Axios Co-founder Roy Schwartz: why average is worthless now

Roy Schwartz (0:00)

My favorite thing is when I connected AI to my calendar and to my email.

Auren Hoffman (0:06)

Why is Google not able to do that?

Roy Schwartz (0:09)

I think they're too big to be able to fix that specific topic.

Auren Hoffman (0:12)

My guest today is Roy Schwartz. Roy co-founded Axios, the news company known for Smart Brevity, and helped grow it to a $525 million exit.

Roy Schwartz (0:21)

That problem, by the way, that we're talking about, probably doesn't matter. It's not on their radar right now. The biggest thing on their radar, which is, by the way, going to be the biggest topic for the next year, is going to be, search is dead, websites are dead.

Auren Hoffman (0:38)

Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Roy Schwartz. Roy co-founded Axios, the news company known for Smart Brevity, and helped grow it to a $525 million exit to Cox Enterprises. He's now the co-founder and CEO of Axios HQ, an AI-powered internal communications platform that was spun out of Axios. And he co-wrote the book Smart Brevity, and he's got a new book, Simplify, which is out this month. Before all that, he was chief revenue officer of Politico. We're also good friends. Roy, welcome to Summation.

Roy Schwartz (1:10)

Auren, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to do this.

Auren Hoffman (1:12)

I'm super excited as well. Now, you kind of like built a whole company on Axios with kind of this idea that everyone writes too much. Why is being brief so hard, and why is everyone's default so long?

Roy Schwartz (1:27)

It goes back to school. Like you remember when you were in high school and you had to write an essay and they forced you to do three, four pages, 5,000 woods. You'd play with the margins, double space. You'd try and do all this stuff. So you have to write less. The issue is that they really put the depth with length. That's the issue. So it's ingrained in us from school.

Same thing, by the way, in journalism.

If you can write a long piece, you must really know your stuff. But it really takes a lot, as you know, to be concise. Like writing in Smart Brevity actually takes longer. It takes a lot more thinking in order to figure out, well, we're doing the work for the audience. So how do I make sure, Auren, that you can get in and out as quickly as possible? And it's just something that, for whatever reason, it's a human glitch. We tend to sit down in front of a keyboard and just vomit woods.

Auren Hoffman (2:19)

There's like a famous Mark Twain quote that goes, you know, something like, I would have wrote a shorter letter if I had more time or something.

Roy Schwartz (2:26)

Super accurate.

Auren Hoffman (2:27)

My pet peeve with podcasts is that all these podcasts are like three, four, five hours long and they're super interesting guests, but they definitely could have been an hour. And also books are like that too. I just read this, I just tried to read this book about George Shultz who I'm fascinated with. It's just like super long biography.

And it was just terrible. It was just like so long and so hard to get through. I would have just appreciated a book that was like one-third or one-fourth as long.

Roy Schwartz (2:55)

Well, look, we were very careful with the wording, right? It's not brief. Brevity is as short as it needs to be to convey the information that you need. And so it doesn't help us if it's just the Cliff Notes version and you don't get the substance that you need.

Auren Hoffman (3:09)

And sometimes the anecdotes which are actually the really important thing to get out of it.

Roy Schwartz (3:14)

There hasn't been a document yet that we've not been able to apply Smart Brevity to and at least reduce to a certain length. But we've done it even for the one that I always bring up is BP Safety Oil Rig Information. So they used to have this really thick document that everyone had to read before they would get on the oil rigs. And of course, nobody wanted to read them. We went in there, helped put it into Smart Brevity. Those things then had to be approved by legal and there's all these compliance issues. But nearly anything can be more concise than it is.

Auren Hoffman (3:48)

Yeah, like that that airline safety video that we watch. I mean, that could definitely be like 30 seconds or something.

Roy Schwartz (3:55)

Yes, exactly.

Auren Hoffman (3:58)