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

Summary

Podcast Summary: The SaaS Podcast - Episode 422: Oyster: From Wizard of Oz MVP to 8-Figure Global HR SaaS with Tony Jamous

Introduction

In Episode 422 of The SaaS Podcast - SaaS, Startups, Growth Hacking & Entrepreneurship, host Omar Khan engages in an in-depth conversation with Tony Jamous, the co-founder and CEO of Oyster. Released on December 5, 2024, this episode delves into Tony's entrepreneurial journey, the evolution of Oyster from a minimal viable product (MVP) to an 8-figure global HR SaaS platform, and the strategies that propelled its success amidst global challenges.

1. Tony Jamous’ Background and Entrepreneurial Journey

Tony Jamous’ story is one of resilience and vision. Born in Lebanon, Tony was compelled to leave his homeland as a teenager due to economic hardships, relocating to France in search of better opportunities. This formative experience profoundly influenced his approach to building globally distributed teams.

After pursuing a degree in computer science, Tony founded his first company, Nexmo, a cloud communications platform. Under his leadership, Nexmo scaled from zero to $100 million in annual revenue within five years and was eventually acquired by Vonage, leading to a significant milestone when Ericsson acquired Vonage for $6.5 billion.

2. Founding Oyster: Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship

Despite a successful exit with Nexmo, Tony was driven to create something more purposeful. Leveraging his experience of building distributed teams across 45 countries, he recognized the complexities and inefficiencies in international hiring. This insight led to the founding of Oyster in January 2020, a platform designed to simplify global employment by enabling companies to hire and pay employees anywhere in the world without the burdens of setting up local entities or navigating complex compliance landscapes.

3. Validating the Idea and Building the MVP

Before developing Oyster’s comprehensive platform, Tony prioritized validating the market need. He conducted extensive interviews with potential customers, compliance experts, and legal professionals to understand the pain points associated with global hiring. This customer-centric approach ensured that Oyster addressed real-world challenges effectively.

Notable Quote:

“I validated my idea by talking to customers before building anything.” – Tony Jamous [16:07]

Initially, Oyster operated on a “Wizard of Oz” MVP model, where the front-end appeared automated to customers, but backend processes were manually handled by the team. This approach allowed Oyster to manage overwhelming demand during the pandemic by ensuring customer needs were met while progressively developing the software infrastructure.

4. Navigating Growth During the Pandemic

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for Oyster’s growth. As companies worldwide transitioned to remote work, the demand for Oyster surged. Despite the product not being fully ready, Tony and his team creatively managed the influx by manually processing customer requests through a simple website interface. This strategy maintained customer satisfaction and provided valuable insights for product refinement.

Notable Quote:

“We turned manual work into an advantage when our product wasn't ready to meet customer needs.” – Tony Jamous [19:00]

5. Shifting to Efficient Scaling Amid Tech Downturn

In 2022, the tech industry faced a downturn with widespread layoffs. Contrary to the trend, Oyster successfully scaled by focusing on cost-effective global hiring solutions. By shifting hiring to emerging economies, Oyster grew by 60% in 2023, positioning itself uniquely in the market even as other tech companies reduced their workforce.

Notable Quote:

“We grew by 60% when other tech companies were cutting headcount for the first time ever in 2023.” – Tony Jamous [36:10]

6. Oyster’s Current Status and Future Plans

As of the episode’s release, Oyster boasts over 2,000 customers and a distributed team of 550 employees spread across 70 countries, all without maintaining physical offices. Approaching $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Oyster exemplifies a successful fully remote enterprise.

7. Building and Managing a Remote Workforce

Oyster’s success is heavily attributed to its robust remote work culture. Tony emphasizes the importance of trust, asynchronous communication, and operational efficiency in managing a distributed team. By adopting tools like Asana for project management, Slack for messaging, and Zoom for synchronous meetings, Oyster ensures seamless collaboration across multiple time zones.

