Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay, everybody, thank you for coming back to the podcast. Today I have a really interesting conversation with Tony Jamis, the CEO and now the chairman of Oyster, a company who we partner with. But we're not going to talk about that too much. We're going to talk about what they do in the EOR market, which is a really exciting new market. Tony, thank you. Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Oyster.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Hey Josh, thank you for having me today and let me first start introducing myself. So, as you said, I'm now the executive chairman and founder of Oyster, but my story started. The Oyster story started actually when I left my home country, Lebanon. I was born in Lebanon. I had to leave when I was in my teenage years to France to study computer science.
And then after a number of years, actually in 2010, I started my first unicorn company and the API software space that I took public on the New York Stock Exchange, which eventually was acquired by Ericsson. And I took some, some time off in between and I was really focused on how can I be at service in this world. And that led me to Oyster, which is a global employment platform, on a mission to reduce wealth inequality by democratizing access to to global job opportunities. And just to give you some data point, there are 85 million knowledge workers in emerging economies. Sorry, there's 85 million knowledge job shortage in the West. And now increasingly AI enabled talent is a massive shortage leading to $8.5 trillion economical loss. While at the same time there's hundreds of millions of knowledge workers coming into the workforce, mostly from emerging economies that are ready to jump on these opportunities. There is an economist called Brian Kaplan from George Mason University.
He wrote a book called Open Borders. And in his book he argues if you remove the concept of borders from talent mobility, you can triple the world economy.
So that's why I started Oyster in November 2019. The mission to reduce inequality by making planet Earth one employment market. And that led us to develop a global employment platform. At the core of it is an employer of record model that is software enabled to help companies hire anyone, anywhere.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Wow, Tony, that is really an interesting way to think about what you're doing. I don't think too many CEOs of HR related companies have that kind of a vision. So what is it that the EOR does that solves the problem of one global employment experience? I know a lot about it, but I don't know if most people know what an ERR is.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: Essentially the model is companies can employ, let's say 50 employees in 50 different countries through one platform, one payroll, one invoice, one payment. So in the past without this technology they have to go country by country setting up legal entities, finding payroll providers, benefit providers, guessing how much they want to pay that person fairly and.
And they can do all of that and still fail to create a homogeneous fair employment experience across these borders. So this is a problem we solve. So what we did is we built this employment entities in 150plus countries and we use software and increasingly AI to actually make that experience homogeneous and seamless across any country in the world.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: When I first learned about the space, did the concept or the word EOR exist when you started?
[00:03:54] Speaker B: It did exist actually. This model exists for 50 years. But before the pandemic it was mostly like a transactional professional service type of businesses that costed a fortune were can only be afforded by Fortune 500 companies. What happened with the pandemic is the market went down market from the enterprise to the smaller and mid sized companies. Arm moves this technology now they can act like a Google and Microsoft and hire the best anywhere in the world operationally.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: When a company wants to use Oyster and go global or hire globally or integrate their global workforce. Exactly what do you guys do and how does it happen?
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Yeah, so essentially the customer, typically the HR team, they go on our platform, they open an account and the first thing they do is they start an onboarding process to onboard Mary in Athens they found this amazing software developer, they want to hire her.
So the platform enable them to generate a compliant employment contract that is designed specifically for Mary that can give her the salary, it guides them on how much they should pay her fairly, what should go into the contract in terms of benefits. And Mary is onboarded, she goes on the platform, she signed the contract, she becomes an employee of Oyster Greece technically. And every month we process a payroll as a, as a normal payroll. And that company can do that in over 150 countries in one simple experience.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: In my mind I think of it as a, as a new type of a. What we used to consider a PEO for a US company, but at a global level.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: So. So there are other companies who've done this for a long time, there's other companies who do it with a lot of technology and some of them are pretty hyper competitive companies, as you know. I won't mention any names, but the ultimate value is not eliminating bureaucracy or staying out of legal trouble. It's more strategic. So tell us about this new idea of really becoming a strategic workforce platform. Strategic workforce partner yeah.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: So to answer that question, we have to look at what, what's happening in the world. Right. So today, what started as a compliance hack during the pandemic to help companies onboard remote workers that are stuck in specific countries.
