Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei

Before Jim VandeHei co-founded the media company Politico, the only thing he’d managed was the night shift at Little Caesar’s pizza in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. An early passion for politics and journalism led him to Washington, D. C., where he became a political reporter for Roll Call, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. But by 2006, he could see how the internet was transforming journalism, so he walked away from the Post to co-found a digital publication—Politico—with the goal of setting the daily agenda for Washington’s power elite. With the financial backing of a local media mogul, Politico took off, but Jim eventually grew frustrated managing a company he didn’t own. So in 2017, he took another leap and co-founded Axios, a news website that gained a following for its bullet-point brevity, ready-made for the internet. Both companies have landed well: last year Axios was acquired by Cox Enterprises for over $500 million, and in 2021, Politico was purchased by Axel Springer for a reported $1 billion. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 2:16Guy Raz?

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• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Speaker 01

  We started to go through the stories one by one, and they were awful. And we were literally sick to our stomach. We're like, how in the hell are we going to put out a publication tomorrow, much less how are we going to do this on a regular basis?

• 5:26Guy Raz?

  And by the way, a lot of people wanted you to fail.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  It was a big deal. I was pretty cocky in public about what we were going to deliver. But it was that bad. It was a dark, dark moment.

• 5:45Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 5:56Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Jim Vandehe walked away from a dream job to help reimagine journalism with Politico, and then 10 years later, did it again with Axios.

• 6:13Guy Raz?

  The business of news is, well, how do I say it clearly? It's a bad business. It's one of the hardest businesses to make sustainable or even profitable. Do you remember Inside.com? Back in 1999, three big time journalists managed to raise $35 million for a site that went bust by 2001. Or how about Talk Magazine? Tina Brown hosted the launch party on Liberty Island with some of the most famous people in America. And within two years, Talk Magazine was no more. Even media brands we've had on this show in the past, like BuzzFeed and Vice Media, aren't looking too healthy these days.

• 6:55Guy Raz?

  Now, I'm not pointing out these failures to pile on. All the people who worked on these things were smart and talented and committed. The problem with most news startups is that not enough people are willing to pay for the news, which brings us to today's story because it happens to be a story of a successful news startup, Axios. And Axios didn't reinvent news or somehow get millions of people to pay to read it. What founder Jim Vandehe and his partners did was figure out how to target small but powerful communities of readers who also had money to spend: lawyers, lobbyists, tech executives, Hollywood insiders.

• 7:37Guy Raz?

  You get those people to pay a high subscription price for premium insider reporting. And you use the money to finance a bigger operation that covers a bunch of other stuff for the general public. That's the model Jim learned as a young reporter in Washington DC in the early 1990s. Back then, he was working for a trade publication that only covered alternative fuels. But it was those small niche publications that seemed to thrive, and by the way, still do. They only had to convince a small number of subscribers that they were indispensable, and they could charge thousands of dollars a year. At the time, Jim VandeHei wasn't looking to become an entrepreneur or a media mogul.

• 8:21Guy Raz?

  He simply wanted to reach the top of the greasy pole as a political reporter. And in fact, he did. He became a star political reporter for The Washington Post. But by 2006, Jim saw that the future of political reporting, and breaking news in general, was moving online. Why read yesterday's news in tomorrow's print newspaper? So a year later, in 2007, Jim and another Washington Post journalist, John Harris, and a wealthy media mogul, Robert Albritton, launched Politico. And Politico became a must-read publication for the movers and shakers in Washington. But the problem was that despite having the idea and launching it, Jim VandeHei did

• 9:05Guy Raz?

  not own Politico. It was financed by Robert Albritton. And over time, tension between Jim and his benefactor grew. So in 2016, Jim left Politico to start Axios. And if Politico was mainly about politics, Axios was meant to focus mainly on media, tech, and business, except the articles were written to be read and digested very quickly, a concept Jim calls smart brevity. Through a combination of premium products for big spenders, brand partnerships, events, and advertising, Axios managed to figure out how to become a profitable news business.

• 9:46Guy Raz?

  And just five years after it was launched, Axios was acquired by the media conglomerate Cox for over $500 million.

• 9:55Guy Raz?

  Jim Van De Heij grew up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where his mom looked after the family and his dad was an accountant. He wasn't really into politics until he got to college. And when it came to schoolwork, Jim really wasn't into that either.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  No, I was a terrible student. Graduated in the bottom third of my class. Was, you know, teachers would probably describe me as a troublemaker.

• 10:21Guy Raz?

  Troublemaker.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  A troublemaker, for sure. Not well behaved. I just didn't, I didn't, it's funny. I didn't, until college, I just, I put so little thought into school or even like what I was going to do with my life. Like, I was a fun-loving guy. I think I got along with people, you know? Because I was interested, like, myself by the time of high school. I was interested in events and news, but I didn't, like, do homework or stuff, things like that, that normal kids did.

• 10:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  You know, even the first couple of years, like, I was, my, I got good enough grades to get into the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. And then I, I turned in my 1.491 grade point average and had myself on the verge of not being in college much longer.

• 11:03Guy Raz?

  Wow. What were you doing?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Two things, three things. Partying, drinking, and I worked a lot. I always had really good work ethic. I was, I probably, even in high school, I worked 40 hours a week at a.

• 11:16Guy Raz?

  What did you do?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  I delivered pizzas for the most play, most part in high school. I did it at Little Caesar's. And then there was a local restaurant called Red's Pizza. And so I'd work, you know, 40, 50 hours a week. Occasionally, you know, going to class and getting lousy grades.

• 11:32Guy Raz?

  So clearly you had a work ethic, but it was focused on things that, that you were interested in, like, delivering pizza, making money, but not a work ethic on, like, your schoolwork, your studies?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Nothing, not until I found journalism.

• 11:46Guy Raz?

  How did that happen? How did you get even like interested in journalism?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny because even when I wasn't interested in school, I did start to really get interested in politics and I really became almost addicted to C-SPAN. So like at night, I would come home smashed from a party and I would sit and watch agriculture committee hearings, which seems pretty loserish, right? But I was just interested in the process and it was all new to me and I, something about it like I intuitively got. And I was also trying to figure out, okay, what am I going to do with my life? I'm a good writer and at that time, I also liked sports a lot. And so I went to the, we had a daily newspaper. I was either cocky enough or dumb enough or lucky enough that I, you know, was starting

• 12:32Speaker 01

  to think about journalism classes and the guy that ran the department said, oh, you should go talk to the Oshkosh Northwestern and see if they have any jobs. I went in, talked to this editor, Joe Dill. I said, listen, I know a lot about sports. I think I'm a good writer. I don't know how this works, but can you give me some kind of test? And maybe if I pass it, can I have a job?

• 12:51Guy Raz?

  This is the, but this is the university, this is a student newspaper at the university?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  No, no, this was, this was the local newspaper. It's a daily, Oshkosh Northwestern, yeah. And so he gave me a writing test and I did well enough that he hired me to basically work full-time as a, mostly covering high school sports, but a little bit of college sports. And then I was hooked. I was like, this, I'm going to do this.

• 13:18Guy Raz?

  And, and how did you, you know, I mean, how did you know how to write?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I read, read newspapers and I was really lucky because the Gene Hints, who, who passed away several years ago, was the professor of the journalism department. He took a real shine to me and was like, listen, just keep working. Like if you can work 50, 60 hours a week, I can't teach you that. Like learn to work sources, learn to write a story, learn to be creative. And, and so I really took his advice.

• 13:54Guy Raz?

