Holiday Special 2023 (Audio)

Ben has some big news. Actually, double big news! On what has become a holiday tradition here at Acquired, we cozy up to the fire to do our annual review of the show “in public”. We reflect on what can only be described as an absolutely mind-blowing 2023 (LVMH! Jensen! Costco! Charlie! Half a million plus listeners!) and look ahead to some big things cooking for 2024. Plus as always, we wrap with extended carve outs (joined this year by some surprise guests) for anyone still shopping for those holiday perfect gifts. Huge thank you to everyone for making 2023 an amazing year again here in Acquired-land, and cheers to even greater things to come in 2023! *Links / Extended Carve Outs!* - The Psychology of Money: https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Money-hardback-Timeless-happiness/dp/0857199099/ - The Artist’s Way: https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th- Anniversary/dp/0143129252/ - Transitions: https://www.amazon.com/Transitions-Making-Sense-Lifes-Changes-ebook/dp/B07QGRGDKJ - Thinking, Fast and Slow: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555 - Zojirushi hot water heater: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00R4HKIV8/ - Nike Pegasus Trail 4 GORE-TEX: https://www.nike.com/t/pegasus-trail-4-gore-tex-mens-waterproof-trail-running-shoes-qdcSR6 - Mill: https://www.mill.com - June Oven: https://juneoven.com - Silo: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14688458/ - Alias: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285333/ - Warby Parker Amari glasses: https://www.warbyparker.com/eyeglasses/amari/arabica-matte?w=medium - Hoka Ora recovery shoes: https://www.hoka.com/en/us/recovery-comfort-shoes/ora-recovery-shoe-2/1119397.html?dwvar_1119397_color=BBLC - Adobe Light Room: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/ - The Eureka Theory of Everything is Wrong by Derek Thompson: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/science-technology-vaccine-invention-history/672227/ - The Luxury Strategy: https://www.amazon.com/Luxury-Strategy-Break-Marketing-Brands/dp/0749464917 - Candide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide - The QB School: https://www.youtube.com/@TheQBSchool - MNF ManningCast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manningcast - The Eras Tour: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28814949/ - Uppababy Vista: https://uppababy.com/strollers/full-size/vista-v2/jake/ - The Joolz Aer Plus: https://www.joolz.com/us/en/strollers/310110-M.html - Coco: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2380307/ - At Present: https://atpresent.com *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?

  I am loving that you also busted out the holiday sweater. Feels very appropriate.

• 0:06David Rosenthal?

  Yes, I purchased this holiday sweater at the Seattle Nordstrom for our 2019 live show at the University of Washington.

• 0:15Ben Gilbert?

  It's like two months before the pandemic hit.

• 0:17David Rosenthal?

  That's right. And I think I wore it last year, too.

• 0:21Ben Gilbert?

  I feel like you did. Yeah, we were right behind me. I wish we were doing it again this year, but seems prudent to not have a father of a toddler hopping on an airplane and then sit in a confined space with me for five hours right now.

• 0:36David Rosenthal?

  A lot of germs in my life right now.

• 0:38Ben Gilbert?

  Thank you for your precautions.

• 0:56Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome to season 13, episode five, the season finale and holiday special of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 1:07David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 1:09Ben Gilbert?

  And we are your hosts. Did you see what I did there, David?

• 1:11David Rosenthal?

  I did. I did. No technology.

• 1:15Ben Gilbert?

  No technology. Yes, I motion to, you know, the whole board of directors here that we drop technology from our intro since I crunched the numbers and four of the 14 episodes we did this year were technology companies.

• 1:29David Rosenthal?

  All right. Well, it's a good thing that there are no other board members of Acquired besides you and me because I am in full agreement.

• 1:35Ben Gilbert?

  Unanimous.

• 1:36David Rosenthal?

  And otherwise, we would have had a deadlock vote there, one to one.

• 1:39Ben Gilbert?

  That's true. And I don't think our charter really actually ever accounts for what to do in that circumstance. So, yes, listeners, if you count Lockheed Martin, it's five. If you count Visa, it's six. But the minority of the episodes that we did in 2023 were tech companies, which is a very fascinating evolution to me, based on where Acquired started analyzing technology acquisitions that actually went well. But of course, we will keep doing deep episodes on tech companies since we are nerds and that's where we've spent, you know, our whole careers so far. So if you liked the programming and assembly language on air from Nvidia, or I guess assembly language pseudocode, or our Qualcomm episode where we tried to describe how the CDMA protocol works, we're still here for you. We're just

• 2:22Ben Gilbert?

  going to do a lot of LVMH, NFL.

• 2:25David Rosenthal?

  Costco.

• 2:26Ben Gilbert?

  Visa, Costco, Nike, and the, you know, mixed in there. So what are we doing here today? Well, David and I are going to bring you good tidings, good cheer, hopefully, and keep you company.

• 2:36David Rosenthal?

  Yes. Happy holidays. Cheers.

• 2:38Ben Gilbert?

  Cheers.

• 2:39David Rosenthal?

  I've got my cinnamon infused hot chocolate here. It's delicious.

• 2:44Ben Gilbert?

  Ooh, you're feeling very festive. Yes, we are here to keep you company on your long drives or flights or workouts or house cleaning or whatever over the holidays. On our agenda today is a recap of acquired this year, both the state of the franchise from the board of directors themselves. We will also be giving you some new tidbits on our favorite episodes behind each one of them, why we picked them, how they came to be, what listeners helped us select, that sort of thing. We're going to talk about how we see acquired fitting into the broader media landscape, how our views about the show and the stuff that we cover have changed over time, what's in store for acquired in 2024, new carve outs, and answering listener questions from the Slack.

• 3:28Ben Gilbert?

  And then at the end of the episode, we're going to share a little bit about David and my investing lives and how those will be changing in 2024. As David, you and I are going to get to do much more of our investing together.

• 3:40David Rosenthal?

  I know, it's going to come full circle. We started both at Madrona investing together. And well, we'll just have to talk about this later in the episode.

• 3:49Ben Gilbert?

  We will. But first, listeners, I mentioned in one quick line on the Charlie interview and have not said anything on any social media or anything like that since. But I am a parent.

• 4:01David Rosenthal?

  Woo.

• 4:02Ben Gilbert?

  I'm joining David on the parenting journey with approximately a one month old here at the Gilbert household.

• 4:07David Rosenthal?

  Ben, Jenny and I are so, so, so happy for you guys. Parenting, as you know now, is the most joyous, difficult, wonderful, biggest thing you will ever do in your life. And there is no way to understand or describe it until you become one. So welcome to the club.

• 4:26Ben Gilbert?

  Thank you. I think that's right. I think any words that I would say about what it's been like so far are words that other people tried to use to describe it to me. And I found them largely meaningless. I mean, I could say the same things that everyone else always says. And there have been some amazing things written. I think I read the Paul Graham article on kids. I read the fourth trimester wait, but why piece I've read.

• 4:46David Rosenthal?

  You read the Michael Lewis book, right?

• 4:47Ben Gilbert?

  The Michael Lewis book.

• 4:48David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, that was good.

• 4:49Ben Gilbert?

  But like. I don't know, the words kind of bounce off you. You're like, well, why would that be fun? Why would that be rewarding? Why would waking up at 3 a.m. to change a diaper and soothe a screaming? Like, why is that? But it's actually Morgan Housel put it to me in a really lovely way where he just said, what greater gift could you have than helping another human, another member in your family who's new to the world in their most intense time of need? And that intense time of need comes a dozen or two dozen times a day. But the sort of privilege of being able to soothe someone when they're experiencing that sort of intense emotion, they may not be fully formed, but babies are people too.

• 5:24David Rosenthal?

  So. Absolutely. Yeah, well, so great. That is big, big change. Number one, since we last reconvened here. Big change. Number two is Geekwire reported about this already, but you are joining me full time next year on Acquired. I'm so, so excited.

• 5:45Ben Gilbert?

  Is about freaking time, huh, David?

• 5:48David Rosenthal?

  I wasn't gonna say it, but.

• 5:51Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I can't wait. You and I are so just fired up to double down on Acquired and it feels very fun to be going all in on it together. And on the one hand, it feels like it's been a long time coming. On the other hand, Acquired has been such a slow burn over the last eight plus years that there was not like an obvious moment to do it. So it was one of these moments where you sort of look back and you're like, whoa, how am I not spending all of my waking time and energy on this? When it is something that is just, it's our life's work, as our friend Patrick O'Neal honestly likes to say about the types of entrepreneurs he's looking for. Like, this is definitively our life's work. And it wasn't when we started and somewhere along the way, gradually it just became that.

• 6:30David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, totally.

• 6:31Ben Gilbert?

  And the way it's going to work, I'm transitioning to a venture partner at PSL, at Pioneer Square Labs here in Seattle. So still get to keep my board seats, which I think keeps me sharp for the show and stay a friend of the family there. So I'm excited to sort of change my role at PSL. But of course, all of my real time and energy going forward is acquired.

• 6:49David Rosenthal?

  I'm so happy, not only as a 50% shareholder in Acquired, but even more so. Like, you're my best friend and this means we're going to spend even more time together and just outside of the show, outside of anything that that means for us, our business, you know, the episodes, all of which are going to get so much better. It just, it brings me joy. I'm so happy.

• 7:12Ben Gilbert?

  Thanks, man. So we should say before we get too far in, this is not investment advice, this whole show. Dave and I may have investments in the companies we discuss in the show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Somebody here has to follow the rules and keep us. I've got a nice script that's well built out in front of me. I also must apologize to listeners. I am coming in hot from podcast or paternity leave here. And if anything I say is completely incoherent, I am on pretty minimal sleep. So thank you for bearing with me.

• 7:39David Rosenthal?

  All the parents out there will understand and appreciate you being here, as do I.

• 7:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 7:44David Rosenthal?

  Well, let's start the 2023 Acquired Year in Review recap. Dude, this has been freaking wild. I mean, you were talking about like, Acquired has been a slow burn. You know, we have doubled every year and we've always been this example of exponential growth that like, it starts small and you know, first year, we doubled from two to four listeners, you know, like, but no, it wasn't exactly that.

• 8:09Ben Gilbert?

  No, I worked it backwards one time. I think it was like 500 to 1,000 or something. Actually, I should crunch that number, but there is a number you can figure out in year one, since you know what our current numbers are.

• 8:19David Rosenthal?

  Yup.

• 8:20Ben Gilbert?

  But small base. It was like, small base, kind of small base, still pretty small base, you know?

• 8:25David Rosenthal?

  There were many years where nobody would have imagined that this would be either of our full-time gigs.

• 8:31Ben Gilbert?

  No.

• 8:31David Rosenthal?

  And I actually, when I looked it up last year on our holiday special, I was both pretty excited and proud to announce and also terrified that we had hit a quarter million listeners to the pod. Felt like, holy crap, that's a big number. This is like, real what we do. And I was terrified because I was like, we talk all the time, Ben talks all the time about how we double every year. Like, how on earth are we gonna do that?

• 8:59Ben Gilbert?

  Right. You were like, you should stop saying that because it's eventually going to not be true.

• 9:03David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, because it's about to end.

• 9:05Ben Gilbert?

  Which is true. Eventually, it will not be true.

• 9:07David Rosenthal?

  Of course. I mean, unless literally we start expanding galactically or something like that.

• 9:11Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And the question is, how big is the addressable market for people who want to, in an audio-only medium, consume, you know, four-hour, essentially books, conversational audiobooks about business histories? Often in kind of an esoteric way, and granted, you and I have gotten much better at becoming storytellers over time, but each one of those sort of concentric circles niches it down. And I think you and I just thought that that addressable market was, you know, 100,000 people or something at first, but now we know it's at least half a million.

• 9:40David Rosenthal?

  Yes. So the big news, we hit half a million listeners this year, which is pretty wild. Hopefully, we can put up the chart, the Ben Gilbert acquired chart that you make obsessively every month, showing our episode growth over time.

• 9:55Ben Gilbert?

  Which at some point I do want to stop making because I said last year on the show, like at the holiday special, I don't think growth is inherently virtuous for us, for the goals of our business here. And yet, I am the person who's sort of obsessively trying to compile the numbers and figure out, is it going to double again organically since we don't advertise or anything? And so, do I want to be known for the Ben Gilbert chart? I don't really think so because it's actually antithetical to how I think about what we do. But I do make the chart. I do put a lot of thought into it and what episodes will do what? And trying to predict the numbers. I think a lot of people describe it as virtuous to, oh, I don't pay attention to the analytics. I think to each his own, I pay a lot of attention to the analytics.

• 10:37Ben Gilbert?

  I think that helps you become better at making a product that people like. I don't understand why you wouldn't immerse yourself in every single number you possibly could all the time. Like, it may lead you to a different outcome, but that outcome, as long as you're measuring correctly, seems to be make something that people want more. So, yes, I obsessively look at the numbers. I look at the completion rates. I think that's super important.

• 11:04David Rosenthal?

  Well, and related side part of that, thank you to all of you, the half a million of you now for spending all this time with us this year. There's a lot to discuss. So. You know, for me, I've kind of gone back and forth. You started saying, I think about two years ago, growth is not a goal. I don't know that growth is good for acquired. And I sort of nodded my head, but I wasn't totally sure. This year, I think, has really helped crystallize my thoughts on this as we've grown so much. I do completely agree with you. Growth in and of itself should not be a priority and in fact, can be very detrimental to what I think we both want to do here if we optimize just for growth.

• 11:49David Rosenthal?

  What I think we've done this year goes back to the very start of this episode and you changing the intro. We went from a podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them to a podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. And yes, we have continued to grow in the tech world and sort of our core niche. And I think that audience and audience potential is way bigger than we ever realized. But we've also added everybody else in the world now who is interested in business and runs a brand and thinks about brand management or runs a retailer or runs a large hardware business like Home Depot or something like that, you know, and also

• 12:33David Rosenthal?

  all around the world, too. I mean, some of our biggest episodes this year were A, not American companies. B, even if they were American companies, they were truly global brands and global companies. A lot of what we do, if we just wanted to optimize for growth, we would do differently. We would not make four hour episodes. We would release more frequently, et cetera, et cetera.

• 12:54Ben Gilbert?

  It's interesting. Growing from a podcast about great technology companies to a podcast about great companies is certainly a growth strategy or a byproduct of doing that is growth because the addressable market is larger. But I think it would fail if that wasn't just you and I following what our natural interests were. People ask us all the time, how do you pick episodes? And the answer is you and I talk for hours a day. We wander around our house and our neighborhoods, putting on AirPods and calling each other and talking about, you know, what's currently In our email inbox, what we're researching, what we need to do to ship an episode, prep for guests, that sort of thing. And one of the conversations that always is happening is what are you interested

• 13:35Ben Gilbert?

  in right now? How have your views shifted over X period of time? What is fascinating to you now? And I think the growth is sort of a byproduct of our obsessions shifting and becoming these durable businesses and trying to understand what makes a company worthy of being a century long company, regardless of where it came from, or how it was funded, or what technologies were used in creating it.

• 14:00David Rosenthal?

  I think that's been what's so cool for me. And my big lessons and takeaways from everything we've done this year is that those stories and studying the LVMHs, the Costcos, the Nikes of the world, if anything, that's like even more important than studying the great technology companies for building a great technology company.

