Oyster: From Wizard of Oz MVP to 8-Figure Global HR SaaS – with Tony Jamous [422]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Tony, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Tony: Thank you for having me. My pleasure.

[00:00:04] Omer: Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[00:00:08] Tony: One of my favorite quotes is culture eat strategy for breakfast. Like you have to have a solid, smart strategy in the business, but you have to also remember that culture trump strategy.

[00:00:19] Omer: I love that, and I think for many people that's gonna make a lot more sense after we talk about your story. And the way that you have built this business. So for people who don't know about Oyster, what does the product do? Who's it for, and what's the main problem that you're helping to solve?

[00:00:34] Tony: Oyster is a global employment platform. We enable any company, anywhere to employ people in any country without the need of setting up entities, hiring expensive lawyers, finding benefit providers and payroll providers. Essentially, we are making global hiring as easy as local hiring, turning planet Earth into one job market. And we do that because we are a mission-driven company.

[00:00:59] First and foremost, we are a mission to reverse brain re and reduce inequality by democratizing access to global job opportunities.

[00:01:09] Omer: Love it. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers size of team.

[00:01:16] Tony: Yeah, so we are still a sub hundred million dollar, but we're not very far.

[00:01:21] We are 550 people distributed in 70 countries with no offices. This is how we started the business in January, 2020 as a distributed fully remote business.

[00:01:34] Omer: Great. And customers?

[00:01:36] Tony: We have, over 2000 customers right now in the business.

[00:01:40] Omer: So let's, let's talk a little bit about your background, because I think it's a interesting part of the story and, and where you are today and, and why you've built this business.

[00:01:51] So what, why don't you just tell us about, a little bit about your background. Like where did you grow up? How did you get into the world of, of building startups? This is not your first, you know, company that you've built. Just, just tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:02:06] Tony: I was born in Lebanon and I had to leave my country, my home country in my teenage years.

[00:02:14] I moved to the west, starting with France, where I studied computer science. And then I started my first hypergrowth technology company 14 years ago. It was in the API business, it was called Nexmo. We were building APIs. For building communication applications. I grew a business from zero to a hundred million of revenue in the first five years.

[00:02:39] I took it public in mid 2016 by doing a reverse merger was Vonage, who was public at that time on the New York Stock Exchange which led to their acquisition by Ericsson for $6.5 billion. And and then in I took some time off after that. That phase in my life. And I realized that I want to build something more purposeful, more impactful.

[00:03:02] And I knew that whatever I would do, it would be a fully distributed company. Why? Because my previous business, NMO was already in 45 countries because we had to, we had to be closer to the customer. We build all these partnerships on the ground, and I was able to witness the power of distributed hiring.

[00:03:22] Not only you have access to an amazing talent pool that is so vast, but you can also change people's life in many countries, specifically emerging economies. So I wanted to start a new business. It was critical for me that that business would be fully distributed. So that was mid 2019. I was looking for a solution for that.

[00:03:42] I couldn't find solutions but I found this industry called employer of record that was a $30 billion industry, fully manual, no use of software. So I knew that by using software. To essentially drop the barrier to entry for companies to employ talent. Anywhere we can create a new category and build a business that can be meaningful to this world.

[00:04:05] Omer: So your your, your previous company you took that, you just said, you know, from zero to a hundred million in about five years, you founded Oyster, I think January, 2020. And. We haven't hit five years yet, but you are getting close to a hundred million in ARR. Again, what is it about you that, you know, like what's your secret sauce?

[00:04:32] How, you know, most people would, wouldn't be able to do this in a lifetime. You've kind of, you know, you do, you, you're doing this for the second time, like. Why do you think you're able to do that? What, what, what is it about your background, the way you build businesses? Like what, what is it that helps you you know, achieve this time type of success?

[00:04:52] Tony: I found there's three parameters that I've got right in my two businesses. The first one is timing, so you have to time it well. In, in our case at Oyster, we started in January, 2020. We knew that remote work will be big, but then. We never thought it was going to be that big, that quickly. So timing was definitely a factor.

