2017 Holiday Special

Acquired cozies up to the fire and looks back on the year in tech. How wildly off were we on last year’s predictions? What does the next year have in store? Most importantly, what price will Bitcoin be trading at in December 2018??? Pour yourself a glass of your favorite holiday beverage and kick back with us. Sponsors: Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegoraStatsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26 More Acquired! Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the Slack http://acquired.fm/slackSubscribe to ACQ2 https://pod.link/acquiredlpMerch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! © Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC LinksJosh Elman on shared experiences https://mobile.twitter.com/joshelman/status/938449919320272896Patrick McKenzie on distribution https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936617094166089728?s=172017 Carve Outs of the Year: Books His Dark Materials https://www.amazon.com/Materials-Omnibus-Golden-Compass-Spyglass/dp/0375847227 trilogy by Philip PullmanShoe Dog https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias=stripbooks&field-keywords=shoe+dog by Phil KnightWooden on Leadership https://www.amazon.com/Wooden-Leadership-Create-Winning-Organization/dp/0071453393/ref=sr_1_1 by John Wooden and Steve JamisonArticles “The Great AI Awakening” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html New York Times Magazine“Founder Friendly” http://avc.com/2017/08/founder-friendly/ AVC blogPodcasts “The Ezra Klein Show” https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/e/49284945 featuring Yuval Noah Harari“The Bill Simmons Show” https://soundcloud.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast/rockets-gm-daryl-morey-and-music-legend-jimmy-iovine-ep-233 featuring Jimmy IovineMusic Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band live at the Hammersmith Odeon London in 1975 https://www.amazon.com/Hammersmith-Odeon-London-75-2CD/dp/B000E97X66A Moment Apart https://odesza.bandcamp.com/album/a-moment-apart by OdeszaMovies Creed http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3076658/Blade Runner 2049 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1856101/The Last Jedi http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2527336/Apps YouTube https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youtube-watch-listen-stream/id544007664?mt=8HQ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hq-live-trivia-game-show/id1232278996?mt=8

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

• 0:00David Rosenthal?

  That is definitely the best news in a long time.

• 0:04Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Dick Costola has a good tweet. Roll tide.

• 0:08David Rosenthal?

  Roll tide.

• 0:21Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome to episode 51 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 0:29David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 0:30Ben Gilbert?

  And we are your hosts. We are coming to you from mid-December in a second annual Acquired holiday tradition, the holiday special. David, are you excited?

• 0:43David Rosenthal?

  I'm so excited. I'm jealous because Ben has a glass of rosé and I am in the office and we don't yet have any wine or beer here. So I'm toasting you in spirit.

• 0:59Ben Gilbert?

  We'll have to do that in person at our meetup and we'll talk about that in a moment. 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.

• 1:26David 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.

• 1:47Ben Gilbert?

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

• 2:09David 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.

• 2:27Ben 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. If you're new to the show, we've got a Slack that you can join at acquired.fm. We're over 1,000 strong and, you know, good place to talk about tech M&A, recent news that happened. And more importantly, we actually have more DM activity than there is chatter

• 3:10Ben Gilbert?

  in the the main feed. So cool to see the connectivity among you listeners who are getting to know each other better by being listeners of the show.

• 3:19David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we're almost at, we're almost at 1,100 now. Our growth is accelerating. We're going exponential.

• 3:27Ben Gilbert?

  That's cool. My data's old. I gotta look. Well, speaking of listeners getting to know each other better, we mentioned it on the last show and we gotta, we gotta drive the point home. We're gonna be in San Francisco. David's already down there. I'll be flying down Thursday, January 18th. Mark your calendars. It'll be in the evening. We are still figuring out, out venue, but we're, we're super excited to hang with our listeners for a few hours and our densest concentration of listeners is in the Bay Area. New York and Seattle are up there too, but the, the Bay Area has certainly been growing the fastest and, and excited to, always good to spend time down there. So.

• 4:04David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And special shout out and thank you to Preet, a longtime listener who has been helping organize and pull this together. So thank you. And this is, we can't wait to see y'all.

• 4:16Ben Gilbert?

  Not only to organize, but to really spark the whole thing. I think this is the thing David and I keep talking about, haven't done. And Preet, thanks for inspiring us to do it. And that is PR 33T if you're looking in the acquired Slack.

• 4:33Ben Gilbert?

  All right, David, what else? We've got an announcement for next year.

• 4:38David Rosenthal?

  We do, we do. We are gonna be evolving the format a little bit in 2018. Big things happening in Acquired. We're gonna have to put the old format back in the Acquired museum that we talked about.

• 4:50Ben Gilbert?

  That's right, that's right, yeah. It's scheduled for construction sometime in... I haven't gotten a date yet from the crew.

• 5:00David Rosenthal?

  Sometime in the next decade. Don't worry, though, we're not making major changes to the show, but we are gonna move to a season format. We thought after 50, now 51, episodes, it would be better to block this into a traditional podcast season format. And that's gonna let us do a few things which we're excited about.

• 5:22Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, we're most excited because it basically gives us a framework to try new things. So if we want to do something kind of radical, at the very longest, it can last one season. Of course, we still can change things on the fly, but can add or remove sections or change the format for seasons at a time. And those seasons will be six months, approximately 10 episodes. And one of the things we're most excited about is to do mini-series. So we've been doing it kind of informally with things like the Disney saga and talking a lot about, basically, different episodes that string together and tell a single narrative. David and I have been thinking a lot about, well, what are trends that we really want to cover? And what are things that we really want to be thoughtful about and learn more on our own?

• 6:05Ben Gilbert?

  And have an impetus to do kind of a wider body of research before doing the episodes? And so I think you can probably expect one mini-series as a part of the season early next year.

• 6:17David Rosenthal?

  Of the season, and if it works well, hopefully each season going forward. So we're thinking this will be probably around three episodes out of the 10. So seven, you know, normal, standard Acquired episodes, and three for a mini-series that we're gonna change up in each season if it works well.

• 6:36Ben Gilbert?

  That's right, and the most important thing is the name, which we are hyper creatively calling Season X. No, it's gonna be Season 2.

• 6:47David Rosenthal?

  Season 10, we're skipping seasons 2 through 9.

• 6:50Ben Gilbert?

  We're actually releasing Season 2 and Season 10 simultaneously. 10 is actually marked by a Y, but you'll get it. It makes sense, we put a lot of time into this.

• 7:02David Rosenthal?

  Ben, this is your cheesy joke for the episode. This is what happens when Ben drinks rosé.

• 7:07Ben Gilbert?

  That's right. That's right. Or should I? Yeah. I thought about earlier making the joke that our meetup was going to be down in acquired HQ2 in San Francisco.

• 7:16David Rosenthal?

  Perfect. Perfect.

• 7:19Ben Gilbert?

  I guess I did.

• 7:20David Rosenthal?

  That will definitely be a prediction for 2018.

• 7:24Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:25David Rosenthal?

  Later in the show, where is HQ2?

• 7:27Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, I've actually...

• 7:28David Rosenthal?

  Like, where's Waldo?

• 7:29Ben Gilbert?

  This isn't in my notes, but like, I do have strong conviction around a prediction for that.

• 7:32David Rosenthal?

  Oh, all right. Well, save it for 2018 predictions.

• 7:36Ben Gilbert?

  I'm adding it to the doc now. All right, David. Okay. Anything else before we dive into the 2017 year in review?

• 7:44David Rosenthal?

  No. Let's do it.

• 7:46Ben Gilbert?

  All right, so listeners, in 2017, we recorded 21 episodes, this being our 22nd. And David and I have gone through and handpicked each of our favorite. So David, why don't you go first? What was your favorite episode?

• 7:59David Rosenthal?

  So, well, I'm gonna start with my runners-up for... I've got two runners-up for...

• 8:04Ben Gilbert?

  That's cheating.

• 8:08David Rosenthal?

  You know, it's like, I love to give multiple grades, you know? I just can't... I have trouble picking just one.

• 8:13Ben Gilbert?

  God, we try and have a format.

• 8:14David Rosenthal?

  I know.

• 8:18David Rosenthal?

  Okay. Well, real quick, my runners-up are the Snap IPO and Square IPOs. Both great shows, near and dear to my heart. But my winner, I cannot not pick our last episode, Beats. That was just too much fun. I mean, anytime you're talking about, you know, Jimmy Iovine, who's probably the coolest person alive, and Dr. Dre in the same building, starting a company on the beach, getting acquired by Apple, largest acquisition ever, it just doesn't get any better than that.

