Holiday Special 2023

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f142c406cdd6f766

I am loving that you also busted out the
Holiday sweater.
Feels very appropriate. Yes. I purchased this holiday sweater.
at the Seattle Nordstrom for our
twenty nineteen live show at the University of Washington. It's like two months before the pandemic hit. That's right.
And I think I wore it.
Last year, too.
I feel like you did.
Yeah, we were right.
behind me. I wish we were doing it again this year, but uh
Seems prudent to uh
not have a father of a toddler hop on an airplane and then sit in a confined space with me for five hours right now. Lot of germs in my life right now.
Thank you for your precautions.
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 season thirteen, episode five, the season, finale, and holiday special of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Resenthal. And we are your hosts. Did you see what I did there, David? I did. I did. No technology.
No technology.
Yes, I motion
to uh you know the whole board of directors here that we dropped technology from our intro since I crunched the numbers and four of the 14 episodes we did this year.
were technology companies.
board members acquired besides you and me because I am in full agreement. Unanimous. And otherwise we would have had a deadlocked vote there one to one. That's true. And uh
I don't think our charter really actually ever accounts for what to do in that circumstance, so
Yes, listeners, if you count Lockheed Martin, it's five. If you count Visa, it's six, but the minority of the episodes that we did in twenty twenty three were tech companies, which is
Uh
Very fascinating evolution to me based on where Acquired started analyzing technology acquisitions that actually went well.
But
Of course, we will keep doing deep episodes on tech companies since we are nerds and that's where we've spent, you know, our whole careers so far. So if you liked the programming and assembly language on air from NVIDIA or I guess assembly language pseudocode.
Or our Qualcomm episode where we tried to describe how the CDMA protocol works.
We're still here for you.
We're just gonna do a lot of L VMH NFL.
Uh he's uh Casco.
Nike in there.
You know, mixed in there.
So what are we doing here today? Well, David and I are gonna bring you
Good tidings, good cheer, hopefully.
And uh keep you company. Yes. Happy holidays. Cheers.
Cheers. I've got my uh
Cinnamon uh infused hot chocolate here. It's delicious.
Ooh, you're feeling very festive.
Yes, we are here to uh keep you company on your
Long drives or flights or workouts or house cleaning or whatever over the holidays.
On our agenda today.
is a recap of acquired this year.
Both the state of the franchise from the board of directors themselves.
We will also be giving you some new tidbits on our favorite episodes behind each one of them.
why we picked them, how they came to be, what listeners helped us select, that sort of thing.
We're gonna talk about how we see acquired fitting into the broader media landscape.
How are
Views about the show and the stuff that we cover have changed over time. What's in store for acquired in 2024.
New carve outs.
And answering listener questions from the Slack. And then at the end of the episode, we're gonna share a little bit about David and my investing lives and how those will be changing.
in twenty twenty four as uh David, you and I are gonna get to do much more of our investing together.
I know it's gonna come full circle.
We started both at Majorona Investing together and uh
Well, we'll just have to talk about this later in the episode.
We will.
But first listeners, I mentioned in one quick line on the Charlie interview
And uh have not
said anything on any social media or anything like that since but uh
I am a parent. I'm joining David on the parenting journey.
With approximately a one month old here at the Gilbert household.
Ben Jenny and I are so, so, so happy for you guys.
Parenting uh as you know now.
is the most
Joyous.
Difficult.
Wonderful.
biggest thing you will ever do in your life.
And there is no way to understand or describe it until you become one. So welcome to the club.
Thank you.
I think that's right. I think any words that I would say about what it's been like so far are words that other people tried to use to describe it to me and I found them largely meaningless.
I mean, I could say the same things that everyone else always says.
And there have been some amazing things written. I think I read the Paul Graham article on kids. I read the fourth trimester Wait But Why piece. I've read
You read the Michael Lewis book, right? The Michael Lewis book. Yeah, that was good.
But like
I don't know, the words kind of bounce off you. You're like, Well, why would that be fun? Why would that be rewarding? Why would waking up at three AM to change a diaper ensue the you know, screaming like why is that? But it's uh actually Morgan Housel put it to me.
in a really lovely way where he just said, What greater gift could you have than
helping another human, another member in your family who's new to the world in their most intense time of need.
And you know, that intense time of need comes a dozen or two dozen times a day, but the sort of privilege of being able to
soothe someone when they're experiencing that sort of intense emotion.
Yeah, they may not be fully formed, but babies are people too, so Absolutely.
Yeah. Well, so great.
That is
Big, big change number one since we last reconvened here.
Big change number two.
is Geekwire reported about this already, but you are joining me.
Full time.
Next year.
Unaquired.
I'm so, so excited.
Is about freaking time, huh, David? I wasn't gonna say it, but Yeah, I can't wait.
You and I are so
just fired up to double down on acquired and it feels very fun to be going all in on it together.
And
On the one hand, it feels like it's been a long time coming. On the other hand, acquired has been such a slow burn over the last eight plus years that there was not like an obvious moment to do it. So it was one of these moments where you sort of look back and you're like, Whoa how am I not spending all of my waking time and energy on this?
when uh you know it is something that is just, you know, it's our life's work, as our friend Patrick O'Shaughnessy likes to say about the types of entrepreneurs he's looking for. Like this is definitively our life's work. And it wasn't when we started and somewhere along the way, gradually it just became that.
Yeah.
Totally.
And the way it's gonna work, I'm transitioning to a venture partner at PSL at Pioneer Square Labs here in Seattle, so still get to
Keep my board seats, which I think keeps me sharp for the show.
And stay a friend of the family there. So
I'm excited to sort of change my role at PSL, but of course all of my real time and energy going forward is acquired.
Um
So happy not only for as a you know, fifty percent shareholder in acquired, but uh even more so like
You're my best friend, and
This means we're gonna spend even more time together and uh
Just outside of the show, outside of anything that that means for
Us, our business, you know.
Episodes all of which are gonna get so much better.
It brings me joy. I'm so happy.
Thanks, man.
So we should say before we get too far in, this is not investment advice, this whole show. Dave and I may have investments in the companies we discuss in the show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Somebody here has to follow the rules and keep us uh I've got a nice script so that's well built out in front of me.
I also must apologize to listeners.
I am
Coming in hot from podcaster paternity leave here.
And if an anything I say is completely incoherent, I am on pretty minimal sleep. So
Thank you for bearing with me.
All the parents out there will understand and appreciate you being here. As do I.
Yeah.
Well, let's start.
The twenty twenty three acquired
Year in review recap.
Dude.
This has been
Freaking wild. I mean, you were talking about like
acquired has been a slow burn, you know, we have doubled every year and we've always been this example of
Exponential growth that like it starts small and we know.
First year we doubled from two to four listeners, you know, like but no, it wasn't exactly that.
No, I I worked it backwards one time. I think it was like five hundred to a thousand or something. Actually, I should crunch that number, but there is a number you can figure out in year one since you know what our current numbers are.
Yep.
But small base. It was like small base.
Kind of small base, still pretty small base.
You know.
There were many years where
nobody would have imagined that this would be either of our
Full time.
Gigs.
No. And I actually went and I looked it up last year on our holiday special.
I was both.
Pretty
Excited and
Proud.
To announce and also terrified.
That
We had hit.
A quarter million.
Listeners.
Yeah.
Felt like holy crap.
That's a big number. This is like real what we do.
And I was terrified because I was like, We talk all the time, Ben talks all the time about how we double every year. Like how on earth are we gonna
Do that. Right. You were like, you should stop saying that'cause it's eventually gonna not be true. Yeah, because it's about to end. Which is true. Eventually it will not be true.
Of course. I mean unless
Literally when we start expanding galactically or something like that.
Yeah, and the question is how big is the addressable market for people who want to in an audio only medium
Consume
you know, four hour essentially books, conversational audio books about business histories.
Often in kind of an esoteric way.
And granted, you and I have gotten much better at becoming storytellers over time, but each one of those sort of concentric circles niches it down. And I think you and I just thought that that addressable market was, you know, a hundred thousand people or something at first, but now we know it's at least half a million.
Yes. So the big news.
We hit half a million.
Listeners.
This year.
Which is pretty wild. Hopefully.
We can put up the chart, the Ben Gilbert acquired chart that you make
Obsessively every month showing our episode growth over time. Which at some point I do wanna stop making. Because I said last year on the show, like
At the holiday special, I don't think growth is inherently virtuous for us, for the goals of our business here.
And yet.
I am the person who's sort of obsessively trying to compile the numbers and figure out is it gonna double again organically since we don't advertise or anything. And so
Do I wanna be known for the Ben Gilbert chart? I don't really think so,'cause it's actually antithetical to how I think about what we do, but
I do make the chart. I do put a lot of thought into it and what episodes will do what and trying to predict
the numbers. I think a lot of people describe it as virtuous to
Oh, I don't pay attention to the analytics.
I think
To each his own.
I pay a lot of attention to the analytics. I think that helps you become
better at making a product that people like. I don't understand why you wouldn't immerse yourself in every single number you possibly could all the time. Like it may lead you to a different
outcome, but that outcome
As long as you're measuring correctly.
seems to be make something that people want more.
So
Yes, I obsessively look at the numbers, I look at the completion rates.
I think that's super important.
Well, and uh related side part of that. Thank you.
To all of you. The half a million of you now for spending all this time with us this year. There's a lot to discuss.
So
You know, for me I've kinda gone back and forth. You started saying I think about two years ago
Growth is not a goal. I don't know that growth is good for acquired.
And I sort of
Not in my head, but I wasn't totally sure. This year I think has really helped
Crystallized.
My
Thoughts on the
Yes.
As we've grown so much.
I
Do completely agree with you.
Growth in and of itself.
should not be a priority and in fact
can be very detrimental to what I think we both wanted.
Do you hear if we
Optimized just for growth.
What I think we've done this year.