Notable Quote:

“You need to build a culture that is built on trust.” – Tony Jamous [38:56]

Challenges included transforming himself into the best remote worker within the organization and fostering a culture that assumes best intent among team members. This approach not only enhances employee satisfaction but also drives high levels of engagement and productivity.

8. Key Insights and Strategies

a. Timing, Market Size, and Team Building Tony identifies three critical factors behind Oyster’s success:

• Timing: Launching during the pandemic when remote work demand was skyrocketing.
• Market Size: Targeting a vast, underserved market with significant growth potential.
• Hiring the Best Team: Recruiting scalable leaders early on who could drive both initial growth and long-term expansion.

Notable Quote:

“Timing was definitely a factor.” – Tony Jamous [09:28]

b. Buyer Purchasing Criteria Framework Oyster employs a data-driven strategy by capturing and analyzing buyer purchasing criteria at the point of sale. This framework helps Tony understand the motivations behind customer decisions, informing both corporate and product development strategies.

Notable Quote:

“Our strategy is a data-driven strategy. We look at what customers are telling us, why they're making decisions.” – Tony Jamous [29:10]

c. Storytelling with Numbers Tony highlights the importance of weaving compelling narratives around business metrics to communicate effectively with stakeholders, whether investors or team members.

Notable Quote:

“Business is numbers with story told around these numbers.” – Tony Jamous [30:22]

9. Lightning Round Highlights

In the concluding segment, Tony shares personal insights and recommendations:

• Best Business Advice: “You can achieve the same amount of success by taxing yourself and your team less,” promoting a stress-free work environment. [44:11]
• Book Recommendation: The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek, emphasizing long-term, mission-driven business strategies. [44:37]
• Attribute of Successful Founders: Non-reactivity, maintaining calm amidst challenges. [45:08]
• Personal Productivity Habit: Implementing “Focus Friday” to disconnect from meetings and recharge. [45:21]
• Passion Outside Work: Consciousness development to enhance personal well-being and leadership. [46:25]

10. Conclusion

Tony Jamous’ journey with Oyster illustrates the power of timing, market understanding, and a resilient, mission-driven approach in building a successful SaaS business. By embracing a fully remote model, prioritizing trust and employee well-being, and maintaining a data-informed strategy, Oyster stands as a testament to modern entrepreneurship’s potential to create impactful, scalable solutions.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Culture Over Strategy:

  “Culture eats strategy for breakfast. You have to have a solid, smart strategy in the business, but you have to also remember that culture trumps strategy.” – Tony Jamous [04:26]

• Following Heart and Brain:

  “Follow your heart until your brain has a reason to follow it.” – Tony Jamous [14:24]

• Trust in Remote Teams:

  “High trusting teams deliver better results than not.” – Tony Jamous [38:56]

• Future of Work:

  “The future of work is going to 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.” – Tony Jamous [43:22]

Final Thoughts

This episode provides a comprehensive look into Oyster’s rise as a global HR SaaS leader. Tony Jamous’ emphasis on mission-driven growth, effective remote team management, and strategic adaptability offers invaluable lessons for entrepreneurs and SaaS founders aiming to build impactful and sustainable businesses.

Transcript

[Omar Khan]

Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host, Omar Khan, and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talked to Tony Jamis, the co founder and CEO of Oyster, a platform that makes it easy for companies to hire and pay people anywhere in the world. Born in Lebanon, Tony had to leave his home country as a teenager and move to France for better opportunities. He didn't realize it then, but this experience would go on to shape his entire future as a founder. After studying computer science, Tony started his first company, Nexmo, a cloud communications platform. He grew from 0 to 100 million in annual revenue in just five years before being acquired by Vonage. Now, most founders might have taken it easy after that kind of exit, but not Tony. At Nexmo, he had built teams across 45 countries and saw how hard it was to hire people internationally. So after taking some time off, he started exploring solutions. He found a huge market for international hiring that nobody seemed to have modernized yet. The whole industry ran on paperwork and manual processes, and Tony saw a chance to change that with software. He launched Oyster in January 2020. Two months later, when the pandemic forced companies to go remote, global hiring became essential and demand for Oyster surged overnight. But there was a problem. The product wasn't ready for so many customers. Instead of turning people away, Tony and his team got creative. They built a simple website where customers could submit their requests and behind the scenes, real people did all the work manually. The approach worked and allowed them to improve their product over time. But then came the tech downturn. In 2022, companies started laying off workers and Tony had to shift from rapid growth to efficient scaling. His team found a clever solution which helped them grow by 60% when other tech companies were cutting headcount for the first time ever in 2023. Today, Oyster has over 2,000 customers and 550 employees spread across 70 countries with no offices anywhere. And they're about to hit $100 million in ARR. In this episode, you'll learn how Tony validated his idea by talking to customers before building anything. Why he hired experienced leaders early, even though it was a risky move for an early stage startup. How they turned manual work into an advantage when their product wasn't ready to meet customer needs. We talk about the buyer purchasing criteria framework that has helped Tony understand exactly why customers buy and how you can use it in your startup and how they've made remote work successful across 70 countries without any offices. So I hope you enjoy this episode is brought to you by Attio, the next generation of CRM. Now imagine a world where your CRM is powerful, easily configured and deeply intuitive. Well, ATIO makes that a reality.

[Tony Jamis]

You can set it up in less.

[Omar Khan]

Than a minute and in seconds of syncing your email and calendar, you'll see all your relationships in one place, all enriched with valuable data. You can also build zapier style automations, get powerful reports and seamlessly handle any go to market motion. From PLG to sales led. Attio is designed for the next era of companies like yours. So it's time to say goodbye to inflexible one size fits all CRMs and join industry leaders like 11 Labs, Replicate, Modal and more. To scale your startup to the next level. You can try Atio for free. That's attio.

[Tony Jamis]

Com.

[Phil]

Are you building a software product? Then you probably know how challenging it is to find competent engineers.

[Tony Jamis]

You don't have to micromanage.

[Phil]

And then you have all those worries. Will this app work correctly? Can it handle millions of users without crashing? Can I trust these developers when I don't know what they're doing? That's where Axle Hub comes in. With 10 years of software experience, they do things differently. You'll work directly with Phil, their CEO and technical leader. No middlemen, no managing multiple developers. Phil guides the entire process and personally oversees your product. Think of him as your technical co founder minus the equity stake. He brings his expert team to build your app right from day one, ready to make quality software without the headaches, visit axlehub.com that's a x e l.

[Tony Jamis]

H u b com Tony, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

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 trumps strategy.

I love that and I think for many people that's going to 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?

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 first and foremost. We are on a mission to reverse brain drain and reduce inequality by democratizing access to global job opportunities.

Love it.

[Phil]

And give us a sense of the.

[Tony Jamis]

Size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?

Yeah. So we are still a sub $100 million, but we're not very far. 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.

Great. And customers?

We have over 2,000 customers right now in the business.

So let's talk a little bit about your background, because I think it's an interesting part of the story and where you are today and why you've built this business. So why don't you just tell us a little bit about your background, like where did you grow up? How did you get into the world of building startups? This is not your first company that you've built. Just tell us a little bit about yourself.

I was born in Lebanon and I had to leave my country, my home country, in my teenage years. 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 that business from 0 to 100 million of revenue in the first five years. I took it public in mid-2016 by doing a reverse merger with Vonage, was public at that time on the New York Stock Exchange, which led to their acquisition by Ericsson for $6.5 billion. And then I took some time off after that phase in my life, and I realized that I want to build something more purposeful, more impactful. And I knew that whatever I would do, it would be a fully distributed company. Why? Because my previous business, Nexmo, was already in 45 countries. Because we had to. We had to be closer to the customer. We built all these partnerships on the ground, and I was able to witness the power of distributed hiring. 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. 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.

