Always Challenge

As the organization grew, and as your brand started to grow, how did that change the demands on you as a leader?

Well, when we were small and just getting started, there was only a handful of us. So something would come up and say in the HR area and we'd say, well, who's the HR person? I don't know. I guess I am. OK. Well, as it grew, we were able to build departments and have teams and bring people in with expertise so that changed, becoming a large organization. But one thing that we talked about and I really enforced daily to the point, I think, where maybe it drove a few people a little crazy, but we had to keep that startup mentality as we grew. We could not say, oh, look at our success. We did achieve success fairly early on, earlier than we expected, certainly earlier than some others expected.

Why do you say you needed to keep that startup mentality?

Because once you start to slow down, once you say we have succeeded here, we have it, we've created the product and now we will just stick with it, then you start to lose. And that's why Politico was able to be launched, frankly, because the others in this space were so successful and thought their business model was so strong and couldn't be adjusted or modified or improved upon, that we were able to come in and do that. So that's been and to this day at The Washington Post, that is the biggest culture issue that I talked to our team about is that we have to always be kind of using political terms. We always want to be the challenger and never the incumbent because the challenger has to earn your vote. They have to give you a reason to vote for them. The incumbent says, well, look what I did for you before, and they're not earning your vote. That was a strategy of Politico and something that I reinforce today at The Washington Post.