthrough the power of software.
And why we do that?
Because you want to make global hiring as easy as a local hiring.
So we can reverse brain drain.So people can stay in their home countries
(01:28):
don't have to leave their family, their community,
but access to these amazing job opportunities
that the worldcan offer.
So we hear a lot about,you know, remote workers
and we hear about some ofthese cool travel visas
that some countriesare putting in place
to try to attract workersand have them come work from there.
But, you know, there'sall this ugliness in terms of
taxes and regulation and traditionally,you know, before Oyster,
(01:52):
if I wanted to set upsome type of entity
to employ somebody someplace,
you had to have kind of some type of a structure.
So how have you solved thatwith software?
Do people work for Oyster technically?
Do you have some type of?
Because I know out here inSilicon Valley there's TriNet.
So everyone who's ever workedfor a startup in Silicon Valley
has worked for TriNet which they,
(02:14):
you know, kind of orchestrate the details
until the company gets old enough to
to kind of do their own HR[Human Resources]
Is that what you're doing?
Explain, how does it actually work?
Yeah, it's actually pretty much like TriNet,
but on aplanetary level.
So let me tell youa bit of history.
The U.S. is composed ofa number of states,
and each state operates like its own countrywhen it comes to labor laws.
(02:35):
So, there was an emergenceof these players in U.S called,
PEOs, Professional Employment Organizations
that would employ the personon your behalf in that state.
And, so we took that conceptand we made it global.
So we built a global employmentinfrastructure in 180 countries.
(02:56):
We have legal entities,we have payroll providers,
we have benefit providersin each of these countries.
And then on top,we build a software platform
that is increasinglyAI driven, that federates all these,
knowledge of complianceof tax regulations,
engineering the contract
can assign benefits to an employee
(03:18):
can process the payrollcan process the payments
all through the onlineplatform and a few clicks.
So if you found and
You found Mary in Athens you want to hire.
She's a great software developer.
You can do that in 24 hours
and you can offer her a great employment contract.
You can pay her fairly.
You can even offer equityif you want.
Interesting.
(03:38):
And you've got peopleI mean,
you kind of areyou’re living
you're living your mission.
So you've got people distributedall over the world.
So do you have
I don't know, points of presence,what’s the right, the word to use
in all those countries as Oyster?
That's really kind ofyour key secret sauce?
Yeah.So we
we ourself use our own technology.
We you know,
When I wanted to start Oyster,
one of mydrivers is
(03:59):
How can I build a hyper diverse
and a hyper distributedorganization on this planet?
And I couldn't find a technologyto support me in that.
So I went and built it.
So we use it internally.
We are, distributedin 70 countries.
We have no offices.
We are nearly 600 people.
We are gender equal across the board.
(04:20):
So imagine the amount of diversity you have
from people living in 70 countries.
Gender equal from over 100 nationalities
coming together to build the software platform
that is driving equalityin the world.
That's great.
And then you've also got
you've got kind of theaggregated market data.
So if I don't know how muchto pay Mary from Athens,
(04:43):
because I've never hired anyone from Ath
or excuse me, from Athens,
you've got, you know, kind of likewe've seen in a lot of the housing
and some of these other,like Zillow,
where suddenly now you've got this aggregated
information to show kind ofwhat is the market and how
how the market is definedto help me figure that out.
Absolutely.
We tell you what is fair,fair pay for her,
(05:04):
depending on her role,on her seniority,
and you know, the first datafor compensation
is somehow availablein the developed world.
Think about the North America
and some placesin Europe,
but it's not availablein the rest of the world.
And also the other challengewe have is that remote workers,
(05:27):
ask for higher salarieswhen they work for a company overseas
when they were local, work locally.
Think about software developers.
Software developersare in high demand in the world.
So we have developed this,
this compensation, insight tool
that enable companiesto estimate
what is a fair compensation,for anyone, anywhere in the world.
(05:51):
And they can use the same toolto design a compensation philosophy
to make sure they cancreate equality across the system.
Because humans are very sensitiveto feeling of fairness.
And when you're in one country,that's easy.
When you're in 50 countries,that's harder to achieve.
So our tool enable youto create that sense of
(06:11):
equality and fairness across the world.
How have you seenthe evolution of pay for skill
versus pay for geo when traditionalgeo borders are breaking down?
How do you see that evolving?
Because that's a bigthat's a big issue, right?
Because there's huge market differences
differentiation for skills in different geos.
(06:31):
Absolutely.
And look, I,I have absolute believe
that there is one day in the futurewhere that difference will go away
between differentgeographies.
It’s going to probablytake us ten years to get there,
but we are making incremental progress toward that.
So the roles that are in high demand
(06:53):
talk about the software developers,
the gap between a software developerin an emerging economy,
and a software developerin the West
has been shrinkingfast in the last few years.
And we’re gonna, we see that happening in other,
roles, knowledge worker roles
that are also increasingly in demand.
Think about sales executive,think about accountants
(07:15):
and marketers.
So all of these areour team members.
We employ on our platform,on behalf of our customers.
And so
There’s still a gap today in the world,obviously, still inequality.
But the good news is thatthat gap is shrinking.
And with platforms like Oyster,by making it more possible
(07:35):
for companies to tap into the world as a talent pool
we can have a shot in creating
more equilibrium betweenthe supply and demand of labor.
Curious to get your take tooon kind of.
And I, you know,you've got a much more global,
point of view.
think of like 1099sand W2s in the US,
and it's such a small kind of slice of definition
(07:57):
of their working relationshipbetween the company and the person.
But then you seethe rise of the gig economy.
You see, you know, these peopledriving Ubers and Lyfts and
driving, you know, Amazon delivery services
that are actually not Amazon.
It's a different,
wholly owned, independent companythat works for them.
How do you see kind ofthe evolution of the relationships
(08:18):
between the company or whoever's paying and workers
with things like Fiverr, with things like fractional CMOs?
It just seems like
there needs to be a lotmore granularity and variability
in the way those relationships are defined,
which of course, thenties back to taxes and
and it gets morecomplicated on the back end.
(08:38):
Yeah, look, Jeff, what was happeningand what’s still happening is that
full time employment has been a bit traumatic for people,
because it restricts your freedom
It's less flexible.
You have to go to an office,you have to commute, you have to,
(08:59):
be in meetings all day long.
So when you work for companiesthat are not well structured
to make people successfulno matter what they are,
and if you work for a companythat restricts your freedom
by imposing some unnecessary restrictions,
such as working in a specific placeor commuting to an office or,
then people are choosing to,
(09:22):
actually quit thefull time employment job
and become a contractor
and not being subject necessarilyto a company's policy,
they would be workingon specific projects instead.
Right
And for multiple clients.
So we see, we've seenthat trend happening.
But also, there are companiesthat are doing the opposite.
There are companies that are giving that flexibility to their employees.
(09:45):
They're investing in their growth and development,
creating a culture that areinclusive and safe and fair.
These companies are thrivingand attracting people,
attracting thebest talent in the world
because the best talentwant to be part of a team, right?
They want to create somethingmeaningful together and,
and inmany countries,
full time employee relationship cannot be done through
(10:06):
a contractual model from a,from a regulation standpoint,
there would be a taxmisclassification issue
that companies will faceif they employ,
contractor, well employees as contractors.
So this is where also our platform can help.
We have a lot of customersthat come to us saying,
I have these 20 contractorsdistributed in five countries.
(10:30):
It's time for me to,
make it compliant.
And we want to move themto full time employee.
And this is where Oyster can come in.
We also supportcontractor model as well.
So we process a lot of payments for
for the gig economy.
So in short,I think the key is
is to create culture that supportspeople's growth and give them
(10:51):
the freedom and flexibilitythey need so that work,
fulltime work is not
[Tony] seen as a tax on people,[Jeff] Right
but is seen as a wayto support their life.
We'll get into your managementphilosophy, and I know
it's interesting, you know,your sustainable leadership.
But before we get there, from the company
from still from companies’ perspective
it just feels likethere's a trend over time
(11:13):
to move more things, right
from the balance sheet to the income statement,
to move less thingsfrom capital expenditures
to more flexible expendituresbased on demand, etc.,
whether it's cloud computing or
or whatever, so do you see and
and also,I would argue that the, you know,
kind of the contractthat my grandfather signed up
when he went to work for AT&Tfor 30 years and got,
(11:35):
you know, lifetime health benefitstill he was 100,
that's all kind of goneaway a lot of the employee match.
And I don't know if you’ve seen the same thing
in Europe and some of the other geos,
but it seems likethe fundamental contract
between what I'm giving youand what I'm getting,
and maybe I'm suffering a little bitmore of that short term pain
because there's some long term benefits
once I retire andand health care for life.
(11:56):
It's I think, part of that's gated here in the U.S.
because of health careand it's still tied to employment.
