Nicole Sahin Transcript
Clint Betts
Nicole, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are the CEO and founder of GP, which is Globalization Partners. You've done so many incredible things. I don't even know where to start with you. Maybe just tell us how you became the founder and CEO of GP.
Nicole Sahin
Thank you, Clint. Yeah, I'm so happy to be here and love your show. GP is a recognized leader in global employment. What we do is we help companies hire anyone, anywhere, quickly and easily, without them having to figure out how to navigate the legal HR and tax jurisdictions around the globe. What we built and the industry that I started and figured out was we built companies in each country around the globe, so 180 different countries. When a company wants to hire an employee in another country, instead of figuring out how to run payroll and how to set up a company in that country, which makes them have to file taxes in that country, we set up companies in each country and give all of our customers access to it using a software that we've built on top of our global legal infrastructure. Ultimately, a customer logs onto our platform and builds a locally compliant employment contract, but when they hit send on the offer, the employment contract goes out from our local company and country directly to the client's end employee. Legally, we're the employer of record in each country, but the customer is like they're usually working all inclusively for that customer and meeting the needs of the customer in that country. How did that start? I used to help companies expand their operations all over the globe and helped them figure out, on a company-by-company basis, how to do business in each country. After doing that for six years, I just thought, "My God, there has to be a more scalable way for companies to do business around the globe," and so I quit my job, took the year off while waiting out my non-compete agreement and figuring out the legal and tax implications in each country and ultimately, figured out it could be done. It's just that the legal and tax implications underneath the platform, we had to figure it out on a country-by-country basis because, prior to that time, most lawyers and tax people would've said it couldn't be done.
Clint Betts
Yeah, it sounds super complicated actually, which is why it's so great as a business I'm sure. How many countries are you in?
Nicole Sahin
We do business in 180. It's over 180 countries, it's all-
Clint Betts
- Yeah. That is incredible.
Nicole Sahin
Thanks.
Clint Betts
How did you get in that many countries? That's phenomenal.
Nicole Sahin
One by one. One by one. We have an amazing legal team around the globe, a global HR ops team, a tax team, and a finance team. We're around 1,100 people now, and the company was built organically, but my vision was always to automate everything around doing global business and just make it really easy for companies to hire anyone anywhere. It took 13 years really to get to this point where we're like, "We have a really good foundation. We're the head of the class for, we're known for compliance, we're known for really supporting our customers," but part of what has supported us, of course, is software and we couldn't be as scalable as we are and cover so many countries without software, but even more exciting right now is AI.
I tell my team like, "Oh, we didn't know what we needed at the time when we set out to do this, but we needed AI in order to just effectively and efficiently manage the legal compliance across such a broad scan of work. It takes vast computing power to stay on top of all of that. Actually, by the time this podcast is announced and published, we'll have launched our AI product into the market, which is the next level of helping companies do business anywhere quickly and easily from an HR and legal perspective.
Clint Betts
How is it changing your company AI in terms of workflow and customer? I mean, obviously, for a company like yours, I imagine it could make a significant impact and kind of cut back on a lot of various roadblocks just out of the way.
Nicole Sahin
Totally. Oh, I think the reason it makes a difference. We have really good data. We know, so you could just look at the laws in each country, and the laws will prescribe one thing, but there's an HR and a human touch element on the ground in each country, which is how things are actually negotiated. In some countries, it's actually not even legal to fire somebody. Of course, people get fired, but how do you do it? How do you terminate a relationship that isn't going to last an entire lifetime? It's always done in countries where there are laws like that, which are to protect people, but then you have to deal with the realities of people being people and business being business. It's done with negotiation.
There's a formula that a lawyer and HR advisor would follow in that country. There's a way to handle the person, and because we have HR and legal people on the ground and each country kind of navigates those situations and all the data of 13 years of doing business around the globe, our team was able to compile all of that into a really smooth product that ultimately, is like you have an HR team on this side, on this shoulder and a legal team on this shoulder, but these legal teams know everything about every country. Then, we put that power and human knowledge at the fingertips of our customers.
