Chief Change Officer - The Adventures of Ian Myers: Discovering Brilliant Global Talents for U.S. Businesses

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

In this episode, I sit down with Ian Myers, founder and CEO of Oceans, a talent agency connecting skilled professionals from Sri Lanka with US companies. While Ian’s known for scaling his business from zero to $10 million in under two years, there’s much more to his story. A Tintin fan like me, Ian’s career has been shaped by his adventurous spirit—moving from the US to Japan, exploring fields from literature to banking, venture capital to entrepreneurship, and gaming to talent recruitment. His secret? Trust your instincts, gather experiences, adjust when needed, and keep moving forward. Key Highlights of Our Interview: Why Tintin Beats Tech Titans: Ian’s Unconventional Role Model “My role model is Tintin. He’s always up for an adventure, exploring new places, and embracing different cultures. That’s the kind of life I want to live.” Zen and the Art of Leadership: How Buddhism Shaped My Approach to Chaos “Buddhism has a lot of excellent teachings that are applicable to running a business… It’s at its core, a method of grounding yourself through honesty in your reality and the potential of everything around you.” Comparison Anxiety: Why Scrolling LinkedIn Might Be Ruining Your Life “I talk to young people today, and they’re always comparing themselves. They’ll say, ‘Oh, this person who went to my college is now a vice president. My life is ruined.’ I’ve never really worried about my career; I just follow what’s interesting.” Experiencing Ageism Across Cultures: From Japan to CEO at 26 “In Japan, age almost becomes the most important thing about you—your track record and success play a much smaller role. That was something I couldn’t personally tolerate.” Skeptical by Nature: Why Ian Questions AI Hype “The technology is impressive and important, but like most great innovations, the adoption curve will likely be much longer than people expect. If you look back at tech predictions, the timeline for changing the world is almost always too short.” Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Ian Myers Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. A Modernist Community for Growth Progressives World's Number One Career Podcast Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI Top 10: GB, FR, SE, DE, TR, IT, ES Top 10: IN, JP, SG, AU  1.3 Million+ Streams 50+ Countries

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chan, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation. Today, I'm chatting with Ian Myers from New York, founder and CEO of Oceans, a modern talent agency connecting high-skilled company from zero to over $10 million in revenue in under two years, or his insights into venture investment. But today, I'm not interested in those stories. They are surely impressive, but not the full picture. What fascinates me about Ian is that, like me, he is a fan of Tintin. Tintin's spirit of adventure clearly impacts Ian's own approach to work and life. From the US to Japan, from literature to banking,

venture capital to entrepreneurship, and gaming to launching a talent agency, he's been on a true journey. What is his secret to success? It's not about over-cal over calculating. It's about doing what feels right, collecting data points and experiences, adjusting course as needed, and simply forging ahead. Let's dive into the ocean of Ian Myers. Good morning, Vince, or good evening.

Good morning, Ian. Yes, it's evening time for me. Welcome to our show. You got a lot, a lot of things to share today. But let's start with your history, your background. You're fairly young. So let's start with your academic background. Then we'll move on to your professional experiences.

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 serve 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 in 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, you know, 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. Great. We'll definitely talk more about Oceans in the second part of our interview. Now, back to your personal journey. You mentioned that you actually moved aboard to Japan, to other Asian countries. And I believe you, in the grad school, Stanford in particular, you were into Buddhism, is that right? 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. Would you say that your exposure to Buddhism, philosophy, and Eastern culture has influenced your approach to investing, entrepreneurship, and even your overall life philosophy today. I'm originally from Hong Kong, so I did the opposite. I studied and emerged myself in Western culture, which has shaped a lot of how I think and conduct myself. I'm curious about the impact Eastern culture and Buddhism have had on you as an American, especially when it comes to running and building businesses.

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 through 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 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 is 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. Early on, you mentioned that you started with literature, moving on to international relations. Then you moved to Japan, got the chance to connect with someone in banking, which led you into finance and investment. From there, you learned about building businesses, and eventually, you started your own companies. Looking back at all these transitions, what would you say are the common themes or real drivers behind them? I ask this to many of my guests. Some say they've always been self-starters,

while others say life is all about learning and that each change was a way to learn something new. What about you? What are the themes or drivers that have shaped your journey so far? It's a good question. I would say probably nothing so noble as your other guests. 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

directives 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 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 not on track to be successful. I worry about a lot of things in life. I'm a very anxious person. I worry wart, but I am 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. You are like Tintin. For those listening, when I first spoke with Ian about this interview, I discovered we had a common interest, a mutual admiration for Tintin, the adventurous explorer always eager to dive into new places and experiences.

Just like Tintin, Ian's got that same curiosity and spirit for discovery. My role model. Wow. People at your age usually see Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk,

all the tech titans as their role models. Yet, you say Tintin is your role model. Absolutely. Absolutely. Your firm is called Ocean. I see that you are swimming in this vast ocean of the future of work.

What fascinates you about this industry, ocean of the future of work. What fascinates you about this industry, about the challenges in this space that made you dive into this big ocean and decide to leave your mark? I think there's a couple of reasons. One, and I, of course, should get this out of the way, 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? Specifically, who are your top clients and what kinds of problems do you help solve?

