The single worst thing that you could do to the men that I know is have them not work. This idea that they're going to go and read poetry and that they're going to learn a foreign language. No. Porn, gambling, smoking, drinking, getting high, Polymarket, Kalshi. You're not going to have this romantic outcome.
Behind every major policy decision, every corporate strategy, every Washington power play, are the insiders shaping the game and the new rules to win it. The Deciders, with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Brody Mullins and veteran DC strategist Lisa Camuso Miller.
Welcome to The Deciders, where we talk to the insiders rewriting the playbook for effective advocacy in Washington, DC. Today we're joined by Jim, who's the co-founder and CEO of Axios. Jim, it's great to have you.
Good to be here. Thank you.
So before we start, I got to tell a story. So my first job in Washington, DC was at Congress Daily, covering the Energy and Commerce Committee, writing about lobbies and campaign finance. And every few days when Roll Call came out, I'd get scooped by these two guys at Roll Call, Jim Vander Hei and John Bresnahan. And so I decided that in order to be a good reporter, I needed to go to Roll Call. So I spent a couple years trying to write Roll Call-type stories to get myself to Roll Call. I finally got there, and you left and went to the Journal. So then I decided I need to go to the Journal. So then I worked all my butt off to get to the Journal, got there, and you'd already gone to the Post.
So tell us about a mentor that you had who helped you in Washington.
David Rogers, certainly. I was like 28 when I got to the Journal. I got hired at a relatively young age to cover the Hill, and David was notoriously a hard ass and really demanding. And I decided, like the Wisconsin kid in me, like I'm going to outwork everyone. I'm going to outwork David. So I'm going to get there before him and I'm going to leave after. And so I would get there literally before they would open the Senate gallery and be waiting there when David would be the first person to come in at 7:00. And then after like three weeks of being there till like 11:00 at night, I was like, 'Screw it. I mean, you win.' And then he was — I don't think he did want — we're great friends now, but he didn't want them to hire me at the time. So he was kind of brutal towards me. So he would rip apart my stories. But then little by little, he actually taught me how to write a back pager, which is thinking much more conceptually, and really made me a much better writer and a much better reporter. Probably the most serious, thoughtful, deeply reported reporter we're ever going to meet. Like, he was literally an institution. Members of the Appropriations Committee would call him to figure out whether or not their understanding of the rules and the process and the history of a piece of legislation were accurate. Like, that doesn't happen anymore.
You know, I think a sad thing about the changes in journalism is that they don't want reporters like David Rogers anymore. He takes too long, does too much research. I think part of the reason why people are losing trust in the media, or why, by the way, media can't employ reporters like that anymore.
Yeah, you need that institutional knowledge. Like, David would really care about a line item in a budget, and he would actually understand, 'Well, where did that come from? Why is that money there? Who does it go to? Is it being spent the way it should be spent?' That's kind of what Congress is supposed to do in some of its watchdog functions. But once you lose that, then nobody's doing it. And when nobody's doing it, that's when bad things happen, or money gets misspent, or things get abused. That's why the system, as imperfect as it is, is a hell of a lot more perfect than any other system, because you've got the media and you've got the different branches of government working in a relatively free market. And I wish there were more David Rogers.
From the flip side, when I was a comms person, we used to wait for hours, long after the floor had closed, to out-wait David Rogers. Inevitably, the next morning we would wake up and he would have had an exclusive with the speaker that I worked for because he waited longer than we did. I mean, he would just sit outside of the speaker's office and just wait. But Jim, so you started your career as a journalist, but now you've become a founder. I'm curious about what it was that inspired you to start Politico, which really has changed and revolutionized media in Washington and all across the country.
I mean, this is where we start to date ourselves. That was 20 years ago. I'd left the Journal. I couldn't keep a job back then. So I went from the Journal to the Post, covering the presidency, and had maybe the best job in Washington. And so I wasn't looking to do something else. It literally was one of these stories where we had this idea in the summer of 2006, talked to a couple people about it. People got excited about it. Took on a life of its own. And Politico went live six months later. It was crazy. It was like a storybook, looking back at it. I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur, but then you become an entrepreneur. Well, once you start something, you got to run something. Well, we never ran anything, right? So we knew how to break news and we knew how to play the media and we're pretty sophisticated on that stuff, but you got to run a — you got to like pay people, hire people, fire people, like arrange people, have a culture. Like all this stuff we knew nothing about. And so that's where being a reporter really helped. Luckily, there's a lot of smart people in town. I would just call people. I'd call CEOs and be like, 'Man, like this culture thing, like what the hell is it? Like how do you do it? What works? What doesn't work?' Read a lot of business books, and some of them are useful, some weren't. But little by little, learned how to do it. And we had Fred Ryan, who had been at the TV station. He was there. He'd been used to running something. So we did have some adults in the room. But it was wild back then, for sure. And remember, we launched in January. It was going to be a Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton. We've got to ride this. We've got to ride this. Well, we rode it. Like all of a sudden, we launched. Everyone's covering us. Back then, everyone thought we were going to fail. So they were kind of covering us, rooting for us to fail. But it took off. And three or four months later, we're on stage co-moderating a presidential debate. And I'll never forget because we showed up — it was with MSNBC. We show up to the Reagan Library, walk into a room with 150 people from NBC. They're like, 'What the hell is this? These rinky-dink little Politico guys?' But we were co-equals at the thing. So it was just a hoot watching like Chris Matthews or Brian Williams try to make sense of these exotic startup guys. But it worked eventually.