• 14:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 14:24David Rosenthal?

  We found this just incredible response, especially to the LVMH episode of like, wow, here are these lessons that are not well talked about and known in our world.

• 14:34Ben Gilbert?

  Right. It is kind of strange becoming canon. I never thought acquired would get to the point where when we do an episode on something, it has the possibility to become an undertone of themes that people are discussing. And certainly years one through six or seven, that was never the case. But with LVMH, with Costco, maybe with Porsche, certainly with Nike, I think there was an element of we released the episode and suddenly we noticed the discussion, especially amongst the tech sphere, about that topic massively picked up, where people would go on CNBC and make a point that we made. And I'd call you David and go like, I wonder how that comparison got made.

• 15:17David Rosenthal?

  This is great. Maybe they didn't even listen to the episode. But what was cool is that enough people now have been consuming this and talking about it and getting value out of it.

• 15:27Ben Gilbert?

  It gets in the water.

• 15:28David Rosenthal?

  It gets in the water. Yeah, it's wild. My favorite was a friend of mine who's a VC at Lightspeed texted me about two weeks after the Costco episode came out and said, dude, I have gotten three pitches this week from startups where at some point in the deck, they talk about how their business model is similar to Costco.

• 15:46Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, I don't want to over toot our own horn on this, but that has been a huge change this year that we have never seen in previous years is, once we do an episode, it sort of gets in the water.

• 15:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. All right. So let's talk about the episodes. So we started the year actually with the NFL, which I think a lot about that episode still to this day. And we did the Visa episode that we finished the year with was like the NFL Coda Part Two. Then we did LVMH, which I feel like we have even more to talk about. Nintendo, Lockheed, Porsche, Nike, Costco, Nvidia Part Three, and then Visa. And then our interviews this year, and we should talk about our kind of change in strategy from what used to be specials last year to acquired interviews this year. Daniel Ek, Dara Kazwashahe from Uber, Jensen from Nvidia,

• 16:35David Rosenthal?

  and then Charlie. But let's stick with the season first. Of that, what was your favorite that we did this year? Like Ben Gilbert's personal favorite episode?

• 16:46Ben Gilbert?

  I think the most interesting businesses, or businesses that sort of tickle me, are Costco and Visa, because there's a purity to them. Costco's is the purity of the way that the puzzle pieces fit together in a way that is just artful. It's almost like a discovery of laws of physics, the way that Saul Price and Jim Senegal and the rest of the crew have sort of built that business over the years. It's just beautiful. It's like watching a ballet. I think that we likened it to that in the episode. Visa, on the other hand, is like the best operating leverage business. I mean, they have over 50% net income margins. They seem like they're locked in forever, you know, for better or for worse,

• 17:29Ben Gilbert?

  as we described on the episode. But if you went and asked someone like, what is the best at-scale business model? It's probably Visa to do this sort of least work for the most free cash flow. You look at Costco, not that much free cash flow, crap ton of work. It's almost like the complete opposite over in Visaland.

• 17:48David Rosenthal?

  Total opposites.

• 17:49Ben Gilbert?

  But you asked me what my favorite episode was, and my favorite episode was LVMH, because it was so not on my radar at all, and not something that I valued at all. And I scorned luxury before doing the research, and I didn't understand any of the history. And now I feel like a whole new world has been opened to me of understanding brand and value.

• 18:11David Rosenthal?

  And now you have a whole closet in your house filled with Louis bags.

• 18:15Ben Gilbert?

  I do not, I do not. I only own one thing from one luxury brand in all my possessions. And actually, that item is not made by LVMH.

• 18:24David Rosenthal?

  Dude, you're just gonna leave it at that?

• 18:26Ben Gilbert?

  Well, I, I want to reveal it on a 2024 episode we are planning.

• 18:30David Rosenthal?

  Oh, okay, all right. You heard it here first, there will be at least one luxury episode in 2024. Is that what you're telling me?

• 18:40Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, absolutely. And I should say, I own probably a lot of things that are LVMH, but none that I would consider a luxury. I don't mean like a Louis Vuitton suitcase. I mean, like, I have some Woodinville whiskey in the closet that LVMH somehow, over the last few years, came to own Woodinville whiskey. I think there's a lot of those sorts of things that, where I've bought a lot of things at duty-free shoppers, or, yeah.

• 19:01David Rosenthal?

  You're talking about an item that is truly a luxury item, which is on a whole different rubric.

• 19:08Ben Gilbert?

  It has a sense of place.

• 19:09David Rosenthal?

  It has a sense of place. It is not a premium item. You could look at it through a certain lens and say, this is utterly ridiculous.

• 19:17Ben Gilbert?

  Correct.

• 19:17David Rosenthal?

  And like, how on earth is this, you know, piece of raw material worth that?

• 19:23Ben Gilbert?

  Right. I only own one of those things.

• 19:25David Rosenthal?

  Yes, okay.

• 19:27Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, would you describe anything that you own that way, other than things that are obviously that way? Other than some, like, Louis Vuitton suitcase that you have, or some, I don't know what you have, but you've got some Rolexes.

• 19:38David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I have some watches, but honestly, those are mostly from my dad. My dad is really into watches. And a few of those sort of have trickled to me over the years. I was thinking about it in preparing for this. I do not. And maybe part of that is having a two-year-old,

• 19:57David Rosenthal?

  which is not good for the health of the objects in your home. But I was thinking about that and I was like, you know, I, I would like to change that and. Have something that is meaningful on a different level beyond just what it physically is.

• 20:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. I guess any jewelry would count as that.

• 20:16David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:16Ben Gilbert?

  And these things may not be branded the way that we're talking about luxury branding, but like a diamond engagement ring is inherently not premium, but luxury.

• 20:24David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And certainly I would count my wedding ring amongst that.

• 20:27Ben Gilbert?

  Or a real world NFT for the crypto folks out there.

• 20:30David Rosenthal?

  Oh, boy. All right. Let's keep it moving here.

• 20:33Ben Gilbert?

  Which, by the way, I think is actually the best way to think about diamonds. I spent some time recently looking into lab grown versus mined diamonds. And there's sort of an interesting, I know we're on a diatribe here, but you asked me about my favorite episode and LVMH came up and here we are. So there is a fixed supply of diamonds in the world and there is a rate at which humans can mine them. So regardless of the intrinsic qualities of diamonds, it is a thing that can only come out at a certain volume. And largely they go through the GIA to be identified with a serial number and it actually gets laser etched microscopically onto the diamond. So these things are like, you know, verified that they came out of the ground and you know, the year they were mined and you know, where they were mined and all that stuff.

• 21:13David Rosenthal?

  Yep. De Beers would be a fun episode to do someday.

• 21:16Ben Gilbert?

  Totally. And the lab grown diamonds are chemically identical. And it's a huge accomplishment of humankind that we've figured out how to do this. And on the one hand, they're identical. You look at them, you right click, you download the JPEG and like these things are identical. But on the other hand, we are only going to get better Moore's Law style at creating lab grown diamonds. And so they will asymptotically approach zero, maybe not zero, but some number. Every year presumably they should get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Whereas for something where there's a known finite supply of them, like GIA certified, number etched diamonds, there's a strong argument for that to hold its value, to the extent that you care about an engagement ring holding its value, but that will hold

• 21:58Ben Gilbert?

  its value much longer or much more durably. And truly the best way to articulate it is, well, if you believe that this JPEG has value, but that other JPEG doesn't have value and that other JPEG is the exact same bitmap as this one, like, why do you believe that? Oh, I see. It's got an on-chain location and blah, blah. It's literally the exact same thing with diamonds.

• 22:18David Rosenthal?

  All right. We're gonna have to do a De Beers episode at some point because this warrants a full acquired deep dive, I think.

• 22:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. I agree. David Rosenthal, what was your favorite episode this year?

• 22:28David Rosenthal?

  I was thinking about this. To not bury the lead, my favorite episode was Nike.

• 22:35Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm.

• 22:35David Rosenthal?

  But I don't think it was our best episode. I think our best episodes this year were LVMH, Costco, and Visa. And I've come to think that there's a sweet spot for you and me in terms of preparation and our sort of emotional states preparing for and leading up to an episode that leads to it being good. And I don't think Nike was bad. I think it was perfectly acceptable. But my level of work, preparation, and emotional concern and stress heading into Nike was the peak that it has ever been about an acquired episode.

• 23:19Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, you were a wreck. I mean, how many books did you read?

• 23:22David Rosenthal?

  Over 10. And part of that was, it was the first episode of the season. Part of that was I went to Stanford Business School, which is the Knight Management Center. And this is Phil Knight. And I've never met Phil Knight, but I felt an extra debt of gratitude to him and obligation to do it right. And then part of it, too, was our friend David Litsky at Fast Company was trailing us, following along with us as we were making it, which was super cool. The article that he wrote was wonderful and very complimentary.

• 23:54Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, he's a talented writer.

• 23:56David Rosenthal?

  But all of that stew, you know, I felt like, okay, I really gotta bring it on this one. And what was interesting, that's why it was my favorite. I'm proud of all the work that I and we did for it. But I think I finally went too far. If you look at that episode, I was trying too hard.

• 24:15Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm. Which may not come out in the final edit. I gotta be honest, if you go back and look, listeners, you may not hear it. I could hear it in the first edit. And certainly while we're recording here live, I mean, the number of things that we end up cutting is massive. But David, I completely agree with you. Until this year, I don't think I would have agreed with the statement that the quality of our episodes is governed just as much by our headspace the day of recording as it is by the quality of the research that we did. And now I believe that that is immensely the case, that the flow of the episode, the excitement about the topic, the clarity of the points that we're trying to make. It's about treating it like Sunday, if you're an NFL player, and having a game day routine in the way

• 24:58Ben Gilbert?

  that teaches you how to perform at your highest.

• 25:01David Rosenthal?

  This is gonna sound incredibly self-aggrandizing here, but this is how I've come to think about it, like NFL Sunday, when we're going out there. You go back to our NFL episode at the beginning of the year. It takes me right back to playing football in high school. The games that I prepared the hardest for, felt like I really put the effort in, those were not the ones where I played the best. The ones where I played the best are when you play loose, you know? You go out there and you have fun and you enjoy yourself and you let it flow. And like, it is the exact same with acquired episodes.

• 25:34Ben Gilbert?

  All right. I wasn't gonna share this, but now that we're on the topic. So at the top of my show notes document for every episode, there's two things written. One is, what should the listener take away from this? And I have some bullet points of make sure you nail these points and are clear about these things. And the other one is a one liner that I have written that says, have fun, laugh, you're good at this. Mantras are powerful.

• 25:57David Rosenthal?

  And those things are so important, I think. You know, just again, for folks who are listening, who are or have been athletes, I suspect this will resonate. That's the past part of my life that it resonates with. All of those are important. Have fun. You're gonna play your best when you're having fun. You know, laugh related to that. But also, to me, makes me think about your team, your teammates, you and I, we're a team. And then the last piece, maybe it's the most important, you're good at this. The sports psychology element, the self-confidence element is huge.

• 26:32Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 26:33David Rosenthal?

  I mean, who are we to think that we can go make these ridiculous episodes?

• 26:38Ben Gilbert?

  Well, that's exactly the headspace that I get into that causes episodes to be bad. When we restart an episode, and listeners, we restarted this episode. We got 15 minutes in and we were like, eh, it feels forced. And we restarted it. I can guarantee you that the quality of this episode is already better. But yeah, that's the sort of negative self-talk that I start getting into. Who are you to, what are your credentials? What qualification? Are you sure you looked under every rock? Those are the things that start ripping me apart if I start thinking them moments before recording.

• 27:04David Rosenthal?

  So that's why Nike is my favorite episode, because I feel like this way of thinking about what we do finally clicked for me. It's like, you gotta like, take yourself past the breaking point before you realize, I might need to think about this differently.

• 27:19Ben Gilbert?

  It is funny how doing the episodes and studying these people and these businesses teaches us things that we internalize in our own business. I would not have been able to describe acquired as a luxury brand or a luxury product prior to LVMH. And luxury's probably still not right. It's probably, I don't know if it's ultra-premium, or if it's just like a prestige brand.

• 27:41David Rosenthal?

  I want to talk about this later in the episode, but my quick take is, we are not a luxury product, but we share a lot of traits.

• 27:49Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Scarcity is kind of the biggest one. And that's a thing where I was unable to understand what to do with our scarcity before studying LVMH. But then afterwards, I sort of came to the realization of, oh, we should embrace the fact that we only have the throughput to be able to do one episode a month. And rather than trying to figure out how to scale that, there is a very fair path to owning it and staying a boutique little shop that's you and I and Steven, our wonderful editor, who worked with us on a contract basis. And this is the team. This is what we do. And we can only make so much. And if we make more, the quality drops, or we have to scale in some way that feels unnatural to us. And that's okay. Rather than every other person in the podcast ecosystem that we had spoken with

• 28:34Ben Gilbert?

  up until that point was, well, you have to figure out how do you layer that second show? Or how do you introduce more hosts? Or how do you get research assistance? So you don't have to do that. And the boutique-iness is one of our greatest strengths. And it was something I think I was trying to run away from for a while. And now people ask, what's going to be different for acquired? When you go full time, you're doing way more episodes. No, absolutely not. We're going to make the same number or fewer of even better episodes.

• 29:00David Rosenthal?

  We got to be careful or we're going to turn into Dan Carlin here and do one episode a year.

• 29:04Ben Gilbert?

  Hardcore history. Yeah, I know.

• 29:07David Rosenthal?

  So the luxury strategy, which was part of our preparation for LVMH, was reading this incredible book, The Luxury Strategy, which contains the 24 anti laws of marketing. And I just want to call out anti law of marketing number 18.

• 29:22Ben Gilbert?

  You have this on your desk?

• 29:23David Rosenthal?

  Well, I put it on my desk ahead of recording this episode. But actually, I've had it on my desk for large portions of this year. Anti law of marketing number 18, do not relocate your factories. Yeah, this is our version of that. Right. We're never going to relocate our factories.

• 29:38Ben Gilbert?

  And we happen to be in a particular business that scales extremely elegantly with a word of mouth go to market and a product that is infinitely replicatable. And a revenue stream that scales nearly in lockstep with the size of the distribution. And I say nearly is important. We should talk about nearly later. But we do have a business model that lets you grow the business indefinitely without compromising at all. And like, if you are an LVMH, you do have to go build another factory in order to go serve more customers. There's not sort of that infinite scaling that can happen by the virtue of the internet and media on the internet.

• 30:21David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So to put a bow on the very easy question of what was your favorite episode?

• 30:26Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, so far you have spent a lot of time not answering me.

• 30:29David Rosenthal?

  Uh, no, I did. It was Nike. Nike was my favorite, but I think the other part of the coin question of what was our best episode, I think Visa was our best episode.

• 30:39Ben Gilbert?

  Nice.

• 30:39David Rosenthal?

  There were others that are more impactful. I think LVMH, that episode alone, I think, completely changed acquired.

• 30:47Ben Gilbert?

  As did Costco.

• 30:48David Rosenthal?

