SoundJam (iTunes)

Ben & David revisit the birth of the digital music revolution and Steve Jobs' "digital hub" strategy, with Apple's 2000 acquisition of the Mac music player SoundJam MP, which would go on to become iTunes. We relive the 90's with brushed metal interfaces, music visualizers and of course, software sold in (physical) boxes. Sponsors: Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegoraStatsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26 More Acquired! Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the Slack http://acquired.fm/slackSubscribe to ACQ2 https://pod.link/acquiredlpMerch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! © Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC

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

• 0:00David Rosenthal?

  And iTunes sucks.

• 0:02Ben Gilbert?

  iTunes does suck. Well, yeah.

• 0:05David Rosenthal?

  It's bloated.

• 0:06Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Or I won't take a position. I'll say, people seem to hate iTunes.

• 0:22Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome to episode 38 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 0:29David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 0:31Ben Gilbert?

  And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering Apple's 2000 acquisition of Soundjam, which would go on to become iTunes. So, speaking of iTunes, we love iTunes. Well, actually now, Apple Podcast reviews. So, this is the part of the show where, before we dive into things, I ask you, our listeners, be it a brand new one, or someone who's been listening to the show for a while, if you've got some extra time, we would love a review on iTunes. It is how we grow the show and make it better. We've also got a Slack. If you're new to the show, there's over 600 of us that are in the Slack channel, talking about technology news, M&A, IPOs, all kinds of stuff. So, if you head over to acquired.fm and you'd like to join us, there's a little widget on the sidebar to join us there. And then lastly-

• 1:16David Rosenthal?

  That was very clever, Ben. I see what you did there. I like that.

• 1:20Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Well, you know, most of this show is kind of unscripted. Like, we have notes, but we don't actually type them out. And then, like, you try and get too clever when you are typing out the exact words that you're going to say and listeners-

• 1:33David Rosenthal?

  Hey, we're just getting more professional here at Acquired.

• 1:35Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. Yes. That is one thing. Like, listeners who've been listening to the show for a long time, it's funny how with these things, when you decide to up-level a little bit, that becomes the new bar. And then, that's just the bar that you have to hit every episode after that. So, if anybody's starting a podcast or a creative project, keep that in mind for the future.

• 1:52David Rosenthal?

  All these new listeners now are like, wait a minute, this doesn't sound very professional.

• 1:55Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56David Rosenthal?

  What are these guys talking about?

• 1:58Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, hopefully we managed to.

• 1:59David Rosenthal?

  This podcast started as Ben and me drinking beer and recording ourselves.

• 2:02Ben Gilbert?

  That's true.

• 2:03David Rosenthal?

  We've come a long way.

• 2:03Ben Gilbert?

  That's true. Since we started doing these morning recordings and we're in different time zones, we're either a lot more coherent because we're not drinking anymore, or we're a lot less coherent because we're groggy. It's not clear.

• 2:15David Rosenthal?

  We will see.

• 2:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. 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.

• 2:37David 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.

• 2:58Ben 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.

• 3:20David 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.

• 3:38Ben 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.

• 4:06Ben Gilbert?

  David, you ready to take us into the acquisition history and facts of Soundjam?

• 4:10David Rosenthal?

  Let's do it. We are entering the time machine here at Acquired. Maybe it's a hot tub time machine.

• 4:16Ben Gilbert?

  Hopefully not.

• 4:16David Rosenthal?

  We're going, we're going back to...

• 4:21David Rosenthal?

  All professionalism is out the window today.

• 4:24Ben Gilbert?

  Apparently.

• 4:26David Rosenthal?

  We are going back to the late 90s and the early days of the MP3 and digital audio revolution. And there were a couple of apps or quote programs, as they were called back then, that ruled the day. And if you were a teenager in America, as I was, you definitely had these on your PC. Winamp and Napster.

• 4:50Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And oh, man. My, just to describe what my, my music listening setup was at this point in my life, it was Napster to get the music. I had a, this was on, I think, I think it was a PowerPC 8500. So it's like a gray Macintosh tower. So I had the Napster Mac client and you get music through that and then-

• 5:12David Rosenthal?

  Okay, so that was, that was after 2000 then. There was no Napster Mac client until 2000.

• 5:19Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, all right. Well, I'm reshuffling my history here a bit. But I guess what I'm getting to here is my hard drive on my computer, I think was like four megabytes or, no, that's wrong. But anyway-

• 5:31David Rosenthal?

  Gigabytes, maybe?

• 5:32Ben Gilbert?

  Nah. I can't remember what it was, but the hard drive on my computer, with all the programs and the system extensions and stuff I had littered around on it, did not have room for MP3s. Like I needed, you know, at least 100 megabytes for my favorite songs at the moment. And I had a zip drive plugged into my computer and then a hundred, like a series of 100 megabyte zip disks that I could like load my MP3s onto and put them in. I didn't have Winamp because I had a Mac and I can't remember exactly how I played the files pre iTunes, but it was a disaster. Like you're just working directly off the file system.

• 6:09David Rosenthal?

  Oh, man. Well, you and every other teenager in America who had a Mac and not a PC had this exact problem. And luckily for you and for everyone else and for acquired, Jeff Robin and Bill Kincaid step into the fray and emerge as the saviors for teenagers pirating music in America.

• 6:34David Rosenthal?

  This is gonna be a fun one. Ben and I were chatting before the episode. We're, we're really excited to dive in here and want to give a quick shout out to my buddy Eric over at IAC who actually, we'd been planning to do this episode for probably as long as the show has been in existence at this point. But Eric shot me an email a couple of weeks ago and he was, he said, hey, I don't know if you explored the company Soundjam as a topic, but it stands out to me as an interesting one because this is the app that not only became iTunes, but may have also influenced the quote metal finish of Apple software design over the next several years. And oh boy, did it ever.

• 7:07Ben Gilbert?

  What a beautiful brushed metal it was.

• 7:10David Rosenthal?

  Brushed metal. And Eric says, I remember buying it. And yes, it came in a box when I was in college because I was looking for an MP3 player for my Mac.

• 7:20Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. Yeah. I mean, I, so fast forward from me playing the MP3s off my zip disk and actually playing them through an application. Soundjam was awesome. Like I remember before Apple acquired them and then we found out there was going to be an iTunes playing with Soundjam. And the coolest thing about it was the skins. There were some really, really not tasteful, but like insane skins that would make this thing transform from like a brushed metal rectangle into like the most insane glob of like

• 7:52David Rosenthal?

  Psychedelic.

• 7:52Ben Gilbert?

  Psychedelic, yeah.

• 7:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And of course it had the visualizer too, which we'll get into all this. But yeah, so 90s. So Jeff Robin and Bill Kinkade worked at Apple in the mid 90s and they were engineers and they were working on the Copland operating system, which listeners, if you go back to our next episode that we did live at the Geek Choir Summit last year, is a key, key part of the history of what ended up becoming when Apple acquired Next and became OS 10. Copland was what Apple was working on before that internally and it completely failed. It was a total disaster. Never shipped. But Jeff and Bill were really good engineers

• 8:37David Rosenthal?

  and Apple really highly regarded. And when it never shipped and Apple acquired Next, they ended up leaving the company. And so Robin left and he became an indie software dev on his own, became really highly regarded. Wrote this program called Conflict Catcher, which back in the old pre-OS 10 Mac days, you had all these extensions for different files on your computer and different programs and it could become a really messed. The operating system didn't manage it itself. And so he hacked this software together to basically just manage it for everybody.

• 9:08Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, so Conflict Catcher was amazing because there were some incredibly interesting architecture choices made in Mac OS 9. So when you would load a system extension, they would load in a certain order as you booted your computer up. And that order was alphabetical. So and not only that, these system extensions all shared, I think this is right, the same addressable memory space, I believe with the operating system. So there were extensions that could accidentally load in an area of memory that another one was trying to directly write to. And they could totally screw with each other and make your computer unbootable. So the only way to do this was like a kind of safe mode thing where you'd go and you'd try and manually figure out how to turn these things on and off. And Conflict Catcher made it so that you could actually

• 9:52Ben Gilbert?

  change the order that these things booted and you know, figure out like, oh, this one conflicts with that one and see it in an interesting way and toggle them on and off so that you didn't have to like manually figure it out how you just horked your computer.

• 10:05David Rosenthal?

  Per usual, I'm gonna do a quick jump ahead to tech themes. One thing, I love doing these episodes on old software because such a reminder of like how far the world has come and how much in software, you're standing on the shoulders of giants and work that has been done before you so that you don't have to deal as a user and a software developer, don't have to deal with this stuff anymore.

