San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Startup shuts amid reports of problems
Ozy Media, the digital media company headquartered in Mountain View, announced Friday that it would shutter days after the New York Times published an article spotlighting problems at the company.
The Times published a statement from the company’s board of directors that Ozy was closing its doors for good “with a heavy heart.” The company produced newsletters, podcasts and videos, spanning “news and culture to technology, business, learning and entertainment,” according to its website. It promised to “never, ever be boring or predictable.”
The Sept. 26 article from the Times centered on a bizarre incident in which an Ozy co-founder and chief operating officer, Samir Rao, apparently impersonated a YouTube executive on a conference call with bankers at Goldman Sachs who were considering investing in Ozy.
The digital media company, according to the Times, sought to tout its success on YouTube as a selling point for the investors.
Ozy executives later apologized for the incident, attributing it to a mental health crisis Rao was enduring.
Last week, Katty Kay, a former longtime anchor for the BBC, announced that she was leaving Ozy after less than a year with the company, shortly after the Times story was published. She tweeted that the Times’ reporting was “serious and deeply troubling.”
Ozy, which began in 2013, was led by former MSNBC host Carlos Watson and rose to prominence in part because of its backing from Laurene Powell Jobs, a prominent investor and the widow of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.
Watson could not be reached for comment Friday. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company had also long faced allegations that it routinely and drastically overstated the number of visitors to its website, a key way in which digital publishers earn revenue and potentially attract investors.
Ozy shunned the webtraffic reports generated by the company Comscore, which many other internet and online media companies rely on, choosing instead to report its own figures.
Ozy also attempted to fend off reports that it was buying web traffic, rather than relying on its own reporting and digital products to attract readers.
According to the Times, Ozy had raised more than $83 million by April of 2020, citing data from PitchBook. The company had 118 employees, according to its LinkedIn page.