S2 Ep17: Redefining HR Using Tech with Jack Mardack from Oyster

[MUSIC] >> Everyone, welcome to a new episode of Tech Can't Save Us Podcast brought to you by Literal Humans. As always, I'm one of your co-hosts, Paul David, co-founder and CEO of Literal Humans. I'll let my seem colleague introduce myself here. >> William Gazoope, the other co-founder of Literal Humans. Very excited to this discussion today. It's going to be an awesome one, huge fan of oyster. So really, really excited to dig into some juicy HR and globally distributed topics. >> We're chuffed today to have another client. I think it's our second client, Jack Mardak, co-founder of oyster and Jack, I'll let you explain exactly what oyster is. You did it so well in the prep here. >> Paul and William, it is a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you so much for having me. So I'm Jack Mardak, co-founder of oyster, whose mission it is to try to make the world a more equal place by making it easy for companies everywhere to hire and pay and take good care of their people anywhere, wherever they are in the world. And the way that we do that is by building a global employment platform that confers those powers of employment and global payroll, giving a benefits to people or globally distributed team. Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, we're very excited for this conversation. And folks, if you don't follow Jack on LinkedIn, you better start because he's an absolute character on that platform. Jack, if you're something you're a recent post, you had a great one the other day about your family, about their immigration journey. I thought that was so powerful and it connects so much with, you know, the human centric stories that we like to tell. And also, the other, the other one I saw was, global hiring shouldn't be hard, just five times just listed there. And it just kind of speaks to the heart of the middle-aged man. >> Some things you have to hammer in. >> Yes, indeed. Well, before we jump directly into what oyster is and what it's all about, we'd like to kind of first talk about the headlines. And we share a couple of pieces with you. And we just want to get your sort of read on some timely issues, you know, relative to the work that you do. It's about how HR can help companies navigate the economic downturn. So just curious about your perspective on how specifically HR, HR tech can help, you know, companies navigate these turbulent waters and ultimately build trust between employers and employees. >> So I think there are two critical opportunities for HR in the midst of the economic downturn that we're facing. The first is to rise to the challenge, to the call, to become a force for human centricity within their company. Right? And so I think that the effects of the last two and a half years have been like the softening of metal on a very rigid and a very little reviewed and little scrutinized, little critiqued way of working that goes all the way back to the office era and still had a lot of unnecessary constraints, particularly on knowledge work. The effects of the pandemic also exposed how important it was for companies and specifically because it's their job. For HR to be the leader in how people are taken care of, not just when there are emergencies as the pandemic created very unprecedented disruption to the way of work and that saw that it was only HR that could respond. Right? And so the world turned with expectation. And I thought that was really an important moment that empowered HR to be a leader in defining and designing how people are taking care of that company is going for. And so I would say rise to that call and become an active leader in designing how your company becomes a more human centric employer. The grievances to call them that of employees are not new. Right? What the pandemic provided is an opportunity for reflection. And so I think the things that employees have been asking for of which obviously work location flexibility is a big theme, but it is not the only theme. It is not the only change here. And so to HR I would say think about how to begin this active journey of evolving and improving and creating an employee experience that your company that will be attractive to individuals. And so the recession has made it important to retain talent. We've had the great resignation causing folks to please certain kinds of organizations often not to take up another job, but merely because those conditions were so undesirable. So that puts a lot of pressure on creating the kind of employee experience that people want to stick around for and want to be a part of. The other big theme for HR I think that relates to the recession and creates an opportunity for businesses is to embrace cross-border international talent acquisition. And so previously companies had to re-forecast their projections for the year because of the changing economic environment. It had to think about laying people off, for example. And so I think that the adoption of remote working and in particular the opportunity afforded by globally distributed teams means that companies have other options now and how they respond. They don't have to stop hiring entirely. They can shift hiring to other parts of the world where talent is less expensive. One of the reasons that companies are casting the office aside is not just the cost of real estate, but what in such cases as London, New York, San Francisco, meant being limited and constrained to the most expensive talent pools on earth. And so globally distributed means that companies have other options now. And it is for HR to be the brilliant orchestrator of that new capability, the creator of that new muscle. And that new muscle includes how to hire