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
Most of my leadership team was 10 years plus older than me. And I worried about that sometimes, but it never manifested itself. I think nobody ever saw really age. And today I am still the youngest person on our leadership team at Oceans, but it's pretty varied and pretty diverse, both in terms of gender and in terms of age. And. It's a great thing.
You have a lot of perspectives that are extremely experienced. There is some knowledge and decision-making and instincts that just come with experience, which is another, again, way of saying age. But there's also...
the challenging the fresh the kind of new perspectives that can come from youth that are important and so i built a culture where age is not really a factor in anything that we do because that's important to me but i have experienced it before that's an interesting example you brought up about japan i actually just got back from japan myself
I would say that it is an interesting business in the sense that we field a lot of interesting questions that come across as ignorance issues. But in reality, most of the time are simply a lack of exposure or experience working with cultures abroad. Our team is over is, I think, 76 percent women. So it's a very dramatically different ratio than most companies, even at the leadership level.
That is true. And I'll give you an example of this. A guy came to us a few years ago and he said, look, I love an EA Plus. I'm really struggling with the operations, my business. I run an investment company. But he really needs to be a guy because I think my wife really wants it to be a guy. And that was a new one for me in terms of gender preferences.
We oftentimes have had clients say, you know, I would like, and this is a real thing that happens. People say they're going to be interfaced with clients. So I'm a, you know, an attractive woman. Yay. Plus.
We don't entertain the clients that come to us with those kinds of requests, because again, there's the more innocent type of preference, which is to say, look, I'd really want a guy because I, you know, I think I'm going to have problems with my wife, even though not whatever, but that's fine. We can work with that. If you're coming to us and saying, I want an attractive woman. Yay.
we're not going to be working with you because that's a ridiculous request and something of a disrespectful request as well. We value people's abilities, not how they look, not what gender they are, not where they come from, not even how old they are.
I will say we have some of our best EAs that work for us two to three years of experience, but they are smart, they are driven, they are capable, they are talented, and they deliver in ways that some of our folks that have ended 12 years of experience don't.
The only thing I would say around age is we have actually found that in a lot of instances, because our clients are startups, if people have been in the workforce for too long, i.e. 15 to 20 years, they will not succeed in the environment that they will be in, not because they're not talented, not because they aren't smart and hardworking, but because if they are not successful,
very familiar with using a huge suite of online technologies and working in a fully remote environment, it's incredibly difficult to adjust. And that does affect their ability to do well in oceans.
Yeah, as a default, we don't entertain preferences. People don't get to come to us and say, look, I want this gender or that gender. I want this type of thing or that type of thing. They come to us with a job description and we provide talented individuals who are capable of filling that job description now.
They might come with a years of experience preference, and I think that is legitimate because it allows for an approximation of knowledge and skills that no other metric can really capture. That being said, we might say, look, I know you asked for eight years of experience, but here's someone with four who should really be able to do this job, and that's the person we will present.
I would say, first of all, I was incredibly privileged to be able to just go to school to study literature because I like literature. I don't think a lot of people have that option. And so if you can do that, great. If you can't, which I think is most people, they're really thinking about what is going to pay my bills because college is so expensive.
To your international listeners, they may not be familiar with this problem. It is a definitively United States issue that the expense of a four-year degree is close to a quarter of a million dollars. more. You're suddenly looking at this, okay, it's costing me $250,000 to go to college. I can't come out and be making something that pays me $30,000 a year, taking me 10 years to pay this back.
It's a uniquely US phenomenon. My advice to people is
is this is a really uncertain time traditional career paths are broken people are not just going to a four-year degree and then going to work their way up at a company and getting a nice salary and buying a house and doing all the things that used to be the milestones of success and you shouldn't go into this with the expectation that is going to be true
I also don't like to push people towards entrepreneurship. I think very few entrepreneurs succeed, and it can be a really damaging endeavor. It can cost people money. It can cost people relationships. It can cost people, most importantly, time. So I don't really recommend that people do that just carte blanche. What I would say is... Most importantly, don't be afraid of taking the wrong step.
That's the thing I see most frequently in young people today. They get analysis paralysis and they look at the world and they're trying to plot their career out 10 moves ahead. And I will tell you that used to work. There used to be a framework where you could say, okay, I'm going to go to this college. I'm going to get this degree. I'm going to go to law school. I'm going to work at this firm.
I'm going to achieve this. And if I just hit these milestones, I know what my life will be like. We live in an age of chaos and upheaval that is not anything familiar to any of us that are younger than 50 or 60 years old.
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