Back to the very start of this episode and you changing the intro.
We went from a podcast about great technology companies.
And the stories and play books behind them.
To a podcast about great companies.
And the stories and playbooks behind them.
And
Yes, we have continued to grow in the
tech world and sort of our core niche and I think that
Audience and audience potential is
Way bigger than we ever realized.
But we've also added
Everybody else in the world now who is interested in business.
And
runs a brand and thin about brand management or runs a retailer or runs a
large hardware business like Home Depot or something like that, you know?
And also all around the world, too. I mean, some of our biggest episodes this year.
were A not American companies.
B, even if they were American companies, they were truly
global brands and global companies.
a lot of what we do, if we just wanted to optimize for growth, we would do differently. We would not make four hour episodes. We would release more frequently, et cetera, et cetera.
It's interesting. Growing from a podcast about great technology companies to a podcast about great companies.
Is
Certainly a
growth strategy or a byproduct of doing that is growth because the addressable market is larger. But I think it would fail
If that wasn't just you and I following what our natural interests were.
People ask us all the time, how do you pick episodes?
And the answer is you and I talk for hours a day. We wander around our house in our neighborhoods putting on AirPods and calling each other and talking about, you know, what's currently in our email inbox, what we're researching.
What we need to do to ship an episode.
Prep for guests, that sort of thing.
And one of the conversations that always is happening is
What are you interested in right now?
How have your views shifted over X period of time? What is fascinating to you now? And I think the growth
is sort of a byproduct of our obsessions shifting and becoming these
durable businesses and trying to understand
what makes a company worthy being a century long company.
regardless of where it came from or how it was funded or what
technologies were used in creating it.
I think that's been what's
So cool for me and
my big lessons and takeaways from everything we've done this year.
Is that
Those stories and studying
The L VMH is
The Costco, the Nikes of the world.
If anything, that's like
even more important than studying the great technology companies.
for building a great technology company.
Yes.
We found this just
Incredible response, especially to the LVMH episode.
Of like
Wow, here are these lessons that are not
Well talked about and known in our world.
Right.
It is kind of strange becoming canon.
I never thought acquired would get to the point where when we do an episode on something, it has the possibility to become
an undertone of
themes that people are discussing and
certainly years one through six or seven, that was never the case, but with L VMH
With Costco
Maybe with Portia.
Certainly with Nike.
I think there was an element of we released the episode and suddenly we noticed the discussion, especially amongst the tech sphere.
about that topic massively picked up, or people would go on C N B C and make a point that we made and
I'd call you David and go like I wonder how that comparison got made. This is great.
Maybe they didn't even listen to the episode, but what was cool is that
Enough people now.
Have been consuming this and talking about it and getting value out of it. It gets in the water. It gets in the water, yeah.
Wow.
My favorite was a friend of mine who's the V C at Light Speed texted me about two weeks after the Costco episode came out and said
Dude, I have gotten three pitches this week from startups where at some point in the deck they talk about how their business model is similar to Costco.
Yes, I don't want to overtude our own horn on this, but that has been a huge change this year that we have never seen in previous years is once we do an episode, it sort of gets in the water. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about
The episodes.
So we started the year actually with the NFL, which I think a lot about that episode still to this day and
We did the Visa episode that we finished the year with
Well, it's like
The NFL Coda part two.
Then we did L VMH.
Which
I feel like we have even more to talk about.
Nintendo, Lockheed.
Porsche
Nike.
Costco, NVIDIA Part Three, and then Visa.
And then our interviews this year and we should talk about our kind of
change in strategy from what used to be
specials last year too.
acquired interviews this year.
Daniel Eck.
Dharakaswa Shahi from Uber.
Jensen from NVIDIA and
Then Charlie. But let's stick with the season first.
Of that.
What was your favorite that we did this year? Like Ben Gilbert's personal favorite episode.
I think the most
Interesting.
Business.
Or at businesses that sort of tickle me are Costco and Visa.
Because there's a purity
to them.
Costco's is the purity of the way that the puzzle pieces fit together.
In a way that is.
Just artful.
It's almost like
a discovery of laws of physics, the way that
Saul Price and Jim Senegal and the rest of the crew have sort of built that business over the years.
It's just beautiful. It's like watching a ballet. I think that we likened it to that in the episode.
Visa, on the other hand, is like the best operating leverage business. I mean, they have over fifty percent net income margins. They seem like they're locked in forever.
You know, for better or for worse, as we described on the episode, but
If you I wouldn't ask someone like what is the best at scale business model, it's probably Visa.
to do the sort of uh least work for the most free cash flow. You look at Costco.
Not that much free cash flow, crap ton of work. It's almost like the complete opposite over in Visa Land. Total opposite.
But you asked me what my favorite episode was, and my favorite episode was L VMH.
because it was so not on my radar at all and not something that I valued at all.
And I scorned
luxury before doing the research and I didn't understand any of the history and now I feel like a whole new world has been open to me of understanding brand and value. And now you have a whole closet in your house filled with Louis bags. I do not. I do not I only own one thing from one luxury brand
In all my possessions. And actually th that item is not made by L VMH.
Dude.
You're just gonna leave it at that?
Well, I
I wanna reveal it on a twenty twenty four episode we are planning. Oh okay, all right.
You heard it here first. There will be at least
One.
Luxury episode in twenty twenty four. Is that what you're telling me?
Yes, absolutely.
And I should say I own probably a lot of things that are L VMH, but none that I would consider luxury.
I don't mean like a Louis Vuitton suitcase. I mean like w I have some woodenville whiskey in the closet that L VMH somehow over the last few years came to own woodenville whiskey. I think there's a lot of those sorts of things that
Where I've bought a lot of things at duty free shoppers or
Yeah.
You're talking about an item that is truly a luxury item.
Which is
On a whole different rubric. It has a sense of place. It has a sense of place. It is not a premium
item
you could look at it through a certain lens and say, This is utterly ridiculous.
Correct.
you know, piece of raw material worth that.
Right. I only own one of those things. Yes. Okay.
I'm curious, would you describe anything that you own that way?
Other than things that are obviously that way, other than some like Louis Vuitton suitcase that you have or something. I don't know what you have, but you've got some Rolexes.
Yeah, I have some watches.
But honestly, those are mostly from my dad. My dad is
really into watches and a few of those
sort of trickled to me over the years.
I was thinking about it in preparing for this. I do not.
And maybe part of that is having a
Two year old um which uh is not good for the health of the objects in your home.
But uh I was thinking about that and I was like, you know, I I would like to change that and
Have something.
That
is meaningful on a different level beyond just what it physically is.
Yeah.
I guess any jewellery would count as that.
Oh yeah. And these things may not be branded the way that we're talking about luxury branding, but like a diamond engagement ring is inherently not premium but luxury. Yeah, and I certainly I would count my
Wedding ring amongst that.
Or a real world NFT for the crypto folks out there. Oh boy. All right. Let's keep it moving here.
Which by the way, I think is actually the best way to think about diamonds. I spent some time recently looking into lab grown versus mind diamonds.
And there's sort of an interesting
I know we're on a diatribe here, but you asked me about my favorite episode and Dell VMH came up and here we are. So
There is a fixed supply.
of diamonds in the world, and there is a rate at which humans can mine them.
So
regardless of the intrinsic qualities of diamonds
It is a thing.
That
can only come out at a certain volume.
And largely they go through the GIA to be identified with a serial number and it actually gets laser etched microscopically onto the diamond. So these things are like
you know, verified that they came out of the ground and you know the year they were mined and you know where they were mined and all that stuff. Yep.
Deber's would be a fun episode to do someday. Totally. And the Lap Grown Diamonds.
Are
chemically identical. And it's a huge accomplishment of humankind that we've figured out how to do this.
And on the one hand, they're identical. You look at them, you right click, you download the JPEG, and like the these things are identical. But on the other hand,
We are only going to get better Moore's Law style at creating lab grown diamonds. And so they will asymptotically approach zero. Maybe not zero, but some number. Every year, presumably they should get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Whereas
for something where there's a known finite supply of them, like GIA certified number etched diamonds.
There's a strong argument for that to hold its value to the extent that you care about an engagement ring holding its value, but that will hold its value
Much longer.
Or uh much more durably.
And truly the best way to articulate it is
Well, if you believe that this JPEG has value, but that other JPEG doesn't have value and that other JPEG
is the exact same bitmap as this one, like why do you believe that? Oh, I see it's got an on chain location and blah. It's literally the exact same thing with diamonds. All right. We're gonna have to do a De Beer's episode at some point'cause this warrants a full acquired deep dive, I think.
Yeah.
Agree.
David Rosendall, what was your favorite episode this year?
I was thinking about this.
To not bury the lead, my favorite episode was Nike.
Hm. But I don't think it was our best episode.
I think
Our best episodes this year.
were L VMH, Costco, and Visa.
And I've come to think
That there's a sweet spot.
For you and me.
In terms of
Preparation.
And are sort of
emotional states preparing for and leading up to
An episode.
That leads to it being good. And I don't think Mickey was bad. I think it was
Perfectly acceptable.
But
My level of work
Preparation.
An emotional
concern and stress heading into Nike was the peak that it is.
Ever been.
About an acquired episode. Yeah, you were a wreck.
I mean how many books did you read?
Over ten.
And part of that was
It was the first episode of the season.
Part of that was
I went to Stanford Business School, which is the Knight Management Center, and this is Phil Knight, and you know, I've never met Phil Knight, but
I felt an extra debt of gratitude to him and obligation to do it right.
And then part of it too was

Trailing us. Following along with us as we were making it.
Which was super cool. The article that he wrote was
Wonderful and very complimentary.
Yeah, he's a talented writer.
All of that stew, you know, I felt like
Okay, I really gotta bring it on this one. And what was interesting
That's why it was my favorite. I'm proud of all the work that
I and we did for it.
But
I think I finally went too far. If you look at that episode.
I was trying too hard.
Mm.
Which may not come out in the final edit. I gotta be honest.
If you go back and look listeners, you may not hear it.
I could hear it in the first edit.
And certainly while we're recording here live, I mean the number of things that we end up cutting is massive.
But David, I completely agree with you.
Until this year, I don't think I would have agreed with the statement
That
the quality of our episodes is governed just as much by our head space.
the day of recording as it is by the quality of the research that we did. And now I believe that that is immensely the case. The the flow of the episode, the excitement about the topic, the clarity of the points that we're trying to make.
It's about
treating it like Sunday if you're an NFL player and having a game day routine in the way that
teaches you how to perform at your highest.
This is gonna sound incredibly um
self aggrandizing here, but this is how I've come to think about it.
Like NFL Sunday when we're going out there. We go back to our NFL episode at the beginning of the year.
It takes me right back to playing football in high school.
The games that I prepared the hardest for felt like I really put the effort in. Those were not the ones where I played the best.
The ones where I played the best are when you play loose, you know? You go out there
And you have fun and you enjoy yourself and you let it flow. And like it is the exact
Same with
Acquired episodes. All right. I wasn't gonna share this, but now that we're on the topic.
So at the top of my show notes document for every episode, there's two things written.
One is
what should the listener take away from this? And I have some bullet points of make sure you nail these points and are clear about these things. And the other one is a one liner that I have written that says
Have fun, laugh, you're good at this.
Mantras are powerful.
And
Those
Things are so.
Important, I think. You know, it just again.
For folks who are listening who are or have been athletes, I suspect this will resonate.
That's the
past part of my life that it resonates with.
All of those are important.
Have fun.
You're gonna play your best when you're having fun.
You know, a laugh related to that.
But also it kinda to me makes me think about
Your team, your teammates, you know, you and I were a team.
And then the last piece, maybe it's the most important, the you're good at this.
The sports psychology element, the self confidence element.
Is
Huge.
Yeah.
I mean who are we to think that we can
Go.
Make these ridiculous episodes.
Well, that's exactly the headspace that I get into that causes episodes to be bad.
When we restart an episode and listeners, we s restart this episode, we got fifteen minutes in and we were like, ah, it feels forced. And we restarted it. I can guarantee you that the quality of this episode's already better.
But yeah, that's the sort of negative self-talk that I start getting into. Who are you? What are your credentials? What qualifications? Are you sure you looked under every rock? Those are the things that start
ripping me apart if I start thinking them moments before recording.
So
That's why Nike is my favorite episode,'cause I feel like
This
way of thinking about what we do finally clicked.
For me.
It's like you gotta like take yourself past the breaking point before you realize
I might need to think about this differently.
It is funny how doing the episodes and studying these people and these businesses
teaches us things that we internalize in our own business.
I would not have been able to describe acquired as a luxury but
brand or a luxury product.
prior to L VM Age. And luxury's probably still not right. It's probably
I don't know if it's ultra premium or if it's just like a prestige brand. I want to talk about this later in the episode, but my quick
Take is
We are not a luxury product, but we share a lot of
Tricks.
Yeah.
Scarcity is kind of the biggest one. And that's a thing where I was unable to understand what to do.
Do with our scarcity.
before studying L VMH, but in afterwards I sort of came to the realization of
Oh.
We should embrace the fact that
we only have the throughput to be able to do one episode a month. And rather than trying to figure out how to scale that,
There is a very fair path to owning it.
And staying a boutique little shop that's you and I and Steven, our wonderful editor who worked with us on a contract basis. And
This is the team. This is what we do, and we can only make so much. And if we make more, the quality drops, or we have to scale in some way that feels unnatural to us. And that's okay.
Rather than every other person in the podcast ecosystem that we had spoken with up until that point was well, you have to figure out how do you layer that second show or how do you introduce more hosts or how do you get research assistance so you don't have to do that. And the boutique
Is
one of our greatest strengths and it was something I think I was trying to run away from for a while and now
people ask what's gonna be different for acquired when you
go full time, you're doing way more episodes.
No, absolutely not. We're gonna make
The same number or fewer of even better episodes.
We gotta be careful or we're gonna turn into Dan Carlin here and do one episode a year.
Hardcore history. Yeah.

I know.
So the luxury strategy, which was part of our
Preparation for
Lv M H was reading this incredible book, The Luxury Strategy.
Which contains the twenty four anti laws of marketing.
And I just want to call out
Anti law of marketing number eighteen.
You just have this on your desk. Well, I put it on my desk ahead of recording this episode. But uh actually I've had it on my desk for large portions of this year.
Anti law of marketing number eighteen.
Do not relocate your factories.
Yeah. This is our version of that.
We're never going to relocate our factories.
And we happen to be in a particular business that
scales extremely elegantly.
with a word of mouth go to market.
And a product that is infinitely replicatable.
And
a revenue stream that scales nearly in lockstep with the size of the distribution.
And I say it nearly is important. We should talk about nearly later.
But we do have a business model that lets you
Grow the business.
Indefinitely.
Without
Compromising at all.
And like if you are an L VMH, you do have to go build another factory in order to go serve more customers.
There's not sort of that.
infinite scaling that can happen by the virtue of the internet and media on the internet.
Yep.
So
To put a bow on the very easy question of what was your favorite episode. Yeah, you so far you have spent a lot of time not answering me.
Uh no I did. It was Nike. Nike was my favorite. But I think um the
Other part of the coin question of what was our best episode. I think Visa was our best episode. Nice. There were others that are more impactful.
I think L VM H
That episode alone, I think, completely changed acquired.
As did Costco. As did Costco.
But
Visa, I think.
was the perfect blend of
Like an NFL Sunday gone extremely right.
We prepared.
The right amount.
And we played least.
We had fun. We laughed.
We were remembered that we were good at this.
I think you can see it in the finished product.
Yeah. It's the ones where we didn't put too much pressure on ourselves that I think came out the best.
Yep.
Which for me were L VMH Costco.
And Visa.
Yeah.
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. Lagora 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
to a hundred million in ARR.
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 him that Ben and David sent you.
So
In January, David and I looked at each other and we said
We should stop doing specials.
Specials is what we
Called the non season episodes.
That we did on the feed until
This here.
And they were almost all
Interviews in practice, but
Anything that wasn't a canonical season episode.
Yeah.
And the reasons that we decided we wanted to discontinue them were
As David, you said they're almost always an interview. And what is an interview? An interview is
Uh episode where you have a person who is not
A part of
your enterprise, something you control, come on the show and say something that they very likely are going to say somewhere else too.
So
by their very inherent value of it.
It is not an N of one product. Whereas when we make a Costco episode, that's an N of one product.
And so no matter how good you do the interview
you are starting on your back foot.
in terms of can you create this diamond, this unique
thing in the world the way that we can on a season episode.
And also.
There are
Other