So your previous company, you took that, you just said from 0 to 100 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 100 million in ARR. Again, what is it about you that you know? Like, what's your secret sauce? How you know most people wouldn't be able to do this in a lifetime? You've kind of, you know you're doing this for the second time. Like, why do you think you're able to do that? What is it about your background, the way you build businesses? Like, what is it that helps you achieve this type of success?

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 our case at Oyster, we started in January 2020. We knew that remote work will be big, but then we never thought it's going to be that big that quickly. So timing was definitely a factor. And secondly is a large market. You have to be operating on a vast hundreds of billion dollar off market in terms of size because that enables you to have the flexibility. You can make mistakes, you can iterate, you can actually, even if you have a very small market share, you still can build pretty sizable business. And thirdly is hire the best team. So in the case of Oyster, I've partnered with an executive search firm early on that helped me design my org and find the top 10 people, the first 10 people that I've worked with that really are scalable leaders because I've seen that many times businesses lose cycles in reshaping their org structures because they haven't really envisioned they're going to be a big business, Right. So that helped me to go faster in both cases.

I often hear about founders who say the kind of person I need from 0 to 1 is probably a very different type of person who's going to help me scale this business. But it sounds like you kind of skipped that and said I'm going to find the people who are going to help me scale this business and hire them as quickly as I can.

There are people that are on this intersection of this Venn diagram. They know how to take businesses from 0 to 1, but they also know how to take them from 1 to 10. And actually 1 of the great thing about our business is that because we are a mission driven business, 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.

Now you've mentioned Oyster is a mission driven business a couple of times and you said earlier that you had to leave Lebanon when you were a teen. Can you, 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 being mission driven, it's not just a buzzword for you, right? It's actually based on your own personal life and experience.

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 their people and their best talent leaves. And that's why they stay emerging economies. Emerging economies stay emerging because they're doing their best. People to the west, that's the reality today. So, and for me personally, that process was very difficult to really bet all my life on economical success. In that days I had to go and work really hard to succeed. And obviously I'm very grateful for having had that experience, but it was pretty traumatizing to be on my own in my teen years in a new country, knowing nobody and have to build everything from scratch, right? So when actually when I left my first business, I took some time off and I was ready to start another business than Oyster. 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. This is when I flipped the idea overnight. And actually 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 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 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.

I love that I love that. It reminds me of 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 incorporate the business. You've seen, you sort of, you sense the opportunity. What did you do beyond incorporating? Like, how did you, how did you validate this idea? How did you figure out specifically what is the problem that we're going to go out and solve? First of all, because you can't build the product that you have today. That takes time. So you've got to get out there with something. So how did you start with just the validation and making sure that the demand was there?

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 the legacy non software vendors. 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. So I gathered all the pain points and this is where my experience as a software entrepreneur helped because I could take all these data and, and envision a software platform that can dramatically reduce the barrier to entry for companies to employ people around the world. And that helped me to build kind of the first vision of the Oyster platform in late 2019.

And then did you, were you self funding this business?

[Phil]

Did you raise a seed round?

[Tony Jamis]

How did that sort of side of the business get started?

Yeah, so to me it was important that I'm not the only one betting on this. 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 seed fund in London. It took me months 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 want to make sure that all these smart people, these investors coming in and actually helping me building that. And that's what happened. Actually I spoke to a lot of investors 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 I really recommend entrepreneurs to talk to as many people as possible and get feedback very early on because.

One.

Person cannot see everything.

What would you say to somebody? I think a lot of people now understand that it's not a good idea to protect your idea and not talk to people. About it because somebody might steal it and stuff like that. And there's a lot of value in having these conversations. And the reality is no one's going to hear about your idea and say, oh, great, I'm going to go and invest the next 10, 15 years of my life going and building this business. Right. It's not like an overnight thing. But what would be your response to somebody who's a little nervous about talking about their idea?

Well, 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. Your personal energy, your personal drive, your personal history that nobody can copy that. And that's what drives success.

Yeah, I love that.

[Omar Khan]

Okay, great.