[00:05:13] And secondly is a, a large market, you have to be operating on a vast hundreds of billion dollar of market in terms of size because that enables you to have the flexibility. You can make mistakes, you can iterate, you can, you can, you can actually, even if you have a very small market share, you still can build pretty sizable business.

[00:05:33] And thirdly is hire the best team. So in, in the case of oyster, I've partnered with an executive search firm early on, I. That helped me design my org and, and find the top 10 people. The first 10 people that I've worked with that really are, are scalable leaders because you I've seen that many times businesses lose cycles in reshaping their org structures because they haven't 3D envisioned they're gonna be a big business.

[00:06:03] Right? So that's, that helped me to to go faster in, in both cases.

[00:06:08] Omer: I often hear about founders who say, you know, the, the kind of person I need from zero to one is probably a very different type of person to who's gonna help me scale this business. But it sounds like you kind of skipped that and said, I'm gonna find the people who are gonna help me scale this business and, and hire them as quickly as I can.

[00:06:28] Tony: There are, there are, there are people that are on this intersection of this Venn diagram. They, they, they know how to take businesses from zero to one, but they also know how to take them from one to 10. And, and and actually one of the great thing about our business is that because we are a mission-driven business, I.

[00:06:45] We will be able, we were able to attract these pearls. These are top talent people that have that experience in scaling from zero, but they've also managed and led teams. That was critical factor in my hiring process in the early days.

[00:07:01] Omer: Now you, you've mentioned, you know, oyster is a mission driven business a couple of times.

[00:07:04] And, and you, you said earlier that you had to leave Lebanon when you were a teen. Can, can you just explain a little bit about that? Like why did you have to leave and why? Was that experience so important and relevant to you when it comes to building this, this particular business and, and being mission driven?

[00:07:22] It's not just a buzzword for you, right? You, it's, it's actually based on your own personal life and experience. I.

[00:07:29] Tony: Like many people in emerging economies, I had to flee for economical reasons. There were no opportunities. Many of these emerging economies actually are failed states. They don't have enough job opportunities for, for their people and their best talent leaves, and that's why they stay emerging.

[00:07:45] Economies, they. They emerging economies stay emerging because they're leading their best people to the west. That's the reality today. So and, and for me personally, that process was, was very difficult to really bet all my life on economical success in that days. I had to go and, and work really hard to succeed.

[00:08:06] And obviously I'm very grateful for, for having had that experience. But it was it was pretty traumatizing. To, to be on my own in my teen years in a new country, knowing nobody and have to build everything from scratch, right? So so when, actually when I left my first business, I took some time off and I was I was ready to start another business at Oyster.

[00:08:30] I had the idea, I had the business plan, I had the team ready to go. I have investor lined up, and it's only after I was doing this. Retreat. I was really focusing on what really drives me as a human being as this is when I flipped the idea overnight and actually my, my therapist told me, don't take any important decisions for the next 10 days, and the next day I went and incorporated oyster because I knew.

[00:08:58] This is where my heart is. I knew my brain has validated the opportunity. It's a big market. It's going to happen. It needs software. But then this is where my heart said, let's do this. And my heart took that decision and I believe that I. Like now I believe in that the universe is helping me succeed because actually I've taken a step towards giving something to the world, and now I'm receiving success from the universe.

[00:09:27] Omer: I love that. I love that. It reminds me of a, a quote I read somewhere, which said, follow your heart until your brain has a reason to follow it. And it kind of sounds like what you ended up doing there. All right. So you, you, you incorporate the business you, you've seen, you sort of, you sense the opportunity.

[00:09:48] What did you do beyond incorporating, like how did you I. How did you validate this idea? How did you figure out specifically like, what is the problem that we're gonna go out and solve? First of all, 'cause you can't build the, the product that you have today, that takes time. So you've gotta get out there with something.