Who are world class.
Interviewers. Yep.
And
They are incredible masters of their craft. And we were kind of looking at what we were doing and be like, Why are we doing this too?
Yeah.
And you can see it in the numbers. Every time we would do one
Even with the biggest names, you know, these people where you're like, I imagine that really moved the needle for you. No, it didn't.
Every single time we did a special,
It had less
downloads than the most recent season episode we did.
Which is crazy.
Never once was a special our biggest episode ever. To your point about analytics, that was telling us something and that was screaming at us in the face for years.
Which is
When you make a unique product, that is the thing that people are here for. You have a format and a product that people want. So make that. Don't go do something that's one click over in the commodity spectrum. And we tried all sorts of things. We tried to do the
A CQ sessions where we really like, you know, try to make it feel more casual and we'd pour wine. And I think all the different specials we did and sessions we did and collabs we did, there's something to be learned from to bring into
Mainstream acquired.
And what interviews now are.
Yes. So here's where the lesson we learned around don't clutch your pearls too tightly.
We swore'em off. We said, You know what? We're done. Yep.
We had made the decision.
That there was never gonna be another interview on Acquired. This is gonna be
A great year going forward where once a month we have this very pure thing that we do that's you know release a L VMH style episode. And then we have the opportunity to fly to Stockholm and interview Daniel Eck.
About Spotify.
And then we get the opportunity to interview
The CEO of the then eighty billion dollar market cap.
Uber.
And
We would call each other and say, We said we weren't gonna do this, so what do we do? Well what we had decided, you know, we have ACQ two.
And we started calling that the acquired interview show. Yeah.
Briefly, for like two weeks. Legitimately, this is where the rubber hit the road.
We were going
to put Daniel and Dara on A CQ two.
And that was the decision.
And we're ready to do it.
Then we just kinda looked at each other and we're like
What are we doing here? Right. We are getting far too precious. And I think our preciousness has made acquired what it is. I believe that, but you can get too precious.
A CQ2 is awesome, but it has one tenth the distribution of acquired. And that's great because it lets us play around with stuff and it lets us do follow ups to episodes where we don't feel like every single person that listened to this big episode would want to listen to the follow up and we get to talk about up and coming companies. It's a lower stakes.
thing for us to do an ACQ2 episode, which is great to have as a part of our ecosystem.
But
It was really dumb and I'm really glad we didn't go through with it to put the CEOs of Spotify and Uber there. And so
The year went on, we had the opportunity to then interview Jensen as he's becoming the most highlighted CEO of one of the top five most important companies in the entire world. And then of course,
We get to spend time with Charlie Munker.
Gosh, a month and a half before you passed away, which is
I feel so unbelievably lucky. Yeah. Well, we'll come back to Charlie.
But it turns out with interviews the answer is
We still don't do interviews. We don't do specials. Acquired is what it is.
Except for you know
Charlie and Jensen. Well, I think there's a couple themes here too.
It all kinda stumbled into real time with Daniel and Dara. Those interviews
actually happened on the calendar pretty close to one another.
And then I think we kind of crystallize this by
The time Jensen and Charlie happened.
We still can do something unique and special.
And
In most cases, I don't want to say this will be every case going forward.
But if you look at those four
Interviews that we did.
This year.
They were all the CEO's sort of you know, sort of protagonists in Charlie's case.
of companies that we had covered extensively on acquired.
And I think that's
To me is at least one example. There may be more.
Of
How we
can do something unique and
Special.
And that's not to take away from
all the other many masters of their craft out there, like Patrick O'Shaughnessy and many others that are
World class interviewers.
Of which I don't think we are in a vacuum.
But in cases where we've done
A hundred hours of work or in Nvidia's case and Berkshire's case
many hundreds of hours of work on
These companies.
I think we then can do something special with the protagonist that other people can't do.
Right.
This is something that my dad would always say to me when I was younger. He's like, I legitimately don't think I'm the smartest person, but I do think I'm the hardest working. And whether it was in school or whether it is career,
The answer was grind for more hours.
and become the most knowledgeable to make the most informed decisions. And I kind of feel that way as an interviewer.
I'm not Andrew Ross Sorkin, you know.
plain vanilla walking into a pretty new subject. He's gonna be
Just a lights out interviewer.
But the place where I can be
one of the best in the world is if I have done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of research on a topic.
You know, we can start with Jensen on the Riva one twenty eight.
And that's not how other interviews are gonna start.
Right. And that was just
Obvious to us. I think that was your idea to do it. You were just like of course we have to start with the Refo one twenty eight.
Right.
You can't know a story as well as the protagonist knows the story, but try to get as close as you can. Sometimes I think we save ourselves from ourselves here, but
I'm glad that we didn't
Cut these and I think it can end up Well, we'll get to the stats in a second, but
Clearly they have ended up being something.
Special.
But the cool thing about the core thing that we do