  As did Costco, but Visa, I think, was the perfect blend of like an NFL Sunday gone extremely right. We prepared the right amount and we played least. We had fun. We laughed. We remembered that we were good at this. I think you can see it in the finished product.

• 31:08Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it's the ones where we didn't put too much pressure on ourselves that I think came out the best.

• 31:12David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Which for me were LVMH, Costco and Visa.

• 31:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. 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.

• 31:36David 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.

• 31:57Ben 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.

• 32:19David 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.

• 32:37Ben 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. So in January, David and I looked at each other and we said, we should stop doing specials.

• 33:12David Rosenthal?

  Specials is what we called the non-season episodes that we did on the feed until this year. And they were almost all interviews in practice, but anything that wasn't a canonical season episode.

• 33:25Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And the reasons that we decided we wanted to discontinue them were, as David, you said, they're almost always an interview. And what is an interview? An interview is an episode where you have a person who is not a part of your enterprise, something you control, come on the show and say something that they very likely are going to say somewhere else to. So by their very inherent value of it, it is not an NF1 product. Whereas when we make a Costco episode, that's an NF1 product. And so no matter how good you do the interview, you are starting on your back foot in terms of can you create this diamond, this unique thing in the world, the way that we can on a season episode?

• 34:08David Rosenthal?

  And also, there are other people and other podcasters out there who are world-class interviewers.

• 34:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 34:16David Rosenthal?

  And they are incredible masters of their craft. And we were kind of looking at what we were doing and be like, why are we doing this too?

• 34:25Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And you can see it in the numbers. Every time we would do one, even with the biggest names, you know, these people where you're like, I imagine that really moved the needle for you. No, it didn't. Every single time we did a special, it had less downloads than the most recent season episode we did, which is crazy. Never once was a special our biggest episode ever.

• 34:45David Rosenthal?

  To your point about analytics, that was telling us something and that was screaming at us in the face for years.

• 34:51Ben Gilbert?

  Which is, when you make a unique product, that is the thing that people are here for. You have a format and a product that people want, so make that. Don't go do something that's one click over in the commodity spectrum. And we tried all sorts of things. We tried to do the ACQ sessions where we really like, you know, tried to make it feel more casual and we'd pour wine. And I think all the different specials we did and sessions we did and collabs we did, there's something to be learned from to bring into mainstream acquired.

• 35:22David Rosenthal?

  And what interviews now are.

• 35:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. So here's where the lesson we learned around, don't clutch your pearls too tightly. We swore them off. We said, you know what? We're done.

• 35:32David Rosenthal?

  Yep. We had made the decision that there was never going to be another interview on acquired.

• 35:36Ben Gilbert?

  This is going to be a great year going forward where once a month, we have this very pure thing that we do that's, you know, release a LVMH style episode. And then we have the opportunity to fly to Stockholm and interview Daniel Ek about Spotify. And then we get the opportunity to interview the CEO of the then $80 billion market cap Uber. And we would call each other and say, we said we weren't going to do this. So what do we do?

• 36:02David Rosenthal?

  Well, what we had decided, you know, we have ACQ 2 and we started calling that the acquired interview show.

• 36:07Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, briefly, for like two weeks.

• 36:09David Rosenthal?

  Legitimately, this is where the rubber hit the road. We were going to put Daniel and Dara on ACQ 2. And that was the decision and we were ready to do it. Then we just kind of looked at each other and we're like, what are we doing here?

• 36:24Ben Gilbert?

  Right. We are getting far too precious. And I think our preciousness has made acquired what it is. I believe that, but you can get too precious. ACQ2 is awesome, but it has 1/10th the distribution of acquired. And that's great because it lets us play around with stuff and it lets us do follow-ups to episodes where we don't feel like every single person that listened to this big episode would want to listen to the follow-up. And we get to talk about up and coming companies. It's a lower stakes thing for us to do an ACQ2 episode, which is great to have as a part of our ecosystem, but it was really dumb. And I'm really glad we didn't go through with it to put the CEOs of Spotify and Uber there. And so the year went on, we had the opportunity to then interview Jensen as he's becoming the most highlighted CEO

• 37:09Ben Gilbert?

  of one of the top five most important companies in the entire world. And then, of course, we get to spend time with Charlie Munger, gosh, a month and a half before he passed away, which is, I feel so unbelievably lucky.

• 37:20David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Well, we'll come back to Charlie.

• 37:22Ben Gilbert?

  But it turns out with interviews, the answer is, we still don't do interviews. We don't do specials. Acquired is what it is, except for, you know, Charlie and Jensen.

• 37:33David Rosenthal?

  Well, I think there's a couple of themes here, too. It all kind of stumbled into real time with Daniel and Dara. Those interviews actually happened on the calendar pretty close to one another. And then I think we kind of crystallized this by the time Jensen and Charlie happened. We still can do something unique and special. And in most cases, I don't want to say this will be every case going forward, but if you look at those four interviews that we did this year, they were all the CEOs or, you know, sort of protagonists, in Charlie's case, of companies that we had covered extensively on acquired. And I think that, to me, is at least one example, there may be more, of how we can do something unique and special.

• 38:19David Rosenthal?

  And that's not to take away from all the other many masters of their craft out there, like Patrick O'Shaughnessy and many others that are world-class interviewers, of which I don't think we are in a vacuum, but in cases where we've done... A hundred hours of work, or in Nvidia's case, in Berkshire's case, many hundreds of hours of work on these companies. I think we then can do something special with the protagonist that other people can't do.

• 38:46Ben Gilbert?

  Right. This is something that my dad would always say to me when I was younger. He's like, I legitimately don't think I'm the smartest person, but I do think I'm the hardest working. And whether it was in school or whether in his career, the answer was grind for more hours and become the most knowledgeable to make the most informed decisions. And I kind of feel that way as an interviewer. I'm not Andrew Ross Sorkin, you know, plain vanilla, walking into a pretty new subject. He's gonna be just a lights out interviewer. But the place where I can be one of the best in the world is if I have done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of research on a topic, you know, we can start with Jensen on the Reva 128. And that's not how other interviews are gonna start.

• 39:25David Rosenthal?

  Right. And that was just obvious to us. I think that was your idea to do it. You were just like, of course, we have to start with the Reva 128.

• 39:31Ben Gilbert?

  Right. You can't know a story as well as protagonist knows the story, but try to get as close as you can.

• 39:35David Rosenthal?

  Sometimes I think we save ourselves from ourselves here, but I'm glad that we didn't cut these. And I think it can end up, well, we'll get to the stats in a second, but clearly they have ended up being something special. But the cool thing about the core thing that we do, our season episodes, is like, that is the natural byproduct. It's not like we need to go carve out time to do 100 hours of work to go interview Jensen or Charlie. It's like, no, no, we've already just done that is the core thing that we do.

• 40:05Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 40:05David Rosenthal?

  So to throw out the opportunity to continue doing those would have been really silly.

• 40:11Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. So you might be wondering, Charlie Margaret was by far our biggest episode ever. Jensen was bigger than any previous season episode. Dara and Daniel were right around the ballpark of what our season episodes were doing at that point in time when we had interviewed them. We sort of figured out there is a style and a Type of person where the episodes behave as N of one episodes. The sort of decay curves look similarly over time of people seeking them out in an evergreen way. You know, we have seen just as many people 92 days later, which is what today is referencing the Jensen interview that we would see referencing the Nike episode 92 days later. These things, if we do them right, stay just as evergreen.

• 40:55Ben Gilbert?

  And so, you know, we want to stay as precious as possible about them. And so what does that mean? Like, how can we change acquired business to make it so that the answer is we don't do interviews on the main show unless of course, it's an interview that we need to do on the main show. And after some early conversations we've had with some of the sponsors for next year, we just sell them differently. I think that was a key insight for us. We used to do in a season, six main episodes and six specials. And we would sell them and both and say, here's what you'll get in this period of time. And that's still how we sell the sponsorships for the season. You know that it's going to happen over six months. You know, it's going to be about once a month.

• 41:38Ben Gilbert?

  We'll give you a heads up as soon as we know with the topic that we're going to be covering. And we would try to do the same thing with specials. And that drove us to create specials, which is entirely the wrong thing to do.

• 41:48David Rosenthal?

  Right. It was broken. It was slot filling. You know, again, not to take away from our guests, we had incredible guests, but the conversations themselves were slot filled. We had slots that we needed to fill. That works for us with the season episodes because we're going to make an episode once a month that's in our control. But with interviews, you can't slot fill if you want them to be special.

• 42:09Ben Gilbert?

  If you're sitting around waiting serendipitously for a Charlie Munger or a Jensen interview to happen, which is basically what we've decided the strategy is for guests.

• 42:17David Rosenthal?

  You can't have pre-sold a commitment to your partners that you're going to do, you know, six of those every six months.

• 42:22Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly. So stay tuned for how this will work in practice. But the way we're thinking about it for next year and some early conversations seems like this is going to work is you get the next three interviews. We promise you they're going to be world class and we have no idea when they will come out and they're probably going to come out next year, but we can't tell you much beyond that. And I think that to the extent that we find and continue to find great partners who want to work with us as sponsors in that way, that works really well to make sure that the content bar is where it needs to be, the audience is happy and that we can frankly blow it out of the water the way that we do on the season episodes for our sponsors. So what does that mean for ACQ 2? I should say ACQ 2 next year is going to be so much better because there's all this inbound that we get for acquired that we've decided doesn't make sense on acquired.

• 43:07Ben Gilbert?

  And what that means is we are getting crazy good guests for ACQ 2. So it would feel silly not to point people toward that when I know it's coming next year. So yeah, I'm excited about that, too.

• 43:17David Rosenthal?

  So I completely, obviously, agree with you on the implications for the business model and not slot filling and you can't predict when serendipitously you're going to get a chance to interview Jensen or interview Charlie. But this is our opportunity. What interviews do we want in a perfect world to do in the next set of time here for acquired?

• 43:40Ben Gilbert?

  Well, David, I think that's the right question and I think the answer is sort of obvious. You just have to look at our episode list. I mean, who are the people that we feel like we've studied the way that we studied Jensen, but we haven't had a conversation with yet? I mean, it's Bernard Arnault, it's Morris Chang, it's Phil Knight, it's Bob Iger. I think there are people whose stories we know, but we don't know and those would make for special interviews.

• 44:03David Rosenthal?

  Ben, I'm going to give you a hall pass on this one because you're literally one month into parenting and Lord knows I have empathy and sympathy for you, but you missed the obvious one that I was teeing you up for there, which we're going to make our appeal. We're going to shoot our shot right here. Taylor, if you are listening.

• 44:23Ben Gilbert?

  Or Travis, if you can make an intro.

• 44:26David Rosenthal?

  Or Travis, if you can make an intro, we'll maybe have you on for a little segment of it.

• 44:31Ben Gilbert?

  We'll go to the Long Pond Studios. We can meet you anywhere at a posh restaurant around New York City.

• 44:36David Rosenthal?

  You're on the South American leg of the tour. We'll fly down there, literally anywhere, anytime.

• 44:42Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, absolutely.

• 44:46David Rosenthal?

  All right, let's talk about Charlie.

• 44:49Ben Gilbert?

  Let's talk about Charlie.

• 44:50David Rosenthal?

  First, we just have to, you know, we said in the episode, but again, say a huge thank you to Andrew Marks, who's become such a good friend of the show.

• 44:59Ben Gilbert?

  I feel like Andrew sends us more research material than, like, Andrew is like a source for every episode. We're not just going to write his name in the sources, but like 10 sources from every episode are things that Andrew texts us. Like, have you found this? Have you found that? Have you found that?

• 45:12David Rosenthal?

  The minute that we solidify what the next episode is going to be, we text Andrew and say, you know, like, all right, what do you got? And he's always got something.

• 45:20Ben Gilbert?

  Not to mention, he's got like a 20-company-long request list with a reason for why each of those companies should be acquired episodes, kind of making the appeal. And so he always celebrates when we pick one off of his list.

• 45:33David Rosenthal?

  So, big, big thank you to Andrew. He is literally the acquired MVP of 2023. It's not you, it's not me, it's Andrew. And also our other friend too, who knows who he is. Thank you to them for making that happen. I mean, it was just, it was a life experience. I don't know what else to say. I can't believe we got to do it.

• 45:55Ben Gilbert?

  There's a strangeness that comes, and if anybody who is listening to this is like a long-form journalist, like a New Yorker writer or something like that, or has written a book on a company, or maybe even like a PhD research dissertation, you sort of know this feeling where even though something happened in real life, you've done enough research about it where it feels like a story to you.

• 46:16David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 46:17Ben Gilbert?

  At some point, you meet the protagonist and you're like, oh, right. You're like a person in addition to being the main character of a story that I know very well. And that in Berkshire's case, there's a cult following of millions and millions of people who all know the story, who can all cite passages from, you know, scripture.

• 46:38David Rosenthal?

  It is. It's like a religion.

• 46:40Ben Gilbert?

  Charlie is a person, a wonderful person in addition to being this character. And I think-

• 46:46David Rosenthal?

  A figure, yeah.

• 46:47Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, the surreality of the moment, I think, hit me the most when there was a question we asked Charlie and he responded, "I'm not interested in being any more of a guru than I already am."

• 46:57David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 46:57Ben Gilbert?

  And you could sort of see that even though it's worked so well for him to get so much of his wisdom to the masses, and he has, he and Warren both have been these incredible teachers their whole, you know, last 50-plus years, in addition to their main job of being great investors, capital allocators, operators, they're sort of these educators on the side. But that education and universe that they've created has blown up to the point where I think it weighs a little bit heavy, at least on Charlie.

• 47:24David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Ben Gilbert?

  It's almost like the burden he carries to get his wisdom out is that he has to sort of be treated as a guru or a character in a story, rather than just a person.

• 47:38David Rosenthal?

  And I guess- I have no idea what Charlie would say to that, obviously, but I think for people who find themselves in those positions, you know, Steve Jobs was that, for sure. Obviously, Warren and Charlie are that. Jensen may be on his way to becoming that.

• 47:58Ben Gilbert?

  Naval has become that.

• 48:00David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Taylor Swift is that 100%.

• 48:03Ben Gilbert?

  It's almost like the Batman thing. What's the line from Batman Begins where he's talking about the sort of frailness of being a person? And then when he becomes Batman, he says, "As a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting," something elemental. It's that sort of idea.

• 48:16David Rosenthal?

  Totally. All these people are both people and symbols. And I'm just imagining, once you become a symbol, you kind of have two options. You could bemoan it, or you could embrace it. And I think Charlie would say, "Look, it's going to weigh on you no matter what. No matter which one you choose, there's no going back. It's going to weigh on you, and so you might as well embrace it."