[00:10:07] So how, how did you, how did you start with just the, the validation and making sure that the demand was there?

[00:10:13] Tony: I spoke to a lot of potential customers in the beginning. I interviewed customers about who they're using today. What does their experience look like with their legacy non-software vendors?

[00:10:25] And I spoke to a lot of compliance people, like lawyers. How do you do this? I interviewed team members about their experience working with these legacy vendors. And so I gathered all the pain points and, and this is where my experience as a software entrepreneur helped because I could take all these data and envision a software platform that can dramatically reduce the barrier to entry for, for companies to employ people around the world.

[00:10:52] And that, that helped me to to, to build kind of the first vision of the Oyster platform in late 2019.

[00:11:01] Omer: And then did you were you self-funding this business? Did you raise a seed round? How did, how did that, that sort of side of the business get started?

[00:11:08] Tony: Yeah, so to me it was important that I'm not the only one betting on this.

[00:11:14] I wanted to have smart investors to see what I'm seeing, to validate what I'm validating. And so very early on, I raised a pre-seed round with a, with a seed, with a seed fund in London. It took me, it took me a month to really gather that together. And once I received this institutional money, I said, okay, I'm going in because I'm making the biggest investment, which is my time here, and I wanna make sure that all these smart people, these investors coming in.

[00:11:45] And actually helping me building that. And that's what happened. Actually. I spoke to a lot of investor at that time just getting advice, and I received, actually, they helped me refine my plans and my strategy. They helped me see things that I could not see before. So every, so I really recommend entrepreneurs to talk to as many people as possible and get feedback very early on because one person cannot see everything.

[00:12:10] Omer: What would you say to somebody? I, I think a lot of people now understand that it's not a good idea to, to protect your idea and not talk to people about it because somebody might steal it and stuff like that. And, and there's a lot of value in, in having these conversations. And the reality is. No one's gonna hear about your idea and say, oh, great, I'm gonna go and invest the next 10, 15 years of my life going and building this business.

[00:12:35] Right? It's not like an overnight thing. But what, what would be your response to somebody who's kind of a little nervous about talking about their idea?

[00:12:43] Well, the, the business is the sum of your idea and yourself. So everybody is easy to have ideas. What's very unique is who you are and what you bring to this idea.

[00:12:55] Your personal energy, your personal drive, your personal history, that nobody can copy that, and that's what drives success.

[00:13:02] Omer: Yeah, I love that. Okay, great. So you've got the idea. You've, you've had a lot of conversations. You bring on investors, they're helping you refine the idea, get more clarity and so on.

[00:13:15] How, how did you go about building the product and then like, I. You know, putting a team together, I guess. And then also like, how did you, you know, this is a, you, you obviously have a big vision for what you want to do here, right? You talked, we, we talked about the mission and everything else, but the reality is you, you can't build everything from day one.

[00:13:36] So how did you decide where you were gonna focus and specifically which problems you were gonna solve first?

[00:13:41] Tony: We got lucky that we started this business in January, 2020, and this. Accelerated. The move to remote work with the pandemic was a launchpad for our business in that year because it changed hiring managers mentality.

[00:13:59] They knew that they don't have any more, they don't need any more to hire people within 20 mile radio from their office. They can hire people anywhere in the world. So but what, but the, the challenge we faced was that we had nothing. We had a piece of paper and we had $4 million in the bank. And so what we've done very quickly is to create a, a front end for the customers that they experience software experience.

[00:14:25] But behind the scene it was people manual, manually executing tasks. That was what was a challenge at that time. It was actually a blessing in disguise for us because suddenly our product roadmap was very clear. Our product roadmap was what these customer are doing. What our internal team is doing manually.

[00:14:48] That drove our customer, our, our product roadmap for the next two years at least. So we didn't have to do a lot of experimentation to test the market, like the market was testing us and we were shaped like a sculpture. We were sculpted by the market and by the customer needs and the customer demand. And that was amazing to see how we were able to.

