Chief Change Officer
#348 Ian Myers: From Tintin to Talent—Building Global Teams With Soul
Tue, 6 May 2025
Ian Myers isn’t here to give you startup hacks—he’s here to tell the truth.At just 26, he became a CEO. By 30, he’d built Oceans, a $10 million agency connecting skilled professionals in Sri Lanka with U.S. startups. But his story isn’t a straight line—it’s an open map. From literature to venture capital, Japan to New York, success and failure, Ian has treated life like a Tintin adventure: follow the clues, embrace the chaos, and keep going.In this conversation, we dig into what really fuels a global entrepreneur—from Buddhist philosophy to a bias for action—and how Ian’s building a future-of-work company that’s human-first, not hype-driven. For anyone rethinking college, career paths, or the AI takeover, Ian offers something rarer than advice: perspective.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Tintin Over Tech Bros: Why Curiosity Beats Calculation“My role model isn’t Musk or Zuck—it’s Tintin. He’s fearless, inquisitive, and always exploring something new.”Zen and the Founder’s Mind“Buddhism taught me how to stay grounded through chaos. That mindset shaped how I lead.”LinkedIn Paralysis Is Real. Here’s What to Do Instead.“People tell me, ‘My classmate’s a VP already—I’ve failed.’ That thinking’s toxic. Just follow what’s interesting.”Ageism, Across Borders“In Japan, your age trumps your ideas. It pushed me toward entrepreneurship.”Oceans: Talent Without Borders“We embed Sri Lankan professionals into U.S. startups—not as temps, but as core team members.”AI, Hype, and the Reality Check“Yes, AI is impressive. But like every tech wave, adoption will take longer than people think.”The Diversity Dilemma: Who Gets a Seat at the (Remote) Table?“We’ve turned down clients who wanted ‘an attractive female EA.’ We hire for skill, not stereotypes.”Don’t Overplot Your Life.“The world’s chaotic. You won’t chart a perfect course. Just keep moving—and recalibrate as you go.”___________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Ian Myers --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Ian Myers and what is his journey in entrepreneurship?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I'm chatting with Ian Myers from New York, founder and CEO of Oceans, a modern talent agency connecting high-skilled talent from Sri Lanka with US businesses.
On most podcasts, you'll hear him share stories about scaling his company from zero to over $10 million in revenue in under two years, or his insights into venture investment. But today, I'm not interested in those stories. They are surely impressive, but not the full picture. What fascinates me about Ian is that, like me, he is a fan of Tintin.
Tintin's spirit of adventure clearly impacts Ian's own approach to work and life. From the US to Japan, from literature to banking, venture capital to entrepreneurship, and gaming to launching a talent agency, He's been on a true journey. What is his secret to success? It's not about over-calculating.
It's about doing what feels right, collecting data points and experiences, adjusting course as needed, and simply forging ahead. Let's dive into the ocean of Ian Myers.
Good morning, Vince, or good evening.
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Chapter 2: How did Ian Myers' early academic and professional experiences shape his career?
Good morning, Ian. Yes, it's evening time for me. Welcome to our show. You got a lot, a lot of things to share today, but let's start with your history, your background. You're fairly young, so let's start with your academic background. Then we'll move on to your professional experiences.
Yeah, and the reason I think it's important to talk about college is it's something that people are increasingly not interested in doing these days. Also worried about whether or not it's going to help them get a job, not get a job, waste of money, waste of time. For me, I just wanted to spend four years studying something that was interesting to me.
So I studied literature, and a big part of my journey has just been Following what was interesting in the moment and not necessarily thinking about my career as a series of points on a line that I had to achieve, which I think a lot of people do, and it actually might have served to hurt people more than it helps them. So I studied literature in school.
I went to grad school for international policy because I loved interacting with people from all over the world. I had lived in Asia for a little while, studied abroad in Japan. And that brought me to work with a Japanese asset manager who was investing in venture funds in the U.S. And that was quite a cross-cultural experience.
Speaking Japanese, I was something of a translator, both linguistically and culturally. And that was my first exposure as someone who had a pretty mundane academic background to venture and startups and technology and flashy growth and lots of money and millions of dollars in financing. And it's hard not to... feel the allure of that world.
If anyone's been in it, been around it, seen it, it's exciting. So naturally I left banking. I went into venture capital and became an investor at a firm in New York. Spent some time there, very rewarding, met a lot of great people. But of course the thing that happens when you're young and in venture is you always look at the entrepreneurs who are building companies and you say, wow,
What am I doing? I'm just moving money around. These people are building stuff. I want to do that. It looks like so much fun. And then if you do it, you realize it's just a lot of pain and suffering until it's great and rewarding. But from the inside, it seems fun. So I took the leap. I became CEO of a company called Newspix, which I built over a year and a half before it was acquired.
