Holiday Special 2022

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/9ad00675076ccee5

How do I open again? Welcome. W what is this show? What are we doing? Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to home.
No, nothing against how I built this, but
That's not us. Okay. Who got the truth?
Is it you, is it you, is it you who got
No
Is it you, is it you, is it you?
Me down
Straight!
Another story on the way
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures. And I'm David Rosenthal, and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco. But today, Ben, you are hosting me.
At your lovely home here in Seattle. Welcome to the studio.
Great to be here.
And we.
Are your hosts.
How ho ho.
Ho ho ho happy holidays. Happy holidays.
Man, I uh I don't know about you, but uh
Ready to put a bow on. Twenty twenty two. Well
We have much to talk about.
Yeah.
Well, listeners, normally I have like a script, like a thing that I'm looking at in front of me to know what to say now.
But I don't really on this one, other than to say
Join the Slack.
There are great people there, including probably you if you're listening to this episode.
We don't think this is an entry point for a lot of people into acquired. We think this is probably
If you're a fan.
You're gonna listen to this, but I don't think this is gonna be anyone's sort of first
Show so we're gonna
Try and go a little uh a little deeper and nerdier than normal.
We've got
We're gonna recap.
twenty twenty two.
For the show.
For tech for us.
Talk a little bit about what's ahead in twenty twenty three.
We've got some extra, extra fun carve outs.
Indeed.
All right listeners.
Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Lagora.
The agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.
Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is gonna completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Ligora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?
So the founders did exactly what great founders do.
operate with obsessive customer focus.
They embedded inside a massive law firm for months.
They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.
And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legor's Bet Here is interesting, since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work.
and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.
And they recently launched Lagora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.
And Lagora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting.
The early Lagora numbers essentially
speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from twelve hundred legal teams in fifty countries.
And crazily, they went from one million

In about.
Eighteen months.

truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.
Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client.
If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company.
You can learn more at Lagora.com slash acquired
And just tell'em that Ben and David sent you.
With that, this is not investment advice. This is probably the episode of the year where we will come closest to things that might be interpreted as investment advice as we talk about things that we have liked and didn't like and predict the future and all that.
So do your own research.
All right, David, what are we starting with?
Alright.
I think we got a recap.
twenty twenty two, despite the craziness of the year of twenty twenty two.
In the um
Broader.
World tech.
Markets economy. This is a pretty great year.
For the show.
I have down here
My
Signature acquired episodes and favorite memories.
From the air.
We started the year
With Taylor Swift. Yes. Isn't that crazy that that was like January? That feels like
three years ago. Well we knew that at the end of the year she was gonna drop midnight. It seemed appropriate that in the year where she was gonna put on the concert
And announce the tickets for the concert series with the most amazing human history that we should of course kick the year off with a Taylor episode, predicting the future as usual here on Acquired.
I think twenty twenty three.
Might need to line her up for a follow up. We should do an acquired session with Taylor. Naturally.
Taylor, we'll come to you. We'll come to your studio. Or maybe the long pond.
Yeah, long pod. Great.
I was reflecting on this. It's pretty crazy that
I think the the announcement was that they had nine hundred stadiums worth of demand.
showing up to ticketmaster.com and there's fifty shows. I think it's something like thirty five stadiums, but a lot of them have two nights. Like there's two nights in Seattle here.
And
I'm sure not all nine hundred stadiums worth can be counted as like actual demand. Like I have to imagine when
you know, there's a U two concert or something, there are a hundred stadiums worth of demand for fifty shows or something like that.
So clearly not necessarily all purchase intent or not all purchase intent at the available prices, but still
There was just no way to service the amount of demand.
Like I actually don't know how you solve this problem. Do you make all tickets ten thousand dollars so that you actually find the
correct price equilibrium for the demand.
You know, kinda like we were talking about in our most recent episode with Ben Thompson and Stratekery and he's like the obvious thing that I should do is raise prices to maximize revenue, but then that's pretty quickly gonna lead to limiting my reach and impact, I think.
Taylor
Cares a lot about her recent impact.
And
she could probably make the most money on this tour by having ten thousand dollar tickets exclusively and still fill all fifty stadiums. I don't know what the price, maybe two thousand dollar tickets, she could do it. But if you're playing for a fifty year career, then you sort of have to like
Nurture thee.
fan base over time and recognize that the that would be like a
That would truly be a farewell tour because that would create so much right off into the sunset. So much uh negative reaction.
Which of course would create even more demand if you knew it was her farewell tour.
Uh this is making me think though, uh reflecting back on that episode.
eleven months ago. So I don't remember exactly everything we said, but
I don't remember.
Talking as much about
the obvious point that this raises for me, which is
Taylor
Is a rock star.
in the internet. She's probably like the first really, really big
Internet rock star. And the thing about the internet is
The markets are bigger than you can ever imagine.
the demand is larger than you can ever imagine. Even in niche products, like
Like for Stratekery or for acquired. Like these niches are bigger than you could ever imagine.
Now think about a mainstream pop star.

Two things. It enables the niches to exist.
So there's way more artists that
can make a living today, I think.
than if you think back to like the sixties or something where the labels would pick the ten bands of the year and that's kind of it.
But
Why is it that Taylor Swift is bigger than the Beatles? Like would the Beatles have had this much demand too when the only promotion that existed was from the labels in a sort of like
The labels pick the winners and then
Those are the winners world.
Well, there's multiple things going on here. Like one is the
disintermediation or at least the reduction of power.
Of the middle men of the
labels and everything else in the middle of the value chain and like so much more of the value is now occurring directly
To Taylor.
But that's not an argument for why there's so much more demand to see the line. There also is a lot more demand for Taylor than there was for the Beatles.
Just because
The
Internet having several ways to reach a customer means that
the most popular artist in the world is going to have
just way more distribution.
Period. Way more distribution, way more touch points. The labels friction, right? As hard as it was in all the news about how hard it was to get tickets to
These Taylor concerts.
Everybody knew.
when they were going on sale, that it was happening through social media and the mainstream media amplifying that.
And it was
Hard to secure a ticket, but very easy to log on to.
Ticketmaster, or maybe not that easy, but uh compared to I don't even know how you would have gotten a ticket to a Beatles show.
Yeah, I assume you have to like go to the stadium box office and line up that day that they're going on sale, and you would only know when they're going on sale because
of radio ads and print ads.
Maybe you read about it in the newspaper.
This is a thing I was thinking about when um I was caught up in the Friday night. Was it Friday night? Whatever it was that people were like, Twitter's going down, like it's gonna basically turn off tomorrow and I like
Mentally new
This is a system that would degrade slowly and fade into irrelevance, not it's going to turn off tomorrow.
But
putting myself in the headspace of Twitter doesn't exist soon.
I was like, How would I know if stuff
is taking off. How will I know what the general consensus is around something? How will I know that
the tenor has shifted and this thing is not interesting anymore and that thing is interesting.
When I start
reading the New York Times many times a day and going deep into many of the sections
I'm certainly not gonna log in. But you can't really even get that same kind of um
Experience from
That's super any kind of centralized publication. Correct. And it's the centralization that makes it like less valuable. You'd never be able to like say, Oh, nobody's talking about that. Because the New York Times
is not a place where you go to find out if people are talking about something. It's a place where you get news. And so you'd literally have to like in person go to events and have a bunch of conversations to know what people are talking about.
Okay, Twitter doesn't exist tomorrow.
Where do you go to find out?
What?
people in the world are talking about right now.
I think it's TikTok. Yeah, but I think it would be a much less efficient experience.
Because it's all video.
The number of new tidbits of information you can consume per minute in Twitter is high and reasonably low in TikTok. Yep.
It's ten to twenty versus two to three.
Yeah.
Well I don't know how we got from
T Swift to Twitter. It's all in a formatless. Except for the pretty robust format that you fleshed out here.
Well, you know me, I can't not prepare for an episode. Even a holiday special.
Okay, next one on my list.
Sony.
Sony Corporation.
Which I didn't think would be that interesting when we started doing it. It was your idea to do it, right? I know, it was, but I found myself being like, God, is this actually an interesting company?
I had wanted to read
made in Japan,'cause I'd heard it was amazing.
But
As I looked back at like
trademark acquired episodes, T S M C, The New York Times like I just didn't
think it would be one of those and it very clear, especially in the numbers, did become one of those.
It has it all. I mean it has the genius founder, it has the
Probably the most adversity that we've ever talked about in any founding story in all of acquired.
It's really hard.
to think offhand of a greater adversity that
a company and founders have ever come than Japan in nineteen forty five.
It also has so many chapters. I mean, the craziest thing to me is if you look at the business as of the time we did the episode, they had five separate business units.
all of which did a double digit percentage.
of their revenue.
So it's super diverse.
And all of which did a double digit percentage.
Of their
Operating income.
So like you have five businesses that are all reasonably the same size.
in top and bottom line.
In one house. Well and that we got well over two hours into the episode.
before we mentioned Playstation. And then like the Playstation story in and of itself.
We could do an episode. I mean the fact that we got from like rice cookers and World War Two to like that crazy coda about Spider Man.
Is nuts.
In the back of my mind I've been percolating
It could be fun to do
A whole episode just on Xbox.
A we need to do a Microsoft.
series. At some point. We've talked a lot
about and around Microsoft on the show, but we've never
Covered Microsoft. Apple and Apple. We've not done Microsoft. We have not done we have not done the Google IPO.
Apple
Google
Oracle.
If we just wanted to cheat and like
spike the numbers as much as possible. We just like
Take the whole next season and just do
You know, Fang, basically.
I think we should do one of
Those
companies a year.
Not even a season, I think one a year. It's gonna take three episodes to do each one.
We're able to fit Amazon into two episodes, but Amazon is only a what twenty seven year old
Company. And we didn't talk about a bunch of stuff. Right. That was the way we skipped it. We didn't really talk about Alexa at all.
Right.
Sorry, everybody, if we just lit up here. Although I think there's enough voice personalization in those devices that if a piece of media says the A word, I don't
Think it lights up anymore.
Well, it might be because I have the Sonos ones and the firmware and the phonos ones is different than the ones that Amazon actually makes, but mine will just like light up.
when people say things that are not that word and are just like in a movie.
Like when dialogue sounds too much like that nature. Like that word. Yeah. Interesting.
Here's my proposal.
I think we should do one of these big tech companies a year.
For two reasons. One
You know, for Microsoft, for Apple.
I think those are gonna be three plus episodes to do it right. Yeah.
Even at acquired length.
Episodes.
So it's a huge lift.
But also I think we should spread it out. Like'cause it's like you said, you know, the cheat code would be
If we just do'em all back to back. Right.
But we have a diversity of interest here acquired. We wanna
Go for many years.
I even have a lot of fear around like doing a three part Microsoft series where like are p people gonna be like I'm just out for the next three months.
'Cause next year, listeners, what we've decided is this is a little bit approximate, but we're gonna average it.
Every month we're gonna do
a season episode and a special. So either a the a season being like
Apple part one.
Or a special being.
an interview with someone or an acquired sessions or something that kinda doesn't fit the normal format.
And like that literally means that
It's like, oh, you're doing a three part Microsoft thing while I'm out for Q one on acquired.
I actually think about this. I've experienced this on um
One
Carve outs for extended carve outs later. One of my favorite video game podcasts, Resonant Arc.
They're a video game story book club, so they choose a game. Yep. And then they'll do
You know, ten to twenty episodes playing through the game, dissecting the story, all the like literary from a literary perspective. It's really cool. I love it.
But if they choose a game that I don't have a
large affinity for then it's
Anywhere from one to two months that I'm
Not listening to that show. Right.
And three months is certainly long enough for someone to permanently change behavior.
I don't think it's good for us if someone decides to take a three month break from acquired'cause the br it's not a hundred percent chance they come back.
Yeah, we gotta think about the right way to do this.
Maybe I'm too focused on the downside and maybe it will turn out that like
while we may alienate some people, it's the largest thing in acquired history because
I was shock that and we'll keep going here on big episodes, but that the Amazon episode was
by far the biggest in acquired history. Uh when David pitched me on this idea, I was like
Hm.
I don't know. Brad Stone has written some excellent books on this. There's been documentaries
Jeff Bezos is the most
studied CEO in the world, I think, until this recent Elon Madness.
What can we bring to the world?
Which by the way, I think that has become
This year.
Something's crystallized for me about
acquired and the show and what we do.
I think that should always be it.
our lens. Like what can we add? Yeah, by doing that.'Cause there's lots of
voices out there saying lots of things. Yep.
Spoiler alert, this is part of why we haven't covered Twitter,'cause like
There's nothing new to add. What can we add? All the best tech journalists in the world are covering it every single day. I mean you have Matt Levine, you have Dan Primack every single day.
They're reporting the newest thing with
not just reporting, but true analysis behind it. You have then Ben Thompson the following day writing a reaction piece that's like
Here's my
even more thoughtful take on what happened. You have Casey Newton who has a whole platform dedicated to this. And a bunch of access and a bunch of insiders sending him stuff, breaking it real time on Twitter. So it was one of these things where we're like, there's no daylight here for us to talk about it. We actually felt the same way about FTX, which
I mean
You could argue that
we did have a part to play in FTX because Sam was on the show last year, but like
there was so much good coverage and good reporting going on, and we're not reporters and we don't do stuff in real time, blah, blah, blah, that it felt like the right way to
have acquired add to the conversation is go do a hundred hours of research on Enron and try and sort of
indirectly draw as many parallels as we can. Like we don't want to hit people over the head with like, this is just like an FTX where they had this. It's more like how can we
Bring up ideas for people that they can draw their own parallels.
It's been interesting to watch this past week. I
Who knows if it was coincidental or not, but I think at least
Two major.
News outlets have run pieces in the past week.
With a title like how FTX compares to Enron. It was obvious. It's obvious to draw that parallel.
They were probably in the works anyway.
Is it worth sharing more on that now? Yeah, yeah.
This is a holiday special. We c we can break the format. Yeah.
Every time people write us in and they're like, Oh, you gotta do a take on this
It's like I almost never have a take in real time. Yep.
That's not what we do.
I suppose the traditional acquired format of a company buying another company, we are some of the most well positioned people in the world to have a take.
On
why that acquisition happened, what
Will make it go well, what could kill it.
Just like you killed grading.
This season, which by the way.
I
love that I was so
Surprise sometimes when you threw it. Yeah, yeah. But like look, things need to evolve. Next year's gonna be our eighth year.
Into the show. Yep.
I thought
Ben Thompson just said it perfectly on our most recent episode with him where he was like
You know, when I was young
I used to think
when I got old that I would like still be cool and I would never be one of those old people. And now that I'm old, I'm like
Old, quote unquote, in relatively. Now that I'm older
I think two things. One, being old is pretty great.
And two, I look at
my peers who are still trying to be young and it just looks kinda
Right. Sad. Like you gotta change. You gotta evolve. And the show has changed and evolved to a point where I think like we are a different show.
Than the show that used to do
Oh breaking you know, emergency podcasts.
Where it still makes sense for us to do those, like John Foley bringing in a new CEO.
The Barry McCarthy connection and that is a take that has not aged well. Yeah, I I think you're right that
It's okay.
That
We're something different now than
than what the show was.
I'm curious what everybody listening thinks.
Yeah.
Last point on this FTX saga, which again, we're watching it play out in real time. I don't know that that's where acquired shines because we we try to make
evergreen pieces that sort of stand the test of time and like
Every week.
It's so different than it was the previous week. These are kind of excuses.
We probably just should directly say we totally had Sam on
We'd wanted to
tell the extraordinary story of FTX, which was extraordinary. I mean
In now in a different way than You could not argue that it is an extraordinary story.
I do want to say I'm sorry if
The exposure.
That FTX.