• 8:49Ben Gilbert?

  No. No, somebody's been watching the documentary.

• 8:54David Rosenthal?

  So good.

• 8:55Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 8:55David Rosenthal?

  Want to come on that later.

• 8:56Ben Gilbert?

  Listeners, The Defiant Ones, the HBO documentary was freaking awesome. Like, if you like the episode, even if you don't, if you like, like rap or entrepreneurship or scrappy founder stories or reflections on pop culture in the last 50 years, like, you gotta go watch The Defiant Ones.

• 9:15David Rosenthal?

  So good.

• 9:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. My favorite was one of your runners up, The Square IPO. I felt like that was one where, you know, sometimes on the show, we're all over the place and sometimes we've, occasionally, we have really good structured thinking. And I thought in that one, we just-

• 9:31David Rosenthal?

  Not on this episode.

• 9:32Ben Gilbert?

  No. I thought in that one, we, I will stand by the conclusion we made on that one forever. And I felt like all of our reasoning to get there was really well founded. I love the fact that we really got into like, why the narrative was the way that it was about the company when it IPO'd and basically poked all the holes in it. And that it's a really sound company with solid fundamentals today that continues to do what it was doing when it was a private company and everyone just looked at it wrong. And so, yeah, pumped about the company Square and pumped about, about that episode. I stand by my grade on that one, unlike the YouTube episode where we gave a C. And every time I see some new article about YouTube, I'm like, we really, we really have to redo that episode.

• 10:17David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we really should. Maybe that would be a fun thing to do in, in season two or maybe season three is revisit, you know, that could be a mini series at some point, revisiting, we should revisit Instagram, we should revisit YouTube.

• 10:30Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, especially when we're wrong, like where we were wrong and why.

• 10:34David Rosenthal?

  Yep. I'm not on the surface without doing the research yet. I'm not 100% convinced we were wrong on YouTube. Will we give it a C?

• 10:44Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and it was largely around opportunity cost and basically spending a whole bunch of time and money on what we kind of called a distraction for the breakeven business of YouTube, but I'm, I'm way more bought in on what it does for the rest of Google and the Google ecosystem than I was before.

• 11:00David Rosenthal?

  I mean, it's an incredible product. I'm going to talk more about it on this show, but it's also still not clear that it makes money, right?

• 11:07Ben Gilbert?

  Uh, I haven't, haven't actually looked in a while. Yeah, but I think that's about right.

• 11:11David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 11:12Ben Gilbert?

  You know, David, you're an early-stage VC. You don't necessarily invest in things that make money. So, you know, what do you care?

• 11:20David Rosenthal?

  That's a low blow, Ben. Low blow.

• 11:24Ben Gilbert?

  Speaking of which, you want to move into our personal 2017s?

• 11:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah. We thought we'd add this section to the show this year, especially given we're doing our holiday episode here and we talk a lot about topical things on the show and companies and stories. But we don't talk that much about ourselves.

• 11:42Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I thought that was like the right thing to do, but we've gotten a lot of feedback from listeners,

• 11:50Ben Gilbert?

  people in person and people from messaging us on the Slack, saying like, you guys mentioned early what you did. You know, like you can look us up on LinkedIn or whatever, but that we don't actually ever talk about our day to day.

• 12:02David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, and it's so funny, like as Acquired's gotten bigger, I mean, at a certain point, I think it was maybe kind of the beginning of this year, like, or maybe end of last year, like, we passed a threshold where like, way, I don't know about you, Ben, but like way more people in the world now know me as like co-host of Acquired than anything else I do in life, which is so great. And yet, you know, Ben and I spend, you know, a small, small portion of our, you know, waking hours dedicated to Acquired.

• 12:30Ben Gilbert?

  To the Acquired Media Empire.

• 12:33David Rosenthal?

  Hey, museum coming.

• 12:34Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 12:35David Rosenthal?

  2019.

• 12:36Ben Gilbert?

  That's right.

• 12:38David Rosenthal?

  But yeah, so I mean, for me, 2017 was about as big a year as you can get. So, almost exactly a year ago, at the end of 2016, Jenny, my wife, finished her PhD, which itself was an incredible accomplishment and I was and am so proud of her. Took her six and a half years. And I would, woo, indeed.

• 13:08David Rosenthal?

  I was also thinking about and embarking on a new journey that I am on now. And so those things coincided and at the beginning of this year, I left Madrona, the VC firm where I was in Seattle, left working there full time. And Jenny and I actually spent the first couple of months of the year living in Europe. We moved to Paris for a couple of months to celebrate her finishing and starting a new journey for both of us.

• 13:40Ben Gilbert?

  And David, during that period, your carve outs were like way, way better than mine.

• 13:43David Rosenthal?

  Oh, man, I had so much time for carve outs. It was.

• 13:46Ben Gilbert?

  It was like.

• 13:47David Rosenthal?

  Magical.

• 13:47Ben Gilbert?

  My carve out is Israel.

• 13:50David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Ben Gilbert?

  I just got back.

• 13:52David Rosenthal?

  And it was so great. Yeah, definitely back to the real world now. But it was great because little, little known fact by, by actually most people in my life, but, but now to be known by the acquired audience, I was a French literature major in college and Jenny was.

• 14:11Ben Gilbert?

  It's the natural, natural path to VC.

• 14:13David Rosenthal?

  Natural path to being a technology VC, early stage technology VC. But I lived in France in college and for a summer and Jenny also studied abroad there. And neither of us had been back since her time in college. So it had been 10 years. Really amazing to have this chance to go back to a special place for both of us. And then this summer, we moved, we moved back to the States and moved to San Francisco, which has been great. And I loved Seattle, still spend a lot of time there, but also love San Francisco and Jenny's from here. And it's just such a, such a amazing city that has so much history and is so much, you

• 14:57David Rosenthal?

  know, is the epicenter of tech, but is also just so much more than tech in Silicon Valley. So it's been great, you know, exploring this new city. And then also I've been working on, working on my new thing with my partner and my business partner. Unfortunately, we can't talk just yet about what it is coming soon in 2018, but the founder journey has been everything it's cracked up to be. It's been wonderful, crazy, scary, awesome, terrifying. You know, I think a bunch of people at the end of the year have been asking me, you know, how's it been? Both, I had no idea the direction it was going to go and like could never have foreseen

• 15:40David Rosenthal?

  all the daily twists and turns along the way. And yet, at the same time, we're like moving along exactly in the direction and pace that we thought we were in the bigger picture. And it's just been such a cool experience and really has helped me build a lot of empathy for, you know, all the other founders out there that we cover on the show that I've worked with in B C. And I'm sure, you know, as we know from our survey, many of you out there as well. So that's been, that's been my 2017. But the, one of the best things, for sure, has been acquired. And especially now that we don't live in the same city. I'm just so glad we keep doing this. And it's turned into much more than neither of us, I think, ever would have expected. So thanks, Ben, for being my co-host along the way.

• 16:26Ben Gilbert?

  Dude, yeah, likewise. You know, it's, it's caused us to make a nice, nice A V investment. I never thought I'd be a person with an office with four microphones and Mike stands behind me, but here I am.

• 16:37David Rosenthal?

  Dude, the, one of the things I enjoyed most about the defiant ones was all of the shots of, you know, Dre and all the other artists in the studio. And, you know, pop filters, like, we have, you know, Dre quality pop filters on our microphones.

• 16:53Ben Gilbert?

  It's the cheap, it's like seven bucks. It's the cheapest part of the whole setup, but it makes it look the most legit.

• 16:58David Rosenthal?

  I know, we are totally legit.

• 17:01Ben Gilbert?

  Well, David, it's funny how we have, you know, very different 2017s, but parallel in a lot of ways. And one of the ways that you were just mentioning is, you know, there's all these crazy ups and downs in sort of the founder journey. But you are exactly in the direction, doing exactly the things where if you were to have drawn the line, you know, when you first started, where you thought you'd be. I'll tell this story in media's rest. So talking about a conversation I had yesterday with one of our investors, and I went through an update deck of everything that's going on with the company and he goes, Looks great. It's exactly where I would have pegged you guys. I haven't heard from you

• 17:42Ben Gilbert?

  in a few months, but this is great. Thanks for letting me know. Right on track. And in my head, I was thinking, right on track? Like, all the, you know?

