#62 Oyster HR and the meteoric rise of global remote hiring

Hey, Kia ora and welcome back to the latest episode of the Be Better podcast. And with me today, I have Tony and Jack from Oyster. G' day guys. How's it going?

Hello. Hello.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for having us.

Hey, no worries. And now, so Tony, you are dialing.

In from.

The island of Cyprus in.

The Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

And Jack, you are dialing in from San Diego, California.

San Diego. So yeah, as we were saying just before, we have pretty much covered the world on this podcast in one episode. So I've never been to Cyprus. I almost went to Cyprus. I had a mate of mine who was in the British army in Cyprus and, and we almost went to visit him. But I have been to San Diego. I used to work for a San Diego based medical device company called Nuvasive. So I've been to San Diego a couple of times. La Jolla is a really awful place to go and hang out, but if you have to, you know, you got to go and slum it and hang out on the beachfront eating great food, you know, such is life.

Doesn't suck here, that's for sure.

It doesn't suck.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so Oyster, like what do you guys do? Who are you? Why are we talking B Corp with Tony and Jack? So yeah, maybe Tony, if you can kick us off like what or who is Oyster and tell us a bit about where it came from, who you are.

Sure. Oyster is a global employment platform. We use software to make global hiring as easy as local hiring. And before being a software company, we are a mission driven company. First and foremost. We are here to move the world to become more equal and more free by democratizing access to job opportunities around the world. To give you some statistics, Brian Kaplan, the economist from George Mason University, in his book Open Borders, he argues if you remove the concept of borders from tenant mobility, you can triple the world GDP. And while in the west there is 90 million knowledge worker jobs going unfulfilled today, leading to over $8 trillion economic loss. So today more than ever with remote work, companies in the west can hire anyone, anywhere and extend amazing job opportunities to people in emerging economies.

And that's why we exist. That's our raison d'. Etre. That's why we here. Jack and I, we founded this company in January 2020. We both worked together before.

We started a company called Nexmo that was in the API and software business that went public in mid-2016. And when I took some time off, I wanted to really align what I believe in with what I do. And therefore Oyster was born in. In January 2020.

Nice. Aligning what you do with what you believe. What a crazy idea. It might catch on. It's that whole purpose thing.

And so, so you got. You guys. So you were working with on the previous business together. Is that. And that's where you guys met and yeah, you sort of thought, hey. So was the sort of. See the pandemic, I imagine has significantly escalated the interest in hiring. Well, we clearly has escalated the interest in hiring people remotely. And you know, for us being in New Zealand, we, we have seen a massive rise of particularly in the tech sector people, you know, smart, highly educated people in New Zealand now can work for a tech company based in San Diego or Silicon Valley because it's all online. You can join a zoom call at whatever time you want to do it. So did you have an inkling that that was kind of going to be a thing or was it really just great timing on your behalf to start a company in the sort of digital recruitment world?

Let me start. Jack, if you want to add, please go for it. Look, when we sat down with Jack in late 2019 talking about this business, we knew that remote work is going to be big.

But we thought it was going to take 10 years, right? It took 10 weeks.

So, so it was a kind of oh shit moment, you know, in, in March 2020, right after we, we, we, we raised our seed round, we got $4 million in the bank and Jack has booked his flight to come to London. I was living in London at that time to do our offsite. Thanks God it was refundable. We were like we had to cancel all this flight.

And then we had to go really fast. We knew that what we're building is going to be in massive demand, so we went really fast. Building an employment infrastructure in 150 countries, building a software platforms that makes global hiring as easy as local hiring and building a team that is intentionally designed to. To terms of diversity dispersity. Today we are in 80 countries.

To.

Make this business successful. And we started growing crazy since late 2020.

Nice. Super cool. Yeah. Jack, anything for you to add? It sounds like it was a bit of a whirlwind.

Yeah, kick off. I was going to say clearly there was a. So I wouldn't change a thing in the last three years. But sometimes I think about the journey that would have been oysters had we not had the pandemic where as Tony said, the writing was on the wall. But people were nowhere near convinced what the future of Work looked like that there would be more fully remote companies. And so.

It'S been very interesting for us to have come into existence with these intentions in mind to be a fully distributed company, to be innovative in the way that we work. And then the pandemic just accelerated the rest of the world so that suddenly what we were doing was common. So that was remarkable for us. The other effect of the pandemic that is relevant to this conversation is that we saw what I describe as a values shift. People, because of the disruptions, had a chance to reflect what was important to them. Work, life, balance. As a result, we also raised our expectations of the companies that we buy from, that we work for and even that we invest in. Suddenly the relevancy of corporate social responsibility, esg, B Corp, all of that also got dramatically accelerated. And so it has absolutely been an incredible positive for Oyster that.

We drew tailwind from both the acceleration of work and we drew tailwind from the acceleration of the importance of impact driven socially responsible companies.

Yeah. I mean literally you could not pick two sort of wagons to hit your, your business to. There were better place for massive expansion at the same time. Yeah. So.

And Tim, I just want to add something. I just want to add something that now I believe in. I believe that when you align your, what you do is what you believe in. The stars will align as well for you. Yep.

100.

The universe will come and help you. You know, call it a spiritual belief, whatever. But now I'm like convinced more than ever that this is true and I've been using it more and more in my life and it's working.

Yeah. No, I would tend to agree that. Yeah. That sense of alignment you're. Yeah. You're working with, with everything rather than trying to jam stuff in or wrestle with stuff to make it, make it fit it 100%. So I guess you probably had, you know, beautiful business plans and you know, we're going to do this and you're raising your capital and yeah, all of a sudden it's well, hang on a got a tiger by the tail. So just in terms of a startup. But I mean, I guess it wasn't, it wasn't your first rodeo in terms of like a startup business, but with presumably everything that you knew about how to, how to start a business and scale. It was kind of thrown out pretty early on with the rate of expansion that you had. So. Yeah. What was that like? And what were sort of some learnings from, from having a tiger by the tiger.

It was very thrilling for me because it's brand new. You had to learn again.

You have to think strategically, you have to think differently, how to scale super fast, who to hire.

And one of the learnings, how do you start.

Creating presence in your world? We have nothing to sell because at least it's going to take us eight months to deliver any software platform that the customer would want to buy. So we had to start manually, we had to start serving our customer manually because they were knocking on our doors and how did we get them to realize we exist again? We had no brand, nobody. Jack and I went on social media and start talking about what we're doing and we built what we call a founder brand. That combined with all these digital marketing that we did, paid advertisement, we did, made that.

At the end of our first year or end of 2020 we were ready to really scale. And.

