Like many people, apparently, I had never heard of Ozy Media until it was already in the midst of media publicity that led to its shutdown. Ozy Media was a company that claimed millions of people were watching its videos and other content but appears to have been a scam.
The company’s downfall began when The New York Times published a story that Ozy media’s co-founder and COO, Samir Rao, pretended to be a senior YouTube executive in a presentation to Goldman Sachs. Ozy was trying to convince Goldman Sachs to invest $40 million in the company.
As several people on Twitter noted, simply reading Ozy Media’s About Us page should have probably given investors pause about the company. Explaining why they chose the name Ozy Media, the company explains,
We were founded on the belief that more is possible and a determination to question assumptions about how the world operates and what lies ahead. And we built those convictions into our name, which comes from “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poem is commonly read as a warning against outsized egos and the impermanence of power. But we choose to read it differently. To us, it’s a call to think big while remaining humble. Admittedly, ours is an unconventional interpretation — because that’s who we are. In a world littered with conformity, we like to see things differently.