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

“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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 wrote up this note to Harris to me and to Harris's wife, Anna O'Hantlin, and she was quoting Churchill and Roosevelt and about seizing the moment and moments like this only happened once, get in the arena. She saved us from ourselves.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically had convinced himself that we can't do this, that he was going to pull the plug. And we had always said, like, we're doing it together. One of us not doing it alone. And so he wanted to pull the plug and he comes over and 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure. I mean, again, I got a wife at home. I've got kids, and we're. It's not a cheap market living in Washington, D.C. And so the risk was. Very high. I always calculated that, okay, but even if I fail. A pretty good reporter, somebody's going to hire me. And so I'd never worry that much about the failure dimension. I worried a little bit about the public humiliation, but even that I don't spend a whole lot of time caring what other people think about me. So 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”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct, yeah. And what we said to them was it just went work. Like 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. You know, they're bringing it, though. At this point, they're bringing it. They do both the charm and then they do the intimidation, right? Like 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, who 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 catastrophic mistake.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 postpolitics? Don't do it there. Do it here. If you think the future's digital, build it out here.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I remember Don Graham saying, what are you 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 a fanciful dream. Was their initial reaction until they realized that we were serious. And then they got serious.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this is the serendipity part. And I remember telling Harris like, if this is meant to be someone's going to come along and hear about it, and, you know, 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 like 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm like, 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. So, yeah, we thought if we could do those two things, we were going to have a really successful publication.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Back then, the Washington Post and WashingtonPost.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 leaderboard, my story got more readers online than it got in print. They're like, yeah, yeah, that happens every day.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it led us very quickly, and it probably only happened because it went quickly, to a series of conversations. John and I, or John had been 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, ah, 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. And every person that we talked to said, not only do I like that, like, can I invest? And so we're like, wow, okay, now this is real.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I answered my rhetorical question to John saying, not that much. If you think about what's happening before us, if we hired, at the time he said, 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. It literally went from 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 Politico”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? 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?”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 you're meeting on this, even if I didn't know they're 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'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 that little bag of tricks and an ability to write fast allowed me to be good.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very competitive reporter, both 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, do I have imposter syndrome? Am I ever going to get another scoop? And a lot of this stuff I didn't realize until later in reflecting on it. 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”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 out to Washington is if I could cover leadership in Congress for roll call. That would be it. Like, I would have made it”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And here I am. I don't own dress clothes. I had like 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 Currick and Matt Lauer. And I couldn't be more scared 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, you know, especially around, like, I was the first person back then to report that Republicans were meeting secretly in the basement 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always had a natural once I got into journalism, a fascination with just how people get views and abuse power. I'm very interested in power. I understood politics.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, you start calling people, you start figuring out who has power. And at the time, I'm in my young 20s and I'm single. And guess what? Most staffers earn their young 20s. 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Punch Bowl. We were covering Congress. The three of us were off and 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 in 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was one of them. I mean, it's one of the little, it's one of the, 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. So 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm like ambitious. Like, I'm carrying bricks. I have no job. I'll take anything. But anyways, they didn't hire me, but a company called Inside Washington Publishers did. And Inside Washington Publishers is a collection of kind of hyper-niche publications. Newsletters. Newsletters. Well, yeah, like pamphlets, yeah, like the pre-newsletter, like paper newsletters, right? Yeah. And New Fuels Report was the one that hired me, and it was covering the alternative fuels industry.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny thinking back about that. 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 I've never thought, even when I became an entrepreneur, I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. But I look 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 in these congressional hearings and such. And so when I finally interviewed with whoever I interviewed at C-SPAN, they're like, I think you're a little too ambitious for us.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, it was awesome. I learned everything you could about, you know, how to deal with the press, but 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 hideaways. And I just, I loved Washington, just loved it.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was done. It was printed. This is the printed version. No. That was humiliating, humbling. But even that, you bounce back and I just, you know, Zane was gracious and the people around him were generous in teaching me and having patience. 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 become a rock star. Like you're the paper. And yeah, it was just an amazing master's class in running something.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You cut out the columns using a razor blade. And This is my first issue. I'm working 80, 100 hours, whatever it was, was 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 1, 2, 4, 3. And I remember sitting in my car and exhausted in reading this and realizing that I had screwed it up. Because they already...”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just inform 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. 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.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's like, I mean, I had decided okay, I really like journalism, but I had this. Kind of suspicion that how many sports is going to get old. And so I called around every newspaper and brilliant news is one of the top of the list because obviously starting with a B. And Zane Xander answers the phone and I explain, hey, I want to come. I'm 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, you know, 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? I'm like, again, I don't really have done one job at covering high school sports. I don't know that that qualifies me to run a newspaper. He's like, yeah, whatever. He goes, my editor just.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I mean, red newspapers. And that was really lucky because Gene Hints, 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. Like, learn to work sources. Learn to write a story. Learn to be creative. And so I really took his advice.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, this was the local newspapers. Oscars Northwestern. And so he gave me a writing test, and I did well enough that he hired me to basically work full time as mostly covering high school sports, but a little bit of college sports. And then I was hooked. Like, I'm gonna do this.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 loserish, right? But I was just interested in the process and it was all new to me and something about it like I intuitively got. And I was also trying to figure out, okay, 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 I went to the, 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 Oshkosh Northwestern and see if they have any jobs. I went in, 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 can you give me some kind of test? And maybe if I pass it, can I have a job?”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things, three things partying, drinking, and I worked a lot. I always had really good work ethic. I probably even in high school I worked 40 hours a week at a delivery. What did you do? I delivered pizzas for the most part in high school. I did it at Little Caesars, and then there was a local restaurant called Red's Pizza. And so I'd work 40, 50 hours a week, occasionally going to class.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Troublemaker, for sure. Not well behaved. It's funny. I didn't until college, I just put so little thought into school or even what I was going to do with my life. Like I was a fun-loving guy. I think I got along with people, you know, because I was interested myself by the time high school. I was interested in events and news, but I didn't like. Homework or things like that, normal kids did. Even the first couple of years, I got good enough grades to get into the University of Wisconsin, Osh Gosh, and then I turned in my 1.491 grade point average and had myself on.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I was a terrible student. Graduated in the bottom third of my class. You know, teachers would probably describe me as a troublemaker.”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a big deal. I was pretty cocky in public about what we were going to deliver. 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
“Started to go through the stories one by one, and they were awful. 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?”
2023-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT