"I Just Want a Good Place in My Life"

Ian Myers spent years chasing other people's definitions of success. He started a PhD in international policy, then moved into finance, then raised venture capital for an app company. Each step felt like climbing a ladder that led somewhere he didn't want to be. "I got on that path and I got on that treadmill," he says, "but very quickly I was like, no, this is not for me."

The turning point came when he realized something simple: "I just want a good place in my life where I can live and do the things I want to do with the people I want to do them with. You don't have to be a billionaire to do that."

That realization led him to build Oceans, a services business that matches high-skill offshore talent to entrepreneurs, e-commerce brands, and service businesses across the world. The company signed its first contract in February 2022, did $650,000 in revenue that first year, and closed 2023 at about $15 million in revenue — highly profitable from the start.

The Opportunity That COVID Unlocked

Offshoring wasn't new. Google has roughly 120,000 people offshore; Microsoft runs the same ratio. "This has been the secret sauce of the biggest companies in the world for decades," Myers says. But before COVID, offshoring was only accessible to companies with enough scale to invest in huge teams.