‍SFG 6: Tony Jamous on leveling the global employment playing field

‍

In this episode of the Startup Field Guide podcast, Sandhya Hegde chats with the founder and CEO of Oyster HR, Tony Jamous. Oyster is a global employment unicorn that helps companies hire employees and contractors anywhere in the world. In this episode, Tony takes us through Oyster’s product-market fit journey.

‍

‍Be sure to check out more Startup Field Guide Podcast episodes on Spotify, Apple, and Youtube. Hosted by Unusual Ventures General Partner Sandhya Hegde (former EVP at Amplitude), the SFG podcast uncovers how the top unicorn founders of today really found product-market fit.

‍

If you are interested in learning more about some of the themes and ideas in this episode, please check out the Unusual Ventures Field Guides on honing your founding insightearly-stage hiring and leading through uncertainty 

TL;DR

• The founding insight: Tony and his co-founder had a mission to help any company in the world tap into the global talent pool.
• Early design partners: With no experience in HR in global employment, Oyster needed to be tested with people who could forgive if mistakes were made, so the earliest design partners were friends. 
• Iterating to product-market fit: Tony and his team created a successful remote-first company by deliberately setting metrics to measure performance, increasing transparent communication, and providing the maximum amount of psychological safety for people to be themselves and be as productive,  creative, and effective as possible.
• Key learnings from starting two companies: 1) being mission-driven is more powerful than being vision-driven; 2) positioning matters, establish that first before the product; 3) be intentional; build the best team as early as possible, and 4) culture is a strategy. 
• Advice to early-stage founders: 1) Align what you do with what you believe in, 2) shoot for a very big market in case you need to pivot, 3) learn from your competition instead of getting caught up in the comparison game, and 4) invest in your people and your culture so they thrive. 

‍

‍

Episode Transcript

Sandhya Hedge 

Our guest today is a serial founder and the CEO of Oyster, a global employment unicorn that helps companies hire employees and contractors anywhere in the world. Before Oyster, Tony Jamous was the founder of Nexmo, a Twilio competitor that was acquired by Vonage in 2016 for $230 million. So please say hello to our listeners, Tony.

‍

Tony Jamous

Hi, everyone! Thanks for having me here.

‍

Sandhya Hedge 

We are so excited to have you here and talk both about Oyster as well as Nexmo. I think we have so much to learn from both experiences! I'm really excited about this episode. So let's maybe start with the Oyster story first. First of all, congrats on building a unicorn company in such a short time! That's never as easy as it looks from the outside. I think every overnight success is definitely years in the making. But you, in particular, started Oyster right in April 2020, as COVID was shutting the world down. So tell us more about how it happened.

How Oyster was started

‍

Tony Jamous

So the story of Oyster started even at Nexmo. When I was at Nexmo, we employed people in 45 countries; we built this API platform that connects the world in terms of communication, technology, messaging, and voice; and I was able to witness the power of distributed work. Not only are you able to tap into an amazing talent pool and create massive amounts of diversity in the business, but you can change people's lives in many countries. So when I left this company, the company — as you said — was merged with Vonage. It went public and was acquired last year for $6.5 billion by Ericsson.

‍

When we wanted to start a new business, I knew that it had to be a globally distributed business, but I also wanted to build a business that aligns with how I see the world going. I wanted it to align with what I believe in, and I believed in the power of software to deliver impact. And for me, the impact here was important when it came to the impact of inequality reduction.

‍

So when I started looking for a solution on how to build this global employment workforce, I couldn't find a solution back in mid-2019. The more I dug into that problem, the more I realized that if you use software to make global hiring as easy as local hiring, not only can you build a big business in no time, but also you can change the world in terms of brain drain reduction and access to opportunity from many countries.

‍

In January 2020, with my cofounder Jack Mardack, we decided that not only would our company be globally distributed, but its mission would be to help any company in the world tap into the global talent pool. Its mission is to enable any talent or knowledge worker around the world to think as if “the world is our oyster” when they're looking for a job. And that's how we started Oyster in January 2020. We raised $4 million, which hit our bank account in March that year and I think the day the money hit our bank account, we all went into lockdown. And we realized that we had to go really, really fast; that we were in a race against a natural thing called the coronavirus, and we needed to achieve product market fit as fast as possible.

‍

Sandhya Hedge

And tell us more about the inspiration there. How much of the Nexmo’s team was actually international? And what was your experience like trying to hire internationally and globally at Nexmo?

