Axios co-founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei on the power of prosperity and perspective

If you’re reading this now, you likely know the drill.?

Succinct, sharply formatted copy framed by bullet points and tags like Why it matters, The latest, Zoom in, Zoom out, Driving the news, Catch-up quick and, of course, Yes, but.?

This instantly recognizable, distinctly branded mix of business, tech, media and politics news has fueled an incredible run for Axios co-founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei.?

In the past seven years, Allen, 59 and VandeHei, 53 have helped propel Axios from a buzzy curio to a formidable digital media force — anchored by a trademark mantra, Smart Brevity.?

This week, VandeHei is releasing a book, “Just the Good Stuff: No-BS Secrets to Success." Unsurprisingly, it’s bullet-point heavy and rich with pithy anecdotes about key moments of his and Allen’s rollicking trajectory. For journalists and other creatives, there’s a lot to take in.?

One of the reasons I wanted to spend some time with Allen and VandeHei ties back to an email the latter wrote back in January for Axios Finish Line. The subject was ‘The power of now’ and its contents had a lasting impact on me. It detailed how Allen, the prototypical DC media oracle, “never hesitates to move instantly on, well, basically anything he deems important.”

“If he's going to connect with someone, he does it now. Apologize? Now. You wanna get lunch? How's tomorrow? Start a new health habit? On it!” VandeHei wrote. Speed “eliminates festering problems faster and accelerates vital progress on important to-dos.”?

If Mike Allen, arguably the hardest working journalist in Washington, is able to respond to messages and emails and live a clutter-free life, why couldn't we all???

“One of the things we have learned about leadership is that everything's contagious — good and bad,” VandeHei told me. “Once you realize you should make a change in your life or your organization, just do it. In your relationships or in the workplace, a hard conversation will just get harder the more water that goes under the dam. So when you know it's the right thing, and you've wrestled with it and you've made a good decision, move on it.”

VandeHei and Allen met covering President George W. Bush’s first term in the 1990s. Allen was working for The Washington Post, VandeHei for The Wall Street Journal. They bonded one night on Bush’s first trip outside North America, an economic summit in Genoa, Italy. They ultimately ended up working together briefly at The Post, sitting in side-by-side cubicles.?

But it was the decision to flee the safety and security of their highly coveted jobs that catapulted them to notoriety. As co-founders of Politico with John Harris, they began a stress-laden but lucrative run establishing two of media’s most celebrated start-ups.?

I was curious to hear just how the transition from The Washington Post to founding Politico and Axios unfolded for VandeHei and Allen. I was also eager to explore the leadership ethos shared in Jim's new book, so I sat recently with the duo. I’ve lightly edited portions of the chat for space and clarity.?

Politico's formation

VandeHei founded Politico with Post colleague John Harris and Robert Allbritton

VandeHei: I had only been at The Washington Post for three years when we founded Politico (in 2007). We got really enthusiastic about the idea of it. But then, you're leaving this big institution, good jobs — and you have kids. There's a lot of fear. The hardest part was when Bob Woodward and Ben Bradley called and specifically said ‘The Post needs you and this will hurt us.’ I don't think people understand how hard that was.?

The Post, to their credit, did try to start a site and basically said, ‘why don't you do that here?’ Newspapers back then thought the web was a weird thing. So the idea that a big institution would have started a digital company, basically competing with itself was a huge ‘give’ on their part. But we also knew it was a huge institution and I didn't wanna fight within that institution. I knew Politico would hurt them and people would be mad and ridicule us. But we were at peace with it and it turned out to be a great decision, but it wasn't guaranteed at that point.

Yes, we made good branding and fundamental business decisions at Politico, but it was the journalism side that helped it take off. We realized there weren't that many people who actually broke news on a regular basis and had the voracious appetite we had. So we were good at spotting that. Ben Smith, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Manu Raju, John Bresnahan, Jake Sherman: We had a lot of them. For all of our weaknesses early as leaders, we were really good cheerleaders, we could make you believe.?