• 48:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. One other behind the scenes point to make, which I think listeners might find interesting on these four, Daniel, Dara, Jensen and Charlie, they all were these massive lead time interviews. They don't just get coordinated a couple of weeks before. And the story behind each of them was Charlie was a maybe six month thing. It was once we started digging into Costco, Andrew suggested, hey, what if you interview Charlie for a follow up? Jensen, I think we originally reached out to Nvidia before we started our Nvidia part one research almost two years ago and said, hey, would Jensen, and this was a very different time for acquired. We thought the dream is to interview Jensen, not the dream is to go learn as much as we can

• 49:27Ben Gilbert?

  about Nvidia and tell the story ourselves. And we reached out and said, can we interview Jensen? And even though we had a good friend of the show who was able to introduce us to someone on their executive team, we got a canned response of it's very busy, that sort of thing. And it wasn't until like, we did the work and then we made part one, part two, where then it caught Nvidia's attention. And the folks that were like, geez, we should do something together. And it still took another year to figure out exactly what the thing was to do together and when. And same thing with Dara at Uber. We met, actually a friend of the show, Brad Gersner, had his investor day for Altimeter. And I met Dara there. And I think it took probably nine months after that to figure out a good time to, you know, on the earnings calendar, on the PR calendar, when it could actually make sense to do the

• 50:11Ben Gilbert?

  interview. The way it happened with Daniel was we said,

• 50:14David Rosenthal?

  Daniel was the quickest.

• 50:16Ben Gilbert?

  What did we say? Like, next time we're in Stockholm, we'd love to do it. And he was like, oh yeah, next time you're here, let's do it.

• 50:21David Rosenthal?

  Well, it turns out of all those four cast characters, only one has a professional podcast studio in his office. And that would be the one who runs a podcasting company.

• 50:31Ben Gilbert?

  So we happened to find ourselves in Stockholm, which that actually was a highlight for me this year. I know it was only three days, David, but that crazy, I mean, we had three beautiful days in May in Stockholm.

• 50:41David Rosenthal?

  What a gorgeous, gorgeous city.

• 50:44Ben Gilbert?

  The run, we did a couple runs around the city while we were there and just made sure to kind of take it all in.

• 50:49David Rosenthal?

  And the people at Spotify were so nice hosting us. I mean, just rolled out the red carpet.

• 50:55Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. By the way, I just want to say, I know a lot of people are lambasting Spotify's podcasting strategy. I think people are entirely missing the forest through the trees on calling that a failure.

• 51:07David Rosenthal?

  Completely agree.

• 51:08Ben Gilbert?

  I think Spotify, in their music business,

• 51:12Ben Gilbert?

  Has gotten to scale and has no potential to create a high operating leverage business. They're always going to be giving the same percentage of the profits to the record labels, who have an unbelievable amount of bargaining power over them. So the question is, what do you do next? Audiobooks is a good bet. Podcasting is a good bet. Something where you can eventually gain operating leverage. And the fact that they did the huge Rogan deal, they bought The Ringer, they bought Gimlet. Well, if you look at the dollars and cents today, you're like, geez, they've spent a lot of money, but they haven't generated a lot of profit from podcasting yet. They totally bootstrapped their way to become the scale player in podcasting.

• 51:53Ben Gilbert?

  So to the extent that there is a big pile of money waiting to be the scale player in podcasting, they're well positioned to make it, given the half billion dollars or three quarters of a billion dollars that they spent on content. They now have bootstrapped to scale.

• 52:07David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, that was the price of entry. And like, we see it in our analytics. Spotify is the majority of consumption of acquired out there.

• 52:18Ben Gilbert?

  No, it is our largest single player, but I don't think it's over 50% yet. But one stat that's interesting is from Spotify wrapped for podcasters. They make a wrapped to give to you in addition to the ones to distribute to your audience, is that 76% of the people who listen to Spotify, acquired on Spotify, found us this year. That is crazy on platform growth.

• 52:39David Rosenthal?

  And I think the corresponding stat is we grew something like 176% on Spotify or something like that, often already decently sized base.

• 52:51Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. So, I mean, in many ways, I'm predisposed to think podcasting is more interesting and important in the world than it is. But if you sort of write off the idea that Spotify will ever make decent margins in music, they needed to make another bet. This feels like a pretty good bet, this and audiobooks.

• 53:10David Rosenthal?

  Yep. I think the other side that we see of it is this will lead into some of our, you know, discussion of acquired the franchise in 2024. Podcasting is a great business. I do not doubt that it is a very valuable, very large market for them to be in.

• 53:25Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. If you can figure out how to make being the scale player translate into lots of profits, which no one has done yet.

• 53:31David Rosenthal?

  Well, no one has done yet. And the previous scale player, almost like a did not start, you know, like didn't even run the race.

• 53:39Ben Gilbert?

  Apple, yeah. Which, as we've talked about before, we are immensely grateful for because it enabled this open, free podcasting medium that we have today, which is to our advantage.

• 53:48David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 53:49Ben 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.

• 54:03David 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.

• 54:17Ben 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.

• 54:27David 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.

• 54:44Ben 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.

• 55:01David 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.

• 55:17Ben 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?

• 55:26David 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.

• 55:38Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, David, let's talk about acquired the franchise.

• 55:42David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, well, to kick things off on that front, I feel like you had a little more to say on our discussion earlier about is growth good? I mean, certainly, this is relevant.

• 55:52Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. So my thinking on this has gotten simpler, which is basically, I am extremely open to fully saturating the niche of smart people who care about what makes businesses work and great technologies, successful and durable in the world. And I think last year, again, I was being too precious about like, I don't think it's good for our lives if we become too famous. I mean, a byproduct of podcasting is you're not on video that often. So you actually do get to stay less famous than YouTubers or less visually recognizable, which is good. I just kind of generally believe recognizability is fun until you get to a certain level and then it's bad. And then you can't put the genie in back in the bottle

• 56:34Ben Gilbert?

  and your life's horrible. And I would like to not become that. But if we can keep doubling and doubling, doubling, and it turns out the set of people who like studying business history and being thoughtful about it and can write us with little tidbits saying, oh, I happen to think about it this other way and have thoughtful responses and want to be a part of the acquired community. If that turns out to be 5 million people or 10 million people, great. That's only goodness. But I think my view on growth is we have a natural governor to our growth, which is the universe of that set of people is a fixed number. And I'm just not interested in discovering a second market outside of that. So to the extent that we can stay true to making the stuff that we love to make and serving that

• 57:16Ben Gilbert?

  group of people, awesome. And I just don't ever want to like, you could say, lower the bar or create some different product or whatever, but to appeal to a different mass audience, that part is not really interesting to me.

• 57:28David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, this has become more evident to me too, in some of our episodes this year, like particularly the Porsche episode that we did with Doug Demiro have blown up on YouTube. YouTube, let's completely put acquired aside for a second. My feelings about YouTube are like, it is an amazing platform. It is an incredible gift to the world that YouTube exists. And one of my carve outs later in the episode is going to be the QB school on YouTube, which is a former NFL quarterback who makes amazing detailed breakdowns of what is actually going on every week on your like favorite teams.

• 58:08Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 58:09David Rosenthal?

  It's incredible. Like the fact that that is available and accessible for free.

• 58:13Ben Gilbert?

  I'm literally going to subscribe to that right now.

• 58:15David Rosenthal?

  Oh, it's amazing. JTO Sullivan, we'll talk more about it later. Go subscribe if you care at all about football, even if you don't. That said, for our episodes that have gotten big on YouTube, if you go look at the comments.

• 58:28Ben Gilbert?

  It's awful.

• 58:29David Rosenthal?

  It is 100% not even the same universe of experience that the acquired Slack community is. And like this kind of crystallized for me what you're talking about of like, anybody who is the type of person who really cares about knowledge, understanding these great businesses, these stories we tell and learning from them, come on in. Like, we want as many people of those in the world. The YouTube comment world out there is not what we want.

• 58:57Ben Gilbert?

  Right. And I'm not trying to be pretentious. I'm not saying like, you must have thought about it as much as I have in order to be a part of that. No, I feel like this has been an eight year journey for us and for me, a 20 year journey of learning about what makes these technologies and these businesses become powerful forces in our world. Anyone who is anywhere on that journey, including far past you and I, David, on that journey, I would love to have a relationship with either two way through the Slack or even if it's just one way through people listening to acquired. So I'm not saying like, I just want to appeal to the people who are like, ah, here's a gotcha. Um, there actually is an eighth power. It's not that. It's the curious, thoughtful people who are not in the YouTube comments of the Porsche episode.

• 59:40David Rosenthal?

  This had never happened to any of our episodes before. Until this year, we were not exposed to.

• 59:49David Rosenthal?

  This part of the internet.

• 59:50Ben Gilbert?

  Well, nothing had like algorithmically blown up.

• 59:52David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 59:53Ben Gilbert?

  And reached a lot of people quickly. The only way anybody had really heard of acquired until this year was their friend told them. And that is always going to be a really high quality way to grow your audience. But if an audience grows quickly, it's like the masses just enter and you get who shows up.

• 1:00:10David Rosenthal?

  Yep. I think for both of us, this really kind of clarified what we really want and meant by this. Uh, we're a little wary about growth. Like, it's not that we're worried about growth. It's that we want to keep this, you know, place that's about knowledge.

• 1:00:26Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Well, and last year, I think we were talking about, we were getting a little bit shaky about the impact on our business from growing the show because getting larger wasn't equating to growing the size of our revenue. And it also was creating problems for the classic sort of startup and growth stage companies that had been our long time sponsors, where we were going to them and saying, okay, the audience is four times bigger than when we worked with you two years ago. Let's have a conversation about what it should cost to sponsor the show. It was just like an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force. There just wasn't anything to be done. And so we've had to get creative in figuring out, what do we do to continue to grow the business?

• 1:01:12Ben Gilbert?

  Well, it doesn't have to be commensurate with the audience, but the audience growing should make acquired a more viable platform for larger sponsors, deeper partnerships, ways that we can sort of increase both the size of our business, but also like the durability and importance in the world of our business.

• 1:01:31David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So as we've started experiencing some of the growth that we talked about, we realized that we'd kind of hit a scale now where acquired is a viable platform and partner to new sponsors that we can work with. Just to talk about what those are for season 14, starting in January, two of our three sponsors are going to be JP Morgan, specifically JP Morgan's Payments Division and ServiceNow, both of which are incredible companies. We are super excited to work with them. But in both of those cases, we knew those companies and knew those people there for several years now.

• 1:02:13Ben Gilbert?

  Right. We should say the teams that have decided to partner with us from each of those companies have been longtime Acquired fans and we've gotten to know over the course of years and years and years. And the answer has sort of always been, hey, we should do something together. And then like we talk about it for a while and then the answer is always kind of like, okay, you're sort of this like little niche, maybe there's something to do. And now the conversation is very much like, oh, wow. You show up in the world in a big way with an important set of people and you're now in this category that we can totally work with you as a durable partner, that we want to like build this deeper relationship with. And especially now that we're in our eighth year, it's a very different thing to be partnering with Acquired than it was when we were in our third year.

• 1:02:56Ben Gilbert?

  It's not like a scrappy startup thing. It's a trusted entity in the world.

• 1:03:00David Rosenthal?

  Yep. It would have been odd for Fortune 500s to work with us before recently. And now starting to work with their teams, how JP Morgan thinks about their brand and their positioning and their kind of whole set of marketing activities is a completely different animal than how startups and, you know, earlier stage tech companies do.

• 1:03:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And it's an intensely coordinated effort with a calendar that is already full. By the time you're finishing 2023, 2024 is largely known. There's a whole set of events. There is a set of campaigns that are going to happen at different times. And these things are adaptable, but my gosh, the level of foresight and planning that we've gotten to work with from those teams has just been like a whole different animal than what we're used to. And we love the nimbleness of small companies and that enables us to do special things together. Sort of our fun task for next year, which I'm excited to unveil some of the stuff we're doing, will be to bring that custom thing that we're able to do with these small

• 1:04:08Ben Gilbert?

  companies and create native content for the medium and do other collaborations with them as a company. For example, the way that we invest in our sponsors, or the way that we speak at their conferences and things like that, to bring that to like, large Fortune 500 enterprises. And that's such an amazing dance. Like, the way that these marketing organizations are able to figure out, okay, can we talk about this partner of ours? And in what way can we talk about it? And how much leeway can we give Ben and David to natively work in an acquired theme from six episodes ago and trust them that in this episode, it's going to come across right on air? It takes a very special marketing department to be able to behave the way that the Vantas and the Modern Treasuries and

• 1:04:50Ben Gilbert?

  the Vouches of the world do while stewarding a 20, 30, 100-year brand. And a few other things we've got up our sleeve, I think the goal is to be able to continue to work with these sort of recent product market fit, you know, Series B-ish companies that we've always worked with. So between the back catalog, between interviews, we will figure out ways that we can still work with those companies. Because frankly, those are the types of companies that David and I love using for acquired. I mean, we're customers of Vouch, and we use Modern Treasury. We like playing with it. We like following the founders on their journeys. We like having the founders on ACQ2, so we can kind of learn about how they're building their companies. We also like getting the exposure to be able to invest.

• 1:05:34Ben Gilbert?

  So it's awesome to be able to build these really tight relationships with those companies, especially when they're founded. Like, I just keep going back to Dimitri and his co-founders coming up to us at our very first live show, after they had come out of YC, and telling us about this tiny little Modern Treasury at the time. And you just look at the behemoth amount of money that they move now. There are dozens of companies in the acquired ecosystem that we have relationships with, that we want to be able to continue to be a partner to, and just figure out the right way to structure that.

• 1:06:03David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And just as importantly, dozens, if not more than dozens, that are going to be coming up over the next set of years.

• 1:06:10Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, David, what you're getting to here is now that we're both full time on acquired, we finally have the opportunity to do our investing together and do it in a way that's uniquely acquired and that is sort of native to acquired. And so there's no big announcement or anything, but that's the thing to share with the acquired community is I've been writing these little angel checks into probably 10-ish of our sponsors at this point and ACQ2 guests and companies we've gotten to know. And we're finally going to be able to kind of do that at scale and do it together in a way that we're not spending a lot of our time hearing early-stage pitches or anything like that. But for companies that we already know well, David and I are going to join our investing forces and invest more in those growth-stage, market-leading tech companies.

• 1:06:51David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And as an early example of this, our great friends over at Vanta and their CEO Christina have been very, very kind guinea pigs for us. So Vanta has been a longtime partner of the show. We've helped grow their business. And last year, Kindergarten Ventures, the early-stage angelist fund that I run with my friend Nap, we did a $10 million SPV in Vanta's Series B. And that was a great test of can we invest in a market-leading company and put meaningful capital to work? So that's a playbook that we're now going to be able to run more often.

• 1:07:28Ben Gilbert?

  More and together and specifically as a part of acquired. I just have this funny thing that's happened so much over the last two, three years, which is a company is raising great up round from, you know, one of the best few investors in the world in technology companies and says, would you like an allocation? I can give you one or two or $10 million in this big growth round. And I, you know, write some little angel check and like, that's been great, but it's time to do more with that opportunity.

• 1:07:58David Rosenthal?

  Yep. This is all part of you coming full time and it's time. It's time for all this to happen.

• 1:08:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. It's time. So that's sort of the state of what we're thinking about for investing, which we'll put into action early next year and sort of the direction that our sponsorships have been going to. And we should say, we're excited to welcome back for next season. In the third slot, Friends of the Show Pilot and Vanta are splitting slot number three. So first three episodes are going to be Vanta, second three are going to be Pilot. And I think we figured out a nice balance to be able to work with Fortune 500s as sort of a scale platform and also to be in business, both investing and on a sponsorship basis for their go to market with growth stage companies.