And every other publication in the world. But from the platform to
Sam and uh FTX and um
Yeah, I do feel.
bad about that. I don't think there's any way we could have known at the time.
And I don't want to stop having
Interesting.
people and companies on the show, you know, c up and coming companies. So
But y yeah, like it you know, it sucks. And like a lot of people lost a lot of money. Yeah.
So sorry if you were like on the fence on FTX and you were like, I don't know if this thing's legit or not and then
acquire and legitimize that for you.
Next.
Just to if you have not listened to the Sony episode
I'm sure most of you have, but like
It's so good. Oh my gosh. Talk about like the office of a frog. We made this thing. It's amazing. You should listen. Sony story.
It is a
vastly underappreciated company and an underappreciated journey overcoming adversity.
Yep.
Okay, Sony.
Dude, we did NVIDIA this year. We did a lot this year. Yeah.
Trying to think.
Which of our silicon episodes
I feel the strongest about in terms of like enlightening me about the way the world works. I think
It's first T S M C
But NVIDIA is
The thing that's the most interesting about the NVIDIA story, I think, is
Jensen bet the company three separate times and truly bet the company like
If this initiative fails, it will go to zero.
And it worked.
Three separate times.
The first time is
When they shipped
the card in whatever it was, nine months instead of two years, and they designed the whole thing in emulation, never tested it, and shipped it to customers.
And it worked. I mean it worked enough.
And maybe I'm forgetting
the story in its entirety, but I
Think
There was a bet the company moment around programmable shaders. Right. And then a third one around the like
seven year investment before the market was there in AI and CUDA and building their own developer ecosystem.
Obviously open AI existed.
Trying to remember if Dolly was out at the time when we did the NVIDIA episodes. Certainly GPT. Well interestingly enough, I think Dolly One was, but it got no acclaim. Right.
The one that lit the world on fire was Dolly Two. It was Dolly Two. Yep.
But now as we record this.
Chat GPT came out last week.
We're thinking about the, you know, AI Renaissance and how important AI is like just in a general sense when we did those episodes.
NVIDIA Stock had that crazy run long before we did the episode. Like two years before we did the episode. Yep.
at the beginning of Covid.
And so it's interesting that I don't think that was around gaming. I think that was around AI, the thing that was sort of selling that story. And so it
In a way.
the like
craziest NVIDIA bowls that were sort of buying at the top and
selling the story as much as humanly possible. When when did it peak? I don't know, late twenty twenty one, maybe.
They were kind of right.
I don't think they knew that the next year would
Make
AI's developments as obvious
Mm-hmm.
But
Everybody who believed that
AI was gonna be this complete step change in the way that we use computers.
and decided that buying NVIDIA at a very high price was the way to endorse that belief. Like that ended up happening very quickly soon after. Yep.
The moment when it really hit me
was when we were recording the L P episode that we did with Jale at Mutiny.
And
Right. And I was like
Well, okay, you are dynamically
rewriting copy on your customers' websites.
Using GPT.
Three.
Okay, that kinda blows my mind.
Yeah.
Like I can now see
The business use cases for this.
You say you can see them.
But we're in this very interesting moment where
We've all seen
three pretty amazing proof of concepts in the last six months. We saw
Dolly two, GPT three, and now chat GPT. Which
To me is actually the most interesting because
The most meaningful change is that it changed the modality that you interact with the AI model, but it's either the same or a s I think it's like GPT three and a half or something. It's very similar.
Model.
But we're interacting with it in a new way and it's stateful.
rather than being stateless as in it sort of can preserve state and you can ask it more questions about and so I think
There's a little bit of a like a crypto moment here where it's the first time someone explains to you a decentralized world computer, you're like, Whoa, that unlocks a whole world of possibilities. And you say, What are they? And someone says,
Let me think about that. Yeah. Yeah. I feel very similar with chat GPT right now. I'm looking at it, Whoa this unlocks a whole world of possibilities. And someone says, What is it? And I'm like
I feel
better than I did about the decentralized world computer, but I still can't articulate to you like
when the app store launched, like, oh, this will be an an eighty billion dollar on demand car service market.
But that's not
Well, I think this is
Just naturally how markets play out though, right? Like we look back now and we're like, Oh, when the app store launched
It was obvious.
But was it at the time?
I think we probably would have felt very similarly back in that moment of like oh
Apps on your phone.
Cool.
When I first saw the iPhone, I thought this
Device changes everything. Cause I was like
I wanted one so bad. Oh, so bad. And I I closed the keynote so many times between the keynote and when it was like six months before the really phone came out. I was so hype for it.
I just remember seeing the device at my co worker's desk at Cisco and thinking like
I need one of these things. This is like so much of the money that I have would be used to buy one. So I I think I bought the three G the next
Year or six months in or something. I got one day one.
I didn't camp out overnight, but I waited in line for hours. I got day one release. I got the original one. I just graduated from college. It was the summer I graduated.
I graduated, but I hadn't started work yet, but I had my signing bonus. I was like
This is where I am spending my money.
I waited in line.
Just to wait in line.
I didn't have enough money. I was seventeen, eighteen.
That's right,'cause you had to pay full price. There was no carrier substitut for the original iPhone. Correct. And so it was fun to just I brought my little point and shoot camera. I took pictures of all the people uh
You know, getting their first iPhones and playing with them and setting up and your dad go with you? No, I went with my friend George.
I remember feeling like this device is amazing. I remember really wanting to make apps for it. So I made this to do list app. Right.
I sort of missed that whole first year of like you can't make apps. I don't think I was thinking about it then.
But like the app that I made was a to do list. It's not like I was like, Oh my God, this is gonna be a way that you can hail cars or order groceries. Or it was like
Let me do the smallest possible thing on this.
And
I think that's actually just how I think about products.
I'm not a Travis Kallanick like person. I think I always sort of think in terms of like
What product can I fulce of and see in my head and understand all the hard stuff involved in it?
And draw a nice neat box around it.
and just work towards shipping that thing that I can fully imagine. It's almost like
I want to be able to do everything myself.
Which is why it I think acquired has sort of come out the way that it has, rather than
Us doing a bunch of hard stuff.
I very much shy away from
Like ooh, you'd have to like send a bunch of people
into grocery stores and like
figure out all their inventory to like load it I just wouldn't do that. But the idea of like
Okay, there's this really nice neat package called an acquired episode and it contains these components and David and I can make it ourselves and what do you think the uh what would have happened otherwise?
Would be if uh
If we did the hard stuff.


Well, like one thing w we've been very explicit about
And a trade off for the show and acquire it as an entity in a business is uh
We don't wanna
have a lot of employees. We don't want to have a team. We don't want to have it. There'd be more shows. I think we would have tried to turn it into a network. We would have taken people up on the book offers. There could be like a Netflix show. There could be I'm trying to think, is there anything we could have
Done or or still do. That would just be like a fundamentally different thing. Like everything you're describing
would be building a gimlet or the like and like
That would be great. You know, we
Probably would make more money.
But that's that's like not what we wanna do. But is there anything that would be like an Uber versus a to do app?
It depends.
what on the believability spectrum you're willing to call part of acquired. Like we could have launched a new podcast app
We thought about it with Glow. We did. Glow was originally gonna be yeah, new
A new app with payments built in.
That would have been a boondogle. Yeah.
I'll validate your point. When the App Store first came out, you could stare at it and go, This is gonna change everything, but it was only a select few people who actually
saw the particular massive use case with the new thing. Yeah.
And that's how I feel about chat GPT right now. I'm like this thing's scary powerful.
And I don't actually know what to do with it. Yeah, most people I think are also
In the same mode that
You and I are of like
Oh, I can see how this could rewrite copy dynamically on a website. Right. And I see that being but that's the to do list.
version of what AI can do. Yep.
Mm.
Yeah, this is fun. We're only like halfway through the year too. Okay, so
We did NVIDIA.
Yeah.
That was so fun.
And I learned so much.
And now it's just so much more important. Almost like T Swift, you know, the same dynamic. Yep.
Then
We did Amazon.
And when I include Walmart and Amazon. I'm so
Glad we did Walmart. First. That's why
I have in my head, I was like, Did we do two Am episodes on Amazon or three? We really did three. Yeah. Episode one was Walmart. Yeah.
In order to understand
The
Roll of
retail in America today, you sort of first need to understand
That
Everything we think of as a retailer.
or most things we think of as retailer are actually discounters.
Yes. And I totally didn't get that before doing the Walmart episode. I was like, Well, there's like stores
Like Walmart and Target and
There's department stores, which are like more expensive and opinionated. And then the brands that have sort of their own stores.
But like I didn't conceptualize that
the most common place that you buy things are actually discounters.
And Walmart
was really
the company that single handedly created the wave of the modern store period, which then Amazon could take digital.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, and I was
So
Blown away.
Learning about
with Walmart.
How much of a tech company.
They were.
Like I think we said on the episode, and I I still think that
They were the first applied
technology company.
In America.
I think this is a silly I think you've said this a few times now. I don't I don't agree with it. Okay. Like
Okay, so technology
at its purest definition.
Is anything
That
enhances the productivity of a human.
So like the wheel is technology because with the same number of calories burned, you're able to go farther. Or a navigational instrument, which means you're able to get somewhere in a shorter amount of time. So
I mean maybe you could scope it to like
Well technology.
Wanna say that is
They were a company who did
business in an established
Sector. Yep.
And they transformed the way
They worked in ultimately the whole sector by applying technology to it.
So did Standard Oil.
By applying technology to the
old way that you used to extract oil from the ground.
Fair enough. I mean I guess like or you could say the car companies
Or the lighting.
The way people light their homes.
I guess the the distinction I'm trying to draw, which may not be a valid one, is
I think in all those cases the business was the technology.
Hm here.
It was a separate existing part of the economy.
that they were in that business and they used technology to transform the way they
Do it.
Maybe it's a
Meaningless distinction.
That's interesting.
I just feel like today like Walmart would have been like a hot venture back startup.
Well it's interesting. The the question with tech applying technology to an existing market is always
What are you using the technology for?
I always think about this with tech enabled businesses.
Okay, what are you using technology for and how does it make your
financial statements of your business at maturity look better? Are you using it to consolidate back office operations to make your company more operationally efficient and thus lower your cost structure and thus with the same amount of revenue?
You just run at better margins.
Were you using it?
Because you're able to
get better distribution. Like the internet enables you to generate way more revenue.
'Cause you're able to reach way more customers on the same set of costs. And so I always think about it as like
what are you actually using technology for in your business and does that make it a meaningfully better business than
Non tech enabled incumbents.
I think there's a lot of stuff in the world today that is a tech enabled thing that is not all that tech enabled when you look at the financials. Yep.
But Walmart is a perfect example of a
tech enabled business, that is like the right way to do it.
And why? What previously large number did it collapse in their financials to a small number because of technology?
Well, certainly
The
Coordination of the distribution. Yep.
And the way Walmart built their supply chain.
was vastly different.
Then
All of the
There to four traditional retailers. Mm-hmm.
And way more efficient and made their financials work in a way that just wouldn't work for other other retailers. Legitimately enabled them to have lower prices to get more customers. Yeah. Yep.
Yeah.
That's a strong argument.
Agree to disagree that they were the first that sort of like brought technology, but uh but yeah, that's a good point.
Benchmark.
Benchmark.
Benchmark was super cool.
I mean that like a pinch me moment for you and I both.
I think we should lean
into
that format as much as possible going forward.
We tell a story.
And then we have the protests on.
I think acquired has been a bunch of iterations to find our way to that format. That does feel like the platonic ideal of an acquired
a way acquired talks about a topic. I do think is probably you and I spending three hours diving deep from everything we can find, telling the story in the way that we
Sort of.
See it.
I used to think, Oh, what what can make us different and better is we're gonna spend
More time preparing.
than any other interviewer.
We're gonna take this.
Super seriously. We only do one of these interviews a month. This is like Which is a tactic, not a strategy. Exactly. And like
Yeah, we probably do more preparation for our interviews than
eighty, ninety percent of other interviewers out there, but there are other really good interviewers like Ben Thompson. Yep.
Patrice, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, exactly.
But what we did with Benchmark.
That's something that only we
Can uniquely do.
interesting. I only is aggressive, but it's something that our
format and the set of trade offs that we make in our business.
makes it easier for us to do that than for someone else.
I always think about strategy is about
trade offs. Like what's the original um
Michael Porter.
journal entries called competitive strategy.
And it's great. It's like for anyone who hasn't read it, it was in the Harvard Business Review, I think when it first came out. Something like twenty pages. It's very cogent. It's very straightforward.
And he talks a lot about how
There's operational efficiency and there's strategy. And operational efficiency is we're just gonna be better. We're gonna be more efficient. We're gonna do it for cheaper costs. You and I are gonna do more research than anybody else. But there's real strategy, which is trade offs. Right. It's the southwest is not a strategy. Right. There's sort of the southwest model of like, we are going to have a
different model for where we keep planes than every other airline. We're not gonna use the Hub and Spoke model. We're gonna
Everywhere that we fly to in a constrained set of places that we fly to is going to be
A pseudo hub for us.
And we're gonna
keep our planes sort of diversified and we're only gonna have one model of airplane. So that way they're easier to service. And there's a whole bunch of trade offs involved with that, but that's our strategy, even though it's
comes with a lot of downsides, we're gonna lean into the upsides. And I think like the lean into the upsides thing for us is
If you're doing a super high velocity show.
Benchmark's probably not gonna feel like
Your
giving them a unique spotlight.
in a way to do something like that.
If you
Do things that
may or may not enable deep trust from listeners.
then there's people that are not gonna wanna come on the show'cause they don't know how they're gonna come across. But if you always
sort of lean into this.
We have very few guests.
We
think they're people that you really should hear from, which by the way, this is why the SVF thing burns me up so much, is cause like we try to be ridiculously selective.
Then
It enables you to
create content with people that otherwise are not going to go do the circuit.
Yep.
Not to mention when we do.
three hours of content about the thing before it enables us to come in with that prepared mind. That's what I was gonna say too. There's an element
In the case of the benchmark episodes.
It actually was all pre planned in advance that we were gonna do the episode just us and then we were gonna do the dinner with them.
That was planned before we even released the first episode.
But
I do that we've experienced in the past with the show
There are
Times where
We will
Engage with a company or a CEO or a firm
Before having done any acquired content on them.
And they're like
They don't engage fully. Right.
And then we do an episode just us, and then it completely changes the tenor of the conversation.
Yeah, it's like being willing to do the work to prove
that you're as serious about caring about this topic as you say you are.
And by us having the format of you and I just doing these deep dives on companies.
That is a differentiated strategy than an interview show.
Yeah.
Okay.
And run.
Kinda talked about it. It's super recent. I have nothing to add other than
One, I think it's fun to add little corrections and additions to as we go through here. Yeah, we've got a few of these. On the Enron one, I neglected to point out that there is a company today called Enron oil and gas that's like an eighty billion dollar company.
Publicly traded as E. O. G. Yeah, Listener uh wrote uh emailed us about this. Yep.
That's the upstream production business. So the oil and gas industry over the last thirty years has sort of fragmented into upstream and downstream and and midstream.
Oh, I think it's a good thing.
And I think EOG is sort of their upstream business that spun off. But it is a publicly traded company that still bears the Enron name. Yeah.
I should have looked this up. Did they change the name officially to EOG or is the actual name? No, that's a good question.
Good question.
It is actually called EOG resources.
Like the name of the company is EOG. That makes sense. It's like the uh accentured Arthur Anderson. Although there is
After many rebrands and iterations, some subset
Uh
Arthur Anderson
was preserved as a tax organization that is now called Anderson Tax again.
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
'Cause I guess tax is separate from audit, right? They had tax, audit, and consulting and consulting became Accenture.
I assume audit is what went away entirely, and I think they spun off tax in its own new name that is now Anderson Tax. Anderson Tax.
Interesting. Which is crazy to me that there was enough brand equity
in Anderson left to sort of go right that
You would have thought that um There's gotta be a story there.
Mm.
Could be an L P episode. Could be an L P episode.
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That Ben and David sent you.
We talked a minute ago about
Trade offs when we're talking about
Benchmark. Yeah. Two parter.
What in your mind are the biggest trade offs that we make here?
Unaquired.
I think we
make a ton of trade offs. I think we are
A maybe to a fault purist.
organization. We're gonna say you're looking at the whole organization. Okay. Not a lot of content.
Right.
A common wisdom is to release content every week. We don't do that. That has downsides.
such as it's hard to become a top show in the charts if you're not constantly producing new content. It works against the algorithms, but it has upsides of now we can go do really, really deep research.
A second one being really long episodes. That's a massive trade off. Like lots of people don't want to listen to you when you do that, but the people who do really like it.
Another one being people often ask like do another show, bring another hosts. You could leverage the podcast feed to promote other
episodes of your new spinoff show with your new host, where you have some of the economics of that.
there's like a lack of purity to me that that's not acquired then. That's I don't know why we would do that. It doesn't fit in the box. It's one of those things where it's like sure you could make more money doing that, but it goes in the too hard pile. I think you and I have a really big too hard pile. Yeah.
In some ways that's strategy. It's like if you actually believe in the set of trade offs that you have
then you have to be willing to have a really big two hard pile when there's a lot of people telling you there's low hanging fruit to be done.
But often that low hanging fruit is counter to your strategic trade offs. It's interesting. I feel like
You
Always.
Been this way, I think, in your life.
I'm cranky.

