Startup: Politico

In 2007, you co-founded Politico, and that's the politically focused news platform, and under your leadership as president and CEO, it came to be recognized by Fast Company magazine for excellence as one of the world's most innovative companies, and that was in 2010. So can you describe that experience for us? What was it like to take an organization like Politico from scratch and then build it into the world class organization it is today?

Well, first, it was a lot of fun, I think, for anybody who's thinking about a startup, if the opportunity comes up, I would do it because it's an opportunity to build something and to watch it grow. And like any startup, you have to be nimble. You have to be able to have a plan and pursue your plan, but you also have to be able to turn and redirect when opportunities present themselves. But one of the interesting things that I would say is, as your viewers are watching, and you think about something they want to do and they're maybe discouraged at first. When we were launching Politico, the first thing we were told by virtually all the quote experts we talked to was "That space is full. There's no room for an organization another news organization to cover politics." And we said we think there is. So we got launched, and two or three years later, it was really getting great growth. And then people were saying, gosh, there was a big void that nobody knew about for political coverage. You guys discovered that. So we went from being told that the space was too crowded and saying that we found an opening that didn't exist before.

You created a new category.

It was a time, you know, the internet was still kind of getting some traction, of course, other the Web sites were all out there. But it was unlike most publications at the time that we'd say, "We're a newspaper that has a web site." We would say, "We're a web site. And by the way, we have a newspaper that we own." And we wanted the newspaper just because it would give credibility to people who kind of think of it is across multiple platforms.