• 10:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 10:24David Rosenthal?

  So that was what Robin did after he left Apple. And Kincaid, he goes to a startup and he's working at the startup, but he also has this hobby on the side, which is that he really likes to race Formula cars. And one day, he's driving up to a racetrack in Northern California and he's listening to NPR on the radio as he's driving up there. He blogs about this much later. And he hears on NPR, this discussion of MP3s. And this is the late 90s and they're talking about Napster and they're talking about this company called Rio and this player that's just came out, this new piece of hardware called the Diamond that they make that allows you to take MP3s that you have on your computer

• 11:09David Rosenthal?

  that you've downloaded from Napster, the internet. Loaded onto it and then listened to them like a walkman on the go. And he's like, oh, wow, that's really cool. And then on the show, they say, don't get excited, though, Mac users, because it doesn't work with Macs. And he has this thought and he's like, well, I bet I can make it work with Macs.

• 11:29David Rosenthal?

  So he's still working at the startup, but he immediately on the side sort of takes this challenge. And the next day he starts researching MP3. People don't know about MP3s at this point. He'd never heard of it. And he actually calls up Diamond, the company that makes the Rio. And we should say too, for listeners who weren't alive back then, I mean, these things were everywhere. You walk into a Best Buy or a CompUSA back in the day.

• 11:55Ben Gilbert?

  There was that one particular model that looked sort of like a lima bean and on one side. And then it was like, kind of convex curved on the other side. And it like kind of fit in the palm of your hand and had this like blue and black swoosh that ran through it.

• 12:09David Rosenthal?

  That when I first went to college.

• 12:12Ben Gilbert?

  I think that's the one that finally had enough megabytes of storage where it could really blow up.

• 12:17David Rosenthal?

  So, so Kincaid calls up Diamond. They're really excited. They're like, yeah, we would love to get this working with Macs. We'll help you out. We'll give you access to our engineering team. And he starts working on it, but he quickly realizes he's not a good enough engineer. Well, he's great at the backend and he can handle the backend, but he's not. They also are going to need kind of a front end and a MP3 management software. And that's not his strength. So he calls up Robin and says, hey, let's get the band back together and work on this.

• 12:47Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, pretty cool. And it's interesting how it started first with necessity is the mother of invention. Somebody needs to figure out a way to make an MP3 codec that works with the Mac. So you can decode this MP3 file format and play it. But that's not enough. Like, what are you just going to click on every file individually in Finder and make it play?

• 13:04David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And you need, you know, you need a way to manage your, your MP3 library. Otherwise these are just going to be random file names sitting on your Finder, as he said.

• 13:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. It's funny how we take MP3 for granted today, but it was not a widely known thing. People weren't distributing MP3s. They had to become world experts on like, reading the ISO spec for what is the MP3 file format? And how would you go about decoding it?

• 13:29David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, amazing. I mean, there are no APIs for this stuff. It's not like, it's not handled natively in the macOS, nor I think in Windows, which I think is why Winamp took off.

• 13:41Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 13:43David Rosenthal?

  So they team up and they quickly bring on a first employee, a third developer to work on it, Dave Heller, who, actually, I don't think they worked with him at Apple. I think they knew him separately. And they get cranking and they build a first version of the product. They decided to call it Soundjam. And they need to get it out to users, all these Mac users who want to get in on the MP3 revolution. But first they need a publisher. Because in those days, if you wanted to distribute software, you needed a publisher to do it because you needed to get it on a CD and shrink wrapped in a box and delivered to Best Buy and CompUSA and all these computer stores where people bought software.

• 14:25Ben Gilbert?

  Unbelievable. I forgot that this notion existed of like, oh, you need a publisher to distribute your software. I was doing the research and saw like Cassidy and Green distributed the software. And I'm like, wait, so-

• 14:38David Rosenthal?

  Yep, so that's who they go with, who had distributed Conflict Center for Robin before.

• 14:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and I'm like, wha- what? Like, so who's getting inquired by Apple? Why are there two companies involved here? Oh, publishers were a thing.

• 14:51David Rosenthal?

  It's amazing how much things have changed since then. But what this is so awesome, what you're not going to get these days with software and the lack, and when you don't need a publisher. So Cassidy and Green, the publisher that they go with, had an employee who wrote the manuals for the software that they published, whose name was David Pogue, who is the David Pogue, who would soon thereafter go to work for the New York Times and become, you know, the Walt Mossberg of the New York Times. And, and so he actually wrote the manual for Soundjam, which is pretty awesome.

• 15:25Ben Gilbert?

  Amazing. And David is what now the editor of Yahoo Tech, I believe, that publication?

• 15:32David Rosenthal?

  Yep, I believe that's right. I think he's left the, left the New York Times now.

• 15:35Ben Gilbert?

  Pretty, pretty amazing. I had, it's a great little Easter egg that I found too in doing the research.

• 15:40David Rosenthal?

  So they, on the strength of the POG written manual, the Soundjam comes out in, I believe, late 1998 and it totally, you know, huge reception. Everybody, like we've been saying, who wants to get into, wants to participate in the digital music revolution on a Mac, this is by far the best software when it comes out to do it. And Macworld, the magazine, writes a review of it and says, "Of all the MP3 software available for the Mac, Cassidy and Green's new Soundjam MP," which I think MP stands for Music Player?

• 16:15Ben Gilbert?

  I believe so, yeah.

• 16:16David Rosenthal?

  "is the most complete. It's the only Mac MP3 tool capable of not only playing back MP3 files, but also encoding tracks from audio CDs, all with a comfortable, customizable user interface."

• 16:31Ben Gilbert?

  And it has the most baller logo. Like, we will link to this in the show notes, but like this, I remember like this, I used to use this extension called Mouth on Mac OS 9. And I remember like loving having the Soundjam logo sit in Mouth as my little pre-doc launcher to launch this thing. It's like this bald dude with this amazing kind of like, he's got this grin on his face, but his eyebrows make him look like he's up to no good. And he's wearing these real cartoony headphones with lightning bolts coming out of them. And it's like, it's awesome.

• 17:03David Rosenthal?

  We, yeah, the kind of thing that once Soundjam becomes iTunes, Steve Jobs quickly gets rid of that.

• 17:12Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, yep.

• 17:14David Rosenthal?

  But the UI is, well, it's not in and of itself groundbreaking, but it is the stock UI, as we were saying, you could download skins for it and customize it, which were skins for software. It was all the rage at this time. But the default UI is brushed metal. And Apple had actually pioneered, had invented the brushed metal UI look when they released QuickTime 4.0 and Soundjam adopted it. And this is the first application that really sort of popularizes it to the world. And then we go through like a five or six year period where everything Mac is brushed metal.

• 17:53Ben Gilbert?

  It's so heavy. The Finder is made out of like lead dipped in hot molten steel. It was, yeah, it's amazing to watch the evolution of Mac UI after that, right? You go into Aqua and then you can start to get into many steps along the way. But now we're in this sort of like, there was intense translucency and now we've taken a step back and we're at like moderate translucency. And it's, it really is, you see this over and over and over again with Apple where they come out with a new UI like iOS 7, they go way too far. They go hard on something and then they need to ease off and head back towards center. But this is continually the pattern that they do is go all in on some new crazy paradigm and then get back towards something, something moderate.

• 18:33David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, and I wonder, this is total speculation here, but I wonder, Scott Forstall must have been at Apple at this point.

• 18:41Ben Gilbert?

  I think so, because Phil Schiller was.

• 18:43David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, and I wonder how involved he was in, in the brushed metal UI, because he was famously or infamously the, the skewomorphism champion with, the angel of skewomorphism within Apple before he got ousted and then it was excised from iOS from, it was iOS 7, right, Han?

• 19:05Ben Gilbert?

  I believe it was even bef, it was, so it was after the Maps debacle on either 5 or 6, but he, he left right after 6 and then 7 was a very clear Johnny Ive taking over software and hardware responsibility and, and doing, I think it's like this crazy seven month scramble to do a complete UI redesign and get that out the door. And I think that's sort of why we saw so much shock and surprise is it had less bake time than usual.

• 19:33David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 19:35Ben 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.

• 19:49David 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.

• 20:03Ben 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.

• 20:13David 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.

• 20:30Ben 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.

• 20:46David 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.

• 21:03Ben 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?

• 21:12David 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.

• 21:23David Rosenthal?

