Chase Center + Summer Update (Audio)

Summer greetings from Acquired! We figured this is a good excuse to update you all on the state of Acquired — after an incredible first half of the year (including WSJ’s profile of the show) we are taking the rest of the summer off to recharge, parent our young children, and prepare for the big night in September. We hope you’re having a great summer, and we’ll see you live in the fall! https://www.wsj.com/business/media/acquired-podcast-tech-business-history-strategy-90e73603 *Carve Outs:* - Thule Urban Glide 3: https://www.thule.com/en-us/strollers/jogging-strollers/thule-urban-glide-3-_-10101972 - Disney’s Aulani Resort: https://www.disneyaulani.com - Meller sunglasses: https://mellerbrand.com - Quarterback on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81482895 - Receiver on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81733809 *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?

  Hello, Acquired listeners and happy summer, David.

• 0:04David Rosenthal?

  Happy summer, indeed. I feel like a kid let out of school.

• 0:08Ben Gilbert?

  I know. You just got back from Hawaii. Are you feeling refreshed?

• 0:11David Rosenthal?

  I am feeling as refreshed and relaxed as the father of a three-month-old and three-year-old can possibly be.

• 0:20Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I bet. We'll get to that in carve-outs, I'm sure.

• 0:23David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 0:24Ben Gilbert?

  Listeners, we, after 10 years straight of never taking any time off of Acquired, we're doing like six weeks off over the summer. And it turns out that doesn't actually mean six weeks off of work for you and I, David. It means six weeks of not making an episode because we are putting all of our energy and focus into September 10th at the Chase Center. David, what are we doing?

• 0:47David Rosenthal?

  Hell, yeah. Chase Center live show in partnership with our good friends at JP Morgan Payments. This is going to be, as many of you have already heard, the biggest thing that we have ever done. This is where the Warriors play. It's the brand-new arena in the middle of downtown San Francisco. And Mark Zuckerberg is going to be there with us onstage. He's only one of the acts that we are planning. We've been very, very busy. We're pulling out all the stops. It's going to be an amazing event.

• 1:20Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, we'll have some fun surprises for everyone that we're not planning to share in advance. So if you're free, September 10th, or if you can make yourselves free, be in San Francisco. It's funny, we announced many months ago on the show, save the date, but then we actually haven't had an episode since tickets have been on sale. And so despite the fact that we emailed a lot of you and we tweeted and we put it in the Slack, David and I were on the phone yesterday and we were like, huh, we should probably let people who just listen to the podcast and don't follow Acquired anywhere else know about it, too. So acquired.fm/sf. We really hope to see you there. Our goal is really just to feel like the biggest celebration and community of like-minded listeners possible, almost like the Omaha for tech or Omaha on the West Coast.

• 2:04David Rosenthal?

  It's going to be great. Listeners are organizing a bunch of events around the show itself, in the days before and after. It's going to be really kind of like the Omaha weekend. So if you want to stay up to date on all of that, look for announcements in the Slack in the coming weeks.

• 2:21Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And feel free to plan your own, too. At the end of the day, even before announcing this on the podcast here, there are several thousand of you who have bought tickets and are coming. And so no one venue, except for the Chase Center, is going to hold us all anyway. So if you're coming and you want to plan dinners or happy hours or company meetups or anything, please just feel free to take the initiative, do that, post in Slack. We'd love for it to happen.

• 2:44David Rosenthal?

  The other thing we should say here, there's two ticket prices, all-in price, it's $100 for floor seats, which are almost gone at this point in time, and $50 for everywhere else in the arena. That's it. That's all in. That includes Ticketmaster fees. We're pretty sure this is the cheapest event that has ever been put on ticket price-wise at the Chase Center. Definitely not the cheapest event production budget-wise, but we're really proud of that. We want this to be open and available and accessible to everybody. We want as many of you there as can make it. This is like a party that we want to throw for everyone.

• 3:21Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Well, David, now that we have a few minutes here and we're not mid-episode, should we reflect on the last few months in Acquired land? We thought listeners would be interested in a little bit of a peek behind the scenes.

• 3:35David Rosenthal?

