Axios CEO Is Betting on Brevity for Political News | Connections Ep. 14 | Salesforce

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, 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 Vande Hei, Politico was only the beginning. Next came Axios. So we came to Washington, D.C. 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. And if you want to be a political journalist, you've got one place to come, and it was here. Basically started my career covering Congress. And I always assumed everyone here is really smart. You went to these fancy schools and I was like, you're not that bright. Then you meet members of Congress, you realize you're really not that bright. And it just sort of gives you this confidence that whenever I could 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. Like, what did you learn from your time there?

Developed a lot of confidence 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. Which I did for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. Kind of thought that's what I was going to do for the rest of my life. You fly around with the president, you get to interview him, you're doing just everyday stuff.

Air Force Life.

This is really cool. But there was always part of me I was like, this is neat. But it really felt like, ah, this is the end game. And then one day we decided that we wanted to become entrepreneurs. And it really took a huge shift at that point.

So what inspired you to found Politico?

Basically what we were thinking is we were sitting at the Washington Post. And I was like, I'm pretty good at this and I know that people 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 in 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 going to 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's 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. Well, it turns out no one wants to read your data. Want less words, want fewer words. So we really studied those habits closely. Almost everybody was reading almost nothing. And it didn't matter if you're a CEO. Headlines top sentence. You could look at that and be dismissive of humanity. Or you could say, wait, maybe the consumer's right and us as a journalist were wrong. What if you made those headlines, those leads, the why it Matters 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 that still animates the company today.

So you have the brevity, you have smart brevity. But then what about how it looks? Is that important?

Very important. And not like 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.

Yeah. 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 because your revenue stream could go away if you take.

That, could have nothing.

But you took that risk, took the.

Risk and we calculated because we knew that people would engage with that type of content. You study the data and then you make bets. 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 a forest, it's meaningless. Right. You've got to have almost like a gorilla mentality towards marketing. You want to maximize the value of your ip, which is in our case, it's, 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 going to quit. If you can't communicate externally to your shareholders, or to your customers, you're not going to 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, of the user? And sometimes that 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 paywall, 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 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 want to put 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 that are coming?

I mean, everything changes so quick right now. Right. 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 going to 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 other 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 going to kind of live wherever we want to live, work wherever we want to work, and not for a lot of people ever have to be physically present. And that's just going to require a whole other 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.

Yep.

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's 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 to 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 going to move even faster than it has over the last five years. I'm not saying that to scare the hell out of you, but 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 through 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 going to snap back into an era of sane politics, effective governance, cooling, climate, technology that slows, come on, like, 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 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 could cower in fear because. Because change scares you, or you could be like, let's get it on.

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