Inside the M&A Press with Bloomberg's Alex Sherman

Ben and David go inside the M&A press with Bloomberg’s technology M&A reporter and host of the Deal of the Week Podcast http://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts/deal_of_the_week, Alex Sherman https://twitter.com/sherman4949. If you’ve ever wondered how stories about big deals get broken or what “according to people familiar with the matter” really means, tune in for the behind-the-scenes scoop! Note: A technical glitch with our recording setup created occasional short silences between Alex’s comments and Ben & David’s. It shouldn’t impact listenability, but we apologize for the awkward pauses! 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 Topics covered include: Bloomberg’s own fascinating “history & facts” and origins following the acquisition of storied Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers Bloomberg’s core as a highly profitable technology business (selling terminals to Wall Street firms), with a large media empire built on top of itThe tradable value of breaking M&A news & information to Bloomberg’s terminal customers, and competing on speedHow “sources" work — and industry standard that sources be directly within the companies involved in a dealThe coded language of M&A reporting and gleaning where information is coming from based on a story’s structure and phrasingThe lifecycle of a story—steps from sourcing to writing to release, and reasons (or lack thereof) for why stories run when they doInternal & external PR resources companies use for M&A How Alex prioritizes his time researching and creating stories, and who he’s meeting with to hear about what deals are in the works The difference between ‘news' and ‘analysis', and why news dominates the majority of stories versus deeper analysisMedia and social media business models, their evolution in the messenger world, and speculation on Twitter’s futureHow entrepreneurs can think about interacting with the press and building relationships with the right reporters for their stage and spaceApple’s ‘unique’ approach to press relations Followups: Instagram announces 500k+ active advertisers https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/22/instagram-500k/, up from 200k in February 2016Amazon stock price surpasses $800/share http://www.recode.net/2016/9/22/13017394/amazon-stock-price-record-jeff-bezos Hot Takes: Ford acquires Chariot http://www.recode.net/2016/9/9/12860834/ford-chariot-motivate-gobike-san-francisco-mobility The Yahoo! data breach and potential impact on their acquisition by Verizon https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/22/report-yahoo-to-confirm-data-breach-affecting-hundreds-of-millions-of-accounts/ The Carve Out: Ben: Phil of Drones’ Burning Man 2016 recap video https://vimeo.com/182824721David: Algorithms to Live By https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Decisions-ebook/dp/B015CKNWJI/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me= by Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths Alex: Clinton’s Samantha Bee Problem http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/opinion/campaign-stops/clintons-samantha-bee-problem.html, by Ross Douthat in the NYT Opinion Pages

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

• 0:00Ben Gilbert?

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• 1:20Ben Gilbert?

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• 1:48David Rosenthal?

  Well, the nice thing is I don't think this is going to be a super-long episode, anyway, so.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. We said that before.

• 1:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Welcome to episode 21 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 2:19David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  And we are your hosts. Today is a special episode where we yet again break the mold and do a little bit of experimenting of our own here at Acquired. We are covering the press perspective of mergers and acquisitions, and we have special guest with us Alex Sherman from Bloomberg. He's based out of their New York headquarters and is the host of the Great Deal of the Week podcast. He started at Bloomberg in 2008 as an intern out of graduate school and has worked in a variety of roles and covered a number of beats since then. Thanks so much, Alex, for joining us and welcome to the show.

• 2:52David Rosenthal?

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:54David Rosenthal?

  We are excited to have you here, and especially as a former employee of the media industry myself a number of years ago now, I'm really looking forward to this one. I think we're gonna have a great time talking about the press and how you guys cover deals, your business model, and how it all relates to tech and acquisitions. So, thanks again for joining us.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Absolutely. It's nice to be on this side of the table instead of the host of the podcast, which I'm used to. I put my answer in.

• 3:27David Rosenthal?

  You're getting the questions posed to you.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, you'll see as the course of this goes around, I may end up being like just interviewing you guys for a force of habit, but yeah.

• 3:37David Rosenthal?

  Oh, that'd be... Our listeners can then see the tables turned.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, for our listeners out there, we wanted to do this episode, we were talking with Alex about, you know, what would be the right way to kind of like work together on something, or have Alex be on an episode. And as we were talking, we realized there's this totally fascinating process of the news cycle of M&A and why we read about stories when we do and how that whole process works that was really not something I had thought about even after doing 20 episodes of this podcast. So, we thought it'd be a cool idea to have Alex on and, you know, clue everyone in on the process.

• 4:17David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. So before we kick off, we're gonna abandon our traditional structure for this show and do it as a special episode. But I want to sneak in a little bit of history and facts about Bloomberg. Cause I bet a lot of our listeners may consume Bloomberg Media, but don't really know much about the company. Other than Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York was the founder. But it's interesting. So Bloomberg actually, I think, might be like the largest technology company that nobody really thinks about. Or talks about too much because people think about it as a media company. But it actually is at its heart and its origins, a technology company. So it has, it was founded in 1981 by Michael Bloomberg.

• 4:58David Rosenthal?

