Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei

title: Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei
author: How I Built This with Guy Raz
contenttype: podcast
publication: How I Built This with Guy Raz
published: 2023-02-27T03:10:00-05:00
sourceurl: https://rss.art19.com/episodes/87f00446-c9f0-451c-9636-827960604f06.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg1PdmVyY2FzdAY6BkVU--3fdaf693ac55dc369c0201a1ede82e0232030d6c

word_count: 15328

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And by the way, a lot of people wanted you to fail. It was a big deal. I was pretty cocky and public about what we were going to deliver. But was that bad? It was a dark, dark moment. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raaz, and on the show today, how Jim Van De Hei walked away from a green job to help reimagine journalism with Politico, and then 10 years later did it again with Axios. 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. 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 Van Dehae 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, 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, D.C. 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. But 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 Van Dehae wasn't looking to become an entrepreneur or a media mogul. 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 Albertan, 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 Van Dehae did not own Politico. He was financed by Robert Albertan. 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. In just five years after it was launched, Axios was acquired by the Media Conglomerate Cox for over $500 million. Jim Van Dehae 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 school, Jim really wasn't into that either. And now I was a terrible student. Graduated in the bottom third of my class was teachers would probably describe me as a troublemaker. Troublemaker. A troublemaker. For sure. Not well behaved. I just didn't, he looked funny. And until college, I just put so little thought into school, or even what I was going to do with my life. I was a fun loving guy. I think I got along with people. Because I was interested, myself, by the time I was interested in events and news. But I didn't do homework or stuff like that. That normal kids did. Even the first couple of years, I couldn't have grades to get into the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. And then I turned in my 1.49, 1 grade point average, and had myself on the verge of not being in college much longer. Wow. What were you doing? Two things. Three things. Partying, drinking, and I worked a lot. I always had really good work at that. Even in high school, I worked 40 hours a week at a... Where did you do? I delivered pizzas for the most part in high school. I did it at Little Seasers. And then there was a local restaurant called Reds Pizza. And so I'd work 40, 50 hours a week occasionally, going to class and getting lousy grades. So clearly you had a work ethic. But it was, focus on things that you were interested in, like, delivering pizza, making money, but not a work ethic on your schoolwork, your studies. Nothing, not until I found journalism. How did that happen? How did you get even interested in journalism? 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 looser-ish, right? But I was just interested in the process. And it was all new to me. And I did something about it like I intuitively got. And I was also trying to figure out, OK, what am I going to do with my life? I'm a good writer. And at that time, I also like sports a lot. And so we had a daily newspaper. I was either cocky enough or dumb enough or lucky enough that I was starting to think about journalism classes and the guy that ran the department said, I should go talk to the Oscar's Northwestern and see if they have any jobs. I went in and 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 could you give me some kind of test? And maybe if I pass it, can I have a job? And it brought- This was the university. This is a student newspaper at the university. No, no, this was the local newspaper. It's a daily Oscar's Northwestern. Oh, oh, no. 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, I'm going to do this. And how did you know how to write? I don't know. I mean, I read newspapers. And that was really lucky because the Gene Hans 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. If you can work 50, 60 hours a week, I can't teach you that. Learn to work sources. Learn to write a story. Learn to be creative. And so I really took his advice. I guess while you were in college, there was another small time paper maybe nearby. And a police call Brilliant. And Wisconsin had a daily paper. And you somehow got a job running this paper, which I think meant literally you were the only employee, the editor and the reporter and the photographer. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, I had decided, OK, I really like journalism. But I had this kind of suspicion that how many things sports is going to get old. And so I called around every newspaper. And Brilliant News is one of the top of the list. Obviously starting with a B. And Zayn Zander answers the phone. And I explained, hey, I want to come 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, 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? And I'm like, well, again, I don't really have that. I've done one job at covering high school sports. I don't know if that qualifies me to run a newspaper. He's like, yeah, whatever. He goes, my editor 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. Wow. 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. What were you covering? How did you generate stories? Would you go to like, was it like a town hall that you would go to? What do you remember? 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 cut them out. Cut them out. Cut out the columns using a razor blade. And I had this my first issue. I'm working, I had 80, 100 hours. Whatever it was, it was an, 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. And I, they already printed the paper when you gave in the, it was gone. It was printed. It was a printed version. And so that was humiliating, humbling. But even that bounce back. And I just, you know, Zane was gracious. And the people around him were generous in teaching me and having patients. 