  The other main famous and now in hindsight infamous UI element of Soundjam was the visualizer. And Apple included this when they, when they launched it in iTunes. But this was, looking at this took me back, took me back 15 plus years at this point. You know, all the MP, I think Winamp, I think pioneered this. But when you would listen to digital music on a digital music player on your computer, you could have the option to have a visualizer where it would take the sound waves from the MP3 you were listening to and then put it through all these transformations and make it into this psychedelic, you

• 22:04David Rosenthal?

  know, landscape that you were watching in sort of in time to the music. And Steve Jobs loved this.

• 22:11Ben Gilbert?

  In fact-

• 22:11David Rosenthal?

  Talked about how it reminded him, reminding him of doing LSD in his youth.

• 22:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And he talked about it like when they, when he announced it, we'll get here. But when they announced iTunes at Macworld 2001, talked about it like they invented it. Like, like, wouldn't it be cool if you could visualize your music? Well, we've done it and like announcing it on stage. And, you know, the folks familiar with Sound Jam or, um, or here's an early hint. We're going to talk about a company called Audion or a product called Audion here in a minute. Just like sitting there with their head in their hands like, we did that. We've seen that.

• 22:44David Rosenthal?

  Well, you know, reality distortion field and all, all that.

• 22:48Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 22:49David Rosenthal?

  So pretty quickly, Apple takes an interest in Steve Jobs and Apple realizes that, hey, digital music is here to stay. And there is now a big wave and big opportunity for computer companies and technology companies to invade the music business. And this coincides actually right at the time where Jobs, so Apple had acquired Next. Steve had come back to Apple in 1997, right? End of 96, early 97. But it wasn't until early 2000 when Steve took the permanent CEO job. He had been interim CEO for a few years and they finally make it permanent in early 2000.

• 23:33David Rosenthal?

  And the first thing that he does after this has happened is he starts to initiate the grand master strategy that would be really what sets Apple on the path to being relevant again and becoming the largest company in the world, which is music. And first iTunes and then shortly thereafter, the iPod.

• 23:53Ben Gilbert?

  The digital hub strategy. This was a major, major key ingredient. I mean, when you, when you talk about ecosystem business models, Apple is like the perfect case study of the behemoth that they've become today, all being bootstrapped off this idea of iTunes was the software hub for everything. The iPod was an incredibly successful consumer product, even before the iPhone was the most successful technology consumer product of all time. And the whole thing was predicated on this idea that you can take your music with you. You've got this iPod. It's all managed there on your computer on iTunes. It syncs, quote unquote seamlessly. And then you can take it with you, bring it back to your Mac. And for a long time, especially when iTunes was Mac only, like, this was a reason to get

• 24:35Ben Gilbert?

  a Mac. Like, you buy the iPod showed you in the door, and then you became a Mac user. And they really, really grew a user base with kind of this iPod as lead generation strategy.

• 24:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, I remember all this happening my first couple of years in college, and so many of my friends switching from PCs and Windows to Macs just so that they could get an iPod.

• 24:58Ben Gilbert?

  Pretty crazy. I mean, that is, that is like, that is using incredible, an incredible product as a really, really high leverage position.

• 25:09David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. So, going back to early 2000, this is all just a dream in Steve Jobs, a very, very prescient dream in Steve Jobs's head. But he knows he needs to move fast. And he decides that Apple, rather than they're going to start developing what will become iTunes, you know, of course, I'm sure they started working on it in-house, but they really wanted to buy one of the existing players in the market and accelerate development.

• 25:33Ben Gilbert?

  Apple actually released something in June of 2000 called Music Player. That was six months before iTunes came out. And it is like, the most basic sort of the Finder. When you look at it, you're like, that's a separate app. It's a pretty bare bones thing.

• 25:49David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So there's SoundJAM, obviously. And then there's also, as Ben alluded to, another product at this point in the market called Audion. And Audion was made by an indie dev shop in Portland, shout out to the Northwest, called

• 26:04Ben Gilbert?

  Panic.

• 26:05David Rosenthal?

  Called Panic. Yeah. And Panic was run by Cable Sasser and Stephen Frank. And there's so much fun stuff to come from this and the interplay between these two companies and Apple.

• 26:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And Panic has just an incredibly rich history. For anybody who's a Mac OS developer out there, they've done, it was called Transit, and I believe now it's Transmit. Coda, Coda 2. If anybody's played Firewatch, they had a hand in building the game Firewatch. And they're truly like a gem of the Northwest, of indie Mac and iOS development. Just an awesome software shop. And they have this, they're just quirky people. Like it's an interesting little aside, but like Cable releases this hilarious blog post every year. That's like the most amazing fireworks packaging he's found for the 4th of July. And he's like a connoisseur of ridiculous fireworks packaging. They have all kinds of just like crazy company traditions. There's this incredible blog post that they've put up about how they created the super unique sign

• 27:01Ben Gilbert?

  that's on their building now as they've grown and they have a shop in downtown Portland. And I remember, I've been following Panic for years and we're about to dive in a little bit to the story of how Audion, you know, was competing with Soundjam and the different fates that they ended up taking. But there's this incredible blog post. Anybody that's interested in this story should go and read the long story by Cable Sasser of Audion's sort of history and story all the way through to its resting place that they have on their website.

• 27:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, and we're, we're gonna quote liberally from it in a minute. But it's so funny to think about if all of this were playing out today. You know, Apple's going, looking to buy a company to get into what's clearly a big technology wave, which is digital music and digital audio. And their two options are two indie dev software shops. You know, today, there would be 15 VC funded companies all pursuing the same thing. You know, all having raised 50 million plus.

• 27:59Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, David, why weren't there? Like there was Venture around at this time. We were, you know, we were pre, was it all going into internet companies? And an MP3 decoder with a desktop UI just not splashy enough?

• 28:11David Rosenthal?

  Well, yeah, I mean, there certainly was Venture at the time. I mean, this was the middle of the tech bubble.

• 28:17Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 28:18David Rosenthal?

  But I think a couple of things, like one, we're talking about Mac only. And that was just a tiny, tiny portion of the market at that point, at least from a VC perspective. And two, I mean, I think we're also just really early in the consumerization of the internet. I mean, you know, Amazon is around and e-commerce is a thing. Pets.com is a thing and Cosmo and Webvan and all those. But the idea, like, there's no Facebook, there's no MySpace. The idea of consumers doing things, you know, sort of for free and quasi-legally. Napster, of course, is around and AOL has bought Winamp at this point, which we'll get into. But for whatever reason, it wasn't a huge focus area for VCs.

• 29:00Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. One way that you can operate as a VC is put on your hat of what's going to be, what's the world going to look like in five years? What's the world going to look like in 10 years? What's the world going to look like in 20 years? And like, people believed in the digital music revolution, which now seems obvious in hindsight. But what's not clear to me is, did people besides Steve Jobs, who has, you know, always had this passion for music and say it's part of Apple's DNA and part of, you know, who they are as a company is loving music? Did other people, including technology investors, also believe that the digital music revolution was coming? Or did this catch just everyone completely by surprise? And that's why you see no funded companies in the space?

• 29:38David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I don't know. It's a great question. I'd love to go back and have been a VC back then and thought about it. I mean, but the reality is too, I mean, none of these companies were big exits. I mean, not even Napster and Winamp.

• 29:49Ben Gilbert?

  Nope.

• 29:50David Rosenthal?

  Really interesting, just how much the infrastructure around these companies, the platforms that enable them to build big businesses. I mean, maybe not in music today, as we'll get into later in the show, but certainly, you know, you think about Facebook, you think about Instagram, you think about Snapchat, you know, just how much that's changed over, you know, what is a long time in technology, but not that long, you know, relative to other businesses.

• 30:14Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 30:14David Rosenthal?

  So, Apple tries to meet with both Soundjam and Audion. They're obviously successful in meeting with Soundjam and they, they know the folks there well, since they were all former Apple employees. But Audion and Panic, they've separately been negotiating with AOL, which owned Winamp and was considering also acquiring Audion and having it, bringing it into the fold and having it power, you know, sort of the Winamp version for Macs. And they, when Apple reached out to them, they didn't realize what Apple wanted, that they wanted to buy them. And so they asked, they thought that they needed, even though they hadn't yet been acquired by AOL, they thought they, it was only right to ask AOL to be part of the

• 30:59David Rosenthal?

  meeting too.

