Axios Founders Publish New Book Simplify

Axios founders Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz have published their new book, Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less. It came out on September 15 from Crown Currency, an imprint of Penguin Random House, running 224 pages in hardcover, ebook and audiobook. The three wrote Smart Brevity together, and where that book was about writing shorter, this one is about what to delete from the work itself. The starting point is a diagnosis: rather than lightening the load, AI has piled up more things that need reviewing.

Overload was what the three talked about at greatest length in a recent interview. According to that report, Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of Axios, said the people he meets at companies tell him, "My team is drowning, everyone thinks they're smart now." The real problem, he said, is that people who had never built a deck or a presentation in their lives are suddenly producing things that all have to be reviewed in detail. Incoming pitches and outside promotional material have multiplied too, he said, so the squeeze comes from inside and outside at once.

Mike Allen, co-founder and executive editor of Axios, put the weight on human nature. "Left to our own devices, we're going to complexify," he said, adding that unless you are ruthless about auditing what piles up in meetings and habits and deleting it, the liberation of having more never arrives. Allen borrowed the phrase work-like activity from Stewart Butterfield, the former CEO of Slack, and Kate Smaje, a partner at McKinsey, has called the same phenomenon a false productivity trap. In most organizations, they say, real work and work-like activity run together.

The evidence they put forward is what they tried on their own company first. In VandeHei's own company column, which METAL has checked, he wrote that three years ago he could not shake the feeling that they were hiring too many people to do too many things, and decided to simplify radically. They killed business lines they liked, from paid policy verticals to sports coverage, whenever they were not confident they could be the best at them in media, and they ruthlessly cut the people, the layers and the number of decisions needed to do what was left. Revenue per employee jumped 75% as a result, the same column says.

Allen's arithmetic runs on time. A week holds 168 hours, sleep and work take 90 to 100 of them, and the Harvard research the authors cite finds that people spend half of what remains thinking about things unrelated to what they are doing. That leaves roughly one-sixth of your own life actually in your hands. It is also why the book leans on research into decision fatigue. Even trivial choices drain the mental capacity available for harder ones, so the sheer volume of daily inputs is itself a cost.

The framework they offer is three words. Confront, delete, amplify, in that order. Confront means stopping work you do out of habit and asking whether it matters even if you do it well; delete means writing an actual kill list of meetings, emails, reports and Slack channels. Amplify means pouring the time you free up into the one or two things you do best, and the bar for saying yes is a single hell yeah, borrowed from Derek Sivers. The official book page carries the line, "Machines can execute. Only you can decide what's worth executing."

The authors keep tightening the audit cycle on themselves. VandeHei said he used to run it quarterly and now tries to do it monthly, and in the interview he floated a weekly cadence. The sentence Allen teaches is two words: I'm booked. When somebody asks you to join something, cut it off with those two words, without apology or explanation, and if your gut answer is that you probably should, the book's actual instruction is that this is a no. Roy Schwartz, CEO of Axios HQ, said the decisive moment was writing his goals down: "it actually gives you permission."

Their advice on how to use AI splits by career stage. According to the report, VandeHei said a college student should use it minimally. The brain needs time to develop, and good ideas mostly come from recognizing patterns in facts, so build up knowledge outside the field you plan to work in first. He himself, by contrast, said he feels smarter and a little deeper than he did two or three years ago, having protected the time to go deep while using the technology to widen the range of material he handles.

What happens on the ground looks somewhat different. VandeHei said his sons and their friends were treated as in-house AI experts during summer internships at government agencies and major companies. The role existed only because they were comfortable experimenting with the tools and nobody around them was. What the interns themselves reported sounded more like nobody knowing what they were doing, yet inside the companies they worked as internal consultants on how to use AI.

The book also carries the words of corporate leaders. Brian Niccol, chairman and CEO of Starbucks, said that simplifying the work and giving people real ownership unleashes the momentum that powers a turnaround, and John Stankey, chairman and CEO of AT&T, said that a company that is not simple internally will never be simple externally. The line from Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, is that the best part is no part, and Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, said he is interested in two or three things for real. The authors interviewed leaders at Starbucks, AT&T, Airbnb and Palantir while writing the book.

The book lands in a 2026 where AI slop has become everyday vocabulary. METAL has reported that clicks on LinkedIn's AI slop report button passed one million. Over the same stretch Axios has been building Axios HQ, the spinoff that sells internal communications software, and according to the report that company recently turned profitable on roughly $20 million in annualized revenue. Axios itself was acquired by Cox Enterprises for $525 million, and Schwartz joined from Gallup in 2008 and became chief revenue officer at Politico about a year later.

What the three are selling is not a new tool but the habit of deleting. Once the volume AI produces passed the volume a person can review, what became scarce inside organizations is not the ability to produce but the judgment about what not to produce. The distance between a company that makes that judgment once a quarter and one that makes it every month is what the word productivity will come to mean.