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 yeah, it was just an amazing master's class. And, and running something. Was that, was that experience, like when you finished that experience, right? Because I know you graduated from, from college in 94. And, and when, but when you finished that job, did it, was it clear to you that you were going to become a reporter? That's what I was going to pursue. I was going to be a, but after that, I was going to be a political reporter in Washington. Hmm. In Washington, DC. Yeah. Yeah. And you've been there before. Never. Never. Never been there. Cocking is her being naive, probably more of the naive. Hmm. I think during your senior year, you applied to an internship in Washington, DC with, 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, and your first introduction to national politics. Yeah. It was awesome. I learned everything you could about, you know, how to deal with the press. And I also did all the grunt errands. So I learned all the tunnels and ways to get around Capitol Hill and where the offices and where the heightaways. And I just, I loved Washington, like just loved it. All right. So you, you get to DC, I think, in 1994, is that right? Yeah. The internship was in the, the spring. And then I went to Martha's Vineyard in Mote Lawns. I did landscaping with friends that I met. Yeah. 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 100 and some resumes and crickets for the most part. I was in, 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, just, just mailing your app, but mailing your resume and a, Manila envelope and waiting to hear back. Yeah. It's funny. I think 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 when I became an entrepreneur, I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. But I looked 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 and these congressional hearings and such. And so when I finally interviewed with whoever I interviewed at C-SPAN, they're like, yeah, I think you're a little too ambitious for us. And I'm like, ambitious, like I'm carrying bricks. I have no job, like I'll take anything. But anyways, they didn't hire me, but a company called Inside Washington Publishers did. Inside Washington Publishers is a collection of hyper-nitch publications. Newsletter. Yeah, pamphlets. Yeah, the pre-newsletter, like paper newsletters, right? And New Fuels report was the one that hired me and it was covering the alternative fuels industry. And that was an awesome job. 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, I think, they're on, you would kind of replicate this model with political 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 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. I mean, it's one of the little, 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. 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. 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, 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, was that right? Yeah, 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 Brezhnehan, 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. There's a three of us were often 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. How did you get sourced up? 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 used and abuse power. They are very interested in power. Like I just, I understood politics. So all right. See, you're working for this publication. And pretty, I think not too long, maybe within a year, I think you're hired by roll call, which is which for people don't know that's the that was at the time like the gold standard in Washington DC for covering Congress. That was like, Kim, I think Monday and Thursday, I don't know Tuesday and Wednesday. And it was every Congress person gets it every lobbyist and lawyer like they all read it religiously. They still might, I don't know. But that right, you were there with, I think within a year of moving to DC. Yeah. 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 especially around, 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 lay the groundwork to impeach Clinton. And it was a monster, monster story back then. And I'll never forget someday I'll find the tape. It was big enough that they got called to be on the today show. And here I am. I don't own dress clothes. I had 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 Curric and Matt Lauer. And I couldn't be more scared in over my head. But 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. It your, I mean, it seems I would imagine that your kind of ambition probably would eventually maybe be like an editor in a newspaper, right? Because you were obviously really successful. You were, because when I think about my early career, it was like, that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. And then I wanted to be the host of all things considered. And then that would be it. Like I'd be done. That'd be great. Yeah. And then 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 up to Washington is I, if I could cover leadership in Congress for Roll Call, like that, that would be it. Like I would have made it. Yeah. But I mean, of course you would eventually move well beyond Roll Call. Like I think what you were still in your 20s, you got 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, the heat by the Washington Post as a political reporter. Yeah. It's a, 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, right? What was your, like, because I think you are, I think you are a competitive reporter, right? I mean, you are. I know you are. Very, very competitive reporter, you know, the, you both like, 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 going to get another scoop? And in a lot of this stuff, I didn't realize until later and 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 would give people some clarity 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 your meeting on this, even if I didn't know their 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 that 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. You know, I mean, here you are, 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 started happening in 2006, you would leave, but what was going on? Why were you getting restless? If you had asked me in May of 2006, are you ever going to start a company? I would have 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, 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 six of the best reporters we know and six rising stars, and we hooked ourselves 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. At literally one of them 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 political. Yeah. And it led us very quickly. And it probably only happened because it went quickly to a series of conversations like we, John and I are John and Ben 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 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. And basically pitched this in 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. Yeah. And I guess at this point, you've got this idea called project X and it's going to be like, I think I read that you described it like the Yankees of political journalism. We're going to get the Yankees together, right? 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 the idea was to reach 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. And by the way, because of cable in the internet, we're probably going to have a pretty large audience for this. Like then, the Washington Post and Washington Post.