internationally, remotely, how to assess talent without bias, how to do that at a reasonable scale. What does it mean to having open roles when the world is your talent oyster, right, versus thinking that you had to focus on people who lived within a narrow radius of a particular HQ? So all of that is an entirely different game, obviously. And we're there to help, obviously, on the how to employ, pay, and take care of side. But there is this bigger picture of help your organization to embrace the opportunities of being globally distributed, which are so relevant to the present recession. You reminded me of a chat I had this week with another agency that were sort of banging their heads against the wall about, hey, we're located in Guildford, you know, and just outside of London. And like we were having such a hard time recruiting, you know, diverse talent and things like that. And they were pulling up all these different, you know, obcandid excuses about, you know, why their team isn't, and maybe as diverse as it could be. And I was just sort of, I was thinking about oyster and so many other platforms. I'm like, guys, most of these problems are sorted for you, you know, in terms of H.R. In terms of being able to hire without bias, like there's so many tools out there to empower you to build a truly, like, globally, you know, diverse remote talented team. And the walls are coming down and it was kind of, it was like painful to kind of talk to some of the points, but also to say, hey, there's tools like oyster, there's tools out there that can help you push past your barriers. So thank you for flying that. Yeah, if you only hire locally in Guildford, you will end up with a white male workforce that's who lives in Guildford. Something else you touched on, Jack, Jack, I think is super interesting is kind of that. There is almost a societal, why revisiting of stuff that had been previously taken as rigid structures. And when you actually dig down into it, you're like, you said these schedules were built in the office area. They, it goes even further than that. You know, they were built in the factory area, or, you know, the great industrial revolution. There we go, even farther back than that. We know where that goes and it ain't a good place, right? 100%, you know, an article that I always bring up and, and remember is, you know, it's just, it was just a short piece and it's like, hey, you know, your partner is struggling to make nine to five work. The reason for that is because nine to five was built assuming that we lived in a sexist society, where the woman would be at home looking after the kids and children, where like when both parents are hired nine to five, of course, you can't work. The whole self-foundation of our economy was built assuming a parent would be there to raise the kids while one other person was employed. It just makes you realize like, yeah, we haven't visited any of these assumptions about how work should be done for, you know, hundreds of years, let alone decades. Yes, well observed that gender inequality is also rather fake in to many of the institutions that we've been living with about what work is and how work works. Well observed. Something as well, you touched on that kind of lead to since the next piece we've shared with you, was, you know, how important it is for HR to really build that two-way relationship between employees. And I do think a large part of that rethinking of how, you know, the sort of power dynamic of employment is, and one of the things that's driven the great resignation is, a lot of people have just realized like, oh, you know what? Actually, I have far more power than I thought, you know, as an employee, it's not just the case of whatever you say, you know, I can ask for things. The piece we shared was, you know, specifically talking about, you know, having the courage to sort of ask your employer for, no, I need that this holiday, I need this extra pay, and I'm just going to be transparent and ask about it and not feel almost sheepish even suggesting that what your needs and the needs of the employer diverge will, to ever fight your corner. And I was just wondering, you know, how, how you see that reimagining that dynamic and how HR teams need to facilitate that in any way, and any tips or any, any good examples you've seen of companies that really are, you know, saying to their employees, hey, if you speak, we will listen, and we will actually execute on it. I think it's two things. I think there needs to be a new tone to this dialogue. And we have had before between the employee individually and collectively the organization, where previously HR was operating almost like a stand-in, like an arbiter, like a human interpreter, if you will, human resources, right? For a long time, there's been this kind of abstraction and opaqueness where HR sat between employees and things that were not transparent, undamentally. And so I think that is a legacy of the imbalance of power that we've had as a as a basic construct and employment were a very long time. So I think that first off of that tone needs to be ripped out and replaced by something that is infinitely more human, infinitely more transparent. And from that shift, come all kinds of positive changes, merely from the change to how the dialogue happens about what I as an employee need and how I feel confident to express those needs to an organization. After the change of tone, if you will, then there needs to be some change of program and methodology as well within HR. I'll give you an example. We're very proud at oyster. Our employee engagement is at the top 2% or venture-funded companies. And we take that as an indication of the health of that dialogue. I think we've