We got ridiculed when we said ‘we're gonna be better than The Post’ and people really rubbed that in my face. It was absurd to say, but I really believed it. Luckily we had our people who delivered the goods, and without that Politico would have failed. I mean, it was such a shit show. People think Politico was a rocket, but it took off way quicker than we were capable of keeping up with. Like, four months in we were co-moderating a presidential debate in Simi Valley, California, walking into the room with our partner NBC, who had 150 people. We had four people, a hammer and some duct tape. They looked at us like we were stoners or something.?

A Newsletter pioneer

Although Ben Smith’s scoops from Democratic sources and Jonathan Martin’s takes inside the wiring of the GOP were huge draws, it was Mike Allen’s inimitable newsletter Playbook that gave Politico serious buzz.

Allen: I can tell the backstory on how Playbook came to be. Believe it or not, back in 2007, morning newsletters or morning emails weren't a thing. Playbook started with two subscribers, as a daily email I wrote to my two bosses, Tim Beu and John Harris. The subject line was ‘How we can rock today.’ It started with, Tell me something I don't know, what's new — always the gold standard. And then, What did we miss? What did other people have? What did I do last night? What should we be covering today? And then a piece of candy at the end, ‘one fun thing,’ something for happy hour. You'll recognize the arc and the cadence of a great morning newsletter to this day because it was a conversation with two people that I knew well. I wasn't going to waste their time or insult their intelligence.

A Clinton presidential campaign person heard about the email and asked, ‘can I get that?’ So then it had three subscribers. Then his deputy wanted it, and then the other presidential campaign wanted five subscribers and it grew like that. It never occurred to us that it was a product. I was forwarding it individually — it was taking me a half hour just to send it! Eventually we let people sign up and realized it was a very valuable journalism and business product. It was a way to take what we might talk about at breakfast or in a bar and share it across parties across the city and across different job functions.?

The Establishment takes note

Politico-isms like “Win the Morning” became a firm part of the DC lexicon. And a profile piece on Allen that ran on the cover of The New York Times magazine in 2010 pushed Playbook and the site into the media mainstream.?

VandeHei: The Times piece was painful at the time. I was on the phone arguing with them about every graph. Mike wasn't super comfortable with the proctology exam they were trying to give him. But then the piece came out, it was the cover and I remember it was such a big deal we got it framed. In retrospect, it was huge. It was like the presidential debate, the moment where George W. Bush out of the blue calls on Mike and asks him to explain what Politico is and basically does a commercial to the world for us.?

It was hard to enjoy the moment… It was so much work, we kept thinking we were gonna fail. It was a wild time… People were cheering for us to fail. We were hellbent when we did Axios to enjoy every minute. Like, worst case, it's gonna be a boutique success and we're gonna have fun and be around good people and we're going to enjoy it.

A dramatic exit

Tensions between VandeHei and Politico’s owner Robert Allbritton had been simmering for years. Eventually in 2016, VandHei and his star reporter Allen left the site to start what would become Axios. Several years later, Axel Springer forked out more than $1 billion to buy Politico — after kicking the tires on buying Axios.?

VandeHei: There was a lot of friction at Politico between me and Robert over values and transparency. As bad as the ending was, we stayed together for 10 years and we had a lot of good times together… It started to get untenable… I was clashing with Robert, I wasn't happy. Sure, I'm not a big fan of Robert’s, but Politico wouldn't exist without him. He bankrolled it. No one thought it would work, so he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for it. And he ended up making a ton of money off the company and he deserves that because he made the investment.

Now, I probably spend 98% of my time happy and doing things I'm good at with people I like. But then, I was spending 70% of my time trying to hide what I thought was kind of shady behavior. I was trying to protect my team from the friction of mom and dad fighting upstairs. I remember my wife one day just being like, ‘you're quitting, go do something else, (Robert) owns the company and he's not gonna change.’ You have to come to the realization. But that's hard, this was our baby and it was a hard birth. But we eventually came to the conclusion that we had to move on. Building a startup, you're really like family. You've gone through some really weird stuff together and you end up loving these people. We tried to do it as peacefully as we could. But you know, it was a messy transition.?