It's not disconnected,which I think
would open up alot of flexibility.
So do youjust see this
kind of ongoing cadencein terms of flexible,
flexible staffing,
either around a project, aroundan initiative, around a whatever.
So I bring talent in around an objective
(12:17):
versus and taking more ofwhat would have been
full time, you know,W-2 hires back in the day.
Yeah, I think when it comes to labor flexibility, it's really,
and in countries where the U.S.where employment is ‘at will’,
it doesn't really make a difference
if you employ somebody as an FTE (Full-time Equivalent)
(12:38):
or as a contractor.
It makes a differencein countries where
there's no employment ‘at-will’like in France.
Where if you let go someone,
it's a very complicated and a risky process.
So in countrieslike that
you tend to default allot toservice providers and outsourcers, and
Actually the IT outsourcingindustry in France is huge
(13:01):
It’s one of the top industriesin the country. Why?
Because the employmentmarket is so rigid
you cannot hire and firepeople easily.
So the companies, before deciding to hire somebody full time
they default to anoutsource company.
And in the U.S. has much more flexible labor.
So we see,
we see noimpact there.
(13:23):
But you're right.
If you're building, if you'reworking on a specific project
that is contained in time and,
and is well defined,then putting together
a team of contractor could be,could be also interesting idea
Yeah, that's great. And congrats to you.
Three years and I think you just had a nice raise
not too long ago and hit$1 billion valuation.
So, congratulations to,to you and the team on that.
(13:47):
Thank you.
Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about kind of the global opportunity.
And you talk about it a lot in podcast appearances
this huge mismatchbetween supply and demand,
especially in Western countries,developed countries.
You could take take a positionlike, you know, security engineers
or whatever.
You know, there's thousands
and thousands of unfulfilled jobs
(14:10):
at the same time there's a lot of people,
that aren't within 20 miles ofan office that might be qualified.
I wonder if you could sharesome of the macro trends,
that got you excited to goin this space in the first place.
And what are you seeing nowthree years into it?
Yeah, when I, started working on Oyster,I started looking in late 2019.
I started looking atthese macro trends.
(14:31):
First, there was remote work,and we looked at remote work,
and it was clear that remote workwas the future of work.
The pandemic enabledthat to happen much faster.
Now you have also
I looked at the,employment data.
There are 80 million jobsgoing unfulfilled in the West,
according to Korn Ferry,
resulting in $8.5 trillion of economic loss,roughly 10% of the world economy.
(14:58):
While at the same time,you have over 1 billion
knowledge workers coming into the workforce in the next ten years
mostly from emerging economies, and
there was this economistcalled Bryan Caplan
from George Mason University.
He wrote a book called ‘Open Borders.’ It’s a very nice book.
It's like a comic, comic bookwritten by an economist. And,
(15:23):
he argues inhis book that
if you remove the concept of ‘border’ from talent mobility,
you have the opportunityto triple the world economy.
So it's anything between10% of the world economy to
to 3 times the world economy.
The potential impactof unlocking global talent.
And knowing how thecapitalistic system works,
(15:43):
I don't see any future where
there's not going to bea supply demand equilibrium.
What was missingwas removing the friction
in front of companies in the West
to employ people in mass in other countries.
And Oyster is a component of that, is an answer of that.
Because we streamline
we make global hiringas easy as local hiring.
(16:05):
A few clicks online
Yeah and bring it down.
I mean, I'm curious within your customer base,
you know, how many smaller companies
because before you couldn't do it,if you were small,
you had to set up that,
you had to set up that,
you know, regional center,
and maybe you could be inone or 2 or 3 countries.
But you couldn't
you couldn't pullfrom all around the world,
and you certainly couldn't pull
(16:25):
pull 1 or 2 individualsfrom a specific country.
So I'm just curious of yourkind of customer distribution.
How many of them aresmall companies?
How many arebig companies?
As there's this flow to, you know,
getting peopleoutside your borders.
Yeah, absolutelyJeff.
So before having platforms like Oyster
companies, only big companieshad access to global talent, right?
(16:46):
They had to
think about Google.
Google would have officesin 50 countries,
and they would go and hire the besttalent in these 50 countries.
But if you're a small startup,you cannot compete with Google
on hiring these peoplethe best talent.
So now our customers are SMB [Small to Medium size Businesses]
and mid-market companies.
So they are between 1 to 5,000 employees.
(17:09):
That's like 95% of our customer base.
Because we give thema secret weapon,
we give them Oyster
to enable them to compete
as well, if not better
than the Googlesof the world
in the waron talent.
And, like wehave a customer
that has 200 team memberson the platform
distributed in, in 50 countries.
(17:33):
Wow. 200 people in 50 countries
so no more than fourin a country on average.
And I thinkyou said you're
you're the only Oyster employeeon Cyprus, correct?
Yes. There's nobody here.
I love it.
You grew up in Lebanon during the civil war.
And you left to go toto France for your education.
(17:54):
And you had an interesting quotein one of your,
podcasts that you were a guest.
You said ‘I built businessesto protect myself’
And you werevery successful.
You built a couple businesses,you sold them.
They went publicmade some money.
And then you weren't happy,you like, did the Silicon Valley dream.
You opened the startup,you went public, got acquired,
(18:15):
made some money.
Here you are.
And then you weren't happy.
And the other great line that Iheard is, one of your friends said,
you know, Tony, what would it takefor you to start another company?
And now you get to approach itfrom a very different perspective,
from protecting yourself.
Now you have an opportunity
to take your learningsand make some changes in the world.
(18:35):
So I wonder if you can share thereflection of that journey
at the beginning
and some of these things that really impacted
this unique thing that you've built in Oyster
that's really kind ofan operational,
platform if you will, your great line,‘Sustainable Leadership’
which is, tightly knit, but somewhat,
(18:57):
I don’t want to say removed,but it's a different layer of,
of intentionalitythan just trying to fulfill
supply and demandwithin your customer base.
Yeah, absolutely Jeff.
Oyster is, a laboratory
for me to experiment in this,
I would sayhuman centric leadership,
leadership, toolsor techniques,
(19:18):
because I want to work inan environment that works for me.
I want to feel safe.
I want to
I don't want to have fearof being judged.
I want to be myself.
I want togive.
I want tobe super creative.
I want toI want to feel,
I want tofeel, fulfilled.
I want to work on something meaningful.
So all of this,
I want to surroundmyself with diversity.
(19:41):
So, this is the environmentI imagined.
And also, I imagine an environment
where I can livewherever I want to live.
I want the freedom of location,the freedom of time.
I want to work, when I, when I want to work.
And that led me to start Oyster.
But before gettingto starting Oyster, I was,
(20:04):
I was doing a lot of inner work,so I took some time off.
I took a year and a half off
between selling my first companyand starting Oyster.
And, during that year,
although I was,I had made
I had made a financial success.
I felt, there was somethingmissing in my life.
My relationship were not that great
The way I take care of myselfwas not great.
(20:25):
So I went on this,inner work journey
essentially a therapy,intense therapy process
that enabled meto realize that,
what made me to realize what I need to do to heal myself,
to get better, to feel healthier.
And be happier.
And one of the component of thatis to work on something meaningful and purposeful.
(20:46):
And that led me to start Oyster,because I felt that
if I can create
if I can put my efforts into,
making people feel they don't have to leave their home countries
and go through the challenges that,
immigrant go through to succeedin the West, then,
(21:07):
then I could feelI could feel more purposeful.
I could feel more fulfilled.
I could, I could be happier, and
so that's kind of what led me to start Oyster, and,
Yeah.
Well there's a couple
there’s a couple kind of philosophical anchors
that I want you toexpand on a little bit.
And one is the role ofcourage and fear.
(21:30):
And you talked about, you know,living with courage and fear
and learning to kind ofmaster those two words.
How do you address courage and fear
and how do you get on top of fear?
Because fear is ait's a big motivator.
And it can drive a lot of crazy behaviors.
Totally. And for me, so I had a
(21:51):
I had a, since I wasa young child,
I have developed a higher sensitivity to fear.
And why? Because I was in this.
I was in this war zone environmentfor the first ten years of my life.
And so, some people call this PTSDpost-traumatic stress disorder.
And so I had to deal with itlater in my life and heal from it.
(22:14):
And what I realize is that,
it's not sensitivityto fear.
It's just sensitivity.
I'm like, I haveI have more sensitivity.
And, instead of running awayfrom what I'm feeling
these difficult emotions such as fear,
I learned how to be present with them.
And that's what courage is with fear.
Having courage is to not running away from your fear.
(22:37):
You still have the fear,but not act on it
is to becomenon-reactive to fear.