Uh you're so you're not criky, though. You're wonderful.
But I'm cranky about things like this. Like I You're per snickety. You're not cranky. I'm per snickety. You're per snickety. Yes, for sure. Jerry Seinfeld said it really well on the Tim Ferris show, which is one of the best podcast interviews in history.
That's my first carve out of the way. Tim asked him, like, how does he come up with all the bits? Like how does he observe things? And his comment is, There's so many things that annoy me.
I sit there and all I can see in the world is all the things that are like a little bit wrong and that just really bother me.
And then I write them down.
And then I polish, polish, polish, polish, polish. And I'm not
Jerry Seinfeld and I don't it's not to that extent but like uh application, but a similar
Like we ship an acquired episode, all I can see are the sixteen ways that we could have made it better.
I'm proud that it's out there, but like
Really all I can see are the flaws.
I think my hunch is right that you've always been this way. Yes.
I've become much more this way over time.
I used to be not this way at all.
I used to be like
I believe you can do everything.
Trade offs like
The old uh Jim Moira, the Colts coach of the playoffs. Like playoffs? I was like, trade offs. Trade offs.
As I become older though, like I
completely have shifted and embraced trade off. Oh yeah, you don't even answer email.
I mean it's honestly crazy. It's like a joke now, yeah. It's not a joke when I'm trying to get a hold of you. I feel so bad. The only person I feel bad about with it is you. You bear a huge brunt to that, thank you. You're also pretty good about like
I said I was gonna be done working today at six, and so
I'm just like
Not really doing anything after six, even if
the text look kind of important. That's fine. Well and I've called parenthood, but Yeah, that's true. Yeah, parenthood has probably forced you to lean into some of that more. Yes. I was leaning this way anyway, for sure. But like
It was like a massive like
title wave by I felt like I was at like a water park, like and a wave machine came along and like I was heading this direction anyway, floating along and then just like whoosh. The issue now that now that you're doing it pretty aggressively is you and I amplify each other because I have this thing where I'm like, oh this is a thing that David would say like not worth it. Like this is like probably a good time to talk about this.
We did a lot of live stuff this year. Let's talk about this. And like some of which were super cool. Like there were some amazing opportunities we got in twenty twenty two. But for lots of reasons, they're way harder than doing you're in my normal thing.
And are they worth it? Are they that much incrementally better for how much harder they are for us? Probably not. In almost all cases. There are cases where it is, but in almost all cases, no. And so
I think this is one of the things where like
You inspire me to be more persnickety. You asked the question and then I went to a place of like, Oh, well that's easy. We should not do anything live because
the juice is almost never worth the squeeze, which is probably too far. Like there's probably some middle ground where it's like if Pitchbook offers us the ability to do another arena show, like oh my God, we should do an arena show.
but the litany of things that make this way harder and frankly way
Less listenable after the fact.
So let's recount the sort of like cool live stuff we did this year.
We did the arena show. It still is like
Surreal. I I can't say that without laughing. Pinch me moment at least number two of the year. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
We did the arena show.
We then also did a