• 17:53David Rosenthal?

  Every day has been an adventure.

• 17:56Ben Gilbert?

  I know. I know. So my year, I think I've talked about this a couple of times on the show, but my normal job is I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, which is a startup studio that's based in Seattle. It's sort of a new model for entrepreneurship that sits somewhere in between being the actual operating founder of a company and being an investor. Our model is that we start companies partnering with a great entrepreneur at sort of various stages. Either we work with them from the moment that we come up with the idea together, or sort of in that first early week or month, or we have an idea internally in the studio. It's about 20 people, heavily biased toward engineers. We prototype things, we talk to

• 18:38Ben Gilbert?

  customers about it, we try and bring it to market. And if that's going well, then we start finding people who are really domain deep, who are amazing founders and work with us. And constantly trying to find different ways to plug in with with great founders that are along various parts of their entrepreneurial journey. So branching out the model a little bit. One thing that I did this year that's that's very different is since July, I've been the interim CEO of our most recent spin out called Taunt. And Taunt is an esports company. For for folks who haven't been tracking esports is this insane phenomenon where people watch other people play video games competitively to the tune of 300 million people per year.

• 19:22Ben Gilbert?

  It's growing very quickly every year. It's huge in Asia and growing quickly in the West. And what Taunt does is it's a way for people to have more fun being fans of esports and to compete with their friends while they're watching in sort of a live fantasy type experience. So you and your friends compete against each other and it's a social competitive app. Boy, the number one thing, switching from my my job

• 19:48Ben Gilbert?

  Basically serially starting these ideas and then working to transition off them to start the next one to sort of running with one, at least in this interim capacity, has been remarkable. I way underestimated how much focus I would need to have. I've basically stopped doing not only everything at PSL, but so many other things in my life because running a company just requires ridiculous, ridiculous focus. And every single day, it's a battle of all the really important things that need to happen that won't happen today. Actually, TA McCann, who's another awesome founder and investor in the Seattle area, calls this ITINDY,

• 20:31Ben Gilbert?

  important things I'm not doing yet. And he keeps a conscious list of things that are like extremely important, super high priority things, but like not, you know, it's either not as urgent, it's not a hair on fire problem as other things, or it's just not as high priority as some other high priority things. I would describe the rest of my life as I worked a lot, but I didn't, you know, like if I ever needed to leave work at three or something and not check in for the rest of the day, that was kind of fine. And it's being in the founder mindset really means it's really not the case. Like there are things, there are sometimes things

• 21:09Ben Gilbert?

  that just absolutely must, must be done today, this hour. Maybe the number one skill is constantly being able to be on all the time, be ready for anything and play schedule Tetris and understand that whatever you looked at and thought your day was going to be at the beginning of the day may actually not be the correct prioritization, given new information and having to juggle that on the fly. And a lot of you out there are probably laughing and know this well and have been in this situation a lot. I've started other things before, but never a venture backed thing where we were sort of quickly building a team, quickly in market. And yeah, the biggest thing is really being able to quickly adapt and reprioritize on the fly.

• 21:56David Rosenthal?

  You have multiple, you know, handful of people that like depend on you, you know? I mean, that's one thing that's not our structure here. And so I'm lucky that I don't have that particular challenge of being a founder. Still have a little bit more kind of autonomy, but I got to imagine like, you know, in some ways, you know, as founder and CEO of something like you have the least amount of freedom.

• 22:22Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And at least in the pre-product market fit stage where you're actually not sure what the North Star is, like you have an idea, you have a value or a mission that's North Star, but there's not a defined implementation yet. There's a lot of, there's a lot of thrashing. And, you know, you try and reduce CPU thrash, but ultimately you are switching back and forth to a lot of things and there is high switching cost to that.

• 22:47David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, is there ever, is there ever? Despite all the things that we have going on in our lives, like I said, I'm just so glad we keep.

• 22:56Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, 22 episodes, you kidding me? I'm proud of us.

• 22:59David Rosenthal?

  Oh, my gosh. Like, yeah, I mean, I'm with you. Other than, other than my time when Jenny and I were, you know, hanging out, gallivanting around, we were not exactly gallivanting, but, you know, when my carve outs were much better back then, like I basically have done nothing else except work and acquired this year.

• 23:17Ben Gilbert?

  There are, yeah, that's the other thing is I think my carve outs probably suffered because there's weeks where I'm like, I'm supposed to have read something that was not an email since the last time we recorded.

• 23:28David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. I am in that boat too.

• 23:33Ben 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.

• 23:47David 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.

• 24:01Ben 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.

• 24:11David 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.

• 24:28Ben 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.

• 24:44David 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.

• 25:01Ben 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?

• 25:10David 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. Well, should we review our 2017 predictions that we made last year?

• 25:28Ben Gilbert?

  Sounds great.

• 25:28David Rosenthal?

  See how we did?

• 25:29Ben Gilbert?

  How wrong were we?

• 25:32David Rosenthal?

  Well, let's see. Okay, so my first one, should we trade off each of ours?

• 25:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's okay.

• 25:39David Rosenthal?

  So my first one was that aggregation theory was going to become even more important. Ben Thompson's seminal aggregation theory was going to become even more important in 2017 than 2016. I think I kind of nailed that one. I mean, it wasn't a very controversial prediction. I think in 2017, it has become super clear that the biggest tech companies, you know, the Facebooks, the Amazons, the Googles, the Apples, have just consolidated so much power in the space, continue to consolidate even more power. And that is, you know, kind of, I think, a direct result of, you know, everything that's implied by aggregation theory. And Ben is actually Thompson has actually shifted a lot of his writing, I think, to this, you know,

• 26:24David Rosenthal?

  what is the consequence of this?

• 26:27Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I mean, it changed, it changed our economy, it changed our political structure, it changed, it changed, it literally changed like the way that people interact with other humans. Like, if you look at a society as a collection of political, social, and economic changes, like, it is the driving force behind the biggest change of all three of those. I mean, if you want to talk about income inequality, if you want, there's a variety of things. I mean, I think aggregation theory is, is the thing driving most of those.

• 26:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And, and, and super specifically, I mean, in the startup tech ecosystem, you know, we're kind of at a moment now where like, for pretty much any kind of product and company that you have, if you want to do user acquisition, like, you have two choices, you have two destinations, like, Google or Facebook, you know?

• 27:14Ben Gilbert?

  It's, it's striking, and everything else is a growth hack.

• 27:17David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, and everything else is like you're rolling the dice. Yeah, super interesting.

• 27:22Ben Gilbert?

  I saw a great tweet earlier by patio11, the frequent commenter on Hacker News, and I think he now works on Stripe Atlas. It was a great tweet storm, and we'll include this in the show notes, of great advice that you can't hear too many times, and that you should just, people should continue to talk about even though they feel it's old hat, because there's always new people that can benefit from hearing it. And one of the observations was that the hardest thing to do in a B2B company is sales, and the hardest thing to do in a B2C company is distribution. And if you're starting a consumer company, you basically have Facebook or Google to go to, and you're effectively just paying a tax to get to their customers, and they get bigger, and they get better. And every single company

• 28:06Ben Gilbert?

  that, that, that bootstraps their business, or not bootstraps, I mean, Coca-Cola pays those companies huge amounts of money per year, everybody does, in order to reach their customers, because they have all the customers. And that just fuels the flywheel even more. So it is, you know, the hardest thing to do in consumer is distribution, and they have the lock on distribution. I just noticed one of my predictions from last year is the big aggregators get bigger. I think we have the same prediction.

• 28:34David Rosenthal?

  Basically the same thing. All right. Check on that one.

• 28:37Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. My, another one that I had, I think the rest of mine are kind of hard to check in on. I said, people get more serious about universal basic income. I think the people who were already proponents of universal basic income got further entrenched in that view, based on our political and economic structure now. I don't think that it picked up any traction in any way. I think the experiments continued. I think a lot of great books were written on it. I don't think it's really picked up steam.

• 29:06David Rosenthal?

  My next one, I said, we would see more tech IPOs in 2017 than 2016. And we did, but we didn't see that many more. So there were 26 in 2016 and 33 in 2017.

• 29:22Ben Gilbert?

  I'll call it. That's, that's cool. I qualify that.

• 29:25David Rosenthal?