Then worked for the acquiring company for a number of years doing new products. And then I launched a second company in the gaming space. It was a total failure, shut down, didn't work out the way I'd hoped. And then I launched Oceans and that brings us up to today.
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Chapter 3: What role did Buddhism play in Ian Myers' leadership approach?
Great. We'll definitely talk more about Oceans in the second part of our interview. Now back to your personal journey. You mentioned that you actually moved aboard to Japan, to other Asian countries. And I believe you, in the grad school, Stanford in particular, you were into Buddhism, is that right?
Yes, I had a professor actually in my undergrad, and he was a Buddhist priest, and I took some of his classes. I studied with him at his temple. I eventually went to Japan to study more about Buddhism. It was a really interesting time of exploration for me, and it was a transformative period for sure.
You can't encounter that ideology and that level of spirituality without it leaving its mark on yourself, I think.
would you say that your exposure to Buddhism, philosophy, and Eastern culture has influenced your approach to investing, entrepreneurship, and even your overall life philosophy today? I'm originally from Hong Kong, so I did the opposite. I studied and emerged myself in Western culture, which has shaped a lot of how I think and conduct myself.
I'm curious about the impact Eastern culture and Buddhism have had on you as an American, especially when it comes to running and building businesses.
For me, the first thing was it helps to shape yourself as a leader. I think Buddhism has a lot, whether or not you follow it to a daily extent, has a lot of excellent teachings that are applicable to running a business. And I say that because it is at its core a method of grounding yourself. true honesty in your reality and the potential of everything around you.
And running a business, being an entrepreneur, being a founder, it's chaos. It's just chaos constantly from the second you start till the second you end, if you ever do. And having those teachings at the back of my mind, I believe have allowed me to navigate some difficult situations that have occurred and set my tone as a leader and as an entrepreneur. I also think that
Anytime you are exposed to working with a truly attempting to understand some cultural aspect that is vastly different from the one you experienced as a child or growing, or as the dominant part of the society you live in, you... Gain an ability to interact with different people from all over the world that for me as a global business person, as a global entrepreneur is incredibly important.
Early on, you mentioned that you started with literature, moving on to international relations. Then you moved to Japan. got the chance to connect with someone in banking, which led you into finance and investment. From there, you learned about building businesses, and eventually, you started your own companies. Looking back at all these transitions,
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Chapter 4: Why is Tintin a role model for Ian Myers?
I also am not really concerned about I think there's a tendency, especially I talk to young people today. They're always comparing themselves. They'll go on LinkedIn. They'll look around. They say, oh, this person who went to my college is now a vice president here. And that's, you know, two levels ahead of me, even though we graduated the same year. My life is ruined.
I'm not on track to be successful. I worry about a lot of things in life. I'm a very anxious person. I worry a lot, but I have never really worried about my career. I have just thought, pursue the thing that is most interesting and trust your instincts and it'll work out. And so far, at times that has felt correct. And at times I felt, oh boy, I've really messed this up.
I think part of it is I'm just not really calculating whether or not this is a good idea. I really just trust myself. And there's a lot of people who love working inside, like just being there cozily, a small cog inside of a large company. And that's where they feel good and happy. And that's what makes them feel safe and successful. And they should pursue that.
For me, it was always the opposite. I wanted independence. I wanted to pursue the things that I wanted to pursue. I've always had a lot of ambition. And so I really put that at the forefront of my decisions around career and transformation. But I always want to be experiencing new things, meeting new people, going to new places.
And the only way to do that in a lot of instances is to do it yourself.
You are like Tintin. For those listening, when I first spoke with Ian about this interview, I discovered we had a common interest, our mutual admiration for Tintin. The adventurous explorer, always eager to dive into new places and experiences. Just like Tintin, Ian's got that same curiosity and spirit for discovery.
My role model.
Wow. People at your age usually see Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, all the tech titans as their role models. Yet, you say Tintin is your role model.
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Chapter 5: What is the mission behind the Oceans talent agency?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Your firm is called Ocean. I see that you are swimming in this vast ocean of the future of work. What fascinates you about this industry, about the challenges in this space that made you dive into this big ocean and decide to leave your mark?
I think there's a couple of reasons. One, and I of course should get this out of the way, there's a lot of ethos in entrepreneurship and startups in America that you're, specifically that you're building something to build and to scratch a niche and do those kinds of things.
And there's a stigma around saying, hey, I saw an opportunity to make a very profitable business that would be successful and make a lot of money. And I try to tell people, you don't need to hide that as a motivation. It's okay to say, I want to be successful, not in the size of my company or the amount of funding I've raised, but that I want to build a business that makes money.
