Holiday Special 2022

Cozy up to the fire and join Acquired as we do our annual strategic review of the show and our business “in public”. We recap our perspectives on Acquired’s big moments from the past year, a bit of commentary on the current state of the tech ecosystem, and what lies ahead for us in 2023. Plus as always at the holidays, we do an extended carve out session on our favorite things from the past year. Huge thank you to all of you for making 2022 an amazing year here in Acquired-land, and here’s to even bigger and better things to come in 2023! *Carve Outs:* - Jerry Seinfeld on The Tim Ferriss Show: https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/ - Project Hail Mary: https://www.amazon.com/Project-Hail-Mary-Andy-Weir/dp/0593135202 - The Psychology of Money: https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Money-Timeless-lessons-happiness/dp/0857197681 - The Power Law: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Law-Venture-Capital-Making/dp/052555999X - Made in America: https://www.amazon.com/Sam-Walton-Made-America/dp/0553562835 - Made in Japan: https://www.amazon.com/Made-Japan-Akio-Morita-Sony/dp/0451151712 - The Godfather (book): https://www.amazon.com/Godfather-Signet-Mario-Puzo/dp/0451167716 - Masters of Doom: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture/dp/0812972155 - Stevie Case vs. the World: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/10/stevie-case-vs-the-world-gaming-industry-sexism - How All this Happened: https://collabfund.com/blog/how-this-all-happened/ - Resonant Arc: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFzWAEPDGiY34bGpwM_DWmA - All-In: https://www.allinpodcast.co - Founders Podcast: https://founders.simplecast.com - MKBHD’s Waveform Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/c/Waveform - The Verge: https://www.theverge.com - Huberman Lab - What Alcohol Does to your Body: https://hubermanlab.com/what-alcohol-does-to-your-body-brain-health/ - Smartless: https://www.smartless.com - T-Swift’s Midnights: https://www.taylorswift.com - Olivia Rodrigo: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Olivia+Rodrigo&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 - Andor: https://disneyplusoriginals.disney.com/show/andor - Black Panther: https://www.marvel.com/movies/black-panther - Top Gun Maverick: https://www.topgunmovie.com - Everything Everywhere All At Once: https://a24films.com/films/everything-everywhere-all-at-once - The White Lotus: https://www.hbo.com/the-white-lotus - The Vow: https://www.hbo.com/the-vow - Flighty: https://www.flightyapp.com - Roborock S7 Max: https://us.roborock.com/pages/roborock-s7-maxv - Apple Keyboard with TouchID: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK293LL/A/magic-keyboard-with-touch-id-for-mac-models-with-apple-silicon-us-english - Elgato AV gear: https://www.elgato.com/en - Especially sound panels: https://www.elgato.com/en/wave-panels - ...and the Cam Link 4K: https://www.elgato.com/en/cam-link-4k *More Acquired:* - Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email and vote on future episodes! - Join the Slack http://acquired.fm/slack - Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! _Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions._

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Gilbert?

  How do I open again? Welcome.

• 0:02David Rosenthal?

  What is this show? What are we doing?

• 0:04Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome to How I Built This.

• 0:08David Rosenthal?

  No, nothing against How I Built This, but that's not us.

• 0:11Ben Gilbert?

  All right, let's start.

• 0:30Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

• 0:44David Rosenthal?

  And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco. But today, Ben, you are hosting me at your lovely home here in Seattle.

• 0:53Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome to the studio.

• 0:54David Rosenthal?

  It's great to be here.

• 0:56Ben Gilbert?

  And we are your hosts. Ho, ho, ho.

• 0:59David Rosenthal?

  Ho, ho, ho. Happy holidays.

• 1:00Ben Gilbert?

  Happy holidays.

• 1:02David Rosenthal?

  Man, I don't know about you, but ready to put a bow on 2022. Well, we have much to talk about.

• 1:10Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Well, listeners, normally I have like a script, like a thing that I'm looking at in front of me to know what to say now, but I don't really on this one, other than to say, join the Slack. There are great people there, including probably you, if you're listening to this episode. We don't think this is an entry point for a lot of people into acquired. We think this is probably if you're a fan, you're going to listen to this, but I don't think this is going to be anyone's sort of first show. So we're going to try and go a little, a little deeper and nerdier than normal.

• 1:37David Rosenthal?

  We've got a little agenda. We're going to recap 2022 for the show, for tech, for us, talk a little bit about what's ahead in 2023. We've got some extra, extra fun carve-outs.

• 1:48Ben Gilbert?

  Indeed. All right, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

• 2:09David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature, or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote "shadow AI" running with no security review at all.

• 2:29Ben Gilbert?

  Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's Governance, Risk and Compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half.

• 2:51David Rosenthal?

  In half, which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake all stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment.

• 3:10Ben Gilbert?

  And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of Acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. With that, this is not investment advice. This is probably the episode of the year where we will come closest to things that might be interpreted as investment advice as we talk about things that we have liked and didn't like, and predict the future and all that. So do your own research. All right, David, where are we starting with?

• 3:53David Rosenthal?

  All right. I think we got to recap 2022, despite the craziness of the year of 2022 in the broader world tech markets economy. This is a pretty great year for the show. I have down here my signature Acquired episodes and favorite memories from the year. We started the year with Taylor Swift.

• 4:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 4:17David Rosenthal?

  Isn't that crazy that that was like January? That feels like three years ago.

• 4:21Ben Gilbert?

  Well, we knew that at the end of the year, she was going to drop midnight. It seemed appropriate that in the year where she was going to put on the concert and announce the tickets for the concert series with the most demand in human history, that we should, of course, kick the year off with a Taylor episode, predicting the future as usual here on Acquired.

• 4:37David Rosenthal?

  I think 2023, we might need to line her up for a follow up. We should do an acquired session.

• 4:42Ben Gilbert?

  With Taylor, naturally.

• 4:43David Rosenthal?

  Taylor, we'll come to you. We'll come to your studio.

• 4:45Ben Gilbert?

  Or maybe the long pond.

• 4:47David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, long pond. Great.

• 4:48Ben Gilbert?

  I was reflecting on this. It's pretty crazy that I think the announcement was that they had 900 stadiums worth of demand showing up to Ticketmaster.com and there's 50 shows. I think it's something like 35 stadiums, but a lot of them have two nights. Like there's two nights in Seattle here and I'm sure not all 900 stadiums worth can be counted as like actual demand. Like I have to imagine when, you know, there's a U2 concert or something, there are 100 stadiums worth of demand for 50 shows or something like that. So clearly not necessarily all purchase intent or not all purchase intent at the available prices. But still, there was just no way to service the amount of demand. Like I actually don't know how you solve

• 5:32Ben Gilbert?

  this problem. Do you make all tickets $10,000 so that you actually find the correct price equilibrium for the demand?

• 5:39David Rosenthal?

  You know, kind of like we were talking about on our most recent episode with Ben Thompson and Stratechery. And he's like, the obvious thing that I should do is raise prices to maximize revenue, but then that's pretty quickly going to lead to limiting my reach and impact. And I think Taylor cares a lot about her reach and impact.

• 5:54Ben Gilbert?

  And she could probably make the most money on this tour by having $10,000 tickets exclusively and still fill all 50 stadiums. I don't know what the price, maybe $2,000 tickets, she could do it. But if you're playing for a 50 year career, then you sort of have to like nurture the fan base over time and recognize that the.

• 6:13David Rosenthal?

  Right. If she did that, that would be like, that would truly be a farewell tour because that would create so much.

• 6:18Ben Gilbert?

  Ride off into the sunset.

• 6:19David Rosenthal?

  So much negative reaction.

• 6:21Ben Gilbert?

  Which of course would create even more demand if you knew it was her farewell tour.

• 6:26David Rosenthal?

  This is making me think though, reflecting back on that episode 11 months ago. So I don't remember exactly everything we said, but I don't remember talking as much about the obvious point that this raises for me, which is Taylor is a rock star.

• 6:44David Rosenthal?

  In the internet, she was probably like the first really, really big internet rock star. And the thing about the internet is the markets are bigger than you can ever imagine. The demand is larger than you can ever imagine, even in niche products like, like for Strategery or for acquired, like these niches are bigger than you could ever imagine. Now think about a mainstream pop star.

• 7:04Ben Gilbert?

  So the internet enables two things. It enables the niches to exist. So there's way more artists that can make a living today, I think, than if you think back to like the 60s or something where the labels would pick the 10 bands of the year and that's kind of it. But why is it that Taylor Swift is bigger than the Beatles? Like, would the Beatles have had this much demand too, when the only promotion that existed was from the labels in a sort of like, the labels pick the winners and then those are the winners world?

• 7:36David Rosenthal?

  Well, there's multiple things going on here. Like, one is the disintermediation, or at least the reduction of power of the middle men of the labels.

• 7:47Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 7:47David Rosenthal?

  And everything else in the middle of the value chain. And like so much more of the value is now accruing directly to Taylor.

• 7:53Ben Gilbert?

  But that's not an argument for why there's so much more demand to see.

• 7:56David Rosenthal?

  I think there also is a lot more demand for Taylor than there was for the Beatles.

• 8:01Ben Gilbert?

  Just because the internet having several ways to reach a customer means that the most popular artist in the world is going to have just way more distribution, period.

• 8:15David Rosenthal?

  Way more distribution, way more touchpoints.

• 8:17Ben Gilbert?

  The labels.

• 8:17David Rosenthal?

  There's also so much less friction, right? As hard as it was and all the news about how hard it was to get tickets to these Taylor concerts, everybody knew when they were going on sale that it was happening.

• 8:28Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 8:29David Rosenthal?

  Through social media and the mainstream media amplifying that. And it was hard to secure a ticket, but very easy to log on to Ticketmaster, or maybe not that easy, but compared to, I don't even know how you would have gotten a ticket to a Beatles show back in the day.

• 8:44Ben Gilbert?

  I assume you have to like go to the stadium box office and line up that day that they're going on sale and you would only know when they're going on sale because of radio ads and print ads?

• 8:54David Rosenthal?

  Maybe you read about it in the newspaper.

• 8:56Ben Gilbert?

  This is the thing I was thinking about when I was caught up in the Friday night. Was it Friday night? Whenever it was that people were like Twitter's going down. Like it's going to basically turn off tomorrow. And I like mentally knew this is a system that would degrade slowly and fade into irrelevance. Not it's going to turn off tomorrow, but putting myself in the headspace of Twitter doesn't exist soon. I was like, how would I know if stuff is taking off? How will I know what the general consensus is around something? How will I know that the tenor has shifted and this thing is not interesting anymore? And that thing is interesting. Would I start reading the New York Times many times a day and going deep into many of the sections? I'm certainly not going to log into Facebook.

• 9:41David Rosenthal?

  You can't really even get that same kind of experience or understanding from

• 9:47Ben Gilbert?

  That's super.

• 9:48David Rosenthal?

  Any kind of centralized publication.

• 9:49Ben Gilbert?

  Correct. And it's the centralization that makes it like less valuable. You'd never be able to like, say, oh, nobody's talking about that. Because the New York Times is not a place where you go to find out if people are talking about something. It's a place where you get news. And so you'd literally have to like in person, go to events and have a bunch of conversations to know what people are talking about. Okay, Twitter doesn't exist tomorrow. Where do you go to find out what people in the world are talking about right now? I think it's TikTok.

• 10:19David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, but I think it would be a much less efficient experience because it's all video.

• 10:25Ben Gilbert?

  The number of new tidbits of information you can consume per minute in Twitter is high and reasonably low in TikTok.

• 10:31David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 10:32Ben Gilbert?

  It's 10 to 20 versus two to three.

• 10:34David Rosenthal?

  Yep. All right. Well, I don't know how we got from T Swift to Twitter and TikTok.

• 10:39Ben Gilbert?

  It's a holiday special, dude. Formatless, except for the pretty robust format that you fleshed out here.

• 10:44David Rosenthal?

  Well, you know me, I can't not prepare for an episode, even a holiday special. Okay, next one on my list. Sony, Sony Corporation.

• 10:53Ben Gilbert?

  Which I didn't think would be that interesting when we started doing it.

• 10:55David Rosenthal?

  It was your idea to do it, right?

• 10:56Ben Gilbert?

  I know, it was, but I found myself being like, God, is this actually an interesting company? I had wanted to read Made in Japan because I'd heard it was amazing. But as I looked back at like trademark acquired episodes, TSMC, The New York Times, like I just didn't think it would be one of those. And it very clearly, especially in the numbers, did become one of those. It has it all. I mean, it has the genius founder. It has the, probably the most adversity that we've ever talked about in any founding story in all of acquired.

• 11:28David Rosenthal?

  It's really hard to think offhand of a greater adversity that a company and founders have ever come than Japan in 1945.

• 11:36Ben Gilbert?

  It also has so many chapters. I mean, the craziest thing to me is if you look at the business as of the time we did the episode, they had five separate business units, all of which did a double digit percentage of their revenue. So it's super diverse and all of which did a double digit percentage of their operating income. So like you have five businesses that are all reasonably the same size in top and bottom line in one house.

• 12:03David Rosenthal?

  Well, and that we got well over two hours into the episode before we mentioned PlayStation. And then like the PlayStation story in and of itself, we could do an episode on.

• 12:12Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, the fact that we got from like Rice Cookers and World War II to like that crazy coda about Spider-Man is nuts.

• 12:20David Rosenthal?

  In the back of my mind, I've been percolating. It could be fun to do a whole episode just on Xbox. A, we need to do a Microsoft series at some point. We've talked a lot about and around Microsoft on the show, but we've never covered Microsoft.

• 12:35Ben Gilbert?

  And Apple.

• 12:36David Rosenthal?

  And Apple. We've not done Microsoft.

• 12:37Ben Gilbert?

  Or Google. We have not done the Google IPO.

• 12:40David Rosenthal?

  Apple, Google, Oracle.

• 12:43Ben Gilbert?

  If we just wanted to cheat and like spike the numbers as much as possible, we just like take the whole next season and just do. You know, Fang, basically.

• 12:53David Rosenthal?

  I think we should do one of those companies a year, not even a season, I think one a year.

• 12:59Ben Gilbert?

  It's gonna take three episodes to do each one.

• 13:01David Rosenthal?

  We were able to fit Amazon into two episodes, but Amazon is only a, what, 27 year old company?

• 13:09Ben Gilbert?

  And we didn't talk about a bunch of stuff.

• 13:11David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 13:11Ben Gilbert?

  That was the way we skipped it. We didn't really talk about Alexa at all.

• 13:15David Rosenthal?

  Right. Sorry, everybody, if we just lit up here. Although I think there's enough voice personalization in those devices that if a piece of media says the A word, I don't think it lights up anymore.

• 13:25Ben Gilbert?

  Well, it might be because I have the Sonos ones and the firmware on the Sonos ones is different than the ones that Amazon actually makes, but mine will just like light up when people say things that are not that word and are just like in a movie. Like when dialogue sounds too much like that name.

• 13:39David Rosenthal?

  Like that word?

• 13:40Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 13:40David Rosenthal?

  Interesting. Here's my proposal. I think we should do one of these big tech companies a year for two reasons. One, you know, for Microsoft, for Apple. I think those are going to be three plus episodes to do it, right?

• 13:54Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 13:54David Rosenthal?

  Even at acquired length episodes. So it's a huge lift, but also I think we should spread it out like, cause like you said, the cheat code would be if we just do them all back to back.

• 14:04Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 14:05David Rosenthal?

  But we have a diversity of interests here on acquired. We want to go for many years.

• 14:09Ben Gilbert?

  I even have a lot of fear around like doing a three-part Microsoft series where like, are people going to be like, I'm just out for the next three months. Cause next year, listeners, what we've decided is, and this is a little bit approximate, but we're going to average it. Every month, we're going to do a season episode and a special. So either a season being like Apple part one, or a special being an interview with someone or an acquired sessions or something that kind of doesn't fit the normal format. And like, that literally means that it's like, oh, you're doing a three-part Microsoft thing. Well, I'm out for Q1 on acquired.

• 14:43David Rosenthal?

  I actually think about this. I've experienced this on one of my carve-outs for extended carve-outs later. One of my favorite video game podcasts, Resonant Ark. They're a video game story book club, so they choose a game.

• 14:55Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 14:55David Rosenthal?

  And then they'll do, you know, 10 to 20 episodes, playing through the game, dissecting the story, all the like literary, from a literary perspective. It's really cool. I love it. But if they choose a game that I don't have a large affinity for, then it's. Anywhere from one to two months that I'm not listening to that show.

• 15:12Ben Gilbert?

  Right. And three months is certainly long enough for someone to permanently change behavior. I don't think it's good for us if someone decides to take a three month break from acquired because it's not 100% chance they come back.

• 15:25David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we got to think about the right way to do this.

• 15:27Ben Gilbert?

  Maybe I'm too focused on the downside and maybe it will turn out that like, while we may alienate some people, it's the largest thing in acquired history because I was shocked that, we'll keep going here on big episodes, but that the Amazon episode was by far the biggest in acquired history. When David pitched me on this idea, I was like, hmm, I don't know. Brad Stone has written some excellent books on this. There's been documentaries. Jeff Bezos is the most studied CEO in the world, I think, until this recent Elon madness. What can we bring to the world in the Amazon?

• 16:01David Rosenthal?

  Which by the way, I think that has become this year, something's crystallized for me about acquired and the show and what we do. I think that should always be our lens. Like, what can we add by doing it? Because there's lots of voices out there saying lots of things.

• 16:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 16:17David Rosenthal?

  Spoiler alert, this is part of why we haven't covered Twitter because like.

• 16:20Ben Gilbert?

  There's nothing new to add.

• 16:21David Rosenthal?

  What can we add?

• 16:22Ben Gilbert?

  All the best tech journalists in the world are covering it every single day. I mean, you have Matt Levine, you have Dan Primack. Every single day, they're reporting the newest thing with not just reporting, but true analysis behind it. You have then Ben Thompson, the following day, writing a reaction piece that's like, here's my even more thoughtful take on what happened.

• 16:43David Rosenthal?

  You have Casey Newton, who has a whole platform dedicated to this.

• 16:46Ben Gilbert?