And a very
concrete example of applicationfor leaders in my position is
well, in my positionyou're always faced with
with very scary challengesthat could
(22:57):
could derail the company,
but you cannot goand react to that,
because if you react to that,you propagate in the organization
unnecessary fear,unnecessary anxiety
that would leadto the wrong decision.
So you have to manage yourself.
You have to lead yourself.You have to sustain yourself.
This is where the sustainableleadership concept came from.
You have to be therefor yourself as a leader
(23:19):
to process these emotions so thatyou don't go and snap at your team.
Create behavior that generates fear in the system.
Then you start losingthe emotional safety
that you need to thrivein an environment,
and then you become highly toxic cultures.
Right?
So managing fear
is an important skillfor leaders.
(23:41):
You know, it's funny we talk a lotabout psychological safety.
We talk a lot about,
you know, creating environmentsfor people to take risks
so that they will take risks,that they'll innovate. Right.
But also by taking risks,some percentage of those will fail.
And there'sthis kind of moment of truth
on the exchange of informationfrom the someone talking to you
to you receiving itand how you respond.
(24:02):
You talk about non-reactive morethan any leader I've ever heard of.
So it's just, you know,
we see in Amazon, I think one of their special skills
is bias for action.
And before they respond, they tryto think of a way to say ‘yes’.
Is there a way I can say yes without saying no
from a leadershipperspective?
But you've kind of more generalizedit into this non-reactive.
(24:24):
And it's really interesting,
at that point of potential friction or that point of,
really, really where the culture rubber meets the road,
because how are you going to react
to whatever I did, said or am reporting?
How do you get ahead of that?
How conscious is that?
Do you take a deep breath?
You try to get the bad newsand the reaction over
before you get on the callwith the person,
(24:46):
because you're very intentional with that.
And I think it'sa really powerful,
behavior that people can try to adopt that,
you know, isn't that hardtechnically, but is a really,
beneficial thingin terms of
building that trust and relationshipwith the person on the other side
that just took a risk and told you something that maybe
wasn't always great.
(25:06):
Yeah, there's a
there is inner workthat you can do
and there's outer environments workthat you can also do.
Let's talk aboutthe inner work.
The inner work is about,
developing higher sense ofsensitivity to how you're feeling.
And, and then,
and then non-react to that
essentially you develop this abilityto make choices,
(25:27):
based on these emotionsand not be on autopilot.
So people do meditation, people do breathing.
People work with plants.
So there's a number of techniques.
Therapy.
There's a new therapythat I use recently called
‘act’ accept, acceptanceand commitment therapy
that enables you to acceptwhatever you're experiencing
and committingto do differently this time,
(25:48):
or not do anythingif you don't have to do anything.
Right.
So this kind of non-reactivityis a skill that you can learn.
And secondlythe outer world,
you can also organize your outer world so that you're not
always on
that you are
have downtime to processbefore going into the meeting.
And asynchronous workthat is very common in remote companies
(26:13):
is an amazing type of work
to minimize these reactivity,because
before going into a meeting,I've already processed the data, I’ve already
if I have a bad news,I got that bad news yesterday
and I have a meetingtomorrow about it.
Right.
So I'm not like having the bad news in the meeting
in real time. Right.
(26:33):
So that helps a lot in reducingreactivity in the workplace.
And,
yeah, I think these are the components.
So there's an inner workyou can do
to develop your abilityto be non-reactive
and not run away from what you're feeling
and be more aware.
And then secondly, is,is really organize your environment
(26:55):
so that you reduce the amount of,
triggers, that are hereto trigger you.
You are also very, outspoken inyour management of your own time,
and the management of thethings that interrupt you.
And it just it shocks me that
too many organizations are still kind of dopamine,
running, chasing notifications,
(27:16):
which often are triggersand not really leveraging
what as you said,one of the beauties of async
is that you get so much more timeto actually turn off notifications
and get work done.
I'm just curioushow that's been reflected
within the companyand how it was so different
than, you know,potentially the last,
couple of organizationsthat you were involved with
(27:38):
in terms of giving peopletime to get work done and specific,
you know, kind of active,instruction
to turn notifications off
during some certain period of time
so that you are getting the actualwork done that we're paying you to do
instead of just replyingto email all day long.
I mean look, this company nowI work for, Oyster
(27:59):
I feel
two times more productive than my previous companies
And, and, not a but, and
and I feel, more relaxedand fulfilled in my life.
Right, so
this is the effect of adopting a purposeful,
way of working designed fordistributed and remote companies.
(28:20):
And so whyI'm more productive.
So to give youan example, I,
instead of sitting in meetings,all day long,
I watchrecorded videos.
Right.
And instead of the meeting,I have to do takes four hours.
It takes one hour.
Because I've already
processed on my ownmany of that meeting component.
(28:42):
I, and why I feel like more fulfilled and more relaxed because,
I work way where I want to work, right?
I don't workin the morning.
I work in the afternoon,and the evening,
at 2:00 pm in the afternoon,I spend two hours with my kids,
and, on the Friday, I don't haveinternal meetings
so Friday I use it for,I call it Focus Friday.
(29:04):
Everybody in the companyhas a focus Friday
Where we don't haveinternal meetings,
and we use that time
to catch up on everything we needto catch up on during the week,
so we can go on the weekend
and close our laptopand shut down our Slack.
Right.
So the next morningwhen we come back to work,
we are refreshedand energized.
So this is how
This is how we do it.And actually
(29:24):
like I do this like this because
we have to protect our selffrom the negative effect of work.
Work can the amazing work help us to grow,
work together, build connection,build relationships,
solve important problem in the world.
But also work can be taxing on us.
So how can we keepthe good things of work
(29:45):
and protect ourselvesfrom the negative things?
Love it.
along that line,one are the things
you'd like to say issuccess is about minimization.
And consuming less.
And if you think of thatin the context of work
and you think of itin the context of,
you know, all thesenotification platforms
where you're getting Slackand email and text and
(30:06):
Lord knows how other many digital work platforms,
that people are using
really this, this focus on minimum minimalization, really which
which could also probablybe described as radical prioritization
and really eliminating the stuff that's not important
and really focusing on the stuffthat's important.
Oh, by the way, you just get thesehuge productivity gains.
(30:28):
I’d love to hear to some of the feedbackfrom some of the folks on the team
to suddenly get an opportunityto work when it make sense for them.
You know,
if I'm just not in the moodgo take a walk,
you know, thisthis async and digital tooling
really opens upa whole different world
of a relationship between you and work.
Absolutely.
(30:48):
Not to mention that you can alsochoose where you want to live,
Right, I mean, many people don't have that option today.
They have tolive in cities.
I mean, if you like to live in cities it’s great,
but many people are forcedto live in places
that are not designedfor human living.
Right?
So there's high level of pollution.
(31:09):
There's time wastedin transportation and,
there's,
well, expensive,expensive real estate.
I mean, they couldthere's really,
having giving people the choice
to be distributed on the planetand live where they want to live.
Not only has a massive impacton people's happiness in this world
(31:30):
because they can choosewhere they want to live,
but also has an impacton our environmental footprint.
We are pouring four timesthe equivalent of New York City
in terms of concreteevery year on this planet to build
more urban centers more urban areas.
And we know that's not sustainable.
So we have to find a way to, continue to grow the economy
(31:53):
because we, we live in the systemof infinite growth requirement,
yet do it in a way that is healthier for the planet and for
its people.
Right.
And you've got all these little towns right
that are gettinghollowed out because there’s
the opportunities,weren't there.
So the young kids have to move
and you get this kind of downward spiral of
of a lot of placesthat aren't crowded
(32:14):
and don't have commutes where,you know, if you can run a fiber,
or you can run a fat pipeto that, that community, you know
suddenly there's an opportunity for people not to have to move,
to take advantage of the opportunities
to actually be able to stay and contribute back in the local community.
But, you know,take advantage of this global,
kind of economic boomthat we're in.
Exactly.
So one of your other,
(32:35):
kind of greatphilosophical points is
kind of thinking in terms of the mind versus the heart.
And, you know, I think if youif you use
feeling and thinking of people as people,
they're not pieces of steelor a piece of concrete or a car,
as they used to think of them and
as an asset,it's really people.
And you talk quite frequently about
(32:58):
you know, letting people know you care.
And in that you're going to get,you know,
this tremendous amount of marginal effort,intrinsic motivation, you know,
pulling harder on the oars,all these things that come from
treating people like people versustreating people like an asset.
I wonder if you can share
you know kind ofwhere does that come from
and how are you usingthat on a day to day basis?
(33:18):
Yeah, it's like I've developed this,
I call themenergetic systems.
And there's an energetic systemI call the Eagle
and another one called the Condor.
And I try to use different onesin different situations.
So let me tell you whateach one is.
So the Eagle is my flight and fight system.
