Tony Jamous: Global, Talent, Sustainable, Unreactive | Work 20XX Ep29

Tony Jamous: Global, Talent, Sustainable, Unreactive | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick, Episode 29
English Transcript
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Cold Open
And I’ll count us down.
Yeah.
So we'll go in three, two, one.

Jeff Frick:
Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here, coming to you from the home studio for another episode of Work 20XX. And I'm excited for this next episode. This gentleman, he's been in the space for a while. He started kind of a transformative company, serendipitously right at the beginning of 2020. And, and he's living it, you know, he's living the values. He's really kind of changing the world. And he's joining us today all the way from Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean. He's Tony Jamous, he's the CEO and Co-Founder of Oyster. Tony, great to see you.

Tony Jamous:
Good to be here, Jeff. Thank you for having me.

Jeff Frick:
Absolutely. So we had the good pleasure of meeting a little while ago. And I just found 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 familiar with Oyster, what's it all about?

Tony Jamous:
Yeah. So Oyster is a global employment platform. We help companies anywhere to employ people in any country without the need of setting up entities, hiring lawyers, accountants, payroll providers. We do all of that through the power of software. And why do you do that? Because we want to make global hiring as easy as local hiring. So we can reverse brain drain. So people can stay in their home countries, don't have to leave their family, their community, but access these amazing job opportunities that the world can offer.

Jeff Frick:
So we hear a lot about, you know, remote workers and we hear about some of these cool travel visas that some countries are putting in place to try to attract workers and have them come work from there. But, you know, there's all this ugliness in terms of taxes and regulation and traditionally, you know, before Oyster, if I wanted to set up some type of entity to employ somebody someplace, you had to have kind of some type of a structure. So how have you solved that with software? Do people work for Oyster technically? Do you have some type of?

Tony Jamous:
Yeah, it's actually pretty much like TriNet, but on a planetary level. So let me tell you a bit of history. The U.S. is composed of a number of states, and each state operates like its own country when it comes to labor laws. So, there was an emergence of these players in the U.S called PEOs, Professional Employment Organizations, that would employ the person on your behalf in that state. And, so we took that concept and we made it global. So we built a global employment infrastructure in 180 countries. We have legal entities, we have payroll providers, we have benefit providers in each of these countries. And then on top, we build a software platform that is increasingly AI driven, that federates all these, knowledge of compliance, of tax regulations, engineering the contract, can assign benefits to an employee, can process the payroll, can process the payments all through the online platform 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 equity if you want.

Jeff Frick:
Interesting. And you've got people I mean, you kind of are you’re living you're living your mission. So you've got people distributed all 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 of your key secret sauce?

Tony Jamous:
Yeah. So we ourself use our own technology. We you know, when I wanted to start Oyster, one of my drivers is How can I build a hyper diverse and a hyper distributed organization on this planet? And I couldn't find a technology to support me in that. So I went and built it. So we use it internally. We are, distributed in 70 countries. We have no offices. We are nearly 600 people. We are gender equal across the board. 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 equality in the world.

Jeff Frick:
That's great. And then you've also got you've got kind of the aggregated market data. So if I don't know how much to pay Mary from Athens, because I've never hired anyone from Ath or excuse me, from Athens, you've got, you know, kind of like we'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 of what is the market and how how the market is defined to help me figure that out.

Tony Jamous:
Absolutely. We tell you what is fair, fair pay for her, depending on her role, on her seniority, and you know, the first data for compensation is somehow available in the developed world. Think about the North America and some places in Europe, but it's not available in the rest of the world. And also the other challenge we have is that remote workers, ask for higher salaries when they work for a company overseas when they were local, work locally. Think about software developers. Software developers are in high demand in the world. So we have developed this, this compensation, insight tool that enable companies to estimate what is a fair compensation, for anyone, anywhere in the world. And they can use the same tool to design a compensation philosophy to make sure they can create equality across the system. Because humans are very sensitive to 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 enables you to create that sense of equality and fairness across the world.

Jeff Frick:  
How have you seen the evolution of pay for skill versus pay for geo when traditional geo borders are breaking down? How do you see that evolving? Because that's a big issue, right? Because there's huge market differences, differentiation for skills in different geos.

