Jim VandeHei

VandeHei was a White House reporter at The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry, working under John F. Harris.⁠[1]

In 2006 VandeHei and Harris left The Washington Post to co-found Politico with Mike Allen and Robert Allbritton, the heir to a banking and media empire who backed the venture. Politico launched in January 2007, when VandeHei was 35.⁠[2][1]

In October 2013 Politico hired Rick Berke to formally replace VandeHei, who had moved to the business side; by 2015 VandeHei had become chief executive of the company.⁠[1]

In January 2016 VandeHei, Politico’s co-founder and chief executive, announced in a memo that he would leave after the election season, as would Playbook author Mike Allen. Amid talk of disagreement with owner Allbritton over expansion into state capitals, VandeHei denied the rumors at a staff meeting and said he was eager to build a new venture once again.⁠[3]

VandeHei co-founded Axios with Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz, and the company launched in January 2017. VandeHei bet that bite-size newsletters could overcome what he called the “crap trap” of the open web. In late 2020 Axios acquired the Charlotte Agenda and expanded into more local markets the following year.⁠[4][2]

On August 8, 2022, Cox EnterprisesCox EnterprisesCox Enterprises is an American family-owned business group headquartered in Atlanta.Open the full entry announced its acquisition of Axios; the three co-founders kept substantial stakes and continued to lead editorial and day-to-day business decisions. Cox did not disclose the price; press accounts put the valuation at about $525 million, and Cox added a $25 million investment to expand coverage. Axios HQ, the company’s communications software business, was spun off as an independent company majority-owned by the founders, with Cox as its sole minority investor and VandeHei as chairman of its board.⁠[4][2]

VandeHei said in the release that Axios had found its “kindred spirit for creating a great, trusted, consequential media company that can outlast us all.”⁠[4]

On February 6, 2023, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry (a16z) published on its YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel the session “The 4th Estate: How Media is Changing in Washington, D.C.,” moderated by a16z general partner Katherine Boyle, in which VandeHei, as Axios co-founder and CEO, appeared with Substack co-founder and CEO Chris Best and journalist and author Bari WeissBari WeissBari Weiss is an American journalist and editor, the founder of the news outlet The Free Press, and editor-in-chief of CBS News since October 2025.Open the full entry. The discussion covers whether the relationship between policymakers and the media is still healthy, how decentralization affects media institutions and journalists, and what motivates people to start new media organizations in a volatile field.⁠[5]

From late 2023 VandeHei held conversations with several AI companies and their leaders, including OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry CEO Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry. At an OpenAI-hosted panel in March 2026 he said that “AI will save local news.”⁠[2]

He calls himself an “AI lab rat” and has required staff to embrace AI tools, saying: “We were early to basically telling our staff that you don’t have a choice.” He has described a “local supersystem” that could automate rote tasks and wants Axios to be in a thousand communities someday.⁠[2]

Axios: Official website: https://www.axios.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]