Is my system that deals with, with crises, with risks.
(33:43):
And so if I may say,
I need to raise moneyfor the company.
That's my, I put my Eagle energy on.
And I fight and flight systemand I focus and get it done, and
so but if,
but the Condor, so
So, and why I call it the Eagle
because the Eagle is a predator.
(34:04):
The Eagle kills toto eat.
The Condor on the other sideis a scavenger.
She or he take care of the environment to survive
Right.
And so he is much more nurturing.
The Condor has one childevery two years.
The Eagle has four per year.
So, so the Condor, when I'm dealing with something
(34:27):
with an issue internallythat is people related
I put my Condor energy system
and I'm more I'm more listening.
I'm more,
compassionate,
I'm more caring
because I'm dealing withwith a human system here.
I'm not dealing with goalsand market issues.
And whatever is requiresme to be this Eagle.
(34:50):
Right.
So being able to choosewhat energy system
I want to usein each situation
has helped me a lotin the last few years
to actually growmy leadership style
and actually don'tget stuck in any style.
Right?
So I can be much more flexibleI call it having Eagle Flexibility
to really adaptto the situation.
(35:11):
I love that,right.
Because average doesn't workanymore, right?
Everything's context sensitive.
You got to You got to have the right context.
[Jeff] So you're a deep thinking guy.[Tony] Yes
And I want to ask youa couple of questions
on some philosophical issues.
I had Mårten Mickos onI don't know if you know Marten
He used to be the CEO at MySQL.
He's the CEO of HackerOne, similar kind of a deal, actually.
He connects companieswith independent hackers.
(35:33):
But we were talking about learning
and he said, you know,we all want to learn.
We all have to learn.
We have to keep learning.
And it's great to have a fun learning environment
and we all grow together.
But he goes, but,
but when youtouch the stove,
you learn really fast.
And that's when you realize that there's
kind of different levels of learning.
There's learning, learning,and then there's
touch the stove learning.
As a leader,
(35:54):
you need to get peoplein situations sometimes where,
maybe they
they accidentallytouch the stove,
you don't want them to burn themselves.
But at the same time,those are the lessons that really get
that really sink in.
How do you think about helpingpeople learn?
In this context?
Because we all needto keep learning.
The world is changing so quickly.
The tools arequickly changing.
(36:15):
But it’s this kind of interestingparadox where there's learning
and then there's, you know,touching the stove, learning.
Yeah. Great question.
So how I do this is a
essentially by empowering them
and giving them room
so that they canmake small mistakes
that are not deadly mistakesor can be reversible.
(36:37):
And,
And, and give them the permission to do so
by being non-reactiveto their mistakes.
Right.
And, and the second pieceis to model the way
is to do that myself
and share the learningfrom my mistakes.
I want to make making mistakes.
Something
(36:59):
Actually allowed or possible.
And part of that journey to learn because,
you can hire an amazing executive
with an amazing track record
but the situation therewas completely different.
So they have tolearn on the job everyday
like learning is a really importantpart of the process.
And you want to create anenvironment where people know that.
(37:20):
They know that
I’m not hiring you because what you know,
I'm hiring you because your ability to continue to learn
That's great
It's like the parenting paradox.
And he's mentioned you've gotyou've got kids, I've got kids.
And I tell young parents,
I think this is the ultimate parenting problem, paradox, because, you know,
you want the kidto learn,
but in helping them learn, sometimes you're hurting their learning.
(37:42):
So I alwaysthink of like
teaching the kid to ridea two wheel bike.
You know, at some point
you have to let go
of the seat and they're probably going to fall over.
But in falling over, maybethey learn to ride the bike better.
At the same time,
you don't want to push them over and scrape their knees.
So this, this constant,
you know, trying to helpversus holding back,
trying to help versus holding back
so that they can learn on their ownand cross those,
(38:06):
those places that they wouldn't have done.
And you can't help them do that.
They have to do that on their own.
I think it's a real challenge.
It's a great example, actually.
This is the way you create safetyfor people to learn is very simple to
very similar to how I taught my son to learn a bike actually, I created
there was a whole lawn.
So it was like all safe to fall first.
(38:28):
And I created I,
I hid all the things that could hurt him as he
and he could fall and be okay.
So this is a very similarto work environment.
You create an environmentwhere failing, is safe.
How can you make feeling safe?
You can get hurt, not
Hurt not injured is always,
Hurt not injured
Hurt not injured,recoverable.
(38:49):
So last thing as we’re gettingtowards the end of our time
impact of AI.
And, you know, you dealwith a lot of
independent contractors and people that are all around the world.
And I can't help but think ofthe people that worked at Fiverr,
as kind of adifferent version
of what you were trying to do around some very specific services.
But, you know,AI changes everything.
(39:10):
How are you using it internally?
But also how do you see AI changing
the demands within this kindof global talent market?
Because some thingsare going to get subsumed,
but other things are going to be new,
different and drivedifferent kinds of demand.
I think AI, what’s going to happen isgoing to shift the expectation
of what employers have
(39:32):
from the value employeeswill be delivering in the future.
So we're goingto expect more value
to be producedby each human being,
by using AI to augmentthe capability of a human being.
It's also goingto be very
fulfilling for people to use AI
because suddenlyyou have this amazing technology
(39:52):
that is supporting you to makemore impactful things.
So when, you know,before we used to do,
run numbers on a piece of paperand then you had Excel.
Imagine how much accountant
like it was Nirvana for accountant right?
It became so much for
for the like the expert on all these
macros and Excel
spreadsheet formulas.
(40:13):
And so we're going to havea similar impact here, we are going to
people is going to be more fulfilled.
And they're going tothey're going to do more things
with the help of technology.
So yeah,so I believe that,
is going to make workmore valuable for businesses
and make people more fulfilledusing these new technology.
Now how we are using it at Oyster, we have, internally,
(40:34):
increasingly people are adopting AI across the board.
Whether you are a customer support representative
or the CEO of the company,we all use a form of AI assistant
We are also developing our own AI technology, so
we were the first to launch ourAI chatbot last year,
where you can chatwith our platform
and get answer, as a customer
(40:55):
about employingsomebody in France or,
about compensation in a specific country.
So, we are
we have the technologythat enables us to
make our customer experiencebetter, but also scale
much more effectivelyour operations.
Because now we instead of havinghumans to answer these questions,
(41:16):
now we have a machinethat does that for us.
Yeah. That's great.
Well we're gettingto the end of our time.
I want to give youthe last word as we
we had into
I don't know,
I don't know if it's even appropriate to bring up with you.
Return to office 5.0
which I brought up with Brian Elliott the other day
here in the States.
It kind of goes with back to school, and Labor Day.
You're obviously well past thatas you look forward,
(41:39):
into the next year as wellas, you know,
you've got a good view on exponential curves and technology.
You were down in the guts,
in the network and telco world.
How do you see the next couple of yearskind of playing out?
What are youexcited about? What
If we talk a year from now,
what are we going to be talking about?
I'm very excited about,
closing the opportunity gapbetween North and South.
(42:02):
We have increased our percentage of team member
in emerging economy from 30% to 40%in the last two years.
And sent hundreds of millions of dollarsin foreign direct investment
into emerging economies.
And we're just getting started.
I'd like to see that numbercontinue to go up. And,
so yeah, I what
(42:23):
what I'm excited aboutis making
employment global by default
so companies can look at the world as their oyster
when they're looking for talent.
Love it.
Well, I'm sure what's going to happen is
you're gonna have these up and comings
to start bumpingoff incumbents.
And I think ultimately it'sgoing to be the financial markets
to start to say, hey, you know,what do you doing?
You got to, you got to adjust with the new time.
(42:43):
Well, Tony it’s great to, great to catch up.
Love all your work.
Listened to a lot of podcastsgetting ready for this.
And I really appreciatethe mission and
and really breaking down barriers
between opportunities and peopleto fulfill those opportunities.
So win, win all the way around.
Thank you for having me Jeff.
All right.
He's Tony, I'm Jeffyou're watching work 20XX.
(43:05):
Thanks for watching.We'll see you next time.
Thanks for listeningon the podcast.
Take care.
That was great.
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you again.
And I’ll count us down.
Yeah.
So we'll go in three, two, one.
Hey welcome backeverybody Jeff Frick here.
Coming to you from the home studiofor another episode of Work 20XX.
And I'm excitedfor this next episode.
This gentleman, he'sbeen in the space for a while.
He started kind of a transformative company,
serendipitously right at the beginning of 2020.
(00:23):
And, and he's living it,
you know, he's he's living the values.
He's really kind ofchanging the world.
And he'sjoining us today
all the way from Cyprusin the Eastern Mediterranean.
He's Tony Jamous, he's the CEO and Co-Founder of Oyster.