live show in another country for the first time. Yep. Uh in uh in Portugal. Uh with Solana at breakpoint.
That was a whole nother crazy set of experience. And and amazing. Yep. Uh we did the LP show live at the T C V event. Yep. The benchmark
Dinner.
Although it wasn't a
Live public event.
The amount of production effort that I was down in San Francisco for three days, we set up three cameras, we bought a bunch of new microphones, we tested all the microphones. Big production lift.
Big production lift.
So things that make production harder.
Guests. Yes. Total wild card. They might cancel on you. They might reschedule. They might not use the equipment we send them. Yes.
In person.
changes it way harder. Like you and I are sitting here now, it took an extra hour to set this up to have this beautiful f roaring fire next to us. Yeah, we haven't even mentioned, yeah.
these three cameras, although now that I'm looking at it
There's only two cameras on because here's a trade off we make. We don't have an engineer. We don't have a sound person or a video person who works with us. So if you've been watching this on video for I don't know how long, the last like
I'm gonna guess that thing shut off.
half hour ago.
We lost our camera.
So
Talk about trade offs.
And especially in camera. Especially in shooting
Stuff.
Like live in person.
There's a whole new web of things that could go wrong that
just don't happen when it's you and I on Zoom. Yep.
Now at a live audience.
That
Massively compounds it.
first of all the sound quality is gonna be way worse. So that bothers me as a personicity person.
the audience gets antsy in their seats'cause no one can sit still for four hours. No one wants to attend a four hour I mean, when you're at a sporting event, you half time, quarters, you know, you go get concessions, you whatever. So
it makes the product different and I think worse for the hundred and fifty plus thousand people who are going to listen after the fact. So it's this interesting compromise where for all those people it's a worse product, but for the people in the room, that's what we're optimizing for in the moment.
And I don't even know that we optimized for that. It's so funny. My um
Uh.
Yeah. The arena show. Like it.
Let's just take a step back. It was so cool. I'm like amazing. Um it was so cool and
Everybody who came, the fact that so many people came and flew in from
All over the world. Yep. We did a Brooks Run with people in the morning. We did a dinner with some sort of like friends at the show and previous guests and sponsors the night before at Canlis, who we've had on the show and that adapting episode. Yeah. But it's you know
looking back on what to talk about because you actually
But
The farther we get from it, the more
In my mind and in my emotions, the space the arena show occupies is just like Jenny and my wedding. Like ups, all the amazingness, special feelings of it. And like
My most vivid memory is looking back on both events.
Or just a huge amount of stress and being like
Are people having fun right now? Like is this going well? Like, you know, I mostly remember the upside of both of them of of of my of my wedding. I remember the upside too, and the you know, but uh but every time I think about it, I can't not think about uh
You know, us being on stage in the middle of the show.
And uh when we got to Act Two and Anu was on and we didn't have breaks planned and like people needed to go to the bathroom and get food and pitchbook was paying for all the free food and booze and everything up and so of course people were gonna go like after the first
act ends, it's like okay, well now's a good time to go take a punish to the open bar. Of course. It was just like oh we should have planned that better than I'm gonna be able to do that.
Anyway, all that to say
Some of the live shows we've done.
Or
the most special experiences of the year. Yes.
They have
hidden value for acquired in a bunch of ways. Like
getting to actually talk with real people, like getting to hang out with the thousand people that came to the arena show. Like
life changingly cool to get to meet so many folks.
And also always, always remember that night, especially the after party afterwards. Yes.
Walking into Queen Edbeer Hall was very cool.
And just hanging out for hours.
And also at least ten, if not twenty times as much work.
for a product that I continue to believe was worse for people who listen to it than our average acquired episode. Yeah.
So it's like again it's a set of trade offs that
We just have to be intentional about making next year rather than being like
Ooh, that would be a fun conference to speak at. Oh my god, I forgot about Capital Camp.
Oh, capital cap, yeah.
That was so cool. That was cool. That was a relatively low trade off because
Uh
Patrick and Brent and Clayton and the team there.
They took care of everything. Yep.
Absolutely.
It was different too'cause we created a talk for it. So it was less
Issues.
because there was no guest. So there was no sort of like guest risk. But like
It was the first time. I'm such a like V C was a technology risk, is there gesterous? Uh
But
The only thing that we had done that was similar
was the acquired top ten, the best acquisitions of all time episode that we did. And so
we had like a little bit of confidence that you and I could produce a sort of talk about a thing that wasn't the entire history and strategy of a company, but that was a
Totally new format for us.
I'm curious what you think.
I'm I'm so glad we did Capital Camp and like that, you know, work time was a fun switch up, but I think it was an inferior
format to the normal show. Like I was thinking like put we put together a deck for it and like I mean which again you did most of but like it was a set of pictures. A set of pictures, but like I haven't made a deck in years.
Yeah. That was cool though. I mean the nice thing about doing that is then we have a product we can sort of like take on the road to
I think we can share this publicly. You gave that talk again at an internal fundrise event. Yes, which was super cool.
I would love to do more of that. Like I got to meet
Everybody at fundrise like the
Yeah.
our biggest partner for the year.
And like
The whole team, like all three hundred people.
At the company, we're there at the off site. It was very cool.
All this to say, it leads me to believe
That
much like all the other trade offs we make, we just need to figure out how do we eighty twenty it.
What are the things that we care the most about and how do we not do the long tail of stuff? So I think it means
pick like one episode per year to do a massive live show and throw the acquired Super Bowl slash wedding.
And maybe once a year is even too often,'cause God, it's a lift.
But two
then feel free to do a bunch of in-person stuff with our partners, with our sponsors, with people that we like.
work with
on the show anyway and want to just like continue to build deeper relationships with, but those aren't necessarily episodes. Yeah.
That has been a
Huge highlight.
for me for the year is I think we have
Found.
Away.
I don't know that anybody would have thought was like possible as a
podcast as a media business to like really build deep relationships with her.
sponsors and our partners. I think almost every single one of them we did something like
the fundraise all hands or you know, a conference.
Most of them now, a a very large percentage of our sponsors we've invested in.
Yeah.
What, five of them? I think five, yeah.
Vanta, we should talk about Vanta in a in a big way.
Modern treasury, vouch, mystery.
Standard metrics.
We've invested in.
And what was standard metrics called when they sponsored?
Quaister. Quaister, original name. Yeah. Back in the day.
Just like we
For our listeners and our audience, you know, we've kinda always thought
I think it's been one of our core
Tenants from the beginning of like
We treat our audience as like
equals to like more impressive than us. Like when we started the show, especially now, and even the folks who are listening to us are the folks who
We want to invest in, we wanna do business with, we wanna do Well that's what eats me alive when I get something wrong in an episode and it's a black mark to me and I can't
do anything but see it as like, you know, I'm thinking
of the people who I know listen to the show who are listening to that and thinking, Up, he didn't quite get that right. Cause that's how I envision our audience.
Not that we didn't always think this way, but it's really come to
be realized now. We think of our sponsors the same way as our you know our partners as like
These are amazing companies. Like how can we build as deep a relationship with them as possible? Yep, totally agree. I mean the sponsorship model is another way that we make a pretty significant trade off. So we only do
Six months.
season long sponsorships.
And
we are ridiculously choosy about the people that we do that with.
And because it's a six month long thing.
to an audience of 250,000 people that happen to be probably the most valuable audience in the world in terms of CEOs, founders, engineers, capital allocators.
Certainly the set. I mean the set. It would be um
Hubris of us to
Claim that.
We singularly it acquired have the most but of the you know, our niche of
Media. Right.
the listeners to our Ninja Media, I think unquestionably are the most valuable.
in the world. So it's a big ticket item whenever a sponsor decides that they want to work with us for the duration, for the reach, and for the magnitude of who you're reaching when you reach them. And so
It's like a big freaking commitment. Yeah. And there's a trade off there in our business model, which is we're not gonna work with that many people when we do, but when we do, we wanna go as deep as possible.
And so that means that we can't do things like engage with agencies or engage with dynamic ad insertion networks or a lot of other things that would make our lives easier. Yep.
It probably also means that we can't outsource sales. Like you and I are the ones talking to the CEOs of the companies who sponsor, which
Again.
Lots of trade offs. They're very busy people. They're often hard to get a hold of, but they're people that we get to build really real relationship with. This is one of my favorite trade offs we've made, kinda like I've been saying, is like these are the types of people
Who we would want anyway to build deep relationships with. So why wouldn't we
lean into that as much as possible.
On the completely opposite end of the spectrum, though, something that I think highlights the trade off.
And that I've really come to appreciate this year.
In the very beginning of Acquired, we could did YouTube. And we've been saying for years and years we gotta re te redo YouTube. At this point it's almost a McGuffin. Yeah. Where like it's like Seattle's NBA team. It's like maybe we should never redo it so we can always talk about the fact that we're gonna be able to Seattle's gonna get an NBA team.
Of course acquired is gonna redo YouTube.
But I was so negative on YouTube in the episode. And the intervening years, I feel like have just been a journey for me of like really coming to appreciate
What a
incredible product and business. YouTube is.
And
This year, my big.
YouTube appreciation has been
They
Enable
For many, many creators.
people to make their livelihoods with the exact opposite trade off of what we do.
You can just focus on content and you
If you have an audience and can build an audience.
Can make a
Good to great living.
On YouTube.
And never engage with business.
Never engage with This is how I felt as an app developer. I was like, wow, there's a money.
Yeah. I write software, I upload it to the store and money comes out the other side.
Which obviously like
That's not
the decision we would make. Yeah. But for the long tail
You know, and mass market and other
niches of media that don't have as valuable an audience as us. Yep. That is an amazing thing. And most
Creators don't want to be business people. Like we want to be business people. We want to be entrepreneurs. Right.
By the way, I think it makes the content better that we are, because then you get first party insights rather than like if we were journalists sort of shooting from the sidelines. Like some of the stuff I've already talked about
on this episode today is the strategic conversation that came out of a board meeting it I was in earlier. And so like
Us.
Engaging in business makes the show what it is too. It's funny.
That reminds me of another trade off. One of the things that like
Really this is driven by being a parent, but uh
Yeah, I don't I don't do boards anymore. I just can't. Never say never, but uh
Man.
Yeah, thinking back on times in my life when I was on
You know, five, six, seven boards and uh
As you are now. I'm on three. It sort of makes it work. It's like you
pick very few companies and you go very deep. I mean it's a very acquired way of of doing it.
Three is a a a manageable number. Yep.
But even so like to do it right.
You really gotta engage.
Yep.
Alright.
What's next on the agenda.
Relatedly.
Show growth.
Show growth.
It was so fun talking to Ben Thomson about this and his
Growth trajectory and curve.
We
Pretty amazingly.
doubled our audience again this year.
Which has basically been true every year since we started seven years ago.
Which
This is always one of these things where
If a startup is only doubling year over year in the first two or three years, it's like
Okay, well it's not gonna be a breakout company. But if you can actually keep doubling for seven, eight, nine years
The numbers get pretty big. And so
It feels very different.
Transitioning from
twenty twenty to today, sort of looking over a two year span where
Even from last year to today. So we we hit
Over a quarter million.
Subscribers. Which was sixty two thousand.
Just
twenty four months ago. I know. So that's the crazy like
That's the place where this sort of like out years of compounding is starting to show up for us.
And the thing that's been
Crazy.
To me is they're still
Have been some.
kind of step change like the Amazon episode. Yeah was that was a step change for us. For sure.
Yeah, I think
The previous highest episode to Amazon had gotten just over a hundred thousand downloads, and that one got a hundred and seventy thousand. Yeah. In the first ninety days. In the first ninety days.
And when we say a quarter million, that is the unique
number of people
who listen to it's basically our monthly active listener account across all platforms who engage with at least one episode. Sadly.
The cool thing about
Podcasts and
For it.
Us and you know, that it is an open ecosystem that's not controlled by algorithms.
It does mean
Growth takes longer.
And it's harder.
And you have to do these step change functions, but then people become subscribers and they stick around.
Amazon was a huge
Step change moment for us in terms of growth.
And
many of those new people subscribed. Right. And so thus
The subsequent episodes Benchmark Enron
Like the two benchmark episodes were
both way higher than the hundred thousand that we were at before Amazon.
And then Enron now is charting to look pretty similar to Amazon. They're early five or six days in, but like
It is
Which would be evil how to I don't think is a reflection on, you know, the benchmark episodes. I think we're great. We're such a cool experience. But
It's more niche. Like it's a venture capital firm versus like Amazon. Everybody cares about Amazon. Yes, yes, exactly.
There's also this chronological thing where like
Every three or four episodes is our biggest episode ever, and not necessarily because the content is more interesting, but because
when you find a podcast you like, you stick around. So there is this sort of like
cumulative effect where we drop a new episode. If we had dropped this in twenty sixteen
it would have gotten a couple thousand listens, but because it's dropped on top of the entire base of people who are subscribed to acquired, it's really meaningful. And I thought Ben brought up this really interesting point where he sort of asserted
Podcasts are great.
because they're really sticky.
But there are
terrible to grow. He basically said, I don't know how you would grow a podcast if you didn't also have a r a writing
platform.
that was easily forwardable because podcasts are really hard to share.
And that sort of explains the reason why no matter how hard we try
We've really never been able to more than double.
in any year, because podcasts are sort of an inherently unsureable mechanism. So unless there's something that happens like
you get feed dropped for free in an NPR podcast that
brings you a hundred thousand new listeners right away.
Or
We had NVIDIA part two, I think, got a large promotion on Spotify. Yeah. And that brought us a bunch of new listeners that were subscribing to Spotify. They have. We really only started kind of more directly working with in January with the Taylor Swift episode. Which is why n was our stat.
Ninety eight percent of the people who listen on Spotify today.
We're not
And we should be clear about w what I mean by
directly working with Spotify. We're we're not owned by Spotify. There's no economic relationship or ad sales or like like we've been saying, we do all that in house. That's our business model. But they assign you a creator manager. There's people that we have that we can contact them. Relationships at Spotify in a way that
We don't have with any of the other platforms. I mean, I think technically we have a manager at Apple, like I don't know who that person is. No, no, no, no. We found someone's email addresses, but they're not assigned there. Yeah.
Spotify's done a great job of
At least from my perspective.
You know, engaging with us as creators. And I think striking a good balance between like
Podcasting is an open ecosystem with all the benefits.
And trade offs that we've just been talking about. Yep.
But you can also like do it better than Apple. Apple's been such a
terrible steward of this industry. You've brought this up before.
Terrible in one respect, but like
they're the reason why we have a direct connection with the listeners. Yeah. It's them advocating the creation of a platform in an intermediary is the reason why
we have this really sticky relationship with listeners.
Such a good point. Such a good point. They're
Internal strategy failure.
And Apple. And execution too. Like I just feel like if you're an Apple shareholder
You should be really angry.
at management about how they have mismanaged
Like fumbled the ball on podcasting. But delighted in many other ways. But delighted in other ways. Yeah, I I agree. Especially the type of business we have and acquired.
is really enabled by the lack of algorithmic strangle hold on this medium.
So it does sort of beg this interesting question that Ben threw out, which is how do you grow
a podcast when you don't have a secondary shareable

And I think
We have tried to do this with the acquired website.
Each episode has a page. That page has a bunch of show notes. That page has a transcript. There's sort of a reason to consume it on that page. You can
sign up via email on that page. You can join the Slack from that page. Which the Slack now has almost fifteen thousand over fourteen thousand members.
Our preferred way to share
an episode is the page because we sort of feel that
that URL is like a
nice way to package it up for someone and say, listen to this. Unfortunately our episodes are four hours long, so
It doesn't come with a deep link.
Like it would be really nice if as you scroll down the page and as you move through the transcript, or as you watch the video, or as you consume the audio,
That was always updating the URL. So that at any given point you copy the URL, it's like this is exactly like Overcast has the um share time stamp. Yeah.
And you can do it on YouTube too. Yeah.
But like
those are inherently flawed because you don't know if someone likes to use that platform. So like when I share that overcast link with people, I'm like,
Are they gonna be like, what is this podcast player that I don't use? Why are you sharing it to me in this weird way?
There's a bunch of reasons that contribute to podcasts being sort of inherently unshareable. Our episodes being really long make them especially hard to share, sort of moments, insights, and there's been a zillion sort of like
Clip apps over the years.
But I do think actually, you know.
We have not
Grown.
In the same way that like a viral product grows.
But we've had really nice growth as a podcast. And I think actually growth happens because we infiltrate a
network, particularly a company network, and then we get shared within the
company like in a company. Slack or Teams or
Just friend networks within within a company. Yep. It's kind of interesting. Like I'm not particularly interested in additional growth.
Yeah.
Especially at this point. Yeah. I mean it's it's great. It would be nice. And I think Ben was kind of
Making this same point in the episode we did with him.
For all of us, additional growth is
Great.
But not
By trading off any of the things that we really care about that drive our business. Right.
Or changing the audience mix. I was uh wildly relieved this year from the
How many people took the survey? Fifteen hundred people or so that answered the survey, which thank you if you did. Yeah, thank you. Um
that the audience mix stayed pretty much the same from two, two and a half years ago, the last time we read a survey, which was awesome. I was like, wow, we managed to get
two hundred thousand more of basically the same type of person. And it was heartening talking to Ben
Because
It sounded like he thought that he had bumped up against
the market that he was starting to saturate and then sort of accelerated through it again. And so
It feels like
Then
I think he probably has close to a million people that consume Stratekery dot com for free.
in a given year.
And so
If he doesn't feel like he's bumping up against the TAM and we have a reasonably overlapping
audience, that feels like pretty good proxy for us to say, Well c we could probably at least four X from here.
But I o
I don't really have like a strong
desire to do I think it would make our lives generally worse if we did.
I think it would be neutral.
I mean, in some ways it would be better, in some ways it would be worse, but if we were a video podcast, it would make it worse. Because we're right at the limit right now. We're like
We have all the benefits of
When we drop an episode, it really matters to the people that we care about it mattering to, and we don't get recognized on the street.
The episode with Ben was about Strategory, obviously. So we didn't really talk about this, but I kept thinking about him wanting to
Explore more we should do here.
Our business model is very different than Ben's.
And
Growth again, like
Nice to have for us.
Comes with some set of trade offs, there's some downsides to it, some upsides.
Neutral to
Yeah.
I don't know. You could argue maybe you think it's slightly negative to growth. May maybe I think it's slightly positive. Like
It's in the neutral.
Zone.
But because of our business model and everything we were talking about, like the deepening of the engagement with the right people.

