Axios Co-founder Roy Schwartz: why average is worthless now

Roy Schwartz co-founded Axios, the news company known for smart brevity, and helped grow it to a $525 million sale to Cox Enterprises. He's now co-founder and CEO of Axios HQ, an AI-powered internal communications platform spun out of Axios. He co-wrote Smart Brevity, and his new book is Simplify. Before Axios, he was chief revenue officer of Politico. In this episode of Summation, Roy and Auren discuss: Meeting bankruptcy: wiping every recurring meeting off the calendar twice a yearAI as a c...

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  My favorite thing is when I connected AI to my calendar and to my email.

• 0:05Auren Hoffman?

  Why is Google not able to do that?

• 0:09Speaker 00

  I think they're too big to be able to fix that specific topic.

• 0:12Auren Hoffman?

  My guest today is Roy Schwartz. Roy co-founded Axios, the news company known for smart brevity, and helped grow it to a $525 million exit.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  That problem, by the way, that we're talking about, probably doesn't matter to us. It's not on their radar right now. Like, the biggest thing on their radar, which is, by the way, going to be the biggest topic for the next, I don't know, year, is gonna be, search is dead, right? Websites are dead.

• 0:38Auren Hoffman?

  Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Roy Schwartz. Roy co-founded Axios, the news company known for smart brevity, and helped grow it to a $525 million exit to Cox Enterprises. He's now the co-founder and CEO of Axios HQ, an AI-powered internal communications platform that was spun out of Axios. And he co-wrote the book Smart Brevity, and he's got a new book, Simplify, which is out this month. Before all of that, he was Chief Revenue Officer of Politico. We're also good friends. Roy, welcome to Summation.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Arin, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to do this.

• 1:12Auren Hoffman?

  I'm super excited as well. Now, you kind of like built a whole company on Axios with kind of this idea that everyone writes too much. Why is being brief so hard? And why is everyone's default so long?

• 1:26Speaker 00

  It goes back to school. Like, you remember when you were in high school and you had to write an essay, and they forced you to do three, four pages, 5,000 words. You'd play with the margins, right? Yeah, you'd like try and like do all this stuff, so you'd have to write less. The issue is that they really put the depth with length. That's the issue. And so it's sort of ingrained in us from school. Same thing, by the way, in journalism, right? Like, oh, if you can write a long piece, you must really know your stuff. But it really takes a lot, as you know, to be concise. Like, writing in smart brevity is actually takes longer. It takes a lot more thinking in order to figure out, well,

• 2:06Speaker 00

  we're doing the work for the audience. So how do I make sure, Arin, that you can get in and out as quickly as possible? And it's just something that, for whatever reason, it's a human glitch, we tend to sit down in front of a keyboard and just vomit words.

• 2:19Auren Hoffman?

  There's like a famous Mark Twain quote that goes, you know, something like, I would have wrote a shorter letter if I had more time, or something like that.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, super accurate.

• 2:27Auren Hoffman?

  My pet peeve with podcasts is that there's all these podcasts that are like three, four, or five hours long, and they're with super interesting guests, but they definitely could have been an hour. And also, books are like that, too. I just read this, or I just tried to read this book about George Shultz, who I'm like fascinated with. It's just like super long biography, and it was just terrible. It was just like so long and so hard to get through. I would have just appreciated a book that was like one-third or one-fourth as long.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Well, look, we were very careful with the wording, right? It's not brief. Brevity is as short as it needs to be to convey the information that you need. And so it doesn't help us if it's just a Cliff Notes version, and you don't get the substance that you need.

• 3:09Auren Hoffman?

  And sometimes the anecdotes, which are actually the really important thing to get out of it.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  There hasn't been a document yet that we've not been able to apply smart brevity to, and at least reduce to a certain length. But we've done it even for, the one that I always bring up is BP Safety Oil Rig Information. So they used to have this really thick document that everyone had to read before they would get on the oil rigs. And of course, nobody wanted to read them. We went in there, helped put it into smart brevity. Those things then had to be, you know, approved by legal, and you know, there's all these compliance issues. But nearly anything can be more concise than it is.

• 3:47Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, like that airline safety video that we all watch. I mean, that could definitely be like 30 seconds or something.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 3:57Auren Hoffman?

  Here's how you do the seatbelt, the masks. Okay, let's take off. Like, let's do it.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  I don't understand why they want it to be this like art project every time you sit down. They're getting longer.

• 4:07Auren Hoffman?

  Kevin Hart is like on there, like showing me his thing. I'm like, I like Kevin Hart, but like, why do I need to see him in this video?

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 4:15Auren Hoffman?