  I guess while you were in college, there was a, another small town paper, maybe nearby, in a place called Brilliant in Wisconsin, they had a daily paper? And you somehow got a job like kind of running this paper, which I think meant literally you were the only employee. You were the editor and the reporter and the photographer. Is that right?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, I mean, I had decided, okay, I really like journalism, but I had this kind of suspicion that how many, like, sports is going to get old. And so I called around to every newspaper and Brilliant News is one of the top of the list because it, you know, obviously, starting with a B. And Zane Zander answers the phone and I explain, hey, I want to come, I'm looking to do anything. I'll do it for free. Do you have any jobs this summer? And it was one of those moments of serendipity. I said, you know, I don't have a ton of academic experience in this and I've done this one sports gig. And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you run my paper? I'm like, well, again, like, I don't really,

• 14:53Speaker 01

  I've done one job covering high school sports. I don't know that that qualifies me to run a newspaper. He's like, yeah, whatever. He goes, my editor just, just informed me that if he can't go to Finland for the next three months, he had some opportunity there, that he was going to leave forever. And I need someone to run my paper for three months. And if you will do it, I'm going to teach you in the next week how to run a newspaper.

• 15:18Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I'm going to teach you how to lay it out. I'm going to teach you how to edit it, how to do photography, how to think about agriculture and the farm country that you're sitting in, and I'm going to set you loose. And he did that.

• 15:30Guy Raz?

  What were you covering? How did you generate stories? Would you go to like, was there like a town hall that you would go to? What do you remember?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  I'd do everything from, you know, it's a small town, so I got to know the people in politics there. And it wasn't, again, it was, I don't know if it was cocky, naive, lucky. I just never, I was never insecure about it, even though my first, I'll never forget my first, it's probably the only time I've ever cried at work. I, my very first edition, this is back when you would lay out a newspaper, you would do it on cardboard, right? And you would use a-

• 16:03Guy Raz?

  Cut them out, cut out the columns.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Cut out the columns using a razor blade. And I, this is my first issue, I'm working eighty, a hundred hours, whatever it was, was Elon Musk hours to get this paper out. And I had accidentally put column three in four, and four in three. So, the only way you could read it, and it would make sense, is if you went column one, two, four, three. And I remember sitting in my car and exhausted in reading this and realizing that I had screwed it up.

• 16:34Guy Raz?

  Because they already printed the paper when you gave them the boards.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  It was done, it was printed. This is the printed version. And so, that was humiliating, humbling. But even that, I bounced back and I just, you know, Zane was gracious and the people around him were generous in teaching me and having patience. And I loved it because it's one of the cool things about journalism. Like, everybody has an interesting story. I don't care what it is. And, you know, you become a rock star, like, you're the, you are the paper. And it was just an amazing master's class in running something.

• 17:11Guy Raz?

  Was that, was that experience, like, when you finished that experience, right? Because I know you graduated from college in ninety-four. And when, but when you finished that job, was it clear to you that you were going to become a reporter?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I was going to be a, but after that, I was going to be a political reporter in Washington.

• 17:31Guy Raz?

  In Washington, DC?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:34Guy Raz?

  And you'd been there before?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Never.

• 17:36Guy Raz?

  Like, on a school trip?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Never.

• 17:38Guy Raz?

  Never, never been there?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Again, again, cockiness or being naive, probably more of the naive.

• 17:43Guy Raz?

  I think during your senior year, you applied to do an internship in Washington, DC with Herb Cole, who was a senator at the time, senator from Wisconsin, of course. And I think, I think this may have been your first time in Washington, right? And your first introduction to national politics.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was awesome. I learned everything you could about, you know, how to deal with the press, but I also did all the grunt errands. So, I learned all the tunnels and ways to get around Capitol Hill and where are the offices and where are the hideaways? And I just, I loved Washington, like, just loved it.

• 18:21Guy Raz?

  All right, so you you get to DC, I think, in 1994, is that right?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yep, the internship was in the the spring and then I went to Martha's Vineyard and mowed lawns and did landscaping with friends that I met

• 18:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  through there and then I moved out in, it would have been February of 95 is when I moved out for good to DC. And I didn't have a job and I sent out a hundred and some resumes and crickets, for the most part. I wasn't, it was months and so I ended up being working for a bricklayer and I, you know, begged everybody from C-SPAN to you name it for a job and just nothing.

• 18:58Guy Raz?

  Just mailing your app, mailing your resume in a manila envelope and waiting to hear back and?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny, I thinking back about that, I had sent the, the one interview I got was with C-SPAN and I was really into C-SPAN, like I said earlier. In my cover letter, had explained to them like changes I would make to C-SPAN. And like I've never thought, even even when I became an entrepreneur, I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. But I look back and I'm like, well, here I am, this young dumb kid trying to get a job as a bricklayer and I'm giving C-SPAN ideas on how they might prepare their viewers by creating content in advance so they're ready for the debates that they're about to watch that unfold in these congressional hearings and such. And so when I'm finally interviewed with whoever I interviewed at C-SPAN, they're like, hey, I think you're a little too ambitious for us.

• 19:47Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  And I'm like, ambitious, like I'm carrying bricks, I have no job, like I'll take anything. Uh, but anyways, they didn't hire me, uh, but a company called Inside Washington Publishers did. And Inside Washington Publishers is a collection of kind of hyper niche publications.

• 20:04Guy Raz?

  Newsletters.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like pamphlets, yeah, like the pre-newsletter, like paper newsletters, right?

• 20:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  And it, uh, and New Fuels Report was the one that hired me and it was covering the alternative fuels industry and, uh, that was an awesome job.

• 20:20Guy Raz?

  This is an interesting niche that some people may not know about, which is that in Washington DC, certainly at the time, even now, there are these publications and later on you would kind of replicate this model with Politico Pro, but the publications that were designed for very specific Audiences like lobbyists interested in oil or lobbyists interested in the transportation industry or lawyers or people who were interested in a particular area and they could and they were expensive, but a lot of inexperienced reporters were brought into these places and they were basically churning out the content for them and you were one of them.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  I was one of them. I mean, it's one of the little, it's one of, like you said, it's one of the little known training grounds for many of the reporters that you see around town today. And you learn because you have to learn how to do a beat. You have to learn, you are covering a sophisticated topic for a sophisticated audience. You can't just be, you just can't be young and dumb. Like you have to pretty quickly become a decent reporter. And every industry, every city, every person has a story and has, there's drama, there's power, there's people, there's politics. And if you dig into it, the people that are living it, breathing it, doing it for a living, they have real passion around it.

• 21:37Guy Raz?

  And by the way, this, I mean, this was all happening around 1995, which was a historic time in Washington because both houses of Congress had just shifted to Republican control, which was a huge story. It was like after 40 years or something. And so I guess that same publisher that was doing the Alternative Fuels Journal, launched a new one to cover Congress and you, like you started working on that. Is that right?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yep. They started a publication called Inside the New Congress, which was created to cover the Republican Congress. And it was me, Charlie Mitchell, and then John Brezhnev who just, who I worked with later at Roll Call, later at Politico, and now is one of the co-founders of Punchbowl. We were covering Congress. So the three of us were off and running, covering this new Congress run by Republicans at a time where most reporters only had Democratic sources. So while we were tiny and unknown and new, we were on equal footing with everyone else because they didn't know anybody in the Republican Party. And we got sourced up pretty quickly and we did some good stories.

• 22:50Guy Raz?

  How'd you get sourced up?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  You know, you start calling people, you start figuring out like who has power. And you know, at the time, I'm in my, you know, young twenties and I'm single. And guess what? Most staffers are in their young twenties. And guess what they do at night? They go out, they play cards, they drink. And you get to go out and I just met everyone I could and tried to create relationships and try to understand power dynamics, try to get to know the members, read a lot, understand the issues. And I've always had a natural, once I got into journalism, a fascination with just like how people get, use and abuse power. Very interested in power. Like I just, I understood politics.