  And a bunch of access and a bunch of insiders sending him stuff, breaking it real time on Twitter. So it was one of these things where we're like, there's no daylight here for us to talk about it. We actually felt the same way about FTX, which, I mean, you could argue that we did have a part to play in FTX because Sam was on the show last year, but like, there was so much good coverage and good reporting going on and we're not reporters and we don't do stuff in real time, blah, blah, blah, that it felt like the right way to have acquired add to the conversation is go do 100 hours of research on Enron and try and sort of.

• 17:23Ben Gilbert?

  Indirectly draw as many parallels as we can. Like, we don't want to hit people over the head with like, this is just like an FTX where they had this. It's more like, how can we bring up ideas for people that they can draw their own parallels?

• 17:34David Rosenthal?

  It's been interesting to watch this past week. Who knows if it was coincidental or not, but I think at least two major news outlets have run pieces in the past week with a title like, how FTX compares to Enron?

• 17:48Ben Gilbert?

  It was obvious. It's obvious to draw that parallel.

• 17:51David Rosenthal?

  They were probably in the works anyway.

• 17:53Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. Is it worth sharing more on that now?

• 17:55David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah, let's, this is a holiday special. We can, we can break the format.

• 17:58Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Every time people write us in and they're like, oh, you gotta do a take on this. It's like, I almost never have a take in real time.

• 18:06David Rosenthal?

  Yep. That's not what we do.

• 18:08Ben Gilbert?

  I suppose the traditional acquired format of a company buying another company, we are some of the most well-positioned people in the world to have a take on why that acquisition happened, what will make it go well, what could kill it?

• 18:23David Rosenthal?

  Just like you killed grading this season, which by the way, I love that. I was so surprised.

• 18:31Ben Gilbert?

  It has its place sometimes.

• 18:32David Rosenthal?

  When you threw it. Yeah, yeah. But like, look, things need to evolve. Next year is going to be our eighth year into the show.

• 18:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 18:38David Rosenthal?

  I thought Ben Thompson just said it perfectly on our most recent episode with him where he was like, you know, when I was young, I used to think when I got old that I would like still be cool and I would never be one of those old people. And now that I'm old, I'm like, old, quote unquote, relatively. Now that I'm older, I think two things. One, being old is pretty great. And two, I look at my peers who are still trying to be young and it just looks kinda

• 19:03Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 19:04David Rosenthal?

  sad. Like, you gotta change. You gotta evolve. And the show has changed and evolved to a point where I think like, we are a different show than the show that used to do, oh, breaking, you know, emergency pod.

• 19:16Ben Gilbert?

  Whole Foods got bought today, cancel everything today so we can do some quick research. And there are times where it still makes sense for us to do those, like John Foley bringing in a new CEO.

• 19:25David Rosenthal?

  The Barry McCarthy connection. And that is a take that has not aged well.

• 19:29Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I think you're right, that it's okay that. Were something different now than than what the show was.

• 19:37David Rosenthal?

  I'm curious what everybody listening thinks.

• 19:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Last point on this FTX saga, which again, we're watching it play out in real time. I don't know that that's where acquired shines because we we try to make evergreen pieces that sort of stand the test of time. And like, every week, it's so different than it was the previous week. These are kind of excuses. We probably just should directly say, we totally had Sam on. We wanted to tell the extraordinary story of FTX, which was extraordinary. I mean, in now in a different way than we thought.

• 20:08David Rosenthal?

  You cannot argue that it is an extraordinary story.

• 20:10Ben Gilbert?

  I do want to say I'm sorry if the exposure that FTX got from acquired and every other publication in the world, but but from acquired caused you to.

• 20:20David Rosenthal?

  Our platform to Sam and to FTX. And yeah, I do feel bad about that. I don't think there's any way we could have known at the time. And I don't want to stop having interesting people and companies on the show, you know, up and coming companies. So, but yeah, like, you know, it sucks. And like, a lot of people lost a lot of money.

• 20:42Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. So sorry if you were like, on the fence on FTX and you were like, I don't know if this thing's legit or not. And then acquired legitimized that for you. Next.

• 20:52David Rosenthal?

  Just to, if you have not listened to the Sony episode, I'm sure most of you have, but like, it's so good. Oh, my gosh. Talk about like, the office of a fraud.

• 21:00Ben Gilbert?

  We made this thing. It's amazing. You should listen.

• 21:04David Rosenthal?

  Sony, the Sony story, whether you like our telling of it or not, but just like, it is a vastly underappreciated company and an underappreciated journey overcoming adversity.

• 21:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 21:17David Rosenthal?

  Okay, Sony, dude, we did Nvidia this year. We did a lot this year.

• 21:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Trying to think which of our silicon episodes I feel the strongest about in terms of like, enlightening me about the way the world works. I think it's first TSMC, but Nvidia is.

• 21:40Ben Gilbert?

  The thing that's the most interesting about the Nvidia story, I think, is Jensen bet the company three separate times and truly bet the company like if this initiative fails, it will go to zero. And it worked three separate times. The first time is when they shipped the card in whatever it was, nine months instead of two years, and they designed the whole thing in emulation, never tested it and shipped it to customers. And it worked. I mean, it worked enough. And maybe I'm forgetting the story in its entirety, but I think there was a bet the company moment around programmable shaders.

• 22:20David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 22:20Ben Gilbert?

  And then a third one around the like, seven year investment before the market was there in AI and CUDA and building their own developer ecosystem.

• 22:29David Rosenthal?

  Obviously, OpenAI existed. I'm trying to remember if DALL-E was out at the time when we did the Nvidia episode. Certainly GPT.

• 22:36Ben Gilbert?

  Well, interestingly enough, I think DALL-E 1 was, but it got no acclaim.

• 22:39David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 22:40Ben Gilbert?

  The one that lit the world on fire was DALL-E 2.

• 22:42David Rosenthal?

  Was DALL-E 2. Yep. But now, as we record this, ChatGPT came out last week. Like, we're thinking about the, you know, AI Renaissance and how important AI is, like, just in a general sense, when we did those episodes.

• 22:54Ben Gilbert?

  Nvidia stock had that crazy run long before we did the episode, like, two years before we did the episode.

• 23:00David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 23:01Ben Gilbert?

  At the beginning of COVID. And so it's interesting that, I don't think that was around gaming. I think that was around AI, the thing that was sort of selling that story. And so it, in a way, the like, craziest Nvidia bulls that were sort of buying at the top and selling the story as much as humanly possible. When did it peak? I don't know, late 2021, maybe. They were kind of right. I don't think they knew that the next year would make AI's developments as obvious as it has. But everybody who believed that AI was going to be this complete step change in the way that we use computers and decided

• 23:41Ben Gilbert?

  that buying Nvidia at a very high price was the way to endorse that belief, like, that ended up happening very quickly soon after.

• 23:49David Rosenthal?

  Yep. The moment when it really hit me was when we were recording the LP episode that we did with Jaleh at Mutiny and

• 23:58Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, just cavalierly. It was like, oh yeah, we have a GPT-3 based feature in our product.

• 24:02David Rosenthal?

  Right. And I was like, whoa, okay, you are dynamically rewriting copy on your customers' websites using GPT-3. Okay, that kind of blows my mind.

• 24:15Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 24:16David Rosenthal?

  Like, I can now see the business use cases for this.

• 24:20Ben Gilbert?

  You say you can see them, but we're in this very interesting moment where we've all seen three pretty amazing proof of concepts in the last six months. We saw Dolly 2, GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, which to me is actually the most interesting because the most meaningful change is that it changed the modality that you interact with the AI model, but it's either the same or I think it's like GPT-3 and a half or something. It's a very similar model, but we're interacting with it in a new way and it's stateful rather than being stateless as in it sort of can preserve state and you can ask it more questions about. And so I think there's a little bit of like a crypto moment here where it's the first time someone explains

• 25:02Ben Gilbert?

  to you a decentralized world computer. You're like, whoa, that unlocks a whole world of possibilities. And you say, what are they? And someone says, let me think about that.

• 25:12David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:12Ben Gilbert?

  I feel very similar with ChatGPT right now. I'm looking at it. I'm like, whoa, this unlocks a whole world of possibilities. And someone says, what is it? And I'm like,

• 25:20Ben Gilbert?

  I feel better than I did about the decentralized world computer, but I still can't articulate to you like when the App Store launched, like, oh, this will be an $80 billion on-demand car service market. That that's not

• 25:32David Rosenthal?

  Well, I think this is just naturally how markets play out though, right? Like, we look back now and we're like, oh, when the App Store launched, it was obvious. But was it at the time? I think we probably would have felt very similarly back in that moment of like, oh, apps on your phone. Cool.

• 25:50Ben Gilbert?

  When I first saw the iPhone, I thought this device changes everything because I was like, I wanted one so bad.

• 25:58David Rosenthal?

  So bad.

• 25:58Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, I had a coworker at Cisco.

• 26:00David Rosenthal?

  So many times between the keynote and when it was like six months before the

• 26:05Ben Gilbert?

  Really?

• 26:05David Rosenthal?

  phone came out, I was so hyped for it.

• 26:08Ben Gilbert?

  I just remember seeing the device at my coworker's desk at Cisco and thinking like, I need one of these things. This is like so much of the money that I have would be used to buy one. And so I think I bought the 3G the next year or six months in or something.

• 26:20David Rosenthal?

  I got one day one. I didn't camp out overnight, but I waited in line for hours. I got day one release. I got the original one. I just graduated from college. It was the summer I graduated. I graduated, but I hadn't started work yet, but I had my signing bonus.

• 26:32Ben Gilbert?

  Ah.

• 26:32David Rosenthal?

  And I was like, this is where I am spending my money.

• 26:36Ben Gilbert?

  I waited in line just to wait in line. Like I went to the Apple store.

• 26:41David Rosenthal?

  You didn't buy one?

• 26:42Ben Gilbert?

  I didn't have enough money. I was 17, 18.

• 26:45David Rosenthal?

  That's right, because you had to pay full price. There was no carrier subsidization for the original iPhone.

• 26:49Ben Gilbert?

  Correct. And so it was fun to just, I brought my little point and shoot camera. I took pictures of all the people, uh, you know, getting their first iPhones and playing with them and setting up.

• 26:57David Rosenthal?

  And did your dad go with you?

• 26:58Ben Gilbert?

  No, I went with my friend, George. I remember feeling like this device is amazing. I remember really wanting to make apps for it. So I made this to do list app.

• 27:06David Rosenthal?

  You couldn't make apps until the next year.

• 27:07Ben Gilbert?

  Right. I sort of missed that whole first year of like, you can't make apps. I don't think I was thinking about it then, but like the app that I made was a to do list. It's not like I was like, oh my God, this is going to be a way that you can hail cars or order groceries, or it was like, let me do the smallest possible thing on this. And I think that's actually just how I think about products. I'm not a Travis Kalanick like person. I think I always sort of think in terms of like, what product can I fully conceptualize of and see in my head and understand all the hard stuff involved in it and draw a nice neat box around it and just work towards shipping that thing that I can fully imagine. It's almost like I want to be able to do everything myself,

• 27:48Ben Gilbert?

  which is why I think acquired has sort of come out the way that it has, rather than us doing a bunch of hard stuff. I very much shy away from like, ooh, you'd have to like, send a bunch of people into grocery stores and like, figure out all their inventory to like loaded it. I just wouldn't do that. But the idea of like, okay, there's this really nice neat package called an acquired episode and it contains these components and David and I can make it ourselves and

• 28:15David Rosenthal?

  What do you think the, uh, what would have happened otherwise would be if, uh, if we did the hard stuff?

• 28:24David Rosenthal?

  Well, like one thing we've been very explicit about in a trade off for the show and acquired as an entity in a business is, uh, we don't wanna have a lot of employees. We don't wanna have a team. We don't wanna have

• 28:36Ben Gilbert?

  There'd be more shows. I think we would have tried to turn it into a network. We would have taken people up on the book offers. There could be like a Netflix show. There could be

• 28:45David Rosenthal?

  I'm trying to think, is there anything we could have done or still do that would just be like a fundamentally different thing? Like everything you're describing would be building a Gimlet or the like and like, that would be great. You know, we probably would make more money, but that's, that's like not what we wanna do. But is there anything that would be like an Uber versus a to do app?

• 29:07Ben Gilbert?

  It depends what on the believability spectrum you're willing to call part of acquired. Like we could have launched a new podcast app for acquired and other podcasts and then tried

• 29:16David Rosenthal?

  We thought about it with Glow.

• 29:17Ben Gilbert?

  We did. Glow was originally gonna be a new, a new app with payments built in.

• 29:22David Rosenthal?

  That would have been a boondoggle.

• 29:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. I'll validate your point. When the App Store first came out, you could stare at it and go, this is gonna change everything. But it was only a select few people who actually saw the particular massive use case with the new thing.

• 29:37David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 29:38Ben Gilbert?

  And that's how I feel about ChatGPT right now. I'm like, this thing's scary powerful and I don't actually know what to do with it.

• 29:43David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, most people I think are also in the same mode that you and I are of like, oh, I can see how this could rewrite copy dynamically on a website.

• 29:53Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 29:53David Rosenthal?

  And I see that being, but that's the to do list version of what

• 29:58Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 29:58David Rosenthal?

  AI can do.

• 29:59Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 30:01David Rosenthal?

  Man, this is fun. We're only like halfway through the year too. Okay. So we did Nvidia.

• 30:05Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 30:06David Rosenthal?

  That was so fun and I learned so much. And now it's just so much more important. Almost like T-Swift, you know, the same dynamic.

• 30:14Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 30:15David Rosenthal?

  Then we did Amazon and I include Walmart in Amazon. I'm so glad we did Walmart first.

• 30:22Ben Gilbert?

  First.

• 30:23David Rosenthal?

  That's why I have in my head, I was like, did we do two episodes on Amazon or three? We really did three.

• 30:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 30:29David Rosenthal?

  Episode one was Walmart.

• 30:30Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. In order to understand the role of retail in America today, you sort of first need to understand that everything we think of as a retailer, or most things we think of as retailer, are actually discounters.

• 30:47David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 30:48Ben Gilbert?

  And I totally didn't get that before doing the Walmart episode. I was like, well, there's like stores like Walmart and Target and there's department stores, which are like more expensive and opinionated. And then the brands that have sort of their own stores. But like, I didn't conceptualize that the most commonplace that you buy things are actually discounters. And Walmart was really the company that single-handedly created the wave of the modern store, period.

• 31:18David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 31:18Ben Gilbert?

  Which then Amazon could take digital.

• 31:20David Rosenthal?

  Yes, yes. Well, and I was so blown away learning about with Walmart, how much of a tech company they were. Like, I think we said on the episode, and I still think that they were the first applied technology company in America.

• 31:40Ben Gilbert?

  I think this is silly. I think you've said this a few times now. I don't, I don't agree with that.

• 31:43David Rosenthal?

  Okay.

• 31:43Ben Gilbert?

  Like, it is okay. So, technology at its purest definition is anything that enhances the productivity of a human. So like, the wheel is technology because with the same number of calories burned, you're able to go farther.

• 32:00David Rosenthal?

  Fair.

• 32:01Ben Gilbert?

  Or a navigational instrument, which means you're able to get somewhere in a shorter amount of time. So, I mean, maybe you could scope it to like, apply digital technology.

• 32:10David Rosenthal?

  What makes me want to say that is, they were a company who did business in an established sector.

• 32:18Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 32:19David Rosenthal?

  And they transformed the way.

• 32:22David Rosenthal?

  They worked and ultimately the whole sector by applying technology to it.

• 32:26Ben Gilbert?

  So did Standard Oil by applying technology to the old way that you used to extract oil from the ground.

• 32:34David Rosenthal?

  Fair enough. I mean, I guess like you could say the car companies.

• 32:37Ben Gilbert?

  Or the lighting, the way people light their homes.

• 32:40David Rosenthal?

  But those, I guess the distinction I'm trying to draw, which may not be a valid one is I think in all those cases, the business was the technology. Here it was a separate existing part of the economy that they were in that business and they use technology to transform the way they do it. Maybe it's a meaningless distinction.

• 33:02Ben Gilbert?

  It's interesting.

• 33:04David Rosenthal?

  I just feel like today, like Walmart would have been like a hot venture backed startup.

• 33:08Ben Gilbert?

  Well, it's interesting. The question with tech, applying technology to an existing market is always, what are you using the technology for? I always think about this with tech-enabled businesses. Okay. What are you using technology for? And how does it make your financial statements of your business at maturity look better? Are you using it to consolidate back office operations to make your company more operationally efficient? And thus lower your cost structure and thus with the same amount of revenue, you just run at better margins. Or are you using it because you're able to get better distribution? Like the internet enables you to generate way more revenue because you're able to reach way more customers on the same set of costs.

• 33:51Ben Gilbert?

  And so I always think about it as like, what are you actually using technology for in your business? And does that make it a meaningfully better business than non-tech-enabled incumbents? I think there's a lot of stuff in the world today that is a tech-enabled thing. That is not all that tech-enabled when you look at the financials.

• 34:09David Rosenthal?

  Yep. But Walmart is a perfect example of a tech-enabled business that is like the right way to do it.

• 34:15Ben Gilbert?

  And why? What previously large number did it collapse in their financials to a small number because of technology?

• 34:22David Rosenthal?

  Well, certainly, the coordination of the distribution.

• 34:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 34:28David Rosenthal?

  And the way Walmart built their supply chain was vastly different than all of the thereto for traditional retailers. And way more efficient and made their financials work in a way that just wouldn't work for other other retailers.

• 34:43Ben Gilbert?

  Legitimately enabled them to have lower prices to get more customers.

• 34:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 34:47Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's a strong argument. Agree to disagree that they were the first that sort of like brought technology, but uh, but yeah, that's a good point.

• 34:55David Rosenthal?

  Benchmark.

• 34:57Ben Gilbert?

  Benchmark.

• 34:57David Rosenthal?

  Benchmark was super cool.

• 34:59Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, that like a pinch me moment for you and I both.

• 35:02David Rosenthal?

  I think we should lean into that format as much as possible going forward of we tell a story and then we have the protectors on.

• 35:13Ben Gilbert?

