Ian Myers
speaker
199 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Ian Myers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Good morning, Vince, or good evening.
Yeah, and the reason I think it's important to talk about college is it's something that people are increasingly not interested in doing these days. Also worried about whether or not it's going to help them get a job, not get a job, waste of money, waste of time. For me, I just wanted to spend four years studying something that was interesting to me.
So I studied literature, and a big part of my journey has just been Following what was interesting in the moment and not necessarily thinking about my career as a series of points on a line that I had to achieve, which I think a lot of people do, and it actually might have served to hurt people more than it helps them. So I studied literature in school.
I went to grad school for international policy because I loved interacting with people from all over the world. I had lived in Asia for a little while, studied abroad in Japan. And that brought me to work with a Japanese asset manager who was investing in venture funds in the U.S. And that was quite a cross-cultural experience.
Speaking Japanese, I was something of a translator, both linguistically and culturally. And that was my first exposure as someone who had a pretty mundane academic background to venture and startups and technology and flashy growth and lots of money and millions of dollars in financing. And it's hard not to... feel the allure of that world.
If anyone's been in it, been around it, seen it, it's exciting. So naturally I left banking. I went into venture capital and became an investor at a firm in New York. Spent some time there, very rewarding, met a lot of great people. But of course the thing that happens when you're young and in venture is you always look at the entrepreneurs who are building companies and you say, wow,
What am I doing? I'm just moving money around. These people are building stuff. I want to do that. It looks like so much fun. And then if you do it, you realize it's just a lot of pain and suffering until it's great and rewarding. But from the inside, it seems fun. So I took the leap. I became CEO of a company called Newspix, which I built over a year and a half before it was acquired.
Then worked for the acquiring company for a number of years doing new products. And then I launched a second company in the gaming space. It was a total failure, shut down, didn't work out the way I'd hoped. And then I launched Oceans and that brings us up to today.
Yes, I had a professor actually in my undergrad, and he was a Buddhist priest, and I took some of his classes. I studied with him at his temple. I eventually went to Japan to study more about Buddhism. It was a really interesting time of exploration for me, and it was a transformative period for sure.
You can't encounter that ideology and that level of spirituality without it leaving its mark on yourself, I think.
For me, the first thing was it helps to shape yourself as a leader. I think Buddhism has a lot, whether or not you follow it to a daily extent, has a lot of excellent teachings that are applicable to running a business. And I say that because it is at its core a method of grounding yourself. true honesty in your reality and the potential of everything around you.
And running a business, being an entrepreneur, being a founder, it's chaos. It's just chaos constantly from the second you start till the second you end, if you ever do. And having those teachings at the back of my mind, I believe have allowed me to navigate some difficult situations that have occurred and set my tone as a leader and as an entrepreneur. I also think that
Anytime you are exposed to working with a truly attempting to understand some cultural aspect that is vastly different from the one you experienced as a child or growing, or as the dominant part of the society you live in, you... Gain an ability to interact with different people from all over the world that for me as a global business person, as a global entrepreneur is incredibly important.
It's a good question. I would say probably nothing so noble as your other guests. I... I have just personality traits that have pushed me in these directions. I think for one, I find it incredibly difficult to work for other people. I'm not a good employee. I don't follow directives well. And so that sort of forced me down a path of entrepreneurship. And I had to make the most of that.
I also am not really concerned about I think there's a tendency, especially I talk to young people today. They're always comparing themselves. They'll go on LinkedIn. They'll look around. They say, oh, this person who went to my college is now a vice president here. And that's, you know, two levels ahead of me, even though we graduated the same year. My life is ruined.
I'm not on track to be successful. I worry about a lot of things in life. I'm a very anxious person. I worry a lot, but I have never really worried about my career. I have just thought, pursue the thing that is most interesting and trust your instincts and it'll work out. And so far, at times that has felt correct. And at times I felt, oh boy, I've really messed this up.
I think part of it is I'm just not really calculating whether or not this is a good idea. I really just trust myself. And there's a lot of people who love working inside, like just being there cozily, a small cog inside of a large company. And that's where they feel good and happy. And that's what makes them feel safe and successful. And they should pursue that.
For me, it was always the opposite. I wanted independence. I wanted to pursue the things that I wanted to pursue. I've always had a lot of ambition. And so I really put that at the forefront of my decisions around career and transformation. But I always want to be experiencing new things, meeting new people, going to new places.
And the only way to do that in a lot of instances is to do it yourself.
My role model.
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