• 31:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. You think about the Panic guys, these are not like business tycoons, like the stories that we've talked about where you have incredibly savvy sort of investment minded CEOs running these empires. Like this is a couple of guys sort of working on this thing out of a passion project and just a burning desire to ship the best software for this use case that they possibly could. And so, you know, for them, they didn't think about like, oh, do we have a no shop clause or anything like that. It was much more like, well, you know, we've already started talking with these guys AOL. So, you know, even though it's AOL and they're not the, they're not the most benevolent people in the world and we're not even sure we want to go work for them, it's probably a good idea to like, you know, see what they think first.

• 31:39David Rosenthal?

  Include Devin in this.

• 31:40Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:41David Rosenthal?

  And it's so funny, at the same time, of course, there's all sorts of corporate bureaucracy at AOL and executives are changing and they can't make the meeting happen. So it just doesn't happen. They, Audion and Panic never meet with Apple. Well, they meet later, but at this point in time, they don't meet with them. And then the deal with AOL ends up falling through too. So they don't get acquired by AOL either. And it's unclear that they actually would have wanted to.

• 32:06Ben Gilbert?

  Right, right.

• 32:07David Rosenthal?

  Especially given all the corporate bureaucracy that was going on there at the time. But instead, Apple needs to move forward and, and so they acquire Soundjam at some point during kind of mid 2000 and Kincaid and Robin and Heller all come back to Apple, join and they start basically ASAP turning it into iTunes because they find out that Steve Jobs wants to launch iTunes at Macworld in January 2001, six months later.

• 32:33Ben Gilbert?

  And they're doing this very quietly. Soundjam users got no notification. There was no public announcement that nobody really knew that Apple owned Soundjam and it wouldn't be around for the foreseeable future at this point.

• 32:43David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And there's some rumors in the, in the industry that start leaking, but nobody really knows what's going on. And the Panic guys definitely don't know what's going on. So they come January, go to Macworld, like every indie.

• 32:57Ben Gilbert?

  David, there is, there is one absolutely amazing little tidbit in here and it's when Cable got, Cable Sasser at Panic got word that something may be going on with Sound Jam and it wasn't totally clear what, he called the tech support line for, for Sound Jam.

• 33:13David Rosenthal?

  For the publisher. Yeah.

• 33:14Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Hey, uh, is it like a good idea for me to buy the next version of Sound Jam? Like implying like, is it going to continue to be maintained?

• 33:26David Rosenthal?

  Supported.

• 33:26Ben Gilbert?

  And got this like shaky like, uh, yeah, I don't see why not.

• 33:32David Rosenthal?

  So they're, they're worried. Um, super funny. This, this blog post is great. And it's so kind of, kind of cable to history and to the community to, to write with such candor about everything that happened.

• 33:44Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 33:44David Rosenthal?

  And he's such a great writer too. And you really get the sense that, you know, he and Steve at Panic were, you know, they were doing this because they love making great software and still do.

• 33:54Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 33:55David Rosenthal?

  So they go to Macworld in 2001 and the rumor is that Apple's going to do something big in music and they're sitting in the audience and Jobs comes on stage and announces iTunes. And they're like, well, that looks a lot like Sound Jam. And.

• 34:11Ben Gilbert?

  It has visualizers. It's, you know, much more full featured like, and we should really harp on this point because it's easy to lose that point today with the bloated behemoth that iTunes has become, but it was beautiful. It was revolutionary.

• 34:25David Rosenthal?

  It was so revolutionary for the time.

• 34:27Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Define new user interface paradigms that would come back into the Mac and Finder and, you know, standard APIs later. It was always the bleeding edge by a year or two on what we would see in the OS in the future. And it was so well thought through. But with all of the great, cool features that existed in Sound Jam and a lot of them, I mean, Sound Jam and Audion had this war back and forth of releasing a new feature, trying to make mine better than the other guys, trying to make mine more beautiful and more well thought through. And suddenly then iTunes comes and it's like the messianic incarnation of what both of them had been striving for.

• 35:04David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And not to mention, free. So included in macOS and completely free for download, whereas both Sound Jam and Audion were boxed software that you had to go to Best Buy and pay 40 or $50 for. So.

• 35:21Ben Gilbert?

  Both free and bundled with the platform, like shipping with the OS.

• 35:26David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, huge, huge announcement. So, but Cable and Steve at Panic, they're, they're undeterred. And after, this is all in the blog post, which we'll again link to in the show notes, after the keynote, they're walking around on the floor at Macworld and they see Steve Jobs. Now, they actually have a meeting, Jobs had reached out to them and Apple, well, I don't know if it was Jobs, Apple had reached out to them.

• 35:50Ben Gilbert?

  This is amazing how this happened. Cable emailed Phil Schiller.

• 35:54David Rosenthal?

  That's right.

• 35:55Ben Gilbert?

  To get a meeting, or I think, I can't remember exactly why he emailed Phil, but didn't really get a response back. And then emailed Steve, just like, I think they always email Steve whenever they release new software, hoping that like, maybe he'll take a look. Oh, they'd emailed Phil because he was an Audion user and they had him in the system.

• 36:10David Rosenthal?

  That's right. He was a registered user. Yeah.

• 36:11Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Yep. So then they email Steve and they're like, hey, Steve, you know, just, you know, as usual, we shipped some new software. We think you really like it.

• 36:18David Rosenthal?

  This is before the iTunes announcement.

• 36:20Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. Yes. And they get a response back that ended up setting this meeting from Steve Jobs. And one of the fascinating things is it's the mail client that is encoded in the headers is still the next email client. He's not using macOS 9. Yeah. And it's not from Steve at Apple, it's from Steve at Pixar.

• 36:43David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Ben Gilbert?

  And it's just like a little one liner email that's basically like, hey, are you interested in throwing in with us at Apple?

• 36:50David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Ben Gilbert?

  And like, what, what, what does that mean? Is that an acquisition offer? Does he want to hire them? Like?

• 36:57Ben Gilbert?

  It's just so, yeah.

• 36:58David Rosenthal?

  Oh, it's such a, only Steve Jobs. He's been CEO of Apple on an interim basis for four years at this point. He's not using a Mac. He's emailing from his Pixar email address and he makes an acquisition offer with one line in a response. Only Steve.

• 37:17Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. So now they've got this second meeting set. So the first one sort of fell through in.

• 37:23David Rosenthal?

  So they get a, they get a second meeting set up for a couple of days after Mac World. But they, they were there and in the audience, they see Steve on the floor afterwards. So they go up to him and they say, you know, hey, Steve, you're like, it's us. We're, we're the, you know, the Audion guys. And Cable transcribes this in the blog post and Steve says to Cable's recollection, something like, oh, hey, Steve, you know, nice to meet you. You know, so tell me, what do you think of iTunes? And Cable says, well, I think it looks great. You guys have done a great job, but you know, I still feel that we'll do all right with Audion. And then Steve says, oh, really? Well, that's interesting because honestly, I don't think you guys have a chance. So Steve Jobs and Cable says, well, Steve,

• 38:07David Rosenthal?

  I really think it'll still find an audience. We've got a lot of higher end features that you guys probably won't ever add. Steve says, yeah, like what? And then Cable's like, well, you can keep count of how many times you've played a song and you can even rate your songs by popularity. And Steve responds, why the hell would anybody want to do that?

• 38:29Ben Gilbert?

  And sure enough, they ship that in iTunes in the near future.

• 38:32David Rosenthal?

  iTunes 2.0 in the near future. So then a couple of days later, they have the formal meeting at Apple headquarters at Infinite Loop and Steve's there. Well, actually before Steve walks in, Phil Schiller's there and Phil says to them, you guys remember the last time we tried to meet with you? It was actually because we wanted you guys to make iTunes, not the Sound Jam guys. And they're kind of stupefied by this. And then right after that, Steve Jobs walks in and supposedly throws his feet up on the table and gets right to the heart of things. He asks him a bunch of questions. He wants to know, you know, how big they are, how long they've been doing this, you know, why they're doing it. And then he says, do you have any other ideas for apps you want to work on? And Cable

• 39:16David Rosenthal?

  replies, well, we've got an idea for a digital photo management platform. And Steve replies, yeah, don't do that one. And then everybody laughs and

• 39:28Ben Gilbert?

  There's this like team of Apple people in the room that all laugh and the panic guys will get at each other like, uh, okay, they all know something we don't.

• 39:36David Rosenthal?

  And then I think either Phil or Steve at that point is like, we're building that it's going to be called iPhoto. And so the panic guys at this point are probably literally in a panic.

• 39:47David Rosenthal?