  I think acquired has been a bunch of iterations to find our way to that format. That does feel like the platonic ideal of an acquired, a way acquired talks about a topic. I do think it's probably you and I spending three hours diving deep from everything we can find, telling the story in the way that we sort of see it.

• 35:32David Rosenthal?

  I used to think, oh, what can make us different and better is we're going to spend more time preparing than any other interviewer. We're going to take this super seriously. We only do one of these interviews a month. This is like.

• 35:44Ben Gilbert?

  Which is a tactic, not a strategy.

• 35:45David Rosenthal?

  Exactly. And like, yeah, we probably do more preparation for our interviews than 80, 90% of other interviewers out there, but there are other really great interviewers like Ben Thompson.

• 35:58Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Patrick O'Shaughnessy.

• 36:00David Rosenthal?

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy, exactly. But what we did with Benchmark, that's something that only we can uniquely do.

• 36:07Ben Gilbert?

  Interesting. I only is aggressive, but it's something that our format and the set of trade offs that we make in our business makes it easier for us to do that than for someone else. I always think about strategy is about trade offs. Like, what's the original, um, Michael Porter journal entries called competitive strategy? And it's great. It's like for anyone who hasn't read it, it was in the Harvard Business Review. I think when it first came out, something like 20 pages, it's very cogent, it's very straightforward. And he talks a lot about how there's operational efficiency and there's strategy. And operational efficiency is we're just going to be better, we're going to be more efficient, we're going to do it for cheaper costs. You and I are going to do more research than anybody else, but there's real strategy, which is trade offs.

• 36:51David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 36:51Ben Gilbert?

  It's the Southwest.

• 36:52David Rosenthal?

  The former is not a strategy.

• 36:53Ben Gilbert?

  Right. There's sort of the Southwest model of like, we are going to have a different model for where we keep planes than every other airline. We're not going to use the hub and spoke model. We're going to, everywhere that we fly to in a constrained set of places that we fly to is going to be a pseudo hub for us and we're going to keep our planes sort of diversified and we're only going to have one model of airplanes. So that way they're easier to service and there's a whole bunch of trade offs involved with that, but that's our strategy. Even though it's comes a lot of downsides, we're going to lean into the upsides. And I think like the lean into the upsides thing for us is if you're doing a super high velocity show, Benchmark's probably not going to feel like you're giving them a unique spotlight in a way to do something like that.

• 37:37Ben Gilbert?

  If you do things that may or may not enable deep trust from listeners, then there's people that are not going to want to come on the show because they don't know how they're going to come across. But if you always sort of lean into this, we have very few guests. We think they're people that you really should hear from, which by the way, this is why the SBF thing burns me up so much is because like, we try to be ridiculously selective, then it enables you to create content with people that otherwise are not going to go do the circuit.

• 38:12David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 38:13Ben Gilbert?

  Not to mention when we do three hours of content about the thing before it enables us to come in with that prepared mind.

• 38:19David Rosenthal?

  That's what I was going to say too. There's an element, in the case of the Benchmark episodes, it actually was all pre-planned in advance that we were going to do the episode just us and then we were going to do the dinner with them. That was planned before we even released the first episode, but. I do that we've experienced in the past with the show. There are times where we will engage with a company or a CEO or a firm before having done any acquired content on them. And they're like, they don't engage fully.

• 38:51Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 38:51David Rosenthal?

  And then we do an episode just us and then it completely changes.

• 38:55Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 38:55David Rosenthal?

  The tenor of the conversation.

• 38:57Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it's like being willing to do the work to prove that you're as serious about caring about this topic as you say you are. And by us having the format of you and I just doing these deep dives on companies, that is a differentiated strategy than an interview show.

• 39:11David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 39:12Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, Enron kind of talked about it. It's super recent. I have nothing to add other than one, I think it's fun to add little corrections and additions to as we go through here.

• 39:22David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we've got a few of these.

• 39:23Ben Gilbert?

  On the Enron one, I neglected to point out that there is a company today called Enron Oil and Gas. That's like an $80 billion company publicly traded as EOG.

• 39:32David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, listener wrote, emailed us about this.

• 39:34Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. That's the upstream production business. So the oil and gas industry over the last 30 years has sort of fragmented into upstream and downstream and.

• 39:43David Rosenthal?

  And midstream.

• 39:44Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, I miss that thing too.

• 39:45David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 39:46Ben Gilbert?

  That makes sense. And I think EOG is sort of their upstream business that spun off, but it is a publicly traded company that still bears the Enron name.

• 39:53David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. I should have looked this up. Did they change the name officially to EOG or is the actual name?

• 39:57Ben Gilbert?

  I don't know. That's a good question. It's a good question. It is actually called EOG Resources, like the name of the company is EOG.

• 40:05David Rosenthal?

  That makes sense, like the Accenture to Arthur Andersen.

• 40:07Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Although there is, after many rebrands and iterations, some subset of Arthur Andersen was preserved as a tax organization that is now called Andersen Tax again.

• 40:22David Rosenthal?

  Oh, interesting.

• 40:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 40:25David Rosenthal?

  Cause I guess tax is separate from audit, right?

• 40:28Ben Gilbert?

  They had tax, audit and consulting and consulting became Accenture. I assume audit is what went away entirely. And I think they spun off tax and its own new name that is now Andersen Tax.

• 40:39David Rosenthal?

  Andersen Tax. Interesting.

• 40:41Ben Gilbert?

  Which is crazy to me that there was enough brand equity in Andersen left to sort of go back to Andersen.

• 40:47David Rosenthal?

  You wouldn't think that. You would have thought that.

• 40:50Ben Gilbert?

  There's got to be a story there.

• 40:53David Rosenthal?

  It could be an LP episode. Could be an LP episode.

• 40:55Ben Gilbert?

  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 no longer the hard part.

• 41:09David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 41:23Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 41:33David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 41:51Ben Gilbert?

  And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 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.

• 42:07David Rosenthal?

  ServiceNow already runs more than 100 billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. 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.

• 42:24Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 42:33David Rosenthal?

  So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com/acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. We talked a minute ago about trade offs when we were talking about the benchmark, two parter. What in your mind are the biggest trade offs that we make here on acquired?

• 42:53Ben Gilbert?

  I think we make a ton of trade offs. I think we are maybe to a fault purist organization. That's the first one, two people.

• 43:02David Rosenthal?

  We're gonna say you're looking at the whole organization.

• 43:04Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, not a lot of content, right? A common wisdom is to release content every week. We don't do that. That has downsides, such as it's hard to become a top show in the charts. If you're not constantly producing new content, it works against the algorithms, but it has upsides of now we can go do really, really deep research. A second one being really long episodes. That's a massive trade off. Like lots of people don't want to listen to you when you do that, but the people who do really like it. Another one being people often ask like do another show, bring another hosts, you could leverage the podcast feed to promote other episodes of your new spinoff show with your new hosts where you have some of the economics of that. There's like a lack of purity to me that that's not acquired then. That's I don't know why we would do that.

• 43:49David Rosenthal?

  It doesn't fit in the box.

• 43:50Ben Gilbert?

  It's one of those things where it's like, sure, you could make more money doing that, but it goes in the too hard pile. I think you and I have a really big too hard pile.

• 43:56David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 43:57Ben Gilbert?

  In some ways, that's strategy. It's like if you actually believe in the set of trade offs that you have, then you have to be willing to have a really big too hard pile when there's a lot of people telling you there's low hanging fruit to be done. But often that low hanging fruit is counter to your strategic trade offs.

• 44:12David Rosenthal?

  It's interesting. I feel like you've always been this way, I think, in your life.

• 44:19Ben Gilbert?

  I'm cranky.

• 44:24David Rosenthal?

  You're so you're not cranky, though. You're wonderful.

• 44:26Ben Gilbert?

  But I'm cranky about things like this, like I.

• 44:28David Rosenthal?

  You're persnickety. You're not cranky.

• 44:30Ben Gilbert?

  I'm persnickety.

• 44:30David Rosenthal?

  You're persnickety. Yes, for sure.

• 44:32Ben Gilbert?

  Jerry Seinfeld said it really well on the Tim Ferriss Show, which is one of the best podcast interviews in history. That's my first carve out of the night. Tim asked up like, how does he come up with all the bits? Like, how does he observe things? And his comment is, there's so many things that annoy me. I sit there and all I can see in the world is all the things are like a little bit wrong and that just really bother me. And then I write them down and then I polish, polish, polish, polish, polish. And I'm not Jerry Seinfeld and I don't, it's not to that extent.

• 44:59David Rosenthal?

  Very different application of this, but a similar.

• 45:03Ben Gilbert?

  Like we ship an acquired episode, all I can see are the 16 ways that we could have made it better. I'm proud that it's out there, but like. Really, all I can see are the flaws.

• 45:12David Rosenthal?

  I think my hunch is right that you've always been this way.

• 45:14Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 45:14David Rosenthal?

  I've become much more this way over time. I used to be not this way at all. I used to be like, I believe you can do everything. Trade offs, like the old Jim Moore, the Colts coach of the playoffs, like playoffs, I was like, trade offs, trade offs.

• 45:33David Rosenthal?

  As I've become older, though, like, I completely have shifted and embrace trade offs.

• 45:38Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, yeah, you don't even answer email. I mean, it's honestly crazy.

• 45:41David Rosenthal?

  It's like a joke now, yeah.

• 45:44Ben Gilbert?

  It's not a joke when I'm trying to get a hold of you.

• 45:46David Rosenthal?

  I feel so bad. The only person I feel bad about with it is you. I really, you bear a huge brunt of that, thank you.

• 45:53Ben Gilbert?

  You're also pretty good about, like, I said I was gonna be done working today at six. And so I'm just like, not really doing anything after six, even if the texts look kind of important. That's fine.

• 46:06David Rosenthal?

  Well, that's called parenthood, but.

• 46:08Ben Gilbert?

  That's true. Yeah, parenthood is probably forced you to lean into some of that more.

• 46:11David Rosenthal?

  Yes, I was leaning this way anyway, for sure. But like, it was like a massive, like, tidal wave. But I felt like I was at like a water park, like, and a wave machine came along. And like, I was heading this direction anyway, floating along, and then just like, whoosh.

• 46:25Ben Gilbert?

  The issue that now that you're doing it pretty aggressively is you and I amplify each other because I have this thing where I'm like, oh, this is a thing that David would say, like, not worth it. Like, this is probably a good time to talk about this. We did a lot of live stuff this year.

• 46:38David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, let's talk about this.

• 46:39Ben Gilbert?

  And like.

• 46:40David Rosenthal?

  Some of which were super cool. Like, there were some amazing.

• 46:42Ben Gilbert?

  Wonderful.

• 46:42David Rosenthal?

  Opportunities we got in 2022.

• 46:44Ben Gilbert?

  But for lots of reasons, they're way harder than doing your and my normal thing. And are they worth it? Are they that much incrementally better for how much harder they are for us? Probably not in almost all cases. There are cases where it is, but in almost all cases, no. And so I think this is one of the things where, like, you inspire me to be more persnickety. You asked the question, and then I went to a place of like, oh, well, that's easy. We should not do anything live because the juice is almost never worth the squeeze, which is probably too far. Like, there's probably some middle ground where it's like, if PitchBook offers us the ability to do another arena show, like, oh, my God, we should do an arena show. But the litany of things that make this way harder and frankly, way less listenable after

• 47:29Ben Gilbert?

  the fact, it's actually a worse product most of the time.

• 47:31David Rosenthal?

  The artifacts of. So let's recount the sort of like cool live stuff we did this year. We did the arena show. It still is like surreal. I can't say that without laughing.

• 47:42Ben Gilbert?

  Pinch me moment, at least number two of the year.

• 47:44David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah. Wow. We did the arena show. We then also did a big live show in another country for the first time in Portugal.

• 47:54Ben Gilbert?

  With Solana.

• 47:55David Rosenthal?

  With Solana at Breakpoint. That was a whole nother crazy set of experiences and amazing.

• 48:00Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. We did the LP show live at the TCV event.

• 48:02David Rosenthal?

  Yep. The benchmark dinner, although it wasn't a live public event, the amount of production effort that

• 48:11Ben Gilbert?

  Totally. I was down in San Francisco for three days. We set up three cameras. We bought a bunch of new microphones. We tested all the microphones. Big production lift.

• 48:18David Rosenthal?

  Big, big production lift.

• 48:20Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, guests. So things that make production harder, guests.

• 48:24David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 48:24Ben Gilbert?

  Total wild card. They might cancel on you. They might reschedule, blah, blah, blah.

• 48:28David Rosenthal?

  They might not use the equipment we send them.

• 48:29Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. In person, changes it way harder. Like you and I are sitting here now, it took an extra hour to set this up, to have this beautiful roaring fire next to us.

• 48:38David Rosenthal?

  We haven't even mentioned, yeah.

• 48:39Ben Gilbert?

  These three cameras, although now that I'm looking at it, there's only two cameras on because here's a trade off we make. We don't have an engineer. We don't have a sound person or a video person who works with us. So if you've been watching this on video for I don't know how long, the last like, I'm gonna guess that thing shut off half hour ago.

• 48:56David Rosenthal?

  We lost.

• 48:56Ben Gilbert?

  We lost the third camera. So talk about trade offs and especially in

• 49:01David Rosenthal?

  I knew I should have brought my camera.

• 49:03Ben Gilbert?

  Especially in shooting stuff like live in person, there's a whole new web of things that could go wrong that just don't happen when it's you and I on Zoom.

• 49:14David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 49:15Ben Gilbert?

  Now at a live audience, that massively compounds it. First of all, the sound quality is going to be way worse. So that bothers me as a persnickety person. The audience gets antsy in their seats because no one can sit still for four hours. No one wants to attend a four hour. I mean, when you're at a sporting event, halftime, quarters, you know, you go get concessions, you whatever. So it makes the product different and I think worse for the 150 plus thousand people who are going to listen after the fact. So it's this interesting compromise where for all those people, it's a worse product. But for the people in the room, that's what we're optimizing for in the moment.

• 49:51David Rosenthal?

  And I don't even know that we optimized for that. It's so funny. My, um, the arena show, like it, let's just take a step back. It was so cool.

• 49:59Ben Gilbert?

  Amazing.

• 50:00David Rosenthal?

  It was so cool. And everybody who came, the fact that so many people came and flew in from all over the world.

• 50:07Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. We did Brooke's Run with people in the morning.

• 50:09David Rosenthal?

  It was so cool.

• 50:10Ben Gilbert?

  A dinner with some sort of like friends of the show and previous guests and sponsors the night before at Canlis, who we've had on the show and that adapting episode.

• 50:18David Rosenthal?

  It was so special.

• 50:19Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 50:19David Rosenthal?

  But it's, you know, looking back on what I'm talking about, because you actually lived this again yourself this year, but the farther we get from it, the more in my mind and in my emotions, the space the arena show occupies is just like Jenny and my wedding. Like all the ups.

• 50:36Ben Gilbert?

  Hundred percent.

• 50:37David Rosenthal?

  Amazingness, special feelings of it. And like my most vivid memories, looking back on both events are just a huge amount of stress and being like, are people having fun right now? Like, is this going well? Like, you know?

• 50:50Ben Gilbert?

  I mostly remember the upside of both of them, of my wedding.

• 50:53David Rosenthal?

  Oh, I remember the upside too. And, you know, but every time I think about it, I can't not think about, uh, you know, us being on stage in the middle of the show. And, uh, when we got to act two and Anu was on it, we didn't have breaks planned and like people needed to go to the bathroom and get food and like.

• 51:07Ben Gilbert?

  Pitchbook was paying for all the free food and booze and everything up. And so of course people were going to go. Like after the first act ends, it's like, okay, well now's a good time to go take advantage of the open bar.

• 51:17David Rosenthal?

  Of course. And I was just like, oh, we should have planned that better.

• 51:22Ben Gilbert?

  Anyway, all that to say, some of the live shows we've done are the most special experiences of the year.

• 51:30David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 51:31Ben Gilbert?

  They have hidden value for acquired in a bunch of ways, like getting to actually talk with real people, like getting to hang out with the thousand people that came to the arena show. Like life changingly cool to get to meet so many folks. And also

• 51:45David Rosenthal?

  I will always, always remember that night, especially the after-party afterwards.

• 51:49Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. Walking into Queen Anne Beer Hall was very cool and just hanging out for hours. And also at least 10, if not 20 times as much work for a product that I continue to believe was worse for people who listened to it than our average acquired episode.

• 52:04David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Ben Gilbert?

  So it's like, again, it's a set of trade-offs that we just have to be intentional about making next year rather than being like, ooh, that would be a fun conference to speak at.

• 52:13David Rosenthal?

  Right, right.

• 52:13Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, my God, I forgot about Capital Camp.

• 52:15David Rosenthal?

  Oh, Capital Camp, yeah.

• 52:16Ben Gilbert?

  That was so cool.

• 52:18David Rosenthal?

  That was cool. That was a relatively low trade-off because Patrick and Brent and Clayton and the team there, they took care of everything.

• 52:27Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, absolutely. It was different too, because we created a talk for it. So it was less issues because there was no guest. So there was no sort of like guest risk. But like, it was the first time, I'm such a like VC, what was it, technology risk? Is there a guest risk?

• 52:43David Rosenthal?

  Is there a guest risk?

• 52:45Ben Gilbert?

  But the only thing that we had done that was similar was the acquired top 10, the best acquisitions of all time episode that we did. And so we had like a little bit of confidence that you and I could produce a sort of talk about a thing that wasn't the entire history and strategy of a company. But that was a totally new format for us.

• 53:04David Rosenthal?

  I'm curious what you think. I'm so glad we did Capital Camp and like that, it worked out as a fun switch-up. But I think it was an inferior format to the normal show. Like,

• 53:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 53:13David Rosenthal?

  I was thinking like, we put together a deck for it and like, which again, you did most of it, but like

• 53:19Ben Gilbert?

  It was a set of pictures.

• 53:20David Rosenthal?

  A set of pictures, but like, I haven't made a deck in years.

• 53:25Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that was cool, though. I mean, the nice thing about doing that is then we have a product we can sort of like take on the road to. I think we can share this publicly. You gave that talk again at an internal Fundrise event.

• 53:36David Rosenthal?