• 23:38Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so you're working for this publication and, and pretty, I think, not too long, maybe within a year, I think you're hired by Roll Call, which is, which for people that don't know, that's the, that was at the time, like the gold standard in, in Washington DC for covering Congress. That was like, came out, I think, Monday and Thursday, I don't know, Tuesday and Wednesday. And it was, every congressperson gets it, every lobbyist and lawyer, like they all read it religiously. They still might, I don't know. But that, you were there with, I think, within a year of, of moving to DC.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yep. I get there, I cover Republican leadership. It just happens to be one of the few moments in history that Republican congressional leaders are the national story. I happen to be extremely well sourced in that space and I start breaking a lot of stories and stories that really echoed nationally. And, you know, especially around, like I was the first person back then to report that Republicans were meeting secretly in the basement and trying, of the Capitol and trying to move money from a slush fund to, to lay the groundwork to impeach Clinton. And it was a, I mean, it was a monster, monster story back then. And I'll never forget, someday I'll, I'll find the tape.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  It was big enough that I, they got called to be on the Today Show. And here I am. I don't own like dress clothes. I had like this supper club sports coat, that plaid thing that was my dad's that didn't fit. And I looked at the time, I was young, but I probably looked like I was 17. And I'm sitting here talking to Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. And I couldn't be more scared and over my head. But it was, it just captured the enormity of that story and of that moment. And it was just, it was fun. It was just, it was interesting. It was intoxicating. And I was getting good at it.

• 25:38Guy Raz?

  In your, I mean, it seems, I would imagine that your, your kind of ambition probably would eventually maybe to be like an editor at a newspaper, right? Because you, you were obviously really successful. You were, because when I think about my early career, I was like, that's what I want to be. I want to be a foreign correspondent. And then I want to be the host of All Things Considered. And then that would be it. Like, I'd be done. That'd be great.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yep. I achieved my objective at Roll Call. I never had ambition to be an editor. I never had ambition to run anything. Like, I never aspired anything beyond that. My dream coming out to Washington is if I could cover leadership in Congress for Roll Call, like, that, that would be it. Like, I would have made it.

• 26:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But, I mean, of course, you would eventually move well beyond Roll Call. Because I think while you were still in your 20s, you get a job covering politics for The Journal, The Wall Street Journal. And then after doing that for a few years, you got hired by the, like, the top of the heap by The Washington Post as a political reporter.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:45Guy Raz?

  It's a, for, for people who don't, you know, aren't interested or don't know much about this world, like, it is high stress, right? Like, the competition was absolutely fierce. So what did that mean? Were you just constantly just working the phones? Like, you know, shouting at people if somebody else got a scoop and you didn't get it first? Or I, what was your life? Because I think you are, I think you are a competitive reporter. Right? I mean, you are. I know you are.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Very, very competitive reporter, you know, the, both like, and like all reporters, like competitive and then insecure about my standing. Like, I would be in this, I would have a great story and I would live off that high for a day and then I'd be like, oh my god, am I, do I have imposter syndrome? Do I, like, am I ever gonna get another scoop? And, and a lot of this stuff I didn't realize until later in reflecting on it, I was, what I was good at and probably what I was uniquely good at, I had learned at The Journal, which is I was really good at fact-pattern recognition. Like, I could see three things that were happening in society or business and politics and I could put them into a portrait that

• 27:57Speaker 01

  would give people some clarity of, of what and why things are happening. And then I was very good at figuring out what moves will somebody else make next based on what I've seen them do in the past, which would then allow me to pick up the phone and call a member of Congress and say, I know you're meeting on this, even if I didn't know they're meeting on it because I know that naturally that's what they would meet on, so why don't you tell me why you're doing that? And it would, it's amazing how often that trick would get them to tell me stuff they otherwise wouldn't tell me because they think I already knew it. And like, that little bag of tricks and an ability to write fast allowed me to be good.

• 28:37Guy Raz?

  You know, I, I mean, here you are, you're working at the best possible place to be for a political junkie and a political reporter, and clearly you loved it and you still love it, you still live there in the DC area. But, you know, what, what started to happen? In 2006, you would leave, but, but what was going on? What would, why were you getting restless?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  If you had asked me in May of 2006, are you ever gonna start a company? I would've looked at you like you're on LSD. Like, what are you talking about? Like, no, like, I'm working at The Washington Post. But, like, later that month or early, I can't remember the exact timing, but somewhere after that point...

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Google bought YouTube and it was like this aha moment for reasons I can't fully explain of I remember going up to John Harris, who's my editor, and looking around the newsroom and thinking about what was happening with cable TV and the internet. And I said, could you imagine if Eric Schmidt came to us right now and said, I want to take on the Washington Post, how much money would that cost me? And I answered my rhetorical question to John, saying, not that much. If you think about what's happening before us, if we hired, at the time I said, if we hired six of the best reporters we know and six rising stars, and we hooked ourselves

• 30:06Speaker 01

  up to the internet, and we took advantage of the fact that cable TV likes to have us on, I bet you we could compete with the Post instantaneously. And it was like a light bulb went off. It literally went from never thought of it to, holy crap, I'm going to start this company. We jokingly called it Project X and started to really sketch out what would later become Politico.

• 30:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  And it led us very quickly, and it probably only happened because it went quickly, to a series of conversations. Like, John and I, John had been at the Post for 20 years. We knew a lot of people around town. We called people who had money. We said, hey, this is what I'm thinking. Here's an idea. And because I worked at Roll Call, I understood the business. I understood that, ah, if you get really influential people to read content, you can sell ads to companies who care about their image in front of that audience of DC elites.

• 31:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  And basically pitched this. And every person that we talked to said, ah, not only do I like that, like, can I invest? And so we're like, wow, okay, now this is real.

• 31:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And I guess that at this point, you've got this idea, it's called Project X, and it's going to be like... I think I read that you were describing like the Yankees of political journalism. We're looking at the Yankees together, right?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:30Guy Raz?

  So it would be political journalists, but it would be a publication for a very specific but influential audience that a certain kind of advertiser wanted to reach. So that was-

• 31:43Speaker 01

  The idea was to reach, like, our thing was, listen, if we can get the president and Nancy Pelosi to have to read what we're writing, we're going to have a very profitable publication.

• 31:54Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  And by the way, because of cable and the internet, we're probably going to have a pretty large audience for this. Back then, The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com were separate companies in separate buildings on two different sides of the Potomac. And I remember walking over to dot com and they're looking at me like, oh my god, the paper people never come here. And I'm like, what are you guys up to over here? And, oh, what's this? Like, oh, this is the traffic to the stories that you're writing. And I'm like, well, wait a second. According to your leaderboard, my story got more readers online than it got in print? They're, yeah, yeah, that happens every day. I'm like, then why the hell am I spending all my time looking at the newspaper if I can get a much bigger audience online? And they're like, yeah, we've been trying to tell you all, but no one cares about the internet, at least people at newspapers.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, we thought if we could do those two things, we were going to have a really successful publication.

• 32:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And I guess that at this point, we've kind of reached a major turning point in the story because this is where you would begin a partnership with a local media mogul named Robert Albritton. He was, I guess, basically the son of a very wealthy media mogul himself who owned a bunch of, like, local TV stations. And at the time, I guess Albritton was trying to launch his own political publication, but it wasn't coming together.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:15Guy Raz?

  And from what I understand, he heard that you and John Harris were trying to do something similar.

• 33:22Guy Raz?

  So then what? Did Robert approach you and say, hey, why don't you do your publication, your political thing with me and I'll fund it?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is the serendipity part. And I remember telling Harris, if this is meant to be, someone's going to come along and hear about it. And there's probably gossip around town that we're thinking of doing something and that's what those guys picked up on. And by this time, remember, we had been pitching this to venture capitalists and pitching it to people in town. We had a very compelling case. So by the time we meet with them, we've really thought it through. We never run a business. We've never done a budget or anything like that. But we had a back of the envelope formula for how this could be a very successful company. And The Post initially, I think, looked at us like we were on drugs or we were aliens.

• 34:11Guy Raz?

