Tackling Global Inequality With Remote Work With Tony Jamous

Chris Ronzio (02:03):

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Organized Chaos. I'm your host, Chris Ronzio. And today, we have with us, Tony Jamous, Tony is the CEO and co-founder of a really cool company called Oyster. And he's going to tell us more about that today. Tony, welcome to the podcast.

Tony Jamous (02:19):

Hi Chris. Hi everyone. Thank you for having me here.

Chris Ronzio (02:22):

Thanks for coming. So you're tuning in today from the beautiful island of Cyprus. Is that right?

Tony Jamous (02:28):

That's exactly right. I moved here a year ago, which is the benefit of working from anywhere, right? So I can build a company being where I want to be.

Chris Ronzio (02:40):

Yeah. And I'm sure a lot of us have that story. I'm actually up in the mountains right now, about two hours from our headquarters. So not quite as far from the office, but it's nice. It's flexible that you can sort of work from anywhere these days. And I know that's a big part of what your company does. So we're going to get into all of that, but I want to start with kind of the root of the problem. From what I've read, a lot of what inspired you to start Oyster was trying to tackle this global inequality in the workforce. And I think something people don't think about often is if you're forcing everyone to go to one location, the people around the world don't have the same opportunity to get employment at that company. So can you talk a little bit about that problem and when you noticed it?

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Global Inequality For Job Opportunities

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Tony Jamous (03:23):

Yeah. I noticed this problem when I was the CEO and founder of a previous technology company called, Nexmo. That was an API business that grew rapidly, went public. And has in seven years, by emerging with another company on the Nasdaq. But what we did in that business, we had to hire people in 45 countries. And I was able to witness there the power of distributed work. Not only you can access a global talent pool and build a very diverse workforce. But you can also be the best employer for certain employees in certain countries. We would be the best employer for Diego in Argentina, and Mary in Athens, Mohammed in Morocco.

Tony Jamous (04:08):

So, when I left this company, when I exited that business, it was really important for me that I build a business that is mission driven. But is also, I wanted to build a distributed company because of founding these superpowers of distributed teams. But I wasn't looking forward to the challenge we faced there. We had set up entities, hire lawyer, accountant, and payroll provider. We spend millions of dollars building our own internal employment infrastructure and we failed to deliver a great employee experience.

Tony Jamous (04:41):

So when I wanted to start a new business, I wanted to be distributed. I didn't find solutions for that. And I realized that if you use software to reduce the barrier of global employment, essentially you take this 180 countries. Every country is different and you use software to reduce that complexity and reduce the barrier to global employment. You can not only build a new category and need it, but also, you can change people's life. And just to give you some data point, according to BCG, there are over 90 million jobs going unfulfilled in the west, mostly knowledge work. And at the same time, you have 1.5 billion knowledge workers coming into the workforce the next 10 years, mostly in emerging economies. So if you remove the barriers for companies that tap into the global talent pool, and also for people around the world to have the world as our oyster when they're looking for a job, why introduce things like brain drain and wealth inequality, you can improve communities in these countries.

Chris Ronzio (05:48):

I love that you dropped that world is our oyster comment, which gets right to where the name came from, Oyster. So can you tell us just directly, how does Oyster solve this problem? What does Oyster do for companies?

Tony Jamous (05:59):

Yeah. So Oyster, we provide a global employment platform. Essentially, it is a combination of an employment infrastructure in 180 countries. So we are the employer of record in all these countries. We have entities, physical entities. And then on top of that, we have a knowledge layer with essentially all the employment laws, labors, payroll regulation, HR best practices. And then on top of that, there's a software layer that enable you as an employer with a few clicks to employ Mary in Athens in less than six hours, and extend to her a fair and a safe and delightful employment experience, which used to take months. And you have to hire lawyers, accountant, benefit providers, peer providers country by country, is now essentially a few hours of work. You move fixed cost and you turn it into a valuable cost.

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The Future Of A Globally Connected Workforce

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Chris Ronzio (06:59):

Yeah, it's such an important service. And I love that the idea for this business came out of the struggles of your last business. And even though that company was very successful, the problem you dealt with in setting up this infrastructure that took millions of dollars to set up was the nucleus the idea for the new business. And I hear so many entrepreneurs come on and say the same kind of story. And so for anyone that's listening, if you've got a business that you're running right now, it's likely that the problems that you're dealing with every day could become your next business. So pay attention to those problems. I'm curious, Tony, the future of this global workforce with one and a half billion people coming into the market, do you think 10 years from now, it's just going to be so normal that everyone has employees across many countries, or how do you see it changing?

