Laying the foundation for rapid growth with Oyster’s Tony Jamous
This week on How to Win: Tony Jamous, co-founder and CEO at Oyster, an HR platform for hiring and managing a distributed team of remote workers. Founded just two years ago in 2020, Oyster has experience hyper-growth and now sits at over 300 team members, having raised both Series A and Series B funding in 2021 for a combined total of over $70M. In this episode, Tony shares how Oyster built a team and company culture that allowed them to act fast and scale quickly when the opportunity arose, and why having a strong, mission-oriented narrative permeate all aspects of the business has been key to their success. I share my thoughts on how to optimize for speed, why understanding the culture you want for your company is important both internally and publicly, and how a clear mission statement can be a powerful rallying cry to your audience.
Key Points:
- Tony describes the opportunity in the market he saw for a company like Oyster (01:05)
- My thoughts on speed as a competitive advantage with a quote from Hopin's Johnny Boufarhat (04:35)
- How Oyster managed to scale fast when met with massive demand (07:25)
- Tony describes Oyster's internal recruitment strategies (08:40)
- My thoughts on what makes a winning company culture, with a quote from Sequoia Capital's Alfred Lin (10:06)
- Why Oyster is obsessed with being the best employer, and enabling their customers to be that too (13:56)
- How an ambitious mission statement is helping Oyster win customers' hearts and minds (15:31)
- I explain the value of a strong mission statement, with a quote from Patagonia's Vincent Stanley (16:34)
- Why Oyster emphasizes practicing what they preach and being an HR gold standard (19:13)
- Tony explains the factors that drove Oyster's rapid growth (21:40)
- I explain the advantage of joining a booming marketing with high demand (22:56)
- Why Oyster hired a Series F team for a Series B company (23:49)
- Wrap up (26:30)
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