What did surprise us was how brazen the deception was. When Ben Smith of the New York Times reported in September that Ozy’s management had done just that, few staffers, past or present, were surprised. Publishers can lie to their employees with relative impunity, but lying to investors and advertisers is more risky. I never stopped having to explain to sources what Ozy was. Watson and Rao assured us that Ozy reached millions of people a month, but the sparsity of emails from readers and the light social media engagement suggested otherwise. (Equity at start-ups typically vests over four years.) It feels even longer if your publisher can’t find an audience for the stories you churn out.
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Eight years makes you a Methuselah in Silicon Valley, where men proudly introduce themselves as serial entrepreneurs and engineers measure their careers in four-year chunks. Right until the day I quit, I left meetings with him feeling energised, eager to carry out whatever preposterous task he had assigned.īuilding up a readership from scratch is a painstaking slog, and for eight years Ozy’s staff toiled in obscurity. If you met Watson you understood why: he was intoxicating.
Ozy’s backers were some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, including the reclusive billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs.
He had hosted on MSNBC, and worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. The son of a Jamaican immigrant father and a schoolteacher mother, he had been educated at Harvard and Stanford Law School. When I first met him he was in his early forties: tall, confident, handsome. I didn’t understand what it meant for a media outlet to be a movement, or what the change generation was, but I could see that Watson was a star.
Instead of merely following the stories deemed newsworthy by big media, Ozy would cover what it called ‘the new and the next’: people and events no one was reading about yet. Ozy would become a movement, Watson said, but it would begin as an online magazine, published daily, expanding quickly to television and events. Its founders, Carlos Watson and Samir Rao, wanted to create a tech-forward platform for the ‘change generation’ – an allusion to one of Obama’s slogans. O zy Media began in happier days, around the start of Obama’s second term.
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