That's what drives
our excitement about the business and the business itself. In a way that for Ben it's different because he actually does need to grow his business.
To keep growing the number of
Consumers'cause some percentage of them will convert to pay. You're saying for his revenue to grow
he must grow the number of subscribers, which means
If subscribers are always a fraction, a fixed fraction of the set of people audience.
are reading anything on Sartre, he must grow the top line. Whereas what you're saying for us is
The revenue is
not necessarily directly connected to
Audience size. Right.
It's connected, but it's not directly connected.
And as we evolve the business model more, I mean, this is a good place to talk about
Vanta.
That's a good point. One of our couple biggest sponsors and partners on
The show this year.
We and kinda through kindergarten and and and you too invested almost ten million dollars in the company this year. So like that's a very Mostly kindergarten, very small. Very small then. And
Most
of that capital.
Came from
the acquired audience community, like the LP Capital that backed that SPV.
Came in very large part from
And so that's not a good thing.
Like
Growing the audience.
Of course increases the number of
super high quality people. And we care about growing the high quality
People in the
Audience.
And the bigger that size is great, but it's not directly tied to the business model. And like
That was a transformational moment for us. I mean I was Vanta is an amazing company, but that's a whole new
It was at least an insight. You could sort of test the hypothesis of like'cause you and I have invested personally in our our sponsors before,'cause we get insight into their business from getting to work directly with CEOs on those and we're like
And we see what our audience with with the products. Right.
That's really an interesting thing. We should invest a little bit. But your insight of okay, this is a growth round
This is
a company that's doing really well, I can sort of
See how well they're doing both from getting to like
Look at the investment pitch, but also the reaction of our community to the sponsorship. Right.
Could I invest a meaningful amount of capital in this? How could we put together a meaningful amount of capital? And do I, as a host of acquired, have relationships with
the owners of capital, the stewards of capital who want to invest in this opportunity. It was a really interesting way
for you to sort of like
Prove out that hypothesis a little bit.
Yeah. There is no strategic plan for kindergarten adventures. Period. It is very much like a you y'all may be shocked that there's no uh strategic plan. Period, but it's not like we uh did uh you know an off site like a we didn't do a um
End of your uh special for kindergarten like we're doing now for Acquired and discuss our strategy and say, you know, I think we should find a opportunity to do a ten million dollar SPV this year. But no, it came naturally from
Everything we're talking about here on the quiet.
Yep.
And just to put a finer point on the
business being not entirely connected to the audience size.
There were years.
Where
The audience
But revenue would ten X.
Yeah.
asset. Well there were several years where revenue was zero. This was not a business. That's true. But it you know, who's to say that we necessarily have the business model optimized
Do I think that there should be more sponsorships and episodes? No. In fact, I think we should probably be a little bit tighter on them and shorter on them and find more ways to make the sponsorship segments even more differentiated, where we're not just giving the high-level pitch on the company, but doing more vouch insurance one-one type stuff where we can sort of like
find a key insight with the company and storytell that together. I think leaning into
the strategic differentiation that we have.
on and I know that sounds like jargon, but like
We are I think the only ones who work
this closely with our sponsors. So what does that enable us to do that no other podcast could do? I think that's like the lens that I want to keep taking to it. And so
To your point.
the business is probably still unoptimized and it will probably grow directionally with audience, but
can grow in other ways too.
All right listeners.
Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow.
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Go check out service now dot com slash acquired and tell'em that Ben and David sent you.
All right, David, what is next on the year in review agenda?
Next we gotta talk about next year.
Twenty twenty three. Looking ahead.
Okay, first question for us.
What
Episodes, topics.
Guess are we
Thinking about
What's on the docket?
Hang on, let me bust out my list.
One that feels like an
Obvious one we should do at some point next year is open AI.
Yeah, absolutely.
We talked about doing it at various points this year and especially like
fitting in with the whole NVIDIA.
The series but um
It's funny. We almost did it twelve months ago. Like I remember last year over the holidays.
Doing some prep work for it.
And
That
I think would have been kind of disastrous'cause we would have done it and
I think way undersold. Like we wouldn't have been would have been way too early. Yeah.
If we do end up doing it and
Do it.
you know, relatively early next year.
It's sort of ironic that the
Next Elon company that we'll cover after our old SpaceX episode is OpenAI. We didn't do anything on Twitter. We haven't done Tesla.
It is crazy. God, he's got his fingers in everything.
The Twitter is just oh my gosh, there's just so much drama. There's so much drama. I don't I don't like having just drama on a choir. That is true. I think part of the reason why we
haven't done a Twitter episode since we interviewed DeCostolo and
Early twenty twenty one, maybe? Yeah, way before all this.
Is like
The story feels less like a business story and more like a T M Z story, which isn't our cup of tea. Yes.
I don't ever want to feel like TMZ. I won't say that like I'm not interested in reading all the TMZ drama about it. It's totally fascinating and you know, if you can run a company on eighty percent less people than you were running it before and
nothing goes terribly wrong. That's super interesting for the world to know. Now, of course, it does look like all sorts of things are going wrong, but
to the extent that they can turn it around and the business can be
generating as much revenue as it was before on a massively lower cost basis.
I'm very curious to know what the second order effects of that are. But the story that we know so far.
We don't actually know that yet.
And everything that is being discussed is
Yeah, it's just
Drama.
Okay, so
Open AI, that's a good candidate.
Yeah.
I was perusing the world's richest people list the other day and uh for
Acquired ideas or just that's what you do with your freeze out. You know.
The lots of the names are very familiar to us and acquired listeners.
The one that is not is Bernard Arnaud, which
one of the world's top five wealthiest people and not in tech, not in finance, but in luxury brands.
I think it'd be pretty interesting to
Go down the path of
like really deeply unpacking brand power. Yeah. And brand power over generations and the concept of a house of brands and what brand mean to people and
Why
you can know that it's the exact same leather that you're buying elsewhere, but because it has this mark on it, you pay five hundred times more for it.
I would love to figure out what the right starting place is for luxury and and do that unacquired. Yeah.
The
point the reason to do it is what you said, the underlink brand. Right.
How did these amazing
Durable.
Brands get built.
Yeah.
I continue to want to do epic health care. I think they're like a huge
force in the American economy and I don't know if that episode will be a hero's journey or a villain. A villain but is it an Enron or a NVIDIA?
I suspect.
Without having done any research, I suspect more of an Enron. Yeah, probably not a fraud, but just a
Open question whether it's good for the world. Yes. Creates uh some value, certainly captures a lot of it. Does it
Capture more than it creates, open question.
One thing I definitely want to
do more of and figure out how it's gonna evolve as sessions. So we did the
Session with Jasanis.
Really fun and felt like a
Really
Cool way to
Do something orthogonal.
Two
The core acquired approach.
But still really fun.
Maybe sessions.
Or a format like sessions ends up
being
what we do with protagonists of stories after we've done
An episode just us on them. Yep.
Maybe we keep doing it with
Interesting people, maybe both.
But that felt like a really cool
different type of
interview than just a standard podcast interview.
I feel like if Sessions evolves into
Talking to
people who do fascinating work.
about things that aren't necessarily their work.
That's a pretty interesting use of the format.
That's something that I want to explore. Ca that statement can kinda take two directions, and I think either would make for an interesting sessions reason for existence. One is
talking to the CEO of a Fortune five hundred company about things that aren't
their company.
they probably think about a lot of really interesting stuff and have a bunch of really interesting ideas and they probably can't say a lot of the most interesting thought they have about their company because they're publicly traded and there's
All sorts of SEC stuff involved.
But there's other conversations we can have with them. But they're people and like they have feelings and emotions. And those aren't the reasons people typically are trying to get them to come on podcasts. Yeah.
That's one thing actually that my wife Jenny pointed out to me after listening to
the session we did with Jason and she was like
It was interesting. It was good.
You guys could have gone way harder on diving into
The emotional
Side of
Jason's lived experience. And
His feelings and like
Especially when he he mentioned, you know, Tony Shay's passing and how that really impacted him and like
led to him d deciding to make some changes in how he approached
life and his work for the next few years. Like she was like
That was an opportunity that you just let fall on the floor. Like you could have gone way deeper into that.
Yeah.
I think that's a great point.
The other thing that I was sort of implying in that statement is
We could have
people on
Almost as a prop.
Like we're not interviewing them, but they're instead
A
piece of whatever discussion you and I wanted to have anyway.
Like, you know, what if we had Eric Fishria just like hanging out next to you on the couch and we weren't talking about benchmark, but Eric was just like chiming in on a lot of this stuff and sharing his ideas.
He's not the subject of the interview. He's a
piece of the show. He's a part of the conversation. He's a foil to bounce ideas off of. I would for sure
Do that with Eric. That would be
An amazing and a great privilege. You know who would be
Truly the most interesting person to have as
playing that role would be Peter Fenton.
Oh yeah. You're right. I I I sorry Peter says we um Oh my gosh, that was uh the whole benchmark career is amazing. That dinner was amazing. There were a few things that Peter said there when we were talking about the principal program and Blake
Uh one of us I can't remember if it was me or you asked, you know.
So why do you guys have a principal, you know, like a like a junior investment person when clearly like your whole
Ethos is you don't do that.
And Peter's response Well it was like uh because forced consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Which is a famous quote from I can't remember where it's from now it's from some
I mean it just like it like leapt out of it. It just like that was the immediate response that leapt out of him and it's like
Wow, I never thought that that would show up on a podcast.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was great.
Peter's one of a kind. He is one of a kind.
Other episodes that I wanna do I wanna do into it.
I think that's a far more interesting and successful business than people realize.
In the vein of consumer brand, we gotta do Nike at some point.
Oh yeah. I wanna continue going back in time from Walmart and do Sears.
Nike's one that I really want to do. I know we said we don't
do live s I actually don't think this should be a live show. I want to go
On site.
I want to go to Oregon. Mm-hmm.
Go to Eugene. Get a workout in.
But I feel like there's like
I don't know. I mean I'm just be curious to see, I've never been, but the facilities there and like because it's such a
Athletic like a physical
I wanna see what it's like.
That's a good point. Yeah. That feels like something that we need to experience more physically.
I don't know, you could make that argument for a lot of'em. Like T S M C the episode would have been
much better if you and I got to witness chips being fabbed and feel what it was like to be in a bunny suit.
The little bit I
No, I think it mostly from the last dance, but like the one of the key, key moments in Nike's history is the signing of the deal with Michael Jordan. Yeah.
But like
What did it feel like when Michael came out?
to the campus. Yeah, there's feeling the history there has to be a
A big thing.
Alright, so
Before we get to our extended carve outside.
In sort of reviewing twenty twenty
Two. You and I both had big twenty twenty twos. So that's probably worth uh worth chatting about a little bit. We did I love this is uh we didn't intend it this way.
This is becoming much like the benchmark dinner that we recorded everything I was like before dinner'cause we didn't want to eat.
dinner before we would have to we got a lot of good comments of like why are they just sitting there with cheese and on their plates? Like aren't they gonna eat? Aren't they gonna eat real food? And like we did afterwards. Yeah. Yeah, but like that would not make for good video content. Yeah. Uh audio or video content.
We are going to after we finish recording here, we're gonna go out to uh celebrate twelve. Celebrate a holiday dinner for acquired for the two of us. But I feel like this is like the pre record, this is the recording version, so at which we would definitely talk about our personal lives.
Well you had
I had probably the biggest life event that you had to have.
Yes.
I got married.
It was wonderful.
I was here.
It was great. You were here.
It was really cool because in some ways I thought it wasn't going to feel different afterwards. I think a lot of people in our generation sort of like
date for a long time and live together and feel like life partners
But there's something totally different about being married. You know, having the ring on every day as a reminder and
the sense of like longevity associated with it is really cool and a really totally different psychological
Place than I thought. Well, and you go through this process and project together. Yes. The wedding. Like from the moment you get engaged.
Until the wedding.
Is this like a you know, you're like a butterfly going into like a caterpillar going into a cocoon. It's like a transformational period. Yes. Um and I say like I was here. You did the wedding at your house af right after moving, like I didn't want to play the twenty twenty two venue game. Yeah.
two times more people got married this year. It was just like you're not getting a venue. And if you are
You're getting a terrible date and you're paying a lot of money for it and you're not going to get any of the things that you want out of it. That was probably half of
CPI inflation right there was my case.
David was my groomsman.
You and I have some great pictures together. Thank you for coming up and being a part of it.
You did a
Amazing job given that
You know.
You too.
Planned it all yourself. You where the venue it was at your house, like it was uh We're literally sitting where the DJ was like DJing uh onto the dance floor out there.
It's so fun going to weddings after having
Been married'cause you're like
Oh good, I just get to enjoy all of the the fruits of the couple's labor.
Yeah.
It really is. When people say it's like
The happiest day of your life.
No doubt the happiest day of my life. And I think the like energy and love and just overwhelming
force that you feel from your closest friends and family when you're like walking down the aisle and you feel all that energy on you. It's crazy. And it's an indescribable moment, really. Yeah.
It w it was super cool.
That was I think the biggest.
Personal life event.
Well for you this year.
Let's reflect on twenty twenty two. We took a vacation to Italy. I'd never been to Italy before. That was like a s absolutely spectacular
Time Rome.
Chinquetera.
Florence, Capri, God, the island of Copri's incredible.
I've never been.
It's just a beautiful. Have you been to Greece?
I've not. Oh, okay. I was curious how it compares to Greece.
I think it's similar to some of the sort of Grecian islands. This one has a uh some cool history associated with it because it at one point the Roman Emperor
was sort of fleeing.
And
I don't know if it was paranoia or is legitimate, but just thought that everyone in Rome was coming and tried and
to kill him. And so he like fled to Capri and ruled from the island where he could sort of see in every direction to sort of fortify.
It's remote work.
Yeah, that's like one of my pre digital nomad. Yes. That's the cool thing about Italy and um
Every European country compared to here, but I feel like especially Italy.
The sense of history, especially for, you know, us.
Two history buffs like
You know, you walk around Rome or Florence and
In Rome, special with Florence in its own.
Right, it's still ancient history compared to America, but like Rome, like
You're talking about the ancient Roman times. And you I mean, actually walking around the forum is wild because you're like literally looking at pillars that are
three thousand years old, at least two thousand years old. Yeah.
So
We're thinking about where to go on a a honeymoon.
probably early to mid next year. And I I like I want to go back to Italy. This is a magical place. This is the problem as you get older and you have
Cool travel experiences.
You like
I wanna go back to those places, but you also want to experience new places. Right. Like I will die without seeing most of the world, no matter how much I travel. And so should I try and put a dent
Yeah.
that as much as possible, or should I say
You know, there's just one spot in Hawaii that I really like and so every single year I'm going back there.
Clearly the answer is.
Both.
Maybe you had some of this plan for
Carve outs but like
I feel like I'm like decently up on like the latest like tech and gadgets and stuff, but like you're like
You made some
Interesting decisions about the Apple Apple Urine review. Yeah. Can we do an apple urine review for Ben? Yeah, let's do it. So got the iPad mini
Four acquired.
We both are rocking the the mini'cause it's uh very, very good for on stage. As we do more live stuff, it's just game changing. This is the perfect device for live events and a any kind of
Where you're not sitting in front of a computer monitor. Yeah.
Easy to hold it in one hand.
I really want the big iPad Pro, but I have basically no use for it.
Like this is actually the device that suits my use case.
I think a little over a year ago I got the MacBook Pro 16 inch, which is which has the star fire. Yep. Which is a the finest computer I've ever owned. It's heavy. Yes, the display is unbelievable. I mean everything about this thing is nuts. I do have NV, the M two MacBook Air.
I think it's sexy. So thin, so light. A lot of the capability of this one, but
When I'm travelling
And because what we do is so everything intensive, it's bandwidth intensive, it's storage intensive, uh the ST slots. We're transferring hundreds of gigabytes back and forth after we record for all the
multiple camera videos
I want the good webcam that comes on this computer in case we have to do a remote.
I want the screen space'cause I'm also a venture capitalist and I'm doing spreadsheety things. I have a hard time with a
travel computer. So if they made an eighteen inch computer and they made it three pounds heavier, I might buy that one too.
When you're doing purely
Personal travel.
Do you not bring this and just bring the iPad? No. Absolutely. Oh so you still bring this? Yeah, yeah.
Purely personal travel, what are you talking about? I don't there's not a single day where I'm on
personal vacation where
I'm not
also doing some even for yours truly that's I mean we're small business owners like there are things every single day where there's no one else that can do it and so either it doesn't happen
Or we have to do it.
Yeah.
And that's on top of like
me being a professional venture capitalist where like
There's real obligations that come with and that you don't necessarily need the heaviest computer you can find for, but like
You need to be pretty responsive on a lot of things and sometimes if you're That's true, if you need a document you you need
Real computer. We need to make edits to an episode or something like
I need a bust out audition. Yeah. Yeah.
And I could do that on a smaller computer and a and and maybe this is totally overkill. Like
When you got here today, I had left to go to a board meeting and then a lunch and then meet someone for coffee for a nonprofit that I'm I'm working with. And
None of those things required a computer.
But
I
Brought.
my backpack with my computer in it to all three, even though I ne knew I would never take it out. Because if something came up
I would need to be able to like get away for five minutes, do something on my computer, put it back in my bag, and then go back to whatever I was doing. I love it. You just never know. You never know. And I'm probably overly paranoid on that, but it's like the one time you get burned
Changes your behavior forever.
Okay, so opposite of this.
And where I thought you were gonna start. So I really like to take pictures.
I'm a very big nerd about like understanding all the physics and as much of the black box that Apple will let you understand of the computational photography.
But I also have like
I think it's tendinosis. Something's up with my wrists. They fatigue super easily and I get basically tennis elbow. It's probably from having my computer with me all the time and and like constantly punched over the computer. Yeah.
So I have the iPhone thirteen mini. It's the correctly sized phone. It's the correct weight for a phone. Uh it's the correct sort of reachability for a phone, which I know Apple used to name a feature, which is a stupid feature. And so I was like gosh, there's no iPhone 14 mini. I would pay
Literally anything. I don't know if the
Is exactly right, but like
four or five X the current iPhone prices. You have a high willingness to pay. For an iPhone fourteen Pro mini. Yeah.
Like
Apple.
If there's a test one in a lab somewhere, please send it to me. I will again like no price sensitivity around it.
But
I was like I should try the new phone and just like play with the cameras and stuff.
I got it.
As you would suspect, it was too big, it was too heavy. I waited thirteen days until the fourteen day return deadline, returned it, went back to my thirteen mini. And I'm thinking about buying another thirteen mini because like at some point the battery's gonna die on this one, and if they never make another mini again, like wanna have one like on in cold storage. It's just like my uh Nike's upstairs that I've got stacked in the closet.
It is the perfect size phone.
So I have um
I have a twelve mini.
Right now. I didn't upgrade to the third. I probably should have. Dude, you totally should right now, before they run out. Well
I realized I finally need to upgrade the twelve mini and the biggest driving factor for me.
As a new parent.