Tony Jamous (07:49):

I don't see any version of the future that doesn't include that. Because the trends are so big, you have Brian Caplan who is the economist from George Mason University. He argued in his book Open Borders that if you remove the concept of borders from tenant mobility, you can triple the world GDP. So when you have such a huge potential in creating opportunity for millions of people around the world, that's going to happen. And obviously, short term financial crisis will derail this mega trends that are shaping the world. You know why today, everybody has internet increasingly and increasingly high speed, high quality internet. Everybody can learn online, can get into the best universities through online classes. It's gone the days where the best software developer in Nigeria go works for a local bank and stay there for 20 years and lose their potential of growth.

Tony Jamous (09:05):

Now, these engineers, 50% of employees under management on the Oyster platform are R&D. So we're witnessing the creation of this independent nation of global remote employees that are not tied to any country. And they can dictate a much higher salary than if they work for local companies. And they are also growing with the opportunity because when they work for companies in the west that are in short of talent, these companies are investing in their people. They're investing and growing their [inaudible 00:09:44] capital. But not domestic local companies in emerging economies yet, because the talent is so abundant in these countries.

Chris Ronzio (09:54):

So everyone listening pay attention to this trend, because this is something I've seen over the last decade, couple decades of people that are pioneering, trying to figure this out on their own. I sit on the board actually of a company that has employees in 11 different countries. And they started eight years ago and had to set up a lot of this infrastructure on their own. Today, it's so much easier when you use a company like Oyster to be able to connect and employ those people and tap into that global workforce. So if you're not looking around the world for your talent, you should be. I think, is a message I want people to hear from this podcast. So Tony, I know that your story you've shared in the past had a piece of it. You grew up in Lebanon, right, during the civil war. And I'm curious how, how much of that experience influenced what you're doing today? How has that stuck with you?

Tony Jamous (10:47):

Yeah, I think it's really hard to assess as a child. I was from age zero to age 10 in a civil war, it's really hard to assess how this impacted me today. But clearly, I mean, when you have children that go through this type of experience, they develop essentially a form of PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, that makes them hypervigilant. And unfortunately being hypervigilant, or fortunately, I don't know how we look at it is great skills of being a CEO, right? An entrepreneur, because then your, your mind is always at the lookout of potential risks and entrepreneurship is not only about taking risks. It's about also taking calculated risks and it's about mitigating risks. So your mind becomes very alert to these potential risk in your business. Now the downside of that is that you have to really take care of yourself, right? You have to find the balance in your life, because if you're always hypervigilant, although essentially you put somebody with PTSD in a CEO job, it can really turn badly if you don't have really good discipline in terms of work life balance and ability to monitor your thoughts and not be reactive to your thoughts. Actually, I burned out in my last job as a CEO and I'm committed not to burn out this time around.

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Beating Burnout

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Chris Ronzio (12:21):

Do you have any recommendations on what you're doing to not burn out or people that are feeling that same kind of stress and being overworked, what should they do to get on top of that?

Tony Jamous (12:33):

So, number one is really reduce your activity to the events around you. And that's happened through a number of meditation techniques. You essentially want to observe your thought process and observe yourself, increase your self awareness, and increasingly be less reactive to the events that are happening around you. And secondly is also, you want to protect yourself from your work in a way that you want to create boundaries, want to create clear boundaries. So for instance, in my case, at Oyster, we don't have meetings on Friday. We don't have internal meetings on Friday. So we call it Focused Friday. And what we do is we use that opportunity to clear up our inboxes, read what we have to read, all the training we have to go through and then make sure that we go into the weekend without the need to work so that we have this gap in the weekend where we don't work.

Tony Jamous (13:36):

Another example is adjusting the schedule of my life that works for me. So for instance, I don't work in the morning. I'm in Cyprus. Most of my team is in Europe or in the US. So I don't work in the morning. In the morning. I spend time with my children. I spend time for myself and I work in the afternoon and evening. And I introduce frequent breaks. And I have one hour break in the middle of afternoon when I spend time with my children when they come back from school. So this is how I maintain some sort of balance, but actually, it's not... It's always changing, right? So there is phases where I can get off balance. In Q1, we were in fundraising and it was a highly intense fundraising because of what's happening right now in the market. So it's really pushed my balance. So now I'm in the process of getting back to that balance.