is like that is the natural byproduct. It's not like we need to go
carve out time to do a hundred hours of work to go interview
Jensen or Charlie.
It's like no no, we've already just done that is the core thing that we do. Right. So
To throw out the opportunity.
To continue doing those would have been really silly.
Yeah.
So you might be wondering.
Charlie Margot was by far our biggest episode ever. Jensen was bigger than any previous season episode.
Dara and Daniel were right around the ballpark of what our season episodes were doing at that point in time when we had interviewed them. We sort of figured out
There is a style and a
Type of person.
where the episodes behave as N of one episodes. The sort of decay curves look similarly over time of people seeking them out in an evergreen way.
You know, we have seen just as many people
92 days later, which is what today is referencing the Jensen interview that we would see referencing the Nike episode 92 days later. These things, if we do them right, stay just as evergreen.
And so
you know, we wanna stay as precious as possible about them. And so what does that mean? Like how can we
change acquired business.
To make it so that
The answer is we don't do interviews on the the main show unless of course
It's an interview that we need to do on the main show.
And
after some early conversations we've had with some of the sponsors for next year.
We just sell them differently. I think that was a key insight for us. We used to do in a season
Six main episodes and six
Special.
And we would sell them in both and say, Here's what you'll get in this period of time.
And that's still how we sell the sponsorships for the season. You know that it's gonna happen over six months.
You know it's gonna be about once a month.
We'll give you a heads up as soon as we know the topic that we're gonna be covering.
And we would try to do the same thing with specials and that
drove us to create specials, which is entirely the wrong thing to do. Right.
It was broken. It was slot filling. You know, and again, not to take away from our guests. We had incredible guests, but the conversations themselves were slot filling. We had slots.
That we needed to fill.
That works for us with the season episodes because we're gonna make an episode once a month that's in our control.
But
With interviews.
You can't
Slot fill if you want them to be special. If you're sitting around waiting serendipitously for a Charlie Munger or a Jensen interview to happen, which is
Basically what we've decided the strategy is for guests. You can't have pre sold a commitment to your partners that you're gonna do, you know, six of those every six months. Exactly.
So stay tuned for how this will work in practice, but the way we're thinking about it for next year and and some early conversations, seems like this is gonna work is
You get the next three interviews, we promise you they're going to be world class, and we have no idea when they will come out. And they're probably going to come out next year.
But we can't tell you much beyond that.
And I think that to the extent that we find and continue to find great partners who want to work with us as sponsors in that way.
That works really well to make sure that the content bar is where it needs to be, the audience is happy, and that we can frankly blow it out of the water the way that we do on the season episodes for our sponsors.
So what does that mean for ACQ two? I should say ACQ two next year is gonna be so much better because there's all this inbound that we get for acquire that we've decided doesn't make sense on acquired. And what that means is we are getting crazy good guests for ACQ two. So
It would feel silly not to point people toward that when I know it's coming next year, so
Yeah, I'm excited about that too.
So
I completely
Obviously I agree with you.
You know, on the implications for the business model and not slot filling and you can't
Predict when serendipitously you're gonna get a chance to
Interview Jensen or interview Charlie.
But
This is our opportunity.
What interviews do we want?
In a perfect world.
To do in the next, you know.
Set of time.
Yeah for acquired.
Well, David, I think that's
the right question. And I think the answer is sort of obvious. You just have to look at our episode list. I mean
Who are the people.
that we feel like we've studied the way that we study Jensen.
But we haven't had a conversation with yet. I mean, it's Bernard Arnaud, it's Morris Chang, it's Phil Knight.
It's Bob Iger. I think there are people whose stories we know, but we don't know.
And those would make for special interviews.
Ben, I'm gonna give you a hall pass on this one because uh you're literally one month into parenting and
Lord knows I have empathy and sympathy for you.
But you missed the obvious one that I was teeing you up for there.
Which we're gonna make our appeal, we're gonna shoot our shot.
Right here.
Taylor.
If you are listening. If you can make an intro. Or Travis, if you can make an intro.
Well
Maybe have you on for a little segment of it.
We'll go to the Long Pond Studios. We can meet you, you know, anywhere at a posh restaurant around New York City. On the South American leg of the tour, you know, we'll fly down there literally anywhere.
Any time.
Yep, absolutely.
Ha.
Mm-hmm.
Um
All right, let's talk about Charlie.
Let's talk about Charlie. First.
We just have to
Yeah, we said in the episode but again say a a huge thank you to
Andrew Marks, who's become such a good friend of the show.
I feel like Andrew sends us more research material than
Like Andrew is like a source for every episode.
We're not just gonna write his name and the sources, but like
10 sources from every episode are things that Andrew texts us. Like, have you found this? Have you found that? Have you found that? The minute that we
solidify what the next episode is gonna be. We text Andrew.
And say, you know, like all right, what do you got? And he's always got something. Not to mention he's got like a twenty
company long request list with a reason for why each of those companies should be acquired episodes kind of making the the appeal. And so he always uh celebrates when we pick one off of his list.
So big big thank you to Andrew. He is literally the acquired MVP of twenty twenty three. It's not you, it's not me, it's Andrew.
And also our other friend too, who
Knows who he is.
Thank you to them for
Making
That happened.
Yeah, I mean it was just uh
It was a life experience. Uh I don't know what else
To say. I
Can't believe we got to do it.
There's a strangeness that comes and if anybody who is listening to this is like a long form journalist, like a a New Yorker writer or something like that, or has written a book
On a
company or maybe even like a PhD research dissertation, you sort of know this feeling where
Even though something happened in real life, you've done enough research about it where it feels like a story to you.
And
At some point you meet the protagonist
And you're like
Oh right. You're like a person
In addition to being the main character of a story that I know
very well. And that in Berkshire's case
There's a cult following of millions and millions of people who all
know the story, who can all cite passages from
You know.
Uh scripture. It is. It's like a religion.
Charlie is
A person, a wonderful person, in addition to being
This character. And I think
A figure, yeah.
Yeah, the surreality of the moment.
I think hit me the most when there was a question we asked Charlie and he responded, I'm not interested in being any more of a guru than I already am. Yes. And you could sort of see that.
Even though
It's worked so well for him to get so much of his wisdom to the masses. And he has he and Warren both have been these incredible teachers their whole, you know, last fifty plus years.
in addition to their main job of being great investors, capital allocators, operators, they're sort of these educators on the side.
But that education
And universe that they've created has blown up to the point.
Where I think it w weighs heavy.
At least on Charlie.
Yeah.
It's almost like the burden he carries to get
his wisdom out is that
He has to
Sort of.
be treated as a guru or a character in a story.
Rather than just a person.
And I guess
I have no idea what Charlie would say to that, obviously.
But
I think for
People who
find themselves in those positions.
You know, Steve Jobs was that.
For sure.
Obviously Warren and Charlie are that.
Jensen may be on his way to becoming that.
Naval has become that. Yeah.
Taylor Swift is that a hundred percent.
It's almost like the Batman thing. What's the line from Batman begins where he's talking about the sort of uh frailness of being a person? And then when he becomes Batman, he says, As a symbol, I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting, something elemental.
It's that sort of idea. Totally. All these people
Are both people and
Symbols.
And
I'm just imagining.
Once you become a symbol
You kinda have two options.
You could
Bemoan it.
Or you could embrace it.
And I think Charlie would say it, look, it's gonna weigh on you no matter what.
No matter which one you choose.
There's no going back. It's going to weigh on you.
And so
You might as well.
Embrace it.
Yeah.
One other behind the scenes point to make, which I think listeners might find interesting on these four
Daniel Dara, Jensen, and Charlie.
They all were these massive lead time.
Interviews. They don't just
get coordinated a couple weeks before. And the story behind each of them was Charlie was a
Maybe six month thing. It was once we started digging into Costco. Andrew suggested, Hey, what if you interview Charlie for a follow up?
Jensen
I think we originally reached out to NVIDIA before we started our NVIDIA part one research.
Almost two years ago.
And said, Hey, would Jensen and this was a very different time for acquired. We thought the dream is to interview Jensen, not the dream is to go learn as much as we can about NVIDIA and tell the story ourselves. And we reached out and said, Can we interview Jensen? And even though we had a good friend of the show who was able to introduce us to someone on their executive team, we got a you know canned response of it's very busy, this sort of thing.
And it wasn't until like we did the work and then we made part one and part two where then it caught Nvidia's attention and the folks there were like geez.
We should do something together. And it still took another year to figure out exactly what the thing was to do together and when and
Same thing with Dar at Uber. We met
uh actually friend of the show Brad Gerstner had his investor day for Ultimate and uh I met Dara there.
And I think it took probably nine months after that to figure out a good time to, you know
on the earnings calendar, on the PR calendar, when it could actually make sense to the interview.
The way it happened with Daniel was we said uh Daniel was the quickest. What did we say, like oh next time we're in Stockholm, we'd love to do it, and he was like Oh yeah, next time you're here, let's do it. Well, it turns out of all uh those four cast characters, only one has a professional
podcast studio in his office. And uh that would be the one who runs a podcasting company. So we happen to find ourselves in Stockholm, which uh
That actually was a highlight for me this year. I know it was only three days, David, but that crazy
I mean we have three beautiful days in May in Stockholm.
What a gorgeous
Gorgeous city.
the run we did a couple of runs around the city while we were there and just made sure to kinda take it all in.
And the people at Spotify were so nice.
hosting us. I mean just
Rolled out the red carpet.
Yeah.
By the way, I just wanna say
I know a lot of people are lambasting Spotify's podcasting strategy.
I think people are entirely missing the forest through the trees on calling that a failure.
Completely agree.
I think Spotify
In their music business.
has gotten to scale and has no potential to create a
Hi.
operating leverage business.
There always gonna be
Giving the same percentage of the profits to the record labels who have an unbelievable amount of bargaining power over them. So the question is, what do you do next?
Audio books is a good bet.
Podcasting's a good bet. Something where you can eventually gain operating leverage.
And the fact that
They did the huge Rogan deal. They bought the ringer. They bought Gimlet.
Well, if you look at the dollars and cents today.
You're like, Geez, they've spent a lot of money, but they haven't generated a lot of profit from podcasting yet.
They totally
Bootstrap their way to become a
V scale player in podcasting. So to the extent
That there is a big pile of money waiting.
to be the scale player in podcasting.
They're well positioned to make it, given the half billion dollars or three quarters of a billion dollars that they spent on content.
They now have bootstrap to scale. Yeah.
That was the price of entry and like we
See it in
Spotify is
the majority of consumption of acquired.
out there.
No, it is my largest single player, but I don't think it's over fifty percent yet.
But one stat that's interesting is from Spotify Rapt for Podcasters. They make a wrapped to give to you in addition to the ones to distribute to your audience, is that 76% of the people who listen to Spotify
acquired on Spotify.
Found us this year.
That is crazy on platform growth.
And I think the
corresponding status, we grew something like
A hundred and seventy six percent on Spotify or something like that.
Decently sized base.
Yeah.
So I mean
In many ways.
I'm
predisposed to think podcasting is more interesting and important in the world than it is.
But
If you
sort of right off the idea that Spotify will ever make
decent margins in music. They needed to make another bet.
This feels like a pretty good bet. This in audiobooks. Yep.
I think the other side that we see of it is
This will lead into some of our um.
Yeah, discussion of
acquired the franchise in twenty twenty four.
Podcasting is a great business.
I do not doubt that it is a very valuable, very large market for them to be in.
Yep. If you can figure out how to make being the scale player translate into lots of profits, which no one has done yet.
Well,
No one has done yet and the
Previous scale player.
Almost like a did not start, you know, like uh didn't even run the race.
Apple, yeah.
Which as we've talked about before, we are immensely grateful for because it enabled this open free podcasting medium that we have today, which is
To our advantage.
Yes.
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Okay, David.
Let's talk about
Acquired the franchise.
Yeah, well to kick things off on that front, I feel like
You had a little more to say on uh
our discussion earlier about is growth good. I mean, certainly this is relevant.
Yeah.
So my thinking on this
has gotten simpler, which is basically
I am extremely open to
fulating the niche of
Smart people.
Who care about what makes
businesses work.
and great technology is successful and durable in the world.
And I think last year again I was being too precious about like I don't think it's good for our lives if we become too famous.
I mean
A byproduct of podcasting is you're not on video that often, so you actually do get to
stay less famous than YouTubers or less visually l recognizable, which is good.
I just kind of generally believe
recognizability is fun until you get to a certain level and then it's bad, and then you can't put the genie in the back in the bottom and your life's horrible. And I would like to not become that.
But
If we can keep doubling and doubling, doubling, and it turns out the set of people who like studying business history and being thoughtful about it and can
write us with little tidbits saying, Oh, I happen to think about it this other way and
have thought responses and want to be a part of the acquired community. If that turns out to be five million people or 10 million people, great.
That's only goodness.
But I think my view on growth is
We have a natural
governor to our growth, which is
the universe of that set of people.
is a fixed number, and I'm just not interested in discovering a second market outside of that. So to the extent that we can stay true to making
the stuff that we love to make and serving that group of people.
Awesome.
And I just don't ever want to like
You could say lower the bar or create some different product or whatever, but to appeal to
a different mass audience, that part is not really interesting to me.
Yeah.
This has become
more evident to me too in um
Some of our
episodes this year, like particularly the Porsche episode that we did with Doug DeMiro.
Have blown up on YouTube.
Utu
Let's completely put acquired aside for a second.
My feelings about YouTube are like it is an amazing platform. It is
an incredible gift to the world that YouTube exists and
One of my carve outs later in the episode is gonna be the QB school on YouTube, which is a former NFL quarterback.
Who makes amazing
Detailed breakdowns of what
is actually going on every week on your like favorite teams.
Oh, that's awesome. It's incredible. Like the fact that that is
Available and accessible for free.
I'm literally gonna subscribe to that right now. Oh, it's amazing. J T O Sullivan
We'll talk more about it later. Go subscribe if you care at all about football, even if you don't.
That said.
For our episodes that have gotten big on
UT
If you go look at the comments. It's awful.
It is.
A hundred percent not.
even the same universe of experience.
That.
The acquired Slack community is.
And like this kind of crystallized for me what you're talking about of like
Anybody who is
The type of
person who really cares about
knowledge, understanding these great businesses, these stories we tell and learning from them.
Come on in. Like we want as many people of those in the world.
The YouTube comment world out there is not what we want. Right.
And I'm not trying to be pretentious. I'm not saying like you must have thought about it as much as I have in order to be a part of the No.
I feel like this has been an eight year journey for us and for me a twenty year journey of learning about
What makes
these technologies and these businesses become
powerful forces in our world. Anyone who is anywhere on that journey, including far past you and I, David, on that journey,
I would love to
have a relationship with either two way through the Slack or even if it's just one way through people listening to acquired.
So I'm not saying like I just want to appeal to the people who are like, ah, here's a gacha on there actually is an eighth power. It's not that.
It's the curious, thoughtful
People who are not in the YouTube comments of the Porsche episode.
This had never happened to any of our episodes before.
Until this year we were not exposed to
This part of the internet.
Well, nothing had like algorithmically blown up. Yes.
And
reached a lot of people quickly. The only way anybody had really heard of acquired until this year was their friend told them. And that is always gonna be a really high quality
way to grow your audience. But if an audience grows quickly,
It's like
the masses just enter and you get who shows up.
Yeah.
I think for both of us this really kinda clarified what
we really want and meant by this
Uh, we're a little wary about growth. Like it's not that we're wary about growth.
It's that we want to keep this
You know, place that's about knowledge.
Yeah.
Well, and last year I think we were talking about
We were getting a little bit um shaky about
the impact on our business from growing the show because getting larger
wasn't equating to
growing the size of our revenue.
And it also was creating problems for
the classic sort of
startup and growth stage companies that had been our longtime sponsors, where we were going to them and saying, Okay, the audience is four times bigger than when we worked with you two years ago.
Let's have a conversation about what it should cost to sponsor the show.
It was just like
an immovable object meeting a an unstoppable force. There just wasn't anything to be done.
And so we've had to get creative in figuring out
What do we do to continue to grow the business?
Well
It doesn't have to be commensurate with the audience, but the audience
should make acquired a more viable platform for
larger sponsors, deeper partnerships.
Ways that
we can sort of increase both the size of our business, but also like the durability and importance in the world of our business.
Yep.
So
as we've started experiencing some of the growth that we talked about.
We realized that we'd kinda hit a scale now where
acquired is a viable
platform and partner to new sponsors that we can work with.
And
Just to talk about what those
are for season fourteen starting in January
Two of our three sponsors are going to be JP Morgan, specifically JP Morgan's payments division.
And service now.
Both of which are
Incredible companies. We are
Super excited to work with them.
But in both of those cases we
knew those companies and
Knew those
People there for several years now.
Right. We should say the teams that
have decided to partner with us from each of those companies have been longtime acquired fans, and we've gotten to know over the course of years and years and years.
And the answer has sort of always been, Hey, we should do something together. And then like we talk about it for a while. And then the answer is always kind of like
Okay.
You're sort of this like little niche maybe there's something to do.
And now the conversation is very much like
Oh.
Wow, you show up in the world in a big way with an important set of people, and you're now in this category that we can totally work with you as a durable partner that we want to like build this deeper relationship with. And especially now that we're in our eighth year.
It's a very different thing to be partnering with acquired than it was when we were in our third year. It's not like a scrappy startup thing. It's a
Trusted entity in the world.
Yep.
Yeah.
Would have been
Odd.
For
Fortune five hundreds to work with us.
before recently.
And now
starting to work with their teams.
How a JP Morgan thinks about
Their brand.
And their positioning
And they're
kind of whole set of marketing activities.
Is a
completely different animal than how
startups and, you know, earlier stage tech companies do.
Yeah.
And it's an intensely coordinated effort with a calendar that is already full by the time you're finishing 2023. Twenty twenty-four is largely known. There's a whole set of events. There's a set of campaigns that are gonna happen at different times. And these things are adaptable, but
My gosh, the level of foresight and planning that we've gotten to work with from those teams has just been like a whole different animal than what we're used to. And we love the nimbleness of small companies, and that enables us to do special things together. And sort of our fun task for next year, which I'm excited to unveil some of the stuff we're doing.
will be to bring that
Customer
thing that we're able to do with these small companies and create
Native
content for the medium and do other collaborations with them as a company. For example, the way that we invest in our sponsors or the way that we speak at their conferences and things like that.
to bring that to like large Fortune five hundred enterprises. And that's such an amazing dance. Like the way that these marketing organizations are able to figure out
Okay, can we talk about this partner of ours? And in what way can we talk about it? And how much leeway can we give Ben and David to natively work in an acquired theme from six episodes ago and trust them that in this episode it's gonna come across right on air.
It takes a very special marketing department.
To be able to
Behave the way that
the Vantas and the modern treasuries and the vouches of the world do while stewarding a
twenty, thirty, hundred year brand.
And
A few other things we've got up our sleeve. I think
The goal is to be able to continue to work with these sort of recent product market fit, you know, series B ish companies that we've always worked with. So
between the back catalogue, between interviews.
we will figure out ways that we can still work with those companies'cause frankly
Those are the types of companies that David and I love using for acquired. I mean, we're customers of
Vouch and we use modern treasury.
We like playing with it. We like following the founders on their journeys. We like having the founders on ACQ too, so we can kind of learn about how they're building their companies.
We also like getting the exposure to be able to invest. So it's awesome to be able to build these really tight relationships with those companies, especially when they're founded. Like I just keep going back to
Dimitri and his co-founder is coming up to us at our very first live show after they had come out of YC and t telling us about this tiny little modern treasury at the time.
And you just look at the behemoth amount of money that they move now.
There are
dozens of companies in the acquired ecosystem that we have relationships with that we wanna
be able to continue to be a partner to
And just figure out the right way to structure that. Yep. And just as importantly, dozens, if not
More than dozens that are gonna be coming up over.
The next set of years.
Yeah, David, what you're getting to here is now that we're both full time on Acquired, we finally have the opportunity to do our investing together and then do it in a way that's uniquely acquired and that is sort of native to acquired.
And so there's no big announcement or anything, but that's the thing to share with the acquired community is
I've been writing these little angel checks into probably 10 ish of our sponsors at this point and ACQ two guests and
companies we've gotten to know and
we're finally going to be able to kind of do that at scale and do it together in a way that we're not spending a lot of our time hearing early stage pitches or anything like that, but for companies that we already know well.
David and I are are gonna join our investing forces and invest more in those growth stage.
market leading tech companies.
Yep. And as an early example of this are
great friends over at Vanta and their CEO Christina.
have been um very, very kind guinea pigs for us.
So Vanta has been a longtime partner of the show. We've helped grow their business.
And last year kindergarten ventures the early stage angel list fund that I run with my friend Nat.
We did a ten million dollar SPV.
in Phantas Series B.
And that was a great
Test of can we invest in a market leading company?
And put meaningful capital to work.
So that's a playbook that
We're not gonna be able to run.
More often.
More and together.
And specifically as a part of acquired.
I just have this funny uh thing that's happened so much over the last
Two, three years, which is
Uh company is raising
great up round from
you know, one of the best few investors in the world in technology companies and says, Would you like an allocation? I can give you one or two or ten million dollars in this big growth round. And I, you know, write some
Little angel check and like that's been great, but it's time to do more with that opportunity. Yep.
This is all part of you coming full time and
It's time.
It's time for all this to happen.
Yeah.
It's time.
So that's sort of the state of
what we're thinking about for investing, which we'll put into action early next year.
And sort of the direction that our sponsorships have been going to. And we should say we're excited to welcome back for next season in the third slot, friends of the show Pilot and Vanta are splitting slot number three. So first three episodes are gonna be Vanta, second three are gonna be pilot.
And
I think we figured out a nice balance to be able to work with Fortune five hundreds as sort of a scale platform and also to
be in business, both investing and on a sponsorship basis for their go to market with growth stage companies.
All of which we are.
Super excited about.
But
You and I are super clear with each other at
We want to be super clear listeners with all of you too.
The show is the most important thing.
Acquired is the show. That is what you and I love doing. That is why you and I are full time podcasters now.
And
All of our effort is gonna go into
The show.
Right.
It's
what we're most excited about, but it's also if you just think about the mungerism, you know, you show me the behavior and I'll show you the incentives, it's literally the thing that makes it all work.
If you look at the acquired flywheel
It is produce unbelievably high quality deep dives.
on these companies and try to
Create.
some of the deepest business content in the world in a very, very approachable, fun conversational way.
and share the learning journey that we're on with everyone.
And like
You said a minute ago we're really clear with each other. Like I feel like that mantra comes up on our phone call.
Once a week or something. And it's like
The quality of the episodes is all that matters. And you know, we just spent 10 minutes talking about how we're evolving the franchise and working with Fortune five hundreds and
You know, how we're gonna be doing more investing together and all that stuff.
The only thing that matters that drives all of it.
Yeah.
quality of episodes.
Yes.
So on that front.
We've got some fun stuff.
Plan for next year.
Episode one.
We are already deep in research for
We're not gonna give it away what it is.
But it is a new category.