It became a strategic tool for organization to, to scale their talent acquisition across borders. Organization are faced with AI talent shortage, with geopolitical pressures and uncertainty.
They need to diversify their sources of labor across countries. There is some immigration rule that are getting more difficult. We've seen what's happening in the H1B in the US so all of that is driving organization to look at this global employment platform, or EOR as a strategic asset. However, many of these vendors that we compete with are either trying to fully automate through software, which works for obviously an employee, important part of the value chain, but they remain the human aspect that is so critical in, in this, in this business. Because you're hiring Mary on the other side of the world, you want to treat her like a human being. You want to make sure that she has the right benefit, she has the right salary. And also there's other vendors that were the professional service oriented vendors that are very service driven, but they are not technology enabled. And therefore the experience is much more complicated to scale. It can work in two or three countries, but as you scale it becomes, would say not as beneficial as doing it yourself.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: In some sense you're sort of building a company that's both a high touch professional services or employee services company or recruiting company or whatever you call that, and a global HCM platform and payroll company, is that correct?
[00:07:44] Speaker B: All combined in one at service of enabling you to develop a global workforce with few clicks.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: So if I think about our situation or other companies like us, and there's lots of companies bigger than us that are in the same situation, you have a lot of management issues on, not just what are the regulatory issues, what are the cultural issues in different countries, the work practices, the labor laws that you may not be aware of, vacation, et cetera, holidays, all that stuff. And then how do we run a global company where we need to just have management practices, HR practices, performance management practices, training across a global company. How much of that do you guys want to bite off? Are you trying to do all of that? Where does the line begin and end for you?
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great, great question, great question. Our intention is to make it as seamless as possible to the customer while making sure they are as compliant as possible. So these are the two kind of, I would say opposing dimensions, right?
That our Platform is specialized in addressing. So in some countries we take on some of these compliance responsibilities and in some countries some of it might be passed to the customer. But this is where the technology comes in and enable the customer to have complete awareness of what are the compliance risk that they might be facing. And our platform has compliance capabilities built in. So example in France, let's take an example in France and France is known for being a difficult country to, to terminate someone.
Our platform does remind the customer before the probation period that the probation period is coming and get them to confirm if they want to extend or not. So we have all these alerts and capabilities that keep the customer as safe as possible and keep the employee as happy as possible.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: So if, if, if your customer, the employer, you, well you're actually the employer of these, right? Even though your customer is using you to get the talent they need. If your customer says to you, well I don't care what the are in France, I want them out of here, what do you do?
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Yeah, well this is where, this is where, this is, this is where the human. Very typical case.
This is where the human touch is important, right? This is where technology is not going to solve everything. These are like edge cases that can be very sensitive and can be very costly for the customer. So we need to come and advise the customer and we have a people service team that does that as part of the service that we offer to make sure the customer has the support they need to make compliant and human centric decisions.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Let me ask you a couple of sort of higher level questions about you and your approach to this. You sound like you're a technology person. You've been very successful in the technology space with the API company. All of a sudden you come over into the human capital domain. I've been doing this for almost 40 years. It's very complicated. It's a giant market with millions of competitors. You don't realize that when you get into it, but then when you get into it you realize it's very strange. What are your observations on doing business with HR in the HR domain compared to your prior life?
[00:10:45] Speaker B: Look, it's very comple. Complicated. It's sometimes very painful and that's why it had to be emission driven. The thing I do and I say and every extra hour I put into this work is because we are reducing inequality. 42% of the team member we have on our platform are from emerging economies. Oyster is a B corp and we are improving the life and the livelihood of these people. We are sending hundreds of millions of foreign direct investment into emerging economies every year. That's why it's worth doing. That's why it's worth doing. It is not easy, it is challenging to be an entrepreneur in the HR tech space, but it's absolutely worth it.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: I totally agree with you. It's. There's a lot of mission driven reasons to do what we do. I'm. I'm in the same boat, but for people that have made a lot of money or have been very successful in the tech industry to get into this, sometimes they jump out as fast as they jumped in. Are you loving it?