  Yes, which was super cool. I would love to do more of that. Like, I got to meet everybody at Fundrise, like the, you know, our biggest partner for the year and like the whole team, like all 300 people at the company were there at the offsite. It was very cool.

• 53:50Ben Gilbert?

  All this to say, it leads me to believe that, much like all the other Trade offs we make, we just need to figure out, how do we 80 20 it? What are the things that we care the most about and how do we not do the long tail of stuff? So I think it means pick like one episode per year to do a massive live show and throw the acquired Super Bowl slash wedding and maybe once a year is even too often because God, it's a lift. But two, then feel free to do a bunch of in-person stuff with our partners, with our sponsors, with people that we like work with on the show anyway and want to just like continue to build deeper relationships with, but those aren't necessarily episodes.

• 54:28David Rosenthal?

  Yep. That has been a huge highlight for me for the year is I think we have found a way. I don't know that anybody would have thought was like possible as a podcast, as a media business to like really build deep relationships with our sponsors and our partners. I think almost every single one of them, we did something like the Fundrise All Hands or, you know, a conference and most of them now, a very large percentage of our sponsors we've invested in.

• 54:58Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. What, five of them?

• 55:00David Rosenthal?

  I think five, yeah. Vanta, and we should talk about Vanta in a big way. Modern Treasury, Vouch, Mystery, Standard Metrics, we've invested in.

• 55:10Ben Gilbert?

  And what was Standard Metrics called when they sponsored?

• 55:12David Rosenthal?

  Quaystar.

• 55:12Ben Gilbert?

  Quaystar.

• 55:13David Rosenthal?

  That was their original name. Yeah.

• 55:14Ben Gilbert?

  Back in the day.

• 55:15David Rosenthal?

  Just like we, for our listeners and our audience, you know, we've kind of always thought, I think it's been one of our core tenants from the beginning of like, we treat our audience as like, equals to like more impressive than us. Like when we started the show especially now and even the folks who are listening to us are the folks who we want to invest in, we want to do business with. We want to do.

• 55:35Ben Gilbert?

  Well, that's what eats me alive when I get something wrong in an episode and it's a black mark to me and I can't do anything but see it as like, you know, I'm thinking of the people who I know listen to the show, who are listening to that and thinking, oh, he didn't quite get that right. Cause that's how I envision our audience.

• 55:49David Rosenthal?

  Not that we didn't always think this way, but it's really come to be realized now. We think of our sponsors the same way as our, you know, our partners as like, these are amazing companies. Like, how can we build as deeper a relationship with them as possible?

• 56:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, totally agree. I mean, the sponsorship model is another way that we make a pretty significant trade off. So we only do six month, season long sponsorships and.

• 56:16Ben Gilbert?

  We are ridiculously choosy about the people that we do that with. And because it's a six month long thing to an audience of 250,000 people that happen to be probably the most valuable audience in the world in terms of CEOs, founders, engineers, capital allocators.

• 56:36David Rosenthal?

  Certainly the set.

• 56:37Ben Gilbert?

  The set.

• 56:38David Rosenthal?

  It would be hubris of us to claim that we singularly at acquired have the most.

• 56:44Ben Gilbert?

  No, but.

• 56:44David Rosenthal?

  But of the, you know, our niche of media.

• 56:47Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 56:48David Rosenthal?

  The listeners to our niche of media, I think unquestionably are the most valuable audience in the world.

• 56:54Ben Gilbert?

  So it's a big ticket item whenever a sponsor decides that they want to work with us for the duration, for the reach and for the magnitude of who you're reaching when you reach them. And so it's like a big freaking commitment. And there's a trade off there in our business model, which is we're not going to work with that many people when we do, but when we do, we want to go as deep as possible. And so that means that we can't do things like engage with agencies or engage with dynamic ad insertion networks or a lot of other things that would make our lives easier.

• 57:25David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 57:25Ben Gilbert?

  It probably also means that we can't outsource sales. Like you and I are the ones talking to the CEOs of the companies who sponsor, which again, lots of trade offs, they're very busy people, they're often hard to get a hold of, but they're people that we get to build really real relationship with.

• 57:41David Rosenthal?

  This is one of my favorite trade offs we've made, kind of like I've been saying is like, these are the types of people who we would want anyway to build deep relationships with. So why wouldn't we lean into that as much as possible? On the completely opposite end of the spectrum, there was something that I think highlights the trade off and that I've really come to appreciate this year in the very beginning of acquired, we could did YouTube and we've been saying for years and years, we got to redo YouTube.

• 58:05Ben Gilbert?

  At this point, it's almost a MacGuffin.

• 58:07David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Ben Gilbert?

  Where like, it's like Seattle's NBA team. It's like, maybe we should never redo it so we can always talk about the fact.

• 58:11David Rosenthal?

  Of course, Seattle's going to get an NBA. Of course, acquired is going to redo YouTube. But I was so negative on YouTube in the episode. And the intervening years, I feel like have just been a journey for me of like, really coming to appreciate what a incredible product in business YouTube is. And this year, my big YouTube appreciation has been they enable for many, many creators, people to make their livelihoods with the exact opposite trade off of what we do. You can just focus on content and you, if you have an audience and can build an audience, can make a good to great living on YouTube and never engage with business, never engage with.

• 58:56Ben Gilbert?

  This is how I felt as an app developer. I was like, wow, there's a money fountain.

• 59:00David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Ben Gilbert?

  I write software, I upload it to the store and money comes out the other side.

• 59:03David Rosenthal?

  Which obviously like, that's not the decision we would make.

• 59:07Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 59:07David Rosenthal?

  But for the long tail, you know, and mass market and other niches of media that don't have as valuable an audience as us.

• 59:15Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 59:15David Rosenthal?

  That is an amazing thing. And most creators don't want to be business people. Like, we want to be business people. We want to be entrepreneurs.

• 59:23Ben Gilbert?

  Right. By the way, I think it makes the content better that we are because then you get first party insights rather than like, if we were journalists sort of shooting from the sidelines, like some of the stuff I've already talked about on this episode today is the strategic conversation that came out of a board meeting I was in earlier. And so like us engaging in business makes the show what it is too.

• 59:46David Rosenthal?

  It's funny. That reminds me of another trade off. One of the things like, really, this is driven by being a parent. But yeah, I don't do boards anymore. I just can't. Never say never, but man, you know, thinking back on times in my life when I was on, you know, five, six, seven boards and as you are now.

• 1:00:05Ben Gilbert?

  And I'm on three.

• 1:00:07David Rosenthal?

  Okay, that's more manageable.

• 1:00:08Ben Gilbert?

  That sort of makes it work. It's like you pick very few companies and you go very deep. I mean, it's a very acquired way of doing it.

• 1:00:16David Rosenthal?

  Three is a manageable number.

• 1:00:18Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:00:19David Rosenthal?

  But even so, like to do it right, you really gotta engage.

• 1:00:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. All right. What's next on the agenda?

• 1:00:26David Rosenthal?

  Relatedly.

• 1:00:28David Rosenthal?

  Show growth.

• 1:00:29Ben Gilbert?

  Show growth.

• 1:00:30David Rosenthal?

  It was so fun talking to Ben Thompson about this and his growth trajectory and curve. We pretty amazingly doubled our audience again this year.

• 1:00:42Ben Gilbert?

  Which has basically been true every year since we started seven years ago, which this is always one of these things where if a startup is only doubling year over year in the first two or three years, it's like, okay, well, it's not going to be a breakout company. But if you can actually keep doubling for seven, eight, nine years, the numbers get pretty big. And so it feels very different transitioning from 2020 to today, sort of looking over a two-year span where.

• 1:01:13David Rosenthal?

  Even from last year to today. So we, we hit over a quarter million subscribers.

• 1:01:18Ben Gilbert?

  Which was 62,000 just 24 months ago.

• 1:01:22David Rosenthal?

  I know.

• 1:01:23Ben Gilbert?

  So that's the crazy, like, that's the place where this sort of like out years of compounding is starting to show up for us.

• 1:01:30David Rosenthal?

  And the thing that's been crazy to me is there still have been some kind of step change, like the Amazon episode.

• 1:01:39Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39David Rosenthal?

  Was that was a step change for us.

• 1:01:41Ben Gilbert?

  For sure. Yeah, I think the previous highest episode to Amazon had gotten just over 100,000 downloads and that one got 170,000.

• 1:01:51David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, in the first 90 days.

• 1:01:53Ben Gilbert?

  In the first 90 days. And when we say a quarter million, that is the unique number of people who listen to, it's basically our monthly active listener count across all platforms who engage with at least one episode.

• 1:02:05David Rosenthal?

  Because not all of you listen to every episode, sadly. The cool thing about podcasts and for us and, you know, that it is an open ecosystem that's not controlled by algorithms. It does mean growth takes longer and it's harder and you have to do these step change functions, but then people become subscribers and they stick around. Amazon was a huge step change moment for us in terms of growth. And many of those new people subscribed.

• 1:02:36Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:02:36David Rosenthal?

  And so thus, the subsequent episodes, Benchmark, Enron.

• 1:02:41Ben Gilbert?

  Like, the two Benchmark episodes were both way higher than the 100,000 that we were at before Amazon. And then Enron now is charting to look pretty similar to Amazon. Early, we're only five or six days in, but like, it is unbelievable how sticky.

• 1:02:56David Rosenthal?

  I don't think it's a reflection on, you know, the Benchmark episodes. I think we're great. We're such a cool experience. But it's more niche. Like, it's a venture capital firm versus like, Amazon, everybody cares about Amazon.

• 1:03:04Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, yes, exactly. There's also this chronological thing where like, every three or four episodes is our biggest episode ever. And not necessarily because the content is more interesting, but because when you find a podcast you like, you stick around. So there is this sort of like cumulative effect where we drop a new episode, if we had dropped this in 2016, it would have gotten a couple thousand listens. But because it's dropped on top of the entire base of people who are subscribed to Acquired, it's really meaningful. And I thought Ben brought up this really interesting point where he sort of asserted, podcasts are great because they're really sticky, but they're terrible to grow.

• 1:03:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Ben Gilbert?

  He basically said, I don't know how you would grow a podcast if you didn't also have a writing platform that was easily affordable, because podcasts are really hard to share. And that sort of explains the reason why, no matter how hard we try, we've really never been able to more than double in any year. Because podcasts are sort of an inherently unshareable mechanism. So unless there's something that happens like you get feed dropped for free in an NPR podcast that brings you 100,000 new listeners right away. Or we had Nvidia Part Two, I think, got a large promotion on Spotify.

• 1:04:20David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Ben Gilbert?

  And that brought us a bunch of new listeners that were subscribing to Spotify.

• 1:04:23David Rosenthal?

  To us this year.

• 1:04:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, they have.

• 1:04:25David Rosenthal?

  We really only started kind of more directly working with them in January with the Taylor Swift episode.

• 1:04:30Ben Gilbert?

  Which is why, what was our stat? 98%

• 1:04:34David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:34Ben Gilbert?

  Of the people who listen on Spotify today were not listeners.

• 1:04:39David Rosenthal?

  Found us this year.

• 1:04:39Ben Gilbert?

  Last year, yeah.

• 1:04:41David Rosenthal?

  And we should be clear about what I mean by. Directly working with Spotify. We're not owned by Spotify. There's no economic relationship or ad sales or like, like we've been saying, we do all that in-house. That's our business model, but

• 1:04:53Ben Gilbert?

  They assign you a creator manager. There's people that we know that we can contact.

• 1:04:56David Rosenthal?

  Relationships at Spotify in a way that we don't have with any of the other platforms. I mean, I think technically we have a manager at Apple. Like, I don't know who that person is.

• 1:05:04Ben Gilbert?

  No, no, no, no. We found someone's email addresses, but they're not assigned there.

• 1:05:07David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Spotify has done a great job of, at least from my perspective, you know, engaging with us as creators. And I think striking a good balance between like, podcasting is an open ecosystem with all the benefits and trade-offs that we've just been talking about.

• 1:05:21Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:05:22David Rosenthal?

  But you can also like, do it better than Apple. Apple's been such a terrible steward of this industry.

• 1:05:28Ben Gilbert?

  You've brought this up before. Terrible in one respect, but like, they're the reason why we have a direct connection with our listeners.

• 1:05:34David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it's like

• 1:05:35Ben Gilbert?

  Them advocating the creation of a platform and an intermediary is the reason why we have this really sticky relationship with listeners.

• 1:05:45David Rosenthal?

  Such a good point. Such a good point. Their internal strategy failure at Apple. And execution too. Like, I just feel like if you were an Apple shareholder, you should be really angry at management about how they have mismanaged, like fumbled the ball on podcasting.

• 1:06:02Ben Gilbert?

  But delighted in many other ways.

• 1:06:04David Rosenthal?

  But delighted in another way. You know, for us, yeah, I agree. Especially the type of business we have at Acquired is really enabled by the lack of algorithmic stranglehold on this medium.

• 1:06:15Ben Gilbert?

  So it does sort of beg this interesting question that Ben threw out, which is how do you grow a podcast when you don't have a secondary shareable component? And I think we have tried to do this with the acquired website. Each episode has a page. That page has a bunch of show notes. That page has a transcript. There's sort of a reason to consume it on that page. You can Sign up via email on that page. You can join the Slack from that page.

• 1:06:43David Rosenthal?

  The Slack now has almost 15,000, over 14,000 members.

• 1:06:48Ben Gilbert?

  Our preferred way to share an episode is the page because we sort of feel that that URL is like a nice way to package it up for someone and say, listen to this. Unfortunately, our episodes are four hours long, so it doesn't come with a deep link. Like, it would be really nice if, as you scroll down the page and as you move through the transcript, or as you watch the video, or as you consume the audio, that was always updating the URL. So that if at any given point, you copy the URL, it's like, this is exactly the-

• 1:07:19David Rosenthal?

  Overcast has the share timestamp.

• 1:07:22Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22David Rosenthal?

  And you can do it on YouTube, too.

• 1:07:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. But like, those are inherently flawed because you don't know if someone likes to use that platform. So like, when I share that Overcast link with people, I'm like, are they gonna be like, what is this podcast player that I don't use? Why are you sharing it to me in this weird way? There's a bunch of reasons that contribute to podcasts being sort of inherently unshareable. Our episodes being really long make them especially hard to share, sort of moments, insights. And there's been a zillion, sort of like, clip apps over the years.

• 1:07:50David Rosenthal?

  But I do think, actually, you know, we have not grown in the same way that like a viral product grows. But we've had really nice growth as a podcast. And I think, actually, growth happens because we infiltrate a network, particularly a company network. And then we get shared within the company, like in a company Slack, or Teams, or just friend networks within, within a company.

• 1:08:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. It's kind of interesting. Like, I'm not particularly interested in additional growth.

• 1:08:21David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Like, especially at this point.

• 1:08:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24David Rosenthal?

  I mean, it's, it's great. It would be nice. And I think Ben was kind of making this same point in the episode we did with him. For all of us, additional growth is great, but not by trading off any of the things that we really care about that drive our business.

• 1:08:38Ben Gilbert?

  Right. Or changing the audience mix. I was wildly relieved this year from the, how many people took the survey? 1,500 people or so that answered the survey, which, thank you if you did.

• 1:08:48David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:08:49Ben Gilbert?

  That the audience mix stayed pretty much the same from two, two and a half years ago, the last time we ran a survey, which was awesome. I was like, wow, we managed to get 200,000 more of basically the same type of person. And it was heartening talking to Ben because it sounded like he thought that he had bumped up against the market, that he was starting to saturate and then sort of accelerated through it again. And so it feels like Ben, I think he probably has close to a million people that consume strategery.com for free in a given year. And so if he doesn't feel like he's bumping up against the TAM and we have a reasonably overlapping audience, that feels like pretty good proxy for us

• 1:09:30Ben Gilbert?

  to say, well, we could probably at least Forex from here. But I don't really have like a strong desire to do, I think it would make our lives generally worse if we did.

• 1:09:41David Rosenthal?

  I think it would be neutral. I mean, in some ways it would be better, in some ways it would be worse, but.

• 1:09:45Ben Gilbert?

  If we were a video podcast, it would make it worse because we're right at the limit right now. We're like, we have all the benefits of when we drop an episode, it really matters to the people that we care about it mattering to, and we don't get recognized on the street.

• 1:10:00David Rosenthal?

  The episode with Ben was about Strategery, obviously. So we didn't really talk about this, but I kept thinking about him, wanting to explore more. And we should do here. Our business model is very different than Ben's. And growth, again, like, nice to have for us, comes with some set of trade offs. There's some downsides to it, some upsides, neutral to, you know, I don't know, you could argue, maybe you think it's slightly negative to grow. Maybe I think it's slightly positive. Like, it's in the neutral zone, but because of our business model and everything we were talking about, like the deepening of the engagement with the right people and the right sponsors, that's what drives our excitement about the business and the business itself.

• 1:10:40David Rosenthal?

  In a way that for Ben, it's different because he actually does need to grow his business to keep growing the number of consumers because some percentage of them will convert to paying.

• 1:10:49Ben Gilbert?

  Right. You're saying for his revenue to grow, he must grow the number of subscribers, which means if subscribers are always a fraction, a fixed fraction of the set of people

• 1:11:00David Rosenthal?

  Of audience.

• 1:11:01Ben Gilbert?

  Are reading anything on Surtaker, he must grow the top line. Whereas what you're saying for us is the revenue is not necessarily directly connected to audience size.

• 1:11:14David Rosenthal?

  Right. It's connected, but it's not directly connected. And as we evolve the business model more, I mean, this is a good place to talk about Vanta.

• 1:11:21Ben Gilbert?

  That's a good point.

• 1:11:22David Rosenthal?

  One of our couple biggest sponsors and partners on the show this year, we and through kindergarten and you too, invested almost $10 million in the company this year. So like, that's a very.

• 1:11:34Ben Gilbert?

  Mostly kindergarten, very small.

• 1:11:35David Rosenthal?

  Yes, very small then.

• 1:11:38David Rosenthal?