  That's more, but nowhere near, you know, the, the heyday of, of the earlier 2000s. There's so many companies that have raised so much money in the private markets and need to exit one way or another. And they still have not exited. And this is a trend that I think will continue into 2018. But some of the big ones, big IPOs we did see in 2017, some of which we cover here. Snap, Blue Apron, Stitch Fix, Cloudera, Okta, MuleSoft, Roku, MongoDB, and Seattle native Redfin.

• 30:03Ben Gilbert?

  That's right.

• 30:03David Rosenthal?

  Went public in 2017.

• 30:05Ben Gilbert?

  Good companies in there, just not a ton of them.

• 30:06David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 30:08Ben Gilbert?

  Another one that, that was one of mine last year was the commoditization of machine learning. And that the value is, value is in the data itself and not in the actual machine learning algorithms or infrastructure to do that. That's absolutely played out. Looking at Reinvent this year, looking at a lot of Google Cloud's announcements. There really are more and more machine learning off the shelf tools. And it really is all about not only having the data, but having the data in a great format, your processing pipeline, and correctly sort of labeling and cleaning data to be used by machine learning. I'll just claim here that I'm not. An expert on this, but we haven't really seen like new math in any way.

• 30:49Ben Gilbert?

  That is radically changed, radically changed what people are doing with machine learning. It's much more about the availability of tools, more people having access to those tools. And a big thing is just sort of the the compute being more and more available. There's some newer models that the people are using, but it's largely about making it more available and less, less expensive for companies to hire the large teams that was previously required to do data science.

• 31:18David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Well, so in contrast to a new, exciting technology becoming easier to use and more widely available. My prediction, or I guess question more for 2017 is we will see if VR becomes a big thing or not. And, well, unfortunately for the VR industry, at least for the moment, it's still not a big thing. So we'll see. I wouldn't, you know, call VR and AR out, per se. I don't think this is the, yet at least the 3D TV of technologies, but

• 31:53Ben Gilbert?

  AR is more in, like AR did great, or AR at least has a path to becoming mainstream.

• 31:58David Rosenthal?

  A path, but it's still not here.

• 32:02Ben Gilbert?

  No. Here's a, here's a like speculative question is, how do you call that earlier? I mean, there were plenty of VR naysayers, but looking back on it, I mean, what are the signals that people just weren't going to buy the devices at the volume that that we were all hoping earlier? So you don't make those investments or you don't spend years of your time working on those companies. Some people are going to weather the storm and do great. And when it finally does become a thing, if it becomes a thing, but you know, how, how do you spot that?

• 32:33David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the Kickstarter, you know, numbers for Oculus were really good all along the way. And then, you know, their, their dev kit shipments. But, and, and the, you know, the Vive is an incredible piece of hardware. I don't know. I mean, I guess the thing is it's just like still not easy to access for, you know, most people, for your mainstream consumer, like you still need to do a lot of work to get the payoff of the incredible experience and spend a lot of money.

• 33:04Ben Gilbert?

  It's not as easy as just like downloading the number one app in the App Store, like Coinbase, you know?

• 33:10David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Yeah, that was something we did not predict.

• 33:14Ben Gilbert?

  No, no, we're in here just to say anything about crypto.

• 33:18David Rosenthal?

  No. Well, we missed that, but.

• 33:21Ben Gilbert?

  We did. In fact, I would say I may miss it again.

• 33:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I don't have, I don't have anything in my 2018 predictions about crypto. Probably should. All right. My last one was, I said, the trend, the mega trend of urbanization would continue. I think it probably did. I don't have a great way to measure, but more people in the world, all around the world, moving to cities. Doesn't seem to be abating anytime soon.

• 33:48Ben Gilbert?

  Nope. And mine was, does it become more expensive to produce physical stuff? David, I honestly can't remember my rationale behind this.

• 33:58David Rosenthal?

  Well, I think you were saying that like, as you know, like, take China, for instance, you know, as the middle class rises, is it going to become more expensive actually to produce stuff physically in China, like physical goods?

• 34:10Ben Gilbert?

  Right, right. Well, the cost of DRAM went up, component costs of smartphones went up. But I think that probably has to do with more like, more business, like structural business dynamics than it does rising labor costs.

• 34:25David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm not sure that that actually happened. If anything, I think more and more returns are going to capital as opposed to labor around the world. All right. Final section to round out our review of 2017 before we look forward bravely and boldly into 2018. Our top acquired theme of 2017. So unlike last year, when we did this, we reviewed themes that we talked about most on the show.

• 34:53Ben Gilbert?

  That section was like way, way too long.

• 34:56David Rosenthal?

  Way too long and not that interesting. So we're, we're taking a more qualitative approach this year. And what we think, you know, looking back on our body of work for this year, like what stands out to each of us as like the, the kind of most impactful or interesting theme that we've discussed on the show. So for me, it's actually a pretty recent one that I think I first. Brought up on the Stitch Fix episode, but then also talked about on the Beats episode. And that's this this concept of the way to really, you know, as an investor, make outsized returns, but as a company and as a founder, to really have a large,

• 35:41David Rosenthal?

  large impact as opposed to a smaller impact is to do something, you know, make a have a thesis with a company or an investment that is, obviously, you want it to be correct, but being correct is not enough. You have to also be correct and non consensus, not obvious. And this was something that Andy Radcliffe, one of the founders of Benchmark, and one of my professors in business school, talks a lot about. And he took this idea from Howard Marks at Oaktree. But it's really, really powerful when you internalize it. And if you look at Stitch Fix, as I mentioned, and Beats, but I think also Square, Starbucks, Snap, all of these are companies and products that they were both like the correct product for the time. But before they were started, like, nobody thought like, you know, who's

• 36:25David Rosenthal?

  going to go to a store to drink coffee? Like, people buy coffee beans to drink at home, you know? Or, you know, who's going to pay a lot of money for headphones that aren't reference headphones? Like, the $2 ones that you get with your iPod or an iPhone are good enough? Or, you know, a Snap like Facebook dominates social media? Like, why do you need another, like, you know, method of sharing photos with one another? And I think it's a really powerful idea. Again, both for both for investing, obviously, but but also as a founder in product design as well.

• 36:56Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I totally agree. It's a good theme. Mine, I don't think we explicitly called this out on a show, but we talked about it in many of these episodes. In 2008, call it, we started, maybe 2007, we started first hearing about social media. And it was a term that I don't think I had quite understood and dissected for a few years of really like, what is what does it actually mean? I get that we're calling Twitter social media. Like, I understand that. What does it imply? As you dig into it and really understand like, okay, it means basically everyone is a citizen journalist and it won't just be for this in this short form capacity.

• 37:40Ben Gilbert?

  Of course, you have the rise of Medium, you have YouTube, you have basically the rise of the internet allowing anybody to become a creator. Where instead of a one to many world where you have publishers that push out to a very small number of publishers that push out to millions of people. You have, you know, everybody on earth able to push content to everybody else else on earth and build followings in different ways. It really makes all media truly social and all media, the future of media, much more about, do you have a compelling message? Rather than, are you able to fit in with a body of content that has existed today? And in the ability to be non-conforming, which David actually fits in pretty well with your your tech theme.

• 38:25Ben Gilbert?

  To be able to be differentiated by be non-conforming and still get distribution on that. That was a new piece of value that was unlocked. And the biggest thing to come of all that is that the internet and social media really removed gatekeepers. It removed a lot of the power that was held by people that controlled the very few that that could actually publish. That you had to fit in with, that you had to be conforming. And you see this in so many different, there's so many different manifestations of which. One of one amazing thing for the world is the fact that Time's Person of the Year was the Silence Breakers.

• 39:04Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, for the first time, there were people, there were women primarily that were able to stand up and talk about their stories. And know that they weren't going to be silenced for that by the people that controlled all the distribution. Because you don't have to be afraid in this world and there are ways to get your message out. Even if you don't go through those gatekeepers trying to silence you.

• 39:25David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, totally. And like, you can tell your story on your terms too. I mean, Ben Thompson's Person of the Year was Susan Fowler, the Uber whistleblower.

• 39:34Ben Gilbert?

  On her own blog.

• 39:35David Rosenthal?

  He talks about it. Yeah, on her own blog. Like, you know, she didn't have to go to, you know, the New York Times to to get them to break the story. And have them tell it on their terms and like, who knows what happens. Like, yeah, on her own blog. Like, she wrote it, she hit publish on her terms.

• 39:51Ben Gilbert?

