Nurasyl Serik is the Co-founder and CEO of Remoteam, global payroll and HR compliance for Remote teams. They provide Employer of Record (EOR/PEO) services for full-time employees and FREE contractors management & payment service in over 150 countries. Before Remoteam, he was the first Product Manager for a new division within JOB TODAY, the #1 mobile jobs platform in the UK and Spain where he developed a payroll system and executed the product vision, definition and go-to-market plan to achieve six-figure monthly revenue from 0 within 10 months. He is a product and remote work expert obsessed with understanding the customers.
Episode transcription:
[00:00:21] Cesar Romero: [00:00:21] Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Ivy Podcasts. If you are wondering about how to best prepare for the remote work revolution, that's happening in front of us, whether you are a professional or an executive, then this episode is for you. We're going to be diving deeper into remote work. What are some of the skill sets that you get developed? How have you built culture? And many other things related to remote work. And today I have the pleasure of having Nurasyl Serik, who is [00:01:00] the co-founder and CEO of a remote team. So thank you so much for being on the show.
[00:01:07] Nurasyl Serik: [00:01:07] It's an honor to be in the show, thanks. Load point waiting guys.
[00:01:11] Cesar Romero: [00:01:11] Okay. Absolutely. No, thanks so much for taking the time to get us started. Let's start with diving deeper, a little bit deeper into your background. I understand that you are someone that is a remote work expert and obsessed with understanding the customer. Where does that come about and how has that played out in your past experiences?
[00:01:39] Nurasyl Serik: [00:01:39] Sure. I guess like, just say background wise, I'm originally from Kazakhstan. I've lived most of my life in the UK. I've studied there. I worked there. I've started a bunch of startups there. I guess the whole idea of how I went into [00:02:00] remote that was like five years ago. So we've been in a remote space for five plus years before it became a trend. So essentially me, my co-founder, and he's from Ukraine. So, we essentially were starting startups in the UK and then for us, because we're mostly bootstrap, most of our startups were a cost, so that was one of the things why we started being remote first. We kind of hated the idea of having to go into office. We either like in someone's house or flat, or just like remote. So we love that idea of flexibility that you can literally work from anywhere. What's the reason for actually being in the room, and then, because obviously we were from different countries, we were kind of looking to employ people from our own countries or different other countries. And then that's where we first faced the kind of challenges of employing [00:03:00] people remotely, essentially in terms of most of our startups, most of them failed, but we had one kind of successful one that we had to exit with. So it was fairly math, it's an AI master up. You take a picture of any math equation. It gives you a step by step solution within seconds. We have a hundred thousand monthly active users open up. So suppose the week, top 10 free education apps in the UK. So at the end we sold the US tech part of it, and we had a nice exit with that, and then essentially with that, knowing that we were all remote first companies, we always faced the challenges of how to hire people globally in a compliant, in the right way. And then we, in a way used, we were kind of our own customer. To be honest, we felt all the pains ourselves. We'll look [00:04:00] for a solution, we use some legacy solutions. And then what we hated about them was that they were super slow, they were well known tech savvy. They have lots of hidden fees, and then those are the things we thought like, okay, in the era of Gusto and Zenefits, like how can