  And most of that capital came from the acquired audience community, like the LP capital that backed that SPV came in very large part from the acquired audience. And so that's not like, growing the audience, of course, increases the number of super high quality people. And we care about growing the high quality people in the audience. And the bigger that size is great, but it's not directly tied to

• 1:12:05Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:12:05David Rosenthal?

  The business. And like, that was a transformational moment for us. And obviously Vanta is an amazing company, but that's a whole new.

• 1:12:12Ben Gilbert?

  It was at least an insight. You could sort of test the hypothesis of like, because you and I have invested small amounts personally in our, our sponsors before, because we get insight into their business from getting to work directly with CEOs on those. And we're like, that's a really interesting.

• 1:12:22David Rosenthal?

  And we see what our audience resonates with, with the products.

• 1:12:25Ben Gilbert?

  Right. That's really interesting thing. We should invest a little bit, but your insight of, okay, this is a growth round. This is a company that's doing really well. I can sort of see how well they're doing, both from getting to like, look at the investment pitch, but also.

• 1:12:40David Rosenthal?

  The reaction of our community to the sponsorship.

• 1:12:42Ben Gilbert?

  Right. Could I invest a meaningful amount of capital in this?

• 1:12:45David Rosenthal?

  How could we put together a meaningful amount of capital?

• 1:12:46Ben Gilbert?

  And do I, as a host of acquired, have relationships with? The owners of capital, the stewards of capital who want to invest in this opportunity. It was a really interesting way for you to sort of like prove out that hypothesis a little bit.

• 1:13:01David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, there is no strategic plan for kindergarten mentors, period. It is very much like a-

• 1:13:06Ben Gilbert?

  Y'all may be shocked that there's no strategic-

• 1:13:08David Rosenthal?

  Period. But it's not like we did a, you know, an offsite like a, we didn't do a end of year special for kindergarten like we're doing now for acquired and discuss our strategy and say, you know, I think we should find an opportunity to do a $10 million SPV this year. But no, it came naturally from everything we're talking about here on acquired.

• 1:13:26Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And just to put a finer point on the business being not entirely connected to the audience size. There were years where the audience would 2X, but revenue would 10X. Just because it was a wildly under monetized asset before-

• 1:13:44David Rosenthal?

  There were several years where revenue was zero.

• 1:13:47Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47David Rosenthal?

  This was not a business.

• 1:13:48Ben Gilbert?

  That's true. But, you know, who's to say that we necessarily have the business model optimized? Do I think that there should be more sponsorships and episodes? No. In fact, I think we should probably be a little bit tighter on them and shorter on them and find more ways to make the sponsorship segments even more differentiated. Where we're not just giving the high level pitch on the company, but doing more Vouch Insurance 101 type stuff where we can sort of like find a key insight with the company and story tell that together. I think leaning into the strategic differentiation that we have on, and I know that sounds like jargon, but like we are, I think, the only ones who work this closely- with our sponsors. So what does that enable us to do that? No other podcasts could do.

• 1:14:33Ben Gilbert?

  I think that's like the lens that I want to keep taking to it. And so to your point, the business is probably still unoptimized and it will probably grow directionally with audience, but can grow in other ways too. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Logora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

• 1:14:59David Rosenthal?

  Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Logora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

• 1:15:16Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 1:15:31David Rosenthal?

  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. Logora'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.

• 1:15:55Ben Gilbert?

  And they recently launched Logora 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.

• 1:16:14David Rosenthal?

  And Logora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Logora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Logora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months.

• 1:16:44Ben Gilbert?

  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 logora.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, David, what's next on the year in review agenda?

• 1:17:12David Rosenthal?

  Next, we got to talk about next year, 2023, looking ahead. Okay, first question for us, what episodes, topics, guests are we thinking about?

• 1:17:23Ben Gilbert?

  Oh.

• 1:17:23David Rosenthal?

  What should we, what's on the docket?

• 1:17:26Ben Gilbert?

  Hang on, let me bust out my list.

• 1:17:27David Rosenthal?

  One that feels like an obvious one we should do at some point next year is OpenAI.

• 1:17:31Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:17:33David Rosenthal?

  We talked about doing it at various points this year and especially like fitting in with the whole Nvidia series, but um, now it feels like we gotta do it.

• 1:17:41Ben Gilbert?

  We almost did it 12 months ago. Like, I remember last year over the holidays, doing some prep work for it. And that, I think, would have been kind of disastrous because we would have done it and I think way undersold. Like, we wouldn't have been.

• 1:17:56David Rosenthal?

  Would have been way too early.

• 1:17:57Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57David Rosenthal?

  If we do end up doing it and do it relatively early next year. It's sort of ironic that the next Elon company that we'll cover after our old SpaceX episode is OpenAI. We didn't do anything on Twitter. We haven't done any revisiting of Tesla.

• 1:18:13Ben Gilbert?

  It is crazy. God, he's got his fingers in everything.

• 1:18:16David Rosenthal?

  The Twitter is just, oh my gosh, there's just so much drama. There's so much drama. I don't like having just drama on acquired.

• 1:18:22Ben Gilbert?

  That is true. I think part of the reason why we haven't done a Twitter episode since we interviewed Dick Costolo in early 2021, maybe?

• 1:18:30David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, way before all this.

• 1:18:32Ben Gilbert?

  Is like, the story feels less like a business story and more like a TMZ story, which isn't our cup of tea.

• 1:18:40David Rosenthal?

  Yes. I don't ever want to feel like TMZ.

• 1:18:43Ben Gilbert?

  I won't say that like, I'm not interested in reading all the TMZ drama about it. It's totally fascinating. And, you know, if you can run a company on 80% less people than you were running it before, and nothing goes terribly wrong, that's super interesting for the world to know. Now, of course, it does look like all sorts of things are going wrong. But to the extent that they can turn it around and the business can be generating as much revenue as it was before on a massively lower cost basis, I'm very curious to know what the second order effects of that are.

• 1:19:12David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:13Ben Gilbert?

  But the story that we know so far is TMZ.

• 1:19:15David Rosenthal?

  Discuss, but yeah, like, that's not the, we don't actually know that yet.

• 1:19:19Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:19:19David Rosenthal?

  And everything that is being discussed is, yeah, it's just drama.

• 1:19:23Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, so OpenAI, that's a good candidate.

• 1:19:25David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:19:26Ben Gilbert?

  I was perusing the world's richest people list the other day and saw.

• 1:19:30David Rosenthal?

  For acquired ideas or just that's what you do in your free time?

• 1:19:33Ben Gilbert?

  You know.

• 1:19:36Ben Gilbert?

  Lots of the names are very familiar to us and acquired listeners. The one that is not is Bernard Arnault, which one of the world's top five wealthiest people, and not in tech, not in finance, but in luxury brands. I think it'd be pretty interesting to go down the path of like really deeply unpacking brand power and brand power over generations and the concept of a house of brands and what brands mean to people and why you can know that it's the exact same leather that you're buying elsewhere, but because it has this mark on it, you pay 500 times more for it. I would love to figure out what the right starting place is for luxury and do that on acquired.

• 1:20:16David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. The point, the reason to do it is what you said, the underling brand.

• 1:20:21Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:20:22David Rosenthal?

  How did these amazing durable brands get built?

• 1:20:26Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. I continue to want to do Epic Healthcare. I think they're like a huge force in the American economy and I don't know if that episode will be a hero's journey or a villain.

• 1:20:37David Rosenthal?

  Is it an Enron or Nvidia? I suspect, without having done any research, I suspect more of an Enron.

• 1:20:45Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45David Rosenthal?

  Probably not a fraud, but just a...

• 1:20:47Ben Gilbert?

  Open question whether it's good for the world.

• 1:20:48David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 1:20:49Ben Gilbert?

  Creates some value, certainly captures a lot of it. Does it capture more than it creates? Open question.

• 1:20:54David Rosenthal?

  One thing I definitely want to do more of and figure out how it's going to evolve is sessions. So we did the session with Jason Calacanis.

• 1:21:04Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:21:04David Rosenthal?

  That was really fun and felt like a really cool way to do something orthogonal to the core acquired approach, but still really fun. Maybe sessions or a format like sessions ends up being what we do with protagonists of stories after we've done an episode just us on them.

• 1:21:29Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:21:29David Rosenthal?

  Maybe we keep doing it with interesting people, maybe both, but that felt like a really cool, different type of...

• 1:21:39David Rosenthal?

  Interview than just a standard podcast interview?

• 1:21:42Ben Gilbert?

  I feel like if sessions evolves into talking to people who do fascinating work about things that aren't necessarily their work, that's a pretty interesting use of the format. That's something that I want to explore because that statement can kind of take two directions and I think either would make for an interesting sessions reason for existence. One is talking to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company about things that aren't their company. They probably think about a lot of really interesting stuff and have a bunch of really interesting ideas and they probably can't say a lot of the most interesting thoughts they have about their company because they're publicly traded and there's all sorts of SEC stuff involved, but there's other conversations we can have with them.

• 1:22:23David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, but they're people and like they have feelings and emotions.

• 1:22:26Ben Gilbert?

  And those aren't the reasons people typically are trying to get them to come on podcasts.

• 1:22:29David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, that's one thing actually that my wife Jenny pointed out to me after listening to the session we did with Jason and she was like, it was interesting. It was good. You guys could have gone way harder on diving into the emotional side of Jason's lived experience and his feelings and like, especially when he mentioned, you know, Tony Shay's passing and how that really impacted him and like led to him deciding to make some changes in how he approached life and his work for the next few years. Like, she was like, that was an opportunity that you just let fall on the floor. Like you could have gone way deeper into that.

• 1:23:07Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I think that's a great point. The other thing that I was sort of implying in that statement is we could have people on almost as a prop, like we're not interviewing them, but they're instead a piece of whatever discussion you and I wanted to have anyway. Like, you know, what if we had Eric Vishria just like hanging out next to you on the couch and we weren't talking about Benchmark, but Eric was just like chiming in on a lot of this stuff and sharing his ideas. He's not the subject of the interview. He's a piece of the show. He's a part of the conversation. He's a foil to bounce ideas off of.

• 1:23:43David Rosenthal?

  I would for sure do that with Eric. That would be an amazing and a great privilege. You know who would be truly the most interesting person to have as playing that role would be Peter Fenton.

• 1:23:57Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, yeah, you're right. I, I, I, sorry.

• 1:23:59David Rosenthal?

  The things that Peter said.

• 1:24:00Ben Gilbert?

  As the example.

• 1:24:01David Rosenthal?

  We, we, you know, we do. Oh, my gosh, that was, the whole benchmarker is amazing. That dinner was amazing. There were a few things that Peter said there when we were talking about the principal program and Blake, one of us, I can't remember if it was me or you, asked, you know, so why do you guys have a principal, you know, like a, like a junior investment person when clearly like your whole ethos is you don't do that. And Peter's response, well, it was like, uh, because forced consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, which is a famous quote from, I can't remember where it's from now. It's from some famous.

• 1:24:30Ben Gilbert?

  And it just like, it like leapt out of him.

• 1:24:32David Rosenthal?

  It just like, that was the immediate response that leapt out of him. And it's like, wow, I never thought that that would show up on a podcast.

• 1:24:41Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Yeah, that was great. Peter's one of a kind.

• 1:24:44David Rosenthal?

  He is one of a kind.

• 1:24:46Ben Gilbert?

  Other episodes that I want to do, I want to do into it. I think that's a far more interesting and successful business than people realize. In the vein of consumer brands, we got to do Nike at some point.

• 1:24:57David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:58Ben Gilbert?

  I want to continue going back in time from Walmart and do Sears.

• 1:25:02David Rosenthal?

  Nike's one that I really want to do. I know he said we don't do lives. I actually don't think this should be a live show. I want to go onsite. I want to go to Oregon.

• 1:25:11Ben Gilbert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:12David Rosenthal?

  Go to Eugene.

• 1:25:13Ben Gilbert?

  Get a workout in.

• 1:25:15David Rosenthal?

  But I feel like there's like, I don't know. I mean, I'm just be curious to see. I've never been, but the facilities there and like, because it's such a athletic, like a physical thing, I want to go see.

• 1:25:26Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:25:26David Rosenthal?

  What it's like.

• 1:25:28Ben Gilbert?

  That's a good point. Yeah, that feels like something we need to experience more physically. I don't know. You could make that argument for a lot of them, like TSMC, the episode would have been much better if you and I got to witness chips being fabbed and feel what it was like to be in a bunny suit.

• 1:25:41David Rosenthal?

  The little bit I know, I think it mostly from The Last Dance, but like the, you know, one of the key, key moments in Nike's history is the signing of the deal with Michael Jordan.

• 1:25:50Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:25:51David Rosenthal?

  But like, what did it feel like when Michael came out to the campus?

• 1:25:56Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, there's feeling the history there has to be a, a big thing. All right. So before we get to our extended carve outs in sort of reviewing 2022, you and I both had big 2022s. So that's probably worth chatting about a little bit.

• 1:26:11David Rosenthal?

  We did. I love this is a, we didn't intend it this way. This is becoming much like the bench bank dinner that we recorded everything. I was like before dinner because we didn't want to eat dinner before we would have.

• 1:26:20Ben Gilbert?

  We got a lot of good comments of like, why are they just sitting there with cheese and on their plates? Like, aren't they going to eat? Aren't they going to eat real food? And like we did afterwards.

• 1:26:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Yeah. But like, that would not make for good video content.

• 1:26:30Ben Gilbert?

  Clink, clink, clink, clink.

• 1:26:31David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Audio or video content.

• 1:26:35David Rosenthal?

  We are going to, after we finish recording here, we're going to go out to

• 1:26:38Ben Gilbert?

  Celebrate 2022.

• 1:26:39David Rosenthal?

  Celebrate a holiday dinner for acquired for the two of us. But I feel like this is like the pre-record. This is the recording version. So at which we would definitely talk about our personal lives. Well, you had by far the biggest event.

• 1:26:51Ben Gilbert?

  Life event that you had a, yes. I got married. It was wonderful.

• 1:26:56David Rosenthal?

  I was here. It was great.

• 1:26:57Ben Gilbert?

  You were here. It was really cool because in some ways I thought it wasn't going to feel different afterwards. I think a lot of people in our generation sort of like date for a long time and live together and feel like life partners. But there's something totally different about being married, you know, having the ring on every day as a reminder and the sense of like longevity associated with it is really cool and a really totally different psychological place than I thought.

• 1:27:22David Rosenthal?

  Well, and you go through this process and project together of the wedding, like from the moment you get engaged until the wedding is this like, you know, you're like a butterfly going into like a caterpillar going into cocoon. It's like a transformational period.

• 1:27:37Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 1:27:37David Rosenthal?

  And I say like, I was here. You did the wedding at your house right after moving like.

• 1:27:42Ben Gilbert?

  I didn't want to play that 2022 venue game. Like two times more people got married this year. It was just like, you're not getting a venue. And if you are, you're getting a terrible date and you're paying a lot of money for it and you're not going to get any of the things that you want out of it.

• 1:27:55David Rosenthal?

  That was probably half of CPI inflation right there was wedding venues.

• 1:28:00Ben Gilbert?

  David was my groomsmen. You and I have some great pictures together. Thank you for coming up and being a part of it.

• 1:28:05David Rosenthal?

  You did a amazing job, given that, you know, you two planned it all yourself. You were the venue. It was at your house. Like it was a

• 1:28:14Ben Gilbert?

  We're literally sitting where the DJ was like DJing out onto the dance floor out there.

• 1:28:19David Rosenthal?

  It's so fun going to weddings after having been married because you're like, oh, good. I just get to enjoy all of the, the fruits of the couple's labor.

• 1:28:29Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it really is. When people say it's like the happiest day of your life, no doubt the happiest day of my life. And I think the like, energy and love and just overwhelming force that you feel from your closest friends and family when you're like, walking down the aisle and you feel all that energy on you is crazy. And it's an indescribable moment, really.

• 1:28:49David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it was super cool. That was, I think, the biggest personal life event. What else for you this year?

• 1:28:57Ben Gilbert?

  Let's see.

• 1:28:57David Rosenthal?

  Reflecting on 2022.

• 1:28:58Ben Gilbert?

  We took a vacation to Italy. I'd never been to Italy before. That was like a absolutely spectacular time. Rome, Cinque Terre, Florence, Capri. God, the island of Capri is incredible.

• 1:29:12David Rosenthal?

  I've never been.

• 1:29:13Ben Gilbert?

  It's just amazing. It's beautiful.

• 1:29:14David Rosenthal?

  Have you been to Greece?

• 1:29:15Ben Gilbert?

  I've not.

• 1:29:16David Rosenthal?

  Okay, I was curious how it compares to Greece.

• 1:29:18Ben Gilbert?

  I think it's similar to some of the sort of Grecian islands. This one has some cool history associated with it because at one point, the Roman emperor was sort of fleeing. And I don't know if it was paranoia or it was legitimate, but just thought that everyone in Rome was coming and tried to kill him. And so he like fled to Capri and ruled from the island where he could sort of see in every direction to sort of fortify. It was remote work before remote work. Yeah, that's like one of my.

• 1:29:46David Rosenthal?

  He was a pre-digital nomad.

• 1:29:49Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 1:29:52David Rosenthal?

  That's the cool thing about Italy and every European country compared to here, but I feel like especially Italy, the sense of history, especially for, you know, us, two history buffs, like,

• 1:30:02Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:30:03David Rosenthal?

  You know, you walk around Rome or Florence and Rome especially, Florence in its own right is still ancient history compared to America. But like Rome, like you're talking about the ancient Roman times.

• 1:30:14Ben Gilbert?

  And you, I mean, actually, walking around the Forum is wild because you're like literally looking at pillars that are. 3,000 years old, at least 2,000 years old.

• 1:30:22David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Ben Gilbert?

  So we're thinking about where to go on a honeymoon, probably early to mid next year. And I like, I want to go back to Italy. This is a magical place.

• 1:30:33David Rosenthal?

  This is the problem as you get older and you have cool travel experiences. You're like, I want to go back to those places, but you also want to experience new places.

• 1:30:41Ben Gilbert?

  The rest of the world, right? Like, I will die without seeing most of the world, no matter how much I travel. And so should I try and put a dent in that as much as possible? Or should I say, you know, there's this one spot in Hawaii that I really like. And so every single year I'm going back there.