Was there a catalyst for what made you guys decide to do it? Was there something that happened that caused that sense?
No, it was really just being excited about the idea. You could tell something was happening. Media was going through something quite profound. The internet is where people were starting to really consume news. The Washington Post inexplicably was two companies. You had to cross the river to go to the website. And when I went over there, they literally looked at me like I was an exotic species. Nobody from the paper's ever come here. And I look at their digital board — more people are reading me here than reading — like, we've been telling everybody that for years and no one will listen to us. And I was like, 'Huh, maybe that's what we should be doing.'
Could you ever imagine a time when your two companies, Politico and then Axios, are competing almost on the same level as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post around the country?
I believed that when we launched. I got a lot of crap for it because I think it was in a USA Today interview, I said I think we're going to be better than the Washington Post and the New York Times, which people literally — one, thought was arrogant, which it was, but also thought it was ludicrous. Nobody thought that was possible back then. No one left these big institutions. No one started companies. But I believed if we had — I really, you know me, like the one thing where you and I connected very early in your careers, I love good journalists. Like, I'm addicted to good journalists. And I believe that one good journalist is better than 20 mediocre journalists. And so I knew that thesis was right. I knew if we could consolidate a couple of the people that we knew could break news routinely, that we could compete. And then I assumed that because they were big institutions, they were going to be slow. And that one we were not only right on, but we even underestimated how slow our competition would be. Like, we really — by year one, two, three, we were eating everyone's lunch. And people didn't love us, but like, it was a hoot.
I mean, the big media companies are still adjusting, I feel like.
It's really hard to change a big institution. You know, why is government so hard to change? Why is Microsoft so hard to change? The bigger you are, the more powerful you are, the more habits you build up, the more difficult it is to change. So there's a real advantage to being a startup. And I think with every year that advantage gets stronger. Eventually we learned how to run businesses, and you know, once you've done it, like by the time we did Axios, I was highly confident we would be successful because we'd already done it. I was telling Mike today, I had lunch with him and I was like, I've never had more fun and I've never worked harder.
So, assuming you're not going to start another media company, if you were starting over, what are the openings in the marketplace right now, do you think?
So you've seen this big rise in boutique media, right? And all of them — almost all of them — run by former journalists, which was unheard of till we did Politico. But you look at what Jake and Anna and John have done at Punchbowl. You look at what Ben and Justin have done at Semafor. You look at the work that you guys are doing. What is the common thread? A journalist at the top, starting with a very specific focus, run much more like a business. And so the opening, I think, is for anybody who has passion around micro topics. I still think there's massive openings everywhere. If I just wanted to make money, I'd start a healthcare company, right? I would cover every part of the healthcare industrial complex. Nobody covers healthcare like Politico covers politics or government, or Axios covers the most important topics across the board. And so I think there's an opening around healthcare. And I think the ability to start companies is going to become exponentially easier and cheaper. And so I think there's going to be a lot of boutique media companies, a lot of boutique companies, period, that will start. I think we're on the verge of what will be an astronomical explosion of individual businesses. For anybody who's entrepreneurial, like now's the time.
Let's talk about your company today. Axios is a media outlet, but you also are doing communications advising for corporations about internal communications. How do those two align?
So we start out, we come up with this idea for Smart Brevity, which is how do you disseminate high-quality information in the most efficient way possible? So it needs to be smart, needs to be brief — hence Smart Brevity. We put it mainly in newsletters on the site, works really well, resonates extraordinarily well. Well, we start getting calls from our friends, you know, at UnitedHealth Group, our friends at BP, our friends at JP Morgan. And they literally all within a month or two all said the exact same thing. They said, 'Hey, all of our executives read Axios, but they won't read a damn thing we write. Will you teach us to write?' And I remember the first time I chuckled, actually, is the NBA was the first to call us. I just laughed. I was like, 'Well, no, like, I'm not going to learn how to write. Go to school. Not my job.' But then you have that many people calling, you're like, 'Oh my god, there's something here.' The punchline is companies are atrocious at communicating. Atrocious. Like, way worse than journalists. So we end up creating this business called Axios HQ that uses both software and teaching to teach companies how to communicate. It's a really good business, and there's a lot of demand for big companies and small companies to learn how to communicate much more efficiently. And that's the neat thing about like being in media or being in a startup is like you can just have an idea and you can go make it happen. And then we turned it into a book. The book becomes a bestseller. We had an agent, Rafe, who lives here in DC, called me one day and he's like, 'You guys, I love Smart Brevity. You got to write a book.' I'm like, 'Rafe, like, what publisher wants me to come in and tell them that I think most of their books should be magazine articles? That sounds deeply offensive.' He's like, 'No, man, I'm telling you, like, there'll be demand for this book.' Lo and behold, five publishers bidding war for it, ends up becoming a bestseller. To this day, three years later, still sells a thousand worldwide every single week. And so we put that into a book, and it worked.