  And Michael had been a partner at Salomon Brothers, which was an investment bank on Wall Street. And Salomon Brothers got acquired in either 80 or 81. By an entity that was rolling up banks and it eventually became Citigroup. And as part of that acquisition, Michael, as a partner, made $10 million in the acquisition. And he used that money, turned around, he started a company called Innovative Market Systems, IMS.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Not quite as catchy, but definitely a little bit less self-serving.

• 5:32David Rosenthal?

  Fortunately for the brand, a couple of years later, just changed the name to Bloomberg. In 1983, so a couple of years later, Merrill Lynch, another large investment bank, actually invested $30 million in the company for a 30% stake. And then ultimately, when Merrill got bought by B of A during the financial crisis in 2008, Bloomberg bought that, bought that stake back from, from Merrill. But the core business of Bloomberg is actually this thing called terminals. Which Alex, you probably use every day and many consumers of Bloomberg Media use.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  I do. I just don't have to spend the $25,000 a year per user fee that everybody else does.

• 6:12David Rosenthal?

  Exactly. And terminals are, this was kind of like the WhatsApp or the, maybe Snapchat, more like the WhatsApp for traders for, for Wall Street, long before the smartphone or WhatsApp or AOL or anything like that. It's, it's the communications platform for Wall Street and basically everybody uses it today.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if, for our listeners out there that do use this, sorry for butchering the explanation of what it is. And for the listeners that don't, it's, it's this total black hole for people that, that aren't in the industry that they actually, it's a Bloom, it's Bloomberg branded hardware and you pay an annual fee and it hooks up to service and it has all this software installed and it sits on your, your desk and it's your kind of core operating, you know, it's the operating system on which you work.

• 7:01David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And you make trades on the platform. You communicate with other traders on the platform. You can run all sorts of data and analytics on stocks, on companies, on markets. It's very, very cool. And as Alex was alluding to, it's also quite expensive. When, when you're selling to clients that have a lot of money, they're willing to pay a lot.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:21David Rosenthal?

  So Bloomberg, unlike, it's interesting, you know, and then we'll get into the show here, but in recent years Bloomberg has evolved and started, you know, started doing radio, which is now podcasts, like Alex's Deal of the Week and television as TV channels, news. There are about 2,000 plus editors and reporters at Bloomberg that Alex is part of that organization. But the terminals, subscribers to the terminals, as Alex was alluding to, pay about $25,000 a year per terminal. And there are in the neighborhood of half a million people that do that, which makes Bloomberg quite a large company.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's really interesting to think about. There's all these, you know, we've talked about the changing dynamics in the media industry on a lot of these different episodes. And, you know, it's primarily because the way that most publications work is just selling ads and that's their main revenue model. And there's subscription, there's paywalls, there's all these other things. But You know, with Bloomberg, they produce all this media, but the core, the core business is one with network effects, one that's based on technology, one that's essential for people to do their job, and it's not monetizing the ads on the publications. And there's a little bit of that, too, because, you know, it's a decent business, but, you know, certainly not compared to selling terminals.

• 8:43David Rosenthal?

  So with that, Alex, with that long preamble, what's your perspective on all that, you know, being at Bloomberg, at this company, but also being a journalist and a reporter and an M and A reporter? How, how does that play out for you?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  So I started at Bloomberg, as you mentioned, as an intern in January of 2008. And I have, sort of, without revealing the who, what, or when, I'd say I've had interviews with virtually every single competitor of Bloomberg since then, at one point or another, for, to change jobs, or because just someone was interested in meeting me, and I've never left. And there's a reason for that. And the main reason is what you just described. Bloomberg is, and this has been the case since I joined the company, Bloomberg is in better financial shape than all of our competitors.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  So it has been hard for me to rationalize why I would go work at, say, a newspaper, which really struggles financially and lives on advertisement, when our entire operation is, you could say, subsidized by the Bloomberg Terminal business, which does $9 billion a year in revenue and is not ad-supported. Ad-supported businesses, unless you're Google or Facebook, are by and large not good. You don't have to look very far. Even digital media companies that have decent valuations really struggle, and nothing is near the size of Bloomberg. So what I have tried to do at Bloomberg is to try to figure out what can I do to provide

• 10:19Speaker 03

  value here to the core business, not just some sort of ancillary side project. Because you mentioned Bloomberg has Business Week, we have a TV station, we have a radio station, we have podcasts. But in the end, if you're not serving the core function of this business, you're not essential to this business. So whatever I did here, I wanted to make sure that I was providing value to maybe both the common user and the terminal user. And covering M and A, I think, is very central to that function because M and A stories move markets a lot more than almost any other story. If we can break a deal, if we can say, this company is in talks to buy, you know, company

• 11:01Speaker 03

  X is in talks to buy company Y, the stocks and bonds are going to move for those companies. The prices are going to move. And it therefore makes it worthwhile for you to spend $25,000 a year to buy a Bloomberg Terminal if you're trading on this information. And one very important note that your listeners should know is that Bloomberg Terminal customers get our news 15 minutes before the rest of the world gets it. It's basically a built-in paywall.