Tony Jamous:
Absolutely. And look, I have absolute belief that there is one day in the future where that difference will go away between different geographies. It’s going to probably take us ten years to get there, but we are making incremental progress toward that. So the roles that are in high demand—talk about the software developers—the gap between a software developer in an emerging economy and a software developer in the West has been shrinking fast 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 executives, think about accountants and marketers. So all of these are our 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 that that gap is shrinking. And with platforms like Oyster, by making it more possible for companies to tap into the world as a talent pool, we can have a shot in creating more equilibrium between the supply and demand of labor.

Jeff Frick:
Curious to get your take too on kind of—and I, you know, you've got a much more global point of view. Think of like 1099s and W2s in the US, and it's such a small kind of slice of definition of their working relationship between the company and the person. But then you see the rise of the gig economy. You see, you know, these people driving Ubers and Lyfts and driving, you know, Amazon delivery services that are actually not Amazon. It's a different, wholly owned, independent company that works for them. How do you see kind of the evolution of the relationships 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 lot more granularity and variability in the way those relationships are defined, which of course, then ties back to taxes and it gets more complicated on the back end.

Tony Jamous:
Yeah, look, Jeff, what was happening and 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 be in meetings all day long. So when you work for companies that are not well structured to make people successful no matter what they are, and if you work for a company that restricts your freedom by imposing some unnecessary restrictions, such as working in a specific place or commuting to an office or, then people are choosing to, actually quit the full-time employment job and become a contractor and not being subject necessarily to a company's policy, they would be working on specific projects instead.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Tony Jamous:
And for multiple clients. So we see, we've seen that trend happening. But also, there are companies that are doing the opposite. There are companies that are giving that flexibility to their employees. They're investing in their growth and development, creating a culture that is inclusive and safe and fair. These companies are thriving and attracting people, attracting the best talent in the world because the best talent want to be part of a team, right? They want to create something meaningful together and, and in many countries, full-time employee relationships cannot be done through a contractual model from a, from a regulation standpoint, there would be a tax misclassification issue that companies will face if they employ, contractor, well, employees as contractors. So this is where also our platform can help. We have a lot of customers that come to us saying, I have these 20 contractors distributed in five countries. It's time for me to, make it compliant. And we want to move them to full-time employees. And this is where Oyster can come in. We also support the contractor model as well. So we process a lot of payments for the gig economy. So in short, I think the key is to create a culture that supports people's growth and give them the freedom and flexibility they need so that work, full-time work is not seen as a tax on people, but is seen as a way to support their life.

Jeff Frick:
We'll get into your management philosophy, 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 like there's a trend over time to move more things, right from the balance sheet to the income statement, to move less things from capital expenditures to more flexible expenditures based 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 contract that my grandfather signed up when he went to work for AT&T for 30 years and got, you know, lifetime health benefits till he was 100, that's all kind of gone away 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 like the fundamental contract between what I'm giving you and what I'm getting, and maybe I'm suffering a little bit more of that short term pain because there's some long term benefits once I retire and, and health care for life. It's I think, part of that's gated here in the U.S. because of health care and it's still tied to employment. It's not disconnected, which I think would open up a lot of flexibility. So do you just see this kind of ongoing cadence in terms of flexible, flexible staffing, either around a project, around an initiative, around a whatever. So I bring talent in around an objective versus and taking more of what would have been full-time, you know, W-2 hires back in the day.

Tony Jamous:
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) or as a contractor. It makes a difference in countries where there's no employment ‘at-will’ like in France. Where if you let go of someone, it's a very complicated and a risky process. So in countries like that you tend to default a lot to service providers and outsourcers, and actually, the IT outsourcing industry in France is huge. It’s one of the top industries in the country. Why? Because the employment market is so rigid you cannot hire and fire people easily. So the companies, before deciding to hire somebody full time, they default to an outsource company. And in the U.S. it has much more flexible labor. So we see, we see no impact there. But you're right. If you're building, if you're working on a specific project that is contained in time and, and is well defined, then putting together a team of contractors could be, could be also an interesting idea.

Jeff Frick:
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.

Tony Jamous:
Thank you.