‍

Tony Jamous

Yeah, so, we hired in 40-45 countries. We had to because we had all these relationships with telecom carriers around the world and we had to open local markets. And since we were a public company, we needed to meet compliance requirements. So we needed to go and open entities and hire lawyers, accountants, local payroll providers, and local benefit providers. We spent millions of dollars building our own Oyster inside of Nexmo. And it wasn't even our business model. And we failed to deliver on a great employee experience and we failed to deliver on scale for . So really, the experience was traumatizing, and I felt that I don't want to go through that again as a founder.

How Oyster iterated to product-market fit

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

Got it. Makes sense. Now that you bring it up, even though Nexmo is a small company, you needed such a big global presence to support all the carriers so you experienced the problem that most people try to avoid when they are a smaller startup. What did you see happen differently after April, as you know, the location was no longer a criteria for hiring for almost any software company, especially even if it’s a big company or if it’s a startup — what did you see happen in the market and how did you think about the first one or two important problems to solve?

‍

Tony Jamous

Yeah, so the first is we really wanted to experiment with market demand. We started a website and our marketing communication–even before having products–but you also have to build the product and the product we built is not only software but it's also employment infrastructure. We started automatically building the workflows to be able to employ somebody in a given country.

‍

But then we had to build the employment infrastructure. We had to set up entities in countries to be able to employ people. And back then, governments were shut down. In many countries, we had to physically go to a local government office to set up an entity. So we could not do it outside of countries where you can do it online, such as the UK or Australia, or Canada.

We were forced back then to pivot the business very quickly into working with partners that already have entities in these markets. We went and acquired a small company that had built these relationships with local partners to help us jumpstart the business very quickly. They had very few customer relationships, but they had built a network of partners.

‍

And at the same time, I had to build a team. So one of our first hires was our general counsel. Typically you don't do that in startups, right? But this is employment law. So this is where I hired Miranda, one of our very first employees. And also, one of our very first employees was Rhys, who was the head of remote operations because we wanted to design a way of operating remotely that not only worked for us, but we could share publicly with the world as the world transformed into moving into working from anywhere.

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

So in some sense, you're building in public because you're trying to help other people navigate the same situation you were in.

‍

Tony Jamous  

Yeah, it's part of our mission. We believe that the more we can share with the world on how to build successful remote companies, the more remote companies will be successful. So this is very similar to the Tesla Model. Tesla open-sourced their software because they wanted to create a category of electrical cars. And we want to do the same. We're creating a category of global employment platforms and that's why we're open-sourcing a lot of our learnings and templates with the world.

‍

Oyster’s approach to building its MVP

‍

Sandhya Hedge 

Makes sense. Going back to this idea of product market fit — which is at some level is what this show is all about — how do you think, as a serial founder, about the concept of product market fit? What do you look for, what is the minimum viable product? Who is the customer? What are the elements you look for that gives you confidence that you have found it?

‍

Tony Jamous  

Before starting my first company, I was in sales. Before that I was in software development, but I wasn't in B2B (business-to-business) sales. So for me, when I started Nexmo, my first company, the question was “how can I get the fastest path to repeatable revenues?” And we use that at Nexmo, and at Oyster, but the fact that the move to remote work was done so quickly, we didn't really need to do that too quickly.

‍

But at Nexmo, we essentially built an API that was customer-facing that had the minimum requirement for developers to implement messaging into the application, it was a few lines of code. But the back end was very manual and outsourced. So I remember we didn't even have prepay on the platform and the customer thought they could have credit with us. But we couldn't stop them if they went above the credit. So I developed an Excel macro that would wake up every three hours, and I’d run it to check to see if any of the customers had crossed their limit.

‍

So I didn't sleep much in the first few weeks of setting up Nexmo because we didn't have these prepay mechanisms that were enabled to help us manage the business. So it's really about “how do you get the fastest way to revenue?” And from a customer standpoint, it's really about the network that you have in B2b sales. It's mostly the network we had when we started Nexmo and many of them were resellers. So it was really about okay, well, we knew that we could jumpstart the revenue. We wanted to show momentum in the revenue very, very quickly early on, to help us prove to investors that there is a significant business opportunity.

‍

Oyster’s approach to customer discovery

‍

Sandhya Hedge 

Make sense? And what do you — so often I meet with Founders who will get positive feedback on a sales pitch or an idea and feel like okay, yes, they are leaning in; and especially when you don't have a sales background; you haven't gone through the pain of an extended sales cycle with maybe eventually resulting in a no; you don't have the intuition to differentiate between someone being positive versus someone being excited and leaning in — how do you tell when you are pitching a customer with new ideas, something that maybe doesn't exist yet, what do you look for to decide yes, this is what we should build, this person would really buy it?

