Up today we're going to be speaking with Jim VandeHei, the co-founder and CEO of Axios and the former executive editor and co-founder of Politico. Jim, how are you today?
Great. Thank you for having me.
Absolutely. Thanks so much for joining. I know it's been a really busy time for Axios and we'll dig into all that, but before we do, I'd love to get a little bit of background about your journey and how you got started in the news industry.
Sure. For most of my life, I was a journalist and kind of thought I would be a journalist. Moved to Washington to be a political journalist and covered Capitol Hill. I was lucky enough to get hired at a pretty young age to cover the presidency and Congress for the Wall Street Journal in my late 20s and then the Washington Post to cover the White House and campaigns and elections, including the presidency for the Post.
And I kind of thought that's what I would do for the rest of my life until 2006 rolled around. And that's when there was just so much upheaval in media and it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that like dark clouds were coming in for mainstream media and kind of had the idea of like why don't we try to control our own destiny and what if we created a publication that could rival the Washington Post when it comes to political coverage. And so six months later we launched Politico, which took off and had a lot of success. And I'd say that journey there like transitioned me from being just a journalist to being much more of a leader and being a CEO. I mean maybe midway through my time at Politico I officially became a CEO so I could run the business and overall operations and really at that point became much more of a business mind and a strategic mind when it comes to media.
And we did that for 10 years and five years ago we started Axios and we started Axios because it was clear to us that one of the fundamental challenges for people was that they're going to have to know more across more topics at a time where they have less time and that you would need to create real efficiency in content consumption. And so we came up with this concept of smart brevity which is combined real intelligence on smart topics with real efficiency. Hence the brevity part and you know we're 520 people and we've had a lot of success and we're expanding into new areas, but I love the media space, could still consider myself a journalist at heart, but I got to go run companies.
Fascinating. And going back to when you founded Politico in 2006, I imagine when you talk about the upheaval you're talking about really the forming, early stages of the forming duopoly of Google and Facebook. What were some of the other issues and signals that led you to going off on your own and starting this business?
It was just clear back then that you had the rise of the web and that readers were going to gravitate towards the internet and that the economics of newspapers which are expensive to produce were going to be very problematic because remember we launched in basically '07 which is right, the iPhone I think came out right...
I was going to say 2008. Yep, next year.
Yeah, right around that time. So like the duopoly Facebook Google really hadn't matured at that point and so they weren't gobbling up the money. We didn't see that, but what we did see was that the consumer was going to move to the internet and that big lumbering bureaucratic newspapers were going to have a hard time making the transition from newspapers and deadlines and news holes to the reality of the internet.
Yeah. So and we have a lot of writers, copywriters, designers that you know, are thinking maybe right now about how do I go from working at an agency to starting my own agency. I would imagine the path is very similar from going from being a writer and a reporter to starting your own publication. What was that process like and what were some of the risks that you were wrestling with when you made that decision?
I mean the risk is that you're taking a kind of safety and probably a good paycheck in the scenario you're outlining and you're risking that you're going to flop and you're not going to make any money. So, there's real risk involved. And I think that is a gut check that anyone has to do. It depends a little bit where are you in life, how much money do you have, how much risk tolerance do you have. But if you have risk tolerance, I think one of the great things about America, one of the great things about capitalism is the fact that anybody can start a company and it's a meritocracy. If you create a product that other people want and are willing to pay for, you can have success beyond your wildest dreams and you can control your own destiny and your own work hours and your own culture and the type of people you're around. And so, I would gladly encourage anybody who has entrepreneurial instincts or hunches to follow them if you can. It just I think it's the best way to live life. It's like a free, fun, self-determined lifestyle. It's not for the faint of heart. Like most startups fail. Even if they don't fail, they're hard. You know, I work a lot. I've always worked a lot and I'm not afraid of working hard. I'm not afraid of failure. Not everybody is that confident in terms of what they do that they're willing to risk failure. But it's just great and then you get to learn from all your mistakes. I mean, everything that I'm good at now, I was terrible at when I started it. It's not like we're born with an understanding of how to create a culture or hire people or structure a company or sell a product or talk to staff or talk to customers. You learn those things and you've got to have both like self-confidence, but you also have to have a lot of forgiveness for yourself and realize, you know what? I'm not going to get everything right, but if I work hard and have a good idea and I can figure out a way to monetize that idea, like good things will happen.
Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. And you know, obviously going from a writer to being co-founder and CEO of a publisher also I would imagine means that your day shifts and you're not just worried about meeting the next deadline, but you're worried about payroll, hiring, ad sales. How did your overall responsibilities change and, you know, were you always writing along the way or did you kind of give that up and just focus on the operations?