  And so Steve continues and he says, hey, so, so here's how I kind of see this playing out. If you stay independent and try to compete with us, it's like you guys are a little push cart going down the railroad tracks. And we're a giant steam engine about to run you down.

• 40:07David Rosenthal?

  And then he follows up with, but we want you guys to work with us. You guys have shown us that you can do a lot with a little. You guys kick ass, your software totally kicks ass. Cable, your marketing kicks ass. We think you do incredible work and we want you to join us. So.

• 40:23Ben Gilbert?

  And that, yeah, I mean, imagine getting that offer. They have complete autonomy now. They have no idea what it looks like if they join Apple. It's hard to know, like to really have a negotiation around what those details could look like. And so then they're faced with this, like, and I think Cable goes into this in the post, that basically it should have been a hard decision, but they both already sort of knew that the answer was no. And that they were independent by, uh, it was kind of their nature and that's what they were going to go and keep doing. And so I think this was largely before the term aqua hire had been coined, but you know, an attempted aqua hire.

• 40:57David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So they end up turning Apple down and Cable doesn't talk about it in the blog post, but I wonder if Steve repeatedly telling them that he's gonna, basically insulting their chances and telling them he's going to steamroll them, which he was totally right.

• 41:11Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 41:12David Rosenthal?

  Had something to do with it too.

• 41:13Ben Gilbert?

  Wait, Steve Jobs was kind of a jerk, but completely right about something? I've never heard that narrative before.

• 41:18David Rosenthal?

  Never.

• 41:20David Rosenthal?

  I mean, that's all these, I love going back and covering these Steve Jobs stories because, you know, both of those things are true. He was a jerk and he was right. You know, really, for all his personality foibles, he really was a visionary.

• 41:35Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And so, you know, it's interesting, there's not much of a what would have happened otherwise in the story that we haven't really covered. I guess what would have happened otherwise, there's one fork where maybe they acquire Audion instead of Soundjam and then sort of the same thing happens where, but the two parties are switched. You could imagine the Audion guys, instead of shutting down the software a few years later, end up quote unquote throwing in with Apple and joining. And, you know, maybe those guys go on to VP positions at Apple. But really, like, Apple was gonna make iTunes. They had some expertise in-house that they'd already started with music player, but really wanted to build on top of product that already had some market validation and some of the hard work done and a lot of the MP3 decoding and file management. And, you know, there were two companies doing it. They wanted to grab one, they could have grabbed both, and here we are where we are today.

• 42:20David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. But they did grab Soundjam. And as best as we can tell, all the Soundjam guys are still 15, 17 years later, all at Apple. And Jeff Robin is actually, he's VP of Consumer Applications. He remains the lead software designer for iTunes. He worked with Tony Fadell on the iPod. Supposedly, he actually led the TV project that kind of never came into being, that Steve was, was, is his pet project right before he died. But ended up, I mean, Apple TV and the new Apple TV did come out, but I don't think that's the sort of full vision of what they were working on. And another fun little Steve

• 43:03David Rosenthal?

  Jobs aside, Robin was so important that in 2005, Time Magazine wrote an article, I think about, probably about iTunes and the iPod, and referred to Robbins, but Steve wouldn't let them refer to him by name, only describe him because he was worried about competitors, quote, "poaching his talent." It became a famous, one of the many famous Steveisms.

• 43:30Ben Gilbert?

  That couldn't be a more seg, a perfect segue into what I believe the acquisition category is. And for me,

• 43:38Ben Gilbert?

  I was debating between whether this is a people or a technology acquisition.

• 43:42David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 43:42Ben Gilbert?

  And I think when you hear comments like that and you sort of take a step back and look at what was going on here. Yes, they forked the SoundJAM code base to ship iTunes. It's based on a lot of SoundJAM code. But this was a people acquisition.

• 43:57David Rosenthal?

  Apple was gonna do this regardless.

• 43:59Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and it's not like some insane new piece of technology that needs to be developed in a research lab where they're actually acquiring the technology itself. It's really the people that have played around with this newish MP3 software, right? And really understand that file format and really understand how people want to interact with music. And it's, they really acquired the expertise of the SoundJAM folks.

• 44:23David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, and really it was, as we were talking about in the beginning of the episode, both the SoundJAM and the Panic folks. I mean, they'd spent years in the guts of, you know, the MP3 codec, you know, audio technology and, you know, all of the guts of making this work. I mean, this was not something that was baked into operating system. So they're really, in terms of people who knew how to do this and make great music software for the Mac operating system. I mean, you were looking at five people in the world and three of them were at one company and two of them were at the other.

• 44:58Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. It's funny, the timing of this episode is interesting for a couple of reasons. Listeners, a lot of the time we'll try and do a, an episode specifically timed with a news event or a tech trend that's going on. I thought when we picked this episode that we weren't doing that at all. I was like, you know what? It's about freaking time that we do SoundJAM. And when I was doing a little bit of research for this, I found, this is a good blog post on Marko Arment's website, marko.org, that the MP3 file format patents actually expired last month. On the 16th of April, the MP3 technology, as referenced originally in US patent number 6,9399, and administered and held by Technicolor, expired.

• 45:42Ben Gilbert?

  So MP3 for the first time is a patent-free file format. And it's funny how I don't think it was ever really a big issue before. Like, I didn't really look into if there were major lawsuits or if Apple had to license the MP3 technology. But it's interesting that now, you know, you can build an MP3 app and feel completely legally on solid ground to do so.

• 46:03David Rosenthal?

  Interesting.

• 46:04David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I never would have thought about that. I mean, we just take it for granted at this point.

• 46:08Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, it's a standard.

• 46:09David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. I mean, when we started doing this show, it's the first time I actually thought about and had to deal with MP3 file formats and different types of digital audio formats, you know, for the first time in years.

• 46:22Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I can get hairy. By the way, if you're ever producing a podcast, there are so many file format things that can make it go wrong. It is so freaking touchy.

• 46:30David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah. Fortunately, consumers don't have to deal with this anymore.

• 46:35Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 46:48David 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?

• 47:05Ben 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.

• 47:20David 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.

• 47:44Ben 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.

• 48:03David 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.

• 48:33Ben 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 lagora.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

• 48:58David Rosenthal?

  Should we move into tech themes?

• 49:00Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, let's do it. So, one big obvious one for me is comparing the world of 2000 to 2005 to the world today. I went from being the music on a zip drive person to music on an external drive person to having every single one of my files on my computer itself. And I remember like buying CDs and buying CDs and buying CDs and downloading music and just having this like incredible huge music library and being so proud of it. Like I would go over to a friend's house and we would hang out together and like show off cool songs that we had and like what I had the entire Beatles CD collection imported into my computer.

• 49:42David Rosenthal?

  This was the version of your album collection, you know, when our parents' generation, growing up, you know, so important, it was such a stamp of who you were or your cassette tape or 8-track collection in the 70s.

• 49:55Ben Gilbert?

  And today, yeah, I mean, today I'm a very loyal Spotify user and it really exemplifies how much of ownership and much of products that I would buy have shifted to subscription in my life. Like I don't have a car, I, you know, I use Uber. I don't buy movies, I subscribe to Netflix. I don't have a music library, which was a part of my identity for a while because I subscribed to Spotify and it's all available on demand and I can stream it and I can get it anywhere on any device. And it's really this world that we live in of everything as a service and everything as a subscription. And I think-

• 50:26David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, you don't have collections anymore.

• 50:28Ben Gilbert?

  Totally. And I think that's only going to continue to happen. And I think honestly, that's when we at Pioneer Square Labs, when we think a lot about like new businesses to start, it's like, where's their additional white space and things that people buy now that they could subscribe to?

• 50:40David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Well, and I think it's a super interesting question. For you is, and for all of us is, as those signifiers of identity have disappeared, with the transition from ownership to renting, to subscription of content, what are the new signifiers of identity?

• 50:59Ben Gilbert?

  Of identity, yes.

• 51:01David Rosenthal?

  Is it the filters you use on Snapchat? I've been, but those are available to everyone at any time, too. You're essentially subscribing to those.

• 51:08Ben Gilbert?

  Right. How can people be creative in a way that defines themselves?

• 51:15David Rosenthal?

  And express their individuality, yeah.

• 51:17Ben Gilbert?

  In a world of so much wide availability.

• 51:21David Rosenthal?

  I mean, I think this is, I mean, I think this is a consequence, both as you were saying, of the shift to everything on demand and subscription versus ownership, but also of the massive, massive broadening of reach of social networks, you know, of Instagram, of Facebook, and of Snapchat in its own way, too. I mean, I think a lot of, while it opens up communication and the possibility to be seen and heard to so many people, to so much wider of an audience, it also, at the same time, has a, you know, homogenizing effect.