‍

Tony Jamous  

Yeah, so I think you need to have friendly customers in the beginning, even before you start developing your product, you're gonna want to do discovery calls. That's what we've done at Oyster. Before the pandemic, we sat down with a number of distributed companies back then, the buffer, and the automatic, and in vision of the world, some of them became our investors at Oyster, and we selected to understand of course what are the challenges, what are the most challenging things you're facing today? And they told us the most challenging thing we face today is how to employ and care for and pay people around the world. So that's why it enabled us to zoom in, first and foremost, on one of the use cases of distributed work or remote work, which is pay and employ and give benefits. So really through customer discovery calls and meetings, it helps you to fine-tune that value proposition. But also I want to say, once you start once you're in the game, and you're starting to create a pipeline and you know prospects, you want to diversify as much as possible in terms of number of segments and number of use cases because you don't know in the beginning what’s going to work. So you want to hack the market, you want to actually because, yes, you might have some ideas of what or how the market will evolve, but you want to get the data and you want to be able to test multiple use cases; multiple customer segments; and multiple personas; and then over time, build your ideal customer profile.

‍

How Oyster found its ICP

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

Do you have any examples from maybe either Oyster or Nexmo or both for like use case hypotheses that didn't work out? You're very optimistic about them but for some reason they didn't work out — we'd love to hear those.

‍

Tony Jamous  

Yeah. So for instance at Oyster, we realized that trying to sell a global employment platform to a multinational corporation didn't work in the beginning because they already had their lawyers and they already had established entities. So very quickly we realized that our early adopters are smaller companies, startups that don't have the time or the resources and they're facing talent shortage against the bigger corporation that already Google can hire developers in Ghana, because they have an entity, they have an office, but if you're a startup in Paris or New York, it's really hard for you. So we make it as easy, if not easier, for you to hire these engineers in Ghana than Google. And so this is an example of Oyster.

In terms of Nexmo, we realized that ...So we started first with the resellers to jumpstart the revenues. So we had revenues, we didn't have a lot of margins, but we had a lot of revenues and volume that enabled us to test the platform; test the scalability of the service; and then what we realized that there was, at that time, there was this explosion of messaging apps: WhatsApp, LINE in Japan, WeChat in China, Viber, and so on and so forth; and we realized that that segment would perfectly fit what we’re trying to achieve, which is one API for mentioning voice for global distribution, they didn't want to go, these were developers. They didn't want to go and talk to carriers for the phone and AT&T and spend months negotiating and using some old-school technology. They really wanted API technology. And they have a lot of users very quickly. So we, when we signed one of these players, we went on, and we drilled into that segment, and we own like 90% market share in six months, and that turbocharger revenue from 2 million to 12 million in one year.

‍

Sandhya Hedge 

Got it, so you point to kind of the repeatable sale, you have one value prop which resonates very clearly with the whole segment and that accelerates it. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe shifting gears a little bit to just kind of milestones along the PM fed journey. For Oyster for instance, you already knew you had to move super fast. How long did it take you from getting the team together to actually having a product in the hands of your first customer?

‍

Tony Jamous  

Less than six months from writing in the investment memo. In January 2020, we incorporated, we wrote the investment memo and to having our first revenue and first customer and they were friends, our first customers were friends because we couldn't like, we were really new to the business like we had no experience in HR in global employment. So we really needed to test with people who can forgive us if you make mistakes, and mistakes we made!

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

Make sense. And how did you think about the phases of company growth after that? How long were you working with friendly customers/design partners versus what did you look for to say, ‘Yes, this product is now mature enough that I can go have a conversation, sell it to someone I have never met before, and I’ll feel good’?

‍

Tony Jamous  

It took us a while because global employment is very complex and every time you open up a new market, it's like you have to learn all the employment laws and regulations and payroll best practices and HR guidance. So luckily, we hired people that were, at the beginning, that were really, they could know how to take from zero to one very quickly. So what they do is we sign a customer, and we go learn as fast as possible. And then the fact that we relied on these partners in these markets. In the beginning, we thought no, we don’t want to be relying on these partners. We wanted to set up our own infrastructure everywhere. But the pandemic forced us to rely on partners, it became a source of knowledge for us. So we created, very quickly, this knowledge capture mechanism in the business that enabled us to make it repeatable on a country-by-country basis. So we had to build a strong operation early on to capture that knowledge and be able to scale very fast.