set the right tone at oyster. People feel that and is driving how they feel about the organization as a whole because they feel that they are seen and they are cared for in a way that I think is still too unusual to rare in the world. And so we have systems in place through which we offer feedback, through which we allow for folks to express their individual moods on a daily basis in a way that works within an asynchronous construct. We use Pendo or the former and we use a tool called Kona for the latter. And these are tools that are chosen by HR, which at oysters called the workplace team, by the way. And that is also kind of a conspicuous change where I don't know if you've been at companies where say it was up to IT to decide whether you were on teams or Slack. Right? And we lived in a world where the tools and the choices that actually determine how an organization works were driven by technical or security concerns in a way that was usually very adjacent to the technology department. That I think is another thing that needs to change where HR needs to take control of the employee experience in total. And a part of that is establishing what we at oyster call the tools and the rules, which is the specific selection of platforms like Slack or notion or loom along with specific guidance about how to use these tools. And when you have no office framework to rely on, it becomes so important for us to be very clear and deliberate about how oysters meant to operate and work. So that as a person arriving as a new joiner, for example, we're an organization of over 600 people. You could imagine how that could be overwhelming when you don't have the usual. Well, there's Bob. I know he sits over there and is supposed to have lunch with him tomorrow and I'm looking forward to getting a day to dump on this subject from Jenny later, etc. You don't have any of those guardrails. And so we sensed that. And we were hyper deliberate in creating and being specific about the ways that we work. And I think that is reflected in the way that our people feel. It feels confident. They know what their work is, what their flexibilities are, what embracing principles such as asynchronous creates as this wonderful new flexibility on the part of individuals in creating their own work-life balance. But along with that, it comes a little bit more, say, cognitive burden. You have things to think about. It's not like, when the factory, the whistle blows, and your brain just literally switches off one track into another to get in your car, you're at your home. So we don't have those abrupt physical transitions anymore. And so it is for people to take more control. And this is how you get, for example, the challenges of burnout. We have been as prescriptive as necessary in helping our people to take that control, to take the reins of their own work-life balance in a way that works for them. Not something that companies had to think about or work to provide previously, I think, now that's become essential. Yeah, I appreciate that point too, about the employees taking more control. And that's, I think, a great segue into the last piece that we discussed with you, which was that economist piece about work from hotel. And I think it sort of is a very alluded to, like, a larger question around just where we're headed with remote work, this movement towards employees and individuals taking more control. And obviously, the dust is finally starting to settle. The post-pandemic, you're seeing folks like Mac and Blackwell come out with, like, everyone should pretty much get back to the office. You know what I mean? And a little dust up with that. But you're super curious to, you know, your take about where we're headed with the kind of remote work, you know, revolution and how it connects to HR tech and how companies can support their employees. I'm Cindy Aiglin, now, and I've lived here since November, only, you know, not yet a year. And for 20 years before that, I lived in the Bay Area in San Francisco City. My wife and I visited San Francisco for the first time since November, just a couple of weeks ago. And I was absolutely stunned by the emptiness of the streets on a Tuesday in the middle of the day hundreds of yards from where I had had desks and known, for example, that if you had any chance of having lunch on a particular day, you need to figure out where you were going, you need to get there in advance. It had to be this whole strategy because such was the glutt of people at every restaurant lines out the door, every truck, every stand. That was the degree of concentration and intensity at a nexus like second in Howard, where I had spent a lot of time. So that was tumbleweeds. When I went there, I couldn't believe it. And I looked around and I saw all these spires of office space affirming the knowledge that we will never go back to those levels of occupation. And so I think as a civilization, you can quote me on this. I think we've absolutely seen peak office. And we are not going back. Of course, real estate has value and implicit scarcity and those owners want to monetize and realize cash flows. And so I think that's going to simulate an interesting evolution of how we use those spaces. And a part of that I think will be new uses for companies, many of which will still say, cavalices and retain office space in cities or places that they think are important. But that office space will be used in different ways in the future, much less. I think, like I said, I don't think we'll have anything like the one cubicle per person necessity that we previously thought was what guided how much office space a company needs. I think we'll have interesting new uses of that office space by companies. So the question