Clint Betts
It must be pretty incredible what you do because, really, as I think about it and step back 180 countries, it sounds to me like you're democratizing opportunity to the entire world. In America, we take for granted, though, how much access to the opportunity we have, and you are really democratizing that. How much does opportunity play into what you do? Obviously, your clients are the people hiring, right?
Nicole Sahin
Yeah.
Clint Betts
You're probably making as much, if not a bigger, impact on the people who are being hired.
Nicole Sahin
It's huge. I mean, it's huge. Look, at the end of the day, we're not telling our customers who to hire or why. We're just making it easier for them to access the best talent for the job, no matter where the talent for that job sits. The equalization of opportunity for people around the globe is something the democratization of opportunity is hugely inspiring for our team. We have team members all around the world. Many of them are today's Silicon Valley rock stars. They're amazing. They've built fabulous careers, and many of them have worked in the world's hottest companies, but most of them had to leave their home country and come to Silicon Valley to find a job and become who they are. Now, in today's generation, it's been incredible, even over the 20-something years that I've had my career, to see how much the landscape has changed and shifted.
I mean, it used to be companies that wanted to hire people in the Bay Area, London, and New York, and that's kind of it. People had to find their way to get to those places in order to get the best jobs. Now, companies are hiring the best talent for the job anywhere it is, and besides just the access to opportunity, if you're really smart and you grew up in India, you can stay in your home, stay home, and get the same access to a job. Beyond that, if you think of the ripple effect on those communities as well, like somebody being able to have a great job who grew up in a village in Brazil and yet stays in Brazil and they spend in Brazil and they bring their colleagues and friends along with them, it's incredible. It really is the globalization of opportunity and access.
Clint Betts
The globalization of opportunity. That's a great way to put that. You wrote a book about this, right?
Nicole Sahin
I did. I did. It's called Global Talent Unleashed, and it's an executive's guide to conquering the world and doing business all over the globe. That was a little bit more just the story and some of the knowledge that I've gained from doing business in so many countries because ultimately, what I found is that over the many years of helping customers do business all over the globe, there's so many little human things that come up that you can't really write it into a how-to manual, but there's a lot of just collective wisdom of doing business with people in different countries. How people communicate is normally one of the key things to know besides the legal and HR stuff. It is an endlessly fascinating career. Of course, I'm biased, but I really have enjoyed my work working with everyone everywhere and helping them get access to opportunities.
Clint Betts
You've been able to, I imagine, travel to a lot of countries, talk to a lot of places, and see a lot of cultures. You spoke at the World Economic Forum; is that correct? One of the unicorn panels?
Nicole Sahin
Yes.
Clint Betts
What was that like? Because by the way, world Economic Forum, over the past two years, has been painted as the most evil. They're controlling our whole world, but of course, that wouldn't be true.
Nicole Sahin
Yeah, it's not; I mean, yeah, I think the Schwab Foundation does a lot of great work in the world. There are incredible people. They garner brilliant people from all over the world, and I guess there are two sides to every coin where there's brilliant intellect and the future of the world is being incubated. These are real people, scientists, leaders, and technologists at the cutting edge of innovation. There's also a lot of money that goes into that, and it can be seen as a cobble of people cooking up the next what's going on in the world. Yeah, I found it really fascinating. I learned a lot about what was going on, and it is fun to be at the forefront of technology in the future. Where we are with technology right now, I'm not the first person to say that we are taking human evolution into our own hands. It's incredibly exciting to be at the forefront of augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, and being human at this time. Yeah, Davos is really the epicenter of that in many ways.
Clint Betts
What do you think, and I know that this is the question everybody's asking, and there's not an actual answer, nobody knows, but given that, what do you think the future of AI is going, how is that going to affect humanity?
