- How important is it to have trust in the media?
- It's the whole game.
I mean, if you think about this moment,
you basically have two groups of people living
in two of their own realities,
so you basically have this loss of trust.
For us as a media company, and if you don't have trust,
you have nothing.
- Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin
and welcome to "Connections" where we hear
from some of the most innovative leaders in marketing.
For most people, launching one successful media company
is a career defining achievement, but for Jim Vandehei,
Politico was only the beginning, next came Axios.
So we came to Washington, DC to learn about his journey
in storytelling and marketing.
- I grew up in a small town, Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
It's like 50,000 people.
It's America.
When I got into college, I was always a good writer
and I fell in love with journalism,
and very quickly decided I wanted
to be a political journalist.
And if you want to be a political journalist,
you've got one place to come and it was here.
I started my career covering Congress,
and I always assumed everyone here is really smart.
They went to these fancy schools.
And I was like, you're not that bright
then you meet members of Congress,
and you realize you're really not that bright.
And it just really gives you this confidence
that what if, I can do this, I can navigate it.
And I was always fascinated with power.
How do people get it?
How do they use it?
How do they abuse it?
And so I spent my early career really focused on leadership
and really becoming a student of power
and a student of institutions.
- And so then you worked at The Journal,
you worked at The Post,
what did you learn from your time here?
- Developed a lot of competence as a writer
and just sort of a thinker about the city.
It's an interesting small town,
even though it feels like a big town,
but I learned a lot about writing, about communicating,
how the newspapers work.
And I liked covering the presidency,
which is what I did for The Wall Street Journal
and then The Washington Post,
kind of thought that's what I was gonna do
for the rest of my life.
You fly around with the president,
get to interview him. - Just everyday stuff,
Air Force One. - It was really cool,
but there was always part of me that was like, this is neat,
but it never really felt like this is the end game.
And then one day we decided
that we wanted to become entrepreneurs
and it really took up huge shift at that point.
- So what inspired you to found Politico?
- Basically what we were thinking
is we're sitting at The Washington Post
and I was like, I'm pretty good at this
and I know the people who are really good at this.
All the action was moving to the web.
Like what if we just created the New York Yankees
of journalism and started our own company.
And five months later we went live with Politico.
It went from getting excited about an idea
to launching a company.
- And what was so different about your approach to content?
- Our theory was there wasn't enough political coverage.
It wasn't written with enough voice
and it didn't have enough immediacy to it.
And we're like, let's give voice,
let's give expertise,
let's go deeper and let's meet the consumer's need
for a lot of political coverage.
And it took off.
Within three months, we're standing on stage
co-moderating a presidential debate,
took it from nothing to about 600 employees,
spread it to Europe.
It kept being so successful that we had time.
And I think we were humble enough to realize
how bad we were at running it.
And then became, I think quite good at running companies.
But at the beginning, like we were terrible.
I always say everything I learned about leadership.
I learned by screwing it up royally at the beginning.
- But you learned. - I learned, yeah, I think so.
- And then that, wasn't your last stop.
At some point you saw that the way people
consume news was changing.
How did that prompt you to start Axios?
- It was clear that because technology
was speeding everything up,
you and me and everyone around us was gonna need to know
more about technology and China and AI
and politics and healthcare.
And so the question is, well, that's a lot,
how would you solve it?
And our theory was,
you have to have really smart coverage
and you have to radically change
the efficiency of how content is delivered.
And we called it smart brevity,
which is people who have real expertise, who are smart,
but then with a huge emphasis
on making information consumption,
starting with the written word way more efficient.
Journalists tend to be very self-indulgent
and we kind of write a lot of words
because that's what really important smart people do.
What turns out when no one wants to read your damn words?
- Less words, less words. - The people want less words,
They want fewer words.
So we really studied those habits closely.
Almost everybody was reading almost nothing.
And it didn't matter if you were a CEO--
- Just reading the headlines,
- Top sentence,
you could look at that and be dismissive of humanity.
Or you could say, wait, maybe the consumers is right
and us as the journalist were wrong.
What if you made those headlines,
those leads, the why it manners as useful,
and as information packed as humanly possible.
Could you change consumer habits
so that they're suddenly getting way more information
in a way shorter period of time.
Convert them into essentially addicts to your product
because it's so much more efficient than the competition.
And that was the bet.
And it turned out the bet was right thankfully
and it's worked,
but it was built on that fundamental premise.
It still animates the company today.
- So you have the brevity, you have smart brevity?
- Yeah.
- But then what about how it looks?
Is that important?
- Very important and not my natural gift,
but I would say I became very obsessed with it.
If you're trying to take that information
and you're trying to display it fundamentally
on the screen of an iPhone. - A small form factor.
- How do you make that as visually appealing
as humanly possible?
And you do that by getting rid of the clutter,
making it feel like totally intuitive,
but also not intimidating.