Which is I don't think we've ever touched it in all two hundred and eighty episodes or whatever.
And it's one of the largest categories of spend for most countries GDPs in the world.
Yeah I think
Gotta be probably every country's GDP in the world. Depending on their level of dysfunction, yeah. Yeah, good point.
Anyway.
We're already deep in the research.
the story itself, like
Industry aside.
Financials aside, you know, market cap aside.
This is a
Century long.
Incredible story too. So I'm
Really, really pumped.
Yeah.
Turns out there's a lot of them out there.
We often get the question, Are you afraid you're gonna run out of episodes to do? No. Everywhere we look, there's like some new fascinating multi-generation business that
you'd never expect could have thrived through all these times that they have and have
five unique amazing vignettes to tell through their whole history to today, like
As long as we want to keep doing this, there will be
fuel to keep doing it.
This year it was brands and luxury and retailers.
It'll be you know this other thing.
hopefully next year. But like
We look around the corner and there's a whole new category of companies to cover.
Yep.
So
We're pumped for that.
Ben, you have already spelt the beans that another
Luxury brand is in the works. Absolutely. Absolutely.
What else we got cooking?
We'll hit some big tech. We have to. It feels like a
Obligatory nod.
will hit something in the sort of entertainment, gaming, streaming world.
And we could keep naming categories, but one listener question that we got that I think is worth chatting about here is how do we handle current events?
Because
There are lots of episodes that would be very appealing to do. For example, the
dozens of requests we got two weeks ago or three weeks ago for open AI after the boardroom drama.
We very much have moved away from current events and I think
That is in part
Because of what we talked about.
Earlier.
That
We want to create N of one content.
And the way to create the most possible commodity content is to
try to cover the current news cycle that literally everyone else is covering concurrently.
I think that's a way to get completely drowned out in the noise, create something that's not special and create something that
even if you blow it out of the water has a shelf life in this world of about eight hours.
And so we have decided to move as far away from that as possible.
And the other reason
I think is a little bit our disposition where
David, when you and I are looking at something brand new that's unfolding in real time, I think we've really started trusting our gut that
There's probably more here.
than there seems to appear on the surface.
And
Years ago, I don't think we felt that. I think we thought
Uber's going public, cover Uber.
Even three years ago, Airbnb is going public, cover Airbnb. And you know, there was an acquired way to do it where most of the episode could actually focus on
you know, the last ten years and only a little bit at the end was focused on the last few months.
But the more current an event is, the
the less evergreen value
that it will have, and the more likely it is that
you could really blow it.
Like I feel super self conscious that we interviewed Sam Bankman Freed.
And like
You know, we're not investigative journalists. We weren't going to spend the time to like try to unfold
And dig up, hey, is this all legit? It's like Sequoia had just invested a huge amount of money. Like everyone
And all the possible signals had validated this person in this company. It was seemingly enormously free cash flow positive.
And yet
Yeah, we regret doing it.
We totally regret doing it.
And we're gonna try our best not to set ourselves up to do something like that again in the future.
So the question becomes, what should you do? And what we are structurally well set up to do.
Is
these huge retrospectives where the story is written and the story is known and it's about really synthesizing it and applying it to today's world.
Where
There is just no way that we are ever going to
Do the sort of uh
investigative journalism and frankly like investment diligence, often with private information that you need to do to get a real time story right. It is structurally impossible for us. So
Swear it off. I think that's the answer. I would even go so far as to say
You know.
Something.
That I've taken from
especially the last couple years have acquired is the story is always
Deeper than you think.
We were set up to do investigative journalism.
And
deep diligence that we would then share with the public on a company.
In real time. In real time, I still think it's impossible to get it right. I mean, look at the best VCs out there.
They are
At least on the diligence and investing side of the equation, making these calls in real time and the very best of them only get it right.
What?
Twenty percent of the time.
At most?
You know, thirty percent of the time.
I don't think it is possible.
To do.
I mean now fraud is different. Yes. I'm not talking about fraud. I'm just talking about getting the story right.
Like the story of Uber.
That we did.
on you know IPO day.
Back when we did that episode. Like
That was not the full story of Uber.
Yeah.
To revisit the SPF interview in particular.
I haven't listened to it in a long time. I do think we've generally had our wits about us enough
to always sort of be
question askers in terms of like
Hey.
This seems really crazy. How did that happen?
And you and I have sort of never been the types to be like everyone should be extremely excited about this, and we urge you to go get involved with this now.
I always sort of chuckle when we say the not investment advice, but that's more my demeanor. I truly mean it. I was like, hey
I've done a certain amount of work on this.
I'm going to tell you what I learned.
And also
I am not recommending you act on this in any way ever.
And I think that
Fortunately our disposition
especially among some of the crypto and web three media, was a little bit more of that.
But
We've learned lessons from that. And those lessons are
You get to choose the games you play and we don't need to play
the current mania's game.
Totally. And
As much as I want to take as a kind personal compliment all the things you're saying and apply it to myself too.
But I really gotta give credit to you.
I think this is a big part of the
Demeanor that you
Bringing your personality to the show. Like you are a
Optimist as we both are, and we've talked about a lot on the show.
But a skeptic. Well, in the big picture. You're an optimist. Yeah. And so I think this is one of the things that makes us a really good team. Like
In terms of
The actual
goal and what we're trying to do here and acquired and what it is and what we want it to be. We are a hundred percent aligned.
And
You do a really good job keeping us in check on this front.
Thank you.
And if we didn't have you, then we would just tell stories of old retailers and old oil companies that, you know, carry no no risk associated with them. Hey, maybe we should do that because those are our biggest episodes.
Yeah.
Thank you. I'll take the compliment. And you do need both. You need someone who's staying attuned to like maybe this is this new thing everyone is talking about is a breakthrough interesting thing. And you also need the
Hey, let's pay attention to history. And I think
Someone asked a question in the Slack, do you consider yourselves journalists? And I, if anything,
'Cause we've gotten the question, are you analysts? Are you journalists? Are you we're certainly not reporters, but I think
on that spectrum, we've shifted much more toward historians.
than journalists.
I don't ever expect that we are going to get a story right about something in flight, but hopefully given, you know, a couple of months to prepare, we can get the story right about something that's happened over a long period of time with a lot of perspectives where people are willing to share.
everything they sort of know since the hatchets are buried. And like
Does anyone have the story right on what happened in the open AI boardroom right now? I don't think so. I don't think so either.
You know, reflecting on this too.
I think
Ironically.
Moving to this
Role as
Hour and
you know, my over the past couple of years official, you know, job function and identity of being historian.
Versus.
Venture capitalist investor.
has made me a
much better investor. Yeah. Ain't it the truth. And for me specifically.
When
I was only an investor, or investor was the primary thing.
Everything we were just talking about.
were both strengths and weaknesses for me. I would fall in love with
Companies.
deeply in love with companies. And
Obviously for people who listen to us, I still do this with acquired episodes with the companies we cover.
And that was a great strength too. Like you can really help companies and founders can really feel like you are on their team and aligned and pulling with them.
And also
Just purely in terms of making the right investments.
Having a bit more arm's length objectivity.
And perspective helps.
shifting my focus to the show.
certainly has made me a better investor. Like I just look at like the investments that I've done and
I've been more active in the past few years than I was when I was a V C and
You know, you and I are gonna be even more active together going forward.
I never would have expected this, but it has really helped me.
Turns out knowing history is very helpful in analyzing the present. Yes. And just having this other thing.
Be my obsession has
Right. Allowed me to have a little more arm's length.
It's also very nice'cause what it does is it puts
most things in your two hard pile.
Like the fact that your main job isn't to go pick early stage companies, like when the whole world is your too hard pile because you need to research an acquired episode.
Only the no brainers end up actually grabbing your time. A hundred percent. Yes. The no brainers that don't
Take up
weeks and weeks of your time to decide if you should do it or not.
are the ones that end up actually
becoming the investments that you do. And especially when you can sort of take something you've learned from history and apply it to
The present. I think that's the David Rosenthal sweet spot. Yes.
It's funny. Marketing in particular, I think um doing acquired has made me such a more savvy marketer.
Perhaps the most useful that I am in boardrooms now is being like a reality check on
Are you actually reaching
People.
A in
A medium that's gonna convert
to what you want them to do and be with a messaging that people will care about.
Because most of the time.
Most people
Oh.
Creating lots and lots of
copy and work product that nobody cares about at all. And that goes for podcasts and that goes for startups. And I think breaking through and creating something where people know.
Oh.
I should pay attention to this.
That's still so rare.
Yeah.
We were having this discussion, you and me on Zoom a couple of months ago with
A you
World class investor.
And the sort of frame that we put on it was taste.
Oh, this conversation. Yeah.
You can't really teach it. You certainly can develop it.
But
This is a version of that.
Yeah.
All right listeners.
Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow.
If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is uh no longer the hard part.
Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making.
AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks
Are real.
Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI control tower.
Yep, AI control tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with
Any AI, not just theirs.
Every device on your network, every permission across every system.
Every AI agent visible and secure in one place.
And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than twenty years building the operational backbone of the enterprise, the workflows, governance, approvals, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security. ServiceNow
already runs more than a hundred billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than eighty five percent of the Fortune five hundred. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates.
And in a future, that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is.
Who's managing them all? So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely, at scale.
Go check out service now.com slash acquired and tell'em that Ben and David sent you.
Okay, what's next on the docket?
Well, keeping on this topic of audience QA.
A couple weeks ago
We
got this kind email from listener Martin from Scotland.
In it he
had a list of questions.
for us and said
If you have time to
Answer a few of them I would
Really appreciate it.