is, is this going to stick? I mean, no, absolutely yes. Pick your way of measuring it. Office space, empty office space in places like San Francisco is one measure. Another measure is the number of companies that every day now are being created as office lists because of course, if you're a startup and you're looking at the constraints and the expense, I don't have data on that. But let's just say conservatively, 25% of startups are being born today as office lists because, of course, spend that as a trend over time. They don't grow up to get offices. They do it like we've done it. They're already 600 people, something that my friend and my recently compared to a 10-story building covering in the air. And it is a bit miraculous like that. Indeed, but I think it is going to become absolutely commonplace for us to have large, even publicly traded companies that don't have offices at all. We're also going to see more companies that have been a little bit more mired in inertia. Just in companies that had offices, had leases, had complications that have taken some time to unwind. There's hybrid is going to continue to be a choice. I think it's a very challenged choice to be sure, but it is a choice that I celebrate because it is at least an indication of greater self-determination, which is different from coasting on autopilot on this stuff, which is what many companies who worked in offices just did. Was no one's job to look at this holistically critically. Now, when we remove the office, it made it very clear that it needed to be someone's job. And in some cases, those leaders, because they best align with business objectives or the perspectives of leadership, will choose different formats. And I think hybrid is going to continue to be selected by companies who are trying to draw a ballot. Apple just affirmed that now on September 5th, folks have to come back to the big doughnut in Cupertino for three days a week, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and one day to be determined by each team. That is an example of clear commitment that I think is the answer, because the enemy is uncertainty and being in limbo. That is the most harmful state for humans. It is certainly the least productive. And so even when the choices made by these companies are different, say, for example, the choice made by oyster and other fully distributed organizations, we admire and wish luck to those HR teams who are contending with complicated picture as we all are. Yeah, I feel you. I definitely felt in limbo when I worked in San Francisco at Tentan Mission, and right near the Twitter building in Uber, and I popped out for lunch, and it was just a madhouse. And then as you said, going back since and visiting, it's totally changed. And also one of the things you mentioned too, what you're saying tracks with our experience as a company as well, where we started out fully remote, then we got an office space for six months, and then decided actually we're better off mostly remote, partially hybrid. We get the team together at least once a month to have a meal and collaborate and things like that. But we're just realizing that the benefits of going hybrid mostly remote outweigh the costs, and we're pushing the agency forward in that direction. So what you're saying really resonates. Congratulations. Think as well, it's just that classic rule of politics. Isn't it? It's very hard to take a right away. Once people have gotten used to it over two years of the pandemic, it's very hard to turn around to those people and say, I know that for two years you've done remote work, but actually remote work doesn't work. And we need you to come back in, and we need you to come back in how it was before where you were in the office five days a week, and maybe we gave you half a day on Friday or something like that. And I do think flexibility will be the key to the most successful teams. And as much as I don't like a couple of these brands for other reasons that I'm about to mention, I think the best canary in the mind for these is probably Facebook and Google, who for a very long time. long time have put high retention at the top of their list and have offered not fully remote work but certainly very flexible working spaces for their team members in an attempt to keep their retention rates up in the high 90% which they have been for quite some time. So yeah, I mean, as a startup, when you're starting out, there's worse things you could do than study the kind of work life balance that those companies try to do when they're trying to keep not just a good developer, but the best developer in the world for whatever it is, they're a good example to follow. Indeed. So many great insights into the trending news story, so thank you so much for all of that, Jack. One of the things I'm really excited for is to just hear more about your and Oyster's personal journey. It's a massive bear mass like you said now of 600 people floating in a building in the air. Talk to us about the journey of kind of getting started. Why did you want to create Oyster and how did it go? I was very lucky to meet my co-founder Tony at his prior company, Nexmo, which was acquired by Vonage in 2016. I stuck around for about two years after the acquisition and Tony was there for about eight months and we were in a continuous dialogue about whatever might be next, just different kinds of ideas for a number of years. And Oyster was the culmination of that conversation right around three years ago, exactly right around in Q3 is when we started talking about Oyster. For me, there were kind of two journey tracks that were relevant in this. I've been having a career based in Silicon Valley living in the Bay Area being a very lucky participant in