Since its creation nearly nine years ago, The Information has built itself into a solid subscription business that consistently delivers analysis and scoops about the tech world, primarily to a lucrative audience of high-flying C-suite-ers. Founder and CEO (and Vanity Fair New Establishment alumna) Jessica Lessin wouldn’t cough up just how many subscribers the publication now has, but she did share a personnel move that stands to take its reader-revenue mojo to the next level: The Information has hired News Corp veteran Karl Wells as its first chief commercial officer, a role that reflects, according to Lessin, how “we’re really gonna ramp up on the business side.”

By the looks of his résumé, Wells has been a subscription wizard at News Corp’s Dow Jones unit for the past seven years, most recently as chief subscriptions officer, a role that includes consumer oversight of Barron’s, MarketWatch, and Lessin’s old stomping grounds, The Wall Street Journal. Before that, Wells worked for The Sun, News Corp’s ferocious U.K. tabloid, which flirted with a paywall back in 2013 only to do a 180 about two years later. “He’s coming aboard to really build out the next phase of The Information,” Lessin told me, plugging two other new recruits in a similar vein: Michelle Evers, who recently left her post at Time to oversee The Information’s brand partnerships; and George Diguido, formerly of Insider, as vice president of growth. “I’m thrilled with the growth of our subscription business, and it has been very organic, but we’re just scratching the surface on the growth of that business, the growth of our B2B corporate business, our brand-partnerships business around events, and so on. So what Karl’s gonna do is ramp that up across the board.”

In the absence of cold, hard numbers, Lessin said revenues are up 35% year-over-year and that The Information has more than 360,000 “active readers,” meaning only a certain slice of them are paying readers. (Others get free newsletters and comped articles and such.) The company’s headcount is now north of 50—about two-thirds of those in the newsroom—and Lessin said she thinks they could “easily double” that within the next couple of years. But what to make of the “brain drain” I read about recently, a bunch of Information folks—including heavyweights like Jessica Toonkel and Martin Peers—departing for the likes of Bloomberg, Politico, and the Journal? “I see talent flowing towards us,” Lessin countered. “We just hired rock stars from The New York Times and Bloomberg. I think as we become more influential, we have a reputation as being a great magnet and platform for talent. I feel pretty good about the direction we’re headed in.”

Apart from the new hires, there was something else that Lessin—who moonlights as an angel investor in start-ups including the forthcoming Justin Smith and Ben Smith project, Semafor—wanted to riff about in the wake of this week’s news that Axios has sold itself to Cox Enterprises for $525 million. “We’re building this company over the very long term,” she said. “We don’t have investors. I own the company. We’re not coming up with, ‘We need to hit this number to sell the company in three years.’ Twenty or 30 years from now, I think the Times will be around. The Journal. Bloomberg. We’ll be around. I don’t think any of these V.C.-backed start-ups are gonna be around.”