Jim VandeHei, Co-founder and CEO of Axios & Mike Allen, Co-founder of Axios

Willy welcomes Mike Allen. He is a journalist, co-founder, and executive director of Axios, a news source that delivers brief and efficient takes on current events, politics, media, and tech. He also co-founded POLITICO, where he wrote his first newsletter, the POLITICO Playbook. He has previously written for Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Along with Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz, he has written Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less. Mike Allen begins by explaining what makes Axios different from traditional media and talking about how "the longer the story, the better chance to get on the front page of the section," which incentives traditional journalists to write verbosely. The first two words of the Axios manifesto are "audience first." This experience inspired Mike Allen and his co-authors to promote smart Brevity to "communicate more efficiently, crisply, and be heard through this crazy fog of words that comes at all of us." With his first newsletter, Mike learned the lesson of imagining that you're a human talking to another human while writing. This means avoiding overly extravagant words or phrases. He also suggests reading whatever you have written aloud so you can edit and avoid sounding like a robot. Mike describes how readers will only remember one thing from their work. The best course of action is to identify what that one thing is, hone it, and put it on top of your writing. He adds that it only takes 20 seconds for an average person to engage with an average piece of content. Mike adds that Axios was created to redesign a new experience for the news consumer. "For ninety-nine percent of content, an efficient experience is the best one," he adds. He gives an example of how one writer used bullet points to improve his emails to parents and how it significantly made it easier for them to remember. Mike also recommends thinking about the audience as you're writing, giving the example of priests delivering lengthy homilies that fail to drive home their key points. "Think of a sharp, memorable way to communicate it and say it," he says. Axios emphasizes the message, "Brevity is confidence. Length is fear." Mike continues by saying how many people fake it in their careers by talking too much. "The long letter is easier to write because you haven't thought about it," he adds. Interestingly, his book, Smart Brevity, has only 28,000 words, the minimum required for a hardcover publication. He retells his experience applying smart Brevity to Jamie Dimon's letters and improving its readership to people beyond real estate and financing. Talking about "sharp communications equals sharp strategy," Mike describes how the human tendency to talk too much can take us out of getting a raise or a sale. He advises saying what you want and stopping there. Some customers might feel overwhelmed by a salesperson's information vomit, eventually walking out of a possible order.
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