Chris Ronzio (14:33):

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes for entrepreneurs, you've got to think about balance through a more macro lens, right? Sometimes balance is seasonal through the year that there's busy parts of the year and then there's lighter parts of the year. That's part of me spending this the summer up here in the mountains is because my kids are off school and I want the flexibility to have more time with them. So I love that you do the Focus Fridays. I think that's a great takeaway and easy thing that everybody could implement. So thank you for that. And you also mentioned being less reactive and trying to be less reactive. Now, one of the biggest things of course, that's happened to all of us in the last few years was COVID-19 and you started Oyster just before COVID-19 hit the world. So I'm curious how you were reactive to that or how did you navigate that and what impact did it have on the business?

Tony Jamous (15:25):

Yeah, we started the business in January 2020, and we raised money in February when the money hit the bank account, we all went into lockdown and we realized that what we thought is going to take us millions of dollars to evangelize the world, convince the world that distributed work is better for business, better for people and better for the planet has happened as remote work becomes a norm. And so we shifted our attention to really acceleration of the infrastructure, built up the acceleration of our product roadmap, and scaling the organization. And in less than two years, we've built a 650 people organization distributed in 70 countries that is as diverse as planet earth. So we have 60% women in the company, including gender equality on the leadership team. And we are receiving over 13,000 job applicant a month. These are people who wants to work for Oyster and we're very, very proud of essentially building an employer brand that people want to associate with, people want to work for companies that give them the flexibility and the freedom of where they want to work, but also empower them and enable them to be successful no matter what they are.

Chris Ronzio (16:52):

That's incredible. I love as diverse as planet earth. I've heard people talk about wanting to be as diverse as their customer base or as diverse as their local geography. And I think being as diverse as the planet is something that someday, hopefully we can all aspire to. So kudos to you on building with such intentionality from the beginning.

Tony Jamous (17:12):

Yeah. Well, and diversity, when it comes to human diversity, we can't compete with natural world diversity that's for sure.

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Stigma Around Hiring From Developing Countries

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Chris Ronzio (17:22):

Yeah. So I know there's a lot of stigmas about hiring internationally, and I saw one of your LinkedIn posts about this, where you talked about people, how they cite regional cultural challenges or language challenges or ethics or productivity. And so what do you say to that? How do you refute that those comments?

Tony Jamous (17:44):

Well, we all have biases. That's number one, it's part of human nature. And secondly, we all are afraid of the unknown. So we haven't done it yet. We are proving with my previous company, but also Oyster that we can build an amazing organization by building a distributed workforce around the world. So when it comes to culture, company culture becomes more important. If you have a strong company culture, it becomes more important than local cultural differences. So that's number one, you have to really invest in a strong company culture. And when it comes to language, increasingly as the world move into remote work, a lot of the work happens asynchronously. So essentially a written language becomes more important than spoken language for the majority of the employees in the organization. And so that's kind of how you overcome the language changes treated by investing in tools to enable your employees to be successful no matter where they are and move to increasingly asynchronous way of working that enable people to work across time zones effectively and have access to the data that they want to have access to be effective.

Tony Jamous (19:03):

And when it comes to the ethical aspect of things, things like also security and safety. So from an ethical standpoint, your company culture is more important than the local culture, right? So you have to really accept that you can find criminals in every country, right? I mean, they exist in every country. And so at various degrees obviously, but they exist in every country. And really it's the company culture that you build around trust and transparency that will enable you to address that issue. And when it comes to security, I mean, today there's so many tools. I mean, the security stacks of Fremont workers have matured rapidly in the last five years. So there's increasingly less security around that.

Chris Ronzio (19:57):

So Oyster runs as remote or more remote than anyone. So I'm curious, what tools or things have you invested in innovation-wise, best practice wise to really enable the asynch?

Tony Jamous (20:11):

Yeah, that's a good question. So we call them the tools and the rules, and we even gave them a brand recently, which is Follow the Sun. So we have our own way, we've developed our own way of working together across time zones that makes everybody successful and we call it, Follow the Sun. And it's actually a number of tools and then rules and how you use them. So tools would be, let's say we use Slack for asynchronous messaging communication. We use Zoom for synchronous video. We Use zoom for asynchronous video, and then we use Notion for all sorts of truths in terms of documentation. Our internal documentation is taken as seriously as our external documentation to our customers and our employee under management. So in every type of meeting, we have to become prepared with some asynchronous material that need to be consumed ahead of time. And these are examples of the tools and the rules we use here.

