At Odyssey, we are hyper-focused on culture— both in our creator communities and our full-time staff. It’s all about building a group of people and an environment that increases the team’s ability to achieve their dreams. We pride ourselves on our culture; it’s what makes us unique.
For our first employee spotlight, we’re featuring Lauri Baker, Odyssey’s senior vice president of sales and marketing.
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In her career trajectory, Lauri has authentically connected brands with established platforms. From her start at BusinessWeek magazine to industry leaders like Yahoo and now Odyssey, Lauri’s journey can be summarized by one simple goal: to be “a disruptor to the status quo.”
“I take that with me everywhere I go,” she explained. Before joining Odyssey in March 2016, Lauri demonstrated expertise as an industry pioneer at The Huffington Post. She launched an entirely new business around native publishing through the HuffPost Partner Studio, which drove 30 percent of their revenue. In her time at Yahoo, Lauri developed content-driven experiences leveraging client-owned data with brands like Coke and Kraft Foods.
This week, we chatted with Lauri about her thoughts on our unique brand, our culture, and Odyssey’s future.
What is it about Odyssey that allows you to seek new perspectives in your career?
“The model. The vision of the leadership. The fact that we have a culture code. I have yet to be at a company with one. HuffPost had a cool culture, but there was no code. It’s really inspiring, the fact that we have one.
I pride myself on getting stuff done. Disrupting and building. I love to build. It’s funny, my son and I spend the majority of our time together ‘building,’ either on the floor with our Legos or digitally with MineCraft. I have always been a builder at my core, and now, I have the opportunity to start a business so disruptive on the ground level— to build the business and the monetization engines.
To come here and actually have my opinions heard and matter, I feel like that’s what motivates me in my career.”
How has your experience across teams at Odyssey been so far?
“Evan has done an amazing job keeping the entire company in the know every single week. The company is built in such a structured way with communication— bottom-up and top down. I am fortunate enough to get exposure across all departments, which is important and something we need to ensure everyone is exposed to.
I was lucky enough to be on Arianna Huffington’s exec team at HuffPost, so I was exposed to business, technology, and editorial on a weekly basis. I feel the same here. I would flip that and say what’s so impressive here is the speed at which we all move. Working with the other business units, we are moving so quickly; sometimes it’s hard to keep up.”