  It's been a hell of a ride the last couple of months, Ben. I don't think I've even really till leaving for Hawaii, whatever it was, 10 days ago, had a chance to stop and reflect on this. My second daughter was born at the end of April, and then the Wall Street Journal article about us came out, I think, like two weeks later. So it's just been a whirlwind.

• 3:55Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it's funny. It's been one of these things. People have asked, what is the impact on the Wall Street Journal profile? And it's hard to disambiguate the two things that happen concurrently. That piece, which is the best encapsulation of what Acquired is that has ever been published. There's sort of been two canonical pieces. David Lidsky's wonderful piece in Fast Company last year, following the production of the Nike episode, really dives into the making of an episode and what that is all about. And this one is kind of like, what is Acquired today? And how did this thing come to be? And what happened is, when that article came out,

• 4:35Ben Gilbert?

  Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.

• 4:43David Rosenthal?

  That is a mind blowing sentence. That is not something that we ever, ever thought

• 4:48Ben Gilbert?

  No.

• 4:49David Rosenthal?

  would even be remotely within the realm of possibility.

• 4:52Ben Gilbert?

  No. And what that led to is number one has staying power because if anybody opens up Apple Podcasts right now and hit the browse tab, you can very clearly see the number one podcast is the one centered on your screen that you're curious about checking out. So all of the goodness that came from the WSJ piece was then massively amplified over the course of weeks and months because we just stayed the number one podcast in this self fulfilling prophecy way across both giant podcasting platforms. So to just add some numbers to that, because we've gotten the question so many times, we were thinking, we should just talk about it on air. 317,000 new subscribers or followers, depending on whether you're using Apple or Spotify's parlance,

• 5:37Ben Gilbert?

  have followed the show since the Wall Street Journal piece went live. And for context, in January, coming into the year, we estimated our listener base was about 500,000 people.

• 5:52David Rosenthal?

  It was a major event.

• 5:53Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. And so David, I had always sort of been of this belief, especially when I'm working with startups, like don't count on a single press article being trajectory changing for you. That's generally true, except when it isn't.

• 6:07David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Like all the companies we cover on the show, it's the exceptions that prove the rule here. It was a wonderful piece. Ben Cohen, who wrote it at the Journal is an excellent journalist. I have the utmost respect for him. He writes the Science of Success column at the Journal that this was part of. It was just one of those lightning in a bottle moments. I don't know how to describe it otherwise.

• 6:29Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. So part of this is a welcome to all of you who are new listeners to the show. You know, David and I have been doing this for close to 10 years now. The audience has grown slowly and it doubled organically every year for the first nine years. And one way to think about that, because we don't really do paid marketing, what that means is the whole audience base, on average, told one friend who stuck around and listened to the show every year. So in some sense, that's almost nothing to write home about. But on the other hand, it actually just kept happening. And the cool thing is, it meant that it built the audience base that we really wanted because everyone personally

• 7:10Ben Gilbert?

  recommended it to a friend rather than having an explosive growth moment. And so that's why the Slack is such a wonderful and civil place. You know, it's not like this community that sort of showed up out of nowhere. It's this community that's been slowly building organically by inviting other people who they know in from the real world over time. And then if I could say, what would be the single best growth event if we were going to have a outsized external force that brought a bunch of audience? The Wall Street Journal is the exact right audience to join the rest of you.

• 7:41David Rosenthal?

  I was gonna say the same thing. Yeah.

• 7:43Ben Gilbert?

  WSJ subscribers are among the most well-educated, thoughtful business people in the world who love nerding out on this stuff. We're delighted to have anybody here who just found out because you read the WSJ.

• 7:55David Rosenthal?

  Totally. The other thing that was just so surprising about this, hell, I used to work at the Wall Street Journal a long, long time ago, briefly, early in my career. So I identify with it deeply and loved the publication and was so glad they were going to cover us. But I at least have always believed that people aren't going to discover podcasts by reading about a podcast or in another medium. If you read about something, you're probably not going to go open up your phone and your podcast player and hit subscribe or you're in some other modality.

• 8:26Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 8:27David Rosenthal?

  But this proved us wrong.

• 8:29Ben Gilbert?

