The State of Global Hiring - with Tony Jamous, Founder and CEO Oyster HR

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Tony Jamous, the founder and CEO of Oyster HR. We'll be covering four main topic areas with Tony today. First, the sustainable CEO, the what, the why, and the how.
Second, why global employment is so important to the world's economy. Third, the reality of global employees. It may just surprise you. And fourth, the top challenges in implementing a global employee strategy. Tony, would you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Tony Jamous** (1:18)
Hello everybody. And thank you for having me Ray here. A little bit of my journey. I was born in Lebanon. I had to leave my home country in my teen years to the West, to France, the UK, the US.
And I started my first technology company 13 years ago was a company called Nexmo. But I grew to 100 millions of revenue in the first five years, took it public on the New York Stock Exchange by merging with Vonage, which led to the acquisition by Ericsson for $6.5 billion. And then a few years ago, actually in January 2020, I decided to start Oyster, which is a global employment platform, on a mission to reduce inequality, reverse brain drain by democratizing access to global job opportunity.
And that enabled me to build an organization that is distributed in 65 countries and enabled me to come back as close as possible to home. I currently live in the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

**Ray Rike** (2:17)
Well, based upon your upbringing, you truly are a global citizen of the world. So it tells me a little bit about your philosophy and we're going to cover some of that today. But let's kind of talk about something that I noticed in your LinkedIn profile.
It doesn't really talk about building two billion dollar plus companies, which you've done successfully. It talks about this concept of a sustainable CEO. Can you share with the listening audience why this is such an important topic to you?

**Tony Jamous** (2:47)
The sustainable CEO is really about taking care of yourself as a leader first. So you can take care of others because as you are on the top of organizations, people look up to you and they see how are you living? How are you feeling working in the organization? And they try to mimic you. So if you burn out, they're going to burn out. So you have to take care of yourself first. And I've experienced that through burning out myself in my first startup built.
It was very tough on me emotionally to get there.
And I promised myself that whatever business I would do, I will take care of myself first. And that led me to start Oyster because Oyster is first and foremost a fully distributed company in 65 countries. We work remotely and remote work has had a positive impact on my mental health and on my well-being. And I role model that in the company. And I want my team to also be healthy and happy working with me.

**Ray Rike** (3:52)
And would you say that at Nexmo, that really wasn't the same Tony Jamous, it wasn't your persona there, you were more of that hard charger burned a candle at both ends?

**Tony Jamous** (4:04)
Well, I mean, it's a journey of discovering who you are, right? So you have to keep removing the layers of illusions and to really start to understand over time who you really are. That journey of self-discovery is very important to me as I grow, as I mature, I start recognizing that actually who I thought I was, it wasn't the reality, it was an illusion. And really driving to really understand who my true self is. And we created an environment at Oyster that allow that because we default to psychological safety. We want people to feel safe working with us so they can be their true self.
And that had positive impact on the engagement level, on the mental health of people that we work with.

**Ray Rike** (4:54)
Interesting. So you can really, it's a palpable, not only feeling, but you see increased productivity because of this kind of evolved approach.