Trailer: What is Acquired?

Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them. The episodes are deep and heavily-researched, uncovering the full histories behind household names you thought you already knew like Rolex, Amazon, Starbucks, or NVIDIA. Enjoy!

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

• 0:00Ben Gilbert?

  Hello and welcome to Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 0:07David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 0:09Ben Gilbert?

  And we are your hosts.

• 0:10David Rosenthal?

  So Ben and I are obsessed with uncovering the history, strategy and stories behind what built the greatest companies in the world. Each month, we choose a company and we spend the entire month researching what uniquely made it work where many others failed. The output of that is a full day recording session where Ben and I come together and tell the absolute deepest business and technology stories on the internet.

• 0:34Ben Gilbert?

  And when we say obsessed, we mean that we spend 100 hours each reading everything that exists about a company and doing primary research and background interviews with the people who lived it firsthand. These are stories like Nvidia, Costco, Hermes, Microsoft, Rolex, Amazon. Those are some of our favorites, anyway. What started 10 years ago as just the study of tech companies has led to a curiosity about our broader world from Berkshire Hathaway to the NFL, or even Taylor Swift. Our goal in creating each episode is to uncover the secrets that are lurking in plain sight and how these world-changing companies went from obscurity to ubiquity. So if you've ever wondered, how did Starbucks end up on every corner around the globe?

• 1:20Ben Gilbert?

  Or what does Visa actually do? And how did they become the payment rails of the whole globe? Or why is the NFL so much bigger than other sports leagues? Then Acquired is for you.

• 1:32David Rosenthal?

  Yep, we have a unique format that we do on the show. We call it a conversational audiobook. Ben and I tell these stories of these companies through a deep conversation. And typically, it's just the two of us without an interview guest. Occasionally, we will bring in a protagonist from the story, like Howard Schultz from Starbucks, or Jetsen Huang from Nvidia, or Mark Zuckerberg from Meta. Usually, though, that's as a follow-up interview to a deep dive that we've already done on their company. Now, one thing we should say. Our episodes are typically very long, like three to four hours long, since we go really deep. But don't be scared. These are amazing stories that deserve every minute, and we have a lot of fun along the way. Our goal is really to deliver a complete

• 2:16David Rosenthal?

  understanding of a company by the time you finish the episode.

• 2:19Ben Gilbert?

  So we're glad you're here. Welcome. And if you ever want to discuss any episodes or give us any feedback, join us in the Acquired community at acquired.fm/slash/Slack. Welcome.