In the first year of operation, 2021 we did double digit annual revenue growth. So from zero to double digit in 12 months.

Was a nice curve for investors.

Yeah. One they're probably not that used to seeing.

Because I guess, yeah, quite often in the world of startup there's yeah, projections and you know, total market cap and you know, this is what we could go and get and all of a sudden you're probably like, yeah, actually we've done that today. Can we have some more money please? Yeah. So was it. So I guess, you know, the impact side of things.

How, because that's a question I like to ask, you know, is balancing that impact and aiming to make a profit. But I guess it sounds like the making the money side of things was coming pretty quick and pretty relatively easily for a startup. How did that enable you to maybe do more impact, more quickly? Or was it harder? Because actually we're just trying to build this airplane whilst it's taking off and suddenly it's got rocket fuel. So yes, how was that in terms of balancing doing the good that you wanted to try and do in the business? And obviously we'll talk a bit more about the B Corp stuff in a minute. Yeah. What was that like?

Well, I think it's always been going back to why we exist, our mission and remind people why we here and commit to that. So when we close our seed round, we committed on the B Corp journey and we promised our investor we want to be B Corp. And.

Since then we've always been.

Making effort on that front. Jack can give us all the various items we had to deliver in the beginning on that front. But I just want to say what we're blessed with at Oyster is that our business model is totally aligned with our impact. The more we employ people around the world, the more we drive the world into more equality and more freedom. So there's a.

The business was designed to perfectly align with the impact and that's what makes it powerful. Jack, do you want to give us.

Yeah, yeah. And so, as Tony said, we have the extraordinary quasi miraculous gift of this alignment between the business model and impact. And so let me explain that a little bit. Imagine that.

We'Re a restaurant and we're putting 180 items on the menu corresponding to 180 countries of the world. And we're going to bring this menu to the employers of the world, but we don't know what they're going to order, right? I mean they might continue to order from the usual places, the usual items. And so there was this potential for impact in employers would be interested in those items on the menu that they'd never, never had an opportunity to explore before. But we didn't know our power to influence that was unknown. Simply putting something on the menu. And so as it turned out, we were very pleased to discover that the rate at which they were ordering.

Items from the, from the emerging world, countries from the emerging world, which is our definition of impact, was, was not zero. Right? It was actually, it was actually in the lower, in the lower 20s. What that means is that out of the gate we defined our impact as employments that we had enabled in the emerging world. And we define the emerging world as those countries with a score of below 0.8 on the United Nations Human Development Index. And so we defined our impact that way. And so right out of the gate, without any effort, we were very pleased to see that the employers that we offered our menu to were ordering from the emerging world to the tune of the lower 20%. And in the ensuing years we've seen that rise to about 28%, which is what we published in our impact report in 2023. And we have a goal of getting that to 30%.

By 2024. So in our case the question is not binary impact, yes or no, but how much can we influence the employers of the world to order those items from the menu that historically have not been available to the employers that have the great knowledge work jobs, the life changing knowledge work jobs of the world. So that's our position. Our question is how much impact can we create? How can we maximize the social impact potential of this machine for impact that we built? That's our situation, that's our, our lucky Position.

Nice. And so fundamentally that impact model is find, I guess, and enable people in like you say, these poorer developing nations to get access to higher quality, higher paying roles in like you say, this distributed economy where if you've got the smarts, if you've got the skills and you've got an Internet connection, we kind of don't really care where you're living right now. Which, which, yeah, that seems to be how a lot of people are thinking when it comes to work. What are the, I guess some of the challenges that you hear? And certainly when you go through the B Corp assessment, there's a lot of countries around the world that don't have, you know, a government recognized living wage. I mean Australia is one of those. The US also doesn't have a federally recognized living wage standard that you can say, yeah, look, we're paying well, this person's being paid X, they're doing really, really well. So are there any mechanisms you've put in place to ensure that you know the salary or the wage that's being paid in an area like have you benchmarked that? Have you? Because I know there are some living wage, independent living wage standards that you can look to accredit yourself through on the B Corp pathway. So yes. How do you manage that? Because that's often the pushback people might say or the like the anti story might be. Yeah, but you're just exploiting these people, you know that there might be bad conditions or. Yeah, how do you, how are you ensuring that they're treated fairly and equitably?

Absolutely. Let me start there. So our impact is felt through our roadmap and our strategy, product roadmap and our strategy and we have tools such as compensation benchmarking that guide our customers to offer fair and competitive pay for anyone, anywhere. And in our case we had to build that tool ourselves. You know, data available online or with existing benchmark are not enough because remote workers are different type of workers. If you're a remote worker in an emerging economy and you're working for a company abroad, you can command anything between 50 to 70% more pay than if you're employed in your local economy. And this is where the impact is, right? So because these people, these the best talent of a country, don't have to brain drain, don't have to leave their country. What keeps emerging economies emerging is that they're losing their best talent. They go to the us, they go to Europe and they contribute to the growth of these economies. But if these brain drain, these people don't have to brain, brain. They can stay in their home countries and they can be paid more equivalent salaries to what people in the west are being paid. Then you bring in this influx of currency into these economies that are spent locally and then you can have a shot in reducing the inequality in the world.

Nice. And I guess there's also then sort of second and third order impact ripples where community, you know, because it's that classic, I guess, I mean I studied geography to, you know, human geography to a level at school in the uk and there's that classic shift from rural to urban economies. You get the brain drain, but also the age drain, the physical drain of that just not being young, healthy people in a center to help support the elder population or have you. So there's probably second and third order impacts around community and yeah, stuff like that that's really hard for you to accurately measure or report against, but undoubtedly will be happening. So. No, that's a really cool.

Yeah, actually Tim, Tim, Jack can tell us more about how. What are the categories of impact that we focus on? One of them. Environment. Yeah, as well.

Right. So.

We put together an impact thesis in the very beginning, right around the same time that we commenced our, our B Corp application in the middle of 2020, soon after closing our first funding round. And that impact thesis described four domains of potential impact for us. Individual people, community, businesses and the environment. The terrific alignment between our business model and IMPACT allowed us to have data about things like the number of hires on our platform in the emerging world, the total economic flows going from the developed world to emerging countries in the aggregate. So right out of the gate, as soon as we'd sort of settled on a definition of what impact was, and as I explained, it was those hires happening in countries with a score of below 0.8 on the UN's human development. Because we didn't want it to be arbitrary, want it to be a meaningful third party reference on what our impact came from. So we took it very seriously. And so naturally, for the availability of data, the first stories that we were able to tell were about individual impact happening to the individual. We were able to establish our first impact metrics at a very early, at a very early point. And our key impact metrics are the percentage of total hires on the platform in the emerging world and the gross payment volume on an annualized basis, sort of think of it, an annual rate of salary flow in the aggregate going to the developed world. So those are our key metrics. But even so, we remain interested in building intellectual Models as well as gathering data about our impact into those other spaces. And in our 2023 report, which is linked to from our website.

