"Odyssey: The Most Exciting Company I've Seen Since Buzzfeed." This quote is by Michael Lazerow and is the title of his article published on April 27. Of course, being a new Editor-in-Chief at Odyssey, this immediately caught my eye. It was sitting right at the top of my feed on my LinkedIn account, as if it knew exactly what I needed. I was hungry for some awesome talk to show my new team members how great Odyssey really is. Lazerow did not let me down.
Lazerow starts off his article by basically saying that Odyssey was an investment, one that he was not entirely sure would pay off. Then he got to our amazing numbers, showing off how many readers Odyssey reaches every month, down to how many minutes people spend reading our articles. All I could think of was, "Wow. This guy is my new bff. And I HAVE to share this with my team!"
After a week of non-stop recruiting and interviewing during every single moment of my free-time, it was so nice and refreshing to see an article with this much praise for this company that I agreed to work with only about two and a half weeks ago. It's not that I ever doubted Odyssey or any of the amazing people or any of the amazing opportunities that it has to offer. It was just a great stress-relief from this past week. Lazerow's article really set me up and got me even more excited for my first launch and for another week, or two or three, of non-stop recruiting and interviewing to build my already badass team.
My favorite quote that Lazerow threw into his article is: "Odyssey is the purest and most successful of these to date." Here, Lazerow is talking about Odyssey being part of "third-wave media." Which, in short terms, just means we act kind of like Facebook and Snapchat with story-telling abilities like larger publication companies, but we're better.
Odyssey is the best for a number of different reasons, as Lazerow mentions in his article. He says, and is pretty spot-on if you ask me, that Odyssey puts community first, at the center. I have definitely been feeling this already with my amazing Managing Editor and the start of a great team. Odyssey has grown (and is growing) fast like super popular social media companies (like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), yet we produce, consistently might I add, top-notch articles and stories.
Lazerow then goes on to brag Odyssey up by showing just how much, and how quickly Odyssey has really grown over the past few years. So thank you, Michael Lazerow. Thank you not only for making Odyssey sound even more fun to be a part of, but also for alleviating some of my recruiting stress. Obviously, Odyssey is just too great of an opportunity, and company, to pass up or ignore. Also, thank you for giving me such a great article to get my team pumped up and ready for our launch here at Hastings College. You rock!