• 1:08:37David Rosenthal?

  All of which we are super excited about. But you and I are super clear with each other and we want to be super clear listeners with all of you too. The show is the most important thing. Acquired is the show. That is what you and I love doing. That is why you and I are full-time podcasters now and all of our effort is going to go into the show.

• 1:09:00Ben Gilbert?

  Right. It's what we're most excited about, but it's also, if you just think about the Mungerism, you know, you show me the behavior and I'll show you the incentives. It's literally the thing that makes it all work. If you look at the acquired flywheel, it is produce unbelievably high-quality, deep dives on these companies and try to create some of the deepest business content in the world in a very, very approachable, fun, conversational way and share the learning journey that we're on with everyone. And like you said a minute ago, we're really clear with each other. Like, I feel like that mantra comes up on our phone call once a week or something. And it's like, the quality of the episodes is all that matters. And, you know, we just spent 10 minutes talking about how we're evolving the franchise and working with Fortune 500s and, you know, how we're

• 1:09:45Ben Gilbert?

  going to be doing more investing together and all this stuff. The only thing that matters that drives all of it is quality of episodes.

• 1:09:52David Rosenthal?

  Yes. So on that front, we've got some fun stuff planned for next year. Episode one, we are already deep in research for, we're not going to give it away what it is, but it is a new category for acquired, which is...

• 1:10:08Ben Gilbert?

  I don't think we've ever touched it in all 280 episodes or whatever. And it's one of the largest categories of spend for most countries' GDPs in the world.

• 1:10:18David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I think gotta be probably every country's GDP in the world.

• 1:10:22Ben Gilbert?

  Depending on their level of dysfunction, yeah.

• 1:10:24David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, good point. Anyway, we're already deep in the research. The story itself, like industry aside, financials aside, you know, market cap aside, this is a century-long incredible story too. So I'm really, really pumped.

• 1:10:42Ben Gilbert?

  It turns out there's a lot of them out there. We often get the question, are you afraid you're going to run out of episodes to do? No, everywhere we look, there's like some new fascinating multi-generation business that you'd never expect could have thrived through all these times that they have and have five unique, amazing vignettes to tell through their whole history to today. Like, as long as we want to keep doing this, there will be fuel to keep doing it.

• 1:11:07David Rosenthal?

  This year, it was brands and luxury and retailers. It'll be, you know, this other thing hopefully next year, but like, we look around the corner and there's a whole new category of companies to cover.

• 1:11:19Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:11:20David Rosenthal?

  So we're pumped for that. Ben, you have already spilled the beans that another

• 1:11:25Ben Gilbert?

  Luxury.

• 1:11:25David Rosenthal?

  Luxury brand is in the works.

• 1:11:27Ben Gilbert?

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:28David Rosenthal?

  Absolutely. What else we got cooking?

• 1:11:31Ben Gilbert?

  We'll hit some big tech. We have to. It feels like a obligatory nod. We'll hit something in the sort of entertainment, gaming, streaming world. And we could keep naming categories, but one listener question that we got that I think is worth chatting about here is how do we handle current events? Because there are lots of episodes that would be very appealing to do. For example, the dozens of requests we got two weeks ago or three weeks ago for OpenAI after the boardroom drama. We very much have moved away from current events. And I think that is in part because of what we talked about earlier, that we want to create N of one content.

• 1:12:13Ben Gilbert?

  And the way to create the most possible commodity content is to try to cover the current news cycle that literally everyone else is covering concurrently. I think that's a way to get completely drowned out in the noise, create something that's not special and create something that even if you blow it out of the water, has a shelf life in this world of about eight hours. And so we have decided to move as far away from that as possible. And the other reason I think is a little bit our disposition where David, when you and I are looking at something brand new that's unfolding in real time, I think we've really started trusting our gut that there's probably more here than there seems to appear on the surface. And years ago, I don't think we felt that. I think we thought Uber is going public? Cover Uber.

• 1:12:58Ben Gilbert?

  Even three years ago, Airbnb is going public? Cover Airbnb. And, you know, there was an acquired way to do it where most of the episode could actually focus on, you know, the last 10 years and only a little bit at the end was focused on the last few months. But the more current an event is, the less evergreen value that it will have and the more likely it is that you could really blow it. Like, I feel super self-conscious that we interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried. And like, you know, we're not investigative journalists. We weren't going to spend the time to like, try to unfold and dig up, hey, is this all legit? It's like Sequoia had just invested a huge amount of money. Like, everyone and all the possible signals had validated this person and this company. It was seemingly enormously free cash flow positive.

• 1:13:43David Rosenthal?

  And yet, yeah, we regret doing it.

• 1:13:46Ben Gilbert?

  We totally regret doing it.

• 1:13:48David Rosenthal?

  And we're going to try our best not to set ourselves up to do something like that again in the future.

• 1:13:52Ben Gilbert?

  So the question becomes, what should you do? And what we are structurally well set up to do is these huge retrospectives where the story is written and the story is known and it's about really synthesizing it and applying it to today's world, where there is just no way that we are ever going to do the sort of investigative journalism and frankly, like investment diligence, often with private information that you need to do to get a real time story right. It is structurally impossible for us, so swear it off. I think that's the answer.

• 1:14:25David Rosenthal?

  I would even go so far as to say, you know, something that I've taken from, especially the last couple of years of acquired, is the story is always deeper than you think. And so let's even say we were set up to do investigative journalism and deep diligence that we would then share with the public on a company.

• 1:14:45Ben Gilbert?

  In real time.

• 1:14:45David Rosenthal?

  In real time, I still think it's impossible to get it right. I mean, look at the best VCs out there. They are, at least on the diligence and investing side of the equation, making these calls in real time. And the very best of them only get it right, what, 20% of the time at most? You know, 30% of the time? I don't think it is possible to do.

• 1:15:07Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, fraud is different.

• 1:15:09David Rosenthal?

  Yes, I'm not talking about fraud. I'm just talking about getting the story right. Like, the story of Uber that we did on IPO Day back when we did that episode. Like, that was not the full story of Uber.

• 1:15:21Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. To revisit the SBF interview in particular, I haven't listened to it in a long time. I do think we've generally had our wits about us enough to always sort of be question askers in terms of like, hey, this seems really crazy. How did that happen? And you and I have sort of never been the types to be like, everyone should be extremely excited about this, and we urge you to go get involved with this now. I always sort of chuckle when we say the not investment advice, but that's more my demeanor. I truly mean it. I was like, hey, I've done a certain amount of work on this. I'm going to tell you what I learned, and also, I am not recommending you act on this in any way, ever. And I think that fortunately, our disposition, especially among some of the crypto and web three mania,

• 1:16:05Ben Gilbert?

  was a little bit more of that, but we've learned lessons from that. And those lessons are, you get to choose the games you play, and we don't need to play the current mania's game.

• 1:16:16David Rosenthal?

  Totally. And as much as I want to take as a kind, personal compliment, all the things you're saying, and apply it to myself too, but I really got to give credit to you. I think this is a big part of the demeanor that you bring in your personality to the show. Like, you are an optimist, as we both are, and we've talked about a lot on the show.

• 1:16:36Ben Gilbert?

  But a skeptic.

• 1:16:38David Rosenthal?

  Well, in the big picture, you're an optimist.

• 1:16:41Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41David Rosenthal?

  And so I think this is one of the things that makes us a really good team. Like, in terms of the actual goal and what we're trying to do here, and acquired and what it is and what we want it to be, we are 100% aligned. And- You do a really good job keeping us in check on this front.

• 1:16:58Ben Gilbert?

  Thank you. And if we didn't have you, then we would just tell stories of old retailers and old oil companies that, you know, carry no, no risk associated with them.

• 1:17:07David Rosenthal?

  Hey, maybe we should do that because those are our biggest episodes.

• 1:17:11Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Thank you. I'll take the compliment and you do need both. You need someone who's staying attuned to like, maybe this is this new thing everyone is talking about as a breakthrough, interesting thing. And you also need the, hey, let's pay attention to history. And I think someone asked a question in Slack, do you consider yourselves journalists? And I, if anything, because we've gotten the question, are you analysts? Are you journalists? Are you, we're certainly not reporters, but I think on that spectrum, we've shifted much more toward historians than journalists. I don't ever expect that we are going to get a story right about something in flight. But hopefully, given, you know, a couple of months to prepare, we can get the story right about something that's happened over a long period of time with a lot of perspectives,

• 1:17:52Ben Gilbert?

  where people are willing to share everything they sort of know, since the hatchets are buried. And like, does anyone have the story right on what happened in the OpenAI boardroom right now? I don't think so.

• 1:18:02David Rosenthal?

  I don't think so either. You know, reflecting on this too, I think ironically, moving to this role as our and, you know, my, over the past couple of years, official, you know, job function and identity of being historian versus venture capitalist investor has made me a much better investor.

• 1:18:25Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, painted the truth.

• 1:18:26David Rosenthal?

  And for me specifically, when I was only an investor or investor was the primary thing, everything we were just talking about were both strengths and weaknesses for me. I would fall in love with companies, deeply in love with companies. And obviously for people who listen to us, I still do this with acquired episodes with the companies we cover. And that was a great strength too. Like you can really help companies and founders can really feel like you are on their team and aligned and pulling with them. And also just purely in terms of making the right investments, having a bit more arms length, objectivity and perspective helps. Shifting my focus to the show.

• 1:19:10David Rosenthal?

  Certainly has made me a better investor. Like I just look at like the investments that I've done and I've been more active in the past few years than I was when I was a VC and you and I are going to be even more active together going forward. I never would have expected this, but it has really helped me.

• 1:19:26Ben Gilbert?

  Turns out knowing history is very helpful in analyzing the present.

• 1:19:29David Rosenthal?

  Yes. And just having this other thing be my obsession has

• 1:19:34Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:19:34David Rosenthal?

  allowed me to have a little more arms length.

• 1:19:36Ben Gilbert?

  It's also very nice because what it does is it puts most things in your too hard pile. Like the fact that your main job isn't to go pick early stage companies, like when the whole world is your too hard pile because you need to research an acquired episode, only the no brainers end up actually grabbing your time.

• 1:19:52David Rosenthal?

  A hundred percent. Yes.

• 1:19:54Ben Gilbert?

  The no brainers that don't take up weeks and weeks of your time to decide if you should do it or not are the ones that end up actually becoming the investments that you do. And especially when you can sort of take something you've learned from history and apply it to the present. I think that's the David Rosenthal sweet spot.

• 1:20:11David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 1:20:12Ben Gilbert?

  It's funny, marketing in particular, I think doing acquired has made me such a more savvy marketer. Perhaps the most useful that I am in boardrooms now is being like a reality check on, are you actually reaching people, A, in a medium that's going to convert to what you want them to do and B, with a messaging that people will care about. Because most of the time, most people are creating lots and lots of copy and work product that nobody cares about at all. And that goes for podcasts and that goes for startups. And I think breaking through and creating something where people know, oh, I should pay attention to this. That's still so rare.

• 1:20:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. We were having this discussion, you and me on Zoom a couple of months ago with a world-class investor and the sort of frame that we put on it was taste.

• 1:21:05Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, this conversation. Yeah.

• 1:21:07David Rosenthal?

  You can't really teach it. You certainly can develop it, but this is a version of that.

• 1:21:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. 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.

• 1:21:27David 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?

• 1:21:44Ben 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.

• 1:21:59David 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.

• 1:22:23Ben 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.

• 1:22:42David 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.

• 1:23:12Ben 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. Okay. What's next on the docket?

• 1:23:39David Rosenthal?

  Well, keeping on this topic of audience Q and A, a couple of weeks ago, we got this kind email from listener Martin from Scotland. In it, he had a list of questions for us and said, if you have time to answer a few of them, I would really appreciate it. And we looked at it and we said, gosh, these are awesome questions.

• 1:24:03Ben Gilbert?

  Should this be the entire episode?

• 1:24:04David Rosenthal?

  This should be our holiday special. So, thank you, Martin. We are going to dive into a bunch of them here, and they are just fantastic. So, number one, what is the book or books you've given most as a gift and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Ben, you want to go first?

• 1:24:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I am not actually a huge book gifter. I love the practice. I just never remember to do it. It's great that when people are able to do that. I think a huge one for me is Psychology of Money. There's a recency bias on it. And we mentioned Morgan Housel at the top of the show, good friend of the show, great, great human. I mean, truly, I massively changed the way that I personally invest.

• 1:24:43David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:24:44Ben Gilbert?

  Based on that book and the way that I just think about spending my time and family and demeanor throughout the day. Another one is this book, and I haven't read it in probably 12, 14 years. It's called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.

• 1:24:58David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah. Tim Ferriss loves this book, right?

• 1:25:00Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I read it as a part of a college class, a cool class at Ohio State called Personal Creativity and Innovation. And one of the mechanics in the book is called morning papers. And the rule is you must write three pages, stream of consciousness, before getting out of bed in the morning. And it is so cool because it flushes out all the crap from your head so that you can go and have a clean slate to start the day. And you're not wasting your time processing, you're not like wasting CPU cycles in your brain processing something and ruminating on something that you really just need to get out, get on the page, and then you can focus on other things, or perhaps focus on that thing. But at least now you have a little bit of clarity on it because you've written. I should do it more often, but I think

• 1:25:42Ben Gilbert?

  it's this amazing practice and kind of like a, I hate the phrase, but life hack that I remember feeling like it really worked for me while I was doing it. David, while you give your answer, I'm gonna turn around and look at my bookshelf to find a third one.

• 1:25:54David Rosenthal?

  I have a bunch more books to talk about later in the episode, but the one that I have gifted the most is a book called Transitions by William Bridges, which was first given to me by Ben and my good friend Mark in Seattle. Ben, have I given you this book?

• 1:26:13Ben Gilbert?

  I don't think so. You've mentioned it.

• 1:26:14David Rosenthal?

  Okay, we need to rectify this right away. Watch your Amazon deliveries. I'm gonna send it to you.

• 1:26:19Ben Gilbert?

  It's not like anything's randomly showing up to my house three times a day from Amazon right now.

• 1:26:23David Rosenthal?

  Right. You'll find it again in like six months or so when you're cleaning out your basement.

• 1:26:29David Rosenthal?

  This book is a super cool concept. It was written, I think, in 1980. And the idea, it's about major transitions in your life. Could be a good transition, like having a baby, welcoming a new family member. Could be a bad transition, like a death in the family or career-related, losing a job, something like that. But the thesis of the book is that when this happens in your life, and it will many times, it's gonna sound a little gruesome, but you need to sort of kill your old self and be reborn as your new self. That sounds super woo-woo, but if you actually think about it, it makes sense.

• 1:27:07David Rosenthal?

  Your identity, who you thought you were before a major transition, it has to change. There is no way around it, and you'll go through the five stages of denial, anger, blah, blah, blah, all the stuff. This book is a great sort of way to streamline that process. But you have to accept that that you that you were before is no longer, and then you can create the new you. And I found it incredibly helpful, both for big challenges in my life and for great positive stuff like having a baby.

• 1:27:43Ben Gilbert?