We had a six month noncompete; we couldn't work, which for us was really hard. Mike, Roy Schwartz (Axios co-founder and president) and Kayla Cook Brown, who started as my EA but became chief of staff, got together with me. We started with the question: What do we want to do? We want to do some important work with people we love and admire. On the level. No mischievousness, no hiding, no game playing. We're gonna be confident in firing anybody who's not a good person. And we've lived that since.?

Allen: There was a light bulb at that time when ‘Smart Brevity’ came to us.? After we'd left Politico, we traveled and talked to difference makers who needed trustworthy high-end information in life and work. We talked about pain points and their needs. People said there's too much firehose; if they put something aside to read later, they never do. So that was Smart Brevity: to make people who are smart professionals smarter in real time. Then came the newsletter architecture of ‘What's new, Why it matters.’ Give me some data, give me some context, give me some color and give me the power to go deeper. And that all started as one screen on an iPhone.?

We basically said, everything needs to be exponentially shorter. We’d had this fight at Politico and it was shot down because others felt like people didn't want that. But we knew, looking at the data, people are skimming, pecking and (mostly) not reading. So we said, let's build something that marries intelligence with efficiency, which was new and a little bit controversial at the time.?

Cashing in on Smart Brevity?

Eventually, Axios sold to Cox Enterprises in a deal that kept the founders on as minority shareholders and valued the company at $525 million. How did that incredible haul change its founders?

VandeHei: We joke only half jokingly that we're the dumbest entrepreneurs in the history of business because we work harder post-deal than we did pre. The truth is, we had (already) made some money off of Politico. We’re just not fancy people. So we don't have a mansion or a plane and we don't want that. We really love our jobs and that hasn't changed. The best part, to be honest, and this sounds cheesy, is you can change the lives of other people. A family member gets sick and you pay the bill. And with this book, I started a foundation to send all of the proceeds to scholarships to help underprivileged kids.?

Allen: Yes, we have staff also working on them, but the Axios AM and PM newsletter are still very much my conversation with the greatest audience in the world. I still get up at 4am, the difference now though is I go to bed at 7 or 8pm. I’ve since learned that t’s undeniable that sleeping longer means living longer.?

VandeHei: Mike is a little humble here. I always tell our staff, like, how could you be egotistical here when Mike, who's the most famous person at this company, is the person who is cleaning up after we have a party or is bringing donuts in for staff or is taking time for anybody regardless of where they sit, to spend as much time as they need, to give career guidance. In many ways, Mike's the heart of the company and that too is very contagious. And I think that's the biggest difference between Mike now and Mike at Politico. At Politico, he did his newsletter and (aside from the big picture calls) that was kind of it. Here he is much more of a leader.

Axios begins to embrace the AI frontier?

As the news industry continues to wrestle with the explosive growth of generative AI, last month, VandeHei publicly declared Axios would be one of the first media companies to aggressively adjust their entire strategy around the technology.?

Mike and I spend a lot of time reporting and talking to a lot of people about AI. We spoke to folks at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. We wanted to know how they see the world to come up with our own thesis on the most likely scenarios for the next 18 months. Our takeaway was that the AI optimists are probably more right than wrong and that in a reasonable time frame we'll have a technology that can do a lot of the things as well as humans can — and then, ultimately better. So anything that’s mechanical or rote or doesn't require much creativity will likely be done by or aided by machines.?

So we thought, if that's the case, we know we will need people who have subject matter expertise who are talking to other people to tell them things that they shouldn't tell them. People will crave more human interactivity, especially around passion projects and professional advancement. So we're doing a lot more in events, membership and programs. And our guess is the next 18 months will be really messy for readers, so they’ll want trust. And we think we'll be able to benefit from that.?

I'm optimistic… But it’s going to be different. I don't look at AI with fear. I could give you scenarios where AI is disastrous, but I could give you scenarios where AI is nirvana. But in all likelihood, the experience of technology over time is that we get excited, we get scared, we evolve and adapt and it turns out that people become a little more productive and we advance after some pain.