Announcing my next venture

I’m excited to share news today of the seed funding and early-access launch of my next venture, Oyster? -- a distributed talent enablement platform.

As an entrepreneur, having built global businesses and hired teams in over 50 countries, I was shocked by the complexities and cost required to employ people in other countries. At Nexmo, the cloud communication platform I founded back in 2010, we struggled with that. As I thought about the next business to start, I knew that I needed to tap into the global talent market to move fast and hire great people anywhere. 

I envisioned the organisation to be distributed in many markets since day one so that it could gain a competitive advantage in speed and cost. I did not want, however, to go through that same painful, expensive and slow cross-border employment process again. 

It was then that I started to look for solutions to facilitate building a distributed cross-border team. To my surprise, I saw that I was not the only one trying to tap into the global talent opportunity. Other remote work pioneers such as Gitlab, Wordpress and Invision, each of which has raised more than $350m, and built a team in over 60 countries, were doing it too. But even these well-resourced companies are still struggling to scale, or so I learned during my interviews with their HR, legal and recruiting managers. It became clear to me then that the old-world rules and regulations of HR, Payroll and Benefits remain an obstacle for modern and smart organisations looking to grow and tap the best global talent. 

I knew there was an important problem here to be solved. I still wasn’t sure, though, that it should be me to do it. 

That all changed when I realized the opportunity for social impact from unlocking cross-border hiring for people outside the established economic hubs (in the US, UK, etc…). I grew up in Lebanon, a country where corruption suppresses the creation of real job opportunities and the unemployment rates for young people have reached 40%. It’s even worse for young people with degrees from top universities. This is the case because they can’t get easily hired by overseas companies and local companies are either going bankrupt or don’t offer exciting and fulfilling jobs that say a modern tech startup in San Francisco or London would do. 

This is clearly not just one country’s problem, but also a world problem. Talented people in developing countries dream of opportunities that are stimulating and pay well, but are only to be found in developed countries. And the companies in developed countries, who would be open to hiring someone great in another country, need to go through a massive admin/hr/payroll obstacle to make it happen. So they don’t hire them. That is why a senior software developer in San Francisco is paid $250k per year, while the same talent say in Portugal is paid less than $50k, and while the same talent in Nigeria stays unemployed. I felt that this was a big problem that is worth dedicating my next 10 years to.

Oyster? bridges the gap by making it easy for companies to hire in other countries and by making it possible for talented people anywhere to have a global career perspective. This begins to address the issues in terms of wealth distribution, and perhaps even makes the world a little bit better. 

Please visit oysterhr.com to join our early-access beta. Read here why Connect Ventures led the round. 

Tony