  All right, that's awesome. I will watch my front doorstep. My third one is a classic, Thinking Fast and Slow by Condamet and Tversky. It's just, everything you think you know about the way your brain perceives the world and how you make decisions is wrong. And reading it doesn't make you get any better, but at least makes you aware of how wrong your decision making is, unless you pay unbelievably close attention and write down exactly why the decision is being made and look at all the data. And even then, you'll probably get it wrong.

• 1:28:12David Rosenthal?

  Ben, there is a very fun Easter egg that is going to be buried later in this episode for you to find related to this book recommendation.

• 1:28:21Ben Gilbert?

  Ooh, sweet.

• 1:28:22David Rosenthal?

  So Ben and listeners can go on a little treasure hunt.

• 1:28:25Ben Gilbert?

  Great.

• 1:28:26David Rosenthal?

  All right, next question. What purchase of $200 or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory? This is a super easy one for me, a no brainer. My Zoji Ruchi hot water heater. For people who don't know about these, and I think this is probably most of the world outside of Japan, this is a device that sits on your kitchen counter and keeps several gallons of water at a set temperature constantly. I am a huge tea drinker. I use this thing four or five times a day and have for the past decade plus. It is amazing. I set it at 195 degrees. I drink green tea every day. I re-steep my teapot

• 1:29:08David Rosenthal?

  constantly throughout the day. And like, it is unquestionably made my life better and probably will extend my lifespan by like, several years from drinking tons of green tea every day.

• 1:29:19Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa, that's awesome. Zoji Ruchi is the brand?

• 1:29:23David Rosenthal?

  We'll link to it in the show notes. Zoji Ruchi is the brand. It's a Japanese company. Everybody in Japan has one of these things.

• 1:29:29Ben Gilbert?

  Awesome. Mine might be a pair of Nike shoes. So, living in Seattle, it rains all winter, or at least it's wet all winter. And there's a particular pair, I'm gonna look up what it actually is, so that if you want to buy it, you can, called the Nike Men's Pegasus for Gore-Tex. And the Gore-Tex is so good. It makes winter running possible, and they even have a few of the colorways that are not like totally insane, so that you can kind of wear them as everyday sneakers. But I basically wear them all day, every day in the winter, and it makes me far less afraid to go out in the world, because I don't like having wet feet.

• 1:30:11David Rosenthal?

  Amazing. Okay. Next one is the Tim Ferriss question. I don't think anybody's ever asked us that before. If you had a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, metaphorically speaking, what would it say and why? Maybe the most random fact about me, I was a French literature major in college, particularly a 17th and 18th century French literature expert. Hardly an expert, but that's what I majored in in college. And something that has stuck with me from then, and the older I get and the world we live in becoming more the world it is, has stuck with me more and more, is the last line of Voltaire's candide,

• 1:30:57David Rosenthal?

  il faut cultiver notre jardin. We must cultivate our own garden.

• 1:31:01Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:02David Rosenthal?

  And especially today, like, there's just so much in the world that you don't have any control over. The only thing you have control over is your garden and cultivating your own garden. And for us, that's acquired. And for me, that's acquired in my family. And, you know, maybe some other things over time, but just focus on what is in your control and be great at that and be good at that. Be great and be good at those things. And that is what you can do. At least, those are the words that I have come to live by.

• 1:31:32Ben Gilbert?

  I love that. I actually don't have my own answer to this question. There's someone else that I know that has an answer to this question that I quite like. So I'm just gonna recant their story, but I should go find some words to live by. A good friend of mine, his dad had a saying when he was growing up, that he would always remind his kids, just be kind. Hey, whatever the thing is, just be kind. You know, someone might be being a jerk to you and, you know, they deserve some kind of repercussion, but you should just be kind. And certainly, the world will figure out a way to deal with this person's action at some point. And the thing my friend did is, at some point, as his dad was getting older, he asked him to write down the motto on a piece of paper and sign it. And he went

• 1:32:15Ben Gilbert?

  and got a tattoo on his back of just be kind, signed by his dad's name. I love that.

• 1:32:19David Rosenthal?

  I now know who you're talking about. That's amazing.

• 1:32:22Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. I just think that's the coolest. I often remind myself of that, of there's almost nothing to be gained by me exuding anything but kindness in this moment. And it doesn't mean let someone roll all over you, but it does mean just always realize that, you know, it's kind of the Michelle Obama thing of when they go low, we go high. You going high is never gonna hurt you in the long run.

• 1:32:42David Rosenthal?

  There's never any reason not to be kind.

• 1:32:44Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:32:45David Rosenthal?

  I love that. That's so good. What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you have ever made? Could be an investment of any type.

• 1:32:54Ben Gilbert?

  Cultivating the relationship with my wife, hands down, 100%. And the second best is cultivating the relationship with you, which has led to so many things that have made my relationship with my wife and building a family possible. And there is no if, ands, or buts about that. The house I'm standing in is, thanks to acquired. The lifestyle I enjoy is 100% acquired. The fact that I wander around all day listening to audiobooks, the thing that it's done to my demeanor and my personality, truly the life that myself and my family enjoy is because of what you and I have built, and thank you.

• 1:33:25David Rosenthal?

  Oh, I have the same answer. I actually didn't write down Jenny, but I should thank you for reminding me. Jenny, I love you. Yeah, ditto. Nothing more to add.

• 1:33:38Ben Gilbert?

  And probably therapy. That's probably the second.

• 1:33:41David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I agree. I started doing weekly therapy. I'd done it off and on before, but I started doing it weekly, committing to that this year, and it's just immensely helpful.

• 1:33:50Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And if you feel like it's not helpful, just switch therapists. You'll eventually find someone who's helpful for you.

• 1:33:55David Rosenthal?

  Yep. All right. What is an unusual habit or absurd thing that you love?

• 1:34:00Ben Gilbert?

  I eat a Starbucks spinach feta and cage-free egg white bite wrap every single day, and I have for years and years and years. And I actually go to Starbucks and buy them still in the package, cold. I buy them like 10 at a time, and then I'll just make them every morning at home.

• 1:34:16David Rosenthal?

  We were in the airport flying back from LA. We were at LAX after interviewing Charlie Munger, and you got one of these at the Starbucks at LAX. And I've known this about you for years. And I just kind of looked at you and I was like, Ben, I think you have eaten more spinach feta wraps than any other human being in the world. And you thought about it and you were like, yeah, I think that's right.

• 1:34:43Ben Gilbert?

  Because I think I've consumed probably close to 3,000 of them.

• 1:34:49David Rosenthal?

  This is amazing. This is the very best Ben Gilbert trivia that exists.

• 1:34:55David Rosenthal?

  When did you start?

• 1:34:57Ben Gilbert?

  Uh, I'm gonna guess around 10 years ago. I mean, I think it really ramped like seven-ish years ago, so maybe 2,000, 2,500, but wow. Yeah, pretty much every day, breakfast or lunch.

• 1:35:12David Rosenthal?

  Speaking of special, unique interviews that only we could do, I don't even need to finish that sentence. We're just gonna leave it.

• 1:35:22Ben Gilbert?

  One day. Yeah.

• 1:35:23David Rosenthal?

  Okay. I'm not even gonna answer that because I can't top that.

• 1:35:27Ben Gilbert?

  In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?

• 1:35:33David Rosenthal?

  Yes. I was gonna say adding weekly therapy this year and related to that, just listening to my instincts, in particular, my physical reactions to things. Like I've found like, you know, it takes a while to train your instincts. So like, I don't know if I just listened to my instincts and followed my instincts when I was 25, that that would have been the right thing. But I'm pretty dialed at this point on like, what's right for me. And I find that I have physical reactions in my body to things and like, listening and tuning into that usually is the right way to go.

• 1:36:10Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. I like that.

• 1:36:11David Rosenthal?

  And just being more aware of it.

• 1:36:13Ben Gilbert?

  I think you have a good sense of that, too. If somebody is a 1% huckster, I notice you get like physically uncomfortable and try to create distance between you and them.

• 1:36:22David Rosenthal?

  Yes. That's just me. I don't know if everybody has that.

• 1:36:25Ben Gilbert?

  I think mine is a thing that I'm still working on, but the amount that I have done it has dramatically improved my life. Be more present, be a better listener. The answer is almost always tune in more to the person that you're talking to and really understand them. And I think listen harder is usually the way to better understand what someone else around you wants. And it's often not what they're saying, it's what they're feeling. My therapist regularly uses the phrase, it's about the feelings, not the content. And if you can figure out how to be present, listen better and meet someone else at their feelings level and figure out, how do I, you don't even have to make their feelings feel better because

• 1:37:05Ben Gilbert?

  they might feel fine, but how do I tune into you emotionally and not try to just have a conversation about the content you're saying, you're much more likely to both have a positive outcome and have a better rest of your day.

• 1:37:18David Rosenthal?

  Dude, you're gonna crush parenting.

• 1:37:22Ben Gilbert?

  Well, easier said than done.

• 1:37:24David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, right. Easier said than done when you're on hour like three of intense feelings, shall we say.

• 1:37:34David Rosenthal?

  What advice would you give a smart, driven college student about to enter the quote unquote "real world" and what advice should they ignore?

• 1:37:42Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, man. Let's see. Some advice I gave like three years ago that I really deeply believe in is harvest when everyone else is harvesting and build skills when there's no harvesting to be done. And in particular, this person had the opportunity to go work at, I think it was a big consulting thing and make good money first year. And they were thinking about doing that or working for a nonprofit as their first job because their heart was in the right place. Like, they just wanted to do good for the world work. And I was like, we're in a weird time where I don't know when it's going to end, but everyone's making stupid money right now. Just like, while there's harvesting to be done, go participate

• 1:38:24Ben Gilbert?

  in that. And you should build the best foundation you can, but I promise you, there will be a time where this job opportunity is not available to you and you will look back at a few years of making a small salary in your first few years out of school and kind of wish that you had built a little bit more of a foundation because I just think this time is gonna end. And like, it sort of flies in the face of be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

• 1:38:52David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, this is kind of be greedy when others are greedy and, you know, build when others are fearful.

• 1:38:58Ben Gilbert?

  And be mindful that you're in this temporary moment, but like, when there's opportunity to harvest, harvest.

• 1:39:03David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, reflecting on the 2020 to 2022 timeframe, that is a huge takeaway for me. Bill Gurley has for years said this, you gotta play the game on the field.

• 1:39:16Ben Gilbert?

  Well, yeah, benchmarks very good at that.

• 1:39:19David Rosenthal?

  Yes, yes, yes, they are. My answer, I would just repeat what I said on the Art of Investing podcast that we went on a few months ago, which those guys have just built such a great show. I mean, they're teachers, they've been teachers for years.

• 1:39:34Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, Rick and Paul are investors and capital allocators and, you know, great partners to the people that they work with. But like even their demeanor in one-on-one conversations is that of a learner and a teacher.

• 1:39:45David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, so wonderful. What I said there, literally two college students was both that following your own path has never been more rewarding in this world that we live in and never been harder. Like, there's so much pressure out there. Social media, everything else about the world we live in, there's so much pressure to conform. And that makes standing out and following your own path that much more valuable. So harder and valuable.

• 1:40:14Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, people are underrated. Like, in my harvesting comment, it was interesting that what I did was to describe two job opportunities. I think there's another way to make decisions, which is surround yourself with, if you're an ambitious person, with the most intelligent people you possibly can, who are the closest to ground zero for your industry. Be where the interesting thing is with the people who are the best at it.

• 1:40:39David Rosenthal?

  This is the Mark Andreessen.

• 1:40:41Ben Gilbert?

  I totally.

• 1:40:41David Rosenthal?

  Go to Denny's.

• 1:40:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, always go to Denny's.

• 1:40:44David Rosenthal?

  Always go to Denny's.

• 1:40:46Ben Gilbert?

  And they can't just be smart, they have to be like unbelievably trustworthy people, worthy of your time and partnership. And that's the harder thing, I think, to suss out over time. That's hard advice to give a college student.

• 1:40:57David Rosenthal?

  Yep. I don't think those two things are at odds.

• 1:41:00Ben Gilbert?

  I don't think they're at odds either, but your circle of opportunity gets smaller when you require more constraints, when you require both of them.

• 1:41:07David Rosenthal?

  All right. In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? Distractions, invitations, et cetera. What new realizations and/or approaches helped? Any other tips?

• 1:41:18Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, man. David, there's a thing that you do that I'm so much worse at, which is you never feel compelled to respond. You never feel like somebody else can give you a task to do.

• 1:41:31David Rosenthal?

  It's not my most flattering quality.

• 1:41:34Ben Gilbert?

  But it's the thing that allows you to give energy to the people in your life that matter the most to you. That's the thing that I've long been jealous of is like, I'm very okay with somebody emails me a form email that I've never heard of them or their name. It's like very easy to archive that. It's harder when it's like somebody that I met three years ago that I really enjoyed getting coffee with. And now I have eight of those in my inbox and I just, I want to at least say I don't have the bandwidth for this right now. But like you do those eight times and suddenly

• 1:42:05David Rosenthal?

  Two hours have gone by.

• 1:42:06Ben Gilbert?

  It's actually taken away some of your, your energy and your life force. Exactly.

• 1:42:10David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:11Ben Gilbert?

  And you do it to me sometimes. So like, I sort of know like what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it. But like, you have a remarkable tendency to truly wake up every morning and say, what actually is important and needs to get done? And you don't do the other stuff and it's kind of okay if that has a little bit of collateral damage.

• 1:42:28David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. I was going to say the same thing and you said it for me. Like I said, this is not my most flattering natural tendency, but as I've thought about this over the years, what I've come back to is I reach out to lots of people. How do I feel if I don't get a response to all of those? I feel fine. And, you know, I assume that folks that I reach out to have something going on. They're busy and especially now having kids. It's just like, I get it for them and I get it for me more. It's like, you know, there's nobody more important to me than my daughter. Nobody. My wife, you know, like, and you, you know, like, okay, outside that circle, like you are my most important people and

• 1:43:11David Rosenthal?

  there's only so many hours in the day. It's like a version of you got to put your mask on before helping others. It's like, I got to put those relationships on before others.

• 1:43:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And everything's a trade-off. Like in a vacuum, sure, you should give your time and your life force to everyone, but you have a finite amount. And so it's a priority thing.

• 1:43:31David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Okay, last one. When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? What questions do you ask yourself? This is so easy, and this is the perfect one to end on. We go make a great acquired episode. And this has been such a gift to me in my life because up until we started doing acquired and up until acquired became my full-time job three years ago, I didn't have anything that I could control like that. I don't know what I would have answered to that question. Like so much of everything was out of my control. When you're a venture investor, you don't control anything.

• 1:44:11Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean? Just go do a good deal. And that way, in 10 years, you'll know if it was good or not.

• 1:44:17David Rosenthal?

  Right. Exactly. We're so lucky now that we have this thing that we do, that we can do, and we're good at, and we know how to do, where no matter how bad things get, or you know, no matter what's going on, we can just go in a lab and like, we know we can make a great episode. And we also know it's the best thing we can do. No matter how good or bad things are going, it's always the best thing we can do.

• 1:44:41Ben Gilbert?

  It's an interesting derivation that I want to take this down. I've had this life advice that I've been thinking about to give to my son when he's old enough to understand life advice, which is not right now.