  It's pretty incredible. And of course, there's negative repercussions to this, too. Of course, you start to get into, you know, you only start reading things from that are that are lower quality because they don't have editorial process that are only confirmation bias thing. I mean, there's of course, many problems with it, but the removal of gatekeepers by social media broadly is is finally coming to fruition.

• 40:14David Rosenthal?

  But I would, what's super interesting, though, is like, I would say, like, yes, social media has definitely removed people, individual people and organizations of people who are gatekeepers. But like we were talking about with the just growth and consequences of aggregation theory earlier, like, there are now technologies that are gatekeepers. So if you want to market to people, you know, in any sense, like, you need to pay the toll to Google and Facebook.

• 40:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, there's, there's different, there's different taxes along the delivery now than there were before.

• 40:48David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Ben Gilbert?

  And they're, they're more obvious and they're more monetary. Like, it's, it's less about paying your dues and more about paying money.

• 40:57David Rosenthal?

  And, you know, even outside of marketing, like, in terms of getting your voice heard, yes, you can do it on via social media and on these platforms, but you also have to pay the toll. You have to pay the toll with your attention and your contribution of that content to that platform, which is going to monetize the attention that it generates.

• 41:17Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And, and everybody is, is either paying the toll to do distribution or, or paying the toll, I'm sorry, paying the toll to do acquisition or paying the toll by giving their content to Facebook and Google with, with accelerated mobile pages, with the subscription platforms are both launching, with Facebook Instagram articles, in all forms, the, the, some of the best content in the world is being contributed as, as part of the bargain that people, that the publishers are striking with platforms.

• 41:49David Rosenthal?

  Indeed, indeed.

• 41:51Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Logora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

• 42:04David 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?

• 42:20Ben 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.

• 42:35David 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.

• 42:59Ben 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.

• 43:18David 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.

• 43:48Ben 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.

• 44:14Ben Gilbert?

  All right, 2018 predictions?

• 44:16David Rosenthal?

  2018, here we come.

• 44:21David Rosenthal?

  Well, maybe I'll start off because it's appropriate. I didn't plan it this way. My first prediction is that the consequences of aggregation theory continue.

• 44:31Ben Gilbert?

  David, you make the most like cop out predictions.

• 44:35David Rosenthal?

  I really, I need to like, I need to go out on a limb more. Clearly, my, my brain, too much in the second half of this year has just been tied up in my work. I have not been able to, been able to make a really, you know, interesting and compelling predictions here. All right, I'm just gonna stop there. I've got more, but you, you go next.

• 44:57Ben Gilbert?

  I'll force you to make a call. Here we sit on December 12th, 2017. What is the price of Bitcoin on December 12th, 2018?

• 45:09David Rosenthal?

  Oh, okay. Well, I'm gonna force you to make a prediction after this.

• 45:14Ben Gilbert?

  And it's 17,000 ish today.

• 45:17David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, 17,000 ish today.

• 45:21David Rosenthal?

  I mean,

• 45:24David Rosenthal?

  I don't know. It depends on so many things, but I'm going to wildly pick a number out of thin air. I am going to say the price of Bitcoin on December 12th, 2018 will be

• 45:39David Rosenthal?

  $28,000.

• 45:42Ben Gilbert?

  I like it. I like it.

• 45:45David Rosenthal?

  And 52 cents.

• 45:48David Rosenthal?

  What's, what's your prediction?

• 45:49Ben Gilbert?

  Buy your futures, right there. You heard it first.

• 45:54Ben Gilbert?

  $2,000. But I do think it's gonna, I think it's gonna get up to 30 first, 30,000 first.

• 46:00David Rosenthal?

  Up to 30, down to 2.

• 46:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 46:02David Rosenthal?

  So you and I are an order of magnitude apart.

• 46:05Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. I'm curious what it's gonna get to in the next two weeks alone. I mean, I think people are gonna get Coinbase for Christmas.

• 46:14David Rosenthal?

  You think people are gonna give each other Bitcoin for Christmas? That should be our carve out.

• 46:17Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Ben Gilbert?

  I think people are gonna get phones, they're gonna download the number one app in the App Store. It's gonna be Coinbase. People are gonna think they're being clever and people are gonna think they're doing the thing that the dot com stock people did when it was like, I'm gonna buy my grandson a tech stock for Christmas and write it up, like, here, have some Cisco. It's gonna be that.

• 46:42David Rosenthal?

  Wow, wow. Stocking stuffer of Christmas 2017.

• 46:47Ben Gilbert?

  We, yeah, we gotta release this before Christmas, so I'm not wrong before this airs.

• 46:52David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we're doing, intentionally doing this show a little earlier this year than last year so that we can get it out before Christmas, so that carve outs can be used as stocking stuffers.

• 47:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and for everyone doing a long drive, you have, you have this to listen to.

• 47:06David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, all right, okay, so my question, back to you, prediction. We referenced it earlier in the show. Where is Amazon HQ2?

• 47:16Ben Gilbert?

  Amazon HQ2 will be in Toronto.

• 47:19David Rosenthal?

  Oh, wow, you're going with the dark horse.

• 47:21Ben Gilbert?

  I am.

• 47:22David Rosenthal?

  Canada.

• 47:23Ben Gilbert?

  I am. They said it's the North American HQ2.

• 47:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Ben Gilbert?

  I think.

• 47:28David Rosenthal?

  You think they were, you think they have Canada in mind all along?

• 47:32Ben Gilbert?

  I do. I think Toronto because it gives them diversification in case tax stuff goes crazy in the US. I mean, it's, it's not, it's not looking like it's gonna hurt corporations right now. But, you know, Amazon's been extremely conscious of, of tax law and done insane things to their business model to, to make sure that they give customers the best deal possible since their very inception. So I think they're very conscious of that. I think they wanna diversify politically as well as have an economic incentive around tax to do that. And I also think, you know, as I used to work at Microsoft, we hired a ton of Waterloo grads, really great computer science school. I think they're gonna do, plop right down the same way they did next to the University of Washington.

• 48:16David Rosenthal?

  Wow. Well, my prediction is somewhere in Texas, probably Dallas, slight edge over Austin, but Austin also a big front runner.

• 48:29Ben Gilbert?

  That's not a bad call. If you're not gonna go to Canada, go to a red state.

• 48:34David Rosenthal?

  Well, Texas is a very, very diverse state. I spent a lot of time in Texas for a lot of reasons, including Jenny's mom's family is all from Texas outside the Houston area and still lives there. There is a very good chance potentially in the next presidential election. But if not by then, the next one for sure that Texas will be a blue state.

• 48:56Ben Gilbert?

  I believe it.

• 48:58David Rosenthal?

  Did you know the demographics are changing incredibly rapidly?

• 49:01Ben Gilbert?

  Did you know Dallas Fort Worth is the number four metropolitan area in the United States?

• 49:07David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it's enormous.

• 49:09Ben Gilbert?

  You got New York, LA, Chicago, and then Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington. And it's not far behind Chicago. It's nine and a half million and 7.2 million.

• 49:18David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, interesting. Bigger than the Bay. Well, the Bay Area is split into the San Francisco area and the San Jose area. I bet if you combine the two of those, it's up there.

• 49:29Ben Gilbert?

  How's Dallas's tech community? Listeners, if you're in Dallas or have have connections with Dallas, would love to kind of explore that a little bit further, to reach out on Slack. Or, you know, it seems like one big theme that a lot of that I hear over and over and over again is people start companies for other people in Silicon Valley. Why don't we start companies for people in the rest of the United States? And then there's lots of arguments about, well, you know, people are harder to reach and I don't understand their pain points and blah, blah, blah. Like, there's a ton of people in Dallas. Seems like that's a rich market to if you believe that people in Dallas behave differently and used and use different services than people in the in the Bay Area would.

• 50:09Ben Gilbert?

  Like, that feels like a huge group of people that you can go start companies for.

• 50:15David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 50:17David Rosenthal?

  To our earlier discussion, like, how are you going to reach people in Dallas? The same way you're going to reach people in the Bay Area? Facebook and Google.

• 50:25David Rosenthal?

  All right, my money's on Texas, but we've got Canada, we've got Texas.

• 50:32David Rosenthal?

  All right. What's your next one?

• 50:34Ben Gilbert?

  My next one is that this current mega consolidation era that we're in will continue and accelerate in 2018. We're in the midst right now of a Disney Time Warner M&A transaction that includes sort of part of the company. We covered the Qualcomm Broadcom.