Tony Jamous (21:20):

And we also train a lot our teams. So we have the Oyster Academy that is a remote work training that takes any knowledge worker and make them a better remote worker leveraging the way we do things at Oyster and it's deployed internally, but it's also a free course. Everybody can go and improve their remote work skills. And we model the way as well. So essentially the leaders, the higher you are in the organization, the more you're expected to be a better remote worker, right? So I'm supposed to be the best remote worker of this company in order for us to model the way and for it to work. And it's really exciting. It's really exciting to be able to change. I mean, it's harder for people of my age to change. But it's really exciting to actually be seeing this change as completely aligned with the success of my company. And kind of if you overcome this fear of change, essentially, and you have to do it.

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Determining Salary For Global Employees

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Chris Ronzio (22:20):

I've never heard that as a CEO responsibility to be the best remote worker. And so, it really gets out of that if that is your culture, and that is the expectation of everyone, you have to model that behavior. And so the tools and the rules are a cool way to communicate that. One thing I worry or think about with employing people internationally is how do we handle compensation. In the US when we're hiring employees and trying to create fair pay scales to pay people for salaries, how do we think about that in international markets?

Tony Jamous (22:56):

It's a big challenge for many organization. The major challenge is really the accuracy and the availability of data, to be able to know what fair compensation look like for a specific law for a specific seniority in a specific country. And there's also various cost of living consideration. And so there's challenges around that. The other challenges also, you have to have a mature compensation model and philosophy in your company in terms of banding levels, different bands that you want to allocate to your team and how they progress across these bands and have really clear rules around what is the compensation for specific role and specific geography. And that's what we do at Oyster. We have a composition philosophy that is based on data that we use to predict and be very transparent about how a person in a given geography at a given role and experience will get paid. And so that's from a [inaudible 00:24:06] standpoint, but also from an equity standpoint, we adopt a geo agnostic equity. So the amount of equity you have is independent from the location you're in, because we believe that there is no reason why the upside should be geo localized, unlike the cost of living consideration which is very specific to a given country.

Chris Ronzio (24:34):

Interesting. So you geo localize the salaries, but don't geo localize the equity component because they're essentially doing the same work as someone else, and why not have the same upside?

Tony Jamous (24:46):

That's correct. That's correct from an equity standpoint. From a monetary composition standpoint, unfortunately, the world is not completely equal from that standpoint and the reality of businesses make it that you cannot run a successful business today. I mean, there's exceptions, if you're a small organization or if you're only hiring engineers that are already very expensive, pretty much everywhere, then you can permit yourself to do that. But it conflicts of reality of growing a successful business today. However, I do believe what's going to happen and part of our job is to facilitate that is to make sure that the supply of labor from a lot of the outside tier one cities, essentially you can think about anywhere outside these tier one cities this disparity will drop because you're going to have essentially an equilibrium that's going to happen in the market.

Tony Jamous (25:51):

The more people can be effective working from anywhere. The more you're going to see an equilibrium. And we've seen that happening in engineering, right? So engineers today, there is this much smaller gap. Think about it as a gini coefficient. Gini coefficient is actually, it's an economical indicator that measure disparity between two variables. So think about it, the wages of executives or employees in developed country would be much higher for the same job than in a developing country. That curve has narrowed down when it comes to engineering that gini coefficient has narrowed down in the last few years because the talent shortage. So companies in the rich world had to go and find talent in emerging economies. So we see that also to continue to happen in other functions as well. So over time you have this country, let's say, independent country called global employers or global employees that can be hired by any country. And eventually that would drive down these disparities in the world.

Chris Ronzio (27:02):

Yeah, we've seen this domestically. We used to, prior to COVID hire mostly where we're located in Arizona. And after COVID, people are hiring all over the US at least. And so we've seen the local salaries become inflated because there's a lot of people that are getting offers from companies in other markets. And so I imagine it's even more pronounced. I used to have people in Czech Republic that I worked with, and now we have people in Ukraine. And again, as you mentioned, seeing the inflation as there's more demand for talent in those international markets. And so I think we'll continue to see it level out a little bit. The disparity will close. But I think it will definitely be more pronounced internationally than it has even been domestically. So it's something to follow closely.

Tony Jamous (27:55):

Yeah.

Chris Ronzio (27:57):

So being, again, a remote company have there been any pitfalls? Have you run into any problems? I'm curious, any issues that you've had to correct over the last few years.

