Michael Bassin, VP of Sales at Simera, on Turning the Team He Hired Into the Company He Sold

Most talent companies start with a thesis. This one started with a health crisis.

Michael Bassin was a chief revenue officer in Israel when he lost hearing in one ear overnight. The treatment made things worse. Two years of debilitating symptoms later, he left his job, left the country, and started a business for the simplest reason there is: it was the only kind of work he could still do. He could manage about four hours a day, from wherever he happened to be.

So he built a cold email agency and staffed it remotely. Mexico, the Philippines, India, South Africa, the UK. Over a few years he replaced nearly the entire workforce with South Africans, not as a cost decision, but because the work was better. That team became the product. Talent Sam was a complete remote hiring solution for companies hiring in South Africa, with the payroll, tax, compliance, and employer-of-record layer built in. Simera acquired it in 2026.

We're building Human Cloud from the buyer's side of that same problem, so companies can find and deploy vetted global talent partners in minutes instead of months.

In this episode, Michael Bassin shares:

• Why the businesses that survive are the ones that own their workforce, not their distribution channel, and how Google and Microsoft deliverability changes killed a profitable agency that depended on them
• Why South Africa is a genuine arbitrage: a currency that collapsed on top of first-world infrastructure, education, and work culture that did not
• Why the best offshore talent refuses to work freelance, and how misclassification risk quietly forces companies into employer-of-record models
• The honest reason a working talent company sells: Talent Sam had HR, payroll, and compliance handled with the press of a button, but sourcing could not keep pace with AI-native recruiters
• Why Simera's CEO would rather acquire people than hire them, and what that says about how talent companies get valued now

Michael Bassin is VP of Sales at Simera and the co-founder of Talent Sam, acquired by Simera in 2026. He is also the author of I Am Not a Spy, a memoir of studying openly as a Jew in Egypt and the UAE and later serving as an Arabic interrogator in the Israeli army.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.