When I haven't gotten it yet. It's'cause it's on Bad Corner, but I went to the fourteen pro. Wow. Which I have never had any of the pro
iPhones.
Like, I care about technology a lot, but I was just never compelled by
I don't care that m didn't
used to not care that much about
photography. Yeah. And so I was just never that compelled by the pro versions.
And I really cared about size.
But now with a little one. If I was a parent, I think I would buy the fourteen pro also. Well it's a double whammy.
What I cared most about size
was for portability when out and about. Which that part of your life has gone away. That part of my life is particularly like exercising.
Now m my exercise is primarily walking a stroller, which has a lot of carrying capacity.
And I didn't care that much about photo quality.
I took very few photos before. I mean and now just like some of the best advice.
I I love talking to people who have older kids and being like
'Cause you just realize time just slips away, like when you have a kid in um almost universally.
I wish I'd taken more photos. I especially wish I'd taken more videos uh throughout the night. And so like oh all right.
The Pro I have on order. But I I'm
conflicted about it. Like I'm really gonna miss the form factor. You are.
You're really gonna miss it.
Yeah, it's like not gonna fit in your pocket.
Yeah. It's gonna be
It's gonna be transition.
And also the camera mountain on this one is so large that
the phone rocks when you're leaving it on a table and typing. It's fascinating to see the set of trade offs Apple's been okay with in the name of getting the very best.
Photos that they can out of this thing.
Which as a parent now I'm like
I see the business reason for doing that. Right.
Okay, so keep going on the lineup.
'Cause you've got another important large device. Yeah, so I bought the Apple Watch. You're having trouble lifting your arm there. It's really heavy. Uh I was about to say the Apple Watch fourteen. The Apple Watch Ultra.
which I'm sure next year there's gonna be the Apple Watch Ultra two or the Apple Watch
Two Ultra and I'm curious how they'll name Apple Watch Ultra second generation, I imagine is what they'll do. Anyway.
This thing
Actually super light.
relative to how large it is. And uh you made the joke about lifting your arm. I like don't feel it anymore. And I think that happens with all watches over time. You sort of like get used to the weight, but
one of the big things that sold me on it is
'Cause I thought the reason I was gonna hate it was the weight. I like put it on and I'm like this I think it's the titanium, remarkably light for how large it is. It's big.
For sure it's big.
It's beautiful though. The screen is yeah, the super clear. Like you can look at pictures on it.
It's really bright, it's two thousand nits, so like it has a flashlight button because it functions as a fairly effective flashlight. The battery lasts like almost three days, which is totally game changing if you I I think I've tracked every single night of sleep for f four or five years now.
And so that's like a thing that I
That's a use case I really care about.
I haven't done anything extreme in it yet. Like I've climbed Mount St. Helens.
Photo behind me. Yeah, that's Iceland that I did with my dad. He used to do this big backpacking trip every summer.
And I have not adventured in this thing yet, mostly'cause I I've just been doing less adventuring over the last year or two.
But um
I totally expect to use it for
the stated purposes, but it's been awesome for me, even not for the ultra.
Type.
purposes that it's advertised for.
The photo viewing, I would imagine, is a really
I would never think I want to view photos on my w wrist, but like actually I I think that could be a There's a good number of times where I'm like, Okay, cool, I I saw it clearly enough now where I don't need to also pull it up on my phone. Yes, exactly. Yep. The other interesting thing is the screen is just large enough where
It kind of feels like a small phone and less like a big watch.
And I think it's the edge to edge display, the fact that they have the like
You know, raised.
It has an on screen keyboard that you can use the finger swiping on. And so I literally can just like s swipe on the keyboard to respond to text messages.
So
I can't decide if that's like
really nerdy and like Casio mid eighties and like that's not actually u useful.
But I've probably done
thirty or forty times since I've gotten it to s respond to text messages real quick and that's been pretty nice.
The one thing I wish they had added that to me would be a
Maybe not killer feature, but like a really, really nice to have would be some sort of biometric.
Authentication in the watch.
'Cause what I don't like is when I well, maybe with a Ultra I wouldn't have to
take it off to charge it as much, but when I put my watch back on after recharging it, then I gotta enter my pin code every time, which you know, like first one problem. But I don't understand why they can't put a touch ID
Center. I mean I know they're trying to save as much space as possible in there, but like No, that's good. You're right. There's no biometric on it. But I think a feature that it does have is if you put it on
And then you take out your phone.
before you need to type in the passcode on your watch and you face ID on your phone your watch is auto unlocked. Yes, that is true, but I found that to be kinda janky. I have found that to be kind of janky too.
reliably trust that it's gonna work. Totally agree. I'm like, why do I still need to type in a passcode? I swear I shouldn't need a passcode right now. And uh one of the things I found maybe I need a different watch band to solve the problem, but
Toddlers really like to grab shiny things with screens and uh especially ones that are on your wrist while you're changing diapers. And so the amount of times a day that I enter my passcode on my watch is uh
A lot larger than it used to be, shall we say.
All right, so let's go with your Apple we'll go reverse order for you. Give me your Apple lineup and then let's get into your year and review. Ooh, okay.
So I'm
Still rocking the twenty twenty original OG M one.
MacBook Air. Yep.
Which so much.
more performant machines out there like this now, but like
I still have tons of head. Right. I'm not sure you'd notice the performance difference. Yeah. And like
The leap forward that that M1 ship was was just
Incredible. I mean
Performance.
Battery life. Price point.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I don't know what
these twenty twenty original M one MacBook Airs are going for on like eBay or Craigslist or whatnot right now. Yep.
Whatever they're going for, like
I bet.
five hundred dollars ish, maybe less, the amount of performance and longevity that you can get.
For that dollar amount. Yeah, it's crazy. Crazy. You're right. If it's only five hundred dollars.
It's
way better.
Then
Let's say you have like a twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen Intel machine.
It's so worth it too.
Trade up.
to even an old M one'cause they're just not
that different after three years. Yep.
Totally.
I can't imagine anything that
Hm.
normal human would need to do.
on a
Computer that
The M one MacBook can't handle.
Yep. Okay. So keeping that guy. Okay, so there's that
Uh we talked about my phone. I'm currently racking the twelve mini
very mixed emotions about transitioning to the fourteen pro. Yep.
And I'm rocking the uh original S E.
Apple Watch.
I forgot they made a watch S E.
They have two now. There's a new
S E two.
I don't know exactly what the
As he too has feature set. I'm very tempted by the ultra.
For all the reasons we discussed. Highly recommend it.
My
Decision for going with the
S E originally was it didn't have the always on screen and I
Actively did not want the always on screen.
How do you find do you does it do you find it distracting you at all?
I like it now.
Especially with the Wayfinder.
watch face that comes on the ultra. When it's off, you still see the watch hands, but everything else, it's a blackground. And then when you turn it, it's got sort of the white face comes on.
So I I like it.
Nice.
I did not like the always on display on the phone.
When I had the fourteen pro.
It was like loud. Yeah.
It's like really on. Yeah. But on the on the watch it, uh
Yeah, it d it's it's subtle. It's not like noticeable.
I will say too, I was in a coffee meeting today where
I did need to call an Uber so that I could get back here so that we could record. And like it was quite nice.
being able to like have the watch at a super mm
What's the social angle thing about uh checking your watching your watch. But having it like being able to see the time when I was looking at it at like a hundred and seventy degree angle.
And
I used to definitely be the person that's like jerking my wrist or like tapping it to try to see the time. So that's like
That is one. Yeah, I'll do like I'll I'll put my hands under the table and then like
Tap it.
Surreptitiously. Yeah.
And then on the iPad side the
I've had many. I had
The one
Really only.
negative experience besides the just amount of work that we and Pitchbook put into the arena show was my old iPad got stolen after the
Arena show.
Criminal.
Literally criminal.
I could still see it on like the map on the Find My Devices. It was somewhere
Up uh like North Gate or somewhere like north of Seattle and like but
It's like one of these things where like just'cause I know where that is, it does not mean I should go there and get it. No, no. Definitely not. Oh man.
But
The mini, I really like the mini. It's not
nearly as good for watching and consuming content. I have an old iPad that we keep in the kitchen for when I'm doing the dishes and stuff. And that
You have promotion on, right?
Like the minis don't have a promotion display, the hundred and twenty hertz.
Yeah. Oh no, I've got like a old old iPad that I don't think has promotion.
I feel like you used to have one with a promotion display. You know what, maybe it does. I think it's an original the first iPad Pro that they made in twenty seventeen. That one did. Okay, you're right, it does have promotion. It does have promotion.
'Cause that I actually missed.
when I was downgrading from the new iPhone down to the thirteen mini.'Cause the
non pro iPhones have never had probation. That's the goes up to a hundred and twenty hertz hertz refresh rate on the screen. Yeah.
Butter.
The Mini is great though for
events. It's also really good. I've stopped
I use a I have a Kindle Oasis that I use for
reading fiction at home. But when I travel, I no longer bring the Kindle Oasis and I use this as a Kindle. It's great for that.
I find like for uh
For outdoor stuff.
You can't beat the Kindle.
Yeah.
I also find that night reading in bed the iPad
even in the lightest setting is kind of too bright.
That's true. When going to the beach.
I'll still bring the Kindle. I w I wouldn't I wouldn't feel good bringing this to a beach.
Yeah, that's a good point.'Cause they're not waterproof. Unlike iPhones, iPads are not waterproof.
The device that's still in my lineup that blows my mind is uh
In two thousand
Twelve.
As a college graduation gift, my uncle got me the seventy dollar
Kindle.
And that is still the Kindle that I use and take on vacation. It's such a good product. They are like
Industrial strength. Yeah. Yeah. And super light. Like I looked at get in the Oasis, but it's actually heavier than my twenty twelve model.
The nice thing about the Oasis is it's got the page turn buttons.
Which I like. And the paper white is a really nice I'm envious of the paper white for sure.
My Kindle is actually worthless in bed because you need to light it with a
Right.
Jenny and I got the
Oases for that very reason. Jenny's a night owl and I'm a morning person.
And Jenny's a huge reader. She has a PhD in literature and um
I'm a huge reader too, but she puts me to shame. She would stay up reading a at night with the light on and then finally I'm just like
I'm buying you this. Turn the light on. It's for you and for me. It's for you, but mostly for me.
Uh
All right, so your twenty twenty two personal year. Oh twenty twenty two personal year. Well this was the year of uh
Adjusting to
Life as a parent our daughter was born towards the end of twenty twenty one. So that was like
Most of the year was
Preparing and you know, then like
The first couple of months I like.
It's I mean.
Of course we're thinking back now on the
FTX interview and when we when we had Sam on. Was that your first interview back? It was in there. I mean I was still in the
Fog of war. Like it was uh
I know we released the interview
Uh we switched it with the Michael Lovitz episode. I think Michael, we interviewed Michael first. Right.
That's right. That's right. But all of that.
She was
No more than two months old.
Probably less.
Like it's such a fog.
Yeah, those first few months. But then this year is when you know Jenny went back to work and she works in person. She works at San Francisco Ballet, like it's an in person physical art form. They put on physical performances. She needs to be in the office.
Every day.
And weekends and nights. So yeah, this year was just about
Figuring out.
Life like with a lot of changes.
But we met.
early in college. So we were like
Babies, you know, and then we were you were together for seventeen years before having a kid, sixteen years. Uh sixteen years. Yeah. Sixteen years before having a kid. Which were wonderful sixteen years. And I'm glad we had all that time together.
Pre baby. But we hadn't had to like really
renegotiate our relationship in a long time. So uh it was like, Oh wow.
Flexing.
Old muscles again. Yeah, I bet.
But the last time was when we got married and like
We didn't expect it, you know, it's hearing you talk about um
Things are different when you get married. Like they really are. All your life systems have to change. Your notion of
Self.
is only about one person, but after you're married
Your notion of self.
includes another person.
whose emotions you can't actually feel. So like when you're like looking out for yourself.
You have to
Account for
things that you currently don't know.
Which I think is this like very interesting phenomenon.
Yeah.
And that is so true about getting my buttons.
Having a kid, I think that's like the biggest, um well, there's so many huge things, but one is like
You now have this
other being. Like when you get married
Yes, you have to account for the other person and you're like in it together. You're no longer just you. Right. But that's decisions, you're like, a responsible adult, hopefully.
You know, can keep themselves alive. Can like if we're going late recording an acquired episode.
She'll be fine. But you know. Right.
When you have a kid.
Right. Yeah, like you can't like
Twenty four seven.
Somebody needs to
have as like a pretty foreground in their mental processes, like I need the like
algorithm of how I'm behaving needs to have at the forefront
Keep this kid alive and happy. Yeah.
And they're incapable of
Doing so their own and
You know, you love this.
Person.
so incredibly much in really like unfathomable.
Ways.
Yeah, how do you like then integrate that back with your life? So that was
It's been a lot of figuring that out for us.
And now like we're now at such a
Good age. Not that it's still not difficult. She's a little over a year old now, fourteen months. Like it's so fun. Like it's always been fun. I've always I've not been I think a lot of parents and especially a lot of dads
They don't love their kids immediately. And like that's a very normal thing of like
Yeah, well, moms too have this, but like
Kid pops out and you're like
No.
You know. But there's there's no instant love. I had the instant love. Like instant. Uh like very, very powerful.
And I still feel that, but like also like as they become more of a person, like she's walking now, she's talking like a little bit and like but she like so clearly has a personality and like
Every day. I'm like
Oh wow. Like you are even more of a person than you were yesterday and like it's so fun.
And it's like also a lot easier than the just like the early days are so physically demanding.
Like on everybody.
Especially moms, but like any any caregiver.
It's one of these things that like you can describe it, but having not experienced it, I don't actually know what it's like. It's like oh there's no way cool words data. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Highly highly recommend it, but uh you know, in due time. Yeah.
Other stuff for you this year personally?
It's sort of crazy looking back on it.
Like so much changes when you parent. But um
We were both intentional about this, but also I think it just
naturally happen because it
is important and part of our lives.
We didn't actually travel any less. Like we didn't travel in the early, early months. But we did
What do we do?
Eight or nine trips with the baby
In twenty twenty two, including going to Portugal. We made that a family trip when we went for breakpoint, which like
Actually was great, like
Really hard. Very different. It seemed very hard, I'm gonna say from the outside. It was hard. It was hard. But I'm really glad we did it. I'm really glad we did it. Then the other big thing for us
This year we'd spent a lot of time over the last couple of years.
Think about where we wanted to live.
In general and then
In anticipation of having a baby and then
After having the baby.
Jenny and I went around the axle so many times about
California. We were pretty sure we're gonna stay in California and probably the Bay Area. Jenny's family's there.
And and we genuinely really love it there.
But do we move to the suburbs? Where do we move? Do we stay in the city? We were in the city before and we ultimately decided to stay in the city, to stay in the same neighborhood. We moved houses, but the plan for now is
We're just like
Gonna stay.
for the perpetuity in the city and
Which
Some
People I think are like
That's crazy. Why would you you know why would you live in San Francisco, period. Especially post pandemic.
Why would you raise kids in San Francisco? It's actually great.
Like for us, it's been
Amazing.
We can walk. We don't have to drive. We don't have to get her in the car. There's so much great stuff. She really enjoys it. Like she's a city kid. Like after
Break point we went out in the countryside in Portugal for a couple days.
The baby was so bored. She was like get me back to Lisbon. Like Oh wow. Um
So it's actually been really great for us staying in the city.
We'll see as she gets older, but um
Well that's the plan.
That's great.
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Carvates.
Carve outs. Let's do it.
All right, should we start with books?
Let's do it.
Alright.
I can't remember if I recommended this one because I read it over the holidays last year. I think it might have been my first carve out of twenty twenty two.
Project Hail Mary.
Oh yeah.
I think I read it on your recommendation. That's right. Ken Vouch very good.
I think it's the best fiction I've ever read. Definitely the best sci fi I've ever read. I think it's the best fiction I've ever read.
The premise arrives at you in real time as you read it. So I don't want to give away the premise.
Unless otherwise stated this is a spoiler free
Yeah. Uh Carmat.
The coolest thing about Project Hail Mary is how
Yeah.
Is
Basically all in our universe.
There's no big leap. Like in Star Trek, you have to like take this leap of like, well
There's warp drive and you don't really understand how it works, and that's fine. And now that we accept this black box.
Now we can go to other stuff. There's not like an accepted black box.
in Project Hail Mary. There's just like all the known rules of physics that we know about
And
Yeah, and it goes from there. It's hard sci fi, I think is the term, right? Is that what they call it? Yeah, where it's like everything is like
Laws of physics explorations for everything.
Right. So that was super cool.
Another book that I finished
About two months ago.
that I thought was exceptional and every single person who listens to Acquired should read it. I think it expands even broader than this audience, but this audience in particular would
Eat it up called The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housell.
We got to talk to Morgan, uh
recently fun. And when we w hopped on that call with him, it was like I was two thirds through the book. And so it was really fun, like
getting to talk about some of the concepts with him while I was in real time digesting them.
But he's unbelievably pithy. I need to read this act. I haven't read it. I I need to read it and yes, I agree. Total class act. I suspect it's a really good one to read now.
Post.
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one bubble when like everything was crazy. It would have been great to read it during twenty twenty one also. Yeah yes.
But it includes I think I've I've made it a carve out before the um Morgan's essay How All This Happened.
And every chapter of Psychology of Money is one of his essays. And so if you liked if you read how all this happened, which is this a m amazing
Path of
World War Two through today, through the American economy and a lot of politics and why different things happened and how everything led to the next thing.
The psychology of money is awesome'cause it incorporates
all of that sort of like factual history.
With
Just really good
Perspectives.
And some citations of research on
what actually makes people happy and what investment strategies work when your goal is happiness.
I certainly don't account for enough of that.
In my own financial planning.
Yeah.
Morgan makes a very strong argument in the book to basically
put as much into S P five hundred index funds.
when you're as young as you
possibly can and just never sell anything. It's like the most boring
style of investing possible that will probably be whatever you do. Yep.
I gotta pick that up and read it.
That'll be good, uh over the holidays.
Book.
Anything else you got in books?
I do actually. I'm halfway through it. And I was tempted to not talk about it'cause I I want to use it for a future carve out, but
It's already so good and this is another one where like listeners of the show will especially eat this up.
The Power Law by Sebastian Mallow. Is it worth reading even if you're already steeped in the industry?
You and I have done research on two hundred and fifty companies and all these venture funds and talked to the people that started a lot of these venture funds, and Sebastian knows more.
It just goes deeper.
He just talks about these investments that like
We think we've talked about the best investments of all time. There are more and like he cites them all numerically. He cites returns on early venture capital funds. He takes you all the way through product venture capital like
I mean there's George Dorio and then Arthur Rock and he talks about like how all those partnerships sort of led to the next ones and how
certain structures were bad and then the invention of the private limited partnership fixed all these problems. You're gonna love it.
Okay.
Might find that under the tree.
That's all I got for bucks. Oh that's all you got. All right.
My books.
I've got two.
Acquired books.
That
I
Can't believe
We did both of these episodes.
This year.
And we completely whiffed on this very obvious sort of like pun and fun.
Moment.
You know, I don't like whiffs.
I know I I'm embarrassed by this. Like mostly for me, this is like an ultimate like
David Rosenthal like dad joke moment.
My top two acquired books and they genuinely are also my top two.
Acquired books for the year.
Made in Japan and made in America.
I made that joke. Did you? Totally made that joke. Oh I can't believe my point. I swear I did.
Did you? We'll have to go back through the transcripts. Or at least like observed that in some capacity. Maybe it was a tweet?
Maybe I just have
But isn't that crazy that they're both named that? And they're both
So good.
Yeah.