Yeah, I've always been a writer and I think being a reporter and a writer has helped me. I still write for the site. I tend to write, I used to write only about politics. Now I write a lot more about leadership because it's what I'm interested in right now, but I also write a lot to sharpen my own thinking. I use notes on my phone and I have thousands of notes about how do I think about different topics so I can sharpen and challenge my own thinking and I communicate a lot in writing with staff because I think I'm a pretty good writer and it's just how I prefer to communicate because I can be precise with my language and I can convey exactly what I want to convey. I can think about it before I hit send. And so I think, you know, once you're a leader, it's all different, right? I was a lone wolf reporter. Like I remember when I told Don Graham that I was leaving the Washington Post to start a company, he looked at me like I was on LSD. What are you talking about? He's like, 'You've never started, you've never managed anyone. You've never asked to manage anyone. You've never led anything.' He goes, 'In fact, like you're never in the office. You're always off just like doing your thing and writing.' He's like, 'Now you're going to run a company?' And he was right. Like at that point, if you looked at the evidence, you wouldn't say, 'Oh, Jim is going to be a natural CEO.' You'd say that's weird. But it wasn't. Like I basically was able to apply the skills I had as a reporter, you know, a good BS detector, a good pattern recognizer, good at finding out like what's real and not real and then applying that to the business of running a business.
And how about ad sales? Were you involved in bringing advertisers on in the early stages?
Very much in terms of going out and pitching like what is it that we're creating and why should they be enthusiastic about it? And particularly with Axios, we came up with a brand new sort of smart brevity ad unit where we got rid of pop-ups, got rid of banners, put it within the feed of content. It was new. And what I wanted to show them is like, 'Listen, I think it's going to be way more effective than any ad you've ever used. Most of the ads that you're often doing are kind of noisy and they're an irritant to the reader. These are pleasing. You're going to learn all the things that we learned as reporters to get people to engage with your content. Buy, and if I'm not right, you won't get the results that you want. But if you get the results you want, I want you to spend a lot more money with us.' And thank God we were right about the smart brevity unit and we've been able to do quite well on advertising and clients who do their own brand lift surveys and other things to validate the efficacy of advertising come back quite pleased and that's great because I'm a big believer that great journalism has to be paired with a great business. And I respect, and you know, a lot of journalists [say] advertisers and business. I'm like, 'No, like that's what supports the journalism that you do and why shouldn't they have like the best tools at their hand? Why shouldn't they have the best data to be able to present ads in a clearly marked advertising space, but they should be as effective as a journalist at engaging their audience?' And I'm proud that we're quite good at that and I'm proud that we have a big advertising base and I think without advertising you wouldn't have free journalism. And so I don't think advertisers necessarily advertise just to support journalism, which I think is important to a healthy democracy, but because of the work that they do, a healthy democracy for the most part, most days it does still exist and I think a lot of that's because a lot of media is still free thanks to advertising.
Absolutely. So, you mentioned Axios and that was my next line of interview is talking about Axios. So, you started in 2016. You know, what was the gap you were looking to fill at that point when you decided to go live with this new publication?
The gap to us was very clear, which was everybody was having the same problem I was having at a personal level, which is I'm getting hit with more content than ever before from more directions and I don't know what to trust. At the same time, me as a media operator, I need to know a lot more about a lot of topics. I need to understand AI, China, healthcare, you know, workforce changes, politics. Well, to do that, and it's not just related, right? It's in collision. It's the collision of those topics that creates controversy or new ideas or new products. Well, you can't do it in the traditional way. No one has enough time in the day. And so we wanted to help people, at least for that content that's kind of moment by moment and day by day, make it exponentially more efficient so that people could spend less time with the content but walk away with more learning, more knowledge so that fundamentally they can make better decisions. And it worked. It worked almost instantly. We were able to get really high-level people, CEOs, politicians, tech leaders, media leaders to read us and then little by little radiate out to a larger audience and that was very gratifying because when you start a company, you have a theory, you have a thesis and you want to tether that to, okay, if I'm right about this theory, I can probably make money, but you don't know. You don't know until you unleash it into the wild and once we unleashed it into the wild, it behaved the way that we thought it would behave and we've been able to probably grow a little bit faster than I would have thought and expand into the new areas that I had not anticipated at the time, but I think it's because when you think about bringing efficiency to content, it works in a lot of places. It works nationally, locally, works inside companies who are trying to learn how to communicate, works wonders in the advertising space where advertisers are desperate to get into a clean, well-lit space with effective advertising. And so, it's been fun. And then you build a culture around people you want. Like I'm blessed in that, you know, I did well at Politico and I've done well in a career. So, like I have the freedom now to do what I want to do with the type of people I want to do it with. And like I want to work with really high-achieving people who have good hearts and good souls and aren't jerks, and aren't arrogant, and aren't just in it for themselves. And we've built an entire company around that. And that makes for a very dynamic, fun workplace. Like it's a very high-achieving workplace and very demanding workplace. But we give as much as we get. And I love that. That's like I tell, I aspire to live my own life and that's how I want to arrange my work life.