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 leader board, my story got more readers online than it got in print. They're like, yeah, that happens every day. And 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. And so yeah, we thought if we could do those two things, we were going to have a really successful publication. 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 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. Yep. And from what I understand, he heard that you and John Harris were trying to do something similar. 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? Yep. 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 capitalist 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. Right. They didn't think it was going to be a lot of work. I remember Don Graham saying, you're 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 like a fanciful dream. Was there initial reaction until they realized that we were serious and then they got serious. 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. 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. And they only came to you with that proposal once they realized that somebody else might actually finance this thing. Correct. Yeah. And what we said to them was it just, it went work. You have this massive legacy operation with leaders who have a lot of power in 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. And they're bringing it though. At this point, they're bringing it. They do both the charm and then they do the intimidation. I think 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 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 cat the straphic mistake. 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 Raaz and you're listening to how I built this. Every business right now is asking the same question. How do we actually make AI work for us? Because the possibilities are huge, but guessing is risky. And sitting on the sidelines, that's not really an option because chances are your competitors are already making their move. That's where NetSuite by Oracle comes in. With NetSuite, you can put AI to work today. NetSuite is the number one AI cloud ERP, trusted by more than 43,000 businesses. 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But if updating your site feels intimidating or worse, you keep putting off small changes because they take too long, Framer might be the website builder for you. With real-time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO and advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, Framer empowers you to build and maximize your.com from day one. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash built for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash built for 30% off framer.com slash built rules and restrictions may apply. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Rise. 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 Aubren. And still, Jim's been told that if he does this, he'll be making a catastrophic mistake. So he's feeling the pressure. For sure. I mean, 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, I don't, I don't spend a whole lot of time caring what other people think about me. So at 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 had convinced himself that we can't do this, that he was going to, 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, 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 can tell instantly that I buckled and she jumped on her keyboard and you know, she wrote up this note to Harris to me and to Harris's wife, Anno Hanlon. And she was quoting Churchill and Roosevelt and about seizing the moment. And like moments like this only happened once getting the arena. And she saved us from ourselves. I mean, it was arguably a big risk for your partner, John Harris, because he was older than you. You were in your early third mid-30s. So that's a normal time for a lot of people to kind of jump ship and try their own, you know, their own thing and you can recover. You can recover and go back. But I think that's right. Yeah, for him it was a big risk. 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. All right. So you connect with Robert Albert and 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. And there was no, it mitigated the risk. 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. Right. Right. I'm not doing it in my garage. This isn't a garage band activity. You and John basically 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. My wife named it, correct. And all Britain and Fred Ryan is the CEO of his sort of media company. They would handle the business side more or less, right? 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 and taking a chance on us, Politico doesn't exist. And I look back at like, it was a miracle. A miracle that Politico worked. Yeah. I mean, with his money, obviously, there were resources, right? I think the paper launches in January of 2007. Yeah. So he, because he owns these television stations, he had a building, I think just across it, it says that DC in Arlington. And that was where Politico would be located. And I remember those early papers when I, you know, 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. Yeah. And from, from like one account that I read, you know, the night or the, the, 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. 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. 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. But you had an entire newspaper to fill and a website 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? And by the way, a lot of people wanted you to fail. It was a big deal. I was pretty cocky in public about what we were going to deliver. What were you promising by the way? What were you saying? I was just saying that we're going to take on the post and like, like the people from big... Why were you saying that? You know, I think John is... I think John and others are asking me that at the time as well. Yeah. 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 PT Barnum in you. 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 going to 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'm never looking at Harris and saying, I 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 was that bad? It was a dark, dark moment. But you don't fail, there's not an option. Like anybody who started a company failure's not an option. 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 Jay March, Jonathan Martin who are breaking stories and other people are 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. But that took time. Took time. And when you're going out there saying, we're going to beat the Washington Post. And that means there's a lot of people really secretly hoping you're going to fail. There's pressure there because you can't fail because that would be humiliating. 