Gosh, these are awesome questions.
Should this be the entire episode. This should be our holiday special. So
Thank you, Martin. We are gonna dive into a bunch of them here.
And they are just fantastic.
So number one.
What is the book or books you've given most as a gift and why?
Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced
Your life.
Ben, you wanna go first?
Yeah, I am not actually a huge book gifter. I love the practice. I just never remember to do it. Like I'd great that when people are able to do that.
I think a huge one for me is psychology of money. There's a recency bias on it.
And we mentioned Morgan Housel at the top of the show, good friend of the show, great great human.
I mean truly.
I
massively change the way that I personally invest. Yeah. Me too.
face on that book. And the way that I just think about spending my time and family and
Demeanor throughout the day.
Another one is this book and I haven't read it in
probably twelve, fourteen years.
It's called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Oh yeah. Tim Ferris loves this book, right?
Yeah, I read it as a part of a college class, a cool class at Ohio State called Personal Creativity and Innovation.
And one of the mechanics in the book is called morning papers. And the rule is you must write three pages stream of consciousness before getting out of bed in the morning.
And it is so cool because it flushes out all the crap from your head so that you can go and have a clean slate to start the day.
And you're not wasting your time processing, you're not like wasting CPU cycles in your brain processing something and
ruminating on something that you really just need to get out, get it on the page, and then you can focus on other things. Or perhaps
Focus on that thing, but at least now you have a little bit of clarity on it because you've written.
I should do it more often, but I think it's a s amazing practice and kind of like a
I hate the phrase, but life hack that I remember feeling like it really worked for me while I was doing it.
David, while you give your answer, I'm gonna turn around and look at my bookshelf to find a third one.
I have a bunch more books to talk about later in the episode, but
The one that I have gifted the most
is a book called Transitions by William Bridges.
Which was first given to me.
Bye.
Ben and my good friend Mark.
In Seattle.
Ben, have I given you this book?
I don't think so. You've mentioned it. Okay. We need to rectify this right away. Watch your Amazon deliveries. I'm gonna send it to you.
It's not like anything's randomly showing up to my house three times a day from Amazon right now. Right. You'll find it again in like six months or so when you're cleaning out your basement.
This book is a super cool concept. It was written I think in nineteen eighty.
And the idea it's about major transitions in your life.
Could be a good transition, like
Having a baby, welcoming a new family member.
could be a bad transition, like a death in the family or career related, losing a job, something like that.
But the thesis of the book is that
when this happens in your life, and it will many times
It's gonna sound a little gruesome, but you need to sort of kill your old self.
And be reborn as your new self. That sounds super woo woo.
But if you actually think about it, it makes sense.
You're
Identity who you
Thought you were.
before a major transition. It has to change.
There is no way around it. And you'll go through the five stages of, you know
Denial, anger, be the blah blah blah, all this stuff.
This book is a great sort of
way to streamline that process.
But
You have to accept that that
you that you were before.
is no longer and then you can create the new you. And I found it incredibly helpful.
Both for big challenges in my life and for great positive stuff like having a baby.
Hm.
All right, that's awesome. I will uh watch my front doorstep.
My third one is a classic.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Conneman and Taversky.
It's just
Everything you think you know about the way your brain perceives the world and how you make decisions is wrong. And reading it doesn't make you get any better, but at least makes you aware of how wrong your decision making is unless you pay unbelievably close attention and write down exactly why the decision is being made and look at all the data and
Even then you'll probably get it wrong.
Then there is a very fun Easter egg that is gonna be buried
Later in this episode.
for you to find related to this.
Book recommendation.
Ooh, sweet.
So Ben and listeners can go on a little treasure hunt.
Great.
All right, next question. What purchase of two hundred dollars or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory?
This is a super easy one for me. Uh no brainer, my Zojirushi hot water heater.
For people who don't know about these, and I think this is probably most of the world outside of Japan.
This is a device that sits on your kitchen counter.
And keeps
Several gallons of water.
at a set temperature.
Constantly.
I am a huge tea drinker.
I use this thing four or five times a day and have for the past decade.
Plus
It is amazing. I set it at a hundred and ninety five degrees.
I drink green tea every day.
I re steep my teapot constantly throughout the day and like it is
Unquestionably
made my life better and probably will extend my lifespan by like
Several years from drinking tons of green tea every day.
Wow.
That's awesome.
Zojirushi is the brand. We'll link to it in the show notes. Zojirushi is the brand. It's a Japanese company.
Everybody in Japan has one of these things.
Awesome.
Mine might be a pair of Nike shoes. So living in Seattle, it rains all winter.
Or at least it's wet all winter.
And there's a particular pair. I'm gonna look up what it actually is so that
If you want to buy it.
You can.
called the Nike men's Pegasus for
Cortex.
And the Gore Tex is so good.
It makes winter running
possible and they even have a few of the
color ways that are not like totally insane so that you can
kind of wear them as everyday sneakers, but I basically wear them all day, every day in the winter, and it makes me far less afraid to
go out in the world'cause I don't like having wet feet.
Amazing.
Okay.
Next one is the Tim Ferris question. I don't think anybody's ever asked us that before. If you had a
Gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, metaphorically speaking.
What would
It's a
And
Why?
Maybe the most random fact about me.
I was a French literature major in
College.
Particularly a um
Seventeenth and eighteenth century uh French literature expert.
I'm hardly an expert, but that's what I majored in in college.
And um
Something that has stuck with me from then.
And
The older I get and the world we live in becoming more the world it is has
Stuck with me more and more is the last line of Voltaire's
Indeed,
Il faut cultive notin.
We must cultivate our own garden.
And especially today, like there's just so much in the world that
You don't have any control over. The only thing you have control over is your garden and cultivating your own garden.
And
For us.
That's acquired. And for me, that's acquired in my family and
You know, maybe some other things over time, but
Just focus on what is in your control and
Be great at that and be good at that.
Be great.
And be good.
At those things and that is what you can do.
At least those are the words that I have come to live by.
I love that.
I actually don't have my own answer to this question. There's someone else that I know that has an answer to this question that I quite like.
So I'm just gonna recant their story, but
I should go find some words to live by.
A good friend of mine, his dad
had a saying when he was growing up.
that uh he would always remind his kids just be kind.
Hey, whatever the thing is, just be kind, you know.
someone might be being a jerk to you and you know, they deserve some kind of repercussion.
But you should just be kind and certainly the world will figure out a way to deal with this person's action at some point.
And uh the thing my friend did is at some point, as his dad was getting older, he asked him to um write down the motto on a piece of paper and sign it.
And uh he went and got a tattoo on his back of Just Be Kind signed by his dad's name.
I love I now know who you're talking about. That's amazing.
Yeah. I just think that's the coolest
I often remind myself of that of
There's almost nothing to be gained by me.
exuding anything but kindness in this moment. And it doesn't mean let someone roll all over you, but it does mean
Just
always realize that
You know, it's kind of the Michelle Obama thing of when they go low, we go high. You going high is never gonna hurt you in the long run.
There's never any reason not to be kind.
Right.
I love that. That's so good.
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments
you have ever made. Could be an investment of any type.
Cultivating the relationship with my wife.
Hands down, hundred percent. And the second best is cultivating the relationship with you, which has led to so many things that have made my relationship with my wife and building a family possible.
And there is no ifs, ands, or buts about that.
the house I'm standing in is
Thanks to acquired. The lifestyle I enjoy is a hundred percent acquired. The fact that I wander around all day listening to audio books, the
thing that it's done to my demeanor and my personality, truly the life that
myself and my family enjoy is because of what
You and I have built and
Thank you.
Ha.
I have the same answer.
I actually didn't.
Write down Jenny, but I should thank you for reminding me. Jenny, I love you. Uh yeah, Ditto.
Nothing more to add.
And probably therapy.
That's probably the second.
Yeah.
I agree. I started doing weekly therapy. I'd done it off and on before, but I started
doing it weekly, committing to that this year, and it's just immensely helpful.
Yeah.
And if you feel like it's not helpful, just switch therapists. You'll eventually find someone who's helpful for you. Yep.
All right, what is an unusual habit or absurd thing that you love?
I eat a Starbucks spinach, feta, and cage free.
Egg white bite rap.
Every single day.
And I have for years and years and years, and I actually go to Starbucks and buy them still in the package cold.
Uh, I'd buy them like ten at a time and then I'll just make them every morning at home.
We were
In the airport.
flying back from LA.
We're at LAX.
after interviewing Charlie Munker.
And you got one of these.
Uh
The Starbucks at LAX.
And I've known this about you for years, and I just kinda looked at you and I was like
Then.
I think
You have eaten more spinach fitter wraps.
than any other human being in the world.
And you thought about it and you were like
Yeah, I think that's right.
'Cause I think I've consumed probably close to three thousand of them.


This is amazing. This is the very best Ben Gilbert trivia that exists.
When did you start?
Uh
I made a guess around ten years ago. I mean I think it really ramped like
Seven ish years ago.
So maybe
Two thousand, twenty five hundred, but
Yeah.
Yeah, pretty much every day.
Breakfast or lunch?
Speaking of special unique
Interviews that only we could do.
I I don't even need to finish that sentence. Uh we're just gonna leave it. One day. Yeah. Okay. I'm not even gonna answer that because I can't top that.
In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? Yes, I was gonna say
Adding weekly therapy this year and related to that.
Just listening to my instincts in particular, my
physical reactions to things. Like I've found like
You know, it takes a while to train your instincts, so like I don't know if I had just listened to my instincts and followed my instincts when I was twenty five that that
Would have been the right thing, but
Pretty dialed at this point on like
What's right.
For me and
I find that I have physical reactions in my body to things and like
listening and tuning into that.
usually
is the right way to go.
Yep, I like that.
And just being more aware of it.
I think you have a good sense of that too. If somebody is uh
one percent huckster. I notice you get like
physically uncomfortable and try to
create distance between you and them. Yes.
I don't know. That's just me. I don't know if everybody has that.
I think mine is uh
A thing that I'm still working on, but
the amount that I have done it has dramatically improved my life.
Be more present.
Be a better listener.
The answer is almost always tune in more.
to the person that you're talking to and really understand them.
And I think
listen harder is usually the way to better understand what someone else around you wants.
And it's often not what they're saying, it's what they're feeling.
My therapist regularly uses the phrase it's about the feelings, not the content.
And if you can figure out how to be present.
listen better and meet someone else at their feelings level and figure out how do I
You don't even have to make
their feelings feel better,'cause they might feel fine, but how do I tune into you emotionally?
And not try to just have a conversation about the content you're saying.
you're much more likely to both have a positive outcome and have a better rest of your day.
Dude, you're gonna crush parenting. Well, easier said than done. Yeah, right. Easier said than done when um
You know, you're on hour like three of uh
Intense feelings, shall we say.

What advice would you give a smart driven college student about to enter the quote unquote real world and what advice should they ignore?
Oh man.
Let's see.
Some advice I gave like three years ago.
that I really deeply believe in is
Harvest when everyone else is harvesting.
And build skill when there's no harvesting to be done.
And
In particular.
this person had the opportunity to go work at I think it was a big consulting thing and make good money first year.
And
They were thinking about doing that.
Or working for a nonprofit as their first job.
'Cause their heart was in the right place. Like they just wanted to do good for the world work. And I was like
We're in a weird time.
Where I don't know when it's gonna end, but everyone's making stupid money right now.
Just like
while there's harvesting to be done, go participate in that.
And you should build the best foundation you can.
But I promise you
There will be a time where this job opportunity is not available to you.
And you will look back at a few years of making a small salary in your first few years out of school.
and kind of wish that you had built a little bit more of a foundation.
Because I just think this time is gonna end. And like
It sort of flies in the face of be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
Yeah, this is kinda be greeting when others are greedy. And
You know, build when others are fearful.
And be mindful that you're in this temporary moment, but like
When there's opportunity to harvest, harvest. Yeah. Reflecting on the
twenty twenty to twenty twenty two time frame.
That is a huge takeaway for me.
Bill Girley has for years.
Said this. You gotta play the game on the field.
Well, yeah. Benchmark's very good at that. Yes. Yes, yes, they are.
My answer, I would just repeat what I said on the Art of Investing podcast that we went on.
A few months ago, which
Those guys have just built such a
Great show. I mean
They're teachers. They've been teachers for years.
Yeah, Rick and Paul are investors and capital allocators and you know great partners to the people that they work with, but like even their demeanor in one on one conversations is that of a a learner and a teacher. Yeah.
So wonderful.
What I said there, literally two college students was uh
Both that following your own path.
has never been
More rewarding.
In
This world that we live in
And never been harder. Like there's so much.
Pressure out there.
social media
everything else about the world we live in. There's so much pressure to conform.
And
That makes standing out and following your own path.
That much more valuable. So
Harder and valuable.
Yep.
People are underrated.
Like in my harvesting comment.
It was interesting that what I did was to describe two job opportunities.
I think there's another way to make decisions, which is
Surround yourself with
If you're an ambitious person with the
Most intelligent.
people you possibly can who are the closest to ground zero for your industry.
be where the interesting thing is with the people who are the best at it. This is the Mark Andrews and uh go to Denny's. Yes.
Always go to Denny's. Always go to Denny's.
And they can't just be smart. They have to be like
unbelievably trustworthy people worthy of your time and partnership. And that's the harder thing, I think, to suss out over time. That's hard advice to give a college student. Yep.
I don't think those two things are at odds.
I don't think they're at odds either, but
Your
circle of opportunity gets smaller when you require more constraints.
When you require both of them.
Alright.
In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? Distractions, invitations, et cetera. What new realizations and or approaches helped
Any other tips?
Oh man.
David, there's a thing that you do that I'm so much worse at, which is
You never feel compelled to respond.
You never feel like somebody else can give you a task to do.
It's not my most uh flattering quality.
But it's the thing that allows you to give energy to the people in your life that matter the most to you.
That's the thing that I've long been jealous of is
Like I'm
very okay with
somebody email me a form email that I've never heard of them or their name. It's like very easy to archive that. It's harder when it's like somebody that I met three years ago that I really enjoyed getting coffee with.
And now I have eight of those in my inbox and I just
I wanna at least say I don't have the bandwidth for this right now. But like you do those eight times and suddenly Two hours have gone by. It's actually taken away some of your your energy and your life force. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
And you do it to me sometimes. So like I sort of know like what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it. But like you have a remarkable tendency to truly wake up every morning and say, What actually is important and needs to get done? And you don't do the other stuff and
It's kind of okay if
that has a little bit of collateral damage.
Yeah.
I was gonna say the same thing and uh you said it for me.
Like I said, this is not my most flattering natural tendency.
But as I've
thought about this over the years.
What I've come back to is
I reach out to
Lots of people.
How do I feel if I don't get a response to all of those?
I feel fine.
Yeah.
You know, I assume that
Folks that I reach out to
have something going on. They're busy and especially now having kids. It's just like I
Get it for them and I get it for me more. It's like you know
There's nobody more important to me than my daughter.
Nobody. I'm my wife, you know, like and you, you know, like
Okay, outside that circle, like you are my most important people and there's only so many hours in the day.
It's like a version of you gotta put the your mask on before helping others. It's like
I gotta put
those relationships on
Before others.
Yeah.
And everything's a trade off. Like in a vacuum, sure. You should give your time and your life force to everyone, but you have a finite amount. And so
It's a priority thing. Yep.
Okay, last one.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused.
Or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do?
What questions do you ask yourself?
This is so easy and this is the perfect one to end on.
We go make a great acquired episode.
And
This has been such a gift.
To me.
In
My life because
Up until we started doing acquired and up until acquired.
became my full time

