YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim VandeHei

lines on the record: 88
first: 2023-02-27
most recent: 2023-02-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 four AM who looks at me and says with his beer in his hand for speed and it's Mike Allen wanting to see who can slam a beer faster and starts a lifelong friendship How do we have a spark of an idea to start Politico and it just happens to be at that very moment the internet's taking off and cable has an insatiable appetite and we happen to run into the right mix of reporters that can bring it into existence like so much of that is luck and it's perishable and I just don't feel like people appreciate that enough”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just feel like... People don't credit luck enough. That's why I hate the great man stories, these one person visionaries who willed something into existence. That's bullshit. Like nobody wills something into existence alone. You have a lot of people who are helping you, who've helped you in the past, who are helping you in real time to do the impossible. And I don't think people appreciate luck of just being in the right place at the right time, of having an idea that works now that might not work tomorrow or might not have worked yesterday, of running into the right co-founder. Like if I don't ask Jen Hurley, who was working in our finance department about where she's going and she had not told me, oh, I'm going skiing with this guy Roy Schwartz, who's really interesting. And 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, Axius wouldn't have existed.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I could leave whenever, I guess, but our commitment to them is, you know, a minimum of six years and probably a lot longer. I think if you talk to the leadership of Cox, they would say, we hope these guys are here for 20 years running the company. And, you know, I don't, you know, I'm 51. I guess at some point I'll get tired. I 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 because I love it. I get a lot of energy off of it. So again, I'm a blessed guy. Like, I've had a hell of a fun ride. I have a big ride in front of us, but I talk to college kids a lot now, and I'm just like, man, if you could figure out a way 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we were probably 35 to 40 million all in. But we're sitting there. We have a nice... Cash runway. We have a good company that's generating a lot of growth. Cox becomes a Series D investor, and they are just like, it's almost too good to be true. Like, they are the nicest people. They're a fourth generation company. They, Alex, who runs the company, is just a great guy. He used to be in journalism himself. They make very clear that the terms you guys are talking about, that's something we could see ourselves doing. 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, it made what could have been very painful and torturous quite easy.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question, especially given that 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 100% editorial control so that we told people along the way, listen, if you are fine 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. There's nothing else that we want to do. Well, along comes Cox Communications. They led our series D, so we had done a couple of rounds in between.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think by year two or by year two we're profitable, not by design, by the way. We were trying to be an investment mode. The business was doing better than we thought, hiring as tough in media, but we were breaking even. We broke even, I think, year two, three, four, or made a little bit of money, but nothing.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the idea was to both teach smart brevity to companies, but then little by little we built a technology, AI-powered technology that took all the learnings from the newsroom about how to write an engaging headline, how to pick the right visual, to get people to pay attention to content that matters. And we created a software that now, you know, hundreds of companies and the mayor of Austin and the school system in Austin, Texas, like tons of people, big companies, small companies, medium companies, now use it HQ and SmartBrevity to communicate internally.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like your entrepreneurial audience will love the story. Like we're a media company, we're doing well. We're 18 months into our creation. And I start to get phone calls The NBA, the basketball association, JP Morgan Chase, United Health Group. Their executives start calling us and say almost identical things like they were in the same room. And they said, Listen, our executives all read axios, but they won't read anything that we write internally. Will you teach us to write? And our initial reaction was no, we're a media company go learn how to write somewhere else. But the more we heard that from people, I remember Roy and I turning to each other saying, man, like, usually a market whispers like this market is screaming. It is screaming at us. And so we created a sister company inside the company called Axios HQ.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, two things. One, we raised money, so we launched with $10 million in cash, and then... Because we had done politica when we left, I probably had four or five companies call me and say, I don't care what you're starting. We've allocated X amount of advertise with you guys, but 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”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have mixed feelings. I have a mixed analysis. Like, on the one hand, it was really good for us because Jonathan Swan and Mike Allen and others were extremely wired into the Trump White House, Trump campaign, and we were able to break a lot of news and people were captivated by Trump. So we were able to elevate our brand for free at scale quickly. That's on the plus side. The minus side was one of the things we'd set out to do is we didn't want to be defined by politics alone. We wanted to be seen as a source of truth for politics business, media, technology, other topics. It made it really hard because Trump sucked up all the oxygen, sucked up all of the traffic. People started to massively consume politics to a level that's not healthy for unnormal human beings' diet. And so those two things were in conflict, but it certainly helped us.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Distilled in the proper hierarchy, and we had seen from the data that if you take multiple ideas and break it into bullets, you're much likelier to get people to keep reading and to retain. And so we broke it into bullets. And having those founding principles made it much easier to run the company because those founding principles really haven't changed to the stay. We're much bigger. We've created new business lines. But fundamentally, all of those things were set in place five years ago and haven't changed that much.