  All right, now, you're dyslexic. I assume like smart brevity is even more important for people that are dyslexic or process information differently.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, I noticed this when I was in meetings. I would, if there was a lot of information being served or a really difficult to understand presentation, I would actually like say, oh, can you go back? Hold on, I want to make sure I understand this. I would summarize that slide. And before long, I realized this is actually a superpower of mine. Like, I can actually go in, I can understand a lot of dense, thick information, and my brain has to simplify it. I don't have a choice. I have to simplify it. Other people came up to me like, oh, I'm so glad you paused there, or you stopped, or you summarized it. Like, that was super helpful. And ultimately, a big chunk of that led to what we did with smart brevity.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  But what was really interesting is, after we launched smart brevity, we would get letters back, I still get these, by the way, where people say, I'm so glad because now I understand why someone sent this to me, you know? And it's not just people with dyslexia or learning differences. It's even people where English is a second language. Where an example of that was, I remember, we got notes back when we first launched smart brevity in a large global organization, where they used to just send articles, right? And someone overseas got this article, and they're like, I don't know why I got this, right? But I gotta read it. My boss sent it to me. We forced the what's new and the why it matters. Just those two words and the sentences of that explanation helped the reader understand, oh, okay,

• 5:46Speaker 00

  now I understand why am I getting this article? What's the point of it? Now I can read it and understand it with that.

• 5:51Auren Hoffman?

  Just like FYI, here's the link.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. So many people just send you decks.

• 5:56Auren Hoffman?

  I get that all the time.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  The worst I hate is like someone sends you an article, and you're just like, okay, but why did you send this to me?

• 6:02Auren Hoffman?

  What about internal meetings? Internal meetings are, in general, terrible. Almost all the internal meetings, including board meetings, including all the internal meetings and board meetings I've personally run, they're all bad. How would you advise somebody like me to run better internal meetings?

• 6:16Speaker 00

  On meetings, your instincts are definitely right. There was a recent study called Super Teams. There's a new book called Super Teams. I wish we'd had this data before we published our book, but it just came out. And they basically looked at average teams versus teams that were exceptional in terms of their productivity. And what they found was an average team had 18 hours of meetings, 11 hours of communication, that being email or Slack or text messages. And so if you think about that, that only leaves like a day, day and a half to actually get some work done, right?

• 6:50Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, we're real work done, yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  The really good teams, the super teams, what they did is they had less standing meetings. They didn't have these reoccurring meetings every week that were an hour long. They only set meetings when they had to. And when they did, they were very clear about a few things. Like, one, there was always an agenda. Two, there was always an outcome that was stated. Okay, we're meeting because we're trying to figure this specific thing out.

• 7:15Auren Hoffman?

  We're trying to decide, should we invest in this company or not invest in this company, or something like that?

• 7:20Speaker 00

  They also had the smallest number of people in the meeting. And so that's something that's really difficult, actually, in a large company.

• 7:26Auren Hoffman?

  Not everyone needs to be in this meeting, right? Okay, you're not, and by the way, like often, like sometimes you're too high to be in this meeting, sometimes you're too low to be in this meeting. Let's get the right Goldilocks people there.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  It tends to be an ego issue. And so this is something that I think has to start at the top. Like, the CEO has to make it okay that they are not in every meeting, that the people that report to them are not in every meeting. Like, it gets to be something where it's like, why am I not in that meeting? You've got to avoid that, because then you end up with these 20, 30% meetings.

• 7:57Auren Hoffman?

  I'm so happy when I don't get invited to meetings. Like, I'm like, hey, can I take myself off this meeting? But like, you know, oh, you know, it'll look bad if you don't show up to the meeting. Like, can I get my avatar to show? Like, I don't know what's going on here.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Well, it just has to become a norm that you actually set up the fewest number of people that are needed in order to make the decision. A meeting should only really take place if you make a decision.

• 8:18Auren Hoffman?

  And maybe if you have a recurring meeting, like, okay, let's cancel it the day before if there's nothing too important to do or something.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  The best advice in the book that we talk about, and this is, look, you can only do this if you're a leader of an organization. We call it meeting bankruptcy, right? Where you just, twice a year, you just say, okay, we're wiping out all of the meetings and we're starting new. All the recurring meetings are gone, and we'll add them back as needed. But there's rules. If you add them back, you have to have an agenda, you have to have an outcome, and you have to review to all the people that are in it. And so that way, as they get added back, they are applying, they already have those rules set in.

• 8:56Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, you've got this system of like, would you like confront, delete, amplify? Like, first of all, walk us through those, and then which of those is the hardest?

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so confront is, why am I doing this? So we'll just take meetings, we're talking about meetings. Should this meeting even happen? Who's in the meeting? Why is this meeting happening? What's the outcome that I want to get? A lot of people don't confront that when it comes to goals or purpose or other things in their life. And so we basically say, you've got to confront these things that take up your time. So look at what's eating up your time. Confront, is this a good use of my time? Should I be doing it at all? That's the confront piece. Delete, now you can actually start to remove things that don't matter. This, I would say, is the hardest part, because humans don't like to say no. They don't like to say no to coffee or drinks off the work. They don't like to say no to events. They don't like to say no to going to a meeting. And so that becomes the hardest part.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  We empower you to say no by going through an exercise where we say, okay, let's make sure we understand what are the three things you're trying to achieve this month, this year, this quarter, whatever it may be. And if it doesn't align with that, then you can say no. And by the way, you kind of have to do it in your work and your personal life, because things like, oh, let's grab a drink off the work, you are inclined to say yes to that. But then it eats into you being a good husband, you being a good dad, which then makes you a worse performer also at work. So getting your priorities straight is really important.

