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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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 directions 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.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
I think there's a couple of reasons. One, and I of course should get this out of the way, there's a lot of ethos in entrepreneurship and startups in America that you're, specifically that you're building something to build and to scratch and itch and do those kinds of things.
And there's a stigma around saying, hey, I saw an opportunity to make a very profitable business that would be successful and make a lot of money. And I try to tell people, you don't need to hide that as a motivation. It's okay to say, I want to be successful, not in the size of my company or the amount of funding I've raised, but that I want to build a business that makes money.
And I personally want to become successful. And I saw that opportunity here. And that's not a small part of it. In addition to that, for me, this was an opportunity to bring a lot more people who are building businesses into the unique experiences I had around working with people all over the globe.
and develop a positive viewpoint of how the interconnectivity of people and cultures can help support a business's growth in ways that were just not possible before. And so it's an exciting new frontier. There is a lot of change. But what was most interesting to me was the receptiveness of a lot of companies in America to
working with folks around the world in a way that wasn't there before and i saw given my experiences a unique role for myself and for my company to play a guide as this kind of new age of global talent dawned for the audience who might not be familiar with your firm could you give us a quick rundown of what your firm does
Showing 141–160 of 199 · page 8 of 10
← Previous
Next →