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, one of the genetic flaws in journalists is that they're not great writers, and they often bury what matters, and they often hide it in a vomit of words. And so we tried to create a structure that could make even mediocre writers at least clear writers. And so we tried to do is mimic the conversation I would have with you if I went to a bar. And if I did, what I would do is I would tell you something in clear language that I'm excited about, that's new, that's interesting, that's illuminating, then I would give you the context, the why it matters. That's our second graph, the why important, 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember I had two co-founders for Axios, I have Roy and Mike, and we have this beautiful professional relationship, and I can't stress, like anybody who's thinking about starting a company, really try to find a partner who you believe in who shares your values, who complements whatever skill set you have, because there will be dark days and you're 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within half an hour of meeting, I remember sitting in a 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For your Times magazine did a cover story called The Man the White House Wakes Up to. He's written a daily newsletter every day but ten 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, Nock's kid, Jonathan Swan, who no one knew about. He had been doing some good reporting on Donald Trump.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but we listen, we have Mike Allen, so we haven't talked enough about Mike. So Mike is one of the co-founders of Politico and he's a co-founder of Axios. 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it could have flobbed. 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 capitalist that I think media is the hardest space in America today. I think that most media companies are going to go under. And yes, if you want to get a 10x return, I would get into healthcare or tech or energy stocks. I would think you have a higher degree of probability to make money there. But if anyone's going to get you a 10x return in the media space based on their previous record, I think we're the group of people who can do that.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you leave a company, especially when you leave with some mid of tension, you have a cooling off period. You have six months where you can't really do anything. You can't start a new company, can't recruit, can't raise money for it. And, you know, we were lucky we had enough money to be able to rest for six months and go figure out what we're going to do. Not a pleasant place to be. I'm not a big sit around type of person. Like some people would love it. I wish that I loved it. I didn't love it.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And it was like, it would have been a competitive advantage if we. 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To other people. Right. 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 talent. And so you wanted to bring everybody together, have everyone have upside in the company.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it ended that we couldn't get on the same page about how you would set up the company. Like, for instance, is very important to us that everybody should be able to share in the success, not just us, but the entire company.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No way. It wasn't my shop. It was Roberts. Robert, listen, again, like to his credit, he's the one who bankrolled it when no one else would. And he took the risk had political gone 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But by the time I became CEO, I was very clear that I'm not in this for the long haul. Like at some point, I was always upfront with Robert, like at some point when I feel like the company can grow at 20% and we're not here, I'm probably going to go at some point. I'm probably going to, I want to do my own thing. By this point, I'm Roy and Kim and Danielle Jones and Mikey. We have our kind of 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything I know is a CEO I learned from being a reporter, everything I learned. New is a reporter I learned from playing poker. So take it back to playing poker in high school and college. 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 like somewhere in that journey from poker table to journalist to CEO, I think those skill sets helped immensely.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started the thing. I felt like I understood it, and I felt like I can 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 until before I started to run Politico. The only thing I had run was the night shift at Little Caesar's in high school in Oshgosh. And so there was a big piece of it that you're learning on the fly. And I learned a lot in that period.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sense at all for sure. Yeah. And there's no doubt. And again, like, I think Robert would say it here 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For us, Politico was us. It was an extension of us. So it's 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Roy and I were super confident that you needed this subscription leg of the business. And eventually Roy and I prevailed and eventually Robert agreed to it. So to his credit, while resistant in the beginning, he did fund it.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nope, you need lobbyists, companies, lawmakers. They pay $10,000 a slot. Some big company who has 50 lobbyists might pay $100,000. And it's an expensive business up front because you've got to hire a lot of reporters. You got to hire a real sales team because you're asking companies to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription. And there was a real clash between Roy and I and really Robert on the other side who just thought it was we were wasting money and that John wasn't that enamored with it because he thought it was too wonky in terms of the coverage focus. But we believe that you couldn't be solely dependent on advertising. And to be a really big, durable company.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Egos emerge, right? And people want credit, or people want more input. Know, our first big clash, I basically. At some point, it was clear to me the company needed a CEO, to be blunt, I thought it needed me to be the CEO because it sounds so arrogant, but I was learning how to lead. I was really interested in the business. I 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's definitely long periods of time where, you know, listen, you're like any startup is like a family. You're trapped in a house together and Harris used to have this expression that we've been in the car too long together. That certainly is true at times. But Robert and I were close at different times. We were friends. But we started to clash. I mean, it's pretty well documented that I just, we had different values. We had different business styles. And at that point, when you start to have success.