We go deeper, both in the individual dimension where we performed a survey of those team members working in those emerging markets on our platform. And so where previously we had just the aggregates, right. Oh, you know, it's a percentage now, we had qualitative data feedback directly from individuals and it was extraordinary. We learned things, for example, that it seems like the systemic suppression, the systemic blockers are when removed, the benefits are greater to women. And so it makes a lot of sense. Right. But to have that in data was quite extraordinary for us. And we've also started gathering information and working more closely with our own customers as think of it as an extension of our, of our business model impact when we enable other companies to both diversify their workforces and through general enablement to lean more into remote working with environmental implications. To your point, think of those as ripple on, ripple on effects from our primary business model. So we're absolutely on that wavelength and that'll be the future of our, of our, of our reporting and our storytelling as we, as we follow those ripples out into communities, into businesses etc. Into the environment.

Nice. So, yeah, you've clearly got a well defined and of course, you know, Jack, your role as sort of head of impact, you've clearly spent a bit of time and having had a brief scan of your impact thesis earlier on, you're not just giving this a go and seeing what happens, you've given it some consideration, you've got the data behind it, which you know is a great place to start. Has there been anything? Because one of the phrases that they talk about, I guess, well, it impact more broadly, but also within the B Corp impact assessment, one of the specific questions, you know, have you monitored for outcomes but any unintended consequences? So has there, was there anything that you had an initial thought or theory around that, like, yep, we're going to do this and it'll be amazing. It's going to create all this positive impact. Was there anything that's cropped up as an unintended negative impact that you've discovered yet, or is it too soon to have that level of data to know if there was any sort of red herrings or distractions that aren't doing the good that you thought they could do?

Well, we haven't seen it, but we certainly were concerned that by enabling access to all employers, to people in the emerging world, that there would be employers on our on our platform who say didn't share our aspirational perspective over the treatment and the fair compensation of people in emerging markets, but rather lent towards the historical exploitative view of those markets. And so we did think about that as a potential consequence where we're putting those items on the menu back to that metaphor, are we prepared for anyone to order them with whatever consequences there might be? So we did think about that. I don't think we've seen it in a significant sense, but it was certainly one of those potential risk factors that enter into our considerations in the beginning.

Nice. And just looking again earlier on, so see one of the areas that you're also looking at is trying to support refugees into, into work.

Yeah, I mean that's that. I guess on the face of it, if I, if I've just stumbled across Oyster, it's kind of like how are you different from Fiverr or there's another one that's similar where you know, you can, you can go on there and you can kind of, you can put a job up and you can bid for people and you know, you can agree a contract with someone and it might be a great wage for them in, in the Philippines or whatever or it might not be, but you don't really know. And I guess it's. Yeah, it's like clearly on the face, having dug a little bit deeper, you clearly are very impact driven company, you're a b corp, etc. But yeah. On the face of it or yeah. Has that been a criticism that's been levelled at you or is that something that you've had to kind of overcome? Yeah. Or do you just think you're playing at a completely different level and it's not, not something that you think or acknowled.

We intervene after the customer has found the talent today. So unlike Fiverr and Upwork, where you go to find talent, you don't come to us to find talent, yet you come to us to employ that talent compliantly, fairly securely and give them great benefits. Make sure you process their payroll. Because when we, before starting this company we interviewed a lot of our customers and I told them what is your challenges around distributed hiring? And they told us culture. We know how to do finding talent. We know how to do employing talent compliantly and paying them. It's so hard and we're failing there. And that was our experience. In our previous company, it was Jack. We hired people in 40 countries and we spend millions of dollars building our own internal employment infrastructure and fail to deliver on a great Employee experience. So that's why this is why we're positioned in the part of the value chain that truly unlocks companies to empower them to say, I'm hiring everywhere, I don't have to hire anymore in 20 mile radius from where I have offices.

Nice.

Very cool. And yeah, like I say, clearly the fact that you're trying to enable refugees to get employment and yeah, you clearly, yeah, the impact I think clearly shines through. But yeah, just I guess the world of sort of recruitment and hiring has not always had the best stereotypical image for ethics and transparency, particularly when dealing with, with you know, markets where, you know, there is that high potential for exploitative behavior of well, look, do you want the job or not? You know, a dollar a day for you is better than no dollar a day. So yeah, it's, I think it's, it's great what you're doing.

Yeah. I think Tim is also about empowering people. Right. So especially great talent from emerging economies that are looking for a job. We want them to think globally as they look for a job. We want them to think as the world as their oyster when they're looking for a job. And this is why we have developed training programs, we have the Oyster Academy that you take any knowledge worker in the world and they go through that program and they become the best remote worker in the world. Right. And they're equipped with that certification and go and apply for jobs in other countries. So we also work on empowering and enabling knowledge workers around the world to be confident that they can pursue a career in another country while staying home. And we give them.

Data on how much they should value.

Their labor to these companies in the West.

Nice. Super, super cool. I think it's, yeah, I think like you say, the timing of sort of this nexus between Purpose B Corp. Impact and remote hiring, it's, yeah, genius. Just like awkward comedy. It's in the timing. And you certainly, you certainly nailed that. So I guess looking back a bit further for sort of both of you has the idea of an impact driven business. You know, is that how you guys have operated in business since day one? You know, is it something that you've been brought up with? Because there seems to be a pretty even split so far with people that we've interviewed for the podcast of some people who've been brought up and raised by clearly better parents than maybe I had, where they had this sense of purpose and meaning and connection and they've been doing good in all their roles from a very early age. And then there are a lot of other people who are a bit more like myself who were working in a corporate jungle. It was all about me. It was all about making as much money as possible, kind of living a great life, and then had this kind of external moment of, whoa, hang on a minute. Actually, this isn't working for you, dude. Or do this. Something needs to change, you know, and then you find this purpose and meaning kind of, you know, side of life. So, yeah. What was the journey like for both of you? Maybe Tony, go first here. Like, have you always been a purpose driven kind of guy or is this something that you've morphed into more recently?

I've always been, but I wasn't aware of it. I was confused. Okay.