this bubble in these very privileged circumstances and enjoying the access that my location provided. We're getting to work at software companies of different types. In many cases, brilliant products like Eventbride, Prezi, to name just a few. I had a chance to really come to appreciate and be inspired by the power of software to prospectively make the world a better place. And seeing these companies created and grow, I also had a chance to really understand how to design knowledge work in the context of a software company. And so I was very much a student of the evolution of work for a number of years. And the other track is like a lot of people who say want to have a successful career, but also be a positive agent in the world. I had a corporate career, if you will, working for profit companies, but I also was involved with multiple nonprofits in the Bay Area. I was on the board of a nonprofit for six years in the Bay Area that focused on improving outcomes for foster kids. And I was a marketing advisor to dozens of other Bay Area nonprofits to help them with the arduous path of continuous unraising. And so like a lot of people, I assume that a company could either be for profit revenue or as in the form of an NGO or nonprofit, it would be something entirely different that was more attuned to creating and going after a positive impact. But like a lot of people discover and it's a cliche indictment of nonprofits that they don't scale, say that they don't have operational excellence, they deliver incredible results, but at small scale and quite local. As a systems thinker, I yearned and dreamed about models through which we might pursue positive impact at global scale. So that was my reaction to the dichotomy in my own life of, you know, go to work for a profit company, compromise on these things, or go to work for an NGO or nonprofit and sort of compromise on the other things. I very much was inspired by this ideal of an alternative model where a business, where commercial success and positive impact could be brought together. Like those things were not like oil and water after all. And so that was very, that was very much the source of the excitement when Tony brought the oyster idea to us and said, hey, here's a way to create a large software company that is also a machine of positive impact. And so of course I was in. That's a great story. I love like good partner stories. Like Will and I have our own journey. We got a beer a couple of years ago and Monday, we're not working on another agency, but like I just love a good buddy story about how, hey, we put our heads together, we made this thing. It's just, yeah, it's heartwarming to us. So thank you for sharing that. Along those lines, curious to hear, what's your favorite customer success story? I don't necessarily mean in the sort of, you know, a techified version of customer success, but what's the best story that you've heard from users of oyster, you know, out there that you love? Yeah, I heard a stat recently that was really mind blowing, which is that one of our customers had hired in over 40 countries on oyster. You know, oyster is no slouch in that department. We're over 70 countries represented among our 600 people, but but that within our set of customers, there was a customer. We were seeing examples of companies reaching the kind of geographic diversity that I think would have been absolutely unheard of for any kind of company, right? Except maybe the very biggest, right? Where, you know, just statistically, they just have a high likelihood. And so I was very, I was very proud of that. I think it's a, it's an indication that the world is changing and we're having a small part in affecting that change. So very proud of that recent stat related to that, you know, the positive impact of driving, what are kind of you and some of the teams like favorite features of oyster, slash, you know, what are the features you think have kind of driven the most change in the most impact? Our thesis is we want to make the world a better place by making it possible for people who yesterday, let's say, could not have dreamt of having a life changing remote job because they happen to live in an emerging country rather than Silicon Valley or Short-Each that it should be possible for them to have that. The other piece of that is, well, we're trying to correct for economic inequality and that has two elements, right? It's having the job, but it's also what you are paid. And so oyster has always been very awake to the not unimportant challenge of trying to get the companies to think differently about the arbitrage, if you will, of talent and to view that as something that I think we want to see shrink over time. So I predict that over time, one of the effects long term of the decoupling of location and job opportunity is that the disparity between the highest and the lowest for common roles around the world begins to shrink. So one of the things that I'm very proud of that we launched early at oyster was a salary calculator that allowed our customers to preview the cost implications in particular, salary levels with transparency as a way to build confidence and get them to think in this aspirational way about a global compensation. That's great. And I remember actually as a company, we've hired globally, but using the salary calculator and the different countries that are brought up on the oyster platform and show you the different hiring practices in those countries, just an incredibly useful tool to see, okay, in Spain, you need to think about private health insurance and you need to think about the specific tax. As someone hiring globally, just found that tool to be so useful, just grateful to have it all in one place and it's