• 1:30:56David Rosenthal?

  Clearly, the answer is both.

• 1:31:01David Rosenthal?

  Maybe you had some other plan for carve outs, but like, I mean, I feel like I'm like decently up on like the latest like tech and gadgets and stuff. But like, you're like, you, you made some interesting decisions.

• 1:31:11Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, we're going to review my Apple, Apple year in review.

• 1:31:13David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah. Can we do an Apple year in review for Ben?

• 1:31:15Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, let's do it. So got the iPad mini for acquired. We both are rocking the mini because it's very, very good for on stage. As we did more live stuff, it's just game changing.

• 1:31:25David Rosenthal?

  This is the perfect device for live events and any kind of where you're not sitting in front of a computer monitor.

• 1:31:31Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Easy to hold it in one hand. I really want the big iPad Pro, but I have basically no use for it. Like this is actually the device that suits my use case. I think a little over a year ago, I got the MacBook Pro 16 inch, which is

• 1:31:46David Rosenthal?

  Which has the lovely

• 1:31:47Ben Gilbert?

  This is our fire, which is the finest computer I've ever owned. It's a tank.

• 1:31:51David Rosenthal?

  The display is amazing.

• 1:31:52Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, the display is unbelievable. I mean, everything about this thing is nuts. I do have envy, the M2 MacBook Air. That thing is sexy, like so thin, so light, a lot of the capability of this one. But when I'm traveling and because what we do is so everything intensive, it's bandwidth intensive. It's storage intensive, the SD slot. Having like, you just need like a desktop computer with you all the time. We're transferring hundreds of gigabytes back and forth after we record for all the multiple camera videos. I want the good webcam that comes on this computer in case we have to do a remote episode. I want the screen space because I'm also a venture capitalist and I'm doing spreadsheety things.

• 1:32:36Ben Gilbert?

  I have a hard time with a travel computer. So if they made an 18 inch computer and they made it three pounds heavier, I might buy that one too.

• 1:32:43David Rosenthal?

  When you're doing purely personal travel, do you not bring this and just bring the iPad?

• 1:32:48Ben Gilbert?

  No, absolutely not.

• 1:32:49David Rosenthal?

  So you still bring this?

• 1:32:50Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, purely personal travel, what are you talking about? I don't, there's not a single day where I'm on personal vacation where I'm not also doing something.

• 1:33:00David Rosenthal?

  That's true. Even for yours, truly, that's-

• 1:33:02Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, we're small business owners.

• 1:33:03David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we are.

• 1:33:04Ben Gilbert?

  There are things every single day where there's no one else that can do it. And so either it doesn't happen or we have to do it.

• 1:33:11David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:33:11Ben Gilbert?

  And that's on top of like me being a professional venture capitalist where like there's real obligations that come with- and that you don't necessarily need the heaviest computer you can find for. But like, you need to be pretty responsive on a lot of things. And sometimes if you're-

• 1:33:26David Rosenthal?

  That's true.

• 1:33:26Ben Gilbert?

  If you're doing a documentary, you need a real computer.

• 1:33:29David Rosenthal?

  We need to make edits to an episode or something like-

• 1:33:32Ben Gilbert?

  I need to bust out audition.

• 1:33:34David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:34Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And I could do that on a smaller computer and maybe this is totally overkill. Like, when you got here today, I had left to go to a board meeting and then a lunch and then meet someone for coffee for a nonprofit that I'm working with. And none of those things required a computer. But I brought my backpack with my computer in it to all three, even though I knew I would never take it out. Because if something came up, I would need to be able to like get away for five minutes, do something on my computer, put it back in my bag and then go back to whatever I was doing.

• 1:34:05David Rosenthal?

  I love it.

• 1:34:06Ben Gilbert?

  You just never know.

• 1:34:07David Rosenthal?

  You never know.

• 1:34:07Ben Gilbert?

  And I'm probably overly paranoid on that, but it's like the one time you get burned changes your behavior forever.

• 1:34:13David Rosenthal?

  Okay, so opposite of this, I'm where I thought you were gonna start.

• 1:34:16Ben Gilbert?

  So I really like to take pictures. I'm a very big nerd about like understanding all the physics and as much of the black box that Apple will let you understand of the computational photography engine. But I also have like, I think it's tendinosis, something's up with my wrists. They fatigue super easily and I get basically tennis elbow. It's probably from having my computer with me all the time and like constantly-

• 1:34:39David Rosenthal?

  It's having that beast on you.

• 1:34:40Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. So I have the iPhone 13 mini. It's the correctly sized phone. It's the correct weight for a phone. It's the correct sort of reachability for a phone, which I know Apple used to name a feature, which is a stupid feature. And so I was like, gosh, there's no iPhone 14 mini. I would pay literally anything. I don't know if that is exactly right, but like four or five X the current iPhone prices-

• 1:35:02David Rosenthal?

  You have a high willingness to pay.

• 1:35:03Ben Gilbert?

  For an iPhone 14 Pro Mini.

• 1:35:05David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06Ben Gilbert?

  Like Apple, if there's a test one in a lab somewhere, please send it to me. I will, again, like no price sensitivity around it. But I was like, I should try the new phone and just like play with the cameras and stuff. I got it. As you would suspect, it was too big, it was too heavy. I waited 13 days until the 14 day return deadline, returned it, went back to my 13 mini. And I'm thinking about buying another 13 mini because like at some point, the battery is going to die on this one. And if they never make another mini again.

• 1:35:33David Rosenthal?

  You want to have one like on in cold storage?

• 1:35:36Ben Gilbert?

  It's just like my Nike's upstairs that I've got stacked in the closet.

• 1:35:40David Rosenthal?

  It is the perfect size phone. So I have, um, I have a 12 mini right now. I didn't upgrade to three, probably should have.

• 1:35:47Ben Gilbert?

  Dude, you totally should upgrade right now before they run out.

• 1:35:49David Rosenthal?

  Well, I realized I finally need to upgrade the 12 mini. And the biggest driving factor for me as a new parent was the camera. And so I actually, when I haven't gotten it yet, it's because it's on back order, but I went to the 14 Pro.

• 1:36:00Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 1:36:01David Rosenthal?

  Which I have never had any of the Pro iPhones. Like I care about technology a lot, but I was just never compelled by, I don't care that, didn't use to not care that much about photography.

• 1:36:12Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:36:13David Rosenthal?

  And so I was just never that compelled by the Pro versions. And I really cared about size, but now with a little one.

• 1:36:19Ben Gilbert?

  If I was a parent, I think I would buy the 14 Pro also.

• 1:36:21David Rosenthal?

  Well, it's a double whammy. What I cared most about size was for portability when out and about.

• 1:36:31Ben Gilbert?

  Which that part of your life has gone away.

• 1:36:32David Rosenthal?

  That part of my life is particularly like exercising. Now my exercise is primarily walking a stroller, which has a lot of carrying capacity. And I didn't care that much about photo quality. I took very few photos before, I mean, and now just like some of the best advice. And I love talking to people who have older kids and be like, because you just realize time just slips away. Like when you have a kid and um, almost universally, I wish I'd taken more photos. I especially wish I'd taken more videos uh throughout the, and so like, like, ah, all right. So the Pro I have on order, but I, I'm conflicted about it. Like I'm really going to miss the form factor.

• 1:37:08Ben Gilbert?

  You are, you're really going to miss it. Yeah, it's like not going to fit in your pocket.

• 1:37:12David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Ben Gilbert?

  It's going to be.

• 1:37:14David Rosenthal?

  It's going to be a transition.

• 1:37:16Ben Gilbert?

  And also, the camera mountain on this one is so large that the phone actually rocks when you're leaving it on a table and typing. It's fascinating to see the set of trade offs. Apple's been okay with, in the name of getting the very best photos that they can out of this thing.

• 1:37:31David Rosenthal?

  Which, as a parent now, I'm like, I see the business reason for doing that.

• 1:37:34Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:37:35David Rosenthal?

  Okay, so keep going on the lineup, because you've got another important, large device.

• 1:37:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, so I bought the Apple Watch.

• 1:37:40David Rosenthal?

  You're having trouble lifting your arm there.

• 1:37:41Ben Gilbert?

  It's really heavy. I was about to say the Apple Watch 14, the Apple Watch Ultra, which I'm sure next year, there's going to be the Apple Watch Ultra 2, or the Apple Watch 2 Ultra. I'm curious how they'll name it. Apple Watch Ultra second generation, I imagine, is what they'll do. Anyway, this thing is actually super light, relative to how large it is. And you made the joke about lifting your arm. I like, don't feel it anymore. And I think that happens with all watches over time. You sort of like, get used to the weight. But one of the big things that sold me on it is, because I thought the reason I was gonna hate it was the weight. I like, put it on, and I'm like, this, I think it's the titanium, remarkably light for how large it is. It's big. For sure, it's big.

• 1:38:17David Rosenthal?

  It's beautiful, though.

• 1:38:18Ben Gilbert?

  The screen is, yeah, the super clear, like, you can look at pictures on it. It's really bright. It's 2000 nits, so like, it has a flashlight button, because it functions as a fairly effective flashlight. The battery lasts like, almost three days, which is totally game changing if you, I think I've tracked every single night of sleep for four, five years now. And so that's like, a thing that I, that's a use case I really care about. I haven't done anything extreme in it yet. Like, I've climbed Mount St. Helens.

• 1:38:43David Rosenthal?

  Got this great photo behind me.

• 1:38:45Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's Iceland, that I did with my dad. He used to do this big backpacking trip every summer. And I have not adventured in this thing yet, mostly because I've just been doing less adventuring over the last year or two. But I totally expect to use it for the stated purposes, but it's been awesome for me, even not for the Ultra-type purposes that it's advertised for.

• 1:39:07David Rosenthal?

  The photo viewing, I would imagine, is a really... I would never think I want to view photos on my wrist, but like, actually, I think that could be

• 1:39:14Ben Gilbert?

  There's a good number of times where I'm like, okay, cool. I saw it clearly enough now where I don't need to also pull it up on my phone.

• 1:39:20David Rosenthal?

  When you're getting photos in a text chat.

• 1:39:21Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:39:22David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:39:23Ben Gilbert?

  The other interesting thing is the screen is just large enough where it kind of feels like a small phone and less like a big watch. And I think it's the edge to edge display, the fact that they have the like, you know, raised

• 1:39:35David Rosenthal?

  bezel around it?

• 1:39:36Ben Gilbert?

  bezel around it, yeah. It has an on-screen keyboard that you can use the finger swiping on. And so I literally can just like swipe on the keyboard to respond to text messages. So I can't decide if that's like really nerdy and like Casio mid 80s and like, that's not actually useful. But I've probably done it 30 or 40 times since I've gotten it to respond to text messages real quick. And that's been pretty nice.

• 1:40:00David Rosenthal?

  The one thing I wish they had added that to me would be a, maybe not killer feature, but like a really, really nice to have would be some sort of biometric authentication in the watch. Cause what I don't like is when I, well, maybe with a Ultra, I wouldn't have to take it off to charge it as much. But when I put my watch back on after I'm charging it, then I gotta enter my PIN code every time, which you know, like first world problem.

• 1:40:22Ben Gilbert?

  And less.

• 1:40:23David Rosenthal?

  I don't understand why they can't put a touch ID sensor. I mean, I know they're trying to save as much space as possible in there, but like

• 1:40:28Ben Gilbert?

  No, that's good. You're right. There's no biometric on it. But I think a feature that it does have is if you put it on and then you take out your phone before you need to type in the passcode on your watch and you face ID on your phone, your watch is auto unlocked.

• 1:40:43David Rosenthal?

  Yes, that is true, but I found that to be kind of janky.

• 1:40:45Ben Gilbert?

  I have found that to be kind of janky too.

• 1:40:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I can't like reliably trust that it's gonna work.

• 1:40:50Ben Gilbert?

  Totally agree. I'm like, why do I still need to type in a passcode? I swear I shouldn't need a passcode right now.

• 1:40:54David Rosenthal?

  And one of the things I found, maybe I need a different watch band to solve the problem, but toddlers really like to grab shiny things with screens and especially ones that are on your wrist while you're changing diapers. And so the amount of times a day that I enter my passcode on my watch is a lot larger than it used to be, shall we say?

• 1:41:14Ben Gilbert?

  All right. So let's go with your Apple. We'll go reverse order for you. Give me your Apple lineup and then let's get into your year interview.

• 1:41:19David Rosenthal?

  Oh, okay. So I'm still rocking the 2020 original OG M1 MacBook Air.

• 1:41:27Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:41:27David Rosenthal?

  Which there's so much more performant machines out there like this now, but like I still have tons of.

• 1:41:32Ben Gilbert?

  Right. I'm not sure you'd notice the performance.

• 1:41:34David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And like the leap forward that that M1 chip was, was just incredible. I mean, performance, battery life, a price point.

• 1:41:46Ben Gilbert?

  That's crazy.

• 1:41:47David Rosenthal?

  I don't know what these 2020 original M1 MacBook Airs are going for on like eBay or Craigslist or whatnot right now.

• 1:41:54Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:41:54David Rosenthal?

  Whatever they're going for, like I bet $500 ish, maybe less. The amount of performance and longevity that you can get for that dollar amount.

• 1:42:05Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:42:05David Rosenthal?

  Crazy.

• 1:42:06Ben Gilbert?

  You're right. If it's only $500, it's way better than, let's say you have like a 2018 or 2019 Intel machine. It's so worth it to trade up to even an old M1 because they're just not that different after three years.

• 1:42:23David Rosenthal?

  Yep, totally. I can't imagine anything that a normal human would need to do on a computer that the M1 MacBook can't handle.

• 1:42:35Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Okay. So keep.

• 1:42:36David Rosenthal?

  Okay. So there's that. We talked about my phone. I'm currently rocking the 12 mini. Very mixed emotions about transitioning to the 14 Pro.

• 1:42:44Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:42:45David Rosenthal?

  And I'm rocking the original SE Apple Watch.

• 1:42:50Ben Gilbert?

  I forgot they made a watch SE.

• 1:42:52David Rosenthal?

  They have two now. There's a new SE2. I don't know exactly what the SE2 has feature set. I'm very tempted by the Ultra for all the reasons we discussed.

• 1:43:02Ben Gilbert?

  Highly recommend it.

• 1:43:03David Rosenthal?

  My decision for going with the SE originally was it didn't have the always on screen and I actively did not want the always on screen.

• 1:43:13David Rosenthal?

  How do you find you, does it, do you find it distracts you at all?

• 1:43:15Ben Gilbert?

  I like it now, especially with the wave finder watch face that comes on the Ultra. When it's off, you still see the watch hands, but everything else, it's a black background. And then when you turn it, it's got sort of the white face comes on. So I like it.

• 1:43:28David Rosenthal?

  Nice.

• 1:43:29Ben Gilbert?

  I did not like the always on display on the phone when I had the 14 Pro. It was like loud. It felt like my phone didn't, it's like really on.

• 1:43:38David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, but on the, on the watch it, uh, yeah, it's subtle. It's not like noticeable.

• 1:43:43Ben Gilbert?

  I will say too, I was in a coffee meeting today where I did need to call an Uber so that I could get back here so that we could record. And like, it was quite nice being able to like, have the watch at a super.

• 1:43:56David Rosenthal?

  Cause there's a social like thing about, uh.

• 1:43:59Ben Gilbert?

  Checking your watch, but having it like, being able to see the time when I was looking at it at like 170 degree angle. And I used to definitely be the person that's like jerking my wrist or like tapping it to try to see the time. So that's like.

• 1:44:11David Rosenthal?

  That is one, yeah. I'll do like, I'll, I'll put my hands under the table and then like tap it like surreptitiously.

• 1:44:17Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18David Rosenthal?

  And then on the iPad side, the iPad mini, I had the one really only negative experience besides the just amount of work that we and PitchBook put into the arena show was my old iPad got stolen after the arena show.

• 1:44:31Ben Gilbert?

  Criminal.

• 1:44:33David Rosenthal?

  Literally criminal. I could still see it on like the map on the Find My Devices. It was somewhere up like North Gate or somewhere like north of Seattle and like, but.

• 1:44:41Ben Gilbert?

  It's like one of these things where like, just because I know where that is, it does not mean I should go there and get it.

• 1:44:44David Rosenthal?

  No, definitely not. Oh man. But the mini, I really like the mini. It's not nearly as good for watching and consuming content. I have an old iPad that we keep in the kitchen for when I'm doing the dishes and stuff.

• 1:44:57Ben Gilbert?

  And that you have promotion on, right? Like the minis don't have a promotion display, the 120 hertz.

• 1:45:03David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Oh no, I've got like an old, old iPad that I don't think has promotion.

• 1:45:06Ben Gilbert?

  I feel like you used to have one with a promotion display.

• 1:45:09David Rosenthal?

  You know what? Maybe it doesn't. I think it's an original, the first iPad Pro that they made in 2017.

• 1:45:14Ben Gilbert?

  That one did.

• 1:45:14David Rosenthal?

  Okay. You're right. It does have promotion. It does have promotion.

• 1:45:17Ben Gilbert?

  Cause that I actually missed when I was downgrading from the new iPhone down to the 13 mini, because the non-pro iPhones have never had promotion.

• 1:45:25David Rosenthal?

  That's the, goes up to 120 hertz, refresh rate on the screen.

• 1:45:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, butter.

• 1:45:30David Rosenthal?

  The mini is great, though, for events. It's also really good. I've stopped. I use a Kindle Oasis that I use for reading fiction at home, but when I travel, I no longer bring the Kindle Oasis and I use this as a Kindle. It's great for that.

• 1:45:44Ben Gilbert?

  I find like for, for outdoor stuff, you can't beat the Kindle.

• 1:45:50David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:50Ben Gilbert?

  I also find that night, reading in bed, the iPad, even in the lightest setting is kind of too bright.

• 1:45:57David Rosenthal?

  That's true. When going to the beach, I'll still bring the Kindle. I wouldn't, I wouldn't feel good bringing this to a beach.

• 1:46:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's a good point because they're not waterproof. Unlike iPhones, iPads are not waterproof. The device that's still in my lineup that blows my mind is in 2012, as a college graduation gift, my uncle got me the $70 Kindle. And that is still the Kindle that I use and take on vacation. It's such a good product.