• 10:25Auren Hoffman?

  Let's say there's something at home, but it's like, you don't feel it's that important to do. Maybe, I don't know, let's go to some random. School meeting or something, but like your spouse thinks it's really important to do. Like, how do you have that conversation with them about it?

• 10:41Speaker 00

  One of the things, a little morbid, but in the book, we say, okay, imagine you're on your deathbed. And you're trying to think about, well, what are the things that I will be remembered for? And, and we try and put everything in rules of three. We talk a lot about like, why the rule of three is important. So like, what are the three things you want to be known for? Most people, it's pretty clear. It's like, I want to be a good husband. I want to be a good dad. I want to be a good friend, right? I don't want to be a, relationships matter to me. Two, I want something in purpose in my life, right? My work has to serve a purpose of some kind. And three usually has to do with like your health, your wellbeing, longevity, something of that nature. If you really understand those things, then you can start applying it to each one. Okay.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  What does it mean to be a good husband or a good father or, you know, a good friend, right? And then is that the time that I want to spend? So what I would say in that situation is, well, if I go to that school meeting, it's actually also an hour I can't spend with my kids.

• 11:36Auren Hoffman?

  That's right. That's all, that's exactly, you're literally sacrificing the time with your kids to go to the school meeting. So you have to decide what's more important, that or the other thing. You can't do both.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  And then the last one is amplify. Sorry, we got, but it was confront, delete, amplify. The last one's the most fun one, right? Because once you have deleted and you've created the space, now you can focus on the areas that really matter. Either they really matter because you're really good at them. They're a strength for viewers and you should be doing more of that. Or it really matters because you've, you know, thought about it and it's part of your purpose, right? Again, being a good dad, being a good father, being a good, you know, leaving a mark on the world, whatever it may be. You've actually thought through it and you're now applying that found time to that. If you don't do that, by the way, time will get filled, right? It will get filled with nonsense, right? And that's just the human condition.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  So you've got to actually like have those priorities and then use that time to amplify the things that matter.

• 12:34Auren Hoffman?

  As like, we're using voice more, I'm using voice a lot more to communicate. So I'll kind of like talk into it and then it converts into text and it'll put that in an email or Slack or whatever. But whenever I use my voice, it's more verbose than if I was just typing it up. So it's good for me because I can get it out quickly, but it's bad for the person I'm sending to. Because they are, have to read more information. Can you see a scenario where like, okay, people can use a voice, but then there's like something at the end of it that then consolidates that in a smart brevity thing before it sends out?

• 13:08Speaker 00

  I fully believe in this. We've developed that software, by the way, we have smart brevity software that the companies use to help turn communications into something that is more concise. It's not as simple as it sounds. Like you have to first teach editorial judgment to people. Ultimately, humans have to make the decision about what's important. You have to be really clear about what is the idea you're trying to convey? Who's the audience you're trying to convey that to? If you don't have those things sorted out, you will just end up with like a lot of words because you haven't like cleared your mind, right? You haven't, you, you don't have a focused mind, therefore you don't, your output is not focused.

• 13:44Auren Hoffman?

  As we interact more and more with AIs, we're reading information from AIs, we're speaking to AIs, where a lot of what we do on a day to day is communicating with AIs, either to AIs or from AIs. How should we be thinking about both the simplify world and the smart brevity world in the new age of AIs?

• 14:05Speaker 00

  Well, so there's a downside and an upside, right? The downside is at this moment in time, AI is actually a complexity machine, right? Which model should I use? What query should I put in? A lot of companies are struggling with, how do I use this? And actually, right now, it's probably eating up more time than it's actually saving for a lot of companies. Not, not everyone. There are ways to use AI that will do the opposite, that will save you time. And actually in the book, you know, what I love about this book is it's probably the first book where you read it, you want to start exercising those habits, right? Changing those things, making, making a difference. And in the past, it's always been, well, you've got to be disciplined, you've got to be strong. We probably, you know, a bunch of people that are listening right now have read Atomic Habits, right?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  And then they're like, I'm going to change my life, right?

• 14:52Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  And then you go and you try and implement and, and it just fails. So AI can actually hold your hand and hold your feet to the fire on this. And so as an example, I'll go back to meetings, this is one that everyone can understand. We have a QR code in the book that you can scan. When you scan it, it will open up a page with all of the prompt engineering related to areas in the book. And so one of them is this meeting audit that we ask you to run. You know, you can run it once a month, once a quarter, where we basically say, what are the goals you're trying to achieve this quarter? Run it against all the meetings, right? You have to connect it obviously to your calendar, running against your meeting. And then tell me what percentage of my time is actually spent in meetings that are related to these goals?

• 15:36Speaker 00

  And I just ran mine, I can tell you it's 50% and I'm obsessed with this, right?