something we recommend to clients as well. Appreciate you saying that. Yeah, of course. You've mentioned the mission a couple of times, so you want to make it easier for companies to hire and pay and take care of their brilliant employees wherever they are in the world, very aspirational. What do you see as the new and evolving challenges getting in the way of that? What are the sort of things you predict or see already that are impeding that mission in the near term at least? I wouldn't say impeding the mission, but it remains an opportunity for us to continue to influence and dive to a more human centric place, the behavior of companies, of our customers, etc. We see this as part of what we're here to do in the world, modestly, which is to try to give visibility to a standard of employment that should be equally available to people around the world. That is a journey. We have customers that are right on that boat with us from the beginning and we are in other conversations where these are new ideas about not just the value of diversity within an organization, which I think is ready for a standing ovation. Finally, I mean, I think we've been talking about this thing for a couple of months back. I posted on LinkedIn, my Google, why does diversity matter? Google's response was the standard business talk. It was like, well, diversity is perform better. It seemed to me like it was this justification. We had to give an ROI based answer to why diversity matter. I think it feels like we're ready to say diversity is just important morally because we live in a world where we've had systemic inequality and for an organization to show diversity. It's workforce means that in that place, diversity, those forces have been mitigated. Those systemic forces have been mitigated against inequality and against bias. That, anything we need to just stand up and say that. I think Oyster is very much about that message. Like I said, we also need to get companies to think fairly about compensation. As they look now with fresh eyes to the talent in the emerging world because maybe they can get them for less than what that person would have caused in Santa Clara. This is not a predatory or opportunistic opportunity. It needs to be viewed in a more holistic light where organizations that we're trying to encourage organizations to stand up to the opportunity to drive impact within their work courses by hiring in these locations. That's something that I think should be elevated and embraced as part of an ESG strategy. Show of the diversity of your work will show you. the direct impact of your organization by the people whom you have employed in emerging countries. So these are some of the ways that we're from the bigger ideas that say that we're trying to roll up the hill. Love that explanation of why diversity matters in a team. I don't think I've ever heard it put like that, but I think that's absolutely brilliant. We talk about this as well and having the past like diverse teams create better work, which is true, but it like you said, it's a very ROI-focused reason and yet it's just morally the right thing to do and you've shown as a company you have overcome the systemic inequalities. I love that. I've never heard that articulated that way and I think it's brilliant. Sort of a related point with regards to kind of, you know, there is that changing mentality that you've seen and has really, you know, been oyster, been at the forefront of in many ways. What are some of the kind of HR tech trends that have caught your bits up by surprise and would you care to venture any sort of predictions for the next year or so and how that's going to look like in the world of sort of HR and employment? Pappy surprise, right? And it's not so much a surprise because it was counter to expectation is it was just something that I hadn't seen before. I previously compared the sudden necessary transformation of HR to the slightly less sudden but as necessary transformation about 10 years ago of IT, right? And if you remember, it was the looming opportunity of the cloud and all that that intended for businesses and the looming opportunity of data and all that that were intended for business and that combined opportunity picture focus on IT as the function that needed to change step up and have a much bigger impact for the organization and they they had previously had because remember before that we how derided and ridiculed IT was, you know, the tape on the glasses and you tumble under your PC, you know, I mean, it wasn't so long ago, right? that we had we had we had an accepted this picture of the uselessness and the non-strategicness of IT and so what is exciting is I think that there's a there's a similar in magnitude and debt transformation happening out of necessity in HR right now but much faster, much faster, catalyzed by the pandemic. It's into those new territories of purposeful design of the employee experience, taking ownership of how a company works, being very deliberate about the creation of that and the integration of culture into that experience, gaining mastery over the logistical complexity of a globally distributed team, etc. So there are some absolutely new skills and so like that I think there will be turnover and there will be some people that are new into HR as we saw with IT. So those are those are my predictions that we're going to continue to see a kind of a radical transformation that is a lot like what we saw in IT at the end of which we'll see HR at the table a strategic partner very clearly so contributing in very clear and meaningful ways to the successful business. The phrase purposeful design of the employee experience is so powerful and it sort of speaks to your point about like