Jeff Frick:
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 mismatch between supply and demand, especially in Western countries, developed countries. You could take a position like, you know, security engineers or whatever. You know, there's thousands and thousands of unfulfilled jobs at the same time there's a lot of people, that aren't within 20 miles of an office that might be qualified. I wonder if you could share some of the macro trends, that got you excited to go in this space in the first place. And what are you seeing now three years into it?

Tony Jamous:
Yeah, when I, started working on Oyster, I started looking in late 2019. I started looking at these macro trends. First, there was remote work, and we looked at remote work, and it was clear that remote work was the future of work. The pandemic enabled that to happen much faster. Now you have also... I looked at the employment data. There are 80 million jobs going unfulfilled in the West, according to Korn Ferry, resulting in $8.5 trillion of economic loss, roughly 10% of the world economy. 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 economist called 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 book written by an economist. And, he argues in his book that if you remove the concept of ‘border’ from talent mobility, you have the opportunity to triple the world economy. So it's anything between 10% of the world economy to 3 times the world economy. The potential impact of unlocking global talent. And knowing how the capitalistic system works, I don't see any future where there's not going to be a supply-demand equilibrium. What was missing was 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 to that. Because we streamline, we make global hiring as easy as local hiring. A few clicks online.

Jeff Frick:
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 in one or 2 or 3 countries. But you couldn't, you couldn't pull from all around the world, and you certainly couldn't pull 1 or 2 individuals from a specific country. So I'm just curious of your kind of customer distribution. How many of them are small companies? How many are big companies? As there's this flow to, you know, getting people outside your borders.

Tony Jamous:
Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. So before having platforms like Oyster, companies, only big companies had access to global talent, right? They had to... think about Google. Google would have offices in 50 countries, and they would go and hire the best talent in these 50 countries. But if you're a small startup, you cannot compete with Google on hiring these people, the 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. That's like 95% of our customer base. Because we give them a secret weapon, we give them Oyster to enable them to compete as well, if not better, than the Googles of the world in the war on talent. And, like we have a customer that has 200 team members on the platform distributed in, in 50 countries.

Jeff Frick:
Wow. 200 people in 50 countries so no more than four in a country on average. And I think you said you're the only Oyster employee on Cyprus, correct?

Tony Jamous:
Yes. There's nobody here.

Jeff Frick:
I love it. You grew up in Lebanon during the civil war. And you left to go to France for your education. And you had an interesting quote in one of your, podcasts that you were a guest. You said ‘I built businesses to protect myself.' And you were very successful. You built a couple businesses, you sold them. They went public, made some money. And then you weren't happy, you like, did the Silicon Valley dream. You opened the startup, you went public, got acquired, made some money. Here you are. And then you weren't happy. And the other great line that I heard is, one of your friends said, you know, Tony, what would it take for you to start another company? And now you get to approach it from a very different perspective, from protecting yourself. Now you have an opportunity to take your learnings and make some changes in the world. So I wonder if you can share the reflection 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 of an operational, platform if you will, your great line, ‘Sustainable Leadership,’ which is, tightly knit, but somewhat, I don’t want to say removed, but it's a different layer of, of intentionality than just trying to fulfill supply and demand within your customer base.

Tony Jamous:
Yeah, absolutely Jeff. Oyster is, a laboratory for me to experiment in this, I would say human-centric leadership, leadership, tools or techniques, because I want to work in an environment that works for me. I want to feel safe. I want to, I don't want to have fear of being judged. I want to be myself. I want to give. I want to be super creative. I want to, I want to feel, I want to feel, fulfilled. I want to work on something meaningful. So all of this, I want to surround myself with diversity. So, this is the environment I imagined. And also, I imagine an environment where I can live wherever 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 getting to starting Oyster, I was, 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 company and starting Oyster. And, during that year, although I was, I had made, I had made a financial success, I felt, there was something missing in my life. My relationships were not that great. The way I take care of myself was not great. So I went on this, inner work journey, essentially a therapy, intense therapy process that enabled me to realize that, what made me realize what I need to do to heal myself, to get better, to feel healthier. And be happier. And one of the components of that is to work on something meaningful and purposeful. 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 immigrants go through to succeed in the West, then, then I could feel I 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...