• 15:40Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  It's, it's really, it's unbelievable how much time we don't spend on the goals that we've written down and said are important. And so you can actually start to use AI, you can tell it, and the prompt engineering is there to say, hey, I want you to act as my chief of staff, my chief simplicity officer. I want you to review my calendar every month and come back and help me delete the meetings that don't matter or are not aligned with the goals that I've set.

• 16:06Auren Hoffman?

  I have like my agent that helps me with my meetings. And of course it does like helps me with my follow-ups and all the other types of things to do in meetings. But one of the other things it does is it just says, hey, rate this meeting on how useful it was to you from one to four. And that could be, um, maybe, uh, I'm playing pickleball with Roy, maybe that's a four.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Better be.

• 16:24Auren Hoffman?

  It could be, yeah, it could be some internal meeting that, that I have. And maybe that meeting was a one and it was like, oh, this was terrible, a huge waste of time. Or somebody who asked me for advice, it just like, didn't actually work out or, you know, whatever it might be. Wasn't, or I didn't prepare for the meeting and I didn't get much out of it or whatever else it might be. And then it just like, it uses that one to four ranking to lead, to help me also to, hey, these internal meetings, like you're always putting a one or two, like, why are you doing this? You know, why are you doing this to yourself? It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, good point. Like, so it's kind of helping me kind of like delete some of these things I don't need to do.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Well, not everyone can afford an executive coach. Everyone has a free executive coach in their pocket now. You just have to, yeah, you just have to train it. You just have to put the prompts in there correctly, but you can engineer the best executive coach possible that is also actually connected to your email, connected to your calendar, connected to your Slack, and is able to actually say you are or are not using your time effectively.

• 17:23Auren Hoffman?

  Your new book, I would say the scariest line in your book, you may, maybe there are other scary lines, is that you basically say, AI may simplify you out of a job. What did you mean by that?

• 17:33Speaker 00

  The reason that we wrote the book at this moment in time is that we feel like we are already drowning in information. There's too much coming at us. Like you and I are people that read a lot of news, a lot of articles, listen to a lot of podcasts. We want to be informed. I don't know if you feel the same way, but I can't keep up anymore. It's really, really hard. There's too much information out there. That feeling is only going to get more and more intense. And so we believe that the people that do best, the companies that do best, will be the ones that simplify everything else. What are they trying to achieve? What are they focused on? If you simplify those other things, then you've removed a lot of the

• 18:16Speaker 00

  decision fatigue that happens naturally in the course of a day, a month, a year, because you're not as overwhelmed by the things that you can control. And so that's a big reason why we wrote it. That line in particular is actually more to do with, don't be average at anything. Average has no value anymore. And so what we say in the book is that we were sort of using simplify that confront, delete, amplify concept to get you to amplify the things that you're really good at. Because we believe that that is what's going to make the human difference. You being exceptional at the things that you're really strong at. And that if you just become average at a bunch of stuff, AI is going to eat that up all day.

• 18:58Auren Hoffman?

  It's interesting, when I use Claude or something, it has, uh, it basically has some options of how they relay information back to you. And, you know, it's got a, okay, we can compact the information, we can do normal. And there's actually weirdly a verbose, it actually is called verbose option. I can't imagine anyone, I would love to get like the, the stats from Anthropic, but I, I doubt like they have more than 0.1% of people in the world that ever click the verbose. And maybe it's just to trick them to just like put normal or something in there or, you know, that, that's out there.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know if you find the same thing. I find that AI is very verbose.

• 19:38Auren Hoffman?

  It is very, yeah. Even when I say, I, when I say like, be as brief as possible, it's still like, like shooting out all this random information that I don't need.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  It is extremely verbose and, and the problem with that is that the output, so then the presentations that people make, the reports that people write, the emails that people drop, they're all longer. And they feel great about it because they're like, oh, I sound so smart. No, it's a problem. You've created AI slop. You've created something that maybe shouldn't have been written in the first place, but now it's twice as long as well.

• 20:09Auren Hoffman?

  There's a premise that people just waste years doing needless stuff and could be like out of habit, out of inertia. Like what are, what are some like basic things you see like smart people or, or good people just stop doing?

• 20:22Speaker 00

  You know, we talk about this, but there, there is this move to be well-rounded, right? There, there's this move to be well-rounded, especially when you're earlier in your career. And so people are wasting a lot of time trying to be average of something.

• 20:34Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, they're trying to go from bad to mediocre many times, right? Instead of going from good to great.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. And, and they're probably in the past, if you were in a corporate setting, there may have been some need for that. We believe that time is dead, like that need is gone. And so, understanding your strengths and then focusing on your strengths is the best use of time.

• 20:57Auren Hoffman?

  There may be something you have that is absolutely debilitating that you have to go address, right? So like, obviously, if you're, if someone's a heroin addict or something like that, okay, like, stop being a heroin addict.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  I don't know if I'd call that a weakness. Yeah, that's a huge life problem.

• 21:10Auren Hoffman?