So when, when I exited my last business, where Jack met, we met with Jack there, I was, I was burned out. I was, you know, I was born in this country called Lebanon. That first 10 years of my life, it was in a civil war. I was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Completely unaware of it. I had this increased fear responses and my life was miserable. You know, although I was very successful, wealthy entrepreneur who made multiple exits, I was not happy in my life. So when I took some time off after the company exited, I was on this. I was committed really to so to address that PTSD issue that I was suffering with. So I was doing this. I was working with some healers on addressing my purpose. What's my purpose here in this world? So I was doing this retreat and at that time, I was about to start another company, actually, I was about to start another company.

In the software communication space, similar to the company Jack and I started before.

And I wanted this company to be distributed because I totally distributed because.

We knew how expensive was to hire software developers in central London and San Francisco. So we wanted to really access to the global talent pool. But I wasn't looking forward to challenges we faced in that company. And so when I did that.

Journey, this, this retreat to help me clarify my purpose, when I exited, it was clear for me. It was clear that my company shouldn't be this communication technology company. Other people can do that. It was important for me that I flip around the idea and start Oyster. And my company would not only itself would be distributed, but its mission is to help other companies be distributed and tap into the global talent pool.

So my coach at that time told me, hey, don't take any important decision next. Next week, the next day I went and incorporated Oyster. I had, I had such a conviction that, that this is what I wanted to do this is my purpose. You know, coming from emerging economies, I had to leave my home country when I was a teenager to study abroad. And.

So it was, it was, it was clear, it was crystal clear to me that that's where my purpose is. And the next day oysterhr.com was, was bought and the company was incorporated in Delaware.

Nice.

So in terms of. I'm interested because I'm a big fan of purpose work and I went on a bit of a journey myself to work out who I should be and who I could be and what I wanted to do when I actually grew up. What were some of the key steps or stages that you had to go through to help you work out like that, that connection and that level of authenticity. Because it's typically not easy work. Because I think that's why most people don't go and do it, because it's hard. You've got to do a lot of self reflection and go and slay some inner dragons that have been keeping you as you don't want to be. Or rather maybe not as closely connected to who you could be or who you should really be. Yes. What were some key moments of discovery or epiphany for you on that journey to finding the sort of. The more authentic Tony.

I believe, is this interaction between your authentic self and the world of work. And.

Work is not today, most work in the world is not here to support your life. It's actually taxing on your life. And.

Many of us unfortunately work for companies in the pursuit of profit only. Nothing more increasing shareholder value. There's nothing more. And that's so demotivating, so depressing for people.

And when you're in this corporation, you end up having some sort of collective trauma that we're all unaware of that shapes our behavior. And we normalize it. It becomes a new. We don't see it. And that was the moment. I took a year and a half off where I dedicated it to my mental health, my well being. And I went on these journeys that led me to see that and decide that I don't want to do that next. I want to do something different. I want to do something much more aligned with my purpose and my true self. I want my true voice to be heard.

And I want to share it with everybody. I remember I was walking with Jack in mid-2019 reflecting, should we do a business together? And he asked me the question, if you would want to do a business, you don't need to do business if you want to do a business. What does business look like I told him I want freedom. I want freedom to live where I want to live. I want the flexibility because I, I don't want to continue living in cities. You know living in cities was taxing me emotionally, physically.

Secondly, I wanted to be flexible time. I had small children. I wanted to be, I didn't want to work to be in the way of my connection with my children. And.

And I also wanted purpose. I wanted, I wanted to. Every action I do, every word I say to be aligned with how I want the world to be. And, and this is how we, this is what, what drive me to start Oyster. But what I realized actually these things, freedom, flexibility and purpose. It's not my needs, it's everybody's need.

Yeah. 100 I think, I think it's Dan Pink. Daniel Pink. He's like a neuro psychology kind of special. I can't remember what his exact specialism is but he calls it MAP mastery. Autonomy and purpose are like the three bedrock things that every human desires.

Yeah.

I think that it's okay to be selfish as long as you define self as everybody. So here in that case these needs I had to have a better life. Freedom, flexibility and purpose were like everybody had these needs but very few of us were aware of them. And this, the pandemic and this shift to remote work enabled many of us to reflect on what's really important for us. And if you design an organization that give that to people you get high level of engagement and you become a talent magnet. We used to receive last year when we were hiring in mass we used to receive 13,000 job application a month for a company that's a year and a half old. Okay. Because people want to work in this environment. They want work to support their life and not the other way around.

Yeah. 100 I guess a follow up question. Do you think the, the challenging situations where you grew up where maybe you know there's war, you felt trapped. Do you think there's something to that that you, there's this expression of you want this freedom because you felt that you didn't have that when you're. Because quite often there's, there's kind of almost two two paths to purpose. One is, you know, you're born a certain way and then over time that gets that version of you kind of just gets corrupted by the system. So you know mum and dad like hey no Tony, stop doing your scribbling. You know you need to do your maths because that's how you're going to get a good job. When you're older and so some stuff kind of gets beaten out of you. But there's also this other theory of almost like traumatic induced purpose where, where you suffer some significant trauma as a child and that then kind of comes into you. It kind of. Yeah. You seek to remedy the trauma by, by I guess reducing that potential trauma for everyone else in the world. So it seems to me. Yeah. Is that something that you kind of reflected on that need for freedom maybe been coming from that?

Absolutely. Like I don't, I don't recommend anybody to grow up in a civil war.

So kind of robs your life. It narrows your vision on life. You're suffering from something, some PTSD symptoms that makes heighten your fear responses to things or your, like, you're like you're in avoidance behavior or your life. And, and the deepest this, this wound is the more potential of what we call post traumatic growth.

Yep, exactly.

And that's, that's what that the journey I went on and some of my past successes are linked to that fear response. I'm very grateful to, to have this protection mechanism that in business is great because. Yeah, what's a founder? You have to look at all this risk and create opportunity, see the opportunity, minimize the risk here. So. But hey, you know, if, if, if my mind is completely consumed by thoughts that everything is going to kind of, kind of fail. And I'm so much afraid of failure that I, I reacting, react on everybody. That's not a great culture you want to be in.

Yeah.

So part of the growth journey is to really, you know, start being with these emotions, being with that fear, use it as wisdom when it's relevant and, and not let it impact people around you. Yeah.

100.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, sort of. Same question for you, Jack. Yeah. Like have you always been a. Someone aligned to their purpose, strong sense of mission and impact, or did you, you know, come from a more commercial background yourself?