companies were shifting their thinking and reframing you know and taking a more human-centric approach of like we cannot just treat these individuals as the unfortunate phrase human resources right and we need to actually think about you know them as as like individuals who bring culture and bring you know so many different assets to the to the table and it's just powerful to see companies shifting their thinking and using platforms like Wester do it. Along those lines we're going to we're going to make a quick turn into what we call the lightning round just kind of some fun interesting question so that our audience can get to know get to know you Jack as a person and the first question you know we are tech podcasts so our audience wants to know you know what kind of tech stack you work with and most importantly what's been a game-changing piece of tech for you. So I'm a Mac person in my hardware standpoint I have all the devices that's hardware-wise and our work tech stack his I've never seen the selection of and the orchestration of a set of tools be so conducive to empowering and creating the capacity to work in an organization as I have Edoister and that that owes a lot to the fact that we had to do it that way because we felt that we were sort of on a tight wire from a making it work standpoint and so some of the very important components of that are Slack which a lot of us have used at other companies in sort of you know in a way that was suggested of the way that it could be used and I think 600 people on Slack know offices we're we're using it in a very rareified and special way and I think we've really inhabited that platform with a lot of specificity with a lot of rules and so I think you know the way we use Slack is is like a blossoming of the potential of the platform that exceeds the way that I'd seen it used that companies before also documentation and having having kind of a sense of place was very important from the very beginning and so we we were very lucky to invest in the notion platform as our kind of primary knowledge repository slash there there in a virtual digital sense is where it's where things live and very impressed by the incredible flexibility and power of that platform to name just a couple of the elements of our stack circling it back to almost the the previous conversation those companies that do need their employees in the building with them overseeing them to make their business model work just have a fundamentally flawed business model because there are so many solutions that have been created that do solve these problems that the what they're really saying there is I need my supervisor being an absolute nightmare to my staff for us to make this business model work why can't you just do this in a sana for task management or Slack for communication we're also very much pro max the mac hardware and pro the Slack communication to 100 percent just moving us on to territory that reflects the name of the podcast what's one problem the tech comes all for and why tech brilliantly empowers us and it also has a tendency to pull us out of our minds out of our own heads and so I think that introspection is a problem where tech isn't yet say helping but rather working in the other way and what I mean is I can remember a quality of consciousness in my own life in my own experience that was very different than the one in which I am now and of course you know you might say the change in the quality of consciousness is an aspect of living long enough right and as we as human beings experience the interplay between technology and that's always a journey and it's always changing but it does feel to me a little bit like introspection the power of has been lost the power to inhabit one's own thoughts quietly in meditation is popular for a reason I think ironically digital virtual meditation is taking in so I think that there remains further development in this broadening even to say in the interplay between technology and mental health I think the problem of introspection just being one that seems conspicuous to me we don't inhabit our minds as we once did and I'm not sure it's all for the better that is the most meta answer we've ever had to that question congratulations that was that was incredibly deep but in existential sorry I think we all feel it is getting harder and harder to you know like tune out the notifications and the you know the pings and stuff like that it's just I think about how I think you know with the onslaught of all these things often and I feel like I don't always have the tools to kind of change the behavior I just took Instagram off my phone I thought that was a big coup but it's just sort of like gosh like you know how do we get in our heads in a healthy way you know again and maybe can tech enable that so along those lines segue into our next question which is my favorite question tech for bad what's the evilest application of tech that you've seen out there Jack? Evilest application suggests intent and I don't think that I mean accept in such cases that make the headlines for being conspicuously bad Cambridge Analytica I think that was that was bad right they were bad that was evil but more common let's say is accidental evil that is the result of opportunism plus power and there's there's just companies doing things that they feel they can and the bigger the company the more dangerous I won't name platforms but to my earlier point about the quality of our consciousness I do think that we are under a kind of a salt on our attention and by extension on our behavior and our way of thinking and feeling that we have not yet properly responded to as a civilization I would say so I'm hopeful that as we mature in our understanding and