  Right. They didn't think it was gonna be.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I remember Don Graham saying, what are you talking about, Jim? You've never managed anything. You're not very often in the newsroom. You've never raised your hand to be a leader. And now you're telling me you're going to start a competitor to The Post? I think they thought it was a joke or a fanciful dream was their initial reaction until they realized that we were serious. And then they got serious.

• 34:38Guy Raz?

  And by the way, did you ever consider going to The Post and saying, hey, let's spin off a company and I'll run it?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Well, they came back with that idea. They said, well, once things got real serious, they said, fine. What if we created a company inside the company and called it Post Politics? Don't do it there. Do it here. If you think the future's digital, build it out here.

• 35:00Guy Raz?

  And they only came to you with that proposal once they realized that somebody else might actually finance this thing?

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah. And what we said to them was, it just, it wouldn't work. Like, you have this massive legacy operation with leaders who have a lot of power and big egos. There's no way that they're going to make good music with us being an upstart internally at the same time. And by the way, by this point, we want to go do it. We want to do it on our own.

• 35:26Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  You know, but they're bringing it, though. At this point, they're bringing it. They do both the charm and then they do the intimidation, right? Like, I remember Don Graham and his leadership team calls us in and explains to us why it's a dumb idea for us to leave. And Don, who couldn't be a sweeter guy and a smart guy, turned to us and just said, "I've never said this to anybody. You are making a catastrophic mistake."

• 35:59Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, what happens after Jim decides not to heed that very dire warning? Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 36:26Guy Raz?

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• 38:38Guy Raz?

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• 40:01Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2006, and Jim is thinking of leaving The Washington Post to start a new publication. And he's going to partner with Post editor John Harris and get financial backing from media mogul Robert Albritton. And still, Jim's been told that if he does this, he'll be making a catastrophic mistake. So he's feeling the pressure.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  For sure. I mean, again, I've got a wife at home. I've got kids and, you know, we're-- it's not a cheap market, living in Washington DC. And so the risk was very high. I always calculated that, okay, but even if I fail, I'm a pretty good reporter. Somebody's going to hire me. And so I'd never-- I didn't worry that much about the failure dimension. I worried a little bit about the public humiliation, but even that, I don't spend a whole lot of time caring what other people think about me. So that part didn't weigh that heavily. But it weighed very heavily on Harris. I mean, he very much wanted to back out. And there was a moment that we now refer to as the famous coffee walk, where he basically

• 41:12Speaker 01

  had convinced himself that we can't do this, that he was going to pull the plug. And we had always said, like, we're doing it together. We're not-- one of us not doing it alone. And so he wanted to pull the plug. And he comes over, we go for a walk. And as I leave, my wife looks at me and she says, "Under no circumstances is Harris talking you out of this." My wife was a huge believer in it. And I said, "No way. No way will he talk me out of it." So we go get coffee, and of course, he talks me out of it. But I get home, and my wife looks at me, and she could tell instantly that I buckled, and she jumped on her keyboard and, you know, wrote up this note to Harris, to me and to Harris's wife, Anne O'Hanlon. And she was quoting Churchill and Roosevelt and about seizing the moment and, like, moments like this only happen once, get in the arena.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  And she saved us from ourselves.

• 42:02Guy Raz?

  I mean, it was arguably a bigger risk for your partner, John Harris, because he was older than you. You were in your early 30s, mid-30s. So that's a normal time for a lot of people to kind of jump ship and try their own thing. And you can recover. You can recover and go back.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  I think that's right.

• 42:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah, for him, it was a bigger risk.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Bigger risk, and he had more of an emotional attachment to the post. Like, I'd been there three years. He'd been there 20. Like, it was his only job. It was definitely an easier move for me than it was for him.

• 42:30Guy Raz?

  All right. So you connect with Robert Albritton. He is going to be the guy that will back this thing. And the reason that you do this is because it's stability. You're going to get a... He's going to guarantee a salary. And he's guaranteeing to put in $10 million in this thing, right, at the time?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:50Guy Raz?

  And there was no... It mitigated the risk.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was all about risk mitigation. But the most important thing is we had a building, and we had money. And so when I went to recruit people from the Journal, I could say, "Look, like, here's a computer. Here's an office. Like, this is real. It's not some... I'm not doing it in my garage. This isn't a garage band activity."

• 43:12Guy Raz?

  You and John basically were handed the reins to run the editorial side of Politico, to kind of create it. And I think your wife gave it the name, right? She named it. She gave the name Politico.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  My wife named it, correct.

• 43:26Guy Raz?

  And Albritton and Fred Ryan, who's the CEO of his sort of media company, they would handle the business side, more or less, right?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  That was the arrangement originally, yes. They would... They had business acumen. They had, you know, they had TV stations. They had set up sales organizations before. And so in the beginning, it was very much a... It was a group effort, right? And Robert, who, you know, if it weren't for his money and his courage in taking a chance on us, Politico doesn't exist. And I look back at, like, it was a miracle. A miracle that Politico worked.

• 44:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, with his, his money, obviously, there were resources. I think the paper launches in, in January of 2007.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:13Guy Raz?

  So he's, he, because he owns these television stations, he had a building, I think, just across, it's outside of DC in Arlington, and that was where Politico would be located. And I remember those early papers when I would, when I, you know, would read them online. But it was a, it was a newspaper and it was online. I mean, it was going to be a print newspaper and an online paper.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:40Guy Raz?

  And from, from like, one account that I read, you know, the night, or the, and the nights before that first edition was launched, a lot of the copy was just crap. It was terrible. Like, you, you and John basically had to rewrite the paper.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  We had a pact going into this. We said, never will either of us ask the following question. If you could do it over again, would you still do it? And we had stuck to it until the night that we're about to launch. And we look at all the stories. We're so busy getting everything put together. We never had time to deal with the copy. We knew what the lead story would be. And, but you had an entire newspaper to fill and a website to, to load up. And we started to go through the stories one by one, and they were awful. And we were literally sick to our stomach. We're like, how in the hell are we going to put out a publication tomorrow, much less, how are we going to do this on a regular basis?

• 45:38Guy Raz?

  And by the way, a lot of people wanted you to fail.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  It was a big deal. I was pretty cocky in public about what we were going to deliver.

• 45:47Guy Raz?

  What were you promising, by the way? What were you saying?

• 45:49Speaker 01

  I was just saying that we're going to take on The Post and like, the people from Big...

• 45:53Guy Raz?

  Why were, why were you saying that? Why would you say that?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think John and others were asking me that at the time as well.

• 45:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Like, I am, at this point in my mind, we are going to will this into existence. And part of willing something into existence is having a little P T Barnum in you.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Understanding that you need people talking about you, even if it's not always in flattering ways. You need to be part of the conversation. So the bet I was making was, I'm gonna be provocative. And definitely it came off, I think, to a lot of people as abrasive or cocky. And so we had tons of people cheering against us. And so against that backdrop, we're looking at these stories. And I remember looking at Harris and saying, if you could do it over again, would you do it? And even though we've promised not to ask that, and he said, no way. But it was that bad. It was a dark, dark moment. But you don't, failure's not an option. Like, anybody who's started a company, failure's not an option.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  I don't have time for pessimism. All I have time for is activation and solutions. And we had enough fresh ideas and enough savvy reporters like Ben Smith and J. Mar, Jonathan Martin, who are breaking stories and that other people were having to follow, that we built up this momentum. And a few things became very clear to us early on. One, talent matters profoundly. One good person, one awesome person, is better than 10 good people. And we had a lot of them. We had a lot of these killer talents. And I wanted to find those people and you wanted to keep those people.

• 47:40Guy Raz?

  But that took time.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Took time.

• 47:42Guy Raz?