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Well, there's a couple, there’s a couple kind of philosophical anchors that I want you to expand on a little bit. And one is the role of courage and fear. And you talked about, you know, living with courage and fear and learning to kind of master those two words. How do you address courage and fear and how do you get on top of fear? Because fear is a... it's a big motivator. And it can drive a lot of crazy behaviors.

Tony Jamous:
Totally. And for me, so I had a... I had a, since I was a young child, I have developed a higher sensitivity to fear. And why? Because I was in this. I was in this war zone environment for the first ten years of my life. And so, some people call this PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder. And so I had to deal with it later in my life and heal from it. And what I realize is that, it's not sensitivity to fear. It's just sensitivity. I'm like, I have... I have more sensitivity. And, instead of running away from 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. You still have the fear, but not act on it is to become non-reactive to fear.

Tony Jamous:
And a very concrete example of application for leaders in my position is, well, in my position you're always faced with, with very scary challenges that could, could derail the company, but you cannot go and react to that, because if you react to that, you propagate in the organization unnecessary fear, unnecessary anxiety that would lead to the wrong decision. So you have to manage yourself. You have to lead yourself. You have to sustain yourself. This is where the sustainable leadership concept came from. You have to be there for yourself as a leader to process these emotions so that you don't go and snap at your team. Create behavior that generates fear in the system. Then you start losing the emotional safety that you need to thrive in an environment, and then you become highly toxic cultures.

Jeff Frick:
Right?

Tony Jamous:
So managing fear is an important skill for leaders.

Jeff Frick:
You know, it's funny we talk a lot about psychological safety. We talk a lot about, you know, creating environments for 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's this kind of moment of truth on the exchange of information from the someone talking to you to you receiving it and how you respond. You talk about non-reactive more than 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 try to think of a way to say ‘yes’. Is there a way I can say yes without saying no from a leadership perspective? But you've kind of more generalized it into this non-reactive. 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 news and the reaction over before you get on the call with the person, because you're very intentional with that. And I think it's a really powerful, behavior that people can try to adopt that, you know, isn't that hard technically, but is a really, beneficial thing in terms of building that trust and relationship with the person on the other side that just took a risk and told you something that maybe wasn't always great.

Tony Jamous:
Yeah, there's a... there is inner work that you can do and there's outer environments work that you can also do. Let's talk about the inner work. The inner work is about, developing higher sense of sensitivity to how you're feeling. And, and then, and then non-react to that. Essentially you develop this ability to make choices, based on these emotions and 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 therapy that I use recently called ‘act’ accept, acceptance and commitment therapy that enables you to accept whatever you're experiencing and committing to do differently this time, or not do anything if you don't have to do anything. Right. So this kind of non-reactivity is a skill that you can learn. And secondly, the outer world, you can also organize your outer world so that you're not always on, that you are... have downtime to process before going into the meeting. And asynchronous work that is very common in remote companies 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 bad news, I got that bad news yesterday and I have a meeting tomorrow about it. Right. So I'm not like having the bad news in the meeting in real time. Right. So that helps a lot in reducing reactivity in the workplace. And, yeah, I think these are the components. So there's an inner work you can do to develop your ability to 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 so that you reduce the amount of, triggers, that are here to trigger you.

Jeff Frick:

You are also very, outspoken in your management of your own time, and the management of the things that interrupt you. And it just it shocks me that too many organizations are still kind of dopamine, running, chasing notifications, which often are triggers and not really leveraging what, as you said, one of the beauties of async is that you get so much more time to actually turn off notifications and get work done. I'm just curious how that's been reflected within the company and how it was so different than, you know, potentially the last couple of organizations that you were involved with in terms of giving people time 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 actual work done that we're paying you to do instead of just replying to email all day long.