I didn't have anything that I could control like that.
I don't know what I would have answered to that question. Like so much of
Everything was out of my control. When you're a venture investor, you don't control anything. Oh my gosh, yeah.
Yeah. What do you mean? Just go do a good deal. And that way in ten years you'll know if it was good or not. Right. Exactly.
Oh we're
So lucky now that we have this thing that we do.
That we can do and we're good at and we know how to do.
Where no matter how bad things get or
You know matter what's going on.
we can just go in a lab and like we know we can make a great episode.
And we also know it's the best thing we can do. No matter how good or bad things are going, it's always the best thing we can do.
It's an interesting derivation that I want to take this down.
I've had this life advice that I've been thinking about to give to my son.
when he's old enough to understand life advice, which is not right now. Oh you could have to wait a while. You'd scream in my face.
And
Which
It's interesting that he can listen to all of this. I don't think he ever will, but it's crazy that there's like hundreds of hours of his dad talking. Like do you ever think about that? Uh
Okay.
Our kids will get to watch us sort of grow up.
I guess there's not video until year five or so, but still like listen to us sort of form.
who we became, assuming that we do this for decades and decades to come.
But
One of the pieces of life advice, and David, I was telling you about this on our walk in LA up uh Runyon Canyon, we were down there interviewing Charlie, was
That when you're
A young person, you should try to become singularly productive.
And I mean productive in the economic sense.
that you are able to soup to nuts within your control.
Make something
of economic value.
And put it in the world.
In a way that you own the
Design, engineering
Creation.
Marketing.
distribution monetization.
And like
Everybody shouldn't do that.
Like the corporation is a great structure that enables people to work together in a creative way.
to produce an output.
But your life is way better if you have the capability
to singularly produce something.
on your own, and then it's always your choice.
of how much stuff outside your control.
you wanna let in.
You might be a singularly productive individual who then goes on to be Craig Federiki and, you know, run all of
Apple software.
But then it's your choice. You're not reliant on a bureaucratic structure for you to thrive in politic inside of.
This is another one of those paradoxes, I think, in the
The way
The world works today.
This has on the surface kinda never been harder.
Organizations are bigger, things are more complex, things are more interdependent. The idea that
Yeah.
Could as a
person and especially a young person be able to do that is
Hard to fathom.
And yet it's also never been more true than ever.
All you need is an internet connection and you can find and learn.
Some version of this.
Yeah.
It's pretty wild.
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Well
For
Then you're in my traditional extended carve outs to end
The holiday special.
I have a special family one that I wanna start with, if that's okay.
Hm.
So my brother in law Dave, Jenny's sister's husband,
Dave is the
most beloved member of our entire family.
Including my daughter who
No doubt about it, loves him way more than
Mom and Dad.
He's the best.
He
Until this year was a early employee at a
Fenture back startup here in San Francisco.
He changed jobs.
And he joined a company called Mill.
This year.
He was telling me about the company. I was
Pretty skeptical, honestly, to start.
Mill was founded by Matt Rogers.
Who Matt was Tony Fidel's co founder at Nest.
Back in the day.
And Mill is the
nest thermostat version of a compost bin.
It's an internet connected
Compost bin.
Oh, I have heard of this, yes.
And uh
At first I was like
Okay, Dave.
I'm glad.
You're passionate about this.
Oh, I can't imagine how many people out there really need an internet connected compost bin.
Then he joined the company.
And she said this is really great.
So it's like okay, I'll support the family. We'll get one.
This thing is freaking awesome. I was.
Totally wrong.
I mean, obviously this is, you know, a sort of a you know luxury good. I mean, it's not a luxury good, it's a compost bin but like it's a premium good.
I did not realize how much I needed this thing.
for basically my entire adult life.
I have had fruit flies.
In my kitchen.
On and off in the compost bin.
And if I didn't have free fly, you know, it's a compost bin, like it you know.
It's compost.
In your kitchen.
This thing.
Roasts your compost.
Overnight.
And is internet connected. It runs overnight. You put all the food scraps in there.
It roasts and turns it.
It turns it into chicken feed.
And
Every morning it gets fully roasted, which means no smell, no mess, and it absorbs
This thing is like a black hole.
of compost. It's a big band.
We will go weeks as a family.
of just putting everything in there. No emptying, no going to the garbage.
No smell, no nothing.
And then when it gets full, your app tells you
You put it in a box, they send you a bunch of boxes like in a bag and a box.
You send it off to them and they sell it as chicken feed.
This is like the most brilliant thing.
Ever. I was so skeptical and now I'm a hundred percent confirmed. Mill.com. I'm not to say it because Dave's my brother in law. Actually, this is the best thing I bought this year.
Did you or did you not get yours for free?
No, I paid for it. I didn't get any discount.
This is not in any way an endorsement. No, there's no paid the only connection I have to the company is that my brother in law joined them and I thought it was a really bad idea.


All right.
I'm trying to decide if like
your problems are real problems at this point, or if you're like you've gotten so comfortable in life that you're like solving these like really I recognize that I just recommended an internet connected compost bin. But it really is awesome. But it's a great one. I mean
Yes.
I recognize the value of good gadgets. I've been using a June oven for the last six months.
Also life changing. You might be like, Why do you need a small oven instead of your big oven? And why does it need to be on the counter and Spinach Spinner wraps.
Oh, every morning. Spanish Feder apps in the June.
It's perfect.
Okay.
I have a litany of carve outs. Go for it.
I'll save my baby related ones for later.
My T V show.
My wife and I just binged watch is like
Holy crap good.
Some of the best TV I've watched in a long time.
very different genre than succession, but like succession level quality.
It's called silo.
on Apple TV.
It is.
Excellent. It's based on a book, maybe book series, and the four TV adaptation is just very good. Dialogue, the cinematography is good, the sets are really impressive, the premise is just beautiful and so simple. And the premise is
Uh this is gonna be spoiler free.
There is a civilization of humans that exist in a silo.
Like him.
Big silo.
I don't wanna say the exact number of people'cause some might consider that uh spoiler, but like
You know.
A civilization in a silo. Okay.
And on earth or in outer space or
Presumably on Earth is the premise.
And
It is all about
people trying to figure out what's going on because it opens with this idea that
At some point it will be safe to leave the silo. We don't know when that day will be.
But we know that day is not today.
And it's a
Hold
Civilization of people.
Living in a silo.
This sounds like a great premise.
That's the setting, and I'm giving no plot details about like what
than transpires, but it's awesome and it's great sci fi.
As you know, I'm not a T V person, but
That is up my alley.
The female lead is the woman from the most recent the last two Mission Impossibles.
Who's a really good actress.
And uh who else is in it?
The woman.
From the office.
Rashida Jones.
is also in it.
It's good show.
Highly recommend it. She's Quincy Jones's daughter, is that right?
I think that's right. Yeah.
Super cool.
So that is awesome. For less good TV, but still very entertaining.
Part of our fraternity leave, maternity leave has been uh watching alias.
Neither of us watched it back in two thousand and two.
And it's like a J J Abrams, early J J Abrams.
Jennifer Garner's the lead. You've already done this as a carve out, but I like the yeah I've re carve out. It's fun.
It's great.
I mean it gets worse as the seasons go on, but uh seasons one, two, and three are
Great.
Very worth watching.
A product that I've been loving. I just got some new Warby Parker glasses.
I believe
They're made out of vinyl.
But the frame is called
Amari.
A M A R I they are much lighter than any other glasses frames that I've ever gotten.
And it's like totally game changing to feel like they're sort of just floating on your face all day.
Some might view them as not as stylish as some of the more stylish options. They're my at home glasses for sure. Yeah.
One of your carve outs I picked up recently.
Hoka slides. I actually didn't get the slides. I got the or uh the recovery shoes.
Focus slides so good. Yeah. I got the same technology in the
kind of more shoe, more enclosed form factor. I think the
Also called the Aura's O R A.
So great.
Best house cheese I've ever had.
Per your recommendation.
Well
Happy to recommend.
Another one is a feature of a product that I found a couple days ago that is friggin' insane.
So
I've had this thing where
As iPhone cameras have gotten better and better
the computational photography, like what Apple does to photos makes them look a certain way. And I've sort of gotten used to that way that photos look.
And
Now that I'm using the big camera again, because we have a baby, I've gone back to I'm using the
Alpha seven Cs and I this kind of like
very flexible lens that can either be a wide or a a zoom lens.
that we're gonna use actually for some upcoming interviews next year to get a tighter shot on the subject.
I've been using that.
And
I've been feeling like God, these images are so grainy. Like basically anything that I shoot indoor feels like it has this really
Terrible green. And you look, and of course, it's like the super high ISO, but the iPhone does so much smoothing that I've like forgotten that.
film green is a thing. And so
Lightroom shipped this unbelievable
ML powered.
D noise.
feature.
I found out about it because uh Neeli Patel was just on uh the talk show with John Gruber, and he is right to say it totally pegs your GPUs while you're using it, but it is
Pure magic.
You open up Lightroom, you select the photos. You can even select like ones that don't seem noisy to you, and you come back and it's like,
Unless you crank the setting way up, they look totally realistic. It doesn't look overly AI'd, but your photos just all get like magically way better. So huge kudos to the Adobe team. I've been
so impressed with everything that they're cranking out on the AI side. Like I think they're the
enterprise company that is probably the best uh rapidly commercializing these generative AI advancements.
This one is immediately useful for me for everything that I shoot, not with my iPhone.
Yeah, this is uh
Well, we did that A C Q two episode with um
Chris from Runway, like
This
sector application of AI in
Image and video.
We're only just scratching the surface. The surface is already unbelievable and like I just can't wait for what's coming.
Yeah.
Totally agree.
I think I may have may have made this a carve out
At some point, but
I wanna re highlight it because it's been at least twelve months because I remember reading it over Christmas last year.
It's an article by Derek Thompson called The Eureka Theory of Everything Is Wrong. Yes.
This is awesome.
It's so good. I just reread it.
It's just such a pleasant reminder that
It's not about the idea, it's about the implementation, and it's often about the unsexy distribution work.
the article highlights a number of different instances where
We know the famous inventor, but we don't know about the heroic effort made by governments around the world to actually roll things out like vaccines and things that are, you know, a huge part of the public good.
I highly recommend it reading it if you're in for
Sort of a
perspective changing
read on
What is important to advanced society.
Forward.
Love it.
All right, I'll jump in with a couple before we get back to you.
First, a book that I alluded to earlier in the episode, The Luxury Strategy by Jean Noel Capferer and Vincent Bastien.
This book.
was a core part for both you and me in L VMH prep.
And
It's so good. It's so counterintuitive and
Worth reading for
Anybody
Who has a brand
Any company that has brandwiches everybody.
Even, you know, like Enterprise Software, SaaS Company, you have a brand.
You should read this book.
I am just gonna read. You have tweeted this and I think maybe even on air said them all, but I'm gonna say them again.
This book contains the twenty four anti laws of marketing.
One.
Forget about positioning. Luxury is not comparative.
Two.
Does your product have enough flaws?
Three.
Do not pander to your customers' wishes.
Keep non enthusiasts out.
Do not respond to rising demand.
Dominate the client.
Make it difficult for clients to buy.
Protect clients from non clients.
The role of advertising is not to sell.
Communicate to those you are not targeting.
The presumed price should always seem higher than the actual price.
Luxury sets the price, price does not set luxury.
Raise your prices as time goes on in order to increase demand.
Think about that one.
Keep raising the average price of your product range.
Do not sell.
Keep stars out of your advertising.
Cultivate closeness to the arts for initiates.
That was seventeen.
Numbers eighteen through twenty four are just like this.
Is acquired right here.
It smacks me in the face.
Eighteen.
Do not relocate your factories. We talked about that earlier.
And then it continues.
Do not hire consultants.
Do not test, do not look for consensus.
Do not look after group synergies. Do not look for cost reduction.
Just sell marginally.
on the internet.
It's so good.
It's good to get the reminders too. Yeah.
That's one
The next one I wanna mention I also talked about earlier in the episode is the QB school.
On YouTube.
So JTO Sullivan, who was like a
Ten year long journeyman backup quarterback in the NFL.

briefly started for the forty niners, I think in like the late two thousands.
After he finished playing.
Went and got a PhD.
In
Leadership studies.
And
then started this YouTube channel.
Where
He breaks down quarterback's performances every week and does behind the scenes of like
Basically just
lets you ride along with
How a quarterback and an NFL offense from like
The offensive coordinator.