  And when you're going out there saying, we're gonna beat the Washington Post. And that means there's a lot of people really secretly hoping you're gonna fail. There's pressure there because you can't fail, because that would be humiliating.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  There's no entrepreneur who's done your show who won't tell you that there's an insane amount of pressure. There's a, it takes a certain amount of lunacy to believe you can take something that doesn't exist and will it into existence. And so you by nature have some level of very high tolerance for stress. And You don't sleep. I remember my brother coming and visiting and my brother, you know, knows nothing about politics at the time, doesn't pay attention to media, just came to, you know, to hang out and go to bars for a couple of days. And I remember him looking at me, getting, you know, going to bed at 12 and getting up at 3 o'clock and firing off 100 emails, saying, whatever you're doing is not healthy. Like, what are you doing?

• 48:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  And it wasn't healthy, but it was, it was exhilarating. It's intoxicating. Like, you either collapse from it, or you, you thrive. And because of it being new, and maybe a little bit because of the bravado, everyone was covering us. So there were stories on CNN, and there were stories in the Journal and others. So we were getting all of this earned media. So the P T Barnum part of it was paying off. And so there was enough public success that it was clear we could be successful.

• 49:17Guy Raz?

  I wonder, I mean, one of the things I wonder about is you, you get there, and you're John Harris, who you worked with, he had managed, some managerial experience because he was an editor. You had none. I mean, you were a reporter. Most reporters are, you know, they're one-person bands, right? They're lone wolves, right? Or if they work in teams, but still, they're, you know, they're their own boss, usually. And now you are a manager, plus you were the, kind of the star reporter. So you also had to report and oversee a team of young reporters and push them hard. How did you learn to do that without being an asshole?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  I don't think I was ever an asshole. I think I pushed people hard. And did I push people? To the limit, there's no doubt. There's no doubt. Like, our level of burnout in that first year was exceptionally high. I never pushed people harder than I pushed myself. And I hired a lot of people who I knew were similar, right? We ended up hiring Jake Sherman or Ben Smith. Like, if you get the right reporter who's motivated, you don't need to push them. Like, they're pushing themselves and they're on fire for breaking news and getting scoops and the adrenaline that flows from it. But yeah, like, I only, I didn't lead. Like, John had been a manager. John was certainly the adult in the room. And I was more Vince Lombardi. Like, I'm gonna, like, pound power. I'm gonna work

• 50:48Speaker 01

  you. I'm gonna work hard. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna try to inspire. I'm gonna try to, like, I'd run around the room, like, what do you got for me now? Like, let's get a scoop. Like, why'd that person beat us? Like, it became a joke, to a point, because I would do so, so much of it. But instinctively, I felt that's what we, we have to somehow do the impossible. And that's the story of, of every startup. You're trying to do something no one's ever done before with a group of people who haven't done it together before. And in this environment, we did it with the added layer of we're under intense public scrutiny.

• 51:26Guy Raz?

  You know, I'm curious, when you would tell reporters, like, when, when new reporters came in, and you would say, this is what a Politico story is. This is what makes us different. How would you describe it? What, what was it? What was a Politico story?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  A Politico story, we would say is, listen, is this an idea, an analysis, a scoop, that the Speaker of the House or the White House Chief of Staff would consider new, revelatory, essential, illuminating? Like, that was the marker. Like, we were writing, we called it the bull's eye of, of the audience. If we can get something that is so interesting to the most powerful people, it's gonna be interesting to anybody who cares about politics.

• 52:07Guy Raz?

  So here's what I'm wondering. Like, Politico became, you know, a sort of a sensation in Washington DC quickly. And let's, let's be honest for a moment here. Washington DC can be very provincial, right? People can really be navel-gazy. And, and so, you know, it's also a great place to get attention, because it is a small town in that sense. So people were talking about Politico, but it was, it was not making money. I mean,

• 52:34Guy Raz?

  Here you've got Politico, you're writing your own stuff. It's really expensive to have all those staffers writing original pieces. And Huffington Post was, at that time, kind of kicking your butt, you know? And they were just aggregating articles. They weren't even writing them.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:50Guy Raz?

  I mean, was there ever, like, did anybody internally just say, what are we doing? Why are we paying people to write stuff? Why don't we just do what they do?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Not really, because we were starting to bring in revenue. The whole idea was if you can write things that members of Congress have to read, then these companies would want to advertise to reach those. And that happened instantly. So we started to get a lot of ad buyers, defense companies, and financial service companies.

• 53:17Guy Raz?

  But that was in the newspaper?

• 53:18Speaker 01

  That was in the newspaper.

• 53:19Guy Raz?

  That was in the print newspaper, yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  But back then, like, that was enough. Like, I don't remember the numbers that first year. But let's say we spent 10 million. I think we brought in 3 or 4 million in year one, if my memory serves me correct. So it wasn't, there was money coming in. And I think by year three, we broke even, or might even have made money that third or fourth year. But back then, like, I wasn't even that worried about the business. We wanted it to work. We were, like, about brand building, about hiring the right journalists, about getting people to take us seriously. And on that score, pretty early on, it was mission accomplished.

• 53:53Guy Raz?

  Did you, I mean, you know, obviously, Allbritton, he knew going in that he was not going to make money for at least a year, probably two. But there must have been pressure coming down to bring in money.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't remember in those early years there being a whole lot of tension about revenue. There definitely started to have tension, probably between John and I, and kind of the suits, Robert and Fred, just about how to run the company. I mean, how often do we need to meet?

• 54:26Guy Raz?

  When did that start?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  I wish I had a better memory on specifics, but I would say it started low grade around year three and got progressively more worse, progressively worse. It's not set up the way you would want to set up a company, right? Our CEO Fred is also running a massive local television empire, right? Right, because Allbritton owned owned a bunch of TV channels. Bunch of TV channels. And so a lot of our leadership, a lot of our technology was coming from TV, which I didn't realize at the time, but very antiquated and a very throwback industry. And it started to become clear that that that was the source of the tension.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  I was like, there's no way that we could be a successful company at a national or international scale if we're running like a mom and pop shop, or certainly running like a mom and pop shop backed by a local TV station. Like, we need like a full-time leader, we need a full-time technologist, we need to continue to grow and find new revenue streams. And like we were, that would be where we started to hit our sort of first period of real turbulence. But up until then, it was like, we're having a blast, for the most part, people are getting along, and we're all trying to kind of figure out like, who does what? And, you know, then John and I are becoming our, you know, we're starting to become leaders

• 55:51Speaker 01

  ourselves, we start to do a lot of self appraisal, we start to figure out what are the weaknesses? And like, how do we create something that's more sustainable? Like, we're not dumb. Like, once you have turnover as high as we had, and you have people writing stories about us being a sweatshop, we're not dopes. We know that that's not sustainable. It may have gotten us to where we were, but we were going to have to create a culture in a company that

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Could rely on something other than the maniacal energy of a few people.

• 56:23Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's interesting because the, the culture, right? I mean, you talk about the culture and, and you mentioned this, this kind of the sweatshop stories that were coming out about Politico. And it's almost as if you, you anticipated that, that churn would happen, that it was just going to be, you know, sort of par for the course, you, to win, you had to operate that way, or maybe not. I mean, if you were to do it again, would you have baked in a different culture from the beginning?

• 56:54Speaker 01

  I can't express this enough. Everything that we did was based on intuition and instinct. And so I think at the crassest level, yes, like, what is, what is the instinct that motivates people in trauma or turmoil? It is, it's, I'm, I'm not, failure's not an option. I'm going to get out of this hole. And so all you're doing is like, I'm going to fight today to win today. And I'm not thinking about casualties. And it was made messier because we were in the media and the media loves to cover media. And so any misstep would be amplified in a way it might not be amplified if I was trying to start a shoe company, right? People wouldn't care.