  Like huge problem. Okay, great. Stop being a heroin addict. But like, you know, it's like, but you have other people who are just like, they're late to meetings, right? It's like annoying, make, ignores their colleagues. Okay, they're, they're late to meetings. Yeah, it's a fault, but like, yeah, maybe you can get better at that. But like, you know, if you go from good to great, there's probably a lot more gains from the, going from good to great.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, the other thing I would say is default versus design, right? So many companies, there are things in place, rules, procedures, you know, the bureaucracy of an organization. We call them barnacles in the book, but it's all things that were done by default. And you're not exactly sure why they are the way they are, but they're all done by default. Everything in an organization should be by design. Everything should be by design. And so that is the confront part that people should go back and look at.

• 21:59Auren Hoffman?

  In a world where people are focusing on their strengths, instead of going from like bad to mediocre on things, then you're just gonna have a lot more people in organizations that are bad at stuff. They don't get to that mediocre, which might like make some of their colleagues upset or, you know, it's, it's like, how do you design an organization where you have, you're essentially gonna have more people that are bad at things?

• 22:22Speaker 00

  I don't know if I'd look at it that way. I think that a lot of things are gonna get automated. A great example, I think this has been a revolutionary change for salespeople, right? Salespeople like to sell, they like to close, they hate the follow-up, they hate the research, right?

• 22:35Auren Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  AI has done an amazing job, amazing job. All the research done for you, all the follow-up done for you, no more meeting notes. It does it all for you. It has the transcripts, right? That's what I mean by focus on the strengths, like the things that I hated as a salesperson, it took up probably two thirds of the time, right? I, I wasn't in sales meetings all the time. Two thirds of my time was research and follow-up. Now you can remove all of that and you can be focused on selling and you can spend all day closing deals.

• 23:06Auren Hoffman?

  Even if you are bad at something, you could probably put, AI can help you put some sort of guardrails on it. Like, hey, start annoying me if I am not doing this or I'm not getting back to someone on time or, you know, whatever it might be. If I'm not getting this thing done, like start, start annoying, you know, whatever it is like. And you might not feel as bad if the AI is annoying you rather than like your boss, your colleagues are annoying you.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Better to get the AI to ping you before your boss, for sure.

• 23:31Auren Hoffman?

  There's something about subtraction that is just hard for people to get their head around, right? Like, I think we are, we are kind of people like addition and we're always, you know, I'm gonna learn this new thing. I do this new thing. It's, it's like, rather than like, hey, I gotta unlearn this thing. It's like a whole different, like, what about humans that makes it like hard for us to like embrace subtraction?

• 23:54Speaker 00

  We talk about this in the book. We're hardwired for this, right? I think it goes back to caveman days where the more shelter, the more food, the more you could get, right? The better off you were. And I think it's very hard for us to get out of that mindset. So we always want more, more money, more meetings, more friends, more follows, more likes. Like, you can see it in nearly all parts of human behavior. We keep at it, right? We, we talk in the book about, you know, people using, you know, storage rooms, right? You know, where they're like hoarding a bunch of stuff that they never used.

• 24:29Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. Storage facilities, you know, you're like, why do I have all this stuff? Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  And so it's a, it's a human condition that we actively have to fight against where we say, actually, no, more isn't, isn't better.

• 24:41Auren Hoffman?

  I used to have these goals in life that I wanted to accomplish. For instance, like I wanted to write a novel. And so I'd like keep notes always about like, I had, I had like four different notes on different novels. I would keep notes on over the years and, but like, there was never a year where writing a novel was in my top 20 priorities. Literally, it's never happened. And then finally, one year, I just said to myself, I am never, ever gonna write a novel. And it was this like weird freeing thing, like all of a sudden I didn't have to keep notes anymore. It just didn't take the headspace. Of course, I could like change my mind at some point if I choose to. But it was something about saying never, like literally that word never, like it gave me all this extra freedom.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Well, you focused it, right? And that, that's a big part about what we talk about in the book, right? You, you said, this isn't, doesn't make my top 20 list. I'm gonna narrow down my focus. And that clarity, it's kind of like when you open that, that desk drawer that we all have, that just has odds and ends in it and you clean it out, that feeling when you're done and you've cleaned it out.

• 25:42Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, you've got this old cord that hasn't worked since like 1997.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Yes, why do I have this?

• 25:48Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, you, you built Axios, sold it for $525 million. Media is like a famously brutal business. How, what did you figure out about making money in media that most outlets just never can figure out?

• 26:03Speaker 00

  So media is incredibly competitive. It is ruthlessly brutal. And unless you know the niche audience that you're trying to reach, and this was not always clear, right? You go back to, you know, Vice and Vox and BuzzFeed and a lot of general news category or general entertainment category, like those days are behind us.

• 26:26Auren Hoffman?

  They were more B to C and weirdly like Politico and Axios were kind of more B to B, even though people don't think of it that way.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  We were aimed at the influencers, right? And so those influencers could have been on Capitol Hill, they could have been executives. But it was really aimed at people that needed information to do their job. And so it wasn't a casual reader of news. If we got you, great, like it doesn't hurt us. But the business model was built around this group of people that needed information to do their job. And, and that's why Smart Brevity paid off for us because they needed to get in and out quickly, right? They weren't interested, they're not this, save the Atlantic read for the weekend, right? Like I'm at work, I need to understand what just happened and I need to read it quickly.