So I'm the, I'm the son of Latin American immigrants who was born in New York, as my grandmother always reminded me by the skin of my teeth. She wanted me to understand that I was going to have a life because of this lucky accident that was privileged and that there were other people, my family, my cousins, et cetera, would not have had this accident. So right from a very early age I had this sense of kind of insecurity about this lucky spin of the wheel that I had received. And so that definitely influenced me and sensitized me to the plight of people who were not so lucky from where Their life got to happen. Standpoint. But fast forward to the first time I heard the word B Corp, which was for me in 2008. And I learned about B Corp from Jay Cohen Gilbert himself the co founder of B Corp. And I met him in 2008 through the taproot Foundation. And I don't know if you've heard of the Taproot Foundation. It's a San Francisco nonprofit created by Aaron Hurst that built a model through which executives, people in business could come together, form teams and work on problems for nonprofits who would submit a grant request and receive a grant. So it was all pro bono. So I got to do some. This is where I took my first impulse to do, let's call it social benefit work, which is kind of a manifestation of a little bit of success, a little bit of guilt and a little bit of a sense that you would like your efforts to be more meaningful. Through that work I got to connect with an organization called San Francisco Casa, San Francisco Court Appointed Special Advocates which focuses on improving outcomes for children in the dependency court. Kids that are foster kids that are removed from their homes, as you can imagine, under the most exigent of circumstances. I was on their board for six years and it was immensely gratifying work. But I also got to appreciate as a systems thinker the inappropriateness of the non profit model for tackling the most important problems that we have on earth. And so this was the context and the preparation that I had for Tony's brilliant eureka in the middle of 2019 or so where he saw that there was this opportunity to have a business model driving a large potential business in a new emerging SaaS category that was also a machine for impact. And so I was absolutely hooked, absolutely ensnared from that moment forward. And so that was my journey to passion with, with this idea.

Nice. And so.

So the B core, I mean, connecting back in 2008, so you said with Jay, wasn't it? You said in 2008?

Yes.

Like, like that's two, two years, two.

Years into this there were 80B. So they, they, they were just starting to publicize and promote it. They were 80B corpse. So he was, he was doing a bit of a roadshow on, on B Corp. It was great.

Wow. Yeah. I mean that is early doors.

And I appreciated it. I mean I was a technologist. And so one lens through which I remember appreciating it in the early days was it was a draft standard. And as technologists we understand the importance of standards where they allow progress to happen very quickly in an area where progress is needed. And so I heard the story of B Corp, its intent, and I said, wow, this is a potentially powerful standard. And it is exactly in that spirit that B Corp became important to Oyster. At the beginning of its existence. We saw it as an important standard that had been created in the world. We sought to validate ourselves, to show our seriousness and commitment. And so B Corp was a vehicle for doing that.

Nice.

Can I add something, Tim, here?

What matters here at the end of the day is for Oyster to succeed.

And generate massive return on investment for investors. Because we want to prove that if you align your business model with impact, that it becomes synergetic. Right.

And.

What we want to be is the best ESG company on public company in the future. How can we get to that point and demonstrate to the world that investment can have meaning? And there's a new flavor of capitalism that we need in this world that enable us to move towards a more sustainable future. Because today you can make money investing in companies doing deforestation, oil and gas. And by the way, these are investment that are not made by human anymore. They made by algorithms.

Yes.

In the pursuit of maximizing a number. So we want to actually.

Hack the system and make these algorithm decide to invest in impact driven businesses because they generate more return than deforestation or oil and gas or whatever industry that is negatively impacting the world. This is why it's important for us to succeed on this journey. And so, and I do believe impact entrepreneurs should be more rewarded, they should make more money in the new world that we need to drive towards than if you're not a mission driven entrepreneur, what needs to happen.

For mission driven entrepreneurs to become more successful and more wealthy than the non mission driven entrepreneurs?

Yeah, and that's a big part of my sort of theory of change. If we can get the good people to be winning, it makes the old way of doing things look literally redundant and not that exciting. So the more money that we can bring into the new economy, that's more forgiving, more favorable, more looking after people and planet, then the less money is going to circulate in the old economy. So yeah, no, totally agree. But in terms of B Corp for you, Tony, had you heard of B Corp before Jack kind of had the conversation with you, obviously working with Jack in the previous role, had B Corp come up in any of your previous companies and ideas or when did you connect to it and make the decision that, yeah, okay, look, Oyster's gonna be built from the ground up as a B Corp.

I knew it existed and Jack obviously had a lot of influence on me when we started the business. And that led us to commit to our seed investor. Actually it was even in the financial legal documentation. We were committing to becoming a B Corp because we wanted our seed money to be mission driven money. And we raised from this fund in London that was backed by.

A European fund called Big Society Capital that actually a pure impact fund that takes the money that people forget in their bank accounts. People die, keep money in bank accounts and that's like hundreds of billions of dollars. Right. And, and they move it into, into mission driven businesses. So we wanted to, to have this mission money impact money into our cap table for the first check and actually we continue on every round we would add impact investor. We have Salesforce impact fund, we have Base, then we have Big Society Capital and many more of these impact driven investors on our cap table. And I think the more we, so we raise in total 230 million and the more we raise money, I do believe that we're going to see a higher and higher proportion of impact money coming into the cap table.

Yeah. And that was one of the questions I was going to ask was how is the funding or the investment world supported you? And clearly very well. And because you know, when we're talking to people about, you know, whether they should consider B Corp or not, the five main benefits at a high level that we always talk to is customer attraction and retention, talent attraction and retention, supply chain pressure potentially. So depending where you sit on the value chain, investor interest and potentials for operational savings by just looking at your business through a different lens. And so it's always great to talk to people who, you know, clearly you got great product market fit, it's great timing. But you also, you know, seemingly finding it relatively easy to find links to investors who actually align with the impact side of things. So that's, yeah, it kind of, it's just reassuring to see, you know, this stuff actually happening in real life rather than this is Tim's theory. You know, here's a couple of papers that support it. But to actually see it.

Impact investment asset class is like the most, the highest gross asset class in the history of investment. Right. There are, what's happening in the world is that you have a shift in money moving hands from older generation to new generation and the new generation cares about purpose. I want to know where my money is invested. I want to make sure that it doesn't hurt the world and it creates some level of positive impact and, and that's why all these wealth managers and whole wealth management industry rushed to create all these impact funds that are, that are loaded with cash, looking for assets like Oyster to be deployed in, but there's not many. Most of them come at late stage, whether it's last round before going public or being acquired or after that. So.

For us it became a competitive advantage because compared to our competitors, well, we have a bigger capital pool we can pull from.

So that enabled us to raise in two and a half years.

$225 million, reaching unicorn status in the record time.

And will continue to be a competitive advantage because the more we grow, now we are late stage, the more we grow, the more impact money will be available for us. And that's great. I mean, that's what we need the world to look. That's why I believe impact entrepreneurs have the chance to be more successful.