[00:15:11] Turn that insight and data into, into, into product and software. And this is where, going back to the team, the team I hired my first head of product, Emily, she came from Carta, where she used to take compliance, so compliance stuff and turn them into software. Like she knew how to turn that. I hired my first general counsel.

[00:15:34] My first hire was Miranda, a general counsel. She came from TriNet where she exact to turn exactly turned all this employment compliance stuff into software. So having the right people at the right time is crucial to really accelerate.

[00:15:50] Omer: Tell me a little bit more about what you just described there with the product.

[00:15:54] So you have this front end, which is basically like, you know, a clickable prototype, right? That they, they can submit some kind of task and then. The request is going to some human on your team who is doing something. So may, maybe just give an ex an example of, okay, the cu, the customer wanted to do X and this is what somebody on the backend was doing to fulfill that.

[00:16:18] Tony: Example, let's say payroll, you have to pay somebody, right?

[00:16:21] So we showed to the customer an invoice. They have like three people in three different countries. So they have one invoice. They pay us, they expect that automatically things are gonna be paid behind the scene, which is obviously what happens today. But in reality, we had people going and making the payments manually.

[00:16:37] And then we learned that, oh hey, you know, paying in Pakistan is very complicated. So we have to go and build some local connection to a local financial institution to be able to deliver that. So we start learning and improving, and then suddenly now we have this amazing global payment infrastructure that can pay, pay anyone anywhere.

[00:16:55] In, in, in hours. So another example is generating an employment contract, right? So you have a, a short, small application on the web that can generate employment contract, but behind the scene you have a lawyer drafting that contract and sending it manually to a team member to sign. So now we have that completely automated.

[00:17:12] We have a a builder of, of employment contract that enables customer to, to dial up or down certain variable, let's say a probation period. How much vacation time within a compliance framework. We are compliant in 180 countries when it comes to employment laws. We won't let the customer make mistakes.

[00:17:33] So we built this compliance engine that took us. A lot of time. I mean, think about it different employment regulation, different tax laws in every country. This is a, a very complicated software problem to solve that only software. And thanks God, now we have AI can help us and, and, and, and solve this problem.

[00:17:54] And by the way, these are manmade problems. Like these are having different employment labor laws and tax laws all manmade, and there's so much money to be made. And creating abstraction layers for manmade problems. So I did it with Oyster in my previous company, nmo, we did the same. We had all these, we have over a thousand telecom network in the world.

[00:18:17] Each network has a different protocol to connect to each. Each country has its own regulation of what's accepted in terms of communication or not. And we plug one API that can abstract the whole world and boom, we created a new market. So dealing using software. To simplify the unnecessary complexity that this whole generates, there's trillions of dollars to be made in this markets.

[00:18:42] Omer: Yeah. Now, if you had tried to build this product and build the backend to do all of these things you just just described, we might have, may have take taken months, years to build that out. How long were you able, how long did it take to build that kind of, this front end with kind of the human powered back, and how quickly were you able to get to market?

[00:19:01] Tony: So the look, the front end, we the front take, the front end took it like six months. But even we started before that because we had customer knocking on our door, right? We had a website with talk to us. Right. That was how we started. And then I remember the first few employment contracts, I had to sign them myself, and I had to talk to the customer myself and get, get the team member onboarded myself.

[00:19:26] Like we had, like everything was done manually in the beginning. And even today, after nearly four years into, into this business, I mean three and a half years of operation we still have a long tail of manual tasks that are not automated. It we are. But we have a roadmap. We know we can automate.

[00:19:44] 90, 95% of, of the whole employment experience across 180 countries,

[00:19:51] Omer: right? So some, some people might take a product strategy where they'll say, we can't do some of these things, but it's on our roadmap, and then we'll be able to provide that for you. And the approach you took was. Well, the software can't do that right now, but we can, and we'll start doing it right away and then we'll replace that human element with software as quickly as we can, as we work through our roadmap.