• 52:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, it's interesting to start thinking more about like, things that haven't been homogenized yet, that could be. Like, you see signs, you know, right now, like, everyone gets the same opportunity to post an Instagram shot, and you just get to pick, like, what pixels are you lighting up, what colors in that square?

• 52:17David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 52:18Ben Gilbert?

  That make you an individual. And there's all these people doing food photography. And then, on the other side of the coin, there's people drinking Soylent, and like, deciding that, like, oh, that, what that guy eats is, I don't need to differentiate myself on what I eat, and I don't actually take that much joy in it, so, whatever, I'll just drink Soylent, and like, it is, quote unquote, nutritious, and everything that I need. And it's interesting to start thinking about, like, there's people that pride themselves on taking the photos of food, and there's other people that have written that off, and they're like, nope, that's the way, then I'm gonna be the same as everyone. And it's almost like, you know, when you think about a business, like, where are we gonna... differentiate and where are we going to be world class and where are we going to just try and outsource our non-core competencies or be table stakes in these areas that are

• 53:01Ben Gilbert?

  our core competencies. As you port that to people, do you think that we're getting less and less opportunities to be different and define our own core competencies because there's an ease of availability to be table stakes and everything else because there is everything as a service or you sort of can outsource everything?

• 53:19David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, I really think so. The really interesting question is like, are we at the crest of the wave here or the nadir of the wave in terms of is individuality and individual expression, especially in physical things and collections, is it going to continue to decline? Or is there going to be a reaction and a pushback to this homogenization to the extent that people are feeling it and people are going to want to go back? I think this might be why you're seeing physical album sales and LPs vinyl is coming back.

• 53:55Ben Gilbert?

  Vinyl continues to grow 50% year over year. Yeah.

• 53:59David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. I think it's why you're seeing a really vibrant, you know, pen and pencil, paper notebook, you know, Moleskine's and other, you know, Moleskine is corporate now, you know, boutique notebooks, you know, all sorts of things. You're seeing it in clothes and fashion, you know, and I wonder if there is something similar, digital and tech-enabled sort of root to more honest and individual expression that can start to emerge.

• 54:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's really interesting. I've got a couple more that are not nearly as ethereal.

• 54:32David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah, we've waxed philosophical on that, too. Go ahead. You want to do, you want to do yours quickly and then I'll jump in with a couple?

• 54:39Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. So it's interesting, the company is acquiring former employees theme.

• 54:45Ben Gilbert?

  When we started acquired, as longtime listeners know, we do this to try and find common threads between successful acquisitions to really understand what makes a successful acquisition and IPO. So that, you know, as we build companies in the earliest stages, how can we build with those things in mind that, you know, you need a very successful integration or a very successful IPO and you don't want to like build something that's great early and then sucks when it's acquired or something. So one thing that I totally thought was going to be a theme that we have only seen once besides this episode is companies acquiring people that used to work for them. And that previous one is Steve Jobs and the next.

• 55:23David Rosenthal?

  Right, right.

• 55:24Ben Gilbert?

  And we talked about that it could happen in the Jet episode where like potentially Mark Laurie could end up back at Amazon and there's a bidding war with Walmart because Walmart really wanted to keep Jet out of the hands of Amazon. But like, we really haven't seen it. And if you would have asked me a couple of years ago, like, is that a common thread of someone leaving the company, starting a thing and it getting bought and bringing them back in? It seemed like it was a common thing, but it has not been the predominant story of these very successful IPOs that we've been talking about or these very successful acquisitions.

• 55:56David Rosenthal?

  If anything, it's kind of the opposite. I wonder if, you know, I think a lot of big tech companies are buying companies that are started by people from their rivals. Like I think about, you know, Facebook buying Instagram and obviously, you know, that was, that is our benchmark here at acquired. I mean, there is, even as Instagram just continues to crush it. I mean, that is going to go down as one of the best purchases of all time in any industry, technology or otherwise. But, you know, Kevin Systrom came from Google and there's so much Google DNA that has come into Facebook through acquisitions. And similarly, you know, Apple DNA into, into Google or Facebook and Amazon or, you know, what have you?

• 56:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. All right. I've got one more. And that one is this rising tide lifts all ships concept where if any of the listeners are familiar with like the indie Mac ecosystem, there's this concept of getting Sherlocked where Apple introduced search, sort of Sherlock the feature. And that was a third party utility before. And when it got built into the platform, you know, that we're very sorry. Thank you for the idea. Thank you for building on our platform. We've destroyed you. And there are times where that is terrible. And there are other times where They do a bare bones implementation on the platform level and it gets better for everyone. And an example of that, I mentioned Marco Arment before, but he built Instapaper

• 57:20Ben Gilbert?

  before doing Overcast. And with Instapaper, Apple came out with Safari Reading List that was baked into the operating system and into the browser. And that actually raised awareness of the category of the concept that you could save things to read later and was good for Instapaper. And it's interesting to think about how sometimes that's the case, but sometimes it kills you. And in this case, Audion guys were hoping, well, maybe Apple did sort of a bare bones thing here. And for pro sophisticated users, they can find out about music management through Apple and then come and buy our software. And that totally didn't happen. iTunes was two-fold featured, number one, it was free, and it was bundled into the platform. And it's something where it's, I've always thought before, well,

• 58:04Ben Gilbert?

  maybe it's, people freak out too much when a platform launches a thing and they should think more about the Instapaper strategy of how can you create something that the platform, by their nature, by needing to serve a wide variety of people, aren't going to serve the narrow band, like, how can you thrive in that narrow band? But you really need some serious pro features and serious narrow band differentiation in order to make your thing worth paying for when it's competing with free and baked into the platform.

• 58:31David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Oh, man. This is such a great lead in into my biggest tech theme I wanted to discuss. But I'm wondering, thinking about this, how much this has to do with Steve Jobs? Like, when you think about, I mean, Sherlocking was like, you know, happening in the Steve Jobs era, and certainly, you know, iTunes-ing, which absolutely killed Audion, as they wrote about in the blog post, you know, Steve was right, and he told them to their face that, you know, when he was launching iTunes, he was like, yep, we're going to steamroll you guys, like, you should throw your lot in with us. And he was right. And then it's later, kind of in the tail end of Steve's tenure, and then after Steve, with stuff like podcasts, you know, talking about Marco and, you know, and the Apple,

• 59:14David Rosenthal?

  you know, default native podcast app. But I use Overcast now that Marco makes, and so do so many other people. And it's the indie software that's so much better. Or like with Maps, you know, when Apple launched Maps, and it was like, oh, you know, are they going to kick Google out? And like, no, best thing that ever happened to Google Maps on iOS was Apple launching Maps.

• 59:32David Rosenthal?

  I wonder if it's really that both the focus that Steve had on really, well, on A, doing individual apps right and having a ton of focus on them, B, having them be key parts of his overall vision. I mean, his vision for the digital music revolution and making Apple relevant again wasn't just iTunes. It was fitting into a whole piece of an ecosystem that he was building.

• 59:59Ben Gilbert?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:59David Rosenthal?

  And Apple's really not done well on that since, since Steve.

• 1:00:04Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's interesting. iTunes is relatively deep. Like, they're not taking a broad shallow approach. They took a full-featured approach. And that full-featured approach resonated with, like, everyone. Like, they did this amazing job of, of making it deep without being complex. And part of that is the praise of the UI design. But another part of that is the fact that maybe Steve kind of was the everyman in his interests, where when he decided this is a passion of mine, and music is a passion of mine, and we're going to go deep into music and be a music company, that actually is something that just did resonate with tons and tons and tons of people. And that he was kind of like a symbol for the everyman.

• 1:00:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. This is the tech theme I wanted to discuss and bring up is one we've talked about so many times on this show, which is, you know, when you're making a product, and I think this just illustrates it so well, you know, you need to make something that people want. And the best way to do that is, and to know you're making something people want, is to make what you want.

• 1:01:09Ben Gilbert?

  And especially if what you want is, is aligned well with mass market. Like, those are the key.

• 1:01:14David Rosenthal?

  Both mass market and the timing of waves and technology.

• 1:01:18Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:01:18David Rosenthal?

  Of which, you know, digital music at this point in time was a huge one.

• 1:01:22Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:01:23David Rosenthal?

