👋 Howdy! This is the Open Source CEO, the bi-weekly newsletter that one day might turn you into a somebody.

COMING IN HOT TODAY 🔥 

🦪 Seven startup exits from one man: Our interview with Tony Jamous!
💣 A cracker of a Notion channel: If you are a nerd like me you’ll dig it.
🧲 The world’s great remote handbook: Or even wiki in general.

If you’re interested in sponsoring these emails, reach out. I’d love to share some ideas and see how we can work together.

PARTNERS 💫 

INTRODUCTION 🤷‍♂️

Welcome back my ever so loyal followers. What a treat I have for you today. Today we get to hear from one of the leaders in tech I respect the most.

No, it’s not Jeff Bezos. Nope, it’s not Yvon Chouinard. It’s Tony Jamous.

Why do I respect Tony so much. Well, simple really. Firstly, because he’s a great operator. But secondly, and 10x more importantly, I have watched from the sidelines in awe of the work he puts in to two things: brand & culture.

I am a broken record at Athyna when talking about this stuff. It’s what truly fires me up and I hope it does you too.

Housekeeping wise: I ditched the news sections from this point onwards. Nobody liked them and there was nothing really ‘open source’ about them.

They were me being slack and lazy and they weren’t going to make anyone better. And the aim of this newsletter is to learn & do exactly that…get better!

LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Tony Jamous - Co-Founder & CEO at Oyster

Tony is the CEO and founder of Oyster, a Global Employment Platform that empowers companies to hire, pay, and care for team members wherever they are in the world. 🌍 Oyster’s mission is to ensure that companies everywhere can hire talent anywhere.

Tony regularly appears on podcasts and in publications discussing distributed work and identifies as a Future of Work Activist.

He is also an active investor, having an incredibly active portfolio through angel investment and his family office after successfully exiting his previous company Nexmo (acquired by Vonage). Aside from his own personal startup exit, Tony has been part of 3 exits as an operator and has 4 exit investments.

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

My main job is to be ahead of the company at all times. I’ve hired very talented leaders to execute the strategy we have aligned upon, and I trust them to do so.

In the meantime, I need to analyze everything that is going on in the market, in the company, and with our customers and anticipate what Oyster should be doing to maximize our mission impact and business success.

And, of course, I need to influence my team to take the right direction based on my findings.

Explain your philosophy around leadership? How do you think about it?

Good leadership starts with human leadership. As leaders, we set the tone for the entire company, and it's our responsibility to empower and motivate our employees.

When people feel micromanaged, stressed, and unable to balance their home and work life, that creates a lot of tension and mistrust. It’s our job to create space for our workforce to grow, thrive, and have a sense of fulfilment.

In the early days of Oyster, I would engineer opportunities to connect with employees. This has continued through our monthly all-hands, internal ask leadership Slack channels, and digital internal communities. I also hold monthly Zoom coffee chats with groups of new joiners and those celebrating their one-year anniversaries with Oyster.

It’s important for me to be visible and connected to the people who make Oyster a great place to work.

How do you build culture?

Building culture is all about intentionality. Strong cultures happen when everyone — from the CEO to the newest person hired — is committed to creating a safe, supportive, and inclusive workplace. When you’re remote or hybrid, that intentionality needs to increase tenfold.

You can’t rely on ‘water cooler’ conversations or ping pong tables to build up your culture. Culture happens in the social calls with your colleagues, the tools and the rules that improve collaboration, and the ways employees are encouraged to support and connect with each other. My advice to anyone thinking about how to build or strengthen their team culture is to start with a solid foundation and make it a part of your company’s DNA.

It’s not enough to say your culture is “supportive”. That needs to be reflected in your policies, practices, and ways of working. At Oyster, we’re big on showing appreciation. You can read more about that in our open-source employee guide. 👇🏼

Every team celebrates wins differently, but we encourage Oysters to shout each other out in our shoutouts Slack channel and celebrate the wins — big and small.

It’s an important way we build camaraderie and trust.

How do you communicate & handle tough decisions in business?

I try to communicate tough decisions with empathy and transparency. Empathy because all emotions that come as a reaction to these decisions are welcomed and understandable.

Transparency on the “how” and the “why” of the decisions gives teammates better understanding so they can work through any difficult emotions they may be experiencing.

EXTRA READING: See how Tony handled a recent re-organisation with class.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire all-star talent?

The competition for talent is fierce. If you’re committed to building a high-performing team, you have to build a workplace and a culture that will attract top talent. That’s why your employer brand is so important.

At Oyster, being transparent about our mission, values, ways of working, and employee benefits put us in a position where we were receiving 12,000 applications for open roles each month. As a very young company, that was huge for us. We also have the advantage of being able to hire anywhere.

From a talent standpoint, this means that the hiring pool is much larger, and we’re able to connect with incredible people from anywhere.

How do you set goals?

We set goals and OKRs at the company, department, and team levels. This means that people are very clear on how their work contributes to the success of the company. When you’re first scaling or experiencing hypergrowth, that buy-in and alignment is critical.

Our goals are also closely tied to the data that we collect across teams and departments. That means we can track our progress, measure our growth, and set ambitious goals in the short and long term.

Do you run hybrid, on-site or remote and why?

Oyster is a distributed and fully remote company. Being remote allows us to hire incredible talent all over the world and tap into a diversity of experiences and perspectives. This is our superpower as an organization.

Because we’ve been able to hire everywhere, we have been able to grow to 600 employees in three years. We’re also able to be more inclusive because of the way we hire. 50% of Oyster employees identify as women, and we also have Oysters in 70+ countries and counting.

We’re able to do this because we have a strong asynchronous work culture that allows us to collaborate effectively no matter the time zone difference.

EXTRA READING: See how Oyster do fully asyc as a 600 person scale-up.

You can find Tony on LinkedIn here, Oyster at their website and also - take a look at Oyster’s recent report on Employee Disillusionment - insights on how to “win back” your people.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

For all you Notion fans out there. Wrap your /’s around this one. If you are building all of your internal docs and wikis in Notion you’re missing a beat.

And if you are a Notion builder this channel is one to watch.

TOOLS & RESOURCES 🔥

The GitLab team handbook is the central repository for how they run the company. When printed, it consists of a bonkers 2,000+ pages of text.

It’s crazy big but crazy great. How to use it…

If you are looking at conquering a problem inside of your org. Head here, and see how an extremely, publicly listed SaaS company does it. 💥 

That's it my lovelies. I hope it was valuable. I have one ask though: tell me what you thought of today's edition.

Also, feel free to reply to this email and spill your thoughts in a deeper more personal way as I'd love to hear from you.

Adios amigos. 🌮