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
And my feeling is undeniable that the technology is impressive and important. I would argue that as with most great technologies, The adoption curve is going to be much longer than people expect. If you look back toward everything from VR to autonomous vehicles, the predictions around when it would change the world were always too short. I think we are at a stage where
AI is going to be an augmentative solution for much longer than people think before it is a full solution in any part of the roles that we fill for businesses. That doesn't mean there aren't going to be specific roles that can be done fully by AI, but I suspect that it will be augmentatives for longer than people think.
Yeah, and I also think not only is the adoption curve longer than people expect, there's different types of businesses that will adopt faster than others. If I look at some of our most cutting-edge startup clients, they are already using AI in very sophisticated ways inside their businesses.
If I go look at some of our clients that own landscaping businesses or that own storage companies, they're not really using it at all. So... I think what we will see is a fast adoption by the always fastest adopters, which are startups, but a much longer tail adoption for other businesses over time.
It's an interesting question. I have experienced it at various points in my career, and I'm also not experienced at all in various points in my career. So an example of this is I worked a lot in Japan, and the Japanese professional structure is extremely hierarchical. Your age is almost the most important thing about you.
Your ideas, your initiative, your drive, your success, your track record plays a somewhat minor role in your ability to succeed inside large organizations relative to tenure, which is another way of saying age. And so...
in societies like that i encountered something that caused me frustration and put me on the path to entrepreneurship which was you're not looking at my ideas and my results you're looking at how old i am that was something i couldn't personally tolerate Now, I became a CEO when I was 26. I had a team of 30 people by the time we exited the company.
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.
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