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Look, I'm loving it because I don't need to be the most expert in HR related issues. I need to find the right people in my team that they are. And to give you an example, the first hire I've done was Miranda, our general counsel. Like when would you start a tech startup and the first person you hire is a general counsel? I needed these people in the beginning of the journey to be able to design a tech driven experience, but rooted in compliance and human centricity.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Well, I mean our experience working with you guys is you're just an amazing group of people and an amazing organization. So the idea of income equality and fairness and globalization is completely out of sync with everything that's going on in the world right now. Politically. What is really happening? Is the world changing from your perspective since you get to see a lot of the data here.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: I mean, absolutely. Like what's happening in the world today is confirming that this is absolutely needed. It's actually getting people to awaken that we are all one on this planet. And these borders and these geopolitical tensions are all illusions that are not real.
And we need technology to abstract them so that we get the growth moving in this world without deforestation, without digging holes in the ground and getting petrol out of it like we have. We're going to have to find alternative ways to grow and making employment more accessible for the. All these amazing talent that is available on the planet is going to be much more powerful to keep feeding this infinite growth machine than depleting natural resources. This has to happen. It will happen.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: No, I agree. It's just so odd that the political environment's going in the other direction. But. So let me ask you a question that people would probably normally ask me, but I want to hear your perspectives. If you think about the companies you work with and I don't know how well you mean that, meet the leadership teams. You probably meet a lot of the HR executives. Some companies Thrive as global companies. Some companies struggle with it for a whole variety of reasons. What would you say to a HR executive or a business leader who is already aware of the need to hire lots of global employees, but they're not sure how to really make it work? Well, what have you learned about the management culture or other strengths here that are needed?
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the first one is the belief that somebody is from another country, different culture, then they're going to struggle to adapt to. The company culture is overrated. That concern because company culture, if there's a strong company culture, then the company culture is more important than the national culture. So that's what I've observed. There's fear to do the first hire another country because of that. But people who've made that jump and they have a strong cultures, they have been rewarded with great talent, more cost effective talent and talent to be honest, that are very loyal. I mean, at Oyster internally we have retention rate that are unheard of. I mean including on the leadership team. I have people here that's been with us for more than five years, which is when we started the company. Six years, actually. Six years. Miranda General Counsel is still here.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: Well, I totally agree with that. That's certainly true. What's your conception at your level of the way DEI has been hired over the. Been treated in the United States over the last couple of years?
[00:14:59] Speaker B: Look, I find this to be unfortunate and it is very much a US issue. Like we don't, we don't see that outside the U.S. right? I mean, something going on in the U.S. that is impacting how we see this issue. But you know, the world, the world doesn't seem to have changed outside the US when it comes to, you know,
[00:15:19] Speaker A: I completely agree with you because I travel a lot. The US is a little bit of an oddball at this moment in this topic.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: Yeah, it is.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: So that's why, that's why I have hope. I have hope that, you know, this is a contained us.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: You know, no matter how bad the politics are, we're living in a global world of human beings. We are, we're all human. We're basically all the same DNA.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Ye. And also I just want to say, I want to say that what is happening in the US is also pushing companies to diversify where they hire people.
And that's a signal that as an organization you don't want to be putting all your eggs in one country. We've seen the issue with the tariffs and supply chain being impacted.
You can access global labor talent pool easily. With platforms like Oyster. And that gives you a diversification and a strategic asset for that.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Let me ask you another question that's been occurring to me over the years and I haven't vendors this, but I'm sure I will eventually. If you were SAP or Oracle or Workday or any one of those HCM providers who don't provide any of the services you do, why wouldn't they do what you do versus you trying to do what they do? If you want to really be a strategic workforce partner, you're going to have to build more and more of a sort of a global HR platform.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: I think it depends, right? It depends if the customer already have an HCM and they are happy with an SAP or an Oracle or a Workday or whatever. Our role is to integrate with them. Right.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: But you have to offer some type of a platform of your own for the medium and smaller companies.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: That's correct. I just want to say it's also for an SAP Oracle, this is a very niche business. Right. I mean it costs hundreds of million to build a global employment infrastructure, let alone the software on top that's going to federate that. So that's something that is very difficult to build in a short period of time.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Yeah. It's interesting if I think about PEO companies, I know in the case of adp, the PEO business is their fastest growing business.