• 50:54David Rosenthal?

  Disney Fox.

• 50:54Ben Gilbert?

  Disney Fox, yep. We covered the Qualcomm Broadcom and what was the third major one? That just, oh, the non-tech, but CVS and Aetna. And I think we're just going to see huge M&A continue through 2018. I think the political climate is right for these companies to combine. You know, you enter these, you enter these eras of lots of new companies being created and companies not combining for a while. So you have sort of proliferation in an industry and then followed by big eras of consolidation. And I think we are charging into a consolidation era.

• 51:37David Rosenthal?

  Interesting. You think across multiple industries or particularly in the tech industry?

• 51:42Ben Gilbert?

  Let's see. The regulatory argument would argue across multiple industries. And the tech argument that I would make is that, let's see, you would see consolidation after a period of sustained innovation, new company creation, which would come from a lot of availability of early-stage capital. So I guess if the cost of capital got more expensive and private company funding was less abundant, then you would start to see more consolidation. I think. I don't know if that logic totally holds, but.

• 52:21David Rosenthal?

  All right. My last one is I seriously believe we have been in the midst of major disruption that has been happening in the venture capital ecosystem over the last few years. But it's been disruption that's been happening at the capital formation and raising parts of the ecosystem as so much money has come into the asset class, both in terms of existing, well-known VC firms raising much larger funds and getting bigger as money has come in, and new entrants like SoftBank, like bringing $100 billion in a new fund into

• 53:02David Rosenthal?

  the asset class. All of that is likely to continue, but I think we're going to start to see, we are starting to see a second order effect of that in the VC ecosystem, which is, I think there is a serious re-tiling of the soil, I would say, of what true early-stage investing is and company building, and who does it and who's great at it. Because what's happened is, you know, the Series A quote-unquote firms that used to be the early-stage firms that invested when companies were getting started and, right, those beginning days,

• 53:46David Rosenthal?

  they don't do that anymore because they're so much bigger now, because they have so much more capital. So they wait until later. And so I don't know, maybe we'll see some turnover in who the quote-unquote best firms, top-tier firms are at the traditional, you know, Sand Hill Road set. But there's this whole really thriving ecosystem underneath it, you know, like you're part of it, Ben, and PSL and so many other firms are, and it's all kind of emerging, you know, underneath. It's like Clay Christensen in action here.

• 54:19Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And say what you will about ICOs, but I mean, there's no denying that that is a super transformative way to finance early-stage companies if that were to continue.

• 54:31David Rosenthal?

  Yep, indeed, indeed.

• 54:34Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm. Alright, well, I have another one, and then I have one question to close with. So, one prediction I have is that we're gonna start seeing smaller, more intimate communication networks rise instead of broad social networks as people start to react to, you know, the lack of comfort with things being public and a shift toward a desire for more private communication and private broadcast of themselves. And this is a prediction that has, you know, people have been making this bet for a long time. Path tried to make it in, what, 2010, 2011?

• 55:08David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, earlier than that even, I think.

• 55:10Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, maybe 2009.

• 55:11David Rosenthal?

  Maybe not that much earlier, sometime around then.

• 55:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And, you know, I'm just not sure the timing was right for that. I think Facebook had so much more, there was still so much more growth available for the user experience in terms of there are so many more people rapidly coming on to this thing and it's becoming the de facto way that I communicate with anyone in the world, so it makes it sort of hard to disrupt. I do think now that, and it's actually a perfect time for Facebook to be experimenting with monetizing WhatsApp, that private communication networks are going to start occupying more of people's time than public communication networks did. I've noticed, and this could be entering a different phase of life, but I do way less activity that could be broadcast to my social network on Facebook, and I spend way more

• 55:58Ben Gilbert?

  time in a variety of private Slacks. I even spend less time on Twitter and more time in Slack and in Messenger groups. And I really do think that people are just finally having the reaction to, "I don't want to have all my stuff be public all the time," and sort of culling that. And of course, you're not actually going to cull it on those platforms where you already have all the connection. You're not gonna shrink those social graphs, you're just gonna move to new ones. And of course, that's why Facebook acquires the new ones, because they, you know, they need to stay king of that.

• 56:29David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Man, Path, I was just looking at a blast from the past. I used to actually really enjoy Path, which for listeners who don't know, this was the sort of private mobile app, social network, I guess you could call it that, from sometime around 20, you know, 9, 10, 11, that had a lot of buzz and really was like beautifully designed, really.

• 56:57Ben Gilbert?

  Oh my God, they invented that, that button, the Path button, that was like a radial menu.

• 57:02David Rosenthal?

  Yes, yes, you're right. You clicked it and then it expanded out into like all the different types of media you could post.

• 57:08Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, and they had parallax scroll down, so you would pull down and different parts of the page would move at different ratios.

• 57:14David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, oh, that's right.

• 57:17Ben Gilbert?

  Way ahead of their time.

• 57:18David Rosenthal?

  Anyway, that might be a fun episode to do at some point, because they-

• 57:20Ben Gilbert?

  They got bought by a Chinese conglomerate of some sort.

• 57:23David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I just, I just looked it up, Daoum Kakao. I'm not sure where they are based, but interesting.

• 57:32Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. I also saw an interesting tweet that's gonna reveal one of my carve-outs early, but it was a Josh Elman tweet. Josh is a partner at Greylock, talking about, "We've had this extreme shift toward individualism, and how everything is so tailored for us now with, basically, everybody has their own personalized news feed. Everybody has the, you log into any technology product now and it's so tailored for you, that it's starting to put us in silos a little bit, and it's starting to make us feel extremely isolated. And we may see products, he suggested that this is why things like HQ Trivia,

• 58:11Ben Gilbert?

  where everybody is all in one room, all together, all at the same time, you know, 400,000 people strong. We're gonna start to see the rise of products that make us feel part of a collective again, and part of something greater than our individually tailored selves. And I think there is really something to that. You know, if you let yourself, you can just become more and more isolated. And I've noticed it in my lifestyle to create, you know, craft a life that's like more and more specifically designed for me, which is awesome in many ways, but is kind of isolating.

• 58:43David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I know a lot of folks in tech are thinking about that broadly and some founders are working on ideas in that space. You know, we're broadly on that theme. It is definitely a counter trend that maybe will come to fruition in 2018.

• 59:00Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And then I have one more sort of question. So I'll posit something first. Talking about being mobile first or moving to mobile today, I think is a lot about is very similar to talking about, you know, being a PC or doing something with software from, you know, many years ago. And

• 59:22David Rosenthal?

  It just seems like an irrelevant question.

• 59:24Ben Gilbert?

  Right. It's like, well, yeah, I assumed. And I'm wondering, you know, are we nearing the end of mobile? And I don't mean that in something is going to replace mobile. Like, I don't think it's going to be the AirPods and the watch and you're not going to have your phone. But it's almost like, are we going to enter somewhere where between like voice assistants in your house and your phone and like, it's all part of a constellation of devices where you have sort of machine learning built experiences for you. There's some AR component. Like, are we moving away from the mobile era and into this sort of

• 1:00:05Ben Gilbert?

  like ecosystem of highly tailored devices era? And will that kind of actually happen in 2018?

• 1:00:12David Rosenthal?

  Okay, I'm gonna go out on a limb here. I think we're moving into the era of the end of eras. Like

• 1:00:18Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 1:00:20David Rosenthal?

  There's no, you know, it's just the internet now. And like, it like, there's no difference between mobile and web or desktop or, you know, voice assistant or AR. It's just like the internet. It's like you can access it, you will access it through

• 1:00:33Ben Gilbert?

  The internet of things.

• 1:00:34David Rosenthal?

  Multiple modalities.

• 1:00:40Ben Gilbert?

  It's just a highfalutin explanation for something that all those, you know, investment research memos have said for four years.

• 1:00:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. But no, where I'm going with this is like, you access the services that you want to interact with through, you know, in multiple modalities. Like you access them, you know, through a keyboard and mouse and through a touchscreen and through your voice and, you know, through your wrist or through your glasses. Like it's all the same and they're all everywhere.

• 1:01:09Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Omnipresent technology. You want to do carve outs?

• 1:01:14David Rosenthal?