[00:20:15] Tony: Absolutely.

[00:20:16] Omer: Smart. Okay, great. So you, I mean. The, the pandemic, obviously, you know, not a great time, but also as you said, a blessing in disguise because suddenly there is a lot of demand. You're not having to put as much effort as maybe you would've had to, to convince. HR and hiring managers and all these people to start thinking about the workforce differently.

[00:20:46] It's sort of naturally starting to happen. They're being forced into this situation. So there's a lot of demand there. How are people finding you guys, because you and I were talking about this earlier and you said, Hey, the first two or three years, everything was inbound. We only started doing outbound really a couple of years, 18 months ago.

[00:21:05] So, you know, typically getting any kind of outbound working takes a long time. One, why, why did you decide that was the way? That, that was gonna be your sort of go-to market motion. And, and how did you, how did you get that going?

[00:21:22] Tony: The market decided for us, because again, the timing was was very unique context.

[00:21:26] We were in, suddenly we had to appear, we had to be visible and customer come to us. So the key was how to become very quickly, very visible with very limited resources. So social media was a key component of this. Storytelling. So we had to tell the story of the future of work. We were living in real time and we were creating with our, our, the help of our customers and their team members around the world.

[00:21:54] So so that, that storytelling enabled us to land a very strong brand very quickly in the market because people were ready to listen to what we have to say. People are looking for answers, but how do you do this? How do you build distributed teams? How do you do remote work successfully across countries?

[00:22:12] How do you lead with empathy in a, in a time where burnout is at all time high and, and disengagement is at all time high? So we, we provided some answer to, to that, and we became we became visible, more visible than we expected. Our brand today is the. Largest brand and share of voice within the HR community, our target buyers.

[00:22:36] So we're not trying to target everybody. We're very targeted in, in our brand reach. And that's how we built the business in the, in the first few years, the first two, two and a half years as we discussed, there was no it was only inbound as the main acquisition channel.

[00:22:51] Omer: You, you talked about some of these, these questions you were answering and, and helping them, you know, your, your ICP sort of navigate through some of these challenges.

[00:23:00] H how were, how were you figuring out what their struggles were? I mean, you know, some people will say, Hey, I'm not gonna talk to customers. I'm gonna go out and do keyword research and see what people are searching for on Google, and I'm gonna answer these types of things. You talked a lot about going out and talking to customers earlier, but how were you, how are you going about and really trying to, you know, get below the surface and really understand what these, these.

[00:23:27] Customers were struggling with?

[00:23:29] Tony: Look, in the, in the early days before starting the business I, I developed really, an interview process and data, data-driven interview process, that enabled me to, when I hired my first head of product to give it to them. Say, okay, this is the problem we wanna solve.

[00:23:43] But eventually when we started having customers, we, we had data obviously from supporting them and all the issues they're, they're facing. With us. But but, but very, very unique in this business I implemented in a previous business as well, is a framework I call the buyer purchasing criteria framework, which is at the moment of the purchase, you ask the customer what are their buying purchasing criteria before they buy.

[00:24:11] And then you, you, you record that and we have. We have recorded thousands of data points about that, and that's data was driving our strategy. Our strategy is a data-driven strategy. We look at what customers are telling us, why they're making decisions, how, how their decision making process to buy our stuff is changing.

[00:24:31] And that feeds into our, our, our corporate strategy and our product development strategy.

[00:24:37] Omer: You said something interesting to me before we, we started recording, you said, Hey, business. Is really, well, why don't you say it? You sound, it sounds better when you say it about the numbers and the story.

[00:24:49] Tony: Yeah. For me, what I'm learning is that business is is numbers with story told around these numbers.

[00:24:56] That's, if you look at what I do as my job. My job is to tell stories around numbers, whether it's in the early days of a company, I wanna convince that there's a market for the staff to, to even at late stage where I'm talking to public market investors or internally to explain why we need to take the strategy and not the strategy.