And I personally want to become successful. And I saw that opportunity here. And that's not a small part of it. In addition to that, for me, this was an opportunity to bring a lot more people who are building businesses into the unique experiences I had around working with people all over the globe.
and develop a positive viewpoint of how the interconnectivity of people and cultures can help support a business's growth in ways that were just not possible before. And so it's an exciting new frontier. There is a lot of change. But what was most interesting to me was the receptiveness of a lot of companies in America to working with folks around the world in a way that wasn't there before.
And I saw, given my experiences, a unique role for myself and for my company to play a guide as this kind of new age of global talent dawned.
For the audience who might not be familiar with your firm, could you give us a quick rundown of what your firm does? Specifically, who are your top clients and what kinds of problems do you help solve?
It's very simple. Our company focus is on highly skilled global talent. We are an agency that hires folks mostly in Sri Lanka currently, but soon all over the world. These are highly skilled college educated professionals. They are interested in working with unique people. companies around the world and our client base works with us to bring these people into their teams as embedded team members.
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Chapter 6: How does Oceans connect Sri Lankan talent with the US market?
Even though they work for Oceans, they spend every day, 40 hours a week with their client, working for their clients on various things. For the long term, the roles that we mostly fill are in operations and admin, so specialized and highly skilled virtual assistants that we call EA+, marketing roles and finance roles. We have over 300 clients who work with us.
Most of them are startups, but a lot of them are small businesses, services companies like law firms and accounting firms, doctor's offices, nonprofits, creative agencies. And for them, they may have holes in their business that they don't have enough money to hire a person in New York for $200,000 a year, but they still need the work done.
And so they come to us to hire really talented, well-educated, smart people, but at a 80% less cost than it would be to hire them in the US.
So the talent supply comes from Sri Lanka, and the demand for such talent is mainly from small and medium-sized service firms, particularly in the States, focusing on roles like operations and marketing. Your vision is to accelerate and scale this model to connect global talent with global demand. Is that correct?
Yeah, that's correct. And I think it's also important to mention that a lot of people that work for us, they're getting to access... We work with some of the top e-commerce companies in the world, some of the top AI startups in the world. They're getting to access... such incredible opportunities and learn from businesses that would be completely inaccessible otherwise for them.
And I think in a way we are opening doors on both sides and that is a great business. Everybody wins. And I haven't built a business before where everybody was like really happy all across the board. And that's been really rewarding.
I've seen business models like this before, essentially redistributing skills and talent by connecting supply and demand more closely. Now, there are a couple of major trends impacting the workplace and the workforce, not just in the US, but globally. I imagine they affect your agency's approach in solving problems for both sides. One of the hottest topics, of course, is AI.
You mentioned that you place roles like admin, operations, and marketing. areas where ai is increasingly capable of taking over tasks so i'd like to pick your brain on how you balance this shift how do you navigate the balance between providing human talent and accommodating clients who might prefer tech solutions over human ones?
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Chapter 7: What are the challenges and opportunities in the future of work according to Ian Myers?
The important thing to know about me is that I am inherently skeptical. I'm something of a cynic. I think the value of being involved in the tech community to a large extent, but also in many other industries around the world. And so I have a healthy amount of skepticism when I hear the tech industry's claims about AI and things like that.
And my feeling is undeniable that the technology is impressive and important. I would argue that as with most great technologies, The adoption curve is going to be much longer than people expect. If you look back toward everything from VR to autonomous vehicles, the predictions around when it would change the world were always too short. I think we are at a stage where
AI is going to be an augmentative solution for much longer than people think before it is a full solution in any part of the roles that we fill for businesses. That doesn't mean there aren't going to be specific roles that can be done fully by AI, but I suspect that it will be augmentatives for longer than people think.
So what you are saying is, while there are areas where AI can add value for cost or efficiency reasons, you still believe that there is a significant demand for human contribution in the roles you place?
Yeah, and I also think not only is the adoption curve longer than people expect, there's different types of businesses that will adopt faster than others. If I look at some of our most cutting-edge startup clients, they are already using AI in very sophisticated ways inside their businesses.
If I go look at some of our clients that own landscaping businesses or that own storage companies, they're not really using it at all. So... I think what we will see is a fast adoption by the always fastest adopters, which are startups, but a much longer tail adoption for other businesses over time.
Another trend gaining momentum in the workplace is ageism. And it's not just affecting the older population. It impacts younger people, too. Looking back at my early career in finance, an industry dominated by men, and in the US, primarily white men, I faced challenges being an Asian woman in that space. So I'm curious about your experience. While ageism may not be your main focus,
As part of the talent ecosystem, how do you approach this issue? Are you working to build a team that's not just culturally diverse, but also inclusive across age groups? And do you have strategies in place to help people of different ages amplify the skills and talents?
It's an interesting question. I have experienced it at various points in my career, and I'm also not experienced at all in various points in my career. So an example of this is I worked a lot in Japan, and the Japanese professional structure is extremely hierarchical. Your age is almost the most important thing about you.
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