  Let's do it. Okay. So just like last year, we are keeping our mega extended carve out section. So we're going to do each pick, uh, one carve out, uh, from all of the categories of carve outs that we typically cover. So we have books and I'm going to do separate fiction and nonfiction, uh, article, uh, podcasts, music, uh, TV or movie or both, uh, and app are our categories. We're thinking this is also why we wanted to get this episode out ahead of the holidays for, you know, all of the upcoming travel that lots of people have, uh, for airplanes, car rides, uh, or maybe stocking stuffers for some of these.

• 1:01:57David Rosenthal?

  We wanted to get these out to you before the season. I will start off with my, my first carve out, uh, fiction book. It's actually a trilogy, uh, is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which the first book of which is The Golden Compass, uh, which is a fantasy, sort of, you know, young adult fiction, but also like, you know, can very much be read and enjoyed by adults. Kind of like Harry Potter, like very similar to Harry Potter trilogy. And, uh, I had not read it growing up. Uh, Jenny had, and he just wrote, came out with the first book of the second trilogy many, many years later. Uh, and so he's writing a new trilogy. The first book of that just came out. Uh, I haven't

• 1:02:41David Rosenthal?

  read it yet because I just finished the original, but really good, super fun. It's like, it's like Harry Potter meets like sci-fi meets steampunk with a female protagonist, uh, and just like really, really well done. And it's all a, uh, it's all a complete inversion and retelling of Paradise Lost. Uh, really, really fun.

• 1:03:04Ben Gilbert?

  I only have one book this year that I, I'm gonna say makes the cut. Shoe Dog. It was so good.

• 1:03:12David Rosenthal?

  Oh, so good.

• 1:03:13Ben Gilbert?

  Talked about it a bunch on, on, when, whatever episode it was where it was my carve out. And David, it was your carve out and I had forgotten that. But the, the story of, of Phil Knight and, and the creation of Nike. Just like page turner thriller, but nonfiction and so freaking well-written.

• 1:03:33David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, that would be, if you have somebody on your holiday list that, you know, enjoys business or shoes or just good, you know,

• 1:03:43Ben Gilbert?

  Good storytelling.

• 1:03:43David Rosenthal?

  Autobiographies.

• 1:03:44Ben Gilbert?

  Sports.

• 1:03:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46David Rosenthal?

  Sports, uh, put this, you know, under the tree or menorah or, you know, whatever your object of celebration is this holiday season.

• 1:03:57David Rosenthal?

  My, uh, my nonfiction is actually, I'm repeating my carve out from, I think the last episode. Just cause I finally, I finished reading it since it was so good, uh, is Wooden, Wooden on Leadership, speaking in the sports and shoes arena. John Wooden, legendary coach of UCLA. And Wooden on Leadership is his book expounding on his philosophies of leadership and in particular, his pyramid of success. And, and what I didn't talk about on, on carve outs last time is, uh, I just think this is so cool, his, his definition of success. I really wanna try and keep this in mind in my own life and in my own, you know, new endeavors now. And, and John Wooden says, you know, they, people think about success as like achieving

• 1:04:40David Rosenthal?

  something or like setting goals and hitting them or, uh, having anything, you know, externally visible. But he said, that's not what success is at all. To him, success is, I'm quoting here, "Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable." So nothing about like results, nothing about external perception. The only measurement that you can truly, you know, both measure and, and feel fulfilled by of success is whether you made the effort to become the best. Best that you can be at whatever you're trying to do. And it's so great because it's like, you can always ask yourself like, did I actually like, put my total effort into this?

• 1:05:24David Rosenthal?

  If yes, it doesn't matter what the outcome is. If no, like, then no, I wasn't successful, you know? And that's how he coached his teams. And I mean, he's, I think, still the winningest coach in college basketball history. I mean, he would go multiple seasons without losing a game and won 10 national championships, I think. But he never cared about the outcome of the game. It was always just about like, getting his players and his teams to do the best that they were capable.

• 1:05:52Ben Gilbert?

  It's a great mantra.

• 1:05:53David Rosenthal?

  Damn. Great mantra, especially in this day and age where there's so much that feels out of our control in life and in tech. All you can control is whether you make yourself the best you can be.

• 1:06:07Ben Gilbert?

  My article, so the second category is the best article we read this year, or at least the one that we feel is noteworthy of a carve out. It actually happened in December of 2016, but I think it was after we recorded the holiday episode. It is the New York Times Magazine cover story called "The Great AI Awakening." And this was the first piece that I read that really brought not only an understanding, but a compelling narrative to why AI and machine learning is so transformative to the era that we live in. And it tells the story of the recreation of Google Translate using, I believe, a neural

• 1:06:49Ben Gilbert?

  network instead of sort of like structured, top-down, rule-based architecture and pitting them against each other. And it's, you know, it's good narrative, it's told really well. And there have been many, probably better pieces written since then. And I'm sure it was a little dumbed down or sensationalist relative to more industry papers or industry articles had written, been written before, but really landmarked to see that on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and really well done.

• 1:07:20David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, man, it's time moves so fast these days like that. Yeah. I totally remember that article and I, in my head, that came out like five years ago and it came out one year ago. Yeah. Okay, my article is, is much shorter, but is a Fred Wilson blog post from earlier this year called Founder Friendly and it was a, about the Uber situation and the benchmark lawsuit against Travis Kalanick and that whole saga. And he was, Fred was, who's a great VC at Union Square Ventures, founder, co-founder of Union Square Ventures.

• 1:08:04David Rosenthal?

  He was responding to a tweet that Dan Primack put out, saying that, Primack tweeted, let me find the exact quote here, "RIP quote unquote Founder Friendly 2010 to 2017." And the point being that like, you know, a VC and a great VC like Benchmark suing the CEO of a portfolio company is like the end of this era of like VCs just sucking up to founders and being founder friendly and founders should watch out for VCs. And Fred had this response, it was like, you know, sometimes like what's most friendly to founders is, is be doing what's best for the company. Or his point, his point was that as a VC and a board member, you need to do what's best for the company and that isn't always like sucking up to founders like sometime, and often in the long run, what's best for the company is also best for the founders.

• 1:08:50David Rosenthal?

  And I don't mean necessarily here to opine one way or the other on the Uber situation particularly, but I think it was, this was the beginning of a sea change in, I think, the relationship between VCs and founders and boards and founders. I think for the better, not in just like bringing power away from founders and back to VCs, but just more of a balance of like going from an era where founders can do no wrong to like do what's best for the company and for all of the stakeholders involved.

• 1:09:19Ben Gilbert?

  My podcast is an episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens. And I can't actually remember if this was one of my carve outs or not. I think Sapiens was, and I think maybe the podcast was, but awesome interview. If you haven't read Sapiens, that's also a great book. It's like a primer on many, many things that are core to the human condition, archaeological stuff, psychological stuff, evolutionary biology, a lot of sociology of why we treat people the way we do today in different groups and how that falls out of different evolutionary things. And Yuval is just a great thinker. And he talks a lot about, he actually does a 60 day meditation retreat, silent meditation retreat to start off every year, which sounds freaking nuts.

• 1:10:04Ben Gilbert?

  But I, I hope, I don't know. I think I'm going to make it a 2018 resolution to do a three day. I'd love to do like a meditation retreat.

• 1:10:16David Rosenthal?

  I would love to do that, too.

• 1:10:17Ben Gilbert?

  But honestly, you know, I've been like, just doing headspace and playing around with some meditation apps and like trying to get into it, like dabble a little bit. This notion of like,

• 1:10:28David Rosenthal?

  60 days.

• 1:10:29Ben Gilbert?

  Oh my God, yeah. But the notion of meditating alone, like actually focusing on your breath and not letting your mind wander, it's impossible. It's very difficult to do that for like five or 10 seconds. I totally see how this is an incredibly trained art and just very interested to see. Like, it's almost like a CrossFit thing, like the people that meditate, like you're very aware that they meditate, but I think it's something where like, if you can really refine the practice and get good at it, I can see how that can change you as a person.

• 1:11:06David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, totally. I did a bunch of exploration with meditation in grad school. And I haven't done any full day retreats, but I did a half day retreat, actually as part of a class at Stanford in grad school. And it was, it was really cool. Very, very difficult, even just a half a day of sitting there. But that's cool. I remember listening to that show too and thinking 60 days. Oh my goodness.

• 1:11:34Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35David Rosenthal?

  Okay, my podcast carve out for the year is also, I think I did have this also as one of my carve outs at some point during the year is the episode of the Bill Simmons Show with Jimmy Ivey. And we've been talking about him a lot lately, but literally the coolest human alive. Go listen to it.