[00:25:18] So numbers convince people numbers are non ambiguous. Source of data that we have in our life. So then the skill, at least the skill that I needed to develop that I find helpful in my world, is to tell stories around these numbers and connect the dots. Choose the right numbers that you wanna, that can support a specific story that you wanna tell.

[00:25:45] Omer: Do you, do you have a, a, a framework or a certain way you think about that when you, when you're, when you're trying to tell a story to somebody? And it could be very different, I guess, if you're telling a story to an investor, somebody on your team, a customer, still a story, but it's, it's maybe a very different approach.

[00:26:02] Tony: Like I don't have a specific framework, but I start with the end goal, right? So what is. What I'm trying to achieve, let's say we're let's say I wanna take the company public. I want, okay, I wanna develop a story for public market investors. Okay? So what public investors want to hear, they want to hear that you have a solid business that's, that is growing and that can deliver returns.

[00:26:19] Okay? What are the comp? So I break that down into what are the components of enterprise value creation. Okay. There's three things. Top line growth profitability and competitive positioning. And then boom, take these three things and you break them down even further. What's the growth inbound outbound channels.

[00:26:35] Okay. So, so, and, and then you start developing a story that is coherent around, around these things. And then you, you, you, it builds your trust because suddenly you are in control of that story and you have rehearsed it. A zillion times. So you're, you're like, nobody knows the story better than you and you know, it's a solid story.

[00:26:56] Omer: So you talked about timing and in many ways, January, 2020 was ironically a great time for you to start this business. And there was so much. So much demand that probably, you know, it was hard to, to, to keep up with and, and fulfill, and things moved a lot faster than you had expected. You knew this was gonna happen, but you just didn't know it was gonna happen this quickly.

[00:27:21] Right. And then a couple of years later, it, everything sort of hit the brakes, right? What, what

[00:27:29] Tony: happened then? We had to pivot very fast from growth at all costs to, to efficient growth. Like many technology companies, but in our case, we, we have, we were planning to become a much bigger business than we are today.

[00:27:46] So we have built an organization that enable us to go there. So we had to do two challenging reorganizations in the business, and we had to drive the automation levels much higher. We spoke about the automation rate between manual work and software work, so we had to really focus on, on that. And, then we had to also, like, we did not know how long this is going to last, so we had to develop these fine financial controls into the business quarter after quarter to take the temperature to see do we, do we, do we increase here? Do we reduce here? And so it's like dealing is like leading in, in an uncertain and turbulent times a machine that just been built yesterday.

[00:28:34] It was very challenging process. And I have to say we we learn a lot in that process. We learn the, the, the power of focus. We learn how to focus our strategy on becoming this pure player. Of global employment. We are a hundred percent focused now on this cross-border employment use case.

[00:28:55] And we poured all of our effort, our r and d resources into making global hiring as easy as local hiring. So while we have essentially reduced our vision. We emerged as a stronger player in our category because now we're like the only pure player in our category. Focus on that use case that is the most difficult for the customer.

[00:29:16] That is the most lucrative market we're in, and and it's totally aligned with our mission. Because this is why we're here. We are here to make the world look like one employment market. So the, the, the cross border use case is a, is a key use case for us. We don't wanna compete with local HR tech platforms.

[00:29:35] We wanna compete with this specific use case that enables customers to employ anyone anywhere.

[00:29:42] Omer: What happened in the, when we talked about hitting the brakes, was it that as, as we came outta the pandemic, did you find that demand dropped or it just flatlined or it just wasn't, you know, you were expecting kind of hypergrowth and what, what happened because it was different experiences for different startups at around that time.

[00:30:04] Yeah, so actually we. We were impacted by the layoffs that were happening in the technology sector. And now we were able, so to, to give, give you an example. Carta did their, their analysis last year, 2023 was the first year where the headcount and technology dropped. In history, we went down 4%. We still grew nearly 60% last year, and we were able to achieve that because we we help our customer employ in, in more cost effective countries.