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

And how did you prioritize which countries to activate? Was it based on your existing customers or the customers that were in your kind of target list and you were going after?

‍

Tony Jamous  

It's really the demand, so we were able to measure the demand where companies want to hire, and we ranked these countries and that was our roadmap. And that will actually be developed like a dynamic model. The demand changes the roadmap in real-time. And so it was always helpful for us to know where we're going and how fast we need to go.

Key learnings from starting two companies 

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

Got it. Super helpful. I'm curious given that Oster was your second company. What did you do differently and the same? What were some of your big learnings from Nexmo that you brought to Oyster, and you feel maybe differently this time?

‍

Tony Jamous  

Yeah, there are four things that I changed from the next month or so. The first one is Oyster is a mission-first company and Nexmo was a vision-first company. I spent much more time in Nexmo thinking about the vision. How are we going to disrupt telecommunication with API's? How can you make communication programmable? And that worked well; I mean, today when you look at it, communication is peak programmable and we achieved that, but when I wanted to do Oyster, it was really about connecting it with my own mission in life. I wanted to align with what I do with what I believe in, because I came to a phase in my career when that's what was really important to me to be able to have the courage and the strength to do another startup. So, by going through a process of connecting what I do with what I believe in, and it turned out to be something that everybody believed in in the world. It became a massive strength to attract top talent; to create affinity with customers; to create a brand that is aligned with how the world is going; so being mission-driven is definitely much more powerful than being only within Germany. That's number one.

Number two is the positioning at Oyster is 12. At Nexmo, we thought that we were going to build the best product, and this is how we're going to win. At Oyster, we believed that you're going to have the best positioning in order for us to achieve our mission. Okay, so this is the difference in how we think about it. And, indeed, I believed that at Nexmo, we had great products, but we didn't market them in a way that created a movement. At Oyster, we're doing the opposite, we're starting first by creating a movement where we believe that remote work is better for your business; better for your people; and better for the planet; and then attached to it is a platform for global employment.

The third learning is really focused on building the best team you can build as early as possible. So our next one took me a while to kind of build a leadership team. Obviously, I wasn't faced with so much pressure at Oyster in terms of time compression, but what I did differently at Oyster, the first person I partnered with was an executive search consultant named Andrew Banks who was leading one of the best executive search firms in technology. And we sat down together, and we created a plan about how to design the best executive team that is fixed for the purpose to make Oyster in this market, in this condition, widely successful. And we went on, and everyone on my team has been found through a very selective and well-thought-through process. When you look at my leadership team, they're all fit for purpose. They're here for a reason and they have this experience to move us not only from zero to one but from one to 10 and beyond.

And finally, culture is a strategy. So especially with what we're doing at Oyster, we believe by creating a culture that is highly diverse, that is creating a higher level of engagement in the business, and is aligned around that mission is what really is more important than strategy. You cannot just spend time building strategy and overlooking culture. I think you have to start with culture and then build a strategy.

‍

Creating a successful remote-first company

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

Makes sense. Well, what is an example, and maybe we'll kind of switch a little bit here to remote work, I think the fear I hear most often from founders who are not familiar with creating enough remote work orgs is culture, that they will lose the culture they have because for them culture is synonymous with kind of the energy and the vibe that they feel in an office workplace. So I love that you have such a huge focus on that. Because I think this is something that so many startups and so many larger tech companies right now are struggling with. Who are we if we don't have this kind of in-office vibe and presence to define our culture? And you mentioned that Oyster’s already employing people over 70 countries. I'm sure even your executive team comes from different countries. So how have you approached creating connection-building culture? What are the things you're doing tactically differently than you have ever done before to make that remote work playbook real? We would love to hear about that and just see what our other founders can copy you shamelessly on.