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, there was nothing about politics at the time. Doesn't pay attention to media. I 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 three o'clock and firing off 100 emails saying, whatever you're doing is not healthy. Like what are you doing? Yeah. It wasn't healthy. But it was exhilarating. It's intoxicating. Like you either collapse from it or 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 that PT Barnum part of it was paying off. So there was enough public success that it was clear we could be successful. I wonder, I mean, one of the things I wonder about is 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. You were a reporter. Most reporters are, you know, they're one person vans, 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? 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 power the power. I'm gonna work 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 that person beat us? Like it became a joke to a point because I would do so much of it. Instinctively I felt that's what we have to somehow do the impossible. And that's the story 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 were under intense public scrutiny. You know, I'm curious when you would tell reporters like when new reporters came in and you would say, this is what a political story is. This is what makes us different. How would you describe it? What was it? What was a political story? A political story we would say is listen, is this an idea and 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 the audience. If we can get something that is so interesting to the most powerful people, it's going to be interesting to anybody who cares about politics. So here's the one thing I'm like, political became, you know, sort of a sensation in Washington DC quickly. And let's let's be honest for a moment here. The Washington DC can be very provincial, right? People can really be naval gaysian. 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 political, but it was not making money. I mean, here you've got political, you're writing your own stuff. It's really expensive to have all the staffers writing original pieces. And Huffington Post was at that time kind of taking your butt, you know, and they were just aggregating articles. They weren't even writing them. Yeah. I mean, was there ever like anybody internally to say, what are we doing? Why do we, why are we paying people to write stuff? Why don't we just do what they do? I did 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. But that was the news, that was the news paper. But back then, like that was enough. Like, I don't know, that was money. Numbers at first year, but let's say we spent 10 million. I think we brought in three or four million in year one by memory. Serious 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. Did you, I mean, obviously, Albritton, 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. Yeah, I don't remember in those early years there being a whole lot of tension about revenue. They're definitely started to have tension between John and I and kind of the suits. Robert and Fred just about how to run the company and how often do we need to meet? And when did that start? I wish I had a better memory on specific, 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 MPV, right? And so, because Albritton owned a 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 was the source of attention. Now, there's no way that we could be a successful company at a national, international scale if we're running like a mom and pop shop or certainly running like a mom and pop shop back by a local TV station. 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 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 figure out who does what. And then John and I are becoming, we're starting to become leaders ourselves. We start to do a lot of self-appraisal. We start to figure out what are the weaknesses and how do we create something that's more sustainable. We're not dumb. Once you have turnover as high as we had and you have people writing stories about us being a sweatshop, we're not dumb. 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 and a company that could rely on something other than the maniacal energy of a few people. It's interesting because the culture, right, and you talk about the culture and you mentioned this kind of the sweatshop stories that we're coming out about, Politico, and it's almost as if you anticipated that that churn would happen. That it was just going to be sort of part of the course. To when 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? I can't express this enough. Everything that we did was based on intuition and instinct. I think at the crisis level, yes, what is the instinct that motivates people in trauma or turmoil? It is, I'm not failure's not an option. I'm going to get out of this hole. All you're doing is I'm going to fight today to win today and I'm not thinking about casualties. It was made messier because we were in the media and the media club's to cover media. Any misstep would be amplified in a way it might not be amplified if I was trying to start a shoe company. People wouldn't care. How was your before thing start to get a little bit tense? I think they started around 2010. From my opinion, you and Robert Albert and we're quite close. You guys went out to dinner with your wives and you guys were on vacation together. You became pretty close. There's definitely long periods of time where you listen here. Any startup is a family or trapped in a house together and you're, Harris, you have this expression that we've been in the car too long together. That certainly is true at times. Robert and I were close at different times. We were friends. We started to clash. It's pretty well documented that we had different values. We had different business styles and at that point when you start to have success, ego is a merge. People want credit or people want more input. Our first big clash, I basically, 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 that sound so arrogant but I was learning how to lead. I was really interested in the business. 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. I started to bring in our team. What happened? I mean, you would obviously eventually become the CEO which we will ask you about in a moment. When you were still in that first year and you guys were trying to figure out ways to grow your revenue. I guess you brought someone on to help you figure that out, right? Yeah. So I 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. 