We'll be right back on The Deciders.
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Welcome back to The Deciders. Jim, you wrote in Axios a few weeks ago how you and Mike Allen had brought on some AI experts to teach you at Axios how to become experts yourselves. What did you learn?
We brought in fellows to do special projects for me. What I learned, which was a super valuable lesson: if you're a young person and you can teach yourself to be AI-fluent, you're instantly going to be 5x more valuable than any of us were on day one in your office. Because nobody else understands how to use it, you instantly become the most important person in the room. And I specifically looked for people who are self-taught AI savants. I didn't want anyone with an engineering degree because I wanted that entrepreneurial dimension to it. Like, they're building things that it would have taken a company six months to do — one guy. If you really understand the technology, you're superhuman, like beyond superhuman. And anyone who thinks it's overrated, I'm telling you, take it to my grave, you're completely delusional. The technology's better than you think it is. It makes me even more outraged at what colleges are teaching kids. They're scaring the hell out of these kids. And there are downsides to artificial intelligence. They should be thinking about the ethics, but you got to send these kids into the workforce fully equipped with the technology of that day at a highly proficient level so that they can go and succeed.
It means my fifth grader last year had some, you know, book report that she had to do, and it said specifically do not use AI. And I thought, no, you should be teaching people how to — the same way that we went to libraries, you need to teach people how to use these tools.
I think it's fine for a teacher to say don't cheat using ChatGPT. I just don't think it's fine to say it sucks up all the water, don't use it, and don't be ready to go into the real world using it. Like, I just want people to be equipped to be successful.
I've heard you say too that it's important for us to not outsource our thinking to AI.
Like every conversation you guys deal with very nuanced stuff on the show, it's just much more nuanced than the black-and-white debate that we're having publicly. The truth is, AI is exceptional if you are a pretty deep thinker and you're creative and you're innovative — it's fantastic. All good creativity, all good new ideas, all good innovation, it comes from some level of thinking and conversation, and if you're just interacting with a machine, you probably lose that.
Let's talk a little bit about your new book. It's Simplified: Do 50% More with 50% Less, available September 15th. Talk to us a little bit about it.
In some ways it's a sequel to Smart Brevity. So we basically took the Smart Brevity principles, which were applied to communications, and applied it to every part of our company. Started doing this three years ago, which is just: what is the most efficient, smartest, simplest way to do things? And it sounds like, oh yeah, doesn't everyone do that? No, almost no one does it unless you kind of force yourself to do it. And what we learned is if you create a system that forces you, like almost every week or at least every month, to simplify — what are you trying to do as a company? Name it in order, 1, 2, 3, one of the most important things you're going to do. What am I, Jim the leader, what are the three things I need to do in order of importance to be able to achieve that? And then cascade that all the way down to the person who's starting today: what are the three most important things they should do? What are the three things they are doing that they think are stupid that they should stop doing? They should have a conversation with their manager. Maybe they stop doing it that day. The new thing we're adding is: what are the three things you could automate? Taking this mindset, we took a company that — I looked back at the budget three years ago — we were budgeted to have 750 employees today. We have about 430, and we're doing 75% more revenue per employee than we had budgeted back then, and we're growing way faster than we ever thought possible. I'm 100% certain it's because we adopted this mentality.
Can you give us an example of something that you cut from your professional life?
Big time. So, three years ago when we started this — you'll appreciate this. So we did Policy Pro. We had our own version of what Politico Pro did, which is this high-end content for lobbyists, trade associations. And we thought, 'Whatever, you know, we did it before, we can do it again.' Well, we did it. We were doing fine, but we weren't doing great. We were also trying to do sports at the time. And basically, I pulled people together and I just said, 'Listen, it's impossible to be great at five things. What are three things we could be great at? And let's just today make the decision we're killing everything else.' And we did. But it's hard. Real consequences to that. So we're going to stop doing that, and then we're going to take a look at the three things that we're going to keep focusing on, and we're going to figure out what are the fewest number of meetings we can have to achieve those, what are the fewest number of process steps that we can have to get there, and what are the fewest number of people we can have involved. And like that, everything started to move super fast. So here you have — you think about us, like we're maniacal about Smart Brevity, we naturally think about simplifying things, and yet here in five short years, we had become too complex. We had become too slow. Well, no wonder it happens to everyone else who's not thinking about it at all. And that was really the lightbulb moment that there's a whole philosophy here. And then when we dug into it, there's tons of science that backs us up. It's not written to win a literary award. It's like Smart Brevity — it is a power tool. Like, you take it, you put it into action. You're not like, 'Oh my god, Jim, you're pros, you're just so magical.' Like, that's not this book. But I do think in terms of usefulness, we really try to achieve that with the book.
