Odyssey cuts off 1/3 workforce after hoisting $25 million
Odyssey’ cuts off 1/3 workforce, after hoisting #25 million
Digital media startup Odyssey has laid off 55 people, cutting off over a third of its permanent, paid staff less than a year after hoisting $25 million, CEO Evan Burns verified to Business Insider.
This is a striking change for a company that board associate Michael Lazerow illustrated in April as being the most thrilling company to him since he devoted in BuzzFeed. (Lazerow sold his startup Buddy Media to Salesforce for $800 million.)
Odyssey has hoisted $32 million in total, and shifted into a new New York office in December.
Burns said that the slashes were across every departments and locations, but paid attention mostly on the editorial part. The causes he gave for the slashes were a need to entirely recreate Odyssey’s technology platform in a means that would permit the startup to develop. The tech platform “wasn’t able to scale,” and slowed down growth, which was driven by receiving more and more contributors, he said. That entire tech revamp will entail resources and time.
Odyssey purposes a bit like a college document on steroids.
The startup has a bulk of over 15,000 mostly unpaid writers, usually in the 10-25 age brackets, which create around one portion a week. The stable are college students, and Odyssey started off as a publication barely focused on Greek life. The content Odyssey writers generate covers all sorts of topics, from politics to fashion to sports.
There is no wide editorial command, but every Odyssey articles goes throughout straight layers of editing, first by a “community” editor, who is essentially a power consumer within a characteristics, and then to the company’s paid staff editors. Those paid editors are where many of the slashes appear, Burns said, “though some of the product team technical leadership was replaced as well”.
When you comprise 15,000 writers and 1,000 diverse community of “editor-in-chief’s” it takes time, Burns said. “It was a couple of days of phone calls” to those who required justification”.