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Beginning, I can't express this enough. Everything that we did was based on intuition and instinct. And so I think at the crassest level, yes, like what is the instinct that motivates people in trauma or turmoil? I'm not, failure is not an option. I'm going to get out of this hole. And so all you're doing is like, I'm going to fight today to win today. And I'm not thinking about casualties. And it was made messier because we were in the media and the media loves to cover media. And so any misstep would be amplified in a way it might not be amplified if I was trying to start a shoe company. People wouldn't care.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be where we started to hit our sort of first period of real turbulence. But up until then, it was like we're having a blast. For the most part, people are getting along and we're all trying to kind of figure out who does what. And, you know, then John and I are becoming, you know, we start to become leaders ourselves, we start to do a lot of self-appraisal. We start to figure out what are the weaknesses and like how do we create something that's more sustainable. Like we're not dumb. Like once you have turnover as high as we had and you have people writing stories about us being a sweatshop, we're not dope. 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 Rely on something other than the maniacal energy of a few people.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bunch 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 in a very throwback industry. It started to become clear that that was the source of the tension. I was like, there's no way that we could be a successful company at a national or international scale if we're running like a mom and pop shop or certainly running like a mom and pop shop backed by a local TV station. We need a full-time leader. We need a full-time technologist. We need to continue to grow and find new revenue streams. And like we were that.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I had a better memory on specifics, but I would say it started low grade around year three. And got progressively. More, worse, gradually worse. It's not set up the way you would want to set up a company, right? Our CEO Fred is also running a massive local television empire, right?”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't remember in those early years there being a whole lot of tension about revenue. They're definitely. Right. 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”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was in the newspaper. But back then, that was enough. That was money. But let's say we spent $10 million. I think we brought in $300 or $4 million in year one by memory serves me correct. So there was money coming in. And I think by year three, we broke even might even have made money that third or fourth year. But back then, I wasn't even that worried about the business. We wanted it to work. We were 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A politico story, we would say, is listen, is this an idea, an analysis a scoop that the Speaker of the House or the White House chief of staff would consider new revelatory essential illuminating? Like that was the marker. Like we were writing, we called it the bullseye.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, it became a joke to a point because I would do so much of it. But instinctively, I felt that's 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 we're under intense public scrutiny.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 push people harder than I push myself. And I hired a lot of people who I knew were similar, right? We ended up hiring Jake Sherman or Ben Smith. 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. John had been a manager. John was certainly the adult in the room. And I was more Vincent Lombardi. Like I'm going to work you. I'm going to work hard. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to try to inspire. I'm going to try to run around the room. Like, what do you got for me now? Let's get a scoop. Like, why did that person beat us?”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And so there was enough public success that it was clear we could be successful.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no entrepreneur who's done your show who won't tell you that there's an insane amount of pressure. 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 knows nothing about politics at the time, doesn't pay attention to media, just came to hang out and go to bars for a couple days. And I remember him looking at me, going to bed at 12 and getting up at 3 o'clock and firing off 100 emails saying, whatever you're doing is not healthy. What are you doing? And it wasn't healthy, but it was.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Failure is not an option, like anybody who's 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 J-March, Jonathan Martin, who are breaking stories and that other people were having to follow, that we built up this momentum. And a few things became very clear to us early on. One, Talent matters. Profoundly one good person, one awesome person is better than ten 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think John and others were asking me that at the time as well. Yeah. 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 remember looking at Harris and saying, if you could do it over again, would you do it? And even though we've promised not to ask that. And he said, no way. But it was that bad. It was a dark, dark moment.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 we're about to launch, and we look at all the stories, we're so busy getting everything put together, we never had time to deal with the copy. We knew what the lead story would be. 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. We were literally sick to our stomach. 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?”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the arrangement originally. Yes, they had business acumen, they had TV stations, they had set up sales organizations before. And so in the beginning, it was very much a group effort, right? And Robert, who if it weren't for his money and his courage in taking a chance on us, Politico doesn't exist. And I look back at it was a miracle, a miracle that politico worked.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, here's a computer, here's an office. This is real. It's not some, I'm not doing it in my garage. This isn't a garage band activity”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT