Politico & Axios: Jim VandeHei

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2023

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before Jim VandeHei co-founded the media company Politico, the only thing he’d managed was the night shift at Little Caesar’s pizza in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. An early passion for politics and journalism led him to Washington, D.C., where he became a political reporter for Roll Call, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. But by 2006, he could see how the internet was transforming journalism, so he walked away from the Post to co-found a digital publication—Politico—with the goal of setting the daily agenda for Washington’s power elite. With the financial backing of a local media mogul, Politico took off, but Jim eventually grew frustrated managing a company he didn’t own. So in 2017, he took another leap and co-founded Axios, a news website that gained a following for its bullet-point brevity, ready-made for the internet. Both companies have landed well: last year Axios was acquired by Cox Enterprises for over $500 million, and in 2021, Politico was purchased by Axel Springer for a reported $1 billion.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.2	What if the greatest tragedy of your life was just covered up?
0:12.5	I have never seen anything like that before or after.
0:15.7	This is the story of the worst marine-on-marine friendly fire in modern history.
0:20.0	A story kept from the public.
0:21.9	It's like, what did y'all have to hide?
0:24.6	We went to NPR's embedded podcast and its latest series, Taking Cover.
0:31.1	We started to go through the stories one by one and they were awful.
0:36.2	And we were literally sick to our stomach.
0:38.3	We're like, how are we going to put out a publication tomorrow, much less how are we going
0:43.3	to do this on a regular basis?
0:45.3	And by the way, a lot of people wanted you to fail.
0:47.7	It was a big deal.
0:49.2	I was pretty cocky and public about what we were going to deliver.
0:54.2	It was that bad.
0:55.2	It was a dark, dark moment.
1:04.9	Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories
1:10.8	behind the movements they built.
1:15.4	I'm Guy Raaz and on the show today, how Jim Van Dei walked away from a green job to
1:20.5	help reimagine journalism with Politico and then 10 years later did it again with Axios.
1:32.4	The business of news is, well, how do I say it clearly?
	...

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