Like what is actually happening.
There was a quote that I think we cut from our NFL episode.
But that kind of sums up what's going on here.
From one of the books that we read.
It said that
Baseball fans love baseball because they think they understand the game.
Foot fans love football because they know they don't understand the game.
I played football for ten years and this is the first time I'm like getting a glimpse of understanding the game. It's so good. This guy is awesome.
I can't wait.
That's
totally been a thing that we've done this fall as
you know, we are getting ready for the birth of our son. And then as we've been on the couch a lot, is like watch an insane amount of college football in NFL games.
Yeah, I'm all over this YouTube channel. You just watch these games and the drama is so compelling.
Uh but what's going on
Is at such another level.
Yes. The production of football and the storylining around the teams and the players. It's the great at scale storytelling of our time.
And to your point, there's a whole nother thing going on underneath it all.
It's funny, the carve out I was gonna do next before you jumped in with a couple is uh Monday Night Football Manning cast. Oh yeah. It's been so good this year. I actually w didn't get into it until this season. I just didn't watch that much N F L until this season'cause I grew up a Browns fan and
Enough said.
Well.
Yeah. But I've watched a lot of NFL this year and Eli and for anyone who who doesn't know about Manning Cast.
When you're watching
Monday night football, you can choose either to watch
The normal announcers.
Or there's a completely second production using the same cameras.
plus a couple of cameras in Peyton Manning and Eli Manning's homes where they're basically just like watching the game on Zoom together. It's a holdover from the pandemic and they have guests on, like they had Will Farrell on, but I think it's actually better without guests. Like even when it's just Eli and Peyton analyzing the game, it's similar to what you're talking about, David. It's
a little bit of like helping you understand what's going on behind the scenes.
But of course by two brothers that are very fun to be around in. They often act like they're still, you know
Eight and ten years old.
I would say like
If you think about um
The NFL broadcasts.
That's one level.
Then there's like
Man and cast that's like
Several clicks deeper in getting a window into what's going on.
And then QB School is like as far to the other side of the spectrum as you could go. While still being really fun. Like JT's a great host, but like It's technical. It's very technical.
Cool.
All right, I'm pumped.
Okay.
We are entering the baby product section of recommendations. Is that okay with you?
I've got one other first.
That I wanna throw out.
Which
Is
going to be a recommendation to nobody'cause you've already seen it.
The Aristotle.
I haven't watched it yet. Oh you haven't watched it yet? Unbelievable. Oh my god. Yeah. It's available at home now, right?
Also, did we call that or did we call that? It's been two years since we did the T Swift episode.
Amazing.
Should have bought stuff. Well, like we said, open invitation, Taylor. You know, we will fly to wherever you are.
It is true.
Dude, you gotta watch it like when the baby's sleeping.
Maybe over the course of two naps because uh
It's a long movie, but um
She's just on another level from anybody. I mean, she's times person of the year this year.
And it is
One of the
the best movies period that I've ever seen, not just like concert film.
Awesome. Can't wait.
All right, baby recommendations.
Go for it.
I feel like I finally have strollers dialed. Now, granted, I only have a one month old, so like the needs massively change over time, but I forever I was trying to figure out.
For nonparents out there.
Figuring out the right car seat stroller combos for all the different needs, like at home.
Travel.
when they're different ages, you have different needs.
Right now we have a lean setup. Like there's a way to be dialed in your setup by just having four strollers.
But I'm pretty pumped.
where we landed with two. I am super pumped for your recommendations because
I really trust you on this. Like
Ben you are such a
Optimized it. Like when it comes to this stuff, this is your wheelhouse. So I
I can't wait.
All right, so here's the current setup. And this is after buying a few other strollers and returning them because there were things I didn't like about them ergonomically.
So the Uppa Baby Vista is the home stroller.
That's the one that's like
big you don't want to be a in the business of like folding that and taking it and that has the newborn
Bed in it. This is like the Chevy Suburban of Strollers. Yes.
Oh, it's you do not ever want to pick this thing up.
But it's got great shocks. We take it on a trail near our house and the the Arboretum in Seattle.
And
The fact that it has a huge bassinet on it.
A lot of his naps happen there. So I can go on walks while the baby's napping.
Even as a newborn, which for a lot of strollers
Newborns can't nap if they're sort of like upright.
Or newbirds can't even sit, you know, in in a normal looking stroller. So you need a bassinet stroller. So that's the home
Yeah.
The travel situation and we haven't like flown anywhere yet, but we will in a month or so.
is
The Jules J O O O L Z Air Plus A E R Plus. Okay, I've not heard of this device.
I hadn't either, but we went to Nordstrom and we uh tested all the strollers. Amazing.
And the one that we had ordered, I really hated the way that the handlebars sat and made my wrists feel. So I we got this um the Jules Air Plus instead.
And
It has adapters for the car seat that we bought, the Cleck Link. Oh yeah.
And it just snaps right in. So this Jules Air Plus a super lights, eleven pounds, it fits in the overhead.
of a airplane, so when we travel starting in a month.
We'll be able to do that.
When we're home, it always sits in the back of the car.
And so like whenever we take the baby out, we leave the baby in the car seat and we just snap the car seat, which by the way is like the safest
You know, the Cleck Ling is like the safe car seat. Yeah, yeah.
You do not want to be
transferring baby out of car seat when baby it's asleep ever.
No.
So the car seat just snaps right in. And so for like doctor's visits and stuff, we just take the travel stroller with the car seat snapped in, no interruption to sleep.
It took a lot of finagling.
But this is where we've arrived for now. The optimizations are some people recommend
the Tulee running stroller in addition to this. We'll have to see if that's a
category we dip into. You're not at that phase yet. Yeah. And other people are swearing by this. In fact, the listener to the show, Alex, I think text me.
I don't know, he texts me a lot about this stroller and I I think he's probably their number one uh fan.
There's a
car seat that converts to a stroller. Yeah, the Duna.
The Duna.
I was literally waiting with Bated Breath for your opinion on the Duna.
That may enter the rotation. I haven't tried it yet. Yeah, uh buried the lead here. Um also Jenny and I are expecting number two this year.
Yay, congratulations. I was wondering if you're gonna talk about it. Obviously Ben already knew, but I I appreciate the faded surprise there.
And we're considering this is among the considerations set and whether we would change our strategy at all. So
Okay, laid on me.
So the Duna
is sort of like a different philosophy of
What if your car seat could become a stroller? And so that way when you're
going on vacation, you actually don't bring a travel stroller. You just keep the baby in the car seat all the way until you get to gate check.
Then you check the Duna.
Or if you're so bold as to get a
seat for your newborn.
Then I think they can stay in it. I'm not exactly sure how that works.
And then when you get there, so the trade off then is like is the Duna actually a good enough stroller for like five mile walks?
And that I don't know.
When we go on vacation, we just try to do like tons and tons of walking. And so that's the thing that I'm playing with, with is the Duna gonna enter the rotation or do we rely on the
Air. Okay. I'm waiting with bated breath for
Your verdict on that.
Yeah. Stay tuned.
At the risk of acquired getting a lot more boring.
I think we have to keep discussion of baby products to a minimum. Well, this is niche acquired here. Like for the right niche, this is riveting content.
Yeah.
Either spin off show or we're gonna have to keep these like
We'll create like a bonus section at the end of the episode or something. Yeah. Yeah.
I was thinking about like oh what are my kids you know?
My daughter's two now. She's like
Yeah, she's certainly not an adult, but like it's you know, it moves fast. Like she's just so she eats people food. Yeah.
She especially. She is
Basically an adult at this point.
You sent me that picture of her eating a Costco hot dog. Oh yeah, totally. Well, let's be clear.
The button. I ate the hot dog, she ate the bun. Which was her choice.
My kid related carve out.
I was having trouble coming up with any of them and this isn't even that kid related, but is her favorite movie.
Which
everybody should watch. I can't believe I hadn't seen it till now is Coco.
The Pixar movie about Dadillos Martos.
It's so good. I've now seen it like ten times. I will probably see it about five hundred more times in my life.
And um
Disney Plus.
Despite all the turmoil and iger and all that.
It's a hell of a drug.
It's a hell of a drug for a parent.
Hey, that's also where you can find great shows such as Alias. Yeah.
Yes.
All right. Well
That's it for extended carve out slash holiday uh present uh suggestions.
This year from acquired
We have one more section.
Two.
Close out the year.
And that is thank yous.
First.
We owe just the biggest
Thank you in the world to our wonderful editor, Steven.
Steven.
You are and everybody listening, I'm sure will agree.
The single best.
Podcast editor.
in the business.
It's unbelievable. Hands down. It's not even close.
And for people who are curious about how this works.
Steven does a first pass after we send him
Eight, nine hours of
Raw audio.
in turning it into sort of a candidate episode. And that's getting rid of likes and ums and all that, but it's retakes, it's redo's, it's David and I saying, Ah, I feel like that didn't come across right. I didn't make the point succinct enough. Why don't I try to make it more succinct?
Then he sends us back this release candidate, which we then also tear apart.
And has you know, a hundred more edits of like this fact is wrong, this little part of this sentence is extraneous, delete this number.
Hey, can we move this section to this part?
And then does a complete second pass after a week's worth of work.
to deal with us on a complete second copy edit. So
Thank you so much, Steven. You're the best. And it comes out just sounding immaculate.
Immaculate.
Steven, you are the man
Thank you for making the show what it is.
Hmm.
Second
Thank you.
for this year is once again M V P of acquired Andrew Marks, not only for Charlie, but
Really for being our thought behind like
Every episode and
relationships that we've built and um, you know, now heading into next year and investing, helping us think through that.
Oh, while we're thinking thought partners, we should thank friend of the show, Mark Bridge, who is a good friend of mine up here in Seattle, a good friend of David's as well. Gave me transitions.
runs a very cool is a founder of a very cool company called At Present.
Which is a marketplace for very unique and uh cool jewelry pieces for women. Dave and I are actually both uh small investors in the company. And customers.
And customers. That's right.
Probably the most expensive thing I ever bought. I bought through at present. Uhhuh.
But Mark has been a thought partner on tons and tons of episodes, especially Berkshire. He actually suggested L VMH, good thought partner on Nike. So Mark, thank you for everything you've done and and helping acquire too. Yes. Speaking of LVMH.
Adam Pritzker helped us a ton.
on L VMH. Adam of course was one of the founders of General Assembly and
Now has assembled brands and
Kate, which they just sold and was a fantastic
outcome for everybody there.
Adam really gave us a window into
actually building and running one of these companies.
Yep, the whole team at NVIDIA, initially the people that were willing to speak with us about the episodes we were doing just to help with the research for the episodes and make sure we got it right, but then subsequently their entire communications team for hosting us and putting up with all of our requests and being willing to
build the insane three screen setup and film it with three cameras and do everything we wanted to the production standards we wanted and way more at Nvidia HQ. So thanks to the
Awesome team there.
Thank you to Doug DeMiro for consenting to join the crazy acquired episode process for Porsche.
I don't think Doug knew what he was getting into when he agreed to this.
No, but he did all the research too, and you know, for someone who has two businesses that he's trying to
You know, run at the same time.
You know, he started with a head start on the history of Porsche, but he really did a ton of work to prepare for that and had all of his
Facts and figures ready at hand. Let us into his garage for the whole day.
Yeah.
Doug Rocks.
Also, I'm thinking about buying my next car and like I've been watching so many Doug videos to prepare. He also totally set the bar for
If and when we ever have another
Voice on a season episode.
That is how we're gonna do it.
Like an expert guest host.
We love that format. We'd like your feedback on it too, but we thought that was
the perfect amount of
guest research and what they brought to the table and how we loop them in with the episode and interacting with David and I. We we were just like
This is a ten out of ten. Ten out of ten. Just such a
high quality guy on every dimension.
Yeah.
And then on the
Research to mention, you know, thank you to um
I mean
Dozens, dozens of people who helped us with research for our episodes.
This year.

to name here, and many of you don't want to be named.
But
Yeah, people who have way better things to do with their time than
Chat with me and Ben about a podcast episode we're working on.
You know.
CEOs and CFOs of public companies, et cetera.
Immensely grateful.
And for most of these folks
They do it'cause they listen and so they sort of know the product that's gonna come out the other side.
Thank you also for listening.
'Cause I think that's sort of the superpower of acquired is the fact that
Now there are
people who listen who can really help us make sure that we get episodes right. So we love getting these notes. I mean we can't respond to them all, but
people who join the Slack or email us acquired FM at gmail.com and say, Hi, here's a thing that I know a lot about in my industry experience. If you ever do it, feel free to reach out.
We totally do when we do those episodes. So thank you. Yeah.
Thank you.
Speaking of the last and most important thank you to all you
This is the
Whole thing.
Would not happen without you.
Listening.
You all are
Just an amazing community and
We really appreciate you.
Have a
Wonderful, wonderful holiday season.
Yeah.
Happy
successful
Wonderful new year ahead.
And with that.
If you want to know every time an episode drops, you can sign up for email updates at acquire.fm slash email. We added two new things recently. Emails include little hints at what the next episode will be.
And they're also were were putting follow ups and corrections to previous episodes. So thanks to uh the two listeners who recently wrote in correcting me on Visa, that it was not North Dakota, but South Dakota that first changed their usury laws to support credit cards, which is why all of your credit cards
Or so many of them are bailed from there today. So we'll be including
probably got three or four more Visa tidbits.
That we'll toss in the email.
For that.
Come talk about this episode with us after listening at acquired.fm slash slack. Check out ACQ two. We just did this awesome Visa follow up.
With our good buddy Gorav Ahuja from Thrive Capital. He's been in the payments industry for over a decade, founding companies, investing in companies, and helped put a finer point on a lot of the things we were describing in the current ecosystem today. If you want some merch
We've got a sweet merch store acquired dot fm slash store.
And with that, listeners, we'll see you next year. We will see you.
Next year.
Who got the truth?
Is it you, is it you, is it you Who got the truth now