Axios CEO Jim VandeHei on Leading with ‘Just the Good Stuff’

Well, first, thanks for having me. And it's right, like one of the reasons I wrote the book is because I grew up in a small town. I was whatever the opposite of a spectacular student was. I was a crappy student and really a late bloomer. If you'd met me when I was 19, there's no way you would have said that guy's going to go start a couple companies and be a CEO and write a book. But I think looking back and reverse engineering it, a lot of it is the stuff that we learned growing up in the Midwest. Like I was always a very hardworking person. I grew up going to dive bars and playing cards and in retrospect I think the lessons of being able to kind of fact pattern recognize things and be able to deal with people from different walks of life has helped me tremendously and I've always been curious even when I was mischievous I was always very curious in a mischievous way and I think that has served me well.

And I grew up in my town. I had all four of my grandparents and two of my grandmothers lived with us right before they had passed away. And so, you know, I have many generations to learn from. And my grandmother on my father's side actually was one of the few women going to Ripon College in Wisconsin back in the 30s. And so, you know, just had a lot of good examples. The other thing, which is like just a simple life thing, is just I had two parents who were very unconditionally loving, still are. They're both still alive at 81. And I think now that I look back, I think that was probably one of the reasons I had the confidence to go take chances and leave the Washington Post to start Politico and become an entrepreneur, just always having that safety net. And I think maybe we underestimate that as parents, the safety net that we could provide our kids by just loving them and kind of being there and encouraging them and being there when bad stuff happens.

Yeah. You know, at first the Washington Post leadership loved us. Like we were great reporters and it was John Harris was the editor, political editor at the time, but back then reporters didn't leave the Washington Post. And you certainly didn't leave it to start a competitor. So they were baffled. But then to their credit, they rallied and tried to get us to stay. And there was a moment I always call it the famous coffee walk where John Harris, who'd been at the Post a lot longer, came over, wanted to have one last gut check on whether to start the company. And as I walked out the door, my wife looked at me and she said, 'He will not talk you out of doing this.' And so we go for an hour and a half walk and he talks me out of doing it. So I walk in the door with this sheepish look on my face and my wife goes apoplectic, gets on the computer, writes this letter to John Harris, to his wife, to me quoting Churchill and Roosevelt and seizing the moment and getting in the arena and basically not being wimps. She turned the whole thing around and we started it and eventually she actually named the company Politico was her idea.

Yeah. And that was a little more similar to the way you described your father starting Edelman because we had started Politico. At the end we decided we're going to go start something on our own. It wasn't the most amicable parting, but the minute that we announced that we were leaving, I think I had three or four different either CEOs or people at top Fortune 100 companies call me and say, 'Man, we so love doing business with you guys that whenever you start, we're buying ads. We've already allocated money to it.' Number one, it was awesome because it made you feel very confident about starting a company. But it's such a good lesson. And one of the things that we did, and I really learned it from Mike Allen, was I never take it for granted when people do business with me. They can buy ads anywhere or they can read anything. And I've always tried to go out of my way to be very grateful, to thank people, to make sure that I make time for them because they're making time and they're making decisions that benefit us. And I think that really paid off in that interim. And so we started Axios seven years ago. The whole idea was build it around smart brevity which is how do I help people get smart fast on a variety of topics whether it's a communications industry whether it's politics, AI, China. It's a lot for all of us in the professional class to learn so we really wanted to bring efficiency and smarts together and the company's been, you know, successful almost from day one which has been very gratifying.

Listen, you've done better research than anyone on this topic and you guys have noted empirically just the decline in trust of everything. People just don't trust leaders. They don't trust institutions. Therefore, they don't trust the media as much. Therefore, they don't trust the journalist, which is a travesty. I think it's going to get harder and harder to run this very complex nation when people don't believe in anything. They might believe in their individual employer, but beyond that, they seem to have lost faith in everything. And it's really hurt our industry. It makes it really hard for me as someone who runs a big media company to persuade people that we're trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth so that we can arm them with better information to make better decisions. And if we live in a world where most of our people don't trust any big institution and they kind of just separate into their own bubble where it feels comfortable having your own personal biases reinforced, that's a dangerous place to be. I'm a big believer in this country and the magic that our forefathers put into democracy and the structure of our government. I believe media, the fourth estate, is a vital component of that. And I look around and I worry when people are tearing this stuff down.

I think it would be foolish for anybody in the media to say that we've not been part of the problem. And if anybody's not doing a lot of self-reflection, they're delusional to the point of ineffective. So where did the media go wrong? I think where the media went wrong really was over the last 10 years, partly because of cable, mainly because of social media starting to make it clear that they had their own personal opinions and that they were starting to seep into the coverage. And you'd watch them on Twitter, you'd watch them on MSNBC or Fox and you could see they were picking teams. So those people who were persuadable potentially suddenly had every reason to distrust you. And then you had this whole cottage industry. You know, Trump's been quite good at it, but also people on the left have been very good at it about basically calling into question the credibility of every single thing you read, even if it might only be a story or two that had those attributes. So we have a burden, an obligation to fix that. You know, one of the things we did with Axios is we said, 'Listen, as hard as it is, whether you're selling ads or you're a technologist or you're a reporter, if you work here, we don't want you expressing yourself publicly about your politics, whether that's on Twitter, whether that's in giving money to politicians, whether that's in attending political rallies.' And we know that's a lot to ask, but the reason we do it is we've got to do everything in our power to try to persuade the persuadables that they can trust us, because we as an industry are losing that battle.

It's a hard one to answer succinctly. So, I think you could trace it back to the internet and the creation of it. I think at some point probably around 2005 to 2007 once the internet is fully in motion and you start to have the iPhone and your Android device and this suite of apps everything started to change so fast for so many people. How they got information, how they work, how they did their job, how they communicated and basically technology started to move faster than the human mind is capable of keeping up with. I think that dynamic creates anxiety. I think during that period, a lot of people who used to hold really good jobs where they made good money with a real pension and that could support a family on it, particularly in the high-end manufacturing class, lost those jobs. Others lost to global trade. Put those things together and people start to worry that change is not benefiting them. Even though I could argue change is benefiting them, but that is the perception that they're having. Along comes AI and you have the creators of it who have a built-in incentive to kind of hype the technology to say that it could be smarter than humans and maybe one day it will. It's nowhere near there now. So, no wonder people fear it. And you put that on top of all this distrust of institutions to begin with and you've got yourself a toxic stew. And I think it's unfortunate because listen, we live in this very complex, very fast-changing world. I would still argue that there's a huge disconnect between the reality and how people feel. I think if you live in the United States right now, by most measures, and I know people hate it when I say this, you're killing it. You are delusional. You are killing it. You look at your GDP growth. You look at the amount of energy that we're producing, clean energy, conventional energy in our own country for our own country. You look at having two oceans that protect you from enemies, two friendly basically neighbors to the north and south. You look at where AI is created. You look at where people want to flee and come work and live and create jobs if they are super talented. You've just got some amazing, amazing attributes. And yes, there's problems. But I think too often the loudest, most polarizing, provocative voices on social media create this reality of things being much worse than they actually are. And so we've got a lot to do as a society to change that. And it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to happen with better leadership in politics, in business, in churches, in communities, and if we don't get that, then we'll continue on this trajectory, which isn't a great one.