Ben Rosen ’08 moved to New York City after college to pursue standup comedy and get a day job. Instead, he ended up with a career at popular and addictive social news site, Buzzfeed, ample time and support for standup comedy, and a community of friends that makes living in the City easy and fun. Read about his experience working at startups like Buzzfeed and Gawker (spoiler: the snacks play a big role).
Q: What is your position title and what do you do at Buzzfeed?
Rosen ’08, creative at Buzzfeed and standup comedian
A: I’m a creative at Buzzfeed – that basically means that I work in the business side to make sponsored articles. If you go on the homepage you’ll see a lot of lists and different articles from our edit team and you’ll also see articles from our sponsored team, and those are the articles that I help write. We write articles that are presented by different brands but have the same kind of flavor as a regular Buzzfeed post. So I’ll work with a representative from the brand to write it.
For example, a brand will approach us with an opportunity – maybe they have a new product that has to do with telecommunications, or a restaurant or something like that. We’ll speak with the brand representatives about what they’re looking to accomplish and who they’re looking to reach, the kind of reactions they want to get.
Once we hear from them I’ll come up with some post ideas and send it to them – posts that I think achieve the same emotions that they want to hit, and that would be really fun and shareable for our readers. So they’ll look at those, they’ll pick a few that they really like or they’ll ask us for more ideas and then we’ll start drafting posts and send them to the brand for approval. Once the posts are approved they go up on the site and we start sharing it.
Q: Did you start out in this position?
A: I started in a different position – I was an account manager for almost a year. That was a lot of fun, it’s also on the business side of the company. I was working more closely with the client by setting the schedule for production, supervising the creative team’s work, reporting on the success of the programs, and acting as the general point of contact for the brand. Then I did a few posts independently that did really well on the site and I felt like I could do well on the creative side and that it was really fun, so I made the switch.
RELATED: Check out some of Rosen’s articles on Buzzfeed
Q: What’s it like working for Buzzfeed?
A: Oh it’s amazing. Everybody I work with is incredible, it’s a very energetic office, everybody’s very funny and everybody works really hard. It’s easy for people to think that the company is super silly and no work gets done but there’s an excellent balance of work and play. It’s a dream job.
Q: What is the office like?
A: The office is really nice, we just moved into a new space and it’s huge. There’s a lot of space, a lot of different rooms, colorful walls… Everything you’d imagine a start-up would be. A good snack selection, that’s important.
Q: What do you like most about your job?
A: I just really enjoy the freedom to create without any heavy-handed supervision. A lot of times even creative jobs can be a little bit too structured but that’s not the case here at all. Everybody lets you experiment and try different things. Everyone is so independently brilliant so everyone is trying out different things and there’s never a wrong path.
Q: How did you find out about the account manager position and what was the interview process like?
A: I was actually working at Gawker before I was working at Buzzfeed, as an ad ops coordinator. That was a more technical position, to schedule, implement, and track all the impressions from the ads on the site, then I submitted reports, built tracking methods for ads, and ate snacks (did I mention how important snacks are?). A few of my friends had moved to Buzzfeed from Gawker, so I started paying attention to the company.
I saw they had an opening for the account manager job which was something exciting and different from what I was doing and I thought, “Wow, I’d really like to do that,” so I applied and interviewed. The interview process was amazing, I met some really cool people, it was a lot of fun and a little scary to make that jump but it really clicked when I went into the office for the first time. It’s almost like this company was built for me to work here. I got here and I was like, “This is exactly the company I dreamed of working at.” It was really cool.
Q: What do you think made you stand out as a candidate?
A: I was really excited for the opportunity to be there. I have some experience with business, back at the College I majored in business administration with a concentration in entrepreneurship and a lot of the work I did immediately after college was to start a company, so I had a lot of meetings and I was in front of a lot of investors and other people trying to pitch my business. When you do that enough, a job interview is easy. It’s fun. So I just had fun with it and didn’t take it too seriously, but I made sure I was prepared to answer the tough questions.
Q: How do you think the College helped you prepare for working at Buzzfeed?
A: The entrepreneurship courses I took were instrumental to my growth. It was something I was really passionate about, and still am, so that helped a lot. And my professors were incredible, just really great teachers. They helped with my work and they had valuable expertise to pass down.
RELATED: Learn more about the College’s entrepreneurship concentration
Q: What advice would you give to current students interested in what you do, or in working for a company like Buzzfeed?
A: I think this is the best advice I could give anyone: A lot of people, when they look for jobs, try to find their dream job first and just go for it, and I think that might not be the most successful tactic. What you need to do is know what your dream job is and then build skills to get there. Like for me, I started about by counting small victories with jobs and picking out the things I wanted to do.
At Gawker, it was an entry-level job. I didn’t know how to do that specific job but I knew I wanted to work at a cool company so I just picked any job to get my foot in the door. And then another opportunity came around with another cool company (Buzzfeed), and it was a better job that I was qualified for. Then the same thing happened within Buzzfeed with the creative position. I would never have been able to just apply to Buzzfeed as a creative and get the job right after college, I was like three levels away. So my advice is do what you want to do, but expect to do it in small increments.
Q: How did you acclimate to New York City after college?
A: I do standup comedy, so I wanted to move to New York to pursue standup but I waited until I got a job to move. I was in Maryland applying to New York jobs on Craigslist. Then I’d take a bus up for the interview, do some standup comedy and take a bus back. I did that for a few months and then I got the call from Gawker that I got the job. They asked if I could start on Monday and I said yes, so I put everything I had into a garbage bag and I moved to the City and crashed on my friend’s couch. It was a bit of a violent change but it was amazing.
Comedy definitely helped me acclimate. There’s an amazing comedy scene here, you meet a lot of people and it’s a fun thing to do in general. Standup has always been a dream of mine, and it’s great having a job that supports my hobby. Even writing posts for Buzzfeed is great because it gets my name out that. It’s funny because I moved up here to do comedy and get a day job, and now they’re two jobs that I love equally.