  You know, I was thinking as doing the research and prepping for the show and, like, we just talked about, you know, Steve, say whatever you want about his personality. Some people love him, some people hated him. But he was someone who was very often right about things and right about things in a big way like this. And I think this is a key component of why he was so right was he had an experience in his mind that he had a vision of that was so clear to him and that he wanted. And then he was so exacting in managing the products to really, really solve that need and bring delight to what he wanted. And that aligned with technology trends and with what lots of

• 1:02:08David Rosenthal?

  people wanted. And I think there's a real danger in if you take the opposite approach and you manage a product just to, you know, either feeds and speeds and specs, or to just, you know, try and time a wave without thinking about solving the problem. That's when you can run into, run into a lot of trouble.

• 1:02:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Agreed.

• 1:02:29David Rosenthal?

  Okay. That's my philosophical waxing for tech thieves. The other two ones I wanted to hit real quick. I mentioned earlier in the show, every time I love doing these throwback episodes because it just reminds us how far technology has come. And I cannot imagine having to muck around in the depths of MP3 codex. And we are, we are standing on the shoulders of giants here.

• 1:02:52Ben Gilbert?

  We are.

• 1:02:53David Rosenthal?

  And will continue to. And five, 10 years from now, people will be like, gosh, I can't believe actually, you know, you had to write like, you know, in Swift or in, in Objective C. It's this self reinforcing and improving cycle in technology that makes magic happen.

• 1:03:10Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Layers of abstraction that, you know, you used to have to write assembly language and or even before that, you know, the hex or the binary. And then you get the Evan and machine language. And then ever since you just keep building more abstraction layers on top of the stack. And, and then it's a You know, you get HyperCard and you get these visual forms of programming languages and you get playgrounds where you can see your iOS code sort of move around in real time. And we have yet to, there have been many times where people have envisioned the way that we will program visually and easily in the future. And you don't actually have to know about the guts, but often to do the specialized thing or to do the best thing, you really do need to know a lot about the guts.

• 1:03:53Ben Gilbert?

  And I'm very curious to watch and see like, I think to do the easy thing, we're going to have platforms, but to do the hard thing, no one who built the platform envisioned the really hard differentiated thing that you want to do. So I think there's always space, if you want to be different at the difficult product level, there's always a space to know what's under your layers of abstraction.

• 1:04:16David Rosenthal?

  Again, Steve Jobs, it's back to his favorite Alan Kay quote, you know, if you really care about software, you should really care about hardware.

• 1:04:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23David Rosenthal?

  Okay. Last one I wanted to make real quick is just this whole idea that again, we've talked about on this show and this episode and others is it's really hard to compete with free in technology. And if you have a utility app and it's just a utility, somebody, if there is a big enough market for that, somebody is going to come along and make it free and you are not going to be able to capture long-term value just from utility. But what does capture long-term value, you know, is either an ecosystem like iTunes and the iPod and the Mac and the digital hub, you know, and sort of bundling. There's two ways to make money in business, bundling and unbundling, as we talked about on the last show, or taking an approach of creating a network around it like Instagram did.

• 1:05:08David Rosenthal?

  I mean, Instagram was hipstomatic. It was a photo filter utility, but they created a network around it, not just a utility. And I think there's a big lesson there. Utilities can be a great wedge of an entry as a product into building a customer base, but you can't stop just there if you want to build a sustainable business. You have to create either an ecosystem or a network around it.

• 1:05:31Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Yep, yep. Love that point. All right. Should we go into grading?

• 1:05:35David Rosenthal?

  Let's do it.

• 1:05:36Ben Gilbert?

  Okay. So.

• 1:05:39Ben Gilbert?

  The financials are silly on this one. Like, we don't even have numbers to run. Like, the purchase price of this thing was so small.

• 1:05:46David Rosenthal?

  For all we know, we might not even, they might not have even really

• 1:05:48Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:05:49David Rosenthal?

  They might have just hired the guys.

• 1:05:50Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, totally, totally. And getting an opportunity, if you're those guys and they say, hey, we'll, we'll pay you a little bit more than you're making on your own right now. You'll get a stable wage and we're going to distribute it to way more people and give you some team members. It's like, all right, done. Deal. It sounds great.

• 1:06:03David Rosenthal?

  And you get to be the key architects on, you know, what became, grew into the most powerful and best product ecosystem and business in the history of technology.

• 1:06:15Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, yep. And so just for fun, like I went and looked at last quarter's financials. They break out services revenue. So Apple has like the Mac, iPod, no, Mac iPhone. They break out a few different product lines and one of them is services and that's basically recurring revenue that comes from iTunes related things. So it's, you know, Apple Pay, it's Apple Music, iCloud, those sorts of things. And that alone last quarter was $7 billion. So just on those sort of

• 1:06:45David Rosenthal?

  One quarter, yeah.

• 1:06:46Ben Gilbert?

  Services related, you know, those things that were born out of iTunes. But really, I think the fair way to assess this is like, it kind of allowed, you know, along with macOS X, a next generation operating system, iPod, an amazing piece of consumer hardware, the iPhone, the most revolutionary consumer technology product of all time. Like, it kind of enabled the way that they were going to do the digital music revolution and the digital hub. And like when you

• 1:07:12David Rosenthal?

  No, I mean, let's be clear, no iTunes, no iPhone.

• 1:07:15Ben Gilbert?

  Right, right. And like last quarter, they did 52 billion in revenue last quarter across all their product lines. And we talked about this, that like the numbers are almost silly when you look at the next acquisition and it's like, well, you know, I think Apple had done like a trillion dollars of revenue since buying Next, almost all of it in some way attributable to Next. It's sort of that same ridiculous thinking. So I was like, okay, duh, A plus. But I'm going to walk it down to an A for this reason. Apple was going to do this with or without either of these two companies.

• 1:07:49David Rosenthal?

  They were going to do this anyway, no doubt.

• 1:07:50Ben Gilbert?

  They would have figured it out. They would have found a way to hire the right people. This is square in their core competency. It's not like they needed Instagram that came with a whole network effect. It's not like they needed Pixar that came with IP. It's not like they needed some core research-based technology. Like, they were going to do this. So, A+ on the foresight and the vision and the plan to create iTunes and have this strategy. Also, freaking brilliant acquisition, like, great. It was sort of the obvious thing and it was, you know, good on them for doing it. Give them an A because of the outcome of what that small investment has really become, but I don't think all of that value is attributable to the acquisition in the same way that it was for Next.

• 1:08:34David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is everything you would want in an A+ in an aqua hire, which is what it was. And in terms of our, you know, sort of grading benchmarks on this show, yeah, I mean, I think I give it an A-, just, you know, like, great, super great execution, probably had very little impact on the ultimate trajectory here, but it did accelerate things. You know, if Apple had had to build iTunes from scratch, then would have taken longer. Maybe, maybe it would have given time for somebody else to really emerge and whether it was Rio or Microsoft or somebody else with Digital Hub strategy.

• 1:09:16Ben Gilbert?

  There's something to be said for acceleration, yeah.

• 1:09:17David Rosenthal?

  Yep, definitely something to be said for acceleration, but on the balance, you know, this is, in and of itself, no Instagram, but is a component of, as we've said many times on this show, what has become the best business and business model of all time.

• 1:09:33Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:09:34David Rosenthal?

  Okay, follow-ups, real quick. So, Amazon, the contender for the throne of best business and business model of all time. So much going on over there, so much innovation and the latest being the Echo Show. We talked about the Echo Look on the last episode. First a camera, now a screen, and shout out to... Other friend of ours and friend of the show, Rob Katz over at Amazon for being a one of the key PMs on the Echo Show.

• 1:10:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and it's interesting as more of this Alexa hardware starts to roll out. It's interesting thinking about what's a clear core evolution of what Alexa is for the mass market and what these Echos are for the mass market and what is like a side project. Like when you, when the Echo Look came out, I was thinking, okay, narrow use case, but this Alexa voice service is something that is cloud-based and you can put on a variety of hardware. So why not put it on some specialized things, especially if you can manufacture them cheaply and ship it with economies of scale. The Echo Look to me, I'm sorry, the Echo Show to me feels like, hey, we released the Echo and now this is Echo version two and this one has a screen. Because like, there are so many freaking use cases when I'm yelling at Alexa that I'm

• 1:10:47Ben Gilbert?

  like, boy, do I wish I could see the product that she's trying to describe to me before I commit to paying money for it. Or, you know, there's a variety of things, like see the song that's playing, see the timer countdown, like it, the device needs a screen.