Nicole Sahin
It's going to be awesome. It's going to be a wild ride to get there, but yeah, there are a lot of complications there. But ultimately, I think we are transforming humanity 10 years from now when we've put brain chips into our kids' heads, and they have a million times the computing power of what we today consider what we are today, we'll be looking at the current versions of ourselves as if we're Neanderthals, and that's scary, and yet who programs the brain chips? I think for all of us to have access to so much collective wisdom, so much collective intelligence, it is inspiring, it's transformative, it's unpredictable, and I'm excited about it. It's a wild ride that all of us have signed up for in one way or another. We're going on the ride, and it's going to be a wild time ahead.
Clint Betts
Kind of humanity doesn't have a choice. Whether you sign up or not, here we go, what's happening with AI, although the chips thing that you would have to sign up for is that. I wonder what a typical day looks like for you?
Nicole Sahin
Oh yeah, a typical day for me is a weekday. I mean, I'm an early riser. I definitely believe that the early bird gets the worm, so I wake up at around 5:00 A.M. I meditate every day. I feel like that's really important to just get my head and heart in the right space, get a lot of clarity from that, and spend a little bit of time with my family, if possible, before getting to work. Because of time zones, I'm definitely on the early side of working too, so I'm usually at my desk by seven or eight and then work just like anybody else and try to focus on what's important, knock out what's urgent, deal with what's important, rather than getting sidetracked by all the many things that we could otherwise spend time on.
Clint Betts
What do you read? What reading recommendations would you have for us?
Nicole Sahin
Well, right now, I'm reading Ray Kurzweil's, The Singularity is Near, so Ray Kurzweil, he wrote The Singularity is Near around 2005, which is about humanity merging with AI and taking the evolution of the human race into its own hands. In 2005, I remember reading it and I was like, "I know this to be true, but it seems far off into the future." At that time, he was saying that 2029 is the point at which humans will merge with AI. Now, where I'm looking at it, I feel like he's probably right on track, and it's kind of crazy. I haven't finished reading it yet, but he has outlined his predictions for the years ahead. I'm excited about that. Other things, I mean, I read the headlines of the news, and I do care what's going on in the world, but I try not to devolve into reading too much about politics. I feel like politics is meant to be very distracting, and where the real innovation and change are happening, the real story of our generation is in science and technology, so I love keeping an eye on that.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah. Politics is a whole rabbit hole you can go down and never get out of if you kind of follow that every day, and as you said, it's hard to make a dent in that area anyway, particularly if you're not in that game. I wonder, as you think about AI and as you think about democratizing or the globalization of talent, how do you think about culture and maintaining your culture both at your company and how do you do that in terms of the values and all that type of stuff across countries?
Nicole Sahin
That's a great question. I mean, so we're a founder-led company, and we've had organic DNA, which is the DNA of a company. It matters about the founder, and things for me that have been important have been people being human, people connecting across the globe, people treating each other with consideration and respect, but also driving hard as a business. Over the 13 years, we've had different chapters in the company and in the business. How do I drive it? In the early days, when people were meeting in the office more, and it was a smaller company, we'd have people flying in and that type of thing. I would always try to bring the best from different countries into our headquarters office. Just as an example, when you go to meet our team in India or Mexico, they're so warm. They pick you up at the airport; they take you to dinner with their parents.
The team is so embracing; they have you scheduled both socially and from a business perspective, from the second you touch the ground until you leave, and you just feel completely loved and embraced. If you compare that to an Indian team member flying over to our Boston office following the American cultural tradition, they get off the plane. They have no idea how to get through customs. They have to figure out how to book a taxi, how to get to their hotel, how to walk to the airport, or how to walk into the office, and then they kind of walk in, and nobody even knows they're coming.
I mean, really, Americans are so independent that we didn't have this culture of hospitality. We actually hired a woman whose job was just to be like the hospitality commitment and bring the best of the traditions of India and Mexico into our headquarters office. She went remote like everybody else during the pandemic and was kind of reaching out to people and doing things remotely. It is hard to have a remote humanist culture. We try to do things like the Muse Storytelling Hour by Zoom, but honestly, it's a challenge to run a cozy, really vibrant company culture by Zoom. I think meeting in person is required in this day and age occasionally.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. How do you stay motivated as a leader and as a CEO every day, keep going? You've obviously seen a tremendous amount of success. What keeps you going?