[00:30:39] So suddenly smart CFOs out there, instead of just laying off people, decided to shift their hiring strategy into most more cost effective countries and kept growing their business because it wasn't really. A, a demand crisis. I mean, we had, we had too much demand. We had, we had we had inflation problem.

[00:30:57] So it wasn't really a demand challenge. It was really an interest rate issue. And so smart companies, some of our customer kept hiring, but they kept by, by shifted their hiring into more emerging economies. And we've seen the ratio of employees hired on our platform and emerging markets went from 29% to over 40%.

[00:31:18] In that period of time, we call it this impact yield for, for oyster. And so that's what happened. What happened is is a shift in who they hire, where they hire, and they use this capability, this, this ability to tap into the global tenant pool as a strategic. Asset for them to to keep growing their businesses.

[00:31:40] Omer: You know, one thing I think is really interesting about oyster and the business that you've built is you, you're not just talking about the future of work and helping other companies build a remote global workforce. You're actually walking the talk. The fact that you have over 500 employees across 70 countries, no offices.

[00:32:04] So you, you are in many ways. You, you, you are, you are your own customer. What's, what, what's been, you know, kind of one of, one of the hardest parts of building a, a, a business like that? Because to go from like zero to 550 employees in, gosh, like four years maybe coming up to five years across that many countries, many people you've never met.

[00:32:31] Face to face. What's been the biggest challenge for you as, as the leader of that organization?

[00:32:36] Tony: Well, the first challenge is that you, as the top of the organization, need to be, the best remote worker in the business for it to work, like it has to come top down. So I had to transform myself how I work and, and adopt the latest and greatest about remote work as synchronous communication and collaboration, by the way, which enabled me to move to the island of Cyprus.

[00:32:58] Now I live in the island of Cyprus, so I'm very grateful for that opportunity to be, geography agnostic. I can be the CEO of a unicorn and can live anywhere I want in the world, which is great freedom. I appreciate my freedom. So that's so, so first that's kind of a challenge for me. But secondly, there is a cultural and operational challenges that faces a business like this.

[00:33:18] So there's a, so culturally you have to you have to build a culture that is built on trust. So trust is our, one of our core values because then you're not seeing the person in seats. So how you trust 'em, they're doing their best. And the, the key for that is to default to assuming best intent.

[00:33:38] So that was a process that you can train your mind to do when you get a thought that that person might not be working the way you want them to work. You're essentially. Assuming not a good intent, you have to drop that thought. You have to let go of that thought. And the more you do that, the more you start bringing positive energy into the business.

[00:34:00] High trust, high trusting teams delivers better results and then than not. So that was a forcing function for us to build a culture that is high trusting. And and secondly, as you, there's operational challenges. So operational challenges. Are around, how do you work together effectively across borders and across time zones?

[00:34:21] So we default to asynchronous work, obviously, where the foundation is about. Training people on the way we work, codifying the way we work. We call them the tools and the rules. We use Asana for project management. We use slack for messaging. We use Zoom for, for synchronous communication. This is how we do meetings.

[00:34:41] We, we do meetings in this way. I every meeting I go to at Oyster, usually there's a pre-read I have to read before there's, maybe there's a Loom video I have to watch. So I'm ready and, and, and very effective in doing this meeting so we can reduce the amount of meetings as well, because this is how you scale as a business.

[00:34:58] So there's an operational aspect of how you work together. I. That need to be codified and scaled. And once you do that, once you have a culture that is based on trust and you have a way of working that make people successful, no matter where they are, this is where the magic happens. People start recording.

[00:35:15] High level of engagement, high level of satisfaction. You have people that are happy. Showing up on, on Zoom calls because suddenly you're enabling them to pick up their children from school when they want to do that. While remaining very productive with no compromise. You're enabling them to go to their gym at, at the time that is works for them, enabling 'em to go work in another country closer to their family from time to time if they wish to.