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. Once I hired him, then we really had an alliance and became quite close and he was just smarter than anybody on the business side of that company by 10X. And we had decided we wanted to start a subscription business called Politico Pro. Yeah. This was, I mean, this really was going to become a significant generator of revenue. And this for people that don't know where 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 in Politico Pro delivers, delivered and delivers this intensive specialized information to them and the subscriptions were like at that $10,000 a year, something like that. And so you didn't need, you don't need that many subscribers. Nope. You need lobbyist 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 up front because you got to hire a lot of reporters. You got to hire like 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 you know, Roy and I and really Robert on the other side, who just thought it was a, 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 believe 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, like while resistant in the beginning, he did fund it. And yeah. For us, like political was us. It was an extension of us. So its success, its durability 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. 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 that and you know, I've read different interpretations from Robert Alburn's not here. And again, this is not a critique of him at all. I think he's very successful and has done some amazing things and made his mark. Certainly with Politico. 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 to give you that job and didn't really think you, I don't know, did you get that sense at all? For sure. 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- Well, you started the thing. 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 Caesars in high school at 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. 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 for most of this career. He was a writer. And what a lot of people don't realize is that reporters, you really have to do things very quickly with limited resources. Everything I know was a CEO. I learned from being a reporter. Everything I knew is a reporter. I learned from playing poker. Huh. Take it back to playing poker in high school and college. Like poker is so much about fact pattern recognition. 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 going to lose. And somewhere in that journey from poker table to journalist to CEO, I think those skill sets helped immensely. 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 up front with Robert. Like at some point, when I feel like the company can grow at 20% and we're not here, I'm probably going to go. At some point, I'm probably going to want to do my own thing. By this point, I'm Roy and Kim and Danielle Jones and Mikey. We have our own view of what a company should look like and what its soul should be and what its value should be, what its morality should be. And you could not make that happen because it was not your shop. No way. It wasn't my shop. It was Robert. Like Robert, listen again, his credit, he's the one who bank rolled 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. So what what happened? I mean, I mean, clearly you're starting to think, okay, eventually I want to run my own shop and you know, you're looting to regret, regretfully how it ended. How did it end? What happened? I mean, it ended that we couldn't get on the same page about 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. You wanted shares distributed and other people. You wanted more ownership distributed. Yeah, both because we thought it was the right thing to do. But also it was getting harder and harder to keep talented. So you wanted to bring everybody together, have everyone have upside in the company because they people are getting equity in Buzzfeed. They were getting equity in other startups. There were. Yeah. And it was like, it would have been a competitive advantage if we could have done that. But it was more just 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 political. 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. 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. 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 more than anything else is what led us to believe. Okay, we can do this. 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. 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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. 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 two or 400 words? And if we could do that, we're going to do something different. All right. So you have this concept. You leave political 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? 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. But when you leave a company, especially when you leave with some mid-attention, 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 and 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 sit-around type of person. Like some people would love it. I wish that I loved it. I didn't love it. Right. Here's a thing. I mean, in 2016, right, when you left, you were not financially set for life. Like you still had to work, if it didn't work out. Correct. You had a playbook. You knew, right, you had done this already. You'd started a media company. But now, really, it was different because you weren't just going to be doing the editorial side. You're going to be running a company, the business side, everything. Yes. It could have flopped. You know, we went out and we raised money. And I mean, in some ways, was the worst person to raise money because I would tell every venture capitalists that I think media is the hardest space in America today. I think that most media companies are going to go wonder. And yes, if you want to get a TEDx 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 TEDx return in the media space based on their previous record, I think we're the group of people who can do that. Here's a thing, though, Jim. Even somebody with your experience talent and platform, building a new brand is really hard. You're leaving at Politico, which was a massive brand by the time you left. And even with all the experience, right? Look at Jeffrey Katzenberg and what was it called? Quibble, Quibble. Right? Quibble. Right? I mean, even super highly successful talent that 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. Yeah, but we have Mike Allen. So we haven't talked enough about Mike. 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. And kind of a legendary report. He wrote this playbook that became a central reading for people in Washington, DC, and beyond. From your time 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 his kid Jonathan Swan who no one knew about. And 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 going to 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 took upside instead of salary. And at that point then I'm okay, we're good. We're going to 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. 