• 27:10Auren Hoffman?

  I gotta grok this thing right away.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And so that was our niche. That's what we focused in on. And I would say the other thing is we said, okay, we are audience first and we're gonna worry about monetization later. And I don't mean like later as in like we'll put it off and one day we'll make money. But it was secondary to serving the audience. And I think a lot of media ended up making sacrifices, putting ads in places.

• 27:36Auren Hoffman?

  Weird ads that makes sense.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  That would pop up and annoy the crap out of people and that became an issue. So they didn't know their audience. It was too broad, therefore very replaceable. And then they annoyed their audience by dumping in a bunch of ads. It is a very difficult space. We've been very, I think, thoughtful in how we went about it. And we focused on this influencer niche and it, and it really paid off.

• 27:57Auren Hoffman?

  How important is events in media?

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Influencer niche, very important. So we do about 200 events a year. We do events all over the world and it's really about your ability to curate a great event, right? Bring together thought leaders, bring together a great audience, make it memorable so that people want to both participate and, you know, you know, be in the event either as an audience member or on stage. And so Axios has a great reputation of putting on incredible events. So we get the best guests, we get the best audience, we're able to have a waitlist for all of our events. And those events, because they are usually paid for by a sponsor of some kind, make money. And so that allows us to create great journalism because we have these great guests that are breaking news.

• 28:43Auren Hoffman?

  The events themselves are like news producing things.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  They have to be. In our category, they have to be.

• 28:49Auren Hoffman?

  Your category, yeah. And the people go feel like they're getting some exclusive thing because it's, it's capped at a certain number of people can go to these things.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Well, and they're seeing news being made, right? Like our, our reporters are on stage actively trying to break news, right? The people who are coming know that they have an opportunity to make news. And so it's happening right in front of them. So that's kind of a really interesting thing for the audience.

• 29:10Auren Hoffman?

  There's something about Live where, you know, the, it's almost like an anti-AI play, right? Like Taylor Swift or the NFL, like these are things that people, as they have more money, they're gonna, they're gonna go to, they're gonna go see, they're gonna go engage with, they're gonna go talk to their friends about. And yeah, you could go, you know, see an NFL game from three weeks ago or something. But that's just not as exciting as seeing something like actually happening right now.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  Obviously, post-COVID, there was this huge boom in real events taking place. And there was a lot of venture money that went into event-related businesses. And then there was this real concern that it was a bubble of some kind, right? That, that there would be like this fall off. But I actually think that in the age of AI, that human interaction is gonna be more important than ever. And so I think events will continue gaining traction. I think people will want and seek out these real life experiences. And so our business has grown tremendously over the last few years and I, I don't see that stopping. I think people are gonna want that experience.

• 30:19Auren Hoffman?

  You have two other co-founders, one of which, Mike Allen, is, is extremely special guy. He just seems like he works harder than anybody else in Washington. Can you give us a sense of like, and he just seems like he's constantly breaking news, like literally every day? Like, give me a sense of what is to work with someone like that?

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Mike is, is truly unique. He's probably the well, most well-connected reporter in the world.

• 30:43Auren Hoffman?

  How many people do you think he texts every day? Like, I get a text from Him like every other week, just a random text about something like this guy must be texting thousands of people a day.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  If you email him, he will email you right back.

• 30:58Auren Hoffman?

  Oh yeah, that's his superpower. He is, he's incredibly, he's incredibly fast at getting back to people. That's like, that actually is his business model in some ways. He just gets back to people super fast.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  But he's genuine. He really cares about people. He cares about your story. He remembers your story. He, he does wake up extremely early as this GIF, like they are like super early risers. They're immediately on the phone with each other. They're talking about news. They're talking about some development that's happening. So I will say like, they live and breathe this.

• 31:29Auren Hoffman?

  These are Jim and Mike are dedicated news people.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  They absolutely love it. And you know, when you talk to Mike, he'll say he's living the dream. Like this is what he wants to do. This is what he enjoys doing. So work and life to him are very blended in, in a good way. Where, you know, he's enjoying himself.

• 31:46Auren Hoffman?

  Now you guys sold to Cox, which obviously is a great company and they're a great steward of, of the brand. But why, why not just stay independent and just keep building?

• 31:57Speaker 00

  So we wanted to build this company that it would outlast us. It was really important to us that, that Axios and what we've built here. And as we continue to build, we're in 40 cities right now. We're trying to expand in, in Axios local into more cities. We wanted this business to outlive us. And so, you know, you're talking about me, Jim and Mike, right? As founders, right? It's a very founder-led business. And even though we sold three years ago, we're still in the business. We still run the business. Nothing actually changed. You know, we have quarterly board meetings, but we had that before. You know, Cox is very hands off in terms of letting us grow the business. They're very much believers in our strategy. And if anything, they act, I think, as great board members, you know, help us, you know, fine tune the strategy.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  And they, in addition to that, help us invest in the business. And so we wanted a, a large organization that had been around for a long time, that understood the editorial line, if you will, like, like what they can and cannot interfere with. And Cox started in media, right? They started in newspapers and they're a fifth generation, family-owned business that is extremely profitable. And so they were in a great situation to help us continue this business even when we're long gone.

