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
It's very simple. Our company focus is on highly skilled global talent. We are an agency that hires folks mostly in Sri Lanka currently, but soon all over the world. These are highly skilled college educated professionals. They are interested in working with unique people. Companies around the world and our client base works with us to bring these people into their teams as embedded team members.
Even though they work for Oceans, they spend every day, 40 hours a week with their client, working for their clients on various things. For the long term, the roles that we mostly fill are in operations and admin, so specialized and highly skilled virtual assistants that we call EA+, marketing roles and finance roles. We have over 300 clients who work with us.
Most of them are startups, but a lot of them are small businesses, services companies like law firms and accounting firms, doctor's offices, nonprofits, creative agencies. And for them, they may have holes in their business that they don't have enough money to hire a person in New York for $200,000 a year, but they still need the work done.
And so they come to us to hire really talented, well-educated, smart people, but at a 80% less cost than it would be to hire them in the U.S.
Yeah, that's correct. And I think it's also important to mention that a lot of people that work for us, they're getting to access... We work with some of the top e-commerce companies in the world, some of the top AI startups in the world. They're getting to access... such incredible opportunities and learn from businesses that would be completely inaccessible otherwise for them.
And I think in a way we are opening doors on both sides and that is a great business. Everybody wins and I haven't built a business before where everybody was like really happy all across the board and that's been really rewarding.
The important thing to know about me is that I am inherently skeptical. I'm something of a cynic. I think the value of being involved in the tech community to a large extent, but also in many other industries around the world. And so I have a healthy amount of skepticism when I hear the tech industry's claims about AI and things like that.
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.
I would say 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 of 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, EA plus.
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