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 unique 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. So the talent supply comes from Sri Lanka and the demand for such talent is mainly from small and medium-sized service firms, particularly in the States, focusing on roles like operations and marketing. your vision is to accelerate and scale this model to connect global talent with global demand. Is that correct? 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. I've seen business models like this before, essentially redistributing skills and talent by connecting supply and demand more closely. Now, there are a couple of major trends impacting the workplace and the workforce, not just in the U.S., but globally. I imagine they affect your agency's approach in solving problems for both sides. One of the hottest topics, of course, is AI. You mentioned that you place roles like admin, operations, and marketing, areas where AI is increasingly capable of taking over tasks. So I'd like to pick your brain on how you balance this shift. How do you navigate the balance between providing human talent and accommodating clients who might prefer tech solutions over human ones? 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. 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 augmentative for longer than people think. So what you are saying is, while there are areas there is a significant demand for human contribution in the roles you place? 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. Another trend gaining momentum in the workplace is ageism. And it's not just affecting the older population. It impacts younger people too. Looking back at my early career in finance,

an industry dominated by men, and in the U.S., primarily white men, I faced challenges being an Asian woman in that space. So I'm curious about your experience. While ageism may not be your main focus, as part of the talent ecosystem, how do you approach this issue? Are you working to build a team that's not just culturally diverse, but also inclusive across age groups?

And do you have strategies in place to help people of different ages amplify their skills and talents? 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. So 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 and had a conversation with a good friend there. He's 49. He has exited his last business. And now he's building a new venture focused on closing the gender gap. He mentioned that as a man, he has enjoyed all the benefits from the system.

But he has a 17-year-old daughter, and he wants a society to be more welcoming for her when she enters the workforce. In Japan, alongside ageism, gender inequality is surely a significant issue. Now, as a company leader and founder, you have the autonomy to shape your team with your own values. But when it comes to sourcing talent for your clients, do they mainly focus on cost efficiency, just looking to fill positions at the lowest cost possible? Or among your 300 clients, do you see a genuine interest in prioritizing diversity when it comes to factors like age and gender? I'm curious how your clients approach these issues. I would say it is an interesting business in the sense that we feel a lot of interesting questions that come across as ignorance. 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% 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 EA Plus. I'm really struggling with the operations, my business. I run an investment company. But it 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. 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 EA, 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 10 to 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 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. So, it sounds like you are very aware of these issues. I understand that a big part of your value proposition centers around cost efficiency, which makes sense. But when clients express specific preferences, whether it's related to diversity, age, or other factors, do you approach each case individually to make your judgment on what's the right call?

How do you determine where to draw the line? 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.

I want to wrap up our conversation with one final question. Linking back to something you mentioned at the beginning, when I asked you to introduce yourself, you started with your academic background, which makes sense, but you also brought up an important point. Now that we're heading into 2025, many young people, those younger than you and me, are questioning the value of a degree. They wonder what kind of degree makes sense. Is it all about AI now for career prospects? Or should they pursue something

that are interesting and meaningful to them like you did for personal fulfillment? Given your experience in both the talent industry and your own educational path, what advice would you give to those listeners who are making these tough decisions about college and career paths? Should they follow their gut and passion or align their choices with the tech-driven reality we see today? I would say, first of all, I was incredibly privileged to be

able to just go to school to study literature because I like literature. I don't think a lot of people have that option. And so if you can do that, great. If you can't, which I think is most people, they're really thinking about what is going to pay my bills because college is so expensive. To your international listeners, they may not be familiar with this problem. It is a definitively United States issue that the expense of a four-year degree is close to a quarter of a million dollars. Not more. You're suddenly looking at this, okay, it's costing me $250,000 to go to college. I can't come out and be making something that pays me $30,000 a year, taking me 10 years to pay this back.

It's a uniquely U.S. phenomenon. My advice to people is this is a really uncertain time. Traditional career paths are broken. People are not just going to a four-year degree and then going to work their way up at a company and getting a nice salary and buying a house and doing all the things that used to be the milestones of success. And you shouldn't go into this with the expectation

that is going to be true. I also don't like to push people towards entrepreneurship. I think very few entrepreneurs succeed and it can be a really damaging endeavor. It can cost people money. It can cost people relationships. It can cost people, most importantly, time. So I don't really recommend that people do that just carte blanche. What I would say is, most importantly, don't be afraid of taking the wrong step. That's the thing I see most frequently in young people today, they get analysis paralysis. And they look at the world and they're trying to plot their career out 10 moves ahead. And I will tell you that used to work. There used to be a framework where you could say, okay, I'm going to go to this college,

I'm going to get this degree, I'm going to go to law school, I'm going to work at this firm, I'm going to achieve this. And if I just hit these milestones, I know what my life will be like. We live in an age of chaos and upheaval that is not anything familiar to any of us that are younger than 50 or 60 years old. 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've 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 it 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. Exactly. It's truly an era of chaos. And now you know why I called this show Chief Change Officer. I think enough change is called chaos, Miss. That's exactly right. No one can truly calculate change or predict every outcome with absolute accuracy.

I completely agree with you. It's all about centering on yourself. It's not about being self-centered, but rather understanding what aligns with your values and vision. It's about knowing what works for you and what doesn't. As you mentioned earlier, it's not always about having everything calculated or planned out. Sometimes it's about going with what feels right.

If something doesn't resonate, you move on. These instincts and tendencies are valuable data points. They are guides that help us navigate the journey ahead. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. the podcasts that I listen to are about how to hack your way to success, are about tactical advice on how to build a certain type of business, how to buy real estate. We've gotten to a place in content 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 do, Vince. Thank you for your kind words. This is very encouraging. One of the best comments I've ever received so far. And of course, thank you for all your sharing and your time, and for working with me to create an out-of-the-box storytelling for this episode.

Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Shen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.