• 33:13Auren Hoffman?

  And you've been in the Washington DC tech scene for a long time. And some people think that's like an oxymoron, like give us a sense about like the tech scene in the DC area.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  I was also one of the early founders of K Street Capital, which was like a DC, it still is. It's a DC group of angel investors where we look for investments in companies that are either going to be heavily regulated or, or our policy expertise or network can be, can be helpful. When we started, I think there was like less than a dozen people at that table, right? I think now it has about a hundred members, but it was very niche. And I think the entire DC tech community has been very niche for, for a long time.

• 33:57Auren Hoffman?

  Though like in the, in the early nineties, like it was booming, right? We had AOL, we had all these kind of like companies, networking companies and stuff like that, that were huge.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  There was a handful, but it was never like Silicon Valley. It was never like New York. Like it was, it was, it has certain, certain niche to it. But I feel like now that is broadening, like as people moved around post-COVID, we got a lot of people like yourself who, you know, have this background from California, are able to bring that mindset. Like it's super helpful.

• 34:24Auren Hoffman?

  Right. A few personal questions. Okay. Why is pickleball the most fun sport in the world? You and I play pickleball. What do you, what do you like about it?

• 34:30Speaker 00

  I also race cars and the pictures behind me, right?

• 34:33Auren Hoffman?

  Very different. Pickleball and racing cars are very different.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Well, I think I told you this story, right? I, you know, if you would have asked me like, what's my most favorite thing in the world? I would've said, oh, racing cars. Nothing beats racing cars. And I went to this track and I was there for three days racing cars, having the time of my life. I was, I was in a Ferrari. So it was like really an exceptional experience. And after the track day, we would play pickleball.

• 34:58Auren Hoffman?

  You're like basically on track, doing track for four or five hours and then, okay, eat some lunch. And then like you go play some pickleball in the afternoon or something.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Exactly. And I realized at the end of that day, I was like, I like pickleball better than I like being on track. You could, I don't think I would have believed it.

• 35:15Auren Hoffman?

  A little less expensive too. Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  A lot less expensive, a lot easier. Look, I think it has to do with the social component, right? You're working out, but you're also having a conversation. There's natural time to get together. I love it when you're playing with a partner and you're switching off. So you're interacting, you're meeting people. You're getting your social time, but you're also working out. Like it makes it the perfect sort of way to spend time.

• 35:42Auren Hoffman?

  Two more questions we ask all of our guests. How are you personally using AI day to day? Either for like work or personal life? That's like maybe interesting.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  My favorite thing is when I connected AI to my calendar and to my email. Cause now finding information is incredibly easy. It used to take me forever. I'd get so frustrated looking for an email or looking for a file. So much easier now to find information.

• 36:08Auren Hoffman?

  Why is Google not able to do that? Like if you, obviously like you probably already have your email on your calendar on Google. Yet if you point Gemini to it and you say, hey, you know, whatever, tell me this thing about my calendar, it like, it literally is terrible. It just cannot do it. Whereas if you point Claude or OpenAI on it, it, it does a great job. Why do you think, why do you think Google cannot get out of its head? Like obviously they're a smart company. Like you could actually do this with an open source model. So it's not like they don't have the models to do it. Like literally you could do it with an off the shelf, off the open source model will work great. Like why have they not got their act together?

• 36:48Speaker 00

  They're so complex. They're so, it's one of those things.

• 36:50Auren Hoffman?

  Is it like a legal thing? Or is it just like, they're just too big of a company at this point and?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  I think they're too big. I think they're too big to be able to fix that specific problem. That problem, by the way, that we're talking about probably doesn't matter. It's not on their radar right now. Like the biggest thing on their radar, which is by the way, going to be the biggest topic for the next, I don't know, year is going to be, search is dead, right? Websites are dead.

• 37:14Auren Hoffman?

  They have this amazing store of personal information for all of us, our email, our calendar, you know, all this other like interactions that they have there, which are like incredible. If you're going to connect that store to somebody else, like now that other, whether it's like to say OpenAI, Anthropic, whoever you're connecting it to now that, or, or one of these agents that could, you know, work on your behalf, like Town or Instinct or something. Now all of a sudden like Google's getting disintermediated. They're just like a dumb store of value.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  I'll be a counter to that, Orin. I actually think that Google is focused on the right thing right now, which is the AI Gemini answers when you do a search. Like that, what, what they're doing, they have to, they have to rescue the search business.

• 37:57Auren Hoffman?