in our custodian shift of these technologies that we keep at that line. Were you a philosophy major Jack because I'm getting a little self-convived see it. No, no, no, no, just an amateur. Sounds good to me. I think the sort of the most evil part applications of tech I see are when a tech company does do something that it hadn't intended but then doesn't clean up half of themselves like you know it's fair enough you couldn't ever see the massive impact some of these things are going to have but to then just go that is how it is that I don't ever find wash as well with me and also a tool that I would recommend you both try I use the headspace app for meditation for guided meditation and it has very much helped me with introspection would recommend giving that a whirl just moving us on to the next question and this is an interesting one if you can give us an answer without giving away any company secrets because I imagine we're working on a lot of tech products and you've already dreamt up one that solves a problem but if you can dream up a new tech product what problem would it solve and why? You can't you guess now after the earlier answer the introspection app naturally naturally but let me give you another another answer as part of an exercise you know because a lot of technology is storytelling right it's what the technology does and then it's how you inspire people about it in So a number of years ago, as an experiment, I conceived a company based on a technology that did not exist. And that was in order to explore the responsiveness and the interestinglyness to people of something that would do these things. And it was a technology that was broadly about behavior modification. As in you want to quit smoking, you want to change your dietary habits. And I know that it's certainly not without potential risks. Right? How are we doing it? How is it working? But let's say if we could give people the kind of power over their own behavior that we know so many millions of people crave and don't seem to muster, I would love to harmlessly give them the power to modify their behavior in ways like smoking cessation, for example. That was an actual exercise where I made business cards and everything. So it was kind of fun. The company was called Majura as Enforce Majura. Ah, okay. Very cool. Last question, you know, tech for good. We're trying to push this narrative that, you know, tech for good is a verb phrase, right? Something you need to like live and breathe. And it sounds like you're already doing that. So curious to hear about how you have in your career, are you career in tech in particular, balance, profit and purpose? You kind of alluded to this earlier about your different pursuits in the private sector. Now, if you're doing with oyster, but yeah, how have you doubled those two? I did it in the way that I described for a long time, which is when you become, you know, even a little bit successful, comparatively speaking enough to realize that there are people of the world who are not so lucky. Many of us, in many of us, that awakens a kind of longing for agency that I certainly experienced. And I was lucky to channel that into some great organizations. San Francisco Casa was the organization on whose board, I sat, they take on the very hard, hard job of not letting kids whose lives are disrupted by being removed from their rental home, usually under the most urgent of circumstances, not letting that disruption be just terminally destructive of their lives to put it mildly, which it turns out to be for a lot of kids. And so I did, I did have that balance that way, day job and volunteering. And so that's the way that I did it. One of the messages that we're putting out there is, this can be done. And by this, I mean, it is possible to conceive a company and organization from the very beginning that is truly committed to positive impact. The most exciting applications of this, I think, are when entrepreneurs founders start by referencing the acknowledged global problems that we have in the world, like the United Nations' sustainability development goals, of which there are 17, four of them very relevant to what oyster is doing. And so imagine a world where entrepreneurs, impact entrepreneurs are proliferating and their modus operandi is to look for ways to intersect business model and important global problems that need solving. Imagine if many, many more did that. That is what I would hope to see. That is the learning from this magical oil and water combination that has been oyster, that I would most love to share with other entrepreneurs. It can be done. The investment community is ready to welcome you warmly as our customers and employees. You know, amazing talent of the world. People want to work for purpose-driven companies. So there's never been a more opportune moment to attack the world's problems with entrepreneurship. By far, I think the best answer you've had to that question. And with concrete examples, like S.F. Kasa, I love Kasa. My aunt who lives in Las Vegas is a Kasa. And she's constantly sending photos and just it's an incredible and important program. So thanks for flagging that. We'll include that in the episode description. So folks can learn more about it. Jack Mardak, a founder of Oyster. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on Tech Can't Save Us podcast. We're so grateful for your time and your insight. Just quickly, where can folks find you and Oyster on the interwebs? Oh, well, OysterHR.com. I'm easily found on LinkedIn, Jack Mardak, a Mayrdac. And I'm on Twitter @2hp. Nice. We'll make sure to include those links in the episode description. Thank you again, Jack Mardak, co-founder of Oyster. For your time today, we appreciate you.