  The dirty secret behind Acquired is every episode is about the exception. Every company we talk about is the most extreme outlier. I often find myself wondering, even though we have this playbook and this lessons learned, is the real playbook that you can't learn any lessons because they're such extreme outliers? You know, these big tech companies, they're all monopolies or near monopolies in the largest and most profitable markets in the world. Well, like, no one else's business is that. And so the lesson you can draw from a cash gusher that is extremely difficult to disrupt, some of the things you can apply to building your business, but it's much more interesting, which is of course, why we do the history and facts,

• 9:10Ben Gilbert?

  to go look at them in their first few years of life to understand how they catapulted to the position, rather than trying to learn something about the companies as you perceive them today.

• 9:20David Rosenthal?

  It feels like a visceral manifestation to you and me of this takeaway from all of our episodes. Every great success story is idiosyncratic.

• 9:29Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 9:29David Rosenthal?

  You can't plan this, and they all are their own journeys. It's why we can make a four or five hour episode about all these different companies. And it's not just, well, they did the same thing that the other companies did.

• 9:42Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Part of this takeaway for me is it's sort of unclear if and what would ever be a large outsized growth event. Like, when you look at our chart, it's perfectly smooth for almost a decade until there's this one point where you can see, whoa, something clearly happened and numbers jumped up from May to now. And I don't know that you can ever really plan for those. So a PR person emailed me, how did you pitch that piece to the journal? And I was just laughing like,

• 10:07David Rosenthal?

  We didn't. Yeah.

• 10:08Ben Gilbert?

  There's no way you could possibly anticipate something like this happening and then execute a PR strategy to try to make it happen. Maybe other people know differently, but I've never once seen that be the way that things like this happen. Well, let's see. Things we wanted to do today. Chat about the arena show. Oh, one other note on that. A few people have emailed us and said, "My whole company is coming." We even had a parent email us and say, "My 13-year-old wants to have his birthday party by bringing all of his friends to the live show," which is the coolest thing ever.

• 10:42David Rosenthal?

  Coolest thing ever.

• 10:43Ben Gilbert?

  Crazy, that's real. If you're interested in something like that, too, email us, [email protected] for big group ticket buys. And there's a special office that we can hook you up with that helps deal with that.

• 10:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we've had a few companies get in touch with us and say, either they're remote-first companies or they're located somewhere else, like, "Oh, we're gonna do our fall offsite as a company in San Francisco for the live show," which is super cool. So, yes, if you want to do anything like that, [email protected] will make it happen. We'd love to have you here.

• 11:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. The other thing that we wanted to do, we've got one more sort of announcement on show structure and then carve-outs. So, the show structure thing is, as you may have guessed or observed, the thing that makes acquired episodes unique is the format of David and I sitting down, doing the hundreds of hours of research, coming together with separate, prepared minds, with separate understandings of the history, and with separate beliefs about what made this business work, and then doing our four-hour format to tell the story and unpack why the business worked. And that's very different than an interview show, where

• 11:56Ben Gilbert?

  you have a great guest on, where everybody knows their name, and you interview them, and then you say, "So long, folks," and you sign off. There are many of those shows, and there are many excellent, excellent of those shows. Occasionally, we do have the opportunity to interview someone like Jensen, like Charlie, like Dara from Uber, where we have covered the business in the past. Or perhaps someone like Howard Schultz is willing to spend the five, six hours with us that it takes to do our standard format with them present. But what we've basically done is we've decided that the main show, with few exceptions, is for doing our core four-hour format of David and I together. Occasionally, we will follow that up with an interview with the protagonist after we've had a chance to really do our

• 12:40Ben Gilbert?

  thing. But that kind of leaves us with a whole bunch of opportunity to do great interviews. But just that are not quite acquired. And so ACQ2 has really become the place where we're doing all of that now. And so if you like interviews like the one we did with the Synopsys founder and the Synopsys CEO to kind of do a deep dive on the state of semis today, or the next one we have coming out is an interview with Joe Montana, who managed to shift from being one of the best football players of all time, you know, many time Super Bowl MVP.

• 13:10David Rosenthal?