Tony Jamous:
I mean, look, this company now I work for, Oyster, I feel two times more productive than my previous companies. And, and, not a but, and I feel more relaxed and fulfilled in my life. Right, so this is the effect of adopting a purposeful, way of working designed for distributed and remote companies. And so why I'm more productive. So to give you an example, I, instead of sitting in meetings all day long, I watch recorded 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 own many of that meeting component. I, and why I feel like more fulfilled and more relaxed because, I work way where I want to work, right? I don't work in 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 have internal meetings so Friday I use it for, I call it Focus Friday. Everybody in the company has a Focus Friday where we don't have internal meetings, and we use that time to catch up on everything we need to catch up on during the week, so we can go on the weekend and close our laptop and shut down our Slack. Right. So the next morning when we come back to work, we are refreshed and energized. So this is how, this is how we do it. And actually like I do this like this because we have to protect ourselves from the negative effect of work. Work can be amazing, work helps us to grow, work together, build connection, build relationships, solve important problems in the world. But also work can be taxing on us. So how can we keep the good things of work and protect ourselves from the negative things?

Jeff Frick:
Love it. Along that line, one of the things you'd like to say is success is about minimization. And consuming less. And if you think of that in the context of work and you think of it in the context of, you know, all these notification platforms where you're getting Slack and email and text and Lord knows how other many digital work platforms, that people are using really this, this focus on minimalization, really which, which could also probably be described as radical prioritization and really eliminating the stuff that's not important and really focusing on the stuff that's important. Oh, by the way, you just get these huge productivity gains. I’d love to hear some of the feedback from some of the folks on the team to suddenly get an opportunity to work when it makes sense for them. You know, if I'm just not in the mood go take a walk, you know, this, this async and digital tooling really opens up a whole different world of a relationship between you and work.

Tony Jamous:
Absolutely. Not to mention that you can also choose where you want to live, right? I mean, many people don't have that option today. They have to live in cities. I mean, if you like to live in cities it’s great, but many people are forced to live in places that are not designed for human living. Right? So there's high level of pollution. There's time wasted in transportation and, there's, well, expensive, expensive real estate. I mean, they could, there's really, having giving people the choice to be distributed on the planet and live where they want to live. Not only has a massive impact on people's happiness in this world because they can choose where they want to live, but also has an impact on our environmental footprint. We are pouring four times the equivalent of New York City in terms of concrete every 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 because we, we live in the system of infinite growth requirement, yet do it in a way that is healthier for the planet and for its people.

Jeff Frick:
Right. And you've got all these little towns right that are getting hollowed 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 a lot of places that aren't crowded and don't have commutes where, you know, if you can run a fiber, or you can run a fat pipe to 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 boom that we're in.

Tony Jamous:
Exactly.

Jeff Frick:
So one of your other, kind of great philosophical points is kind of thinking in terms of the mind versus the heart. And, you know, I think if you, if you use feeling and thinking of people as people, they're not pieces of steel or 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, 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 versus treating people like an asset. I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of where does that come from and how are you using that on a day-to-day basis?

Tony Jamous:
Yeah, it's like I've developed this, I call them energetic systems. And there's an energetic system I call the Eagle and another one called the Condor. And I try to use different ones in different situations. So let me tell you what each one is. So the Eagle is my flight and fight system. It's my system that deals with crises, with risks. And so if I may say, I need to raise money for the company. That's my, I put my Eagle energy on. And I fight and flight system and I focus and get it done, and... But the Condor, so... And why I call it the Eagle because the Eagle is a predator. The Eagle kills to eat. The Condor on the other side is a scavenger. She or he takes care of the environment to survive. Right. And so he is much more nurturing. The Condor has one child every two years. The Eagle has four per year. So, so the Condor, when I'm dealing with something with an issue internally that 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 with a human system here. I'm not dealing with goals and market issues. And whatever requires me to be this Eagle. Right. So being able to choose what energy system I want to use in each situation has helped me a lot in the last few years to actually grow my leadership style and actually don't get stuck in any style. Right? So I can be much more flexible. I call it having Eagle Flexibility to really adapt to the situation.

Jeff Frick:
I love that, right. Because average doesn't work anymore, right? Everything's context-sensitive. You got to, you got to have the right context.

Tony Jamous:
Yes.

Jeff Frick:
So you're a deep-thinking guy. And I want to ask you a couple of questions on some philosophical issues. I had Mårten Mickos on, I 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 companies with independent hackers. 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 you touch 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, you need to get people in situations sometimes where, maybe they accidentally touch 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 helping people learn in this context? Because we all need to keep learning. The world is changing so quickly. The tools are quickly changing. But it’s this kind of interesting paradox where there's learning and then there's, you know, touching the stove, learning.