Tony Jamous (28:11):

Many. Many issues. What we do is very complex. I mean, if you think about it, we are combining employment compliance knowledge with payroll and payment and effects in 108 countries with benefits across all these countries. So essentially solving that with software is complex and we cannot solve it ourself with software right away. We cannot just come and just build software. And before we start to learn, we had to kind of learn about the differences between all these countries and then build software after we gathered all this knowledge and databases about different flavors of employment around world. And there's always issues. There's always issues that pops up. Think about things like a different payroll regulation in every country. Some countries you have to pay them 13 months or 14 months other countries you have to pay weekly. So essentially there's a number of challenges that happens as you start automating and softwarizing the employment value chain across all these countries.

Tony Jamous (29:31):

So yeah, that's really the major challenge, the monster challenge that we tackling with software today. So the other challenge that I faced as a CEO is essentially, how do you balance growth with customer satisfaction and your team wellbeing and engagement as you are hyper growing. So we've grown 20X last year and we've grown 50 people to 600 people. And when you do that in such a short period of time, while you have to really keep balancing these three variables. Think about it as a golden triangle of growth. And every quarter you want to invest in expanding the surface area of that triangle. So you cannot grow too fast if you haven't invested in your people. You cannot grow too fast if you haven't invested in your customer satisfaction. And the same, you cannot invest too much and hire too much people ahead of your growth. So you have to really keep balancing that equation all the time. And essentially you have to put efficiency at the center. So you have to really grow the three variables in an efficient way. And many companies, especially when capital was readily available for technology company, that efficiency variable was not always in the equation.

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Why Founders Have A Hard Time Adopting Remote Work

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Chris Ronzio (30:59):

I'm smiling because it's like you were just in the meeting that I was in before we jumped on this call. Because we were talking about the balance of growth and employee wellness. And so I think that's in the forefront of a lot of our minds, especially companies that are growing quickly or have the opportunity to grow quickly, because you don't want to burn your people out, right? You don't want to grow it at all costs. And so I think how you mentioned about just expanding the surface area is a really great way to think about it. I've got a couple more questions here that we'll touch on before we wrap up. So a lot of CEOs are demanding people come back into the office and they're resisting the idea of distributed work. I'm curious, what do you think is so hard for them to wrap their head around or why are some companies just not getting this?

Tony Jamous (31:49):

Leaders have a challenge with this because we used to confuse performance with presence. We used to go to the office and see people in the office and say, "Yes, people are working then I can actually relax." And which, by the way, we inherited that from the industrial revolution. And from being in a factory when you go in business schools. If you went to business schools then you learn the management techniques that we learn today in business schools are being inherited from the industrial era and haven't been much updated. So you have that fear that if people are not present in their seat, then they're not productive.

Tony Jamous (32:36):

And when you start losing that signal, that they're not in their seat. So what happens with the leader? They start mistrust. They start mistrusting the person, their employees. And their employees feel that. And then it becomes a cycle. So we have more mistrust and less engagement, more mistrust and less engagement. You have this vicious cycle of mistrust and this engagement that happens. So that's the problem that many leaders are faced with today. So what you need, you need to really change your chip. You need to look at the data that they need to show you that first people, vast majority of people, they want flexible work. They want that freedom to work from anywhere. And you know what the top tenant in the world know that they can find a job from anywhere. So they're going to gravitate towards company that makes them successful no matter what they are. Which tells you that the best companies of tomorrow are going to be distributed companies that make these people successful. And so that's why there's no going back to the office the same way we used to go a few years ago.

Chris Ronzio (33:49):

So what about on the employee side? If there is this cycle of mistrust and poor engagement, how do employers look for a person? Look for an individual that will be successful in a remote environment? Are there things that they should look for on people that are great [inaudible 00:34:08] and collaborators, or can operate across time zones?

Tony Jamous (34:12):

The barrier to qualify to work remotely are very low. We talked earlier about written language because your work is mostly a synchronous, right, depending on your level. So anybody, any knowledge worker today can perform their job remotely. But that requires that the company can make them successful. That the way the company is run and built, and the way people work together is a way that makes people successful no matter where they are. So not because you come to the office that you get promoted. Not because you come to the office that you get more productive. So how can you create more equality regardless of the location and more inclusiveness of location. So yeah, so that's what really, it's, everybody can qualify for being a remote worker.

Chris Ronzio (35:10):

So many remote workers out there, as you heard at the beginning, 1.5 billion workers coming to the workforce in emerging markets and Tony's company, thankfully, is providing a great solution for you to be able to tap into that workforce. So, like Tony said, don't confuse performance with presence. I love that. I think people should be embracing remote work. And Tony, thank you for giving so many great tips on how you've built this with Oyster and how you've enabled so many other businesses. Be sure to look up Tony, look up Oyster. They put out great content. Check out their website. Tony, thank you so much for being here.