Because of what's happening in the financial industry and the shift to purposeful investment.

Yeah, no, 100%. 100% agree.

So looking into the B Corp journey a little bit. So you said, so the company's headquarters in Delaware. So did you apply for the B Corp pending status, which you can do in the us Was that something that you did or did you sort of keep your powder dry and just. And worked away at it behind the scenes?

We did the pending.

You did, yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah. So, yeah, for people listening in. So in certain regions, I think, I think it's mainly the US and uk. I'm pretty sure the UK have it, but Australia, New Zealand, we don't have it. So if you are a startup. So to become B Corp certified, you need at least 12 months of operational data to be reviewed when it comes to the audit. So obviously if you're a startup, you don't have any operational data. So yeah, in certain markets they allow you to pre apply and you get this B Corp pending status, which basically means you've gone through the assessment, you're just waiting time until you've been in operation for 12 months and then you're going to get your assessment reviewed and away you go. So yeah, just curious to know whether you made use of that. Was that useful for the investment conversations?

Certainly, I think I'll let Tony comment as regards investor sentiment, but I think that having that pending status, that having initiated the diligence and the rigor of the application was meaningful. I'll say though, that probably the most interesting and unusual aspect of our B Corp journey was that, as you may know, Tim, there are tiers of companies different Sizes by different measures. And our growth was so dramatic that we blew through those milestones and had to reinitiate our application process twice. Oh, man, that happened to us twice. And I think that's probably pretty unusual. And that owed to many factors, the pandemic was happening in the world. The extraordinary influence that that had on our, on our growth trajectory. Yeah, so that's probably the most exotic aspect of our journey to certification.

Yeah, we've. We've had one client who they were literally on the cusp of, I think the 249 to 250. And every day they were like, oh, we've lost someone. Oh, we've hired someone. We've lost someone. We've hired someone. And right up until verification, like literally the week before they started cutting board with the verification, they were like, actually, we've got five new hires coming in, so maybe we should err on the side of going bigger. So again, for people not fully acquainted with the assessment, the size of company matters because basically the bigger the company or the more employees you have, there's a, I guess, like extra layers of depth on some of the questions. So as a slightly smaller company, you might have one question of evidence or one question that you have to answer on a topic, but if you've suddenly got a thousand employees, there might be 10 sub questions that pop up. So, yeah, a bit of a nightmare to keep on top of that, but you think you've nailed it. Yeah, we've got it. We're on task. Tony's like, hey, sorry, yeah, we just hired 100 people. Tony, just stop it for a month. You just stop it for a month.

That's classic. But yeah, so in terms of. And I guess you know, because again, this is a question we, we encounter quite regularly when people who are talking to us about maybe helping them with their big corp and they are a startup. Some people feel like, you know, oh, we're a startup, we should wait until we're a bit bigger. But I actually think going as early as possible and baking in everything, you know, because if you, if you're suddenly morphing from 50 to 200 employees. Okay, well, how do we operate as a company with 200 employees? Let's think about that today before we get there. So, yeah, what was your experience like as a startup? Did you find it useful as a framework to sort of help build the company around as you were going?

Being mission driven is like, it has to be in huge from day one. Ideally, it's not like you cannot become later. But this is more like your diversity numbers. Like if you wait later to start addressing your diversity numbers, it's going to be harder. So you start early and.

It'S important to start as early as possible because you start attracting people that are mission aligned from day one that's going to come and help you and be part of that journey and support that and they will go and hire other people that are mission driven. So therefore it becomes very synergetic. The earlier you can do it, the better it will be for your business. That being said, you can always change and start your journey at any point in time.

Yeah, no, 100% agree. And we work with a real mix of companies.

The majority companies that we're helping with their B corp are they are already a B corp or they're similar to you. They're a startup who have got that mission and impact baked in from day one and they want to use the framework to make sure that they're operating in, in a manner that aligns. But we do have in, I guess increasingly, just as the movement expands and there's more interest, we do start having some of these more transition companies who have not been operating like a B corp, but recognize that they want to and maybe need to. And in some ways those are the more interesting ones because you have to take them on a bit of a journey and take them down that purpose path. Whereas yeah, typically with an aligned company it's just a case of, well, can you instigate that policy or are you okay to operate at that level on the assessment? Or is there a resource constraint that means you can't offer, you know, that benefit or whatever it is? But no, I agree. I'm a big skier and I quite like my Warren, the Warren Miller movies. I don't know if either of you into your skiing, but at the end of all, every year Warren Miller used to make an epic ski movie highlighting a different part of the world. And his final sentence or his final expression at the end of each movie was, don't forget, if you don't do it this year, you'll be one year older when you do. And I kind of feel like it's the same with B Corp. If you don't get started today, you're just going to be a week older as a company when it's going to be maybe slightly more complex and you have missed some opportunities. So yeah, just, just get on it.

Yeah. What was the, was there like a part of the assessment that was particularly hard for you or.

Not? I don't think it sounds like there wasn't any kind of alignment or lack of desire to want to do impact. But was there just other than the changing numbers, was there any particular part of the assessment that you just felt like, wow, this is really hard for us to work out how to do this or how do we actually capture or prove this? Or was it all pretty seamless?

Pretty seamless, I would say. And you may appreciate this Tim, that, you know, because we had this excitement about the alignment between our business model and impact. The aspect of B Corp that was most interesting and exciting to us was the IBM was the impact business model, which is sort of designated as kind of a latter stage. And so that was our aspiration from the very beginning. And so I think that that put us sort of a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of the rest of the stuff, which is say, a bit more perfunctory. Our thinking was already at that latter stage, at sort of that, that latter stage of impact performance. And because of that, and so I don't think that, that we face any particularly challenging aspects in the, in the rote application process.

I wanted to ask Tim, are you. Do you have an opinion on the, on the proposed changes to the, to the standard?