Tony Jamous:
Yeah. Great question. So how I do this is essentially by empowering them and giving them room so that they can make small mistakes that are not deadly mistakes or can be reversible. And, and give them the permission to do so by being non-reactive to their mistakes.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Tony Jamous:
And, and the second piece is to model the way is to do that myself and share the learning from my mistakes. I want to make making mistakes something 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 there was completely different. So they have to learn on the job every day like learning is a really important part of the process. And you want to create an environment where people know that. They know that I’m not hiring you because of what you know, I'm hiring you because of your ability to continue to learn.

Jeff Frick:
That's great. It's like the parenting paradox. And you've mentioned you've got, you'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 kid to learn, but in helping them learn, sometimes you're hurting their learning. So I always think of like teaching the kid to ride a 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, maybe they 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 help versus holding back, trying to help versus holding back so that they can learn on their own and cross those, 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.

Tony Jamous:
It's a great example, actually. This is the way you create safety for 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. And I created... I hid all the things that could hurt him as he... and he could fall and be okay. So this is very similar to a work environment. You create an environment where failing is safe. How can you make failing safe? You can get hurt, not...

Jeff Frick:
Hurt not injured is always...

Tony Jamous:
Hurt not injured.

Jeff Frick:
Hurt not injured, recoverable. So last thing as we’re getting towards the end of our time, the impact of AI. And, you know, you deal with a lot of independent contractors and people that are all around the world. And I can't help but think of the people that worked at Fiverr, as kind of a different version of what you were trying to do around some very specific services. But, you know, AI changes everything. How are you using it internally? But also how do you see AI changing the demands within this kind of global talent market? Because some things are going to get subsumed, but other things are going to be new, different and drive different kinds of demand.

Tony Jamous:
I think AI, what’s going to happen is going to shift the expectation of what employers have from the value employees will be delivering in the future. So we're going to expect more value to be produced by each human being, by using AI to augment the capability of a human being. It's also going to be very fulfilling for people to use AI because suddenly you have this amazing technology that is supporting you to make more impactful things. So when, you know, before we used to do, run numbers on a piece of paper and then you had Excel. Imagine how much accountant, like it was Nirvana for accountants, right? It became so much for the like the expert on all these macros and Excel spreadsheet formulas. And so we're going to have a similar impact here, we are going to, people are going to be more fulfilled. And they're going to, they're going to do more things with the help of technology. So yeah, so I believe that, is going to make work more valuable for businesses and make people more fulfilled using these new technologies. Now how we are using it at Oyster, we have, internally, 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 our AI chatbot last year, where you can chat with our platform and get answers, as a customer, about employing somebody in France or, about compensation in a specific country. So, we have the technology that enables us to make our customer experience better, but also scale much more effectively our operations. Because now instead of having humans to answer these questions, now we have a machine that does that for us.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. That's great. Well, we're getting to the end of our time. I want to give you the last word as we, we head 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 that as you look forward, into the next year as well as, 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 years kind of playing out? What are you excited about? What, if we talk a year from now, what are we going to be talking about?

Tony Jamous:
I'm very excited about, closing the opportunity gap between North and South. We have increased our percentage of team members in emerging economies from 30% to 40% in the last two years. And sent hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign direct investment into emerging economies. And we're just getting started. I'd like to see that number continue to go up. And, so yeah, what I'm excited about is making employment global by default so companies can look at the world as their oyster when they're looking for talent.

Jeff Frick:
Love it. Well, I'm sure what's going to happen is you're gonna have these up and comings start bumping off incumbents. And I think ultimately it's going to be the financial markets to start to say, hey, you know, what are you doing? You got to, you got to adjust with the new time. Well, Tony, it’s great to, great to catch up. Love all your work. Listened to a lot of podcasts getting ready for this. And I really appreciate the mission and really breaking down barriers between opportunities and people to fulfill those opportunities. So win, win all the way around.

Tony Jamous:
Thank you for having me, Jeff.

Jeff Frick:
All right. He's Tony, I'm Jeff. You're watching Work 20XX. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening on the podcast. Take care.

Cold Close
That was great. Thank you.
Thank you, thank you again.

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