Tony, great to see you.
Good to be here Jeff.
Thank you for having me.
Absolutely.
So we had the good pleasureof meeting a little while ago.
(00:45):
And I just found your your story fascinating.
You also are a great sharer.
You've got an open source ethos.
So, you know,people can really find out.
There's no secrets here.This is not secret.
But before we get into it,let's just jump into Oyster 101.
For people that aren't familiarwith Oyster, what's it all about?
Yeah.
So Oyster is a global employment platform.
(01:05):
We help companies anywhereto employ people in any country
without the need of setting up entities,
hiring lawyers, accountants,payroll providers.
We do all of thatthrough the power of software.
And why we do that?
Because you want to make global hiring as easy as a local hiring.
So we can reverse brain drain.So people can stay in their home countries
(01:28):
don't have to leave their family, their community,
but access to these amazing job opportunities
that the worldcan offer.
So we hear a lot about,you know, remote workers
and we hear about some ofthese cool travel visas
that some countriesare putting in place
to try to attract workersand have them come work from there.
But, you know, there'sall this ugliness in terms of
taxes and regulation and traditionally,you know, before Oyster,
(01:52):
if I wanted to set upsome type of entity
to employ somebody someplace,
you had to have kind of some type of a structure.
So how have you solved thatwith software?
Do people work for Oyster technically?
Do you have some type of?
Because I know out here inSilicon Valley there's TriNet.
So everyone who's ever workedfor a startup in Silicon Valley
has worked for TriNet which they,
(02:14):
you know, kind of orchestrate the details
until the company gets old enough to
to kind of do their own HR[Human Resources]
Is that what you're doing?
Explain, how does it actually work?
Yeah, it's actually pretty much like TriNet,
but on aplanetary level.
So let me tell youa bit of history.
The U.S. is composed ofa number of states,
and each state operates like its own countrywhen it comes to labor laws.
(02:35):
So, there was an emergenceof these players in U.S called,
PEOs, Professional Employment Organizations
that would employ the personon your behalf in that state.
And, so we took that conceptand we made it global.
So we built a global employmentinfrastructure in 180 countries.
(02:56):
We have legal entities,we have payroll providers,
we have benefit providersin each of these countries.
And then on top,we build a software platform
that is increasinglyAI driven, that federates all these,
knowledge of complianceof tax regulations,
engineering the contract
can assign benefits to an employee
(03:18):
can process the payrollcan process the payments
all through the onlineplatform and a few clicks.
So if you found and
You found Mary in Athens you want to hire.
She's a great software developer.
You can do that in 24 hours
and you can offer her a great employment contract.
You can pay her fairly.
You can even offer equityif you want.
Interesting.
(03:38):
And you've got peopleI mean,
you kind of areyou’re living
you're living your mission.
So you've got people distributedall over the world.
So do you have
I don't know, points of presence,what’s the right, the word to use
in all those countries as Oyster?
That's really kind ofyour key secret sauce?
Yeah.So we
we ourself use our own technology.
We you know,
When I wanted to start Oyster,
one of mydrivers is
(03:59):
How can I build a hyper diverse
and a hyper distributedorganization on this planet?
And I couldn't find a technologyto support me in that.
So I went and built it.
So we use it internally.
We are, distributedin 70 countries.
We have no offices.
We are nearly 600 people.
We are gender equal across the board.
(04:20):
So imagine the amount of diversity you have
from people living in 70 countries.
Gender equal from over 100 nationalities
coming together to build the software platform
that is driving equalityin the world.
That's great.
And then you've also got
you've got kind of theaggregated market data.
So if I don't know how muchto pay Mary from Athens,
(04:43):
because I've never hired anyone from Ath
or excuse me, from Athens,
you've got, you know, kind of likewe've seen in a lot of the housing
and some of these other,like Zillow,
where suddenly now you've got this aggregated
information to show kind ofwhat is the market and how
how the market is definedto help me figure that out.
Absolutely.
We tell you what is fair,fair pay for her,
(05:04):
depending on her role,on her seniority,
and you know, the first datafor compensation
is somehow availablein the developed world.
Think about the North America
and some placesin Europe,
but it's not availablein the rest of the world.
And also the other challengewe have is that remote workers,
(05:27):
ask for higher salarieswhen they work for a company overseas
when they were local, work locally.
Think about software developers.
Software developersare in high demand in the world.
So we have developed this,
this compensation, insight tool
that enable companiesto estimate
what is a fair compensation,for anyone, anywhere in the world.
(05:51):
And they can use the same toolto design a compensation philosophy
to make sure they cancreate equality across the system.
Because humans are very sensitiveto feeling of fairness.
And when you're in one country,that's easy.
When you're in 50 countries,that's harder to achieve.
So our tool enable youto create that sense of
(06:11):
equality and fairness across the world.
How have you seenthe evolution of pay for skill
versus pay for geo when traditionalgeo borders are breaking down?
How do you see that evolving?
Because that's a bigthat's a big issue, right?
Because there's huge market differences
differentiation for skills in different geos.
(06:31):
Absolutely.
And look, I,I have absolute believe
that there is one day in the futurewhere that difference will go away
between differentgeographies.
It’s going to probablytake us ten years to get there,
but we are making incremental progress toward that.
So the roles that are in high demand
(06:53):
talk about the software developers,
the gap between a software developerin an emerging economy,
and a software developerin the West
has been shrinkingfast in the last few years.
And we’re gonna, we see that happening in other,
roles, knowledge worker roles
that are also increasingly in demand.
Think about sales executive,think about accountants
(07:15):
and marketers.
So all of these areour team members.
We employ on our platform,on behalf of our customers.
And so
There’s still a gap today in the world,obviously, still inequality.
But the good news is thatthat gap is shrinking.
And with platforms like Oyster,by making it more possible
(07:35):
for companies to tap into the world as a talent pool
we can have a shot in creating
more equilibrium betweenthe supply and demand of labor.
Curious to get your take tooon kind of.
And I, you know,you've got a much more global,
point of view.
think of like 1099sand W2s in the US,
and it's such a small kind of slice of definition
(07:57):
of their working relationshipbetween the company and the person.
But then you seethe rise of the gig economy.
You see, you know, these peopledriving Ubers and Lyfts and
driving, you know, Amazon delivery services
that are actually not Amazon.
It's a different,
wholly owned, independent companythat works for them.
How do you see kind ofthe evolution of the relationships
(08:18):
between the company or whoever's paying and workers
with things like Fiverr, with things like fractional CMOs?
It just seems like
there needs to be a lotmore granularity and variability
in the way those relationships are defined,
which of course, thenties back to taxes and
and it gets morecomplicated on the back end.
(08:38):
Yeah, look, Jeff, what was happeningand what’s still happening is that
full time employment has been a bit traumatic for people,
because it restricts your freedom
It's less flexible.
You have to go to an office,you have to commute, you have to,
(08:59):
be in meetings all day long.
So when you work for companiesthat are not well structured
to make people successfulno matter what they are,
and if you work for a companythat restricts your freedom
by imposing some unnecessary restrictions,
such as working in a specific placeor commuting to an office or,
then people are choosing to,
(09:22):
actually quit thefull time employment job
and become a contractor
and not being subject necessarilyto a company's policy,
they would be workingon specific projects instead.
Right
And for multiple clients.
So we see, we've seenthat trend happening.
But also, there are companiesthat are doing the opposite.
There are companies that are giving that flexibility to their employees.
(09:45):
They're investing in their growth and development,
creating a culture that areinclusive and safe and fair.
These companies are thrivingand attracting people,
attracting thebest talent in the world
because the best talentwant to be part of a team, right?
They want to create somethingmeaningful together and,
and inmany countries,
full time employee relationship cannot be done through
(10:06):
a contractual model from a,from a regulation standpoint,
there would be a taxmisclassification issue
that companies will faceif they employ,
contractor, well employees as contractors.
So this is where also our platform can help.
We have a lot of customersthat come to us saying,
I have these 20 contractorsdistributed in five countries.
(10:30):
It's time for me to,
make it compliant.
And we want to move themto full time employee.
And this is where Oyster can come in.
We also supportcontractor model as well.
So we process a lot of payments for
for the gig economy.
So in short,I think the key is
is to create culture that supportspeople's growth and give them
(10:51):
the freedom and flexibilitythey need so that work,
fulltime work is not
[Tony] seen as a tax on people,[Jeff] Right
but is seen as a wayto support their life.
We'll get into your managementphilosophy, and I know
it's interesting, you know,your sustainable leadership.