So you get rid of pop-up ads, you get rid of banner ads,
you get rid of all the things that we as media companies did
to monetize the consumer,
but they kind of sucked for the consumer.
And our bet was, well, if you do that,
then you'll get them to consume your content.
You'll use that same logic for ads.
- Yeah you Marie Kondo all the content
and then you're worried cause
your revenue stream could go away if you take--
- You could have nothing.
- But you took a risk.
- Took the risk and calculated.
Because we knew that people would engage
with that type of content.
You study the data and then you make bets
and you hope that you can get the right people around you
to execute on your vision.
And that's how you get a successful show
or a successful entity.
- So as a CEO of Axios, you have great content,
but how important is it that that's marketed out there?
- It's everything right?
Like if you have this great thing
and you drop in the forest, meaningless, right?
You've got to have almost like a guerrilla mentality
towards marketing.
You wanna maximize the value of your IP,
which is in our case, it's that content.
It's why I think like marketing and communicators,
like this is your moment.
It wasn't that big of a deal five or 10 years ago.
It was a pretty simple job.
I now think it's one of the most complex jobs at a company.
It's the whole game.
If you can't communicate internally to your employees,
they're gonna quit.
If you can't communicate externally to your shareholders
or to your customers, you're not gonna have a good business.
- When you started Axios,
your goal was to put the audience first.
What does that look like in practice?
- You have to live by it.
It's literally the first words of our manifesto.
Like audience first.
Is this really in the best interest of the user.
And sometimes it means surrendering short term profit
to make sure that you're serving that user.
And our theory has always been, if you do that,
people will reward you.
They can sniff out a phony.
They know if you're authentically trying to get them
to the closest approximation of the truth.
And that means getting rid of some ads
that might be annoying,
that might mean we don't have a pay wall.
And it's just being kind of ruthless with yourself
about these are the principles we're going to live by,
live by them and then it'll happen.
- You've written about the war for attention.
What would your advice be for content creators
who are trying to, as you say, like bust through the noise?
- One, use fewer words, use stronger words,
realize you've got maybe two or three seconds
for you to grab me or not.
So be very thoughtful about
what is my introduction?
What's my headline?
What's my tweet?
What's my subject line?
And then make sure that like,
you're packing what you want them to know
at the very top of it.
Don't make them guess, don't make them work.
You wanna pull people through it
and make sure that you're calibrating your voice
based on the environment
that you're trying to communicate in.
- So in your business,
you always have to be ready for change?
- Yeah.
- And what types of change do you see
with storytelling that are coming?
- I mean, everything changes so quick right now.
In terms of having all these different platforms.
I think one of the big tricks is going to be,
at least for the short term.
You do have people who live in two realities
and you can't cut off half of your customers.
So I think one of the trends
is you're gonna have to understand, even as a business,
how do you communicate with someone in rural America,
which might be different than someone in urban America.
I think that's a big change.
I think the other is once we get to some progress
with virtual reality,
I do think there's going to be a whole 'nother way
to communicate that gives you an additional layer
of intimacy without being physically present.
The world's not going back to the way it was,
like we're all now gonna kind of live wherever
we wanna live, work wherever we wanna to work
and not for a lot of people ever
have to be physically present.
And that's just gonna require a whole nother layer
of communicating both in terms of
how do you recruit and retain talent,
but then how do you connect people
especially at your company
who might not have a physical connection.
That's really hard
and I think it's going to be a real tough one.
- You've dealt with a lot of change.
- Yeah.
- Do you think that we're done with the change
or do you think change is constant?
- I think we're in the middle
of a long period of insane volatility.
I think people are underestimating the intensity
of the volatility to come.
- What do you think is going to happen?
- I just think that a bunch of things
have been set in motion
that lead towards somewhere between volatility and chaos.
You've got massive amounts of misinformation
that can move at scale at almost no cost.
You just have a tribalism to your politics
and an emotionalism of your politics
that's going to be hard to put back in the bottle.
You've got the climate changing that is
obviously having a massive effect on storms and weather
and where people live.
That's only going to speed up.
Then you take technology,
you take artificial intelligence,
you take quantum computing,
you apply that to all the things
that we all build businesses around.
It means everything is gonna move even faster than it has
over the last five years.
I'm not saying that to scare the hell out of you.
- You did a little bit.
- I don't get that emotional about this stuff.
I try to look at the world as clear as I can
to the inputs that I have
and then make smart determinations.
And that's what people have to do.
I think anyone who thinks we're gonna snap back
and do an era of sane politics, effective governance,
a cooling climate, technology that slows, come on,
none of those things are even possible.
All these things have been unleashed.
So then the question is, what do you do with that?
How do you navigate it?
And I think it affects on how you build your culture,
how do you market?
How do you structure your company?
Where do you do business?
And I think they're fun things to figure out.
And like you can cower in fear because change scares you
or you can be like, let's get it on.