Leaning into the Future of Work

“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” —Tuli Kupferberg

I'm grateful to Google search for furnishing the above quote on vague input, and to Tuli Kupferberg, an interesting counterculture poet I'd never heard of before today, for writing it. It wasn't easy to find a fitting quote about bright sides from bad events that works with COVID-19. But Tuli totally nails the particular perspective from which I am drawing much inspiration, as I look around... and look ahead.

It's not instinctive for us to see the disruption of familiar patterns as a good thing. Tuli's proposition goes against our deep-seated human affinity for predictable tomorrows. This may also be a difficult time for many of us to think about abstract systemic patterns, when more immediate urgencies abound. But if we were to open ourselves to bright sides on an admittedly intellectual footing, and we were to look upon the current state of pattern disruption through this lens, it's possible to recognize an unprecedented opportunity to effect positive change on many of the systems that shape our lives.

It may be precisely the right time for all of us to work together towards the emergence of "new worlds", as Tuli put it so poetically. But where to begin!?

The systems that have clearly failed us during this time of crisis should get our fist attention. At least now we know what they are and where they're broke. "Stressors are information", that we can use now to design the next better versions of the systems we need. Marc Andreessen did a nice job succinctly indicting a number of the systems whose failings have been exposed by the COVID-19 crisis. It's a good list. But what is most valuable in Marc's essay is not the indictment part but the call to action at the end:

"To everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?" - Marc Andreessen

Working for Systems Change in the World of Work

It is an opportune moment to push for systems change in the world of Work. We're all seeing things with fresh eyes and with an unprecedented readiness to replace old assumptions. In the wake of the disruption, we'll soon look back and see that it became easier to catalyze the changes that will make us all happier and more productive.

With that inspiration in mind, Tony Jamous and I are thrilled to share news today of the founding and funding of Oyster™, a company whose mission is to help usher in a better world of work.

We are motivated to make an impact in three areas:

How we Work

COVID-19 has pressed “fast-forward” on the remote working adoption curve at global scale. In every major city of the world, remote working has become an instant reality for all types of organisations, teams, and individuals, many of which would never have otherwise had this experience. Some orgs and people will go back to the office with alacrity. Some will draw a new balance point between distributed and and co-located. But many, many, will not go back, who don’t have to. In every country of the world, teams and organizations are reviewing and adjusting how they work, and there will be unprecedented interest in how to be a good distributed team.

Thankfully, there is already lots of guidance out there on how (and why) to be a distributed team. This was already a movement! Since COVID-19 sent us sheltering two months ago, our feeds have been overflowing with practical tips for better remote working. That didn't all get written in the last two months. While much of that practical guidance is useful, less common and more necessary are the insights and vision that leaders can use to transform their teams and organizations. For exactly that (and a good deal more) give a listen to this recent podcast from David Heinemeier Hansson (Distributed Pioneer, founder of Basecamp, creator of Ruby on Rails).

As a completely distributed startup, Oyster plans to contribute to the evolution of good practices by openly sharing "How we work at Oyster", so other teams can build on what we've done. We are thoughtfully crafting ourselves as a distributed company and hope to lead by example.

How companies and talent connect

Smart startups and scaleups already recognized it makes absolutely no sense to expect to source transformational talent within a small geo-radius around an HQ. For this reason, there has been a dramatic increase in the formation of remote-first and remote-only companies, who embrace being a distributed team as part of their DNA. We planned and would have been such a company, even without the Coronavirus acceleration.

At the same time, the most in-demand knowledge worker talent wants to work only for companies they believe in (that inspire them), and in a manner that affords them the flexibility to design their work/life balance.

These two forces, supported by a wonderful environmental argument, had already catalyzed a movement that was pushing remote working steadily towards wider adoption, if on a slow(er) trajectory. Then COVID-19 pressed fast forward, and we are perhaps decades further along in 2020 than I predicted here.

Increased readiness and confidence by employers, combined with increased appetite for remote jobs by workers, means there is a massive need to enable cross-border employment.

That this remains clunky, inconvenient and costly for companies is the business problem we are solving at Oyster. We believe making this easy for companies will fundamentally enable the free "flow" of talent around the world.

How work shapes the economies of places

To judge our success at enabling the free flow of talent, we would count the number of people for whom the dependence on location as a determiner of employment prospects had been broken. Hopefully, that will be millions.

At scale, this could be an extremely positive global trend that would begin to transform the relationship between economic wealth and places. The current trend is to continue to concentrate wealth in a few places of the world, like San Francisco, where the cost-of-living has risen to exclusionary levels. Without the requirement that they need to find work where they live, workers would become free to choose to live in places for other reasons. This would naturally transform those places, both economically and from a community enrichment standpoint. And in places where great knowledge work jobs don't exist but brilliant individuals do, brain drain can be prevented, those people can stay where they call home and enrich those communities.

We couldn't be more inspired by the moment or the need.

Our Mission | How we Work