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 between you believe in who shares your values, who complements whatever skills that you have because there will be dark days. And you're going to 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 found yourself a gem. 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 its short articles. Very short articles, but it had very specific principles. What made an article adhere to the smart brevity model? Basically, one of the genetic flaws in journalists is that they're not great writers. 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 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 it's important. And then you would give me some kind of visual cue about whether to go deeper, which 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 is 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 like clear 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 at the state where 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. How important was the Trump era to the success of Axios? I mean, that was a boom time for news. We know that for CNN everybody. I have mixed feelings. I have a mixed analysis. 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. People started to massively consume politics to a level that's not healthy for a normal human beings diet. And so those two things were in conflict, but it certainly helped us. It certainly helped put us on the map. Yeah. How did you, I mean, I obviously it's a private company. So you may not talk too specifically about financials. But as you said yourself, media companies are inherently risky. They're very hard to make profitable. We're going to see what happens over the next couple of years with a lot of different media companies. But diversification seemed to be the answer for a while. It's two events and let's do partnerships and licensing deals and podcasts and TV and we'll, we'll, you guys wouldn't even be on that. You created a piece of software for businesses based on the smart brevity model, like to help businesses write shorter 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, to bring in revenue? What was, what was the biggest driver of that? Yeah, I mean, two things. One, we raised money. So we launched with $10 million cash. And then because we had done political, 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 be successful. And that's where most of the money came from in those early years and then a great, like you're entrepreneurial audience. I 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 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, where 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 built a technology, AI power 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 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. So all right, I mean, I think that sometimes 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 I think how long until you reached sustainability or profitability? How many years in? I think by year two or by year two, we're profitable. Not by design, by the way. We were trying to be in investment mode. The business was getting better than we thought, hiring tough in media. But we were breaking even. Like we were doing, we were, we broke even, I think year two, three, four, or made a little bit of money. But not, I don't know. So, so you are, and you know, you've got all these revenue streams going. And then in 2022, you sold to Cox Enterprise, they bought out Axio, I think, for a little more than $500 million. Again, it can come across as an obvious question, which is why I would sell it because it's $500 million, why not? But why? I mean, 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? Yeah, it took great question. I especially given that, you know, five years earlier, we wanted to control our own destiny, right? And we were very clear with people that were 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 a 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. How long comes Cox communications? They let our series D, so we had done a couple of rounds in between. How much did you raise in total? I think we're 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. They're the nicest people. They're a fourth generation company. They, you know, Alex who runs the company is just a great guy. He 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. And so it made the transaction which you could imagine you're selling your baby. You made what could have been very painful and torturous, quite easy. What's your commitment? How long? I mean, I could leave whenever I guess, but my commitment to them is, you know, a minimum of six years and probably a lot longer. I think if you talked 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, I'm a, I'm a bus 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 a, it's, I talked to college kids a lot now and I'm just like, man, if you could figure out a way, like, or to do a job that you would do for free, that you love it so much, like, that's Nirvana. That's winning the lottery. You know, which question is coming next because you, I know you've heard this show before, but it's still a question that worth asking after talking with you for several hours, which is, and you 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 day. That you put in for two decades. So what do you, what do you, I don't know, how much, how much is, is it about one and, and how much is about the other? 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 told me, I'm going skiing with this guy, Roy Schwartz, who's really interesting. You should talk to him about business. He's just a smart guy. 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 went to big sister. 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 the person next to me at 4 a.m. 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 start 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 have been running to 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. That's Jim Van De Haai, co-founder of Politico and co-founder and CEO of Axios. By the way in 2021 Robert Albrighton, Jim's co-founder and the man who financed and owned Politico sold it to the German media giant Axel Springer, reportedly for a billion dollars. And according to the New York Times, it was one of the most expensive media mergers in recent memory. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hipt at id.wondery.com. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at how I built this and mine is at Guy Ross on Instagram or at how I built this and I'm at Guy. 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 Carrie Thompson with Music composed by Routine Erreblewe. He was edited by Niva Grant with research help from Sam Paulson. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, K.C. Herman, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Messini and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Ross and you've been listening to How I Built This.