[00:35:39] So, so this has becomes a gift to your employees, this flexible work, but without the compromise because you created a system that enabled people to be successful. And grow no matter what they are. And that is the future of work. It's a future of work that is fully distributed, that is empathy based and touch with the real needs of humans and leverages the data's technologies to create a way of working that makes people successful no matter what they are.

[00:36:07] Omer: I love that. And we are gonna have to wrap up in a minute and we're gonna get onto lightning round. But I have to ask you one question about, just as a follow up on this, is lately we're seeing a lot of companies. Trying to drive people back into the office. Just had this announcement, you know, Amazon and some of these other things that's very different to the, the vision that you just shared.

[00:36:32] From your perspective, what do you think is driving that and, and do you think it's, it's, it's, this is just a start of something? Or, or, or, or do you, do you, do you have a sort of different perspective on, on what's gonna happen with how you see the future of work?

[00:36:45] Tony: What is driving that is, is a crisis of leadership from the top is these leaders don't trust their people to do their work and treat them like adults.

[00:36:54] And give them the infrastructure to be successful. So it's a question of trust and and what's going to happen is that these companies that are forcing their people to go back to the office and work from the office are going to lose their best people and they're gonna lose their best people. For companies that do make people successful, no matter what they are, and that's the future of work, the future of work is gonna be supported by the best talent in the world that knows that they can be successful and still have that degree of freedom and flexibility.

[00:37:24] Omer: Love it. Great answer. All right, let's get onto the lightning rounds. You ready? Let's go. Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've ever received?

[00:37:33] Tony: The best business advice I received was my, from my, from my previous coach in my previous business. He told me that you can have, build the same out of success, if not more by taxing yourself less and taxing the people around you less.

[00:37:45] And it has driven my strategy at Oyster to to create a company where we're removing the unnecessary. Anxieties and TA and, and burden on people specific such as trying, commuting to to office.

[00:37:59] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:38:02] Tony: The Infinite Game from Simon Sinek because he portrayed the characteristic of businesses that can I.

[00:38:10] The very long term businesses that can be successful. And at the core of his, his, his theory is businesses have to have a just cause That is more than just making money. I believe mission-driven businesses are the future of business.

[00:38:25] Omer: What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:38:28] Tony: Non non-reactivity? Because founders are going to be faced with a lot of challenges. So how they can stay calm in inside the storm. What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit focus? Friday we have something called Focus Friday on Oyster, where we don't have internal meetings during that day, and that enables me to catch up on everything during the week.

[00:38:50] So during the weekend, I completely disconnect and recharge, so I'm fully engaged and ready for the next week.

[00:38:56] Omer: Perfect. What's a new crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:39:01] Tony: I think this world needs an infinite. Totally sustainable and renewables form of energy. I think fusion is, is gonna be the future and I'd love to dig more into that world.

[00:39:15] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:39:19] Tony: I happen to have two birthdays. One for business and one personal.

[00:39:25] Omer: What do you mean a birthday? Like the business birthday when it was born. You celebrate that?

[00:39:28] Tony: Yeah, I have an admin birthday. So I get all my admin colleagues sending me birthday on that day. And I have a personal one, the real one when I was born. Right. So there's been a mismatch between the two.

[00:39:40] Omer: Love it.

[00:39:40] And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:39:44] Tony: At the moment, like for the last few years I've been, passionate about what I call consciousness development. So how can I expand my consciousness so that I can feel better in my life? I can be a better leader, a better father.

[00:39:56] And that's been, that's been a passion for me in the last few years.

[00:39:59] Omer: Awesome. Tony, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. If people want to find out more about Oyster, they can go to oysterhr.com and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:40:11] Tony: LinkedIn.

[00:40:12] Omer: LinkedIn. We'll include a link to your profile in the show notes. Thank you. It's been a pleasure and congratulations on everything you and the team have done so far and I wish you continued success.

[00:40:21] Tony: Thank you, Omer.

[00:40:22] Omer: Cheers.