• 1:46:26David Rosenthal?

  They're like industrial strength.

• 1:46:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Ben Gilbert?

  And super light. Like, I looked at getting the Oasis, but it's actually heavier than my 2012 model.

• 1:46:35David Rosenthal?

  The nice thing about the Oasis is it's got the page turn buttons, which I like.

• 1:46:39Ben Gilbert?

  And the Paperwhite is a really nice.

• 1:46:41David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:46:41Ben Gilbert?

  I'm envious of the Paperwhite, for sure. My Kindle is actually worthless in bed because you need to light it with a.

• 1:46:47David Rosenthal?

  Right. Jenny and I got the Oasis for that very reason. Jenny's a night owl and I'm a morning person. And Jenny is a huge reader. She has a PhD in literature and I'm a huge reader too, but she puts me to shame. She would stay up reading at night with the light on and then finally I'm just like, I'm buying you this. Turn the light on.

• 1:47:06Ben Gilbert?

  It's for you and for me.

• 1:47:07David Rosenthal?

  It's for you, but mostly for me.

• 1:47:10Ben Gilbert?

  All right. So your 2022 personal year.

• 1:47:13David Rosenthal?

  Oh, 2022 personally. Well, this was the year of adjusting to life as a parent. Our daughter was born towards the end of 2021. So that was like, most of the year was preparing and you know, then like the first couple of months, I like. I mean, of course, we're thinking back now on the FTX interview when we when we had Sam on.

• 1:47:34Ben Gilbert?

  Was that your first interview back?

• 1:47:36David Rosenthal?

  It was in there. I mean, I was still in the fog of war. Like, it was, I know we released the interview.

• 1:47:44Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, we switched it with the Michael Lovitz episode. I think, Michael, we interviewed Michael first.

• 1:47:48David Rosenthal?

  Right. That's right. That's right. But all of that, she was no more than two months old, probably less. Like, it's such a fog. Yeah, those first few months. But then this year has been, you know, Jenny went back to work and she works in person. She works at San Francisco Ballet. Like, it's an in-person physical art form. They put on physical performances. She needs to be in the office every day and weekends and nights. So, yeah, this year was just about figuring out life, like, with a lot of changes. But we met early in college, so we were like babies, you know, and then we were.

• 1:48:21Ben Gilbert?

  You were together for 17 years before having a kid? 16 years?

• 1:48:25David Rosenthal?

  16 years, yeah. 16 years before having a kid, which were wonderful 16 years. And I'm glad we had all that time together, pre-baby. But we hadn't had to, like, really renegotiate our relationship in a long time. So it was like, oh, wow, flexing old muscles again.

• 1:48:41Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 1:48:41David Rosenthal?

  But the last time was when we got married and, like, we didn't expect, you know, it's funny hearing you talk about things are different when you get married, like, they really are.

• 1:48:49Ben Gilbert?

  All your life systems have to change. Your notion of self is only about one person, but after you're married, your notion of self includes another person whose emotions you can't actually feel. So like, when you're like, looking out for yourself, you have to account for things that you currently don't know, which I think is this, like, very interesting phenomenon.

• 1:49:15David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And that is so true about getting married. But then having a kid, I think that's like the biggest, well, there's so many huge things, but one is like, you now have this other being. Like, when you get married, yes, you have to account for the other person and you're like, in it together. You're no longer just you.

• 1:49:30Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:49:30David Rosenthal?

  But that other person.

• 1:49:32Ben Gilbert?

  You're like, trying to figure out.

• 1:49:33David Rosenthal?

  Is like a responsible adult, hopefully.

• 1:49:37David Rosenthal?

  You know, can keep themselves alive, can like, if we're going late, recording an acquired episode, she'll be fine.

• 1:49:43Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:49:43David Rosenthal?

  You know, when you have a kid.

• 1:49:46Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:49:46David Rosenthal?

  That's very.

• 1:49:47Ben Gilbert?

  Kid starves.

• 1:49:48David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, like you can't like 24/7, somebody needs to have as like a pretty foreground in their mental processes, like I need the like algorithm of how I'm behaving needs to have at the forefront, keep this kid alive and happy.

• 1:50:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04David Rosenthal?

  And they are incapable of doing so their own end, you know, you love this person so incredibly much in just really like unfathomable ways. And so it's like, yeah, how do you like then integrate that back with your life? So that was, it's been a lot of figuring that out for us.

• 1:50:22Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:23David Rosenthal?

  And now like, we're now at such a good age, not that it's still difficult. She's a little over a year old now, 14 months. Like it's so fun. Like it's always been fun. I've always, I've not been, I think a lot of parents, and especially a lot of dads, they don't love their kids immediately. And like, that's a very normal thing of like, you know, moms too have this, but like kid pops out and you're like, whoa, you know?

• 1:50:44Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:50:44David Rosenthal?

  But there's no instant love. I had the instant love, like instant, uh, like very, very powerful. And I still feel that, but like also like as they become more of a person, like she's walking now, she's talking like a little bit and like, but she's like so clearly has a personality and like every day and like, oh wow, like you are even more of a person than you were yesterday. And like, it's so fun. And it's like also a lot easier than the just like, the early days are so physically demanding, like on everybody, especially moms, but like any, any caregiver.

• 1:51:16Ben Gilbert?

  It's one of these things that like, you can describe it, but having not experienced it, I don't actually know what it's like. It's like, oh.

• 1:51:21David Rosenthal?

  Oh, there's no way.

• 1:51:22Ben Gilbert?

  Cool words, David.

• 1:51:23David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, right. Exactly. Highly, highly recommend it, but uh, you know, in due time.

• 1:51:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Other stuff for you this year personally?

• 1:51:31David Rosenthal?

  It's sort of crazy looking back on it, like so much changes when you parent, but um, we were both intentional about this, but also I think it just naturally happened because it is important and part of our lives. We didn't actually travel any less, like we didn't travel in the early, early months, but we did, what did we do? Eight or nine trips with the baby in 2022, including going to Portugal. We made that a family trip when we went for Breakpoint, which like.

• 1:52:01David Rosenthal?

  Actually, it was great, like really hard, very different.

• 1:52:04Ben Gilbert?

  It seemed very hard, I gotta say, from the outside.

• 1:52:06David Rosenthal?

  It was hard, it was hard, but I'm really glad we did it. I'm really glad we did it. Then the other big thing for us this year, we'd spent a lot of time over the last couple of years thinking about where we wanted to live in general and then in anticipation of having a baby. And then after having the baby, Jenny and I went around the axle so many times about California. We were pretty sure we were going to stay in California and probably the Bay Area. Jenny's family's there and we genuinely really love it there. But do we move to the suburbs? Where do we move? Do we stay in the city? We were in the city before and we ultimately decided to stay in the city, to stay in the same neighborhood. We moved houses, but the plan for now is we're just like gonna stay for the perpetuity in the city. And which some people I think are like, that's crazy.

• 1:52:50David Rosenthal?

  Why would you, you know, why would you live in San Francisco? Period. Especially post pandemic. Why would you raise kids in San Francisco? It's actually great. Like for us, it's been amazing. We can walk, we don't have to drive, we don't have to get her in the car. There's so much great stuff. She really enjoys it, like she's a city kid. Like after Breakpoint, we went out in the countryside in Portugal for a couple of days. The baby was so bored. She was like, get me back to Lisbon.

• 1:53:19Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:53:21David Rosenthal?

  So it's actually been really great for us, staying in the city. We'll see as she gets older, but um, but that's the plan.

• 1:53:27Ben Gilbert?

  That's great.

• 1:53:29David Rosenthal?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

• 1:53:35Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

• 1:53:46David Rosenthal?

  Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next.

• 1:54:06Ben Gilbert?

  This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags and product analytics into one unified system. So teams can ship safely, test rigorously and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved.

• 1:54:19David Rosenthal?

  So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com/acquired to get started.

• 1:54:30Ben Gilbert?

  Carvats?

• 1:54:31David Rosenthal?

  Carvats. Let's do it.

• 1:54:32Ben Gilbert?

  All right. Should we start with books?

• 1:54:34David Rosenthal?

  Let's do it.

• 1:54:35Ben Gilbert?

  All right. I can't remember if I recommended this one because I read it over the holidays last year. I think it might have been my first carve out of 2022. Project Hail Mary.

• 1:54:45David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah. I think I read it on your recommendation.

• 1:54:48Ben Gilbert?

  That's right.

• 1:54:48David Rosenthal?

  Ken Vautz, very good.

• 1:54:50Ben Gilbert?

  I think it's the best fiction I've ever read. Definitely the best sci fi I've ever read. I think it's the best fiction I've ever read. The premise arrives at you in real time as you read it. So I don't want to give away the premise. Unless otherwise stated, this is a spoiler free

• 1:55:01David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:02Ben Gilbert?

  carve outs. The coolest thing about Project Hail Mary is how it is basically all in our universe. There's no big leap. Like in Star Trek, you have to like take this leap of like, well, there's warp drive and you don't really understand how it works and that's fine. And now that we accept this black box, now we can go to other stuff. There's not like an accepted black box in Project Hail Mary. There's just like all the known rules of physics that we know about. And then you go from there.

• 1:55:32David Rosenthal?

  It's hard sci fi, I think is the term, right?

• 1:55:33Ben Gilbert?

  Is that what they call it?

• 1:55:34David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Where it's like, everything is like laws of physics explanations for everything.

• 1:55:38Ben Gilbert?

  Right. So that was super cool. Another book that I finished about two months ago that I thought was exceptional and every single person who listens to Acquired should read it. I think it expands even broader than this audience, but this audience in particular would eat it up, called The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.

• 1:55:56David Rosenthal?

  We got to talk to Morgan recently.

• 1:55:58Ben Gilbert?

  That was really fun. And when we hopped on that call with him, it was like, I was two thirds through the book. And so it was really fun, like getting to talk about some of the concepts with him while I was in real time digesting them. But he's unbelievably pithy and a real class act.

• 1:56:12David Rosenthal?

  I haven't read it. I need to read it. And yes, I agree. Total class act. I suspect it's a really good one to read now, post 2020 and 2021 bubble when like everything was crazy.

• 1:56:22Ben Gilbert?

  It would have been great to read it during 2020.

• 1:56:23David Rosenthal?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:56:25Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 1:56:28Ben Gilbert?

  But it includes, I think I've, I've made it a carve out before the Morgan's essay, How All This Happened, and every chapter of Psychology of Money is one of his essays. And so if you liked, if you read How All This Happened, which is this amazing path of World War II through today, through the American economy and a lot of politics, and why different things happened, and how everything led to the next thing. The psychology of money is awesome because it incorporates all of that sort of like factual history with just really good perspectives and some citations of research on what actually makes people happy and what investment strategies work when your goal is happiness.

• 1:57:10Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm. I certainly don't account for enough of that in my own financial planning. Yeah. Morgan makes a very strong argument in the book to basically put as much into S and P 500 index funds when you're as young as you possibly can and just never sell anything. It's like the most boring style of investing possible that will probably beat whatever you do. Yep. I gotta pick that up and read it. That'll be good. Over the holidays. Book. Anything else you got in books? I do, actually. I'm halfway through it. And I was tempted to not talk about it because I want to use it for a future carve out, but it's already so good. And this is another one where like listeners of the show will especially eat this up. The Power Law by Sebastian Maloney. Is it worth reading even if you're already steeped in the industry?

• 1:57:54Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. You and I have done research on 250 companies and all these venture funds and talked to the people that started a lot of these venture funds. And Sebastian knows more. It just goes deeper. He just talks about these investments that like, we think we've talked about the best investments of all time. There are more. And like, he cites them all numerically. He cites returns on early venture capital funds. He takes you all the way through product venture capital. Like, I mean, there's George Dorio and then Arthur Rock. And he talks about like, how all those partnerships sort of led to the next ones and how certain structures were bad. And then the invention of the private limited partnership fixed all these problems. You're gonna love it. Okay.

• 1:58:35David Rosenthal?

  I might find that under the tree.

• 1:58:36Ben Gilbert?

  That's all I got for books.

• 1:58:37David Rosenthal?

  Oh, that's all I got. All right. My books, I've got two acquired books that I can't believe we did both of these episodes this year and we completely whiffed on this very obvious sort of like pun and fun moment.

• 1:58:54Ben Gilbert?

  You know, I don't like whiffs.

• 1:58:56David Rosenthal?

  I know. I'm embarrassed by this. Like mostly for me, this is like an ultimate like David Rosenthal like dad joke moment. My top two acquired books that genuinely are also my top two acquired books for the year. Made in Japan and made in America.

• 1:59:11Ben Gilbert?

  I made that joke.

• 1:59:12David Rosenthal?

  Did you?

• 1:59:12Ben Gilbert?

  Totally made that joke.

• 1:59:13David Rosenthal?

  Oh, I can't believe I forgot that.

• 1:59:14Ben Gilbert?

  I swear I did.

• 1:59:15David Rosenthal?

  Did you? We'll have to go back through the transcripts.

• 1:59:17Ben Gilbert?

  Or at least like observed that in some capacity. Maybe it was a tweet.

• 1:59:21David Rosenthal?

  Maybe I just have dad brain.

• 1:59:23Ben Gilbert?

  But isn't that crazy that they're both named that?

• 1:59:26David Rosenthal?

  And they're both so good.

• 1:59:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:59:29David Rosenthal?

  Highly recommend. Non-acquired books that I read this year. I think I did this as a carve out the Godfather series, the books.

• 1:59:36Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:59:37David Rosenthal?

  Mario Puzo's books. They are so good. As good or better than the movies and the movies are, in my opinion, some of the best of all time.

• 1:59:44Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:44David Rosenthal?

  And then the other one is Masters of Doom. I don't know if I talked about that on the show. We've thought about doing an id episode and then Lex did that like huge interview with Carmack. So felt less urgent for us to do it, but um, really well-written book. And then the author of Masters of Doom, David Kushner, just did a follow-up piece, I think in Vanity Fair of a follow-up interview. Did you see, I think, did I send this to you? With um, Stevie Case, who's the CRO at Vanta.

• 2:00:14Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 2:00:15David Rosenthal?

  Stevie is a prominent figure in the book and she was the first, the first or one of the first professional female gamers ended up working. Did you work at id? She may have worked briefly at id, but then she joined Romero at his next company after Romero and Carmack broke up.

• 2:00:30Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, crazy.

• 2:00:32David Rosenthal?

  Anyway, crazy story. And then she went on. She came out to Silicon Valley, ended up working at Twilio and now is the CRO at Vanta.

• 2:00:37Ben Gilbert?

  Tell me about this. I'm not sure I read the article, but I remember hearing, yeah.

• 2:00:41David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. So good. Both the book and the follow-up article. Great.

• 2:00:45Ben Gilbert?

  Huh.

• 2:00:45David Rosenthal?

  And Stevie's story is amazing. So that's my, that's my article carve out too, which is our next category.

• 2:00:52Ben Gilbert?

  Mine was how all this happened.

• 2:00:53David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, perfect.

• 2:00:54Ben Gilbert?

  Podcasts.

• 2:00:55David Rosenthal?

  Podcasts. I already mentioned Resident Ark, my favorite video game podcast. Got it all in, Resident Ark and All In are like my go to must listen every episode.

• 2:01:05Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 2:01:06David Rosenthal?

  Two shout outs though, that I discovered this year and have become friends, David Tenra and the Founders Podcast.

• 2:01:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 2:01:13David Rosenthal?

  Of course, wonderful show. And we've become close with David and like, when you hear David on the show, he is exactly that same way in real life too. Like, it's so great. We, he's come out to California. We've hung out a bunch. Love him. The other one, I've been a huge MKBHD fan on YouTube, as I know you have.

• 2:01:29Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 2:01:30David Rosenthal?

  Been too. The Waveform Podcast that they do is great. I've started like regularly listening. I really like it. And our buddy David Immel, who's on the MKBHD team, he's regularly on, host, a co-host on that. They rotate through the team. On the Waveform Podcast and like, it's in the same vein as kind of the Verge Podcasts. Like it's all about the products of tech, but it's really well done.

• 2:01:52Ben Gilbert?

  I've become an increasingly large fan of The Verge. I don't know how I sort of slept on it. In my head, it was like, oh, another one of these like NGadget Gizmodo type things. But like, that was wrong. It is my, this is like embarrassing to say, new favorite publication. Like Neelai is so smart and I'll basically go listen to Neelai talk wherever he is. Like that is a way for sure. Get me to go listen to an episode of whatever the podcast is. So I sort of like first and over COVID, I think was like, I'll listen to Neelai in any situation. And then like with The Verge redesign, I sort of, I don't think I realized how unbelievably thoughtful the team there is and how strategic they are.

• 2:02:35Ben Gilbert?

  They're one of the few publications that thinks about the fact that they're a business too, and thinks about the way to marry their business with their editorial and how they can uniquely show up in the world based on what they do differently than other people. And like, I think the new Verge redesign is genius. Like, I don't know if it'll work or not, but I love the attempt. They're also one of the few news sites in the world that actually gets a ton of direct traffic. So that's a huge thing that plays to their advantage that then they can do interesting things with. There's people that come to them to solve a problem in their life or to fill a need.

• 2:03:10David Rosenthal?

  It's so true. I mean, even me, I mean, you're way deeper in the product side as a fan of the product side of tech than I am. But anytime there's a new Apple device or

• 2:03:19Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 2:03:20David Rosenthal?

  There's a couple of places I will go directly. I will go to MKBHD and all the various properties that he and they have now, and I'll go to The Verge. And I might consume some other stuff that comes to me on social media, but like I will directly go to those two properties. And I feel like my impression of Neily is that like, he is world-class on the product side of tech, but he also gets the business side.

• 2:03:43Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure.

• 2:03:45David Rosenthal?

  Which is super rare.

• 2:03:46Ben Gilbert?

  Super rare. And like his, his like legal background, he gets all the like, interesting IP copyright stuff that's going on in technology. I just feel like he's, there's that Scott Adams aphorism, you don't want to be top 1% at anything, you want to be top 25% at the right three things and figure out how to marry them together. I feel like that's Eli. I'll also say, I think The Verge has been the thing that's surprisingly the most helpful for me for acquired research this year. Like I did a ton of Qualcomm research on The Verge because they've done so much reporting on Qualcomm over the years. So, big Verge fan. I know that's, we don't have publication, it's like a category, but

• 2:04:25David Rosenthal?