Nicole Sahin
Thank you. I think what keeps me going is making my team successful, knowing that it's really about making the next generation of great leaders, and knowing that we are at the cutting edge of the next era of technology. I feel like with our original business, even though the global employer of record platform and the industry that we started has only really penetrated about 40% of the market, a lot of companies don't even know it exists yet. To me, it's like, oh, we've already built it, so I can mentally move on. Now, to be at the forefront of AI and be like, "Oh my God, we have this really; we have an incredible opportunity to change the future of humanity." If you think about global employment law and global HR matters and how you treat people around the globe, nothing could be more important than to get right for people and to make sure that it's not only compliant but truly takes care of people and honors their work. It's incredibly important. The last maybe five generations of people of our elders and ancestors were fighting for employment rights. That's what we're kind of codifying into the future of humanity by what we're offering through our HR and legal product that's AI-enabled.
Clint Betts
Yeah. We kind of talked about politics earlier, but I wonder what you think of this whole idea of CEOs, maybe 10, 15 years ago, who were never asked to speak out on anything outside of their company. People just like, "Hey, this is what you do for a living." Like, "Hey, if you're in manufacturing, we want to ask you about manufacturing. "Now, CEOs have a much larger role in society, it seems, and they have a social responsibility to go outside of their company and to speak on behalf of whatever they're passionate about. How do you feel about that? Do you think that's a good change, a bad change, or neutral?
Nicole Sahin
I mean, I think people want to know who they're working for and with and where somebody stands from an integrity perspective. I would say there's often not a right side to any situation or a wrong side. There's just human compassion and empathy, and always being aligned with integrity is important. I'm not sure I have more to say than that, but I do think that CEOs are business celebrities and leaders, and they're people that people want to follow, and I think people have the right. Yeah, I do think where a CEO matters stands on certain topics, especially when you're choosing something as important as who's going to be your employer and what you are going to work toward. People now want more from their employers and from their business partners than just money. They want to be inspired by what they work for and what they buy into.
Clint Betts
What makes a great leader, in your opinion? What traits and values should they have?
Nicole Sahin
Let's see what the most important traits are that a successful leader should have. I think for a founder CEO, it's really a vision and staying true to the vision of what you set out to execute. Because if you're a founder CEO, which is different than other types of CEOs, there's something that you set out to accomplish that nobody else kind of had the audacity to do and the gumption to do. There's a high risk of failure, but I think either owning you're going to make it or not make it and driving with everything you have to get there and like crawling a team behind you to accomplish that vision and mission. That's ultimately what moves the world forward. That's critical.
The second is passion, which ties right into that. You have to have the passion of endless grit and determination to get it done because that human force and willpower is the only thing that's going to make it happen. Then, finally, I think just from a structural perspective, it's making sure that you have the right team behind you. It's both choosing the right people, moving people around when you need to, and treating them well and inspiring them to leap across every hurdle that is inevitably going to come your way. I think that's the secret formula for success that I try; I think those are the critical components of CEO leadership.
Clint Betts
I love it. Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is, at CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Nicole Sahin
Yeah, thank you for asking. I mean, when I think about who gave me the best chance, I think like everyone else, it's my parents and in the case of my parents, they were always incredibly supportive of me being kind of marching to the beat of my own drummer. I grew up in the Midwest, and international travel was not a common thing, but they really encouraged me to travel abroad at a young age and study abroad in college, which must have taken an incredible amount of courage, and I'm just incredibly grateful for them for everything that they taught me.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Nicole, thank you so much for coming on. We'll link to your book and everything that you do in the show notes as well. Seriously, what an honor to have you, and congratulations on everything you're doing and best of luck in the future.
Nicole Sahin
Thank you so much, Clint. A pleasure to be here, and thank you for having me.
Edited for readability.