‍

Tony Jamous 

Absolutely there is, everything here is for copying. So I think first, I want to say that if you’re worrying about your culture, then that's a good thing. Then you have to do something about it, right? So when we are in the office, we can get away with weak cultures. When we move to remote work, then it becomes a forcing function to be deliberate, to think about culture. And that's why distributed companies will be the best companies of tomorrow because they're gonna create cultures that enable people to be successful no matter where they are. And so what we do at Oyster is, as I said, earlier, we start with a strong mission, that is that is truly across the company, then we, we deliver, we deliberately designed our culture, so through values, so we have our values that are specifically designed to support our business, every company will have a different value system. So we spent time working with experts and consultants, there are a lot of consultants that help design that early on. What do you want this culture to be? And then also part of that culture, culture is not only the values, culture is also how you measure results becomes part of your culture. And as a remote company, since you don't see people in seats, which usually we confuse, presence with performance or in the office, and that messes up performance numbers and the productivity numbers. Here, when you are remote, you don't see people working, so you have to know that people are delivering results. So you have to shift from assessing presence to assessing outputs and outcomes. So, part of our culture is an objective key result process, where we design the objective of the company, from a high level, a company level, to the team level to the individual level. And we make it clear to everyone in the company what success is. So people can relax about whether they're performing well or not performing well. Thirdly, culture is values, how we measure results, and how we set results. Thirdly, how we work together becomes part of your culture. Again, when you're in the office, you don't have to think about how you want to collaborate or communicate, you just go to the office, and you do meetings, go into meeting rooms, and you go to your cubicle or your desk, and then you type on your computer, right. And that's what makes up the office experience. So when you are remote, you have to be deliberate about how you design how you work. So at Oyster we call it for the sun, we branded our way of working. Which is a combination of asynchronous and synchronous practices. We have defined the tools we use and the rules we use this tool for and how you do meetings. So for instance, on Tuesday, before my exact meeting, I spent two hours listening to video content from all my teams and got the update of what happened in the business in the last week. And everybody has access to the same information. So you have transparency and synchronization, that makes the executive team meeting the most effective meeting that I've ever been to. Even our board meetings happen like that. Our board meetings, we do produce the content in advance. We produce the videos, the content we ask our board members to engage with the content 48 hours in advance. And then we spend the board meeting diving deeper into questions and strategic issues. So these are the most effective board meetings I've ever been to. And lastly, a strong culture is also about social connection. So you have to also be prescriptive in how you connect socially. So you have to engineer experiences that get people together, whether virtually or in person in order to sustain that connection and nurture the connection. I would say you also need to have, you need to evolve with a leadership style you need to like again, if you're in the office and you're a weak leader, you can get away with it. If you're a remote leader, you have to invest in your leadership style, you have to become a better leader through things like transparent communication. Things like truly caring about what people feel working with you and being on your team and provide the maximum amount of psychological safety for people to be themselves and be as productive and creative and effective as possible.

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

Can you elaborate more on how you have, like, what are some of the steps you have taken or the activities that you do on a regular basis, maybe some of the daily, weekly ritual habits in the company that really drive that element of making everyone feel seen, heard, cared for, appreciated, and even help people build relationships with each other? Because I think that's the other thing people are really concerned about with Zoom-first meeting vectors, you don't really do a lot of casual conversation on Zoom. You kind of become much more transactional, less relationship building as opposed to you getting lunch together. Right? That's an often quoted example. Could you share more about what are some of the activities you have found have been truly effective for Oyster? 

‍

Tony Jamous  

Yeah, I'm going to give you a list of activities we have and it's still always a work in progress and improvement. And so, every Zoom meeting we always start with a social conversation, right? So we don't jump right away into the meeting. And the meetings are very well defined in that we always have content and events, asynchronous content that we need to learn why we're here and what we're trying to do so there's less anxiety to jump right away into the meeting, but gives us room and space to have a conversation about personal connection conversation. And secondly, I call them my one-to-ones with my direct reports because we are asynchronous first. So essentially, I know the result of that team member before I talk to them. I already received their video and already looked at the content, already interacted with the meeting before the meeting. And then the meeting, it's really about me being there for them, and listening to them and trying to support them and help them with what they’re trying to do. So I call them heartbeat meetings where I'm present to their needs and not concerned about, ‘Hey, did you hit that number?’. And other examples are we use Kona, which is one of our mutual preferred companies. That is an app on Slack that enables us to measure sentiment. So every day, I get a ping from Kona to ask me how I'm feeling and get that from the whole company. And we have a dashboard and it's measuring how people are feeling, and based on that we can decide whether to take actions or not. We have an application called Donut that creates random social connections with people. And we also meet in person from time to time, right? So I believe that we can work effectively together, we can know that we can trust each other without meeting in person. But meeting in person enables us to feel that we can trust each other. And so every four - five months, I design a leadership team meeting with my team, and we meet somewhere to get stuff done. But most importantly, it is designed to sustain this connection and feel trust. Unfortunately, we couldn't do the company retreat this year because of the economic crisis. Breaks my heart. But we encouraged teams and people to connect on a global basis as much as they can.

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

And what do you look for in terms of data points, evidence to say, ‘Okay, this is working. It's not just me as a CEO hoping it's all on track, but it's actually working. The results are there.’ Well, what are the data points you look for?

