Hello fintech friends,

We're back with our fifth installment of Building The Best, our podcast hosted by Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures.

In this podcast, we dive deep into the fundamentals of creating and scaling transformative fintech products by interviewing the founders themselves.

In this episode, Jillian is joined by Tony Jamous, the Founder and CEO of Oyster. Oyster is an automated global employment platform that allows businesses to hire talent in over 180 countries. It lets you hire, pay, reward, and manage talent compliantly without setting up an entity in every country you want to employ people from, with an automated hiring system and deep compliance support. Oyster has raised $224 million through its Series C at a $1 billion valuation, and employs 600+ people.

Before starting Oyster in 2020, Tony was Co-Founder and CEO of Nexmo, a communications startup acquired by Vonage and then by Ericsson.

You can give the episode a listen here:

Building the Best, with Jillian Williams feat. Tony Jamous of Oyster

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As well as here on Spotify.

🎧Building the Best, with Jillian Williams feat. Tony Jamous of Oyster by The This Week in Fintech Podcast

We’re back with our fifth installment of Building The Best, our podcast hosted by the fantastic Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures. In this podcast, we dive deep into the fundamentals of creating and scaling transformative fintech products by interviewing the founders themselves. In this episode, Jillian is joined by Tony Jamous, the Founder and CEO of Oyster. Oyster is an automated global employment platform that allows businesses to hire talent in over 180 countries. It lets you hire, pay, reward, and manage talent compliantly without setting up an entity in every country you want to employ people from, with an automated hiring system and deep compliance support. Oyster has raised $224 million through its Series C at a $1 billion valuation, and employs 600+ people.

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"I'm originally from Lebanon and I had to move to Europe and the US eventually for a better economic future, and leave my community behind. And so so I was convinced that whatever company I would start next, it would be a fully-distributed company.

In 2019, I was looking at: what is the infrastructure available? What are the tools available for companies to adopt a global hiring strategy? And I couldn't find any. What I found was what the industry calls the employer of record, that are pretty much HR service providers, highly fragmented, there are tons of them in every country, that enable you to employ somebody without the need of setting up the local entity, hiring lawyers, accounting, and payroll providers. But it wasn't really scalable. You had to pay expensive fees, it took three months to set up. And you couldn't use it for global hiring at-scale. And so I knew that if you use software to make it to make global hiring as easy as local hiring, you can not only create a new category, build a successful business quickly, but more importantly – you can change people's lives." - Tony Jamous

Jillian Williams  00:00

All right, so today we have Tony Jamous, the founder of Oyster joining us. We are extremely excited to have him here today. And Tony, what I'm really excited about to hear from you is maybe first just kind of giving us a quick intro on your background, but really kind of hearing what spurred the idea and especially founding a company in the heart of 2020. And especially when FinTech was on the rise, and was this a really hot sector. Did you always know you were going to start a FinTech company? Or did that sort of factor into the decision as well?

Tony Jamous  00:39

Well, first, hello, Jillian, and hello, everybody. Thank you for having me here on the show. And, yeah, let's talk about the idea. Let's take a step back because everything is connected, right? So before starting Oyster, I was the founder of a technology company called Nexmo which was an API business, a global API and business that went public was acquired, and so on, and so forth. And in this company, we had hired people in over 40 countries, because we needed to be close to the customer in all these countries. And I was able to witness the power of global hiring – we can not only tap into the global talent pool, but you can also change people's lives specifically in emerging economie. Myself, originally from Lebanon, I had to move to Europe and US eventually to for a better economical future, and leave my community behind. And so so I was convinced that whatever company I would start next would be it is fully distributed company. And in 2019, I was looking at, what is the infrastructure available? What are the tools available for companies to adopt a global hiring strategy, and I couldn't find what I found was an industry call employer of record, that are pretty much HR service providers, highly fragmented, there are tons of them in every country, that enables you to employ somebody without the need of setting up the local entity, hiring lawyers account and payroll providers. But it wasn't really scalable. You had to pay expensive fees, it took three months to set up. And you couldn't do the use it for global hiring at scale. And so I knew that if you use software to make it to make global hiring as easy as local hiring, you can not only create a new category, build a successful business quickly, but more importantly, you can change people's lives. They can reduce barriers to, to expanding the opportunity for people around the world, they can reverse brain drain, people like me don't have to leave their home country for better economical future. And this is where January 2020, I was convinced that a copy not only will be if redistribute company, but its mission is to help other companies that enter the global talent pool. And that's how we started at a very unique time in the future of work history.