[Tony Jamis]

So you've got the idea. You've had a lot of conversations. You bring on investors, they're helping you refine the idea, get more clarity and so on. How did you go about building the product and then like, 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've talked about the mission and everything else, but the reality is you can't build everything from day one. So how did you decide where you were going to focus and specifically which problems you were going to sol solve first?

We got lucky that we started this business in January 2020. And this accelerated move to remote work with the pandemic was a launchpad for our business in that year because it changed hiring managers mentality. They knew that they don't have any more, they don't need any more to hire people within 20 mile radius from their office. They can hire people anywhere in the world. So. But 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 front end for the customers that they experience software experience. But behind the scene, it was people 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 customers are doing and what our internal team is doing manually that drove 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 turn that insight and data 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 stuff and turn them into software. Like she knew how to turn that. I hired my first general counsel. My first hire was Miranda, a general counsel. She came from Trinet where she turned exactly turned all this employment compliance stuff into software. So having the right people at the right time is crucial to really accelerate.

Tell me a little bit more about what you just described there with the product. So you have this front end which is basically like, you know, a clickable prototype, right? That they can submit some kind of task and then the request is going to some human on your team who is doing something. So maybe just give an example of okay, the customer wanted to do X and this is what somebody on the backend was doing to fulfill that example.

Let's say payroll, you have to pay somebody, right? So we show 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 going to be paid behind the scene, which is obviously what happens today. But in reality we had people going and making the payments manually. And then we learned that hey, 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 anyone anywhere in hours. So another example is generating employment contract, right? So you have a 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. We have a builder of employment contract that enables customer 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. So we build 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 very complicated software problem to solve that only software and thanks God now we have AI can help us and solve this problem. And by the way, these are man made problems. Like these are having different employment, labor laws and tax laws, all man made and there's so much money to be made in creating abstraction layers for man made problems. So I did it with Oyster. In my previous company, Nexmo, we did the same. We had all these. We have over a thousand telecom networks in the world. Each network has a different protocol to connect to. 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 world generates. There's trillions of dollars to be made in these markets.

Now if you had tried to build this product and built the back end to do all of these things you just described, it may have taken months, years to build that out. How long did it take to build that kind of this front end with the human powered back? And how quickly were you able to get to market?

So the look, the front end, we, the front end took at like six months. But even we started before that because we had customer knocking on our door, right? We had a website was 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 the team member onboarded myself. Everything was done manually in the beginning. And even today, after nearly four years 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. But we have a roadmap. We know we can automate 90, 95% of the whole employment experience across 180 countries.

Right. So 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.

[Phil]

The software can't do that right now.

[Tony Jamis]

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.

Absolutely 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 have had to convince HR and hiring managers and all these people to start thinking about the workforce differently. 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. So typically getting any kind of outbound working takes a long time. One, why did you decide that was the way that was going to be your go to market motion and how did you get that going?

The market decided for us because again, the timing was very unique. Context 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 the help of our customers and their team members around the world. So 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 were looking for answers. But how do you do this? How do you build distributed teams? How do you do remote work successfully across countries? How do you lead with empathy in a time where burnout is at all time high and disengagement is at all time high? So we provided some answer to that and we became more visible than we expected. Our brand today is the largest brand and share of voice within the HR community, our target buyers. So we're not trying to target everybody. We're very targeted in our brand reach and that's how we built the business. 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.

You talked about some of these questions you were answering and helping them, your ICP sort of navigate through some of these challenges. How are you figuring out what their struggles were? I mean some people will say, hey, I'm not going to talk to customers. I'm going to go out and do keyword research and see what people are searching for on Google and I'm going to answer these types of things. You talked a lot about going out and talking to customers earlier, but how are you going about and really trying to get below the surface and really understand what these customers were struggling with.