But before we get there, from the company
from still from companies’ perspective
it just feels likethere's a trend over time
(11:13):
to move more things, right
from the balance sheet to the income statement,
to move less thingsfrom capital expenditures
to more flexible expendituresbased on demand, etc.,
whether it's cloud computing or
or whatever, so do you see and
and also,I would argue that the, you know,
kind of the contractthat my grandfather signed up
when he went to work for AT&Tfor 30 years and got,
(11:35):
you know, lifetime health benefitstill he was 100,
that's all kind of goneaway a lot of the employee match.
And I don't know if you’ve seen the same thing
in Europe and some of the other geos,
but it seems likethe fundamental contract
between what I'm giving youand what I'm getting,
and maybe I'm suffering a little bitmore of that short term pain
because there's some long term benefits
once I retire andand health care for life.
(11:56):
It's I think, part of that's gated here in the U.S.
because of health careand it's still tied to employment.
It's not disconnected,which I think
would open up alot of flexibility.
So do youjust see this
kind of ongoing cadencein terms of flexible,
flexible staffing,
either around a project, aroundan initiative, around a whatever.
So I bring talent in around an objective
(12:17):
versus and taking more ofwhat would have been
full time, you know,W-2 hires back in the day.
Yeah, I think when it comes to labor flexibility, it's really,
and in countries where the U.S.where employment is ‘at will’,
it doesn't really make a difference
if you employ somebody as an FTE (Full-time Equivalent)
(12:38):
or as a contractor.
It makes a differencein countries where
there's no employment ‘at-will’like in France.
Where if you let go someone,
it's a very complicated and a risky process.
So in countrieslike that
you tend to default allot toservice providers and outsourcers, and
Actually the IT outsourcingindustry in France is huge
(13:01):
It’s one of the top industriesin the country. Why?
Because the employmentmarket is so rigid
you cannot hire and firepeople easily.
So the companies, before deciding to hire somebody full time
they default to anoutsource company.
And in the U.S. has much more flexible labor.
So we see,
we see noimpact there.
(13:23):
But you're right.
If you're building, if you'reworking on a specific project
that is contained in time and,
and is well defined,then putting together
a team of contractor could be,could be also interesting idea
Yeah, that's great. And congrats to you.
Three years and I think you just had a nice raise
not too long ago and hit$1 billion valuation.
So, congratulations to,to you and the team on that.
(13:47):
Thank you.
Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about kind of the global opportunity.
And you talk about it a lot in podcast appearances
this huge mismatchbetween supply and demand,
especially in Western countries,developed countries.
You could take take a positionlike, you know, security engineers
or whatever.
You know, there's thousands
and thousands of unfulfilled jobs
(14:10):
at the same time there's a lot of people,
that aren't within 20 miles ofan office that might be qualified.
I wonder if you could sharesome of the macro trends,
that got you excited to goin this space in the first place.
And what are you seeing nowthree years into it?
Yeah, when I, started working on Oyster,I started looking in late 2019.
I started looking atthese macro trends.
(14:31):
First, there was remote work,and we looked at remote work,
and it was clear that remote workwas the future of work.
The pandemic enabledthat to happen much faster.
Now you have also
I looked at the,employment data.
There are 80 million jobsgoing unfulfilled in the West,
according to Korn Ferry,
resulting in $8.5 trillion of economic loss,roughly 10% of the world economy.
(14:58):
While at the same time,you have over 1 billion
knowledge workers coming into the workforce in the next ten years
mostly from emerging economies, and
there was this economistcalled Bryan Caplan
from George Mason University.
He wrote a book called ‘Open Borders.’ It’s a very nice book.
It's like a comic, comic bookwritten by an economist. And,
(15:23):
he argues inhis book that
if you remove the concept of ‘border’ from talent mobility,
you have the opportunityto triple the world economy.
So it's anything between10% of the world economy to
to 3 times the world economy.
The potential impactof unlocking global talent.
And knowing how thecapitalistic system works,
(15:43):
I don't see any future where
there's not going to bea supply demand equilibrium.
What was missingwas removing the friction
in front of companies in the West
to employ people in mass in other countries.
And Oyster is a component of that, is an answer of that.
Because we streamline
we make global hiringas easy as local hiring.
(16:05):
A few clicks online
Yeah and bring it down.
I mean, I'm curious within your customer base,
you know, how many smaller companies
because before you couldn't do it,if you were small,
you had to set up that,
you had to set up that,
you know, regional center,
and maybe you could be inone or 2 or 3 countries.
But you couldn't
you couldn't pullfrom all around the world,
and you certainly couldn't pull
(16:25):
pull 1 or 2 individualsfrom a specific country.
So I'm just curious of yourkind of customer distribution.
How many of them aresmall companies?
How many arebig companies?
As there's this flow to, you know,
getting peopleoutside your borders.
Yeah, absolutelyJeff.
So before having platforms like Oyster
companies, only big companieshad access to global talent, right?
(16:46):
They had to
think about Google.
Google would have officesin 50 countries,
and they would go and hire the besttalent in these 50 countries.
But if you're a small startup,you cannot compete with Google
on hiring these peoplethe best talent.
So now our customers are SMB [Small to Medium size Businesses]
and mid-market companies.
So they are between 1 to 5,000 employees.
(17:09):
That's like 95% of our customer base.
Because we give thema secret weapon,
we give them Oyster
to enable them to compete
as well, if not better
than the Googlesof the world
in the waron talent.
And, like wehave a customer
that has 200 team memberson the platform
distributed in, in 50 countries.
(17:33):
Wow. 200 people in 50 countries
so no more than fourin a country on average.
And I thinkyou said you're
you're the only Oyster employeeon Cyprus, correct?
Yes. There's nobody here.
I love it.
You grew up in Lebanon during the civil war.
And you left to go toto France for your education.
(17:54):
And you had an interesting quotein one of your,
podcasts that you were a guest.
You said ‘I built businessesto protect myself’
And you werevery successful.
You built a couple businesses,you sold them.
They went publicmade some money.
And then you weren't happy,you like, did the Silicon Valley dream.
You opened the startup,you went public, got acquired,
(18:15):
made some money.
Here you are.
And then you weren't happy.
And the other great line that Iheard is, one of your friends said,
you know, Tony, what would it takefor you to start another company?
And now you get to approach itfrom a very different perspective,
from protecting yourself.
Now you have an opportunity
to take your learningsand make some changes in the world.
(18:35):
So I wonder if you can share thereflection of that journey
at the beginning
and some of these things that really impacted
this unique thing that you've built in Oyster
that's really kind ofan operational,
platform if you will, your great line,‘Sustainable Leadership’
which is, tightly knit, but somewhat,
(18:57):
I don’t want to say removed,but it's a different layer of,
of intentionalitythan just trying to fulfill
supply and demandwithin your customer base.
Yeah, absolutely Jeff.
Oyster is, a laboratory
for me to experiment in this,
I would sayhuman centric leadership,
leadership, toolsor techniques,
(19:18):
because I want to work inan environment that works for me.
I want to feel safe.
I want to
I don't want to have fearof being judged.
I want to be myself.
I want togive.
I want tobe super creative.
I want toI want to feel,
I want tofeel, fulfilled.
I want to work on something meaningful.
So all of this,
I want to surroundmyself with diversity.
(19:41):
So, this is the environmentI imagined.
And also, I imagine an environment
where I can livewherever I want to live.
I want the freedom of location,the freedom of time.
I want to work, when I, when I want to work.
And that led me to start Oyster.
But before gettingto starting Oyster, I was,
(20:04):
I was doing a lot of inner work,so I took some time off.
I took a year and a half off
between selling my first companyand starting Oyster.
And, during that year,
although I was,I had made
I had made a financial success.
I felt, there was somethingmissing in my life.
My relationship were not that great
The way I take care of myselfwas not great.
(20:25):
So I went on this,inner work journey
essentially a therapy,intense therapy process
that enabled meto realize that,
what made me to realize what I need to do to heal myself,
to get better, to feel healthier.
And be happier.
And one of the component of thatis to work on something meaningful and purposeful.
(20:46):
And that led me to start Oyster,because I felt that
if I can create
if I can put my efforts into,
making people feel they don't have to leave their home countries
and go through the challenges that,
immigrant go through to succeedin the West, then,
(21:07):
then I could feelI could feel more purposeful.
I could feel more fulfilled.
I could, I could be happier, and
so that's kind of what led me to start Oyster, and,
Yeah.
Well there's a couple
there’s a couple kind of philosophical anchors
that I want you toexpand on a little bit.
And one is the role ofcourage and fear.
(21:30):
And you talked about, you know,living with courage and fear
and learning to kind ofmaster those two words.
How do you address courage and fear
and how do you get on top of fear?
Because fear is ait's a big motivator.
And it can drive a lot of crazy behaviors.
Totally. And for me, so I had a
(21:51):
I had a, since I wasa young child,
I have developed a higher sensitivity to fear.
And why? Because I was in this.
I was in this war zone environmentfor the first ten years of my life.