  To a really excellent venture capitalist.

• 13:12Ben Gilbert?

  To an exceptional investor, yes.

• 13:14David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Ben Gilbert?

  And we've got several other public company CEOs lined up that we're going to be doing on ACQ2 soon. So while Dave and I are taking some time to breathe, prep for the arena show, if you're feeling like you want to experience some more acquired and you've already gone through the back catalog, ACQ2 is the place to tune in for those as they come out.

• 13:34David Rosenthal?

  Indeed. All right. To bring us home here for our little summer session, carve outs.

• 13:40Ben Gilbert?

  Carve outs.

• 13:41David Rosenthal?

  Ben, we were about to hit record and you stopped and you said, wait a minute, I gotta walk around my house. I am so excited to hear what you came back to us with.

• 13:48Ben Gilbert?

  All right. So we may have to start doing this on the show, or we may hear a revolt if we start doing this. I don't know. Now that you and I both have small children, there's like a whole second category of goods that are parent related.

• 14:01David Rosenthal?

  Baby carve outs. Yeah. Parent carve outs.

• 14:04Ben Gilbert?

  So I'll do my parent carve out first. On the holiday special, I gave two stroller recommendations. So in keeping with tradition, I'm doing a third stroller recommendation. My Father's Day gift.

• 14:16David Rosenthal?

  It was the most Ben Gilbert thing ever. I love it. Wait, was your Father's Day gift a stroller?

• 14:20Ben Gilbert?

  It was. It was a running stroller.

• 14:24David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 14:25Ben Gilbert?

  Cause it kind of perfectly aligned with my son turning six months old, which is when it's reasonably safe for them to be in a running stroller. And I will tell you, he loves it. Running through the park near our house, the trees whizzing by, whether it's wake time or nap time. It's great. I get the miles in. I've been ramping up my running again, which is, you know, now that I have a nine month old, a thing you can kind of start doing again. But the Thule or Thule, I don't exactly know how to pronounce it.

• 14:53David Rosenthal?

  I never know how to pronounce it. Yeah.

• 14:55Ben Gilbert?

  Thule? I'm going to mess it up with my American, but I think it's colloquially referred to in America as Thule.

• 15:01David Rosenthal?

  T H U L E is the brand, right?

• 15:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. The Urban Glide 3 is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking about running with a small child.

• 15:12David Rosenthal?

  It's funny, I never got into the running stroller, running with children thing. I think I would really enjoy it, but it's so hilly here in San Francisco.

• 15:21Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I can't imagine pushing that thing up, you know?

• 15:24David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I've been more in carrier mode and then doing hikes with the baby in the carrier, which I'm now back in that world with baby number two here. Well, okay, great. We'll trade off. You did your parent carve out. I'm gonna do my parent carve out, then I'll kick it back to you. So mine actually is what you started the show off with was my time in Hawaii. So our second daughter just turned three months old. We wanted to do a family vacation while we're having this little acquired hiatus before Jenny goes back to work. And we were thinking, what could we possibly do with like a three year old and a three month old in tow? That is going to be the least bit enjoyable or relaxing as a family vacation.

• 16:07David Rosenthal?

  And we scoured the earth and the best idea that we came up with was the Disney resort in Hawaii. And it was awesome. Let me tell you, this place, it's called Alani. It was perfect. So it is not the nicest resort. It is not a Disney park. There's no like rides or stuff, you know? As far as Disney goes, it's actually fairly light touch. So it's not the best Disney experience. It's not the prettiest beach.

• 16:34Ben Gilbert?

  Well, you are really selling it.

• 16:35David Rosenthal?

  It is not spiky in any category, but the Venn diagram of needs of like, you have a young family, you are a harried parent. You want something like a Hawaii vacation where you can have some hope of getting a little bit of relaxation in and everyone will have a good enough time. Like, man, it nails the center of that Venn diagram. It was truly like the very best trip we could have done at this stage in our lives.

• 17:06Ben Gilbert?

  That is great to know.

• 17:07David Rosenthal?

