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
in these times you can't plot your course and so you shouldn't be afraid of making a wrong move you should call your instinct all what feels right and constantly be adjusting and recalculating for the things that are important to you in life and not the things that you think should be important to you or you're told are important to you
Because there might be moments in time where you feel like you made the wrong decision. You're at the wrong job. You took the wrong choice. But ultimately, a door might open as a result of that leads you to a place where you are very happy that wouldn't have opened if you hadn't made that quote unquote wrong choice. So keep moving forward.
Don't let yourself be afraid of decisions and just push the envelope and keep recalibrating as you advance through your career.
I think enough change is called chaos.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I would just say I think it's the important work you're doing here. People, too many of the podcasts that I listen to are about how to hack your way to success, are about practical advice on how to build a certain type of business, how to buy real estate. We've gotten to a place in content where
Where it's all about tactical advice that you might pay for or take a course on or something like that. And of course I'm generalizing, but I guess my point is it's refreshing to have a microphone to a topic that is more about how to guide people's lives through change. And for people listening who are experiencing a lot of change in their lives, tactical advice doesn't really help.
Hearing just holistically and qualitatively about the human experience in times of change, I think is a really reassuring thing. So I just want to applaud the work you did, Vince.
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.
Showing 61–80 of 199 · page 4 of 10
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