• 1:44:53David Rosenthal?

  Oh, you're gonna have to wait a while.

• 1:44:54Ben Gilbert?

  You'd scream in my face. And which is interesting that he can listen to all of this. I don't think he ever will, but it's crazy that there's like hundreds of hours of his dad talking. Like, do you ever think about that?

• 1:45:06David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:06Ben Gilbert?

  That our kids will get to watch us sort of grow up. I guess there's not video until year five or so, but still like, listen to us sort of form who we became, assuming that we do this for decades and decades to come. But One of the pieces of life advice, and David, I was telling you about this on our walk in LA up Runyon Canyon, we were down there interviewing Charlie, was that when you're a young person, you should try to become singularly productive. And I mean productive in the economic sense, that you are able to soup to nuts, within your control, make something of economic value and put it in the world in a way that you own the

• 1:45:49Ben Gilbert?

  design, engineering, creation, marketing, distribution, monetization. And like, everybody shouldn't do that. Like, the corporation is a great structure that enables people to work together in a creative way to produce an output. But your life is way better if you have the capability to singularly produce something on your own. And then it's always your choice of how much stuff outside your control you want to let in. You might be a singularly productive individual who then goes on to be Craig Federici and, you know, run all of Apple software. But then it's your choice. You're not reliant on a bureaucratic structure for you to thrive in politic insight of.

• 1:46:33David Rosenthal?

  This is another one of those paradoxes, I think, in that the way the world works today, this has, on the surface, kind of never been harder. Organizations are bigger, things are more complex, things are more interdependent. The idea that you could, as a person, and especially a young person, be able to do that is hard to fathom. And yet, it's also never been more true than ever. All you need is an internet connection, and you can find and learn some version of this.

• 1:47:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. It's pretty wild.

• 1:47:04David Rosenthal?

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

• 1:47:10Ben 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.

• 1:47:21David 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.

• 1:47:41Ben 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.

• 1:47:54David 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. Well, for Ben Yurin, my traditional extended carve-outs to end the holiday special, I have a special family one that I want to start with, if that's okay.

• 1:48:15Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:16David Rosenthal?

  So my brother-in-law, Dave, Jenny's sister's husband, Dave is the most beloved member of our entire family, including my daughter, who, no doubt about it, loves him way more than mom and dad. He's the best. He, until this year, was an early employee at a venture-backed startup here in San Francisco. He changed jobs and he joined a company called Mill this year. He was telling me about the company. I was pretty skeptical, honestly, to start. Mill was founded by Matt Rogers, who, Matt was Tony Fadell's co-founder at Nest back in the day. And Mill is the Nest thermostat version of a compost bin.

• 1:49:00David Rosenthal?

  It is an internet-connected compost bin.

• 1:49:03Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, I have heard of this. Yes.

• 1:49:06David Rosenthal?

  And at first I was like, okay, Dave, I'm glad you're passionate about this. I can't imagine how many people out there really need an internet-connected compost bin. Then he joined the company and he was saying, this is really great. So I was like, okay, I'll support the family. We'll get one. This thing is freaking awesome.

• 1:49:27David Rosenthal?

  I was totally wrong. I mean, obviously, this is, you know, I just sort of a, you know, luxury good. I mean, it's not a luxury good. It's a compost bin, but like it's a premium good. I did not realize how much I needed this thing. For basically my entire adult life, I have had fruit flies in my kitchen, on and off, in the compost bin. And if I didn't have fruit fly, you know, it's compost bin, like, you know, it's compost in your kitchen. This thing roasts your compost overnight and is internet connected. It runs overnight. You put all the food scraps in there. It roasts and churns it. It turns it into chicken

• 1:50:07David Rosenthal?

  feed. And every morning, it gets fully roasted, which means no smell, no mess, and it absorbs. This thing is like a black hole of compost. It's a big bin. We will go weeks as a family of just putting everything in there. No emptying, no going to the garbage, no smell, no nothing. And then when it gets full, your app tells you, you put it in a box, they send you a bunch of boxes, like in a bag, in a box, you send it off to them, and they sell it as chicken feed. This is like the most brilliant thing ever. I was so skeptical, and now I'm 100% confident. Mill.com, I'm not just saying it because Dave's my brother-in-law. Actually, this is the best thing I've bought this year.

• 1:50:47Ben Gilbert?

  Did you or did you not get yours for free?

• 1:50:50David Rosenthal?

  No, I paid for it. I didn't get any discount.

• 1:50:51Ben Gilbert?

  This is not in any way an endorsement?

• 1:50:53David Rosenthal?

  No, there's no, the only connection I have with the company is that my brother-in-law joined them, and I thought it was a really bad idea.

• 1:51:02Ben Gilbert?

  All right. I'm trying to decide if like, your problems are real problems at this point, or if you're like, you've gotten so comfortable in life, that you're like solving these like, really?

• 1:51:12David Rosenthal?

  I recognize that I just recommended an internet-connected compost bin. But it really is awesome.

• 1:51:18Ben Gilbert?

  But it's a great one. I mean, yes, I recognize the value of good gadgets. I've been using a June oven for the last six months. Also life-changing. You might be like, why do you need a small oven instead of your big oven? And why does it need to be on the counter instead?

• 1:51:30David Rosenthal?

  Spinach feta wraps.

• 1:51:31Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, every morning. Spinach feta wraps in the June. It's perfect. Okay, I have a litany of carve-outs.

• 1:51:38David Rosenthal?

  Go for it.

• 1:51:38Ben Gilbert?

  I'll save my baby-related ones for later. My TV show, my wife and I just binged-watched, is like, holy crap good. Some of the best TV I've watched in a long time. Very different genre than Succession, but like, Succession-level quality. It's called Silo on Apple TV. It is excellent. It's based on a book, maybe a book series, and the for-TV adaptation is just very good. Dialogue, the cinematography's good, the sets are really impressive. The premise is just beautiful and so simple. And the premise is, this is gonna be spoiler-free. There is a civilization of humans that exist in a silo, like, a big silo.

• 1:52:21Ben Gilbert?

  I don't wanna say the exact number of people, cuz some might consider that spoiler, but like, you know, a civilization in a silo.

• 1:52:29David Rosenthal?

  Okay.

• 1:52:30Ben Gilbert?

  And-

• 1:52:30David Rosenthal?

  On Earth or in outer space, or?

• 1:52:33Ben Gilbert?

  Presumably on Earth, is the premise. And it is all about people trying to figure out what's going on. Because it opens with this idea that, at some point, it will be safe to leave the silo. We don't know when that day will be, but we know that day is not today. And it's a whole civilization of people living in a silo.

• 1:52:55David Rosenthal?

  This sounds like a great premise.

• 1:52:57Ben Gilbert?

  That's the setting, and I'm giving no plot details about like, what then transpires, but it's awesome, and it's great sci-fi.

• 1:53:04David Rosenthal?

  Hmm, as you know, I'm not a TV person, but that is up my alley.

• 1:53:09Ben Gilbert?

  The female lead is the woman from the most recent, the last two Mission Impossibles, who's a really good actress, and who else is in it? The woman from The Office, Rashida Jones, is also in it. It's a good show, highly recommend it.

• 1:53:24David Rosenthal?

  She's Quincy Jones's daughter, is that right?

• 1:53:26Ben Gilbert?

  I think that's right.

• 1:53:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, super cool.

• 1:53:29Ben Gilbert?

  So that is awesome. For less-good TV, but still very entertaining, a part of our paternity leave, maternity leave, has been watching Alias. Neither of us watched it back in 2002, and it's like a J.J. Abrams, early J.J. Abrams. Jennifer Garner's the lead.

• 1:53:45David Rosenthal?

  You've already done this as a carve-out, but I like the-

• 1:53:46Ben Gilbert?

  Have I?

• 1:53:47David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, re-carve-out, it's fine.

• 1:53:49Ben Gilbert?

  It's great. I mean, it gets worse as the seasons go on, but seasons one, two, and three are great. Very worth watching. A product that I've been loving, I just got some new Warby Parker glasses. I believe they're made out of vinyl, but the frame is called Amari. A M A R I. They are much lighter than any other glasses frames that I've ever gotten. And it's like totally game changing to feel like they're sort of just floating on your face all day. Some might view them as not as stylish as some of the more stylish options. They're my at home glasses for sure.

• 1:54:23David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. One of your carve outs I picked up recently. Hoka slides. I actually didn't get the slides. I got the, or the recovery shoes.

• 1:54:32Ben Gilbert?

  Hoka slides. So good.

• 1:54:33David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. I got the same technology in the kind of more shoe, more enclosed form factor. I think they're also called the Ora's, O R A. So great. Best house shoes I've ever had, per your recommendation.

• 1:54:46Ben Gilbert?

  Well, happy to recommend. Another one is a feature of a product that I found a couple of days ago that is frigging insane. So I've had this thing where as iPhone cameras have gotten better and better, the computational photography, like what Apple does to photos makes them look a certain way. And I've sort of gotten used to that way that photos look. And now that I'm using the big camera again, because we have a baby, I've gone back to, I'm using the Alpha 7Cs and this kind of like very flexible lens that can either be a wide or a zoom lens that we're going to use actually for some upcoming interviews next year to get a tighter shot on the subject. I've been using that and I've been feeling like, God, these images are so grainy.

• 1:55:30Ben Gilbert?

  Like basically anything that I shoot indoor feels like it has this really terrible grain. And you look and of course it's like the super high ISO, but the iPhone does so much smoothing that I've like forgotten that film grain is a thing. And so Lightroom shipped this unbelievable ML powered denoise feature. I found out about it because Neelai Patel was just on the talk show with John Gruber. And he is right to say it totally pegs your GPUs while you're using it, but it is pure magic. You open up Lightroom, you select the photos, you can even select like ones that don't seem noisy to you. And you come back and it's like, unless you crank the Setting way up. They look totally realistic. It doesn't look overly AI'd,

• 1:56:11Ben Gilbert?

  but your photos just all get magically way better. So huge kudos to the Adobe team. I've been so impressed with everything that they're cranking out on the AI side. Like, I think they're the enterprise company that is probably the best at rapidly commercializing these generative AI advancements. This one is immediately useful for me for everything that I shoot, not with my iPhone.

• 1:56:32David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, this is, uh, we did that ACQ2 episode with Chris from Runway. Like, this sector, application of AI in image and video, we're only just scratching the surface. The surface is already unbelievable. And like, I just can't wait for what's coming.

• 1:56:51Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, totally agree. I think I may have made this a carve out at some point, but I want to re-highlight it because it's been at least 12 months because I remember reading it over Christmas last year. It's an article by Derek Thompson called "The Eureka Theory of Everything is Wrong."

• 1:57:07David Rosenthal?

  Yes, this is awesome.

• 1:57:09Ben Gilbert?

  It's so good. I just reread it. It's just such a pleasant reminder that it's not about the idea, it's about the implementation, and it's often about the unsexy distribution work. The article highlights a number of different instances where we know the famous inventor, but we don't know about the heroic effort made by governments around the world to actually roll things out like vaccines and things that are a huge part of the public good. I highly recommend reading it if you're in for sort of a perspective-changing read on what is important to advance society forward.

• 1:57:43David Rosenthal?

  Love it. All right, I'll jump in with a couple before we get back to you. First, a book that I alluded to earlier in the episode, "The Luxury Strategy" by Jean-Noel Kepfer and Vincent Bestien. This book was a core part for both you and me in LVMH prep, and it's so good. It's so counterintuitive and worth reading for anybody who has a brand, any company that has a brand, which is everybody, even enterprise software, SaaS company. You have a brand. You should read this book. I'm just going to read. You have tweeted this, and I think maybe even on air said them all, but I'm going to say them again. This book contains the 24 anti-laws of marketing. One, forget about positioning.

• 1:58:27David Rosenthal?

  Luxury is not comparative. Two, does your product have enough flaws? Three, do not pander to your customers' wishes. Keep non-enthusiasts out. Do not respond to rising demand. Dominate the client. Make it difficult for clients to buy. Protect clients from non-clients. The role of advertising is not to sell. Communicate to those you are not targeting. The presumed price should always seem higher than the actual price. Luxury sets the price. Price does not set luxury. Raise your prices as time goes on in order to increase demand. Think about that one. Keep raising the average price of your product range.

• 1:59:12David Rosenthal?

  Do not sell. Keep stars out of your advertising. Cultivate closeness to the arts for initiates. That was 17. Numbers 18 through 24, I just like, this is acquired right here. It smacks me in the face. 18, do not relocate your factories. We talked about that earlier. And then it continues. Do not hire consultants. Do not test. Do not look for consensus. Do not look after group synergies. Do not look for cost reduction. Just sell marginally on the internet.

• 1:59:44Ben Gilbert?

  It's so good. It's good to get the reminders, too.

• 1:59:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. That's one. The next one I want to mention, I also talked about earlier in the episode, is the QB School on YouTube. So JTO Sullivan, who was like a 10-year-long journeyman backup quarterback in the NFL. He briefly started for the 49ers, I think, in like the late 2000s. After he finished playing, went and got a PhD in leadership studies and then started this YouTube channel where he breaks down quarterbacks' performances every week and does behind the scenes of like, basically just lets you ride along with how a quarterback

• 2:00:31David Rosenthal?

  and an NFL offense from like the offensive coordinator down to the quarterback's coach, down to the players. Like what is actually happening? There was a quote that I think we cut from our NFL episode, but that kind of sums up what's going on here from one of the books that we read. It said that baseball fans love baseball because they think they understand the game. Football fans love football because they know they don't understand the game. I played football for 10 years and this is the first time I'm like getting a glimpse of understanding the game. It's so good. This guy is awesome.

• 2:01:06Ben Gilbert?

  I can't wait. That's totally been a thing that we've done this fall as, you know, we are getting ready for the birth of our son. And then as we've been on the couch a lot is like, watch an insane amount of college football and NFL games. Yeah, I'm all over this YouTube channel.

• 2:01:20David Rosenthal?

  You just watch these games and the drama is so compelling. But what's going on is at such another level.

• 2:01:27Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. The production of football and the storylining around the teams and the players, it's the great at scale storytelling of our time. And to your point, there's a whole nother thing going on underneath it all. It's funny, the carve out I was going to do next before you jumped in with a couple is Monday Night Football Manning Cast.

• 2:01:43David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:44Ben Gilbert?

  It's been so good this year. I actually didn't get into it until this season. I just didn't watch that much NFL until this season because I grew up a Browns fan and...

• 2:01:52David Rosenthal?

  Enough said.

• 2:01:53Ben Gilbert?

  Well, yeah, but I've watched a lot of NFL this year and Eli and for anyone who doesn't know about Manning Cast, when you're watching Monday Night Football, you can choose either to watch the normal announcers or there's a completely second production using the same cameras, plus a couple of cameras in Peyton Manning and Eli Manning's homes, where they're basically just like watching the game on Zoom together. It's a holdover from the pandemic and they have guests on, like they had Will Ferrell on, but I think it's actually better without guests. Like even when it's just Eli and Peyton analyzing the game, it's similar to what you're talking about, David. It's a little bit of like helping you understand what's going on behind the scenes, but of course by two brothers that are very fun to be around and they often act like they're still, you know, eight and 10 years old.