Look, in the early days before starting the business, I developed really an interview process and data driven interview process that enabled me to, when I hired my first Tetra product to give it to them, say, okay, this is the problem. We want to solve. But eventually when we started having customers, we had data obviously from supporting them and all the issues they're facing with us. But what 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 and then you record that. And we have recorded thousands of data points about that. And that's today what's driving our strategy? Our strategy is a data driven strategy. We look at what customers are telling us, why they're making decisions, how their decision making process to buy our stuff is changing. And that feeds into our corporate strategy and our product development strategy.

You said something interesting to me before we started recording. You said, hey, business is really. Why didn't you say it? It sounds better when you say it. About the numbers in the story.

Yeah. For me what I'm learning is that business is numbers with story told around these numbers. 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 want to convince that there's a market for the stuff to even at late stage where I'm talking to public market investors or internally to explain why we need to take this strategy and not the strategy. So numbers convince people numbers are non ambiguous source of data 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 and choose the right numbers that you want to, that can support a specific story that you want to tell.

Do you have a framework or a certain way you think about that 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 maybe a very different approach.

Like I don't have a specific framework, but I start with the end goal, right. So what I'm trying to achieve, let's say we're. Let's say I want to take the company public, okay. I want to develop 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. 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 growth? Inbound. Outbound channels. Okay. So, so, and then you start developing a story that is coherent around these things. And then 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 a story better than you and you know it's a solid story.

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 demand that probably it was hard to keep up with and fulfill. And things moved a lot faster than you had expected. You knew this was going to happen, but you just didn't know it was going to happen this quickly. Right. And then a couple of years later, everything sort of hit the brakes, right? What happened then?

We had to pivot very fast from growth at all costs to efficient growth, like many technology companies. But in our case, we were planning to become a much bigger business than we are today. 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 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 increase here, do we reduce here. And so it's like dealing, it's like leading in an uncertain and turbulent times. A machine that just been built yesterday. It was a very challenging process. And I have to say we learn a lot in that process. We learn the power of focus. We learn how to focus our strategy on becoming this pure player of global employment. We are 100% focused now on this cross border employment use case. 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 the only pure player in our category focus on that use case. That is the most difficult for the customer. That is the most lucrative market we're in. And it's totally aligned with our mission. Because this is why we're here. We're here to make the world look like one employment market. So the cross border use case is a key use case for us. We don't want to compete with local HR tech platforms. We want to compete with this specific use case that enables customers to employ anyone, anywhere.

What happened in the, when we talked about hitting the brakes, was it that as we came out of 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 happened? Because it was different experiences for different startups around that time.

Yeah, so actually we, we were impacted by the layoffs that were happening in the technology sector and now we were able. So to give you an example, Carta did their analysis last year. 2023 was the first year where the headcount in technology dropped in history. We went down 4%. We still grew nearly 60% last year. And we were able to achieve that because we help our customer employ in more cost effective countries. So suddenly smart CFOs out there, instead of just laying off people, decided to shift their hiring strategy into more cost effective countries and kept growing their business. Because it wasn't really a demand crisis. I mean we had too much demand, we had inflation problem. So it wasn't really a demand challenge, it was really an interest rate issue. And so smart companies, some of our customers kept hiring, but they kept by shifting their hiring into more emerging economies. And we've seen the ratio of employees hired on our platform in emerging markets went from 29% to over 40% in that period of time. We call that this impact yield for Oyster. And so that's what happened. What happened is a shift in who they hire, where they hire, and they use this capability, this ability to tap into the global tenant pool as a strategic asset for them to keep growing their businesses.

One thing I think is really interesting about Oyster and the business that you've built is 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, so you're in many ways you're your own customer. What's been kind of one of, one of the hardest parts of building 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 face to face. What's been the biggest challenge for you as the leader of that organization?