  Google is a massive company with so many smart people. They can do both, like doing the, doing the pointing an AI at your calendar. Literally I could go to Google today and by the end of the day today, I could ship that product. It's that easy to do. There is no excuse for Google not doing it. It is, I, I think it's actually like a destruction of shareholder value, like that I've never seen before, that they haven't done it. Like it is so easy for them to do, yet they somehow choose, I think there's some lawyer there or I don't know, somebody who's just decided not to do it. Like it is obviously something like their consumers want.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  There is a little bit of a creepy factor, right? Because Google does actually know so much about you. That if you were doing something like when, when OpenAI and Claude tell you, oh, is this because of this thing that you told me about? And you're like, yes, that is, you connected these dots. You get excited about it. If Google did it in my email, I think I would be creeped out. Oh, is this why you were searching for this product? Right? Like that, you'd have to be careful because to your point, they do know all of that.

• 39:04Auren Hoffman?

  That's interesting. All right. Last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm going to go back to that well-rounded piece. Like how many years did we spend hearing from people? You've got to be well-rounded. You've got to fix these weaknesses that you have. Like think about the entire feedback loop within a corporation. It's all weakness focus, right? Whereas the moment that you start focusing on your strength, focusing on the things that you're good at, it makes you happier too. Like I, I enjoy my work more because I focus my time in the areas that I'm really good at. Therefore I have more success. Therefore I am better at it. Therefore I spend more time on it. And so that is the loop that you want to fixate on. And I think too many people are still focused on this well-rounded piece. Too much feedback within a corporation

• 39:54Speaker 00

  is about fixing your weakness. Like no, find that area that you're passionate about and that you're really good at. And spend more time doing that. You will see that you will become exceptional at.

• 40:03Auren Hoffman?

  That starts early, starts in, you know, we have kids in school, both, both of us have kids in school. Like it starts at a very, very early age. You gotta get, you know, you gotta get better at this thing.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  I get this question from both my kids. Like, why am I doing this? Like they, I think they're way smarter than we were. Like I, I remember that thought running through my head, but, but I, you know, I didn't express it. Like both my kids are like, I don't understand why I'm learning this. I'm never going to use this in my life.

• 40:28Auren Hoffman?

  And I'm not passionate about it. It's one thing if I'm passionate about it or, you know, whatever it might be.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it's our job, you know, in, in, when it comes to our kids, exposing them to a lot of different things. So that we can see what they like and what they don't like. But once you figure out that they really like something, let them go at it. And the same, you know, work, like we gotta stop, you know, trying to get everyone to be average at everything. Like no, like even when you are starting out in your career, if you start noticing you're really good at something or you just enjoy that thing, you gravitate towards it, spend more time there. That, that's where you're going to be exceptional.

• 41:04Auren Hoffman?

  There's certain things like that schools, at least schools in the US are very good at. Like they're probably very good at like teaching basic math or something, whatever. Yeah. And maybe they're not like, I don't know. And there's certain things that I clearly not good at. Like they're clearly not good at teaching languages. Like it is just like almost every student, even students who had like an eight-year language requirement come out like not knowing anything except English.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Well, I actually, I know some of the reason that that's happening because I really, I, I was, I was really curious about this. When my son was taking multiple languages and learned nothing. And it's because you have to, and in fact, I, I actually tried to go to the school and like get this change. You have to learn to read and write in that language. And I'm like, no, like I want my kid to speak it. Like whether you can read or write, it does, does not matter to me. Like my kid could speak fluent Spanish. Like the fact he can't read it, like that's not, that's not important. I want him to be able to speak it. Cause then you can utilize it and they won't allow that. Again, it goes to that well-rounded this thing. Like my, my son is in his fourth year now of a second language and he can speak it, but he can't write or read a word of it, right?

• 42:14Auren Hoffman?

  The fact that he could speak it is amazing. I mean.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Well, that's only because I, I forced that. I told him, I was like, I don't care about your, your reading and writing. I just want you to be able to speak it. And like, I basically let him off the hook for the reading and writing portion. The school didn't though.

• 42:28Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, I took six years of French from seventh grade through 12th grade. And like literally by the end of it, I could order le canard d'orange at a restaurant and I could conjugate some verbs. And that was all I got out of six years. It was an absolute waste of time.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Waste of time. Yeah. Unbelievable.

• 42:44Auren Hoffman?

  All right. Well, thank you, Roy Schwartz. This was not a waste of time. This was amazing. I love this. I love this podcast with you. Thank you, Roy Schwartz, for joining us on Summation. This was incredible. I encourage our listeners to both buy Smart Brevity and buy Simplify your new book as well.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Thank you. And it comes out September 15th. You can get it at any of your favorite places, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you want to order your book.

• 43:06Auren Hoffman?

  And September 15th will probably be after this goes. So we, it's probably already out.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  So it's available.

• 43:11Auren Hoffman?

  It's already out. We're, that's in the future in the past. Yes.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Sounds good.

• 43:15Auren Hoffman?

  Amazing. One more thing before we go. I read a blog called Summation. It's the same as this podcast. The blog is about non-obvious idea sharing on business, talent, data, longevity and random contrarian takes. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.