• 57:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How was your, before things started to get a little bit tense, right? I think they started around 2010. But from, from everything I've read, I mean, you and, and Robert Albritton were quite close. You, you guys went out to dinner with your wives and you guys went on vacation together. I mean, you became pretty close.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there are definitely long periods of time where, you know, you, listen, you're like, any startup is like a family, you're trapped in a house together. And, you know, you're, Harris used to have this expression that we've been in the car too long together. Like, that, that certainly is true at times. But Robert and I were, were, were close at different times. We were friends. But, you know, we started to clash. I mean, it's pretty well documented that I just, we had different values, we had different business styles. And, you know, at that point, when you start to have success, egos emerge, right? And people want credit or people want more input.

• 58:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  You know, our first big clash, I basically

• 58:40Speaker 01

  At some point, it was clear to me the company needed a CEO. And to be blunt, I thought it needed me to be the CEO. Because I had, it sounds so arrogant, but I was like, I was learning how to lead. I was really interested in the business. I had, I had started to gravitate away from the coverage and much more towards how do you turn these things into scalable businesses? I had started to think about culture. You know, I started to bring in our team.

• 59:06Guy Raz?

  So what, what, what happened? I mean, you would, obviously, eventually become the CEO, which we will, I will ask you about in a moment. But when you were still in that first year, right? And you guys were trying to figure out ways to, to grow your revenue. I guess you, you brought someone on to help you figure that out, right?

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Yep. So I had went out on a limb and hired a guy, Roy Schwartz, who was at Gallup and had been a consultant, but was just smart as hell. And I'm like, you need to come and run our revenue. You need to, there's no way that there can't be a better way than this good old boy network. I need someone who's smart and savvy, who could talk to CEOs, who can help companies think smartly about how to utilize our platform. And once I hired him, then, you know, we really had an alliance and became quite close. And he was just smarter than anybody on the business side at that company by 10x. And we had decided we wanted to start a subscription business called Politico Pro.

• 1:00:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah. This was, I mean, this really was going to become a significant generator of revenue. And this, for people that don't know what it is, it's similar to what you did as an early reporter. I mean, it's like, it was designed for industry people, lobbyists, lawyers, you know, who had a specific interest in a specific topic. And Politico Pro delivers, or delivered and delivers this intensive specialized information to them, and the subscriptions were like. That $10,000 a year, something like that.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:00:42Guy Raz?

  And so you didn't need, you don't need that many subscribers?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Nope. You need lobbyists, companies, lawmakers. They pay $10,000 a slot. Some big company who has 50 lobbyists might pay $100,000. And it's an expensive business upfront because you've got to hire a lot of reporters, you've got to hire like

• 1:00:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  a real sales team because you're asking companies to pay, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription. And there was a real clash between Roy and I and really Robert on the other side, who just thought it was, we were wasting money and that John wasn't that enamored with it because he thought it was too wonky in terms of the coverage focus. But we believed that you couldn't be solely dependent on advertising. And to be a really big durable company, Roy and I were super confident that you needed this subscription leg of the business. And eventually Roy and I prevailed and eventually Robert agreed to it. So to his credit, while resistant in the beginning, he did fund it.

• 1:01:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  And for us, Politico was us. It was an extension of us. So its success, its durability was, was everything. And we just felt in our bones that if we didn't have another, if we didn't have another revenue stream and God forbid we hit economic turbulence and the ad market locks up, that we could be in real trouble.

• 1:02:04Guy Raz?

  Jim, you finally get to actually become the CEO in 2014. And there are different accounts, or I guess 2013, when Fred Ryan stepped down, there are different accounts of, of that. And, you know, I've read different interpretations from, you know, Robert Auburn's not here to talk. And again, this is not a critique of him at all. I think, I think he's very successful and has done some amazing things and made his mark, certainly with Politico and But you know, there are some accounts that said, that I've seen that suggested that he kind of really didn't really want you doing that job, that he sort of felt pressured

• 1:02:46Guy Raz?

  to give you that job and didn't really think you, I don't know, did you get that sense at all?

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  For sure, yeah. And there's no doubt. And again, like, I think Robert would say it here, and at the time, he might have been right. I think he felt like, number one, like, I had essentially demanded that I be CEO. I felt like I-

• 1:03:05Guy Raz?

  Well, you started the thing.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  I started the thing. I felt like I understood it, and I felt like I could run this thing. And he felt like I couldn't. I think he thought, you know, I need someone more seasoned, I want someone with more experience in media. And so, we had a mighty clash over it. But again, to his credit, he was right that I had not, again, like, I'd be the first to say, I was a reporter. I hadn't run anything, like, until before I started to run Politico. The only thing I had run was the night shift at Little Caesar's in high school in Oshkosh. And so, there was a big piece of it that you're learning on the fly. And I learned a lot in that period.

• 1:03:46Guy Raz?

  I actually think that being a reporter is good training for becoming a formal entrepreneur, because there are entrepreneurial things you have to do. I talked about this with Don Katz, who started Audible. He was a Rolling Stone reporter, you know, for most of his career. He was a writer. And what a lot of people don't realize is that reporters, you really have to, you know, do things very quickly with limited resources.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Everything I know as a CEO, I learned from being a reporter. Everything I knew as a reporter, I learned from playing poker. Huh. Right? So, take it back to playing poker in high school and college. Like, poker is so much about fact-pattern recognition.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  It's about knowing when to take a risk. It's knowing about how to modulate emotion in complex and often tense situations. And knowing that there's a decent probability that you're gonna lose. And like somewhere in that journey from poker table to journalist to CEO, I think those skill sets helped immensely.

• 1:04:59Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  But by the time I became CEO, I was very clear that I'm not in this for the long haul. Like at some point, I was always upfront with Robert, like at some point when I feel like the company can grow at 20% and we're not here, I'm probably gonna go. At some point, I'm probably gonna, I wanna do my own thing. Like I have, by this point, I'm, you know, Roy and Kim and Danielle Jones and, you know, Mikey, like we're, we have our kind of own view of like what a company should look like and what its soul should be and what its value should be, what its morality should be.

• 1:05:35Guy Raz?

  And you could not make that happen because it was not your shop?

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  No way. It wasn't my shop. It was Robert's. Like Robert, listen, again, like to his credit, he's the one who bankrolled it when no one else would. And he took the risk, had political down, down the tubes, it's his money that would have been lost. And so he owned it and therefore he had every right to control it. And, you know, it's hard after 10 years. You could have the best of intentions, it's very hard for that to end in a pretty way. And obviously, it didn't end in a pretty way, but that's life.

• 1:06:07Guy Raz?

  So what, what, what happened? I mean, I mean, clearly, you're starting to think, okay, eventually, I want to run my own shop. And, and, you know, you, you're alluding to, you know, regret, sort of, kind of regretfully how it ended. Well, how did it end? What happened?

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  I mean, it ended that we couldn't get on the same page about. Like how you would set up the company. Like, for instance, it's very important to us that everybody should be able to share in the success, not just us, but the entire company.

• 1:06:36Guy Raz?

  You wanted, you wanted shares distributed and--

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  To other people, right.

• 1:06:39Guy Raz?

  You wanted more ownership distributed.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, both, because we thought it was the right thing to do, but also it was getting harder and harder to keep talent. And so you wanted to bring everybody together, have everyone have upside in the company.

• 1:06:51Guy Raz?

  Because if people were getting equity in BuzzFeed, they were getting equity in other startups.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. And it was like, it would have been a competitive advantage if we could have done that. But it was more just a, like, it's a philosophy. Like, we had a philosophy about what we wanted out of life and what we wanted out of a company that was incompatible at Politico. And it just wasn't going to happen. We wanted a very transparent culture. We wanted to be very clear lines of authority. And so in many ways, it was more the power of that, of, you know what? I think we could do that. I think we could go off on our own. I think we could raise money and we could build a utopian company. And it was that, you're almost, again, like that naive or that cocky, whatever, somewhere in the middle of that, that we could build a utopian company. And that lure of that was powerful.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  And by the time Mike tells me, yes, if we do that, we're in, and Roy says, yes, come on, let's go do that, you know that it's going to be successful. There's no company that Mike Allen is a part of and that Roy Schwartz is a part of and that wasn't going to be a success. And that, that more than anything else is what led us to believe, okay, we can do this.