Highly recommend.
Non acquired books that I read this year.
I think I did this as a carve out uh the Godfather series, the books. Yep.
Mario Puzo's books.
They are.
So good.
As good or better than the movies and the movies are
Uh in my opinion, some of the best of all time. Yeah.
And then the other one is Masters of Doom. I don't know if I talked about that on the show. We've
Thought about doing an id episode.
And then Lex did that like huge interview with Carmac.
So felt less urgent for us to do it, but um
A really well written book. And then the author of Masters of Doom, David Cushner, just did a
Follow up piece, I think in Vanity Fair.
of a follow up interview.
Did you see I think did I send this to you with um
Stevie Case.
Who's the CRO at Vanta?
And Stevie is a prominent figure in the book and she was the first
the first or one of the first professional female gamers ended up working
Did she work at Id? She may have worked briefly at Id, but then she joined Romero at his next company after Romero and Carmack broke up. Oh crazy.
Anyway, crazy story. And then she went on, she came out to Silicon Valley, ended up working at Twilio, and now is the CRO at Vanta. Tell me about this. I'm not sure I read the article, but I remember hearing yeah.
Yeah.
So good. Both the book and the follow up article.
Great.
Uh and so Stevie's story is is amazing.
So that's my
That's my
Article carve out too, which is our next category.
Mine was how all this happened. Yeah. Perfect.
Podcast. Podcast.
I already mentioned Resident Arc, my favorite.
Video game podcast.
Got it. All in Resident Arc and All In are like my go to must listen.
Every episode. Yep.
Two shout outs though that I discovered.
This year and have