• 1:11:02David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. So great timing in this episode too, and you know, talk about the power of a, you know, a digital hub strategy. And you can see the potential here for something like, you know, the show and future versions of Alexa and Echos to become the hub of Amazon, the hub of e-commerce. I mean, what is Amazon? It's an e-commerce company. When you're buying things and buying things through the Echo, gosh, it's really helpful to be able to see it.

• 1:11:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Even the hub of messaging, crazy, like they're Trojan horse communication platform now.

• 1:11:35David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Next follow-up, relevant to right on the heels of our last episode on BAMTech. Facebook announced yesterday that starting today, they have done a deal with Major League Baseball to stream live 20 games, 20 Major League Baseball games on Facebook this season.

• 1:11:56Ben Gilbert?

  Very interesting.

• 1:11:57David Rosenthal?

  And I think, well, I'm not sure. Details are scarce. I guess we'll find out later today when the first one happens. But I would assume it will be done on Facebook's infrastructure, not BAMTech's, which is interesting, given BAMTech is now an independent company outside of MLB.

• 1:12:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Now, as soon as they split, like, there's competing business interests and MLB should do what's in MLB's best interest, which is make their content available on the most places to generate the most revenue for them. And so, like, suddenly BAMTech is an interesting thing for them. It's a great utility. It's a, an asset that they own a lot of and can, you know, the majority of and can guide what it does. But when it's in their own best interest for their core business, suddenly it's Facebook's infrastructure.

• 1:12:40David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:12:41Ben Gilbert?

  Which, let's continue to harp on the fact that the horizontal versus vertical problem that we touched on last episode, that so many people fail at, Major League Baseball's doing a great job at knowing, hey, our main priority is our main priority and this BAMTech thing helps us when it helps us, but otherwise, go be your own business.

• 1:12:57David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And this is, you know, a great, we talked about on the show, you know, why would, why is it in MLB's interest to spin this off? Can see why it's in BAMTech's interest. But this is a great example of why it was in MLB's interest to do this. Now they can focus on the main thing and serve their customers where they are.

• 1:13:14Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Yep. Yep. One more piece of follow up.

• 1:13:19David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:13:19Ben Gilbert?

  So we, yeah, Snap had their first earnings call, where they, in a single day, dropped from 2229 down to 1805. You know, after being up even higher before that, they announced they had a $2.2 billion loss, 2 billion of which could be attributed to stock-based compensation related to restricted stock units with a performance condition. So, everyone's freaking out. It's up, it's back up to over $20 now. Everyone's freaking out about this loss. And like, yes, they're losing a lot of money. Yes, that's true. I'm much more concerned about the potential slowing of user growth from the Instagram, all the Instagram features really cutting them out before they have a chance to grow to a larger audience. But I think that the $2.2 billion loss was very overhyped. Like, it's a one-time event

• 1:14:04Ben Gilbert?

  with a lot of these RSUs, much of it, the public already Knew about that was the seven, eight hundred million, um, million dollar

• 1:14:12David Rosenthal?

  CEO bonus.

• 1:14:13Ben Gilbert?

  That is a very weird thing that go listen to the snap episode if you're listening, if you're interested in that. But basically like all that should have been priced in and expected. It happened. I think it vested like a little bit earlier than people thought, which is why it came as as more of a surprise. But

• 1:14:26David Rosenthal?

  Ah, interesting.

• 1:14:27Ben Gilbert?

  It's a lot of hype. Uh, there's still a long game here. Let's see what the next, you know, eight earnings calls look like.

• 1:14:35David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. I mean, to me, the snap earnings call was like, I guess unsurprising. I mean, these things take time, but um, it's like, okay, well, that didn't really answer the question. We got to wait till the next one, you know, and the question is user growth. Uh, and can they reignite it? And it ticked up a little bit from the last couple of quarters, but not enough that it was snap has not yet. And will need to in the next six to 12 months, maybe slightly longer, but I don't think they have that much time. They're going to need to definitively answer yes or no, and how they're going to reignite user growth.

• 1:15:15David Rosenthal?

  And this is like we talked about on the episode, I mean, just the exact same situation that that Facebook was in right after their IPO with totally missing mobile. And um, it'll be very interesting to watch. And of course, that was when Facebook acquired Instagram. And as of yet, you know, snap has not made any major either internal product announcements or acquisitions along those lines. But um, you know, I think these next six to 12 months are really when the next few years of snap are going to be going to be forged.

• 1:15:43Ben Gilbert?

  Maybe they'll ship free ARVR spectacles to everyone, get everyone on their platform. And then I don't know.

• 1:15:54David Rosenthal?

  Well, that's a, that's one way to use your IPO cash.

• 1:15:57Ben Gilbert?

  That's right.

• 1:15:59David Rosenthal?

  All right. Should we move on to carve outs?

• 1:16:00Ben Gilbert?

  Let's do it. So mine is accidentally very aligned. I was looking through the way that I generally do carve outs is I'll look through my Insta paper and say, what did I read this week? And I'll flip through my overcast and say what podcasts I listened to this week. And the one that stood out to me is the most interesting thing I consumed was uh, the internet history podcast. Shout out to Brian McCullough, friend of the pod and uh, the Napster story with Jordan Ritter.

• 1:16:24David Rosenthal?

  Oh yeah. So great. I'm so glad that episode came together, both of them friends of us and friends of the show. And it was, that was a great episode. Highly recommend. Everyone go check it out. And Jordan, it's very relevant to this episode, talking about early days of the digital music revolution and Napster and MP3s. And Jordan is just a fantastic guest. He's very honest and open about the dynamics at the company and in the industry and how Napster played out. Very worth listening to.

• 1:16:53Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, especially if you, if you are listening to acquired because you like narratives and you like hearing the backstories of this stuff and, you know, the details and what went down and inside baseball, it's all there. So also thank you, David, for doing my carve out explanation for me. I'm gonna send mine.

• 1:17:08David Rosenthal?

  Sorry about that. I just totally hijacked your carve out.

• 1:17:12Ben Gilbert?

  I'll send you my carve outs beforehand now, and that way you can prepare a little something.

• 1:17:17David Rosenthal?

  I couldn't help myself. I'm sorry.

• 1:17:18Ben Gilbert?

  Pour myself a glass and just listen.

• 1:17:22David Rosenthal?

  Do you want to do mine?

• 1:17:24Ben Gilbert?

  Well, I don't know what it is, man.

• 1:17:26David Rosenthal?

  Mine, mine is actually, well, I don't know if you could do mine. Fun, totally unrelated. As we've talked about on this show, my wife Jenny and I have been on a bit of a travel expedition over the last few months and we wrapped it up. We just got back to the States yesterday, which again is probably why, if we're less professional on this episode, that's, we can blame it on the jet lag. But one of our last stops before we came home was Israel and neither of us had ever been before and was just such a amazing eye opening experience in so many ways. And so glad we went and just really would recommend to everybody, if you have

• 1:18:10David Rosenthal?

  a chance, you know, if you, if you live in America, or you live in Europe, or, or elsewhere in Asia, or, or Africa, and you, you haven't been to Israel, you haven't been to the Middle East.

• 1:18:17Ben Gilbert?

  So basically, if you don't live in South America?

• 1:18:21David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, well, if you live in South America, yeah. If you don't live in the Middle East, let's put it that way.

• 1:18:24Ben Gilbert?

  I see, yeah.

• 1:18:26David Rosenthal?

  You know, highly, there's so much going on and I, you know, I feel like I understand so little still about the, that place. But I understand so much more about the world and about our own country, having actually been and seen what's going on there. And even though Israel is just a small part of the Middle East, makes me want to go back, Seymour felt completely safe the whole time, as safer, safer than any major American city. And just can't recommend enough to go see it with your own eyes. It's an amazing place if you haven't.

• 1:18:59Ben Gilbert?

  I felt very, very similar after my trip a few years ago. It's something to understand there for everyone.

• 1:19:06David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, regardless of what religion or lack of religion you are or political persuasion, I mean, it literally, it is the cradle of Western civilization and it is worth seeing with your own eyes.

• 1:19:17Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:19:19David Rosenthal?

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

• 1:19:25Ben 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.

• 1:19:36David 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.

• 1:19:56Ben 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.

• 1:20:09David 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.

• 1:20:20Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners, I think that'll do it for today. We appreciate you listening, as usual. If you are not subscribed and you want to hear more, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast client. And if you feel so inclined, we would love a review on iTunes. You can find us at acquired.fm, @acquiredfm on Twitter. We're on Facebook. Search for Acquired Podcast or Acquired. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.