That's a great question. That was a question I was going to potentially ask you. So welcome and forbidding me to that one. Yeah, I'm, I'm kind of, I still kind of sit on the fence a little bit. I see the intent behind it. So again, for those people not familiar with B Corp even in the slightest form, the current format to get B Corp certified is you undertake this assessment where your business is measured against five main areas of governance, workers, if you have workers. If you don't have workers, you don't have to answer any questions on that one. But for the main part, it's governance, workers, community, environment, and then your customer models. So what is it you do and who do you sell it to and how? And currently you just need to score 80 points out of 200. And theoretically you can score really, really well under workers, for example, and be scoring really badly under community or environment. So one of the criticisms level at the assessment is you can sneak in as a B Corp with like 80.1 points and actually be not performing very well in a couple of the sections. I get that. However, I would still say based on the fact that, you know, there's, there's, we've just tipped over about 7,000 B Corps globally. That's about 0.01% of the global Business world. From research that I've done on, on Google, that's about 0.1% of companies globally are currently B Corp certified. So when you look about, I think there's somewhere in the region of about 200 ish thousand companies have taken the assessments and have either not completed it or have stopped or have failed to meet that 80 out of 200 criteria. So one of the criticisms though is look, it's kind of you could game the system and you could do really well on a couple of the pillars and not so well on the others and you're through and there still could be a bit of a trail of destruction and maybe in your supply chain or what have you. And I kind of get that. So the draft standards are proposing that they move it from five to 10 areas that you get looked at.

And you have to meet a minimum threshold on all ten. My, my two fears with the, with the updated standards is, are that at the minute that there's a middle ground of companies who could achieve B Corp certification without having to radically alter their business. But they're in the, they're in the community and they can start making changes gradually. And I feel that there's going to be this mid ground of businesses who might be like, you know, as a even say for example, as myself. As a small service business, my environmental impact is pretty limited. You know, I work from, from a home office, I try and drive my car as little as possible and I don't really do much flying. So I'm really not making a huge amount of environmental destruction. So for me it's not a massive focus on my business. Whereas client selection or you know, community impact might be something that's more applicable for me and something that's more readily open to me to sort of think about how it makes some impact. So I think the challenge. Say again.

Yeah, that's the trade off. It's like it's the shift from, you know, build your score of 80 from these categories. You know, it doesn't matter which to you must score in all 10 of these categories is absolutely say an increase in rigor that comes with some rigidity. That means that some organizations will feel a little bit excluded. I think that's 100% true. But I think the 10 points that have been selected are super relevant to a large number of organizations. And so I'm ultimately positive on the proposed change because I think that it is an increase in rigor, but it's a framework that I think will be highly relevant to a large number of organizations. And so I think the potential for aggregate impact is perhaps greater than before because those 10 topics are super sharp. Right? I mean truly, if you do these 10 things then you can boast a certain achievement which is say less obvious than a score of 80 which could have been a lot of this and none of that. So I'm positive on it.

I think that's true. I just wonder whether is it too much too soon? I just think if we were at 1% or 10% of businesses at B Corp, yeah, let's ratchet this thing up. But I just wonder we might lose some middle ground businesses who kind of go, we'll never be a B corp because this is just too, you know, it's going to be too much resource for us to achieve this. Whereas like I say, you can with, with a, with a good amount of, of intent and, and you know, actual implementing some stuff. A well intentioned business can get to 80, you know, by implementing, implementing enough stuff. If they're not quite there and at least then they're in and they can see that, they can see the, you know, the, the mountain that they can climb to go from 80 to maybe 85 to 90 to. Yeah, that that's my only fear. I'm willing and hope to be proved wrong that there's a big enough community of. I think it's because, you know, the vast majority of B corps globally are small to medium businesses and typically they, they are big on intent but tight on cash and time and resource to implement and make stuff happen. But I guess equally there are.

Possibly systemic and legal, you know, changes also happening to the bigger company tier, which is going to mean, you know, through supply chain pressure actually you're going to have to be doing some of this stuff if you want to be selling to a big company anyway. So yeah, I don't know, I guess it's all going to come out in the wash. But it's way above my pay grade, all of that stuff. The very smart people who design the assessment. I mean just, I remember that there was a teacher at my school who was the person responsible for creating the timetable, you know, and his job was to make sure that there were no, no kids that should, you know, that weren't in the same, in different classes at the same time. But equally that every teacher was available to teach every class that they should be like, it's that kind of stuff that my brain just kind of, I wouldn't even know where to start. It's like, let's just all go in one Big hall and we'll just sort of work it out from there. So, yeah, whoever's working on the standards is like, yeah, that's way, way above my level of intelligence and expertise. But yeah, it'll be, it'll be interesting to see where it ends up, that's for sure.

Yes. Anything else you sort of want to talk about the B Corp journey or. I feel like you've sort of covered that. Yeah. Was there, was there anything that surprised you or anything that. Yeah. Anything unintended or.

Yeah, the reception by the community has been amazing. You couldn't judge that from the outside looking in. So far the embrace has been, has been very warm and you get a sense of that movement in the building just from a few, just from a few meetings and a little exposure that I've had to other recently certified B Corps. And the passion there, it's been very inspiring.

Nice. It's great to hear. And you really are a bigger bit poster child for B Corp because like I say, the arguments we give to people are movement and community.

Investment, attraction, talent attraction. And you're clearly being overwhelmed with people wanting to work for you.

You know, client attraction. Yeah, you're kind of ticking all the boxes in terms of like, hey, this is the, the gold standard of why you should do B Corp, both from a, an impact side of things and making sure that there's rigor in, in the impact that you're making, but also in the upside and, you know, what's in it for you in terms of being a B Corp. So, yeah, completely unprompted. I haven't paid these guys to be saying all this amazing stuff about B Corp. You know, they're just doing it and reaping the rewards for it. So what does the future look like for Oyster? I mean, clearly you've got a lot of potential. You're obviously nailing it. You're tripping over investment. You're in a growth, I guess, economy in terms of people looking to make use of your type of work. So, yeah, what does the future look like? Or is it all going to be taken over by ChatGPT?

That too. But.

We are here to drive the impact of our mission. So our product roadmap is driven by that. So the next step for us is to. Is to launch what we call global cross border payroll. So let's say if you're company that already have entities in six, seven countries and you want to have one platform to handle everything, compliance, payroll, payment, benefits. Oyster is your platform again. How can we remove all the Barriers in front of companies to tap into the global talent pool. And next part of our roadmap is helping companies find talent. And I believe that would have a big impact on our mission because suddenly we can bias where companies want to hire if we offer them only great talent from emerging economies. Well, we would accelerate our, our impact goals to employ more important people in marine economies. So these two milestones for us from a product development standpoint. Nice.

Anything else from you, Jack, in terms of on the impact side and what's the future? Hold on.

As Tony said, you know, we, we launched this menu of 180 countries, 28% of the time.

We'Re getting orders from the emerging world. What, what, how much power of influence can we have? Can we, can we discover through things like enabling talent discovery, particularly focus on the emerging world? So we're, we've built this machine with, with an unknown maximum potential for impact. We're keenly interested in discovering that maximum.