• 1:11:54Ben Gilbert?

  I'm queuing that up now. Literally just grab my phone.

• 1:11:57David Rosenthal?

  I'll jump forward. My music also related to this whole Jimmy Iveyan ecosystem, although everything in music is related to him. I discovered Bruce Springsteen and the East Street Band have multiple live albums. I had, growing up, their Live in New York City album from their reunion tour, which was fantastic. But there is, I think, probably their best live album is Live at the Hammersmith Odeon in London in 1975. This is early, early days, right after Born to Run comes out. And this is just an amazing show. Bruce writes about it in Born to Run in the autobiography.

• 1:12:41David Rosenthal?

  Whatever your streaming service of choice is, go listen to this now. It's just the boss at his best with the band.

• 1:12:48Ben Gilbert?

  Sweet. My music, I'm sure this was a carve out of mine, Odeza's new album, A Moment Apart. I know that I listen to this over and over again. I know that it's, knew it anecdotally, and that the Spotify Your Top Tracks of 2017 reinforced it. It's my work music. It's my morning music. It's my workout music. It's so good. And it's weird. Somebody asked me the other day, three bands you would take to your grave. And like, I have longer bands that have like Staying Power, the other two, the Beatles and Radiohead. And I'm like, it's weird, but they're newer, they're trendy, but Odeza makes the cut. And we can revisit that in like five years, but that's how I feel right now.

• 1:13:31David Rosenthal?

  Radiohead?

• 1:13:32Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:13:33David Rosenthal?

  I mean, Radiohead's great, but like, you put them in the same category as The Beatles and Odeza.

• 1:13:38Ben Gilbert?

  Well, for Take to My Grave, I think, I mean, they're more than Odeza. Like, I think, Odeza's three. And I'm not in my Radiohead, I'm more in an Odeza phase right now than a Radiohead phase, but like, you know, Radiohead got me through college.

• 1:13:52David Rosenthal?

  Fair enough. That's the thing about music. And back to the Beats episode that Jimmy and Dre just totally identified. Like, music is about, it's like, you identify with a certain point in your life, with certain activities, like, it's just such, it's an emotional thing. It is, um, I totally hear you. There's, like, mid 2000s, you know, hip-hop dance tracks that, like, were in, you know, just take me right back to that specific moment of time in college. Anyway.

• 1:14:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24David Rosenthal?

  Okay. My movie, TV and movie for me for 2017. I was gonna do the Defiant ones, but we can't, that's, we can't do too much of that.

• 1:14:33Ben Gilbert?

  It's a recency bias already.

• 1:14:35David Rosenthal?

  Recency bias, yeah. I didn't watch that many movies in 2017, but I just, on an airplane trip last week, finally watched Creed, the latest Rocky movie. And I think probably, I think the last.

• 1:14:53David Rosenthal?

  Hard to imagine them following up on that. Watch, I'll say that, and they probably made Creed 2, but, uh, really, really, really good, uh, and very worth watching.

• 1:15:03Ben Gilbert?

  Cool. Mine is Blade Runner 2049. It's a movie of the year that I thought, saw in theaters. And embarrassed to say, I'd never watched Blade Runner, the original, all the way through. So I watched, I think the edition I watched was the final cut, or the, there's a few different remastered versions, but watched that the night before, and then went and saw 2049 in theaters the next day. And, um, you know, it's what, it's, it's both visually incredible and one of those thinker movies that you're thinking about for, for days after. And especially in our, um, AI apocalypse that we are in. Definitely interesting to think about.

• 1:15:40David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. I'm gonna add one additional movie carve-out. Hasn't come out yet, but obviously, The Last Jedi is, it hasn't even come out yet, but it's definitely movie of the year.

• 1:15:51Ben Gilbert?

  Look, if they already greenlit a new trilogy, then, for, for Rian Johnson, then I'm pretty sure we're gonna love it.

• 1:15:59David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be awesome.

• 1:16:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:16:02David Rosenthal?

  All right.

• 1:16:03Ben Gilbert?

  App.

• 1:16:05David Rosenthal?

  App. So my app of the year, I'm joking, says the guy who told you I would talk about YouTube later in the episode. We gave it a C on Acquired. I'm not sure it deserves more than a C, but my app of the year is YouTube. I have been spending a lot more time in YouTube this year and I feel like on the episode we did on the company, I was very critical of like YouTube is not a destination site. Like who goes to YouTube? You just follow links there. You do, you know, embeds. That's the only YouTube content you watch. I've been re-engaging with like the main app and the feed and like, there's great stuff that they surface for you in there and very personalized based on your, you know, watching history. I find myself often, you

• 1:16:50David Rosenthal?

  know, when I'm bored at home, just open up YouTube and see what it recommends for me.

• 1:16:55Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. That's like a behavior I know people do that it just hasn't materialized for me. Like I, I actually extremely rarely watch something on YouTube and I know that, I know that sounds weird, but like, you know, I never want, it's actually just not a good modality for me. I've never, I never want to play sound on my phone. It's too much of a commitment really for me to browse through and that's why Twitter's better or Facebook's better. Maybe 2018 will be the year that I start browsing the YouTube newsfeed.

• 1:17:24David Rosenthal?

  So I was totally in the same mode as you, didn't understand it at all. And then I don't know why, for some reason, I just picked it up one day and I was like, oh, wow. This is really entertaining and the feed is like very personalized to me.

• 1:17:39Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's right, listeners. You are listening to the insightful show Acquired, where we realize that YouTube is cool.

• 1:17:48David Rosenthal?

  If, if we didn't already, you know, know that we were too old and not cool anymore, like now it's official, at least for me.

• 1:17:56Ben Gilbert?

  That's right. That's right. Well, here, I, so I have, I've already given away my app, app of the year, which is HQ, which I talked about on the last episode. But my biggest observation around this, when David, you sent me the framework to go through and figure out my, my app of the year, went through my home screen. So I got the iPhone 10. So I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven by four. There's 28 apps on my home screen, including the dock. Zero of them came out in 2017.

• 1:18:25Ben Gilbert?

  And that's, I think, an interesting point about the end of the mobile era. Like, there is very, very, very rarely a new app that becomes a part of my daily or even weekly life. The closest would maybe be, I started using Enlight and Photofox and some other specialized photo editing apps now that you can do a lot more powerful, sort of pro-style tools on the iPhone. But I actually don't think those are 2017 either. I just don't actually think there's new apps that are habit-forming in my daily life.

• 1:19:06Ben Gilbert?

  And maybe I'm just like, not one of the cool kids anymore, and there's plenty of those and I'm not involved. Like, Musically was 2016. I mean, there's been a rise of new consumer apps. I guess I have TBH on my phone, but it's not at the beginning. HQ is not on my home screen either. But I think it's telling.

• 1:19:27David Rosenthal?

  Well, it's nowhere near the velocity that it used to be.

• 1:19:30Ben Gilbert?

  No. I mean, pull out your phone. Do you have anything on your home screen that came out this year?

• 1:19:33David Rosenthal?

  No, I did the same exercise, and that's how I ended up with YouTube. I was like, okay, there's nothing new on my phone this year. What have I interacted with differently or more than last year? And that's how I got YouTube.

• 1:19:47Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. All right. So you heard it here first. Couple of old men doing a podcast.

• 1:19:53David Rosenthal?

  Welcome to 2018.

• 1:19:54Ben Gilbert?

  David actually bought an older phone.

• 1:19:59David Rosenthal?

  Pretty soon, I'm going to be telling the kids to get off that lawn.

• 1:20:04David Rosenthal?

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

• 1:20:10Ben 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.

• 1:20:21David 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.

• 1:20:41Ben 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.

• 1:20:53David 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. All right.

• 1:21:05Ben Gilbert?

  I think that's all we've got. Have a safe drive, a safe travel to wherever you're going. Enjoy the time off work. And if you've ever thought, hey, you know, they say that thing about reviews and that's nice and that's for other people to do, we actually mean that for you, too. So we would love, love, love as soon as we sign off here or right now. I don't have anything else important to say. If you'd leave us a review on iTunes. That's all we've got. Happy holidays.

• 1:21:31David Rosenthal?

  Happy holidays.

• 1:21:32Ben Gilbert?

  We'll see you in 2018. We'll see you in season two.

• 1:21:34David Rosenthal?

  See you in season 10.

• 1:21:38David Rosenthal?

  Or two.