Absolutely. I mean, it's interesting because a lot of purists, for lack of a better term in journalism, have often said, you know, short-form is the death of journalism and it takes away from the deep reader experience, etc. But I think you guys have really proved the opposite. And the reality is the consumer's changing. The millennial is a completely different species than every generation that came before them. And you know, a lot of what I, the way I would describe Axios is it's you get a lot of breadth and you can, like you said, you have the collision of all these different distinct topics versus having to go too deep. And you guys do also give the ability to go deeper as well. But I think the form factor was really something that was quite disruptive at the time. And obviously, to your point, proved to be a really valuable thesis.
Thank you. And it's scalable.
Right? That's what we were trying to do. Like how do you create a form that's scalable? Like yes, there might be some journalistic skepticism. I think there's less than I had anticipated. But the truth is, like all we did was create an architecture that gets you closer to how I would share really important information with you if we went and had a beer. I'm not going to lard it up with a bunch of silly words. I'm not going to meander to the point. I'm going to tell you what is fun and exciting to me. I'm going to tell you why it matters and then you're going to give me some kind of social cue about whether we should go deeper. That's how the mind wants to interact with information. That's how the mind gets enthusiastic about information. It doesn't have a, I don't get there and talk to you in the voice of God and suddenly it seems stupid and foggy. I'm trying to be direct and fun and engaging and that's the format that we tried to create and I think it resonates because that's how we as a species want to interact with each other and interact with information.
Absolutely. And over time I think obviously given your background coming out of DC, you know, obviously the world's become so much more polarized especially here in the United States. How have you guys walked that tightrope in terms of trying to stay as close to the center as possible without losing your soul so to speak because obviously one of the huge issues facing American media right now is this partisanship especially in any publication that goes anywhere near politics.
Yeah, I mean we did a couple of things and we were pretty purposeful about it. One, we made the decision early on we're never going to have an opinion page which you know comes at a cost because opinion can drive a lot of traffic. Number two, we asked every employee regardless of your position whether you're on editorial, technology, marketing, we asked that when you work for us that in public settings you not engage in political activity and argument on Twitter and other forums. Mainly because what I'm telling our staff is like we're just trying to rebuild trust. The country is suffering from not just a deficit of trust but potentially a debacle from the deficit of trust. And so the little part we can play is try to restore that relationship of trust between us as a publication and the reader. And then when we ask our journalists, we say listen, cover this stuff clinically. We want you to be tough and I think if you look at some of the interviews we've done with Trump and others we've been as tough as anyone else but we're not hyperbolic. We're not on cable or Twitter like saying these guys are losers or stupid or whatever. We're trying to hear the facts based on real expertise of reporting delivered in a clinical but direct way, and then we're not editorializing around it. And I just think there's enough hyperventilating on Twitter and on cable TV. They don't need more of that from us. What we can do is offer like real expertise and thought into what is happening inside institutions or how this is an anomaly in terms of how institutions have been operated and run in the past, and then let people make decisions. And I think that's served us well because I don't know the exact ideological makeup of our readership, but we have a lot of Republicans, a lot of Democrats, a lot of independents, and I hear from all sides that while they might not love that we're not using sharper language occasionally, but they do like the fact that we're trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth. And I'm not delusional. We're not going to save democracy, and we're not going to change media ourselves, but we do what I call a staff. It's listen, you have something that 99.999% of humanity doesn't have. You have a platform that is read by some of the most powerful people around the country and around the world. And so we should protect it. We should just protect the sanctity of that, do everything we can to day in and day out try to earn the trust of people who are persuadable. There's some nuts out there we're never going to be able to persuade them to trust us. They might want ideological fuel, we don't offer it. But I don't think that's most people. I think most people are normal, and we're trying to appeal to the normal part of our country.
Yeah, that being said, I'm sure you did have to walk a fine line at times because even things that you, you know, present as facts, in this world there are many others who will say that's not a fact. So I would imagine it's, I mean, the way you describe it is quite black and white, but I think even if you go down that route, I would imagine sometimes you have people that really have a lot of dissent towards what you're putting out there.
For sure. I mean, certainly in this environment you have more of it than ever. You've got a group of people that will say that the election was rigged and that there's widespread evidence of voter fraud and all we can say is there's very little evidence of voter fraud and in fact in most of these swing states it was Republicans who investigated it and showed that there wasn't voter fraud. That's just a fact. It's not me putting my hand on the ideological scale. It is what it is. Just like January 6th, the storming of the Capitol, the killing of people in Congress never happened before and is something that no one ever thought would happen in America and just to point that out is not to make a judgement about the entire Republican Party or every Trump supporter, but pointing it out in very vivid and direct terms that that's not normal. That's not usual and that they are real threats to democracy when people move away from the truth. If you'd ask me like my biggest concerns about the country, it's that. I'm really, really worried that a lot of smart people are being duped by misinformation and I think the reason that I have faith in our resiliency as a country is that most people I meet are normal and yes, they might be a little ideological, but I think that they volunteer, they work hard, they would shovel your driveway if there's a snowstorm. Like most people are good people and that's who we've got to make sure those people are armed with high quality information so that they can be better citizens, better workers, better neighbors, better people.