  I think they've got podcasts.

• 2:04:26Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, they do.

• 2:04:27David Rosenthal?

  Podcasts.

• 2:04:28Ben Gilbert?

  So back to podcasts. I already said the episode of Tim Ferriss with Jerry Seinfeld from a couple of years ago, so good. The episode of Huberman Lab, What Alcohol Does To Your Body.

• 2:04:38David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:04:39Ben Gilbert?

  Dude, it's scary, scary stuff. And like moderation is also bad. There's no like, well, I only had one drink this week and that's devastating to your body versus zero. And this is certainly not medical advice, but go listen to that podcast. It's just unbelievable, the research studies that he's citing, where it's just so much more bad for you in every way than I ever thought. And I thought it was bad for you.

• 2:05:03David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, you were already starting to drink less, right?

• 2:05:05Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. I mean, we both opened tonight with cocktails, but um, well, you gotta live.

• 2:05:11David Rosenthal?

  This is a celebratory event.

• 2:05:12Ben Gilbert?

  That's right. That's right. My last podcast recommendation is Smartless. Any episode, so fun. It's just so fun to go live in their world for an episode.

• 2:05:21David Rosenthal?

  You've liked that one for a while, right?

• 2:05:22Ben Gilbert?

  Last six months or so.

• 2:05:23David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I feel like you've been big on that. All right, music.

• 2:05:27Ben Gilbert?

  Music. I don't think I discovered any new music this year. I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift midnights. I did a ton of prep for our wedding, curating a bunch of different playlists for like different segments of the day.

• 2:05:39David Rosenthal?

  That's right. You put together all the playlists yourself too, right?

• 2:05:42Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. I mean, the DJ did all the work that a great DJ does, but I sent him very highly manicured playlist that took several months to put together with a lot of opinion in it. So, you know, here's the dance, here's the cocktail hour, here's dinner, here's... So I was looking at my like Spotify year review and I was like, all this is like my favorite songs from over the course of my life and my wife's life. And that's where most of my music listening went this year. I'll also say, most of my audio time, like even when I'm in the gym now, is podcasts or audible books, mostly in service of acquired research. I just listen to way less music than I used to.

• 2:06:19David Rosenthal?

  I feel like you do a large part of your acquired book research via audiobooks, right?

• 2:06:25Ben Gilbert?

  Almost exclusively.

• 2:06:26David Rosenthal?

  Wow.

• 2:06:27Ben Gilbert?

  It was painful for me to read the whole Qualcomm book, but the only way to get it is a paperback book.

• 2:06:32David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. It's interesting. Whereas I've gone the total opposite direction. I pretty much only do physical paper copies for acquired research.

• 2:06:40Ben Gilbert?

  I admire your attention span.

• 2:06:41David Rosenthal?

  I'm interested to try. I do have an Apple pencil for our iPad minis. And I wish I could write with the Apple pencil.

• 2:06:50Ben Gilbert?

  I find that to be a useless device. I bought that and I thought it'd be so cool and I never use it.

• 2:06:54David Rosenthal?

  I agree. I agree. It's like, I don't know if it's a DRM thing or like a font size thing that changes the page, but like really just want to be able to write with the Apple pencil directly on an ebook, the same way I do on a physical book. And for whatever reason, the tech gods just have not let me do that. I have new music.

• 2:07:15Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:07:15David Rosenthal?

  Shockingly, you would not think that me, knowing me, and as a new parent, would discover new music this year. But the baby loves Olivia Rodrigo.

• 2:07:27Ben Gilbert?

  Ah.

• 2:07:29David Rosenthal?

  Less so now, but when, uh, when she was like, I don't know, between ages, like... Two months and six months, they'll go through moments.

• 2:07:39Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 2:07:40David Rosenthal?

  Olivia Rodrigo, almost without fail, turn on driver's license. Like, she would just be wrapped in attention and like immediately calm down.

• 2:07:50David Rosenthal?

  We're like, I guess we have a teenager like.

• 2:07:53David Rosenthal?

  So I listened to a lot of Olivia Rodrigo this year. And she's very talented, very impressive.

• 2:07:59Ben Gilbert?

  All right. I got out to, uh, to my Spotify.

• 2:08:04David Rosenthal?

  TV and movies.

• 2:08:05Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. Andor was my carve out very recently.

• 2:08:08David Rosenthal?

  Everything here because I did none.

• 2:08:10Ben Gilbert?

  Friggin' exceptional.

• 2:08:11David Rosenthal?

  Rewatched Black Panther recently. It was just as good.

• 2:08:14Ben Gilbert?

  Great movie.

• 2:08:14David Rosenthal?

  But that's all I got.

• 2:08:15Ben Gilbert?

  So Andor, I saw the new Top Gun. That was unbelievably fun. Like, put that on a big 4K TV with some surround sound and just enjoy.

• 2:08:23David Rosenthal?

  Jenny and I watched that, uh, on a laptop. Yeah, we, we gotta go. I think they're re-releasing it in theaters for the holidays.

• 2:08:30Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. We can go upstairs after this and watch it's a 75 inch, like, like, it's a very good, uh, it's a very good experience.

• 2:08:39David Rosenthal?

  Nice.

• 2:08:39Ben Gilbert?

  I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, the movie. And that movie gives you all the feels. That is a great, great movie. Great one to watch together if you're looking for something to watch with your partner. Weird movie, kind of a sci-fi, kind of a rom-com. It's like a family dynamics movie, sad parts, happy parts, and visually stunning. So, and great acting. I don't even really want to talk about what it's about because it's, it's one of these that I just don't want to spoil it. But basically everyone will like this movie.

• 2:09:12David Rosenthal?

  Great. Good holiday movie?

• 2:09:13Ben Gilbert?

  Great holiday movie. I haven't watched season one yet because it felt like I just wanted to catch up as soon as possible because everyone was talking about it. I'm now up to date on White Lotus, season two. That is a wild show. It's basically, the premise is like, you get, I don't know, eight to 10 rich people that show up at this beautiful hotel, the White Lotus in Sicily. And they're in three or four different groups. So the plot sort of follows different groups. But the thing that runs through everyone is like, Everyone is extremely set in life, very wealthy and like deeply unhappy. And then crazy problematic stuff ensues from there and it's visually stunning.

• 2:09:53Ben Gilbert?

  And the acting is great and you're simultaneously very mad at all these characters for doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing, but you also totally understand. The characters are so well established that you understand based on their flaws as humans, why they're falling into these traps.

• 2:10:09David Rosenthal?

  Are they real people? Is it reality or is it fiction?

• 2:10:11Ben Gilbert?

  No, fiction.

• 2:10:11David Rosenthal?

  Fiction.

• 2:10:11Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, just very, very well written fiction. And the first one was in Hawaii. So it's, and I think it's almost a completely different cast, but like sort of same general premise in Italy.

• 2:10:22David Rosenthal?

  So each season is a different set of-

• 2:10:23Ben Gilbert?

  I think that's what they're doing. Yeah. Lastly, I watched a lot of TV this year. The Vow on Netflix is great, like trash TV to leave on in the background. It is two seasons long and it is a documentary about a cult. And unbelievably, the cult leader is so wrapped up. I mean, maybe not unbelievably for a cult leader in self glorification that like-

• 2:10:50David Rosenthal?

  That sounds very believable for a cult leader.

• 2:10:51Ben Gilbert?

  15, 20 years ago, he started recruiting filmmakers to join the cult. So they would shoot all this footage. So there's all this like very, very high production value footage over the entire life of the cult. All the way through the trial, which was only a few years ago, is the NXeum cult. And like dude went to prison for life and a bunch of other people went to prison because like they did terrible cult stuff. And the whole thing is just like perfectly documented the entire time. Cause I think it was like part of the arrest that like all this document, all this stuff became public footage. Yeah. So, or maybe they, maybe Netflix bought it. I don't know. But either way, very, very good background TV.

• 2:11:34David Rosenthal?

  Great.

• 2:11:35Ben Gilbert?

  Apps.

• 2:11:36David Rosenthal?

  The only new app that I started using this year that had any meaningful impact was our baby monitor app.

• 2:11:45David Rosenthal?

  I just like, everything's ossified. What about you? Do you have anything?

• 2:11:49Ben Gilbert?

  I have a few apps since moving houses that are sort of tied to like IOT type things. The only one that's not that I really like that I started using this year is Flighty, which is Ryan Jones's, he's an indie developer. He previously did Weatherline, which was my favorite weather app. And Flighty is sort of like the modern Tripit. The best way to explain it is like unbelievably good UI to tell you real time information about your flight. And it's tied into like every available API with every available airline. So you get information from Flighty before the airline notifies you of it. And often before it even displays on gates when you're in the airport.

• 2:12:27David Rosenthal?

  Okay, I gotta get this.

• 2:12:28Ben Gilbert?

  Before.

• 2:12:28David Rosenthal?

  I can get this for flying back in a couple of days.

• 2:12:30Ben Gilbert?

  Dude, when, when you get like a 30 second heads up on a change before the mass of people are behind you, it's very valuable.

• 2:12:38David Rosenthal?

  Huge.

• 2:12:40Ben Gilbert?

  Very valuable.

• 2:12:40David Rosenthal?

  That is an edge. That's alpha.

• 2:12:41Ben Gilbert?

  That's, that's alpha right there.

• 2:12:42David Rosenthal?

  That's alpha. Although now we just gave it to everybody.

• 2:12:46Ben Gilbert?

  I think he was even featured in the Apple keynote. So we're not giving anybody any distribution here that they didn't otherwise already earn. But Ryan's is just amazing indie developer. It's been really fun to like, watch, I haven't met him or anything, but watch the success of his apps over the years. And this is just a fantastic experience.

• 2:13:03David Rosenthal?

  Be fun to do, maybe it'd be an LP show or two, but we should have some indie developers on. Like, those are interesting business stories.

• 2:13:11Ben Gilbert?

  Totally. All right. Products. I have one that actually comes with an app.

• 2:13:16David Rosenthal?

  Great.

• 2:13:17Ben Gilbert?

  Mine is the RoboRock S7 Max.

• 2:13:20David Rosenthal?

  RoboRock S7 Max. Can I guess what the, is this a robo vacuum?

• 2:13:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. It's the competitor to Roomba. And I think it's a Xiaomi company. You know how Xiaomi owns like large stakes and a whole bunch of companies that they like manufacture for? I think it's that, but it's just like, I had a Roomba and I actually returned it to get the RoboRock instead. And the S7 Max is the like. I mean, it's like the worst product name of all time, but it's like the souped up self emptying also has a lightweight mop built in. It's the first time I've actually had like a robot where you actually can say like, this thing is robust enough that it's just going to make my life easier without failing or getting stuck or needing some kind of intervention. It just does its job.

• 2:14:05David Rosenthal?

  What's preventing me from ever seriously considering robot vacuums is stairs. So you just need one for each floor?

• 2:14:12Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly.

• 2:14:12David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:12Ben Gilbert?

  Or you can move it, but

• 2:14:14David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:14Ben Gilbert?

  I went for two robo rocks.

• 2:14:17David Rosenthal?

  Given the Xiaomi involvement or potential, I would imagine you could probably get two for less than the cost of a

• 2:14:26Ben Gilbert?

  No, they're very expensive.

• 2:14:27David Rosenthal?

  Oh, they're very expensive?

• 2:14:27Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:27David Rosenthal?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:14:28Ben Gilbert?

  I was expecting that too. No, they're, they're, they're premium priced.

• 2:14:32David Rosenthal?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:14:33Ben Gilbert?

  But great. Fantastic product. Yeah.

• 2:14:35David Rosenthal?

  I guess that is the solution. You just do one for each floor.

• 2:14:37Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 2:14:38David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 2:14:39Ben Gilbert?

  Or get used to carrying it. It's fine.

• 2:14:41David Rosenthal?

  I mean, I guess

• 2:14:41Ben Gilbert?

  You're gonna walk upstairs to like, go to bed. So you may as well just like carry this thing under your arm and set it down and then start it in the morning or something.

• 2:14:48David Rosenthal?

  Hmm. That's great. I never thought about that.

• 2:14:52Ben Gilbert?

  Just saved you a thousand bucks right there.

• 2:14:58Ben Gilbert?

  All right. That's all I got.

• 2:15:00David Rosenthal?

  That's all you probably, okay. Let's see. I, I'm intentionally going to limit a parenting product to just one. I could really do a whole other show about this.

• 2:15:09Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, like this is maybe

• 2:15:10David Rosenthal?

  I should do a list.

• 2:15:11Ben Gilbert?

  Maybe listeners want this.

• 2:15:12David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, maybe. Well, I mean, not all, but a subset do. So my, my just one, this is a super pro tip that I never would have thought of, but diaper bags are like big.

• 2:15:27David Rosenthal?

  Brilliant idea. I wish I could take credit for this, but I can't.

• 2:15:31David Rosenthal?

  Put the key essentials of a diaper bag, which are diapers, wipes, changing pad, in a pouch. You know, like you can get like a nice like pouch or whatever, like printed or like, you know, I don't even know where ours is from. And then you could just move that pouch into whatever bag or you could either carry the pouch yourself or put it in your backpack or put it in whatever, like rather than having a dedicated diaper bag, keep the core essentials of the diaper bag in a pouch that you can then put in other things.

• 2:15:57Ben Gilbert?

  God, dude, this show is getting worse and worse. Listeners, if you're still listening, I'm sorry.

• 2:16:04David Rosenthal?

  I'm sorry.

• 2:16:04Ben Gilbert?

  We'll be back next year with better content.

• 2:16:09David Rosenthal?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:16:10Ben Gilbert?

  But by the way, at some point, if I'm ever a parent, I'm totally gonna be like,

• 2:16:13David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, just go back to the back.

• 2:16:14Ben Gilbert?

  For all this.

• 2:16:15David Rosenthal?

  I'll make a list for you.

• 2:16:16Ben Gilbert?

  Good.

• 2:16:17David Rosenthal?

  On the universal product appeal, a couple of quick ones. One, I went back actually to the Apple keyboard. I had a mechanical keyboard, which I really liked, but I went back to the Apple one for Touch ID built in. Like, it actually, it's so convenient.

• 2:16:33Ben Gilbert?

  It is really nice.

• 2:16:34David Rosenthal?

  It's so convenient.

• 2:16:35Ben Gilbert?

  I have the Microsoft Ergonomic Sculpt 2, and I love it, but I think I type my password two dozen times a day more than I would if I just had my.

• 2:16:45David Rosenthal?

  I seriously doubt they'll do this, but actually, they could sell it for a hundred bucks and make a ton of margin.

• 2:16:49Ben Gilbert?

  A little standalone.

• 2:16:49David Rosenthal?

  Standalone Touch ID dongle.

• 2:16:52Ben Gilbert?

  I pay for that, for sure.

• 2:16:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, totally. Bunch of Elgato gear, including the sound panel. Their sound panels are so good, so easy to put up. I don't know if listeners noticed from.

• 2:17:04Ben Gilbert?

  By the way, we have four Elgato lights in this room right now, an Elgato Stream Deck. David and I use the Elgato Preamps, the Wave XLR.

• 2:17:13David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 2:17:14Ben Gilbert?

  And then also the camera, the wide camera that somehow turned off again, is mounted on the Elgato Boom Arm where my mic is normally on my desk.

• 2:17:23David Rosenthal?

  Yep, they make such good stuff. The sound panels in particular are really, really good and really, they have frames around them and then sticky stuff to mount. So like, literally, I've put up, I don't know, probably 12 of them in total, took less than an hour.

• 2:17:40Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, we also use the CamLink, the CamLink 4K, the way that we pipe our cameras into our computer as webcams.

• 2:17:47David Rosenthal?

  Yep, huge, huge Elgato fans.

• 2:17:50Ben Gilbert?

  Nice.

• 2:17:51David Rosenthal?

  All right, and then you added to the agenda a final new carve out section of places.

• 2:17:58Ben Gilbert?

  Places.

• 2:17:58David Rosenthal?

  This year.

• 2:17:59Ben Gilbert?

  Kopri, that was my.

• 2:18:01David Rosenthal?

  That you already.

• 2:18:02Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:02David Rosenthal?

  Discussed.

• 2:18:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. Any for you?

• 2:18:06David Rosenthal?

  No, we didn't really go anywhere new despite all our travels. We've been to Portugal and Lisbon before. We went back to Santa Barbara. We try and go there every year, at least once a year. That's the beach for us. Santa Barbara is just amazing. Lovely, lovely place. One of the loveliest places on earth and very accessible from California.

• 2:18:26Ben Gilbert?

  We gotta find more. We did the EA episode down there. We gotta, we gotta find more acquired related reasons to go.

• 2:18:30David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, that's right. Trip lives down there. He's got it figured out.

• 2:18:32Ben Gilbert?

  That's right. Well, with that, listeners, I think we will see you in 2023. We would love to see you in Slack. We'll be hanging out there over the holidays. If you want to listen to the LP show, we actually just recorded two other great LP shows that'll be coming out soon. You can join and get those two weeks early at acquired.fm slash LP. Or you can search acquired LP show in any podcast player and get access to them two weeks after LPs get them. Anything else, David?

• 2:19:02David Rosenthal?

  One very, very important last thing, a big thank you to all of you. We, we talked about it a lot on this episode. We truly have the best audience in the world, the best community in the world. Ben and I just pinch ourselves like literally on a weekly, if not daily basis, that we get to do this, that I get to do this as a living. And it's all thanks to you all. We just get so much joy out of putting this show together. I mean, clearly we can talk for hours just about the year and all the fun that we have.

• 2:19:37Ben Gilbert?

  That's interesting to other people remains to be seen, but every business should know their source of power and their source of differentiation. And ours is all of you. So thank you so much for being on the journey with us. It's been an amazing seven years and here's to seven more.

• 2:19:51David Rosenthal?

  Indeed. Happy holidays.

• 2:19:53Ben Gilbert?

  Happy holidays.