How Do You Run a Company When You Can’t See Six Months Ahead? - with Axios CEO Jim VandeHei

Jim VandeHei (0:00)

I believe every one of us will have Einstein-level genius across any topic we could possibly give a shit about, probably in a three-year time period. In a two-to-five-year time period, I think the open web will largely collapse, and that will move most information content to social platforms and LLMs, most of them highly personalized. I believe that anything that is verifiable, repeatable, identifiable will be automated.

Once everybody has Einstein-level intelligence, people are not going to be satisfied with sameness. Humans hate having the same thing. I'm Jim VandeHei, co-founder, CEO of Axios. I'm jazzed to talk about how AI has transformed my job as CEO, has transformed the company Axios that I run, and is transforming the country that all of us live in and love.

Jeremy Utley (0:47)

I think it'd be worthwhile to start with your confessions of an AI lab rat, and one thing that Henrik and I, of course, I think we sent it to probably 100 different of our CEO friends, because we want them to be lab rats, and or we want them to have kind of kindred, know that there are kindred spirits in the world.

Why did you write that? And also, what was the impact on your team?

Jim VandeHei (1:07)

Well, I wrote it because I did turn myself into an AI lab rat, and I think people are deeply curious, both our readers and my own team, on kind of like, what are we doing? Why are we doing it?

Luckily, I think I was early to figuring out, okay, AI is gonna be a big deal, right? We cover business, we cover media, we cover tech and politics. I got to know, you know, spend some time with the Sams and the Darios of the world early on. You could tell, okay, this is gonna be something bigger than your traditional technology.

And what I realized early is, okay, this could be like the first technology that speaks Jim, meaning I don't do anything about coding. I don't know languages. I don't know how to do it. I'm like a self-described tech dope. But it felt like, okay, this one's gonna work based on language. So it really was going to be like, how creative could you be? Are you conceptual? Do you think in systems? Are you kind of persistent in trying to solve a problem? If so, this technology will probably work. So I decided, okay, I want to do that. I'm gonna throw myself into this. And I knew that in media, I just didn't want us to be a victim of another technological wave, kind of like the Washington Post was when I was there. So I'm like, I want us to be at the forefront of using it. If we as a company are gonna be at the forefront of using it, why is the CEO need to lead by example? And so I threw myself into it, spent a lot of time reading about it, thinking about it, talking to people, utilizing it. So by the time I wrote the column, I was hearing from readers who were deeply curious about it. And I felt like, okay, I'm running a media company. I'm also a reporter and a writer. So why don't I put those two together to explain what I'm doing and what I'm seeing? Because there was and still is a huge gap between people who kind of passively see the technology and they're somewhat unimpressed with it. And I think those of us who spend a lot of time utilizing it, and we kind of see day to day the magic of it and the possibility of it. And I wanted to narrow that gap. And the reaction was amazing, like just a lot of feedback. It turned out, I think the most surprising thing was, and you probably experienced this with your show, there's a lot of CEOs who I would have assumed were more AI savvy than they actually were. Which now, in retrospect, makes sense, because they're just running their company.

They've always had a CTO. They got the job because they were great at sales, great at operations, great at something specific. And this is a kind of a new skill set. And so I was surprised by how many people I heard. And in fact, after writing that AI lab rat column, I ended up starting a newsletter for CEOs by me, a CEO that largely focuses on how do you utilize this technology and think about this technology in a workplace that's changing every six or seven weeks. And that has been a really good product for us. It turns out to be a pretty good business for us, but lots of us CEOs, literally thousands on it.