• 2:02:37David Rosenthal?

  I would say like, if you think about the NFL broadcasts, that's one level. Then there's like Manning Cast, that's like several clicks deeper in getting a window into what's going on. And then QB School is like as far to the other side of the spectrum as you could go, while still being really fun. Like JT is a great host, but like...

• 2:02:58Ben Gilbert?

  It's technical.

• 2:02:59David Rosenthal?

  It's very technical.

• 2:03:00Ben Gilbert?

  Cool. All right, I'm pumped. Okay, we are entering the baby products section of recommendations. Is that okay with you?

• 2:03:07David Rosenthal?

  I've got one other first that I want to throw out.

• 2:03:11Ben Gilbert?

  Lay it on me.

• 2:03:12David Rosenthal?

  Which is going to be a recommendation to nobody because you've already seen it. The Eras Tour.

• 2:03:18Ben Gilbert?

  I haven't watched it yet.

• 2:03:19David Rosenthal?

  Oh, you haven't watched it yet?

• 2:03:20Ben Gilbert?

  Unbelievably.

• 2:03:20David Rosenthal?

  Oh, my God. It's available at home now, right?

• 2:03:22Ben Gilbert?

  Also, did we call that or did we call that? It's been two years since we did the T-Swift episode.

• 2:03:26David Rosenthal?

  Oh, amazing.

• 2:03:27Ben Gilbert?

  Should have bought stock.

• 2:03:28David Rosenthal?

  Well, like we said, open invitation, Taylor. You know, we will fly to wherever you are.

• 2:03:32Ben Gilbert?

  It is true.

• 2:03:33David Rosenthal?

  Dude, you gotta watch it. Like, when the baby's sleeping, maybe over the course of two naps because it's a long movie. But she's just on another level from anybody. I mean, she's Times Person of the Year this year. And it is one of the best movies, period, that I've ever seen, not just like concert film.

• 2:03:50Ben Gilbert?

  Awesome. Can't wait. All right, baby recommendations?

• 2:03:53David Rosenthal?

  Go for it.

• 2:03:54Ben Gilbert?

  I feel like I finally have strollers dialed.

• 2:03:57David Rosenthal?

  Ooh.

• 2:03:57Ben Gilbert?

  Now, granted, I only have a one month old, so like the needs massively change over time. But forever I was trying to figure out, for non-parents out there, figuring out the right car seat stroller combos for all the different needs, like at home, travel, when there are different ages, you have different needs. Right now, we have a lean setup. Like, there's a way to be dialed in your setup by just having four strollers. But I'm pretty pumped where we landed with two.

• 2:04:25David Rosenthal?

  I am super pumped for your recommendations because I really trust you on this. Like, Ben, you are such an optimizer. Like, when it comes to this stuff, this is your wheelhouse. So I, I can't wait.

• 2:04:39Ben Gilbert?

  All right. So here's the current setup. And this is after buying a few other strollers and returning them because there were things I didn't like about them ergonomically. So the Upper Baby Vista is the home stroller.

• 2:04:49David Rosenthal?

  Okay.

• 2:04:49Ben Gilbert?

  That's the one that's like big. You don't want to be in the business of like folding that and taking it. And that has the newborn bed in it.

• 2:04:57David Rosenthal?

  This is like the Chevy Suburban of strollers.

• 2:04:59Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. Oh, it's, you do not ever want to pick this thing up. But it's got great shocks. We take it on a trail near our house in the Arboretum in Seattle. And the fact that it has a huge bassinet on it. A lot of his naps happen there, so I can go on walks while the baby's napping, even as a newborn, which for a lot of strollers, newborns can't nap if they're sort of like upright, or newborns can't even sit, you know, in a normal looking stroller. So you need a bassinet stroller. So that's the home situation. The travel situation, and we haven't like flown anywhere yet, but we will in a month or so, is the Joolz, J-O-O-L-Z,

• 2:05:36David Rosenthal?

  Ooh.

• 2:05:36Ben Gilbert?

  Air Plus, A-E-R Plus.

• 2:05:39David Rosenthal?

  Okay, I've not heard of this device.

• 2:05:41Ben Gilbert?

  I hadn't either, but we went to Nordstrom and we tested all the strollers.

• 2:05:45David Rosenthal?

  Amazing.

• 2:05:47Ben Gilbert?

  And the one that we had ordered, I really hated the way that the handlebars sat and made my wrists feel. So I, we got this, the Joolz Air Plus instead. And it has adapters for the car seat that we bought, the kleck ling.

• 2:06:00David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:06:00Ben Gilbert?

  And it just snaps right in. So this Joolz Air Plus is super light, it's 11 pounds. It fits in the overhead of a airplane. So when we travel, starting in a month, we'll be able to do that. When we're home, it always sits in the back of the car. And so like, whenever we take the baby out, we leave the baby in the car seat and we just snap the car seat, which by the way, is like the safest, you know, the kleck ling is like the safe car seat.

• 2:06:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah. You do not want to be transferring baby out of car seat when baby is asleep, ever.

• 2:06:33Ben Gilbert?

  No. So the car seat just snaps right in. And so for like doctor's visits and stuff, we just take the travel stroller with the car seat snapped in, no interruption to sleep. It took a lot of finagling, but this is where we've arrived for now. The optimizations are, some people recommend the Tully running stroller in addition to this. We'll have to see if that's a category we dip into.

• 2:06:55David Rosenthal?

  You're not at that phase yet.

• 2:06:56Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And other people are swearing by this. In fact, a listener to the show, Alex, I think, texts me, I don't know, he texts me a lot about this stroller and I, I think he's probably their number one fan. There's a car seat that converts to a stroller.

• 2:07:10David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, the duna.

• 2:07:11Ben Gilbert?

  The duna.

• 2:07:12David Rosenthal?

  I was literally waiting with bated breath for your opinion on the duna.

• 2:07:16Ben Gilbert?

  That may enter the rotation. I haven't tried it yet.

• 2:07:18David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, buried the lead here. Also, Jenny and I are expecting number two this year.

• 2:07:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yay, congratulations. I was wondering if you're going to talk about it.

• 2:07:25David Rosenthal?

  Obviously Ben already knew, but I appreciate the faint surprise there. And we are considering, this is among the considerations set and whether we would change our strategy at all. So, okay, laid on me.

• 2:07:37Ben Gilbert?

  So the Duna is sort of like a different philosophy of what if your car seat could become a stroller? And so that way, when you're going on vacation, you actually don't bring a travel stroller, you just keep the baby in the car seat all the way until you get to gate check, then you check the Duna, or if you're so bold as to get a seat for your newborn, then I think they can stay in it. I'm not exactly sure how that works. And then when you get there, so the trade off then is like, is the Duna actually a good enough stroller for like five mile walks? And that I don't know. When we go on vacation, we just try to do like tons and tons of walking. And so that's the thing that I'm playing with, with is the Duna going to enter the rotation, or do we rely on the air?

• 2:08:19David Rosenthal?

  Okay, I'm waiting with bated breath for your verdict on that.

• 2:08:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, stay tuned. At the risk of acquired getting a lot more boring, I think we have to keep discussion of baby products to a minimum.

• 2:08:31David Rosenthal?

  Well, this is niche acquired here, like for the right niche, this is riveting content.

• 2:08:37Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Either spinoff show, or we're gonna have to keep these like, we'll create like a bonus section at the end of the episode or something.

• 2:08:43David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah. I was thinking about like, oh, what are my kids? You know, my daughter's two now. She's like, you know, she's certainly not an adult, but like it's, you know, it's moves fast. Like she's a

• 2:08:52Ben Gilbert?

  She eats people food.

• 2:08:53David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, she especially, she is basically an adult at this point.

• 2:08:57Ben Gilbert?

  You sent me that picture of her eating a Costco hot dog.

• 2:08:59David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah, totally. Well, let's be clear.

• 2:09:02Ben Gilbert?

  The bun.

• 2:09:03David Rosenthal?

  I ate the hot dog, she ate the bun, which was her choice. My kid related carve out, I was having trouble coming up with any of them. And this isn't even that kid related, but is her favorite movie, which everybody should watch. I can't believe I hadn't seen it till now is Coco, the Pixar movie.

• 2:09:21Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:22David Rosenthal?

  Coco.

• 2:09:22Ben Gilbert?

  It's good.

• 2:09:22David Rosenthal?

  About Dia de los Muertos. It's so good. I've now seen it like 10 times. I will probably see it about 500 more times in my life. And Disney Plus, despite all the turmoil and Iger and all that, it's a hell of a drug. It's a hell of a drug for a parent.

• 2:09:37Ben Gilbert?

  Hey, that's also where you can find great shows such as Alias.

• 2:09:40David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:43David Rosenthal?

  All right. Well, that's it for extended carve out slash holiday present suggestions this year from acquired. We have one more section to close out the year, and that is thank yous. First, we owe just the biggest thank you in the world to our wonderful editor, Stephen. Stephen, you are, and everybody listening, I'm sure will agree, the single best podcast editor in the business.

• 2:10:14Ben Gilbert?

  It's unbelievable.

• 2:10:15David Rosenthal?

  Hands down. It's not even close.

• 2:10:17Ben Gilbert?

  And for people who are curious about how this works, Stephen does a first pass after we send him eight, nine hours of raw audio in turning it into sort of a candidate episode. And that's getting rid of likes and ums and all that, but it's retakes, it's redos, it's David and I saying, ah, I feel like that didn't come across right. I didn't make the point succinct enough. Why don't I try to make it more succinct? Then he sends us back this release candidate, which we then also tear apart and has, you know, 100 more edits of like, this fact is wrong. This little part of this sentence is extraneous. Delete this number. Hey, can we move this section to this part? And then does a complete second pass after a week's worth of work to deal with

• 2:11:00Ben Gilbert?

  us on a complete second copy edit. So thank you so much, Stephen. You're the best. And it comes out just sounding immaculate.

• 2:11:08David Rosenthal?

  Immaculate. Stephen, you are the man. Thank you for making the show what it is.

• 2:11:14David Rosenthal?

  Second, thank you for this year is once again, MVP of acquired Andrew Marks, not only for Charlie, but really for being our thought partner behind like every episode and relationships that we've built and, you know, now heading into next year and investing, helping us think through that.

• 2:11:31Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, well, we're thanking thought partners. We should thank friend of the show, Mark Bridge, who is a good friend of mine up here in Seattle, a good friend of David's as well.

• 2:11:38David Rosenthal?

  He gave me transitions.

• 2:11:40Ben Gilbert?

  Runs a very cool, is a founder of a very cool company called At Present, which is a marketplace for very unique and cool jewelry pieces for women. David and I are actually both small investors in the company.

• 2:11:51David Rosenthal?

  And customers.

• 2:11:52Ben Gilbert?

  And customers. That's right. Probably the most expensive thing I ever bought, I bought through at present.

• 2:11:58David Rosenthal?

  Uh huh.

• 2:11:58Ben Gilbert?

  But Mark has been a thought partner on tons and tons of episodes, especially Berkshire. He actually suggested LVMH, good thought partner on Nike. So Mark, thank you for everything you've done and helping acquired too.

• 2:12:09David Rosenthal?

  Yes. Speaking of LVMH, Adam Pritzker helped us a ton on LVMH. Adam, of course, was one of the founders of General Assembly and now has assembled brands and Kate, which they just sold and was a fantastic outcome for everybody there. Adam really gave us a window into actually building and running one of these companies.

• 2:12:31Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. The whole team at Nvidia, initially the people that were willing to speak with us about the episodes we were doing, just to help with the research for the episodes and make sure we got it right. But then subsequently their entire communications team for hosting us and putting up with all of our requests and being willing to build the insane three screen setup and film it with three cameras and do everything we wanted to the production standards we wanted and way more at Nvidia HQ. So thanks to the awesome team there. Thank you to Doug DiMiro for consenting to join the crazy acquired episode process for Porsche.

• 2:13:06David Rosenthal?

  I don't think Doug knew what he was getting into when he agreed to this.

• 2:13:10Ben Gilbert?

  No, but he did all the research too. And you know, for someone who has two businesses that he's trying to, you know, run at the same time, you know, he started with a head start on the history of Porsche, but he really did a ton of work to prepare for that and had all of his facts and figures ready at hand.

• 2:13:25David Rosenthal?

  Let us into his garage for the whole day.

• 2:13:28Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Doug rocks. Also, I'm thinking about buying my next car and like, I've been watching so many Doug videos to prepare.

• 2:13:34David Rosenthal?

  He also totally set the bar for if and when we ever have another voice on a season episode, that is how we're going to do it.

• 2:13:44Ben Gilbert?

  Like an expert guest host. We love that format. We'd like your feedback on it too, but we thought that was the perfect amount of guest research and what they brought to the table and how we loop them in with the episode and interacting with David and I, we were just like, this is a 10 out of 10.

• 2:14:00David Rosenthal?

  10 out of 10. Just such a high quality guy on every dimension.

• 2:14:04Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 2:14:05David Rosenthal?

  And then on the research dimension, you know, thank you to, I mean, dozens, dozens of people who helped us with research for our episodes this year. Too many to name here, and many of you don't want to be named, but people who have way better things to do with their time than chat with me and Ben about a podcast episode we're working on, CEOs and CFOs of public companies, et cetera. Immensely grateful.

• 2:14:31Ben Gilbert?

  And for most of these folks, they do it because they listen. And so they sort of know the product that's going to come out the other side. Thank you also for listening, because I think that's sort of the superpower of Acquired is the fact that now there are people who listen who can really help us make sure that we get episodes right. So we love getting these notes. I mean, we can't respond to them all, but people who join the Slack or email us [email protected] and say, hi, here's a thing that I know a lot about in my industry experience. If you ever do it, feel free to reach out. We totally do when we do those episodes. So thank you.

• 2:15:03David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, thank you. Speaking of the last and most important thank you to all you, this whole thing would not happen without you listening. You all are just an amazing community and we really appreciate you. Have a wonderful, wonderful holiday season.

• 2:15:22Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 2:15:22David Rosenthal?

  All the best for a happy, successful, wonderful new year ahead.

• 2:15:28Ben Gilbert?

  And with that, if you want to know every time an episode drops, you can sign up for email updates at acquired.fm/email. We added two new things recently. Emails include little hints at what the next episode will be. And they're also where we're putting follow-ups and corrections to previous episodes. So thanks to the two listeners who recently wrote in correcting me on Visa that it was not North Dakota, but South Dakota that first changed their usury laws to support credit cards, which is why all of your credit cards, or so many of them are bailed from there today. So we'll be including Probably, I don't know, we've got three or four more Visa tidbits that we'll toss in the email for that. Come talk about this episode with us after listening at acquired.fm/Slack.

• 2:16:10Ben Gilbert?

  Check out ACQ2. We just did this awesome Visa follow-up with our good buddy Gorav Ahuja from Thrive Capital. He's been in the payments industry for over a decade, founding companies, investing in companies, and helped put a finer point on a lot of the things we were describing in the current ecosystem today. If you want some merch, we've got a sweet merch store, acquired.fm/store. And with that, listeners, we'll see you next year. We will see you next year.