David Senra and the Founders Podcast. Yep. Of course.
Wonderful show.
And we've become close with David and like when you hear David on the show, he is exactly that same way in real life too. Like it's so great. We he's come out to California, we've hung out a bunch uh love him. The other one, I've been a huge
MKB H D fan on YouTube, as I know you have been too. Uh, the Waveform podcast that they do is great. I've started like regularly listening. I really like it. And um
Our buddy David M L, who's on the MKBHC team.
He's regularly on uh host uh a co host on the they rotate through the team. Hm.
on the Waveform podcast and like it's in the same vein as kind of the Verge podcasts. Like it's all about
the products of tech, but it's really well done.
I've become an increasingly large fan of The Verge.
I don't know how I sort of slept on it. In my head it was like, Oh, another one of these like N gadget
Gizmoto type things. But like
That was wrong.
It is my
This is like embarrassing to say, new favorite publication. Like
Neh is so smart and I I'll basically go listen to Nei
Talk wherever he is. Like that is a way to for sure get me to go listen to an episode of whatever the podcast is.
So I sort of like first
And over Covet, I think was like
I'll listen to D Lai in any situation. And then like with the Verge redesign, I sort of
I don't think I realize how
unbelievably thoughtful.
the team there is and how strategic they are.
They're one of the few publications.
that thinks about the fact that they're a business too and thinks about the way to marry
their business with their editorial and how they can uniquely show up in the world based on
what they do differently than other people. And like I think the new Verge redesign is genius. Like I don't know if it'll work or not, but I love the attempt.
They're also one of the few
news sites in the world that actually gets a ton of direct traffic. So that's a huge thing that
plays to their advantage that then they can do interesting things with. There's people that come to them to solve a problem in their life or to fill a need.
It's so true. I mean, even me, I mean, you're way deeper in the product.
As a fan of the product side of tech that I am, but
Anytime there's a new
Apple device or there's a couple places I will go directly. I will go to MKBHD and all the various properties that he and they have now.
And I'll go to the verge. And I might consume some other stuff that comes to me on social media, but like I will directly go to those two
Properties.
And I feel like
My impression of Ne is that like
He is
World class on the product side.
Of tech, but he also gets the business side. Oh yeah, for sure.
For sure. Which is super rare. Super rare. And like his his like legal background, he gets all the like
interesting IP copyright stuff that's going on in technology. I just feel like he's
There's that Scott Adams aphorism. You don't want to be top one percent at anything, you wanna be top twenty five percent at the right three things and figure out how to marry them together. I feel like that's
Eli.
I'll also say
I think
The Verge has been the thing that's surprisingly the most helpful for me for acquired research this year.
Like I did a ton of Qualcomm research on the verge because they've done so much reporting on Qualcomm over the years.
So big Verge fan. I know that's we don't have publication as like the category, but I think they've got podcasts.
So back to podcasts. I already said the episode of Tim Ferris with Jerry Seinfeld from a couple of years ago, so good.
The episode of Huberman Lab, What Alcohol Does to Your Body. Oh yeah. Dude, it's scary, scary stuff.
And like moderation is also bad. There's no like, Well, I only had one drink this week and
That's
devastating to your body versus zero. And this is certainly not medical advice, but go listen to that podcast. It's just a
unbelievable the research studies that he's citing were
It's just so much more bad for you in every way than I ever thought.
And I thought it was bad for you. Yeah, you were already starting to drink less, right?
Yeah. I mean we both opened tonight with cocktails, but um
Well, you gotta live.
This is a celebratory event. That's right. That's right.
My last podcast recommendation is Smartless.
Any episode. So fun. It's just so fun to go live in their world.
For an episode.
You've been like that one for a while, right?
Last six months or so. Yeah. I feel like you've been big on that.
Right.
Music.
Music.
I don't think I discovered any new music this year.
I listen to a lot of Taylor Swift midnights.
I did a ton of prep for our wedding, curating a bunch of different playlists for like different segments of the day.
Well that's right. You uh
put together all the playlists yourself too, right? Yeah. I mean the DJ
did all the work that a great DJ does, but I sent him very highly manicured playlist that took several months to put together with a lot of opinion in it. So
You know, here's the dance, here's the cocktail hour, here's dinner, here's
So I was looking at my like Spotify year in review and I was like, Oh, this is like
my favorite songs from over the course of my life and my wife's life. And that's where most of my music listening went this year. I'll also say
Most of my audio time
Like even when I'm in the gym now is
podcasts or
Audible books mostly in service of acquired research. I just listen to way less music than I used to.
I feel like you do
A large part of your
acquired book research via audiobooks, right? Almost exclusively. Wow. It was
painful for me to read the whole Qualcomm book, but the only way to get it.
Total opposite direction. I pretty much only do physical paper.
Copies for acquired research. I admire your attention span.
I'm interested to try I do have an Apple pencil for our iPad minis. And
I wish I could write with the Apple pencil directly on the thing. Yeah. I bought that and I thought it'd be so cool and I never use it. I agree. I agree.
It's like I don't know if it's a DRM thing or like a font size thing that changes the page, but like
Really
Doesn't want to be able to write with the Apple Pencil directly on an ebook.
The same way I do on a physical
For whatever reason the tech gods.
I know.
Let me do that.
I have new music.
Oh yeah? Shockingly, you would not think that
Me
Knowing me.
And as a new parent.
Would discover new music.
This year.
The baby
loves Olivia Rodrigo. Less so now, but when uh
When she was like, I don't know, between ages like
Two months and six months.
They'll go through
Moments. Right.
Olivia Rodrigo almost without fail.
Turn on driver's license. Like
She would just be wrapped in attention and like immediately calm down. Amazing. We're like, I guess we have a teenager. Like So I listened to a lot of Olivia Rodrigo this year. And she's very talented. Very impressive. All right.
I got out to uh to my Spotify. Uh
T V and movies. Yes.
And or was my carve out very much. None exception. I re watched Black Panther recently. It was just as good. Great movie. But that's all I got.
So and or I saw the new Top Gun, that was unbelievably fun. Like put that on a big four K T V with some surround sound and just enjoy
Jenny and I watched that uh on a laptop uh yeah, we we gotta go. I think they're re releasing it in theaters for the release. Yeah.
We can go upstairs after this and watch it's uh seventy five inch like
Like it's it's a very good uh it's a very good experience.
I watched everything everywhere all at once, the movie.
And that movie gives you all the feels.
That is a great
Great movie.
Great one to watch together if you're looking for something to watch with your partner.
Weird movie, kind of a sci-fi, kind of a rom com
It's like a family dynamics movie, sad parts, happy parts, and visually stunning.
So and great acting. I don't even really want to talk about what it's about'cause it's it's one of these that
I just don't want to spoil it, but basically everyone will like this movie.
Right.
Good holiday movie? Great holiday movie.
I haven't watched season one yet.
Because
it felt like I just wanted to catch up as soon as possible because everyone was talking about it.
I'm now up to date on White Lotus season two.
That is a wild show.
It's basic the premise is like
You get
I don't know, eight to ten.
rich people that show up at this beautiful hotel, the White Lotus, in Sicily.
And they're in three or four different groups, so the plot sort of follows different groups, but the thing that runs through everyone is like everyone is extremely set in life, very wealthy and like deeply unhappy. And then crazy problematic stuff ensues from there. And it's visually stunning.
And the acting is great.
And
you're simultaneously very mad at all these characters for doing stuff that
they shouldn't be doing, but you also totally understand
The characters are so well established that you understand.
Based on their flaws as humans, why they're falling into these traps.
Are they real people? Is it reality or is it fiction? No fiction. Fiction. Yeah.
Just ver very well written fiction.
And the first one was in Hawaii.
So it's I think it's a almost a completely different cast, but like sort of same general premise in Italy.
So each season is a different set of I think that's what they're doing. Yeah.
Lastly, I I watch a lot of TV this year. The vow on Netflix
is great like trash TV to leave on in the background. It is um
two seasons long and it is a documentary about a cult.
And
unbelievably the cult leader
Is so
Wrapped up.
I mean, maybe not unbelievably for a cult leader in self glorification that like fifteen, twenty years ago, he
started recruiting filmmakers to join the cult.
So they would shoot all this footage. So there's all this like
very, very high production value footage over the entire life of the cult.
All the way through the trial, which was only a few years ago, is the Nexium cult.
And like
Dude went to prison for life and a bunch of other people went to prison'cause like they did
Terrible cult stuff.
And the whole thing is just like
Perfectly documented.
The entire time.'Cause I I think it was like part of the
Arrest that like all this document.
All the stuff became public footage, yeah.
So
Well, maybe they maybe Netflix bought, I don't know. But either way, very very good background TV.
Great.
Apps.
The only new app
That I
started using this year that had any meaningful impact was our baby monitor app. I just like everything's ossified. And uh what about you? Do you have anything I have a few apps since moving houses that are sort of tied to like IOT type things. The only one that's not that I really like that I started using this year is uh
Flighty, which is Ryan Jones's he's an indie developer. He previously did Weatherline, which was my favorite weather app. And Flighty is sort of like the modern trip it. The best way to explain it is like unbelievably good UI.
to tell you real time information about your flight and it's
tied into like every available API with every available airline. So you get information
from Flighty before the airline.
notifies you of it and often before it even displays on gates when you're in the airport. Okay, I'm gonna push before I get this for flying back in a couple days. Dude when when you get like
A thirty second heads up on a change before the mass of people are behind you. It's
Very huge.
That is an edge. That's alpha. That's alpha. Although now we just gave it to everybody. I think he was even featured in the Apple keynote. So we're not giving anybody any distribution here that they didn't otherwise already earn. But
Ryan's just uh just amazing indie developer. It's been really fun to like watch um I haven't met him or anything, but watch the success of his apps over the years and
This is just a fantastic experience.
Be fun to do.
Maybe it'd be an L P show or two, but we should have some indie developers on.
Like those are interesting business stories. Totally.
Alright.
Products.
I have one that actually comes with an app.
Okay.
Mine is the Roborock S seven Max.
Robo Rock S seven Max. Can I guess what the is this a RoboVacuum? Yes. It's the competitor to Roomba.
And I
I think it's a Xiaomi company. You know how Xiaomi owns like large stakes and a whole bunch of companies that they like manufacture for? I think it's that.
But it's just like
I had a roombo and actually returned it to get the Robo Rock instead. And the S seven Max is the like
I mean it's like the worst product name of all time, but it's like the souped up self emptying
also has a lightweight mop built in. It's the first time I've actually had like a
robot where you actually can say like
this thing is robust enough that it's just gonna make my life easier without failing or getting stuck or needing some kind of intervention. It just does its job. What's preventing me from ever
Seriously considering robot vacuums is
Stairs.
So you just need one for each floor. Exactly. Yeah. Or you can move it, but
Yeah.
I went for two
Roborox.
Given the
Shell me um
involvement or potential, I would imagine.
You could probably
Get two for less than the cost of a No, they're very expensive. Oh, they're very expensive. Oh wow. I was expecting that too. No, they're they're um
They're premium priced. Oh, interesting.
But great. Fantastic product. Yeah.
I guess that is the solution you just do, one for each floor.
Yep.
Yeah.
Interesting. Or get used to carrying it, it's fine.
I mean I guess it's not. You're gonna walk upstairs to like go to bed, so you may as well just like carry this thing under your arm and set it down and then start it in the morning or something.
Mm.
Yeah, it's great. I never thought about that.
Jave a thousand bucks right there.
Yeah.
Uh
All right.
That's all I got? That's all you're probably okay.
Let's see. I uh
I'm intentionally gonna limit a parenting product to to just one. I could really do a whole thing. Yeah. Do a list of listeners want this. Yeah, maybe. Well I mean
Not all, but it's a subset too.

This is a
Super
Pro tip that never
would have
Thought of but
Sniper bags are like
Big.
Brilliant idea. I wish I could take credit for this, but I can't.
Quit.
the key essentials of a diaper bag, which are diapers, wipes, changing pad.
In a pouch.
You know, like you can get like a nice like pouch or whatever, like printed or like you know.
I don't know. I even know where ours is from.
And then you could just move that pouch into whatever bag or you could either carry the pouch yourself or put it in your backpack or put it in whatever, like rather than having a dedicated diaper bag.
Keep the core essentials of the diaper bag in a pouch that you can then put in other things. God, dude, this show is getting worse and listeners, if you're still listening, I'm sorry. We'll be back next year with better content.
Oh boy.
But by the way, at some point if I'm ever a parent, I'm totally gonna be like I'll just do the I'll make a list for you. Good.
On the
Universal.
Product appeal.
Couple quick ones. One, I went back actually to the Apple.
Keyboard. I had a mechanical keyboard.
Which I really liked, but I went back to the Apple one for
T built in like it actually it's so convenient. It is really nice. It's so convenient. I have the Microsoft Ergonomic Sculpt Two.
And I love it, but I think I type my password.
Two dozen times a day more than I would if I just had my
I seriously doubt they'll do this, but actually they could sell it for a hundred bucks and make a ton of margin. A little standalone. Standalone touch ID.
Dongle.
Not done delayed over that. Yeah, totally.
Bunch of Elgato gear. Uh including the sound panel. Their sound panels are so good, so easy to put up. I don't know if listeners noticed from
By the way, we have
four Elgato lights in this room right now.
An Elgato stream deck.
David and I use the Elgato preamps, the Wave XLR, and then also the camera.
the wide camera that somehow turned off again is uh mounted on the Elgato
Boom arm where my mic is normally on my desk. Yep. They make such good stuff.
The sound panels in particular are really
really good and really they have
frames around them.
And then sticky stuff to mount so like it
Literally. I've put up uh I don't know, probably twelve of them.
In total took less than an hour.
Oh, we also use the cam link.
The Came Lake 4K, the way that we pipe our
cameras into our computer as webcams.
Yeah.
Huge, huge Elgano fans.
Nice.
Alright, and then you added to the agenda a final
New carve out.
Section.
Of places.
This year.
Uh copy.
That was my discussed.
Yes.
Any for you?
No, we didn't really go anywhere new despite all our travels. We've been to Portugal and Lisbon before
We went back to Santa Barbara. We try and go there every year, at least once a year. That's
The beach for us. Santa Barbara's.
Just an amazing lovely.
Lovely play, one of the loveliest places on earth and very accessible from California. We gotta find more. We did the EA episode down there. We gotta we gotta find more acquired related reasons to go. Yeah, it's right. Trip lives down there. He's gotta figure it out.
That's right.
Well
With that listeners.
I think we will see you in
twenty twenty three.
We would love to see you in the Slack.
We'll be hanging out there over the holidays.
If you want to listen to the LP show, we actually just recorded two other great LP shows that'll be coming out soon. You can join and get those two weeks early at acquire.fm slash LP.
Or you can search acquired LP show in any podcast player and get access to them two weeks after LPs get'em.
Anything else, David?
One very
Very important last thing.
A big
Thank you.
All of you, we uh we talked about it a lot on this.
Episode. We truly

In the world.
The best community in the world.
And I just
Pint ourselves like
Literally
on a weekly if not daily basis.
That we get to
do this that I get to do this as a living. And um it's all thanks to you all
We just get so much joy out of
putting this show together. I mean clearly we can talk for hours just about the year and all the function. Whether or not that's interesting to other people remains to be seen, but every business should know their source of power and their source of um differentiation and and ours is all of you. So thank you so much for being on the journey with us. It's been
An amazing seven years, and uh here's to seven more.
Indeed.
Happy holidays. Happy holidays.
Who got the truth?
Is it you, is it you, is it you Who got the truth now?
Oh.