  Highly, highly recommend for anybody in the same life phase. Although there were people of families of all phases there. There weren't many non-families there, I will say. But there were big family reunions happening. There were parents with preteens, there were parents with teens. I was like a little surprised by that, but I mean, hey, who doesn't love Disney and who doesn't love Hawaii? Yeah, I highly, highly, highly recommend it, especially with young children.

• 17:33Ben Gilbert?

  All right. Great to know. All right. My adult carve out. I don't know.

• 17:39Ben Gilbert?

  My carve out that anyone can appreciate is a sunglasses brand called Mellor, M E L L E R. When I was at my buddy's wedding in Crete earlier this summer, I was out walking around the shops and I forgot my sunglasses because I left super early in the morning and I just grabbed these because they were at the store and I was like, oh, those look pretty cool. They are the highest quality lenses that I have ever had in a pair of sunglasses. And maybe it's because I just always buy cheap, throwaway sunglasses because I lose them all the time. But 59 bucks, polarized, it's the type of lens where you put them on and you can see things that are further away clearer. Normally, when you put some form of glass in front of your eye, it-

• 18:21David Rosenthal?

  Distorts a little bit, yeah.

• 18:23Ben Gilbert?

  Right. It's not going to get any better than your own clear eyesight, but I noticed that I put these on and I can suddenly see better than I can with my own plain eyes. So-

• 18:32David Rosenthal?

  Wow.

• 18:33Ben Gilbert?

  I'm like now a loyalist Mellor, M E L L E R sunglasses.

• 18:36David Rosenthal?

  Is it a SLR Luxottica brand or is it an indie?

• 18:40Ben Gilbert?

  That's a great question. I mean, my general answer when anyone asks is that SLR Luxottica would be yes, of course it is, just because it's the default answer for all the brands, you know?

• 18:49David Rosenthal?

  It's a safe bet. Yeah.

• 18:50Ben Gilbert?

  You know, Ray-Bans and Oakleys and everything, but I don't think so.

• 18:54David Rosenthal?

  Well, speaking of, I am intentionally wearing my Ray-Ban Metas here to prepare.

• 18:59Ben Gilbert?

  I see you are.

• 19:00David Rosenthal?

  I especially enjoyed these in Hawaii. They were great.

• 19:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, they look great. But no, I don't think unless my quick Google was wrong, that I think Mellor is not SLR Luxottica.

• 19:11David Rosenthal?

  Independent. Wow. Wow. The question is, for how long? Well, to bring home on our summer carve out theme, my carve outs for everyone are it's summertime, which means sadly, no NFL. But with the little baby, I finally got around to watching the Netflix quarterback series from last year and then the new receiver series. They're so good. I love them both. The quarterback series especially, there's no other position in sports, or at least sports that I am familiar with, that are like large team sports where so much of the game hinges on that one person. Just following like the

• 19:55David Rosenthal?

  amount of mental work that goes into being an elite NFL quarterback and then just the pressure that these guys are under is so immense. Receiver was funny too. Like I enjoyed receiver. Almost equally as much, but it's so funny to watch the difference between the preparation and the pressure that the quarterbacks are under versus what the receivers are doing. Very, very different stakes, although they are obviously the receiving end of what the quarterbacks are throwing.

• 20:26Ben Gilbert?

  All right, on my list. Well, with that, listeners, thank you for tuning into our Ben and David randomly hop on a call and you get to listen summer mini episode here. We really hope to see you September 10th in San Francisco. We're going to have a blast. Mark Zuckerberg and other special guests will be there. And yeah, feel free to organize any meetups, lunches, dinners, anything you'd like in the acquired Slack, acquired.fm/slash Slack and tickets are available now at acquired.fm/sf. A huge thank you to our friends at JP Morgan Payments for just pulling out all the stops. Their team is so awesome. It's like the acquired team has tripled or quadrupled in size for a few months here while we all

• 21:10Ben Gilbert?

  do this together. It really does feel like we are one.

• 21:13David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it's not just that their name is on the building, which it is, but they are performing a heroic amount of work and effort to make this hopefully the best live event that you've ever been to, and we cannot wait.

• 21:27Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. All right. With that, listeners, thank you and we'll see you next time.

• 21:31David Rosenthal?

  We'll see you in September.