• 11:29David Rosenthal?

  Whoa.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  So if you're a-

• 11:31David Rosenthal?

  Wow, I didn't realize that.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  That's right. If you're a terminal subscriber, you have access to this information first. Now, a lot of that, that advantage-

• 11:39David Rosenthal?

  And if you're a hedge fund and you're, you're trading the markets, like that's, and you, and, you know, and Alex breaks a story about, you know, a potential merger, like that, that is, that pays for itself in literally, the $25,000 a year pays for itself in seconds, right?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, 15 minutes is an eternity.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  It, it comes in the sales pitch. There's no question that, you know, some of our biggest scoops, while we try to sell customers terminals, we say, look, we broke this deal. You know, $6 billion in, in market value was created instantly, and you would have missed it if you don't have a Bloomberg Terminal. What I will say, though, and this is, this is very important toward the future of this business, is that that 15-minute, the 15-minute delay has eroded because of social media and, in essence, TV. So what has happened is, you still don't get the story first, but as soon as we hit headlines, it goes on Bloomberg TV, so we have it virtually instantly. So in other words, we've sort of cannibalized ourselves that way.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  And of course, anyone that has a Bloomberg Terminal can then tweet the headline. So we realize that we live in a world now where the 15 minute delay is a little bit anachronistic. It still exists, but it's something that's discussed here internally almost all the time. Like, do we want to change this? Do we still want to keep it? So far, we've decided as an organization that there's still value in this, so we do keep it. But Twitter and other forms of media have certainly put this 15 minute delay in a different category now. And I think we're OK with it because, honestly, so much of the trading is algorithmic that the money is made instantly. So really, you just need

• 13:17Speaker 03

  to be first. And as long as you're point 0001 seconds first, you've paid it off. After that point, when the stock jumps and everything's programmed in there, it's much less important.

• 13:28David Rosenthal?

  That's exactly where I was going to go. I mean, it's super interesting how that's evolved. It reminds me a little bit of when I was at the Wall Street Journal. Our debate was famously the WSJ.com had a paywall in an era when very few news organizations did on the internet. But that's like, if you're talking about access to a story when all that matters is the news, that's totally different from this situation. And I was going to ask, like, how do you, as a reporter now, and when you're covering an M&A acquisition, when it is all about that data that's going to feed the algorithmic traders, does Bloomberg

• 14:11David Rosenthal?

  Now, and do you, as you're writing stories, like, set up data feeds that come out when you break the story?

• 14:17Speaker 03

  So, we deal with this in different ways. So, we know that there's going to be a reaction, given our stories. And there are ways within the Bloomberg terminal that we can actually somewhat manipulate the reaction. And it becomes incumbent upon us to do this responsibly. So, the most telling way that I can explain this is that our biggest stories are redheaded. They're literally red on the terminal. So there's a scrolling set of headlines at the bottom of your terminal that are constantly going by. And the biggest stories are highlighted in red.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  So if we break a news story and we red head it, there's almost always a massive jump in the stocks. And that, I would imagine, has to do with algorithms from trading, from traders that are set up, however they do it to be coded, where if something is red headed, then the stocks move. So we will purposefully not red head stories where we don't actually want to generate an enormous market reaction if maybe the story is more nuanced. So, you know, if, if, let's say a company might be considering buying another company, but they haven't entered formal talks yet, or something like that.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  You know, we, we, we want to make sure that we emphasize the nuance there so that maybe that, maybe that particular M and A deal is not as advanced as we would, you know, maybe want one to be. Or maybe here's another example, that talks have happened and ended and are now dead and it's not live.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  For example, you, you wouldn't red head something about, you know, Apple to probably buy McLaren.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Right. Well, that's right. In fact, in fact, we did not red head that story when, um, when, because we did write sort of a version of it after the FT put out their story. And yes, we did not red head that story. Although, although, let me put, let me put it this way. When, and this is something that we do as a sort of a service to our clients, when the FT ran that story, their headline was red headed. So we did red head their headline because the people that made that decision thought that that was an important enough headline. And the FT is of a stature where we have decided at Bloomberg that, that they're right almost all the time. So, you know, we've given certain media organizations, the FT, the New York Times, CNBC, the Wall

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Street Journal, the benefit of the doubt that they're, they're, you know, they know, we know that their track record is good enough that even if they beat us to a story, we typically will alert our clients to that fact. Uh, now look, there.

• 17:04David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, well, it's interesting. It's almost like even, um, at that point, this is what's so fascinating about how markets work, like. The news, like you, you guys may have decided not to redhead or not to run a story about that potential acquisition, but once that news is out there, that impacts the markets. So redheading the news that the news, the news that the rumor is out there is probably is super relevant to your customers.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  You, David, you've hit on something that we talk about all the time here as reporters, which is if we get beat on a story, how much do we then have to react to somebody else's story, you know? So it's, it's a, in other words, this wasn't news a minute ago and we didn