‍

Tony Jamous  

You have to measure culture. So we use an engagement survey that not only gives us a pulse on what's happening in the business, we can do it on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis, but also benchmark us to other VC-backed companies. And we are top 2% of all VC-backed companies in terms of engagement with a company that has no offices that grew from zero to 700 people in two and a half years and is in 70 countries with over 100 nationalities. The other area we measure is things like our Glassdoor review, we are 4.9 out of five as we speak today on Glassdoor and we also measure our employer brand attractiveness. We receive 13 job applications per month. These are people who want to work for Oyster, believing that this model of work is better for them and better for business.

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

That's really incredible results. Congratulations. And thank you so much for being generous and sharing what playbook is working for you. I think a lot of these things are very hard for people to imagine in isolation, let alone actually execute in reality. So it's really helpful to have you share those examples. What would be your advice for other early-stage founders today, having done this a couple of times now? If you were starting a company for the first time what would be your advice to your younger self on how you approach it? How do you go about it? What are the obvious things to get right and avoid getting wrong?

Tony Jamous’s advice to early-stage founders

Tony Jamous  

Yeah. So the first thing is, as I mentioned earlier is align what you do with what you believe in, spend some time clarifying your purpose and trying to imagine how you want the world to be different. That changes everything because the startup journey is going to be really, really hard and you want to shoot for something bigger than just making money, and that's really important for your team as well. Because if you miss a target, that is totally arbitrary. If the team joins you just to make money, then they're going to be demotivated. But if they're joining to further a mission, they know that missing a number one quarter is not the end of the day. So really aligning what you do with what you believe in. And for me, it was that I left my home country when I was 17. I’m from Lebanon, I had to go for economical reasons to develop my career elsewhere. But I really feel a sense of inequality because many people around the world, there's  great talent but don't have access to opportunity. And that drives me on a day-to-day basis and enabled me to overcome some of the lows and the roller coaster of building a high growth technology business.

Secondly, make sure that whatever you're doing, the market is massive, whether the market that exists today that you're trying to disrupt or the market you're trying to create. Really, you have to shoot for a very, very big market because the journey is going to be bumpy. So you're gonna have to probably pivot a number of times, so you need to make sure that you have the opportunity to do so on a massive market. [You] need to hire the best talent early, you should show that — when I sat down with Andrew, my advisor on an executive search, we looked at the data and the data showed that company that features a unicorn status in less than five years, what makes them unique from the other companies was that they invested more and earlier in building their executive teams. So hire the best talent early.

I would say don't get obsessed with the competition. Look at them as learning opportunities. Look at them as a way to show you your weaknesses and how you can expand your market or become stronger, but don't get too much obsessed with your competitor because it's going to create this fear culture in your business every time a competitor is launching a new product, and you're gonna have a hit in terms of engagement. So you really want to focus on what you can learn from these competitors and accept that some quarters, you'll be ahead and some quarters you'll be behind. And it's not really about feature parity. If the product with the most features was the right strategy, then Samsung would have been more powerful than Apple. So essentially, really, it's less about the number of features that the competitor has.

And last but not least, focus on the culture and people and enabling them to be successful and let go with that need of control that you feel as fast as possible. And I'm actually surprised that the people function within companies around the world, and including startups, technology startups, is not as strategic as it should be. I think it should be centered on what this company does. The Chief People Officer should report directly to the CEO and not be one or two layers down because culture eats strategy for breakfast.

‍

Sandhya Hedge  

What has been the most influential source for you, whether it's a book or someone else in terms of developing a remote-first leadership style for yourself as a CEO?  What helped you get there? If there are other people trying to go on that same journey right now and figure out how to be better CEOs for a global startup, where should they look?

‍

Tony Jamous 

I stumbled upon, recently, a book by Simon Sinek. I think it's probably his latest book called The Infinite Game that I was surprised to see that what he's preaching in the book was very similar to what we're trying to achieve here at Oyster, which is around how can you build a business that sustained the test of time, and it's here to continue after you left the business, and how being mission-driven is crucial to the success of the business. And so that's definitely a recent inspiration for me. I recommend everybody take a look at it.

‍

Sandhya Hedge 

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Tony. This was such a joy to learn more about your life experiences, the clarity of purpose you feel about your mission, and how you're building Oyster — very, very useful and so many learnings for all of us. Thank you so much for sharing them with us today.

‍

Tony Jamous 

So yeah, thank you for having me here.

‍

‍