• 1:08:05Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Jim and his partners designed a new publication to stand out from the others. And in the process, stumble across an unexpected stream of revenue. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 1:09:56Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. So it's early 2016 and Jim is about to take another risk. And this time, he's going to leave the business he helped build, Politico, to start a new online publication. And he's partnering with two colleagues, the finance guy, Roy Schwartz, and the journalist, Mike Allen. And they want to cover topics other than politics and do it in digestible chunks, ready-made for the internet.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  The data was... Unambiguous that most people were skimming and scanning and they weren't reading most of the words that any of us in the media were writing. And so it meant that people were just consuming content in smaller chunks. And that's the light bulb. That becomes Axios. We're like, if we could solve for that, how can we help people, especially busy, smart people, get smarter, faster, across more topics? Wow, if we could solve that, that would be a big company. Well, the solution to us became very clear. What we come to over that period is this concept of smart brevity. We've got to find people who have subject matter expertise in media, in business, in technology, in politics.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  And we have to figure out the most efficient way to deliver that. Ha, smart brevity. So we come up with this architecture of, okay, what is the smartest way to deliver 200 or 400 words? And if we could do that, we're going to do something different.

• 1:11:23Guy Raz?

  All right. So you have this concept, you leave Politico in January of 2016. And was there any threats or any sort of like, you can't do this, or you can't go off and start your own thing? Or any concern that there might have been like litigation or anything? Or were you pretty comfortable that wasn't going to happen?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Oh, no. We thought for sure we'd be going to court. I mean, there was tension, right? And Robert and others, it sort of threatened if you take any information from here, or if you replicate any of our ideas. I think by the time I left, I had three lawyers, you know, like looking at my contract, looking at potential litigation, probably an overreaction because we never actually had any litigation.

• 1:12:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  But when you leave a company, especially when you leave with some mitt of tension, you have a cooling off period. You have six months where you can't really do anything. You can't start a new company, can't recruit, can't raise money for it. And, you know, we were lucky, we had enough money to be able to rest for six months and go figure out what we're going to do. Not a pleasant place to be. I'm not a big, like, sit around type of person, like not. Like, some people would love it. I wish that I loved it. I didn't love it.

• 1:12:38Guy Raz?

  Right. Here's the thing. I mean, in 2016, right?

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Guy Raz?

  When you left, you were not financially set for life. Like, you still had to work if it didn't work out.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:12:48Guy Raz?

  But you had a playbook. You knew, right, you had done this. Already, you had started a media company. But now, really, it was different because you weren't just going to be dealing with the editorial side, you were going to be running a company, the business side, everything.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  Yes, like, it could have flopped. We went out and we raised money. And, I mean, I, in some ways, was the worst person to raise money because I would tell every venture capitalist that I think media is the hardest space in America today. I think that most media companies are going to go under. And, yes, if you want to get a 10x return, I would get into healthcare, or tech, or energy stocks. I would think you have a higher degree of probability to make money there. But if anyone's going to get you a 10x return in the media space, based on their previous record, I think we're the group of people who can do that.

• 1:13:34Guy Raz?

  Here's the thing, though, Jim. Even somebody with your experience, talent, and platform, building a new brand is really hard. You're leaving Politico, which was a massive brand by the time you left. And even with all the experience, right? I mean, look at Jeffrey Katzenberg and, what was it called?

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Quibble.

• 1:13:54Guy Raz?

  Quibble, right? Quibble. You know, right? I mean, even super highly successful, talented people have a hard time building a brand. So, what was the way that you were going to put this out there? Because to be successful, you had to have an audience, because without an audience, you can't command high prices for advertising.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we, listen, we have Mike Allen. So, like, we haven't talked enough about Mike.

• 1:14:19Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  So, Mike is one of the co-founders of Politico, and he's a co-founder of Axios. He's maybe the most generous, gracious person in the history of American journalism. And he also has a work ethic that has never been seen before and never will be seen again. He's written-

• 1:14:34Guy Raz?

  And kind of a legendary reporter.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Legendary.

• 1:14:36Guy Raz?

  He wrote this playbook that became a central reading for people in Washington DC and beyond for years.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. New York Times Magazine did a cover story called "The Man the White House Wakes Up To." He's written a daily newsletter, every day but 10 days, for 15 years straight. It's insane. I've never seen anything like it. Gets up at 2:30 in the morning, bangs that thing out, and it is read by the most influential people in the world. And so, we knew that we had Mike. And we knew that when we launched, all the important people in Washington would read Mike. So, that was like, as long as Mike is breathing and healthy and feeling good, we were going to be successful. And then, in that early day, in walks this kid, Jonathan Swan, who no one knew about, and-

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  He had been doing some good reporting on Donald Trump. And within like half hour of meeting him, I remember sitting in the room with Mike and looking at Swan, who had, I think, three other offers at the time, and looking at him and saying, dude, you were born to work for us. Like, we are gonna pour whatever we have into you, and I think we could be helpful. You have a gift that few people have. And he turned down everyone else and took a job with us and, you know, took upside instead of salary. And at that point, then I'm, okay, we're good. We're gonna be a really interesting, fun company. And that was the cool thing. Like, one of the things that your entrepreneurial listeners would enjoy is like, I don't know how people do it alone.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Remember, I had two co-founders for Axios. I have Roy and Mike. And we have this beautiful professional relationship. And I can't stress, like, anybody who's thinking about starting a company, really try to find a partner who you believe in, who shares your values, who complements whatever skill set you have. Because there will be dark days. And you're gonna want someone you trust in those dark days. And if you can find people who can handle themselves with class and character in the darkest of moments, you've found yourself a gem.

• 1:16:36Guy Raz?

  What was the, tell me about this approach you took. You call it smart brevity. Basically, I mean, to kind of distill it down to, it's short articles, very short articles, but it had very specific principles. What made an article adhere to the smart brevity model?

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Basically, one of the genetic flaws in journalists is that they're not great writers. And they often bury what matters. And they often hide it in a vomit of words. And so, we tried to create a structure that could make even mediocre writers at least clear writers. And so, what we tried to do is mimic the conversation I would have with you if I went to a bar. And if I did, what I would do is I would tell you something in clear language. That I'm excited about, that's new, that's interesting, that's illuminating. Then I would give you the context, the why it matters. That's our second graph, the why important.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  And then you would give me some kind of visual cue about whether to go deeper, what we call go deeper, into the conversation. And if you go deeper into the conversation, you would like it to be hierarchical because you don't know when the conversation's going to end. So make sure the most important information is distilled in the proper hierarchy. And we had seen from the data that if you take multiple ideas and break it into bullets, you're much likelier to get people to keep reading and to retain. And so we broke it into bullets. And having those founding principles made it much easier to run the company because those founding principles really haven't changed to this day. We're much bigger, we've created new business lines. But fundamentally, all of those things were set in place five years ago and haven't changed that much.

• 1:18:22Guy Raz?

  How important was the Trump era to the success of Axios? I mean, that was a boom time for news.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:32Guy Raz?

  We know that for CNN, everybody.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  I have mixed feelings. I have a mixed analysis. Like, on the one hand, it was really good for us because Jonathan Swan and Mike Allen and others were extremely wired into the Trump White House, Trump campaign. And we were able to break a lot of news and people were captivated by Trump. So we were able to elevate our brand for free at scale quickly. That's on the plus side. The minus side was, one of the things we'd set out to do is we didn't want to be defined by politics alone. We wanted to be seen as a source of truth for politics, business, media, technology, other topics. It made it really hard because Trump sucked up all the oxygen, sucked up all of the traffic.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  People started to massively consume politics to a level that's not healthy for a normal human being's diet. And so those two things were in conflict. But it certainly helped us, it certainly helped put us on the map.