And so, some people call this PTSDpost-traumatic stress disorder.
And so I had to deal with itlater in my life and heal from it.
(22:14):
And what I realize is that,
it's not sensitivityto fear.
It's just sensitivity.
I'm like, I haveI have more sensitivity.
And, instead of running awayfrom what I'm feeling
these difficult emotions such as fear,
I learned how to be present with them.
And that's what courage is with fear.
Having courage is to not running away from your fear.
(22:37):
You still have the fear,but not act on it
is to becomenon-reactive to fear.
And a very
concrete example of applicationfor leaders in my position is
well, in my positionyou're always faced with
with very scary challengesthat could
(22:57):
could derail the company,
but you cannot goand react to that,
because if you react to that,you propagate in the organization
unnecessary fear,unnecessary anxiety
that would leadto the wrong decision.
So you have to manage yourself.
You have to lead yourself.You have to sustain yourself.
This is where the sustainableleadership concept came from.
You have to be therefor yourself as a leader
(23:19):
to process these emotions so thatyou don't go and snap at your team.
Create behavior that generates fear in the system.
Then you start losingthe emotional safety
that you need to thrivein an environment,
and then you become highly toxic cultures.
Right?
So managing fear
is an important skillfor leaders.
(23:41):
You know, it's funny we talk a lotabout psychological safety.
We talk a lot about,
you know, creating environmentsfor people to take risks
so that they will take risks,that they'll innovate. Right.
But also by taking risks,some percentage of those will fail.
And there'sthis kind of moment of truth
on the exchange of informationfrom the someone talking to you
to you receiving itand how you respond.
(24:02):
You talk about non-reactive morethan any leader I've ever heard of.
So it's just, you know,
we see in Amazon, I think one of their special skills
is bias for action.
And before they respond, they tryto think of a way to say ‘yes’.
Is there a way I can say yes without saying no
from a leadershipperspective?
But you've kind of more generalizedit into this non-reactive.
(24:24):
And it's really interesting,
at that point of potential friction or that point of,
really, really where the culture rubber meets the road,
because how are you going to react
to whatever I did, said or am reporting?
How do you get ahead of that?
How conscious is that?
Do you take a deep breath?
You try to get the bad newsand the reaction over
before you get on the callwith the person,
(24:46):
because you're very intentional with that.
And I think it'sa really powerful,
behavior that people can try to adopt that,
you know, isn't that hardtechnically, but is a really,
beneficial thingin terms of
building that trust and relationshipwith the person on the other side
that just took a risk and told you something that maybe
wasn't always great.
(25:06):
Yeah, there's a
there is inner workthat you can do
and there's outer environments workthat you can also do.
Let's talk aboutthe inner work.
The inner work is about,
developing higher sense ofsensitivity to how you're feeling.
And, and then,
and then non-react to that
essentially you develop this abilityto make choices,
(25:27):
based on these emotionsand not be on autopilot.
So people do meditation, people do breathing.
People work with plants.
So there's a number of techniques.
Therapy.
There's a new therapythat I use recently called
‘act’ accept, acceptanceand commitment therapy
that enables you to acceptwhatever you're experiencing
and committingto do differently this time,
(25:48):
or not do anythingif you don't have to do anything.
Right.
So this kind of non-reactivityis a skill that you can learn.
And secondlythe outer world,
you can also organize your outer world so that you're not
always on
that you are
have downtime to processbefore going into the meeting.
And asynchronous workthat is very common in remote companies
(26:13):
is an amazing type of work
to minimize these reactivity,because
before going into a meeting,I've already processed the data, I’ve already
if I have a bad news,I got that bad news yesterday
and I have a meetingtomorrow about it.
Right.
So I'm not like having the bad news in the meeting
in real time. Right.
(26:33):
So that helps a lot in reducingreactivity in the workplace.
And,
yeah, I think these are the components.
So there's an inner workyou can do
to develop your abilityto be non-reactive
and not run away from what you're feeling
and be more aware.
And then secondly, is,is really organize your environment
(26:55):
so that you reduce the amount of,
triggers, that are hereto trigger you.
You are also very, outspoken inyour management of your own time,
and the management of thethings that interrupt you.
And it just it shocks me that
too many organizations are still kind of dopamine,
running, chasing notifications,
(27:16):
which often are triggersand not really leveraging
what as you said,one of the beauties of async
is that you get so much more timeto actually turn off notifications
and get work done.
I'm just curioushow that's been reflected
within the companyand how it was so different
than, you know,potentially the last,
couple of organizationsthat you were involved with
(27:38):
in terms of giving peopletime to get work done and specific,
you know, kind of active,instruction
to turn notifications off
during some certain period of time
so that you are getting the actualwork done that we're paying you to do
instead of just replyingto email all day long.
I mean look, this company nowI work for, Oyster
(27:59):
I feel
two times more productive than my previous companies
And, and, not a but, and
and I feel, more relaxedand fulfilled in my life.
Right, so
this is the effect of adopting a purposeful,
way of working designed fordistributed and remote companies.
(28:20):
And so whyI'm more productive.
So to give youan example, I,
instead of sitting in meetings,all day long,
I watchrecorded videos.
Right.
And instead of the meeting,I have to do takes four hours.
It takes one hour.
Because I've already
processed on my ownmany of that meeting component.
(28:42):
I, and why I feel like more fulfilled and more relaxed because,
I work way where I want to work, right?
I don't workin the morning.
I work in the afternoon,and the evening,
at 2:00 pm in the afternoon,I spend two hours with my kids,
and, on the Friday, I don't haveinternal meetings
so Friday I use it for,I call it Focus Friday.
(29:04):
Everybody in the companyhas a focus Friday
Where we don't haveinternal meetings,
and we use that time
to catch up on everything we needto catch up on during the week,
so we can go on the weekend
and close our laptopand shut down our Slack.
Right.
So the next morningwhen we come back to work,
we are refreshedand energized.
So this is how
This is how we do it.And actually
(29:24):
like I do this like this because
we have to protect our selffrom the negative effect of work.
Work can the amazing work help us to grow,
work together, build connection,build relationships,
solve important problem in the world.
But also work can be taxing on us.
So how can we keepthe good things of work
(29:45):
and protect ourselvesfrom the negative things?
Love it.
along that line,one are the things
you'd like to say issuccess is about minimization.
And consuming less.
And if you think of thatin the context of work
and you think of itin the context of,
you know, all thesenotification platforms
where you're getting Slackand email and text and
(30:06):
Lord knows how other many digital work platforms,
that people are using
really this, this focus on minimum minimalization, really which
which could also probablybe described as radical prioritization
and really eliminating the stuff that's not important
and really focusing on the stuffthat's important.
Oh, by the way, you just get thesehuge productivity gains.
(30:28):
I’d love to hear to some of the feedbackfrom some of the folks on the team
to suddenly get an opportunityto work when it make sense for them.
You know,
if I'm just not in the moodgo take a walk,
you know, thisthis async and digital tooling
really opens upa whole different world
of a relationship between you and work.
Absolutely.
(30:48):
Not to mention that you can alsochoose where you want to live,
Right, I mean, many people don't have that option today.
They have tolive in cities.
I mean, if you like to live in cities it’s great,
but many people are forcedto live in places
that are not designedfor human living.
Right?
So there's high level of pollution.
(31:09):
There's time wastedin transportation and,
there's,
well, expensive,expensive real estate.
I mean, they couldthere's really,
having giving people the choice
to be distributed on the planetand live where they want to live.
Not only has a massive impacton people's happiness in this world
(31:30):
because they can choosewhere they want to live,
but also has an impacton our environmental footprint.
We are pouring four timesthe equivalent of New York City
in terms of concreteevery year on this planet to build
more urban centers more urban areas.
And we know that's not sustainable.
So we have to find a way to, continue to grow the economy
(31:53):
because we, we live in the systemof infinite growth requirement,
yet do it in a way that is healthier for the planet and for
its people.
Right.
And you've got all these little towns right
that are gettinghollowed out because there’s
the opportunities,weren't there.
So the young kids have to move
and you get this kind of downward spiral of
of a lot of placesthat aren't crowded
(32:14):
and don't have commutes where,you know, if you can run a fiber,
or you can run a fat pipeto that, that community, you know
suddenly there's an opportunity for people not to have to move,
to take advantage of the opportunities
to actually be able to stay and contribute back in the local community.
But, you know,take advantage of this global,
kind of economic boomthat we're in.
Exactly.
So one of your other,
(32:35):
kind of greatphilosophical points is
kind of thinking in terms of the mind versus the heart.
And, you know, I think if youif you use
feeling and thinking of people as people,
they're not pieces of steelor a piece of concrete or a car,
as they used to think of them and
as an asset,it's really people.