Well, the first challenge is that you as a top of the organization, you 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 adopt the latest and greatest about remote work, asynchronous communication and collaboration, by the way, which enabled me to move to the island of Cyprus. 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 first that's kind of a challenge for me. But secondly, there is a cultural and operational challenges that faces a business like this. So culturally you have to build a culture that is built on trust. So trust is one of our core values because then you're not seeing the person in seeds. So how do you trust them? They're doing their best. And the key for that is to default to assuming best intent. 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 that thought. And the more you do that, the more you start bringing positive energy into the business. High trusting teams delivers better results than not. So that was a forcing function for us to build a culture that is high trusting. And, and secondly is you. There's operational challenges. So operational challenges are around how do you work together effectively across borders and across time zones. 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 synchronous communication. This is how we do meetings. We do meetings in this way. Every meeting I go to at Oyster, usually there's a pre read I have to read before maybe there's a loom video I have to watch. So I'm ready and very effective in doing this meeting. So we can reduce amount of meetings as well because this is how you scale as a business. So there's an operational aspect of how you work together 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 high level of engagement, high level of satisfaction. You have people that are happy showing up 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 the time that works for them, enabling them to go work in another country, closer to their family from time to time if they wish to. So this 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 where they are. And that is the future of work. It's a future of work that is fully distributed, that is empathy based in touch with the real needs of humans and leverages the latest technologies to create a way of working that makes people successful no matter what they are.

[Omar Khan]

I love that.

[Tony Jamis]

And we are going to have to wrap up in a minute and we're going to get onto the 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 vision that you just shared. From your perspective, what do you think is driving that? And do you think it's this is just the start of something, or do you have a sort of different perspective on what's going to happen with how you see the future of work?

What is driving that 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 and give them the infrastructure to be successful. So it's a question of trust. 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 going to 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 going to 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.

Love it. Great answer. All right, let's get on to the lightning round.

[Omar Khan]

You ready?

[Tony Jamis]

Let's go.

Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've ever received?

The best business advice I received was from my previous coach in my previous business. He told me that you can have built the same amount of success, if not more, by taxing yourself less and taxing the people around you less. And it has driven. My strategy at Oyster to create a company where we're removing the unnecessary anxieties and burden on people such as commuting to office.

What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

The Infinite Game from Simon Sinek because he portrayed the characteristic of businesses that can be very long term, businesses that can be successful. And at the core of 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.

What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Non reactivity. Because founders are going to be faced with a lot of challenges. So how they can stay calm 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. So during the weekend I completely disconnect and recharge. So I'm fully engaged and ready for the next week.

Love it. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

I think this world needs an infinite, totally sustainable and renewable form of energy. I think fusion is going to be the future and I'd love to dig more into that world.

What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

I happen to have two birthdays, one for business and one personal.

What do you mean a birthday? Like the business birthday when it was born. You celebrate that?

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. So there's been a mismatch between the two.

Love it. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work at the moment?

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 and that's been a passion for me in the last few years.

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 want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

LinkedIn.

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.

Thank you, Amir.

Cheers.

[Phil]

Remember those development headaches we talked about? Look, building software shouldn't be a worrisome experience. Innovation should be fun. That's where Axle Hub comes in. They've been building software for 10 years, but here's what makes them different. You'll work directly with Phil, their CEO and technical leader. No middlemen, no managing multiple developers. Phil guides the entire process and personally oversees your product. Think of him as your technical co founder minus the equity stakeholder. He brings his expert team to build everything right from day one. Want to focus on your business instead of managing developers? Visit axlehub.com that's a X E L.

[Omar Khan]

H u B com all right, this episode was brought to you by Attio, the next generation of CRM. Atio is powerful, easily configured and deeply intuitive.

[Tony Jamis]

You can set it up in less.

[Omar Khan]

Than a minute and in seconds of syncing your email and calendar, you'll see all your relationships in one place, all enriched with valuable data. What's more, you can also build with zapier style automations, get powerful reports and seamlessly handle any go to market motion. From PLG to sales led, Attio is designed for the next era of companies like yours. So it's time to say goodbye to inflexible one size fits all CRMs and join industry leaders like 11 Labs, replicate modal and more to scale your startup to the next level. You can try Attio for [e-mail] that's attio.com.