Nice. Really, really push the, put the throttle forward and go right where does this. Yeah, which is. You just seem to be in a really cool position where you know, you've got the capital, you've got the, you've got the ability and the fact, you know, that your impact is clear. Like you say, it's so tied to your success, whereas sometimes there can still be this divergence between. Yeah, we're doing really well, but actually, you know, the impacts may be not going so well, does it? I guess there's a similar, well, the most similar example I can think of. I did some work with a, actually a charity here based in Christchurch called Kilmarnock Enterprises. And they provide meaningful education and employment opportunities to people with intellectual disability. And Michelle, who was the CEO at the time when I was hanging out with them, she. They used to be 100% reliant on funding from, you know, donations to basically almost, it was almost like, to a degree there was an element of like almost daycare for these people with the disabilities. Like we're going to get you in and look after you and you know, we're going to wrap around some support services. And they lost one of their biggest funding contracts and literally overnight they were about to close down and Michelle really turned them around into being a very, I guess like the true sense, a social enterprise where they went out and started seeking to do, you know, paid work.

In a competitive commercial market to then get sustained funding. And Michelle had this great graph showing, you know, as their, as their revenue was dwindling and then went down a cliff of losing this main funding, you know, source that the level of impact was also dwindling. But as they turned it round and they got this consistent revenue because 100% of what they do is creating impact, the little line of impact was, was tagged, you know, it was completely indexed to the revenue. And I think you're exactly the same. And that's just so cool to know that, you know, every, every extra dollar that you're putting bringing in is just making more impact. So, yeah, exciting times. Super, super exciting. I mean, I guess, yeah. Just to finish off though, I mean, the whole AI thing, you know, I sort of make a little note to myself the other day. Oh, I should use CHAT GPT more. I was mucking around. We're not mucking around. I was working on adapting and just updating a workshop that I'm giving to a client in a, in a. In an amount of time, I won't say how many weeks because that will give away who it is. And I was like, oh, I. The title of this workshop's a bit boring. I wonder if ChatGPT can come up with a more sexy title that's got a bit of humor. And I'm like, hey, ChatGPT, this is the topic of the workshop. I'd like you to create a title that aligns with these principles and it needs to be funny. It needs to either have rhyme or alliteration in it. And it came up with like 10 examples. And I'm like, they're all really good. So that's like, you know. So in terms of the future of work, do you think is ChatGPT or AI in general, is. Is that a threat to some of the opportunities that you're presenting to, you know, for people in the emerging markets where maybe some administrative type jobs that you could maybe outsource to human. Right now, is that going to go to AI, or is it more of an enabler maybe for people in emerging countries who can make use of ChatGPT as part of their role to support people? Or is it. Who knows? It's just a.

Wait and see. Yeah, thoughts on that?

It's an amazing opportunity for our mission because it's going to elevate talent from emerging economies.

Our customers hire remote workers across borders. Right. And when you remote work, the main way of communication and collaboration across time zone, across borders, is asynchronous communication. It's primarily written. So. And when you're not an English native speaker, you have challenges to really be effective, to write long documentation and to communicate effectively. So suddenly you have this tool that makes you communicate perfectly and effectively and elegantly and purposefully is going to increase dramatically the productivity and the fulfillment of remote worker, no matter what they are. And if especially non English native speakers is going to give them a superpower and I use it all day long. I'm not an English native speaker, I have.

Neurodiversion. So for me words are difficult. Although it might not appear to you. I really spend a lot of energy to produce statistically accurate phrases now. ChatGPT is my new friend.

Yeah.

Anything for Djak.

Generative AI is a fundamental evolution of the human OS that as a result is going to increase the value and the productivity of knowledge work. Because of the world we're in today where remote working has been more broadly adopted, where we're prepared to look to new places, where for the availability of well prepared knowledge work. I think it's absolutely going to be a net plus to our mission because we're going to see the dramatic acceleration in the value of knowledge work spread to the emerging world in a way that we have not seen before in history. And I think that's going to be significantly amplified by AI.

Nice.

Knowledge work. Knowledge work is going to get more valuable just as more people are going to be able to do that knowledge work.

Super cool. Clearly a very exciting future coming to Oyster all around. Yeah, super cool. That's pretty much all I've got. Any final thoughts or anything that you want to cover before we wrap up? I feel like we've dug in pretty, pretty deep into what you guys are up to and how you're doing it.

I just want to say thank you Tim, for doing what you're doing. Demonstrating the world that being mission driven is better for business and better for people and better for the planet. That's what our relief too. And thank you for having them on the show.

Pleasure.

Thank you for. Thank you for your passion on this topic, Tim. There are a few things worth staying up late or getting up early to talk about. This is one of them. So thank you, Appreciate it.

Yeah. What time was it for you, Jack? I didn't, didn't even ask.

It's. It's. It's midnight 24.

Oh man. So yeah, you've probably got the worst. The worst. And what's it, what time is it for you, Tony? I should have asked.

No, listen, I'm buoyed by that, by the excitement of the topic.

Well, that's the thing. I just think, yeah, I'm not short on passion on a good day, but there is just something when you get people of purpose with shared vision, you know, and I guess for us at the meta level it's that it's the B Corp transition, the economy to be one that's just fairer for everyone and looks after the planets. It's hard to not be excited. And I think, you know, I often look or talk to people and say, you know, maybe in, in 40 years time, maybe when we're living on Mars, on, in the rest home in Mars, we'll go, ah, hey, Jack, Tony, do you remember in 2023 when we there was only like 7,000, can you remember there was only 7,000 B Corps? God, what a crazy day that was.

God.

Remember when we got to the millionth B Corp, you know, in 2030, go, what a celebration, what a party that was. And I think it's hard for us to recognize where we are on, on this journey, but it's exciting to be a part of it and it's just great to be able to connect to increasingly more people like yourselves who, you know, are genuinely impact driven from day one. And so no kudos to you too because you didn't have to, you know, you could have just worked out how to make as much money as possible and driven off into the sunset.

So yeah, doing both at the same time, that's the point, Tim.

Exactly right.

That's the key and that's why Mission can support you in that, in that way. And yeah, thank you.

No worries. Well guys, thank you so much. Keep up your amazing work and yeah, let's maybe let's do another podcast in a year when you've got like a thousand million employees all over the world and you're just dominating everything.

Love to. We will do. Thank you. Have a great day. Night everybody.

So, yeah.

Hey, it's Tim here, that B Corp bloke from Grow Good. If you want more content on purpose, B Corp, how to do more good in the world as an individual or a business, then you know the drill. Hit the like and subscribe. Check out some other videos, they're probably floating around here somewhere. You know how it works. Thank you so much. See you next time.