• 1:19:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:32Guy Raz?

  How did you, I mean, I, you know, obviously, it's a private company, so you may not talk too specifically about financials, but, I mean, as you said yourself, media companies are inherently risky. They're very hard to make profitable. And we're going to see what happens over the next couple of years with, you know, a lot of different media companies. But, you know, diversification seemed to be the answer for a while. You know, let's do events, and let's do partnerships, and licensing deals, and podcasts, and TV, and, you know, we'll, we'll, you guys, even beyond that, you created a piece of software for businesses, this, based on the smart brevity model, like, to help businesses write shorter

• 1:20:16Guy Raz?

  emails and stuff. How did you, but that took some time. But out of the gate, how did you just drum up cash to, you know, to bring in revenue? What was, what was the biggest driver of that?

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, two things. One, we raised money. So we launched with $10 million in cash.

• 1:20:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  And then, because we had done Politico, when we left, I probably had four or five companies call me and say, I don't care what you're starting, like, we've allocated X amount to advertise with you guys. Like, whatever you're going to start, we're successful, you're going to, you're going to be successful. And that's where most of the money came from in those early years. And then, a great, like, your entrepreneurial audience will love the story, like, we're a media company, we're doing well, we're 18 months into our creation, and I start to get phone calls. The NBA, the Basketball Association, JP Morgan Chase, United Health Group, their executives start calling us and say almost identical things,

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  like, they were in the same room. And they said, "Listen, our executives all read Axios, but they won't read anything that we write internally. Will you teach us to write?" And our initial reaction was, "No, we're a media company. Go learn how to write somewhere else." But the more we heard that from people, I remember Roy and I turning to each other saying, "Man, like usually a market whispers, like this market is screaming, it is screaming at us." And so we created a sister company inside the company called Axios HQ. And the idea was to both teach smart brevity to companies, but then little by little, we

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  built a technology, AI-powered technology that took all the learnings from the newsroom about how to write an engaging headline, how to pick the right visual, to get people to pay attention to content that matters. And we created a software that now, you know, hundreds of companies and the mayor of Austin and the school system in Austin, Texas, like tons of people, big companies, small companies, medium companies, now use it, HQ and Smart Brevity, to communicate internally.

• 1:22:23Guy Raz?

  Hmm. So, all right. I mean, I think that sometimes this comes across, this can come across as an obvious question because, you know, why wouldn't you? But here you've got this thing that you launched in 2017, and it's doing pretty well. You know, it's, it's, I think, how long until you reached sustainability or profitability? How many years in?

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  I think by year two, or by year two, we're profitable. Not by design, by the way. Like, we were trying to be in investment mode. The business was doing better than we thought. Hiring is tough in media, but we were, we were breaking even. Like, we were doing, we broke even, I think, year two, three, four. Or made a little bit of money, like, but not, I don't know.

• 1:23:09Guy Raz?

  Right. So, so you are, and, you know, you've got all these revenue streams going.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:23:16Guy Raz?

  And then, in 2022, you sold to Cox Enterprises. They bought... Bought out Axios, I think for a little more than $500 million. Again, it can come across as an obvious question, which is why? Why would you sell? Because it's $500 million, why not? But, but why? I mean, you know, you wanted, you wanted independence, you wanted to run your own shop. You're just four and a half years in. Why was it the right time?

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question, especially given that, you know, five years earlier, we wanted to control our own destiny, right? And we were very clear with people that we're a hard company to buy because, yes, we're willing to sell a substantial percentage of the company, but we want to run the company. We want to run the business and we want 100% editorial control. So that we told people along the way, listen, if you are fine, you know, buying out the shareholders and you're paying a premium price and you believe in us and you believe in this culture, you got to let us run the show for a long time. This is like, there's nothing else that we want to do. Well, along comes Cox Communications.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  They were, they led our Series D, so we had done a couple of rounds in between.

• 1:24:36Guy Raz?

  How much did you raise in total?

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  I think we were probably 35 to 40 million all in. But we're sitting there, we have a nice cash runway, we have a good company that's generating a lot of growth. Cox becomes a Series D investor and they are just like, it's almost too good to be true. Like, they're the nicest people, they're a fourth generation company, they, you know, Alex, who runs the company, is just a great guy, used to be in journalism himself. They make very clear that, you know, the terms you guys are talking about, that's something we could see ourselves doing. Like, we have no desire to operate the company, we want you guys to operate it.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  And so it made the transaction, which is, you could imagine, you're selling your baby, it made what could have been very painful and torturous quite easy.

• 1:25:29Guy Raz?

  What's your commitment? How long?

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  I mean, I could leave whenever, I guess, but our commitment to them is, you know, a minimum of six years and probably a lot longer. I think if you talk to the leadership of Cox, they would say, we hope these guys are here for 20 years running the company. And, you know, I don't, you know, I'm 51. I guess at some point I'll get tired. I don't, I probably work harder today than I did, I don't know if I worked as hard as I did that first year at Politico, but I work a lot, like, because I love it. I get a lot of energy off of it. And so it's, you know, again, I'm a blessed guy. Like, I've had a hell of a fun ride. I have a big ride in front of us, but like, it's just, it's, I can't, I talk to college kids a lot now, and I'm just like, man, if you could figure out a way, like, to do a job that you would do for free, that you love it so much, like,

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  that's Nirvana. That's winning the lottery.

• 1:26:20Guy Raz?

  You know which question is coming next, because you, I know you've heard this show before, but it's still a question worth asking after talking with you for several hours, which is, and you've alluded to this in various points during the interview, you've talked about luck. How much, how much do you think luck got you to this point versus the grind? I mean, I'm tired, exhausted, just imagining the 18-hour days that you put in for two decades. So what do you, what do you, what do you, I don't know. How much, how much is it about one and how much is about the other?

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  I just feel like people don't credit luck enough. That's why I hate the great man stories, these one-person visionaries who willed something into existence. That's bullshit. Like, nobody wills something into existence alone. You have a lot of people who are helping you, who've helped you in the past, who are helping you in real time to do the impossible. And I don't think people appreciate Luck of just being in the right place at the right time, of having an idea that works now that might not work tomorrow or might not have worked yesterday, of running into the right co-founder. Like, if I don't ask Jen Hurley, who was working in our finance department, about where she's going, and she had not told me, "Oh, I'm going skiing

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  with this guy Roy Schwartz, who's really interesting, and you should talk to him about business. He's just a smart guy." Like, that's pure luck. Like, how did I have that conversation with her? And she pointed me to Roy. If we didn't have Roy Schwartz, Axios wouldn't have existed. Or how do I end up on the Lido deck in Genoa, Italy, during the trade protests when I'm working at the Wall Street Journal, and I turn to the person next to me at 4:00 AM, who looks at me and says, with his beer in his hand, "For speed?" And it's Mike Allen wanting to see who can slam a beer faster, and starts a lifelong friendship. How do we have a spark of an idea to start Politico, and it just happens to be at that very moment, the internet's taking off, and cable has an insatiable appetite, and we happen to run

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  into the right mix of reporters that can bring it into existence? Like, so much of that is luck, and it's perishable. And I just don't feel like people appreciate that enough.

• 1:28:39Guy Raz?

  That's Jim Vandehe, co-founder of Politico, and co-founder and CEO of Axios. By the way, in 2021, Robert Albritton, Jim's co-founder and the man who financed and owned Politico, sold it to the German media giant Axel Springer, reportedly for $1 billion. And according to The New York Times, it was one of the most expensive media mergers in recent memory.

• 1:29:07Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is @howibuiltthis, and mine is @guyraz. On Instagram, we're @howibuiltthis, and I'm @guy.raz.

• 1:29:23Guy Raz?

  And don't forget to follow this show wherever or however you're listening to it so you don't miss any new episodes. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Sam Paulson. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Alex Chung, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estvez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.