And you talk quite frequently about
(32:58):
you know, letting people know you care.
And in that you're going to get,you know,
this tremendous amount of marginal effort,intrinsic motivation, you know,
pulling harder on the oars,all these things that come from
treating people like people versustreating people like an asset.
I wonder if you can share
you know kind ofwhere does that come from
and how are you usingthat on a day to day basis?
(33:18):
Yeah, it's like I've developed this,
I call themenergetic systems.
And there's an energetic systemI call the Eagle
and another one called the Condor.
And I try to use different onesin different situations.
So let me tell you whateach one is.
So the Eagle is my flight and fight system.
Is my system that deals with, with crises, with risks.
(33:43):
And so if I may say,
I need to raise moneyfor the company.
That's my, I put my Eagle energy on.
And I fight and flight systemand I focus and get it done, and
so but if,
but the Condor, so
So, and why I call it the Eagle
because the Eagle is a predator.
(34:04):
The Eagle kills toto eat.
The Condor on the other sideis a scavenger.
She or he take care of the environment to survive
Right.
And so he is much more nurturing.
The Condor has one childevery two years.
The Eagle has four per year.
So, so the Condor, when I'm dealing with something
(34:27):
with an issue internallythat is people related
I put my Condor energy system
and I'm more I'm more listening.
I'm more,
compassionate,
I'm more caring
because I'm dealing withwith a human system here.
I'm not dealing with goalsand market issues.
And whatever is requiresme to be this Eagle.
(34:50):
Right.
So being able to choosewhat energy system
I want to usein each situation
has helped me a lotin the last few years
to actually growmy leadership style
and actually don'tget stuck in any style.
Right?
So I can be much more flexibleI call it having Eagle Flexibility
to really adaptto the situation.
(35:11):
I love that,right.
Because average doesn't workanymore, right?
Everything's context sensitive.
You got to You got to have the right context.
[Jeff] So you're a deep thinking guy.[Tony] Yes
And I want to ask youa couple of questions
on some philosophical issues.
I had Mårten Mickos onI don't know if you know Marten
He used to be the CEO at MySQL.
He's the CEO of HackerOne, similar kind of a deal, actually.
He connects companieswith independent hackers.
(35:33):
But we were talking about learning
and he said, you know,we all want to learn.
We all have to learn.
We have to keep learning.
And it's great to have a fun learning environment
and we all grow together.
But he goes, but,
but when youtouch the stove,
you learn really fast.
And that's when you realize that there's
kind of different levels of learning.
There's learning, learning,and then there's
touch the stove learning.
As a leader,
(35:54):
you need to get peoplein situations sometimes where,
maybe they
they accidentallytouch the stove,
you don't want them to burn themselves.
But at the same time,those are the lessons that really get
that really sink in.
How do you think about helpingpeople learn?
In this context?
Because we all needto keep learning.
The world is changing so quickly.
The tools arequickly changing.
(36:15):
But it’s this kind of interestingparadox where there's learning
and then there's, you know,touching the stove, learning.
Yeah. Great question.
So how I do this is a
essentially by empowering them
and giving them room
so that they canmake small mistakes
that are not deadly mistakesor can be reversible.
(36:37):
And,
And, and give them the permission to do so
by being non-reactiveto their mistakes.
Right.
And, and the second pieceis to model the way
is to do that myself
and share the learningfrom my mistakes.
I want to make making mistakes.
Something
(36:59):
Actually allowed or possible.
And part of that journey to learn because,
you can hire an amazing executive
with an amazing track record
but the situation therewas completely different.
So they have tolearn on the job everyday
like learning is a really importantpart of the process.
And you want to create anenvironment where people know that.
(37:20):
They know that
I’m not hiring you because what you know,
I'm hiring you because your ability to continue to learn
That's great
It's like the parenting paradox.
And he's mentioned you've gotyou've got kids, I've got kids.
And I tell young parents,
I think this is the ultimate parenting problem, paradox, because, you know,
you want the kidto learn,
but in helping them learn, sometimes you're hurting their learning.
(37:42):
So I alwaysthink of like
teaching the kid to ridea two wheel bike.
You know, at some point
you have to let go
of the seat and they're probably going to fall over.
But in falling over, maybethey learn to ride the bike better.
At the same time,
you don't want to push them over and scrape their knees.
So this, this constant,
you know, trying to helpversus holding back,
trying to help versus holding back
so that they can learn on their ownand cross those,
(38:06):
those places that they wouldn't have done.
And you can't help them do that.
They have to do that on their own.
I think it's a real challenge.
It's a great example, actually.
This is the way you create safetyfor people to learn is very simple to
very similar to how I taught my son to learn a bike actually, I created
there was a whole lawn.
So it was like all safe to fall first.
(38:28):
And I created I,
I hid all the things that could hurt him as he
and he could fall and be okay.
So this is a very similarto work environment.
You create an environmentwhere failing, is safe.
How can you make feeling safe?
You can get hurt, not
Hurt not injured is always,
Hurt not injured
Hurt not injured,recoverable.
(38:49):
So last thing as we’re gettingtowards the end of our time
impact of AI.
And, you know, you dealwith a lot of
independent contractors and people that are all around the world.
And I can't help but think ofthe people that worked at Fiverr,
as kind of adifferent version
of what you were trying to do around some very specific services.
But, you know,AI changes everything.
(39:10):
How are you using it internally?
But also how do you see AI changing
the demands within this kindof global talent market?
Because some thingsare going to get subsumed,
but other things are going to be new,
different and drivedifferent kinds of demand.
I think AI, what’s going to happen isgoing to shift the expectation
of what employers have
(39:32):
from the value employeeswill be delivering in the future.
So we're goingto expect more value
to be producedby each human being,
by using AI to augmentthe capability of a human being.
It's also goingto be very
fulfilling for people to use AI
because suddenlyyou have this amazing technology
(39:52):
that is supporting you to makemore impactful things.
So when, you know,before we used to do,
run numbers on a piece of paperand then you had Excel.
Imagine how much accountant
like it was Nirvana for accountant right?
It became so much for
for the like the expert on all these
macros and Excel
spreadsheet formulas.
(40:13):
And so we're going to havea similar impact here, we are going to
people is going to be more fulfilled.
And they're going tothey're going to do more things
with the help of technology.
So yeah,so I believe that,
is going to make workmore valuable for businesses
and make people more fulfilledusing these new technology.
Now how we are using it at Oyster, we have, internally,
(40:34):
increasingly people are adopting AI across the board.
Whether you are a customer support representative
or the CEO of the company,we all use a form of AI assistant
We are also developing our own AI technology, so
we were the first to launch ourAI chatbot last year,
where you can chatwith our platform
and get answer, as a customer
(40:55):
about employingsomebody in France or,
about compensation in a specific country.
So, we are
we have the technologythat enables us to
make our customer experiencebetter, but also scale
much more effectivelyour operations.
Because now we instead of havinghumans to answer these questions,
(41:16):
now we have a machinethat does that for us.
Yeah. That's great.
Well we're gettingto the end of our time.
I want to give youthe last word as we
we had into
I don't know,
I don't know if it's even appropriate to bring up with you.
Return to office 5.0
which I brought up with Brian Elliott the other day
here in the States.
It kind of goes with back to school, and Labor Day.
You're obviously well past thatas you look forward,
(41:39):
into the next year as wellas, you know,
you've got a good view on exponential curves and technology.
You were down in the guts,
in the network and telco world.
How do you see the next couple of yearskind of playing out?
What are youexcited about? What
If we talk a year from now,
what are we going to be talking about?
I'm very excited about,
closing the opportunity gapbetween North and South.
(42:02):
We have increased our percentage of team member
in emerging economy from 30% to 40%in the last two years.
And sent hundreds of millions of dollarsin foreign direct investment
into emerging economies.
And we're just getting started.
I'd like to see that numbercontinue to go up. And,
so yeah, I what
(42:23):
what I'm excited aboutis making
employment global by default
so companies can look at the world as their oyster
when they're looking for talent.
Love it.
Well, I'm sure what's going to happen is
you're gonna have these up and comings
to start bumpingoff incumbents.
And I think ultimately it'sgoing to be the financial markets
to start to say, hey, you know,what do you doing?
You got to, you got to adjust with the new time.
(42:43):
Well, Tony it’s great to, great to catch up.
Love all your work.
Listened to a lot of podcastsgetting ready for this.
And I really appreciatethe mission and
and really breaking down barriers
between opportunities and peopleto fulfill those opportunities.
So win, win all the way around.
Thank you for having me Jeff.
All right.
He's Tony, I'm Jeffyou're watching work 20XX.
(43:05):
Thanks for watching.We'll see you next time.
Thanks for listeningon the podcast.
Take care.
That was great.
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you again.
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