So we have spent a lot of time just trying to figure out and that's our job is to figure out like where's the world going and what happens when you have machines that can synthesize process sort and then convey information as well if

not better than humans and I think that's where we're headed.

I'm Mary Long and that's Jim Vandahi, CEO of Axios, the co-founder of Politico, and author of the new book, just the good stuff. I caught up with Vandahi for a conversation about his career,

how media is changing, and what investors can learn from journalists about working in high-pressure

environments.

There's a moment in 2006 when I've heard you talk about this before.

There's a moment in 2006 when I've heard you talk about this before.

You say that you're working at the Washington Post and you say that if someone had asked you in May of 2006,

whether you'd ever start your own company, you'd have looked at them like they were totally crazy.

But then maybe like a month later,

you have an aha moment and it starts with Google buying YouTube.

How did that purchase change the way that you looked at a newsroom?

Yeah, it's funny because I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur.

Now when I reverse engineer it, I see that I was entrepreneurial, but I never

thought of myself as an entrepreneur. But I was always asking questions and when Google bought

YouTube I could tell things were changing in the industry and I remember having this conversation with John Harrison just saying man like

Looking around the Washington Post is like I love the post but we're not that great. There's like a couple of us I think break news a lot like imagine that we banded together and Eric Schmidt said how many people do I need to be able to be really interesting and to be able to compete in politics I said not that many maybe like six

superstars and six young up-and-comers and if you hook yourself up to cable TV

and hook yourself up to the internet you could be competitive if you had the right people and it's like lightning in a bottle we're like whoa well let's do that and then we took it to you I didn't even know what venture capital was really at that time took it to some venture capitalist, everybody we talked to was like,

yes, it's a good idea, I would back that or yes, you should do that.

And it took on a life of its own and from the aha moment to going live with political was literally six months

it wasn't a long process at all it just went bang bang bang and had it not gone so quickly

...