These services businesses actually are growing faster than software in many areas of hr. So you're kind of in a hot spot. Globalization, technology, technology enabled. What's the role of AI for you? What do you see AI doing and how are you implementing it?
[00:17:28] Speaker B: For businesses like Oyster where it's about clients, regulation, information and human service, AI is a gift for us. Like we are deploying AI everywhere in the organization. We're shifting not only how we operate our business internally to become more efficient, but how our customer interact with our plat moving from SaaS to AI native interfaces. So AI is our priority for the foreseeable future is the number one priority. It is going to transform Oyster, become more efficient and be able to be better for our customers. Also I want to say AI is driving growth in our business because the shortage we this business is driven by tenant shortage and our customers are looking to hire AI talent and they don't find enough AI talent in the countries where they have their headquarters. They have to go elsewhere. So AI is also driving our growth.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Do you help companies with selection and sourcing and searching for talent as well as the administration and management?
[00:18:24] Speaker B: We advise them and where they need to search for a certain type of talent and increasing the AI talent. So we do some of that advisory work for them.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Okay, so if I look at some of that, let me just run through some of the things in your new strategic partner strategy. Faster global hiring, compliant employment without local entity set up, centralized governments, cost visibility and process standardization, consistent employee experience, equitable benefit and pay transparency, scalable operations, integration with HR and payroll and finance systems, workforce analytics and performance insight, predictive planning and location intelligence, operational improvement, strategic advisory. All of those are things that Oyster does.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: What do you think will differentiate you against other EORs that probably get asked for the same kind of stuff?
[00:19:12] Speaker B: So today when you work with Oyster, you get both, you get the technology and the human service as well in a way that is very, very much integrated. The market is divided with you have legacy vendors that have the white glove service, but they don't have necessarily the full enablement in terms of technology. And then you have the technology only but the technology mostly players that believe that they can automate everything. And when you have this issue of somebody you want to kind of sensitive issue you want to deal with in a country, this is where you would hope to have somebody to kind of advise you and support you to make compliant and human centric decisions.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: What would you tell a company kind of rolling their own global employment practices today, hasn't really considered a platform like you guys, but has heard of you and what would you advise them to get started and what are some of the questions they should ask?
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Yeah, so I would say talk to us, try us for, for one of your team members, assess the experience and some of the questions that they need to ask us is not only about how easy the service is or how fast the service is, but also how can we care together for that human being on the other side of the world and what's important for them.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: Great. Tony, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. You're such an interesting entrepreneur that you're bringing this human centered mission to this world of HR tech and HR services. In addition to your own innovation and creativity in the company, we also really appreciate you working with us on Galileo. You've been instrumental in us getting Galileo up to speed and it's really wonderful to work together. So I want to thank you for that and thank you for joining me on the podcast today and anybody that wants to learn more about this world of global employment. I really recomm you talk to Tony and talk to Oyster.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Thank you, Josh.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: So Tony, you've recently done some research with the Everest Group on the different modalities of EOR providers. Can you tell us a little bit about that research and what you discovered?
[00:21:01] Speaker B: Yeah. When we work with the Everest folks, what we've discovered is that customers are not only looking for technology when it comes to employing somebody on the other side of the world. They're looking for strategic advice. They're looking for people services that are there for them, especially when things go wr to get advice not only on compliance but also how to treat people in a human centric way. And what we've realized is that that's not something the market is offering. We've seen that most of the players are about speed or about automation and they're missing this critical part that makes a global employment platform a strategic partner for customers. And that's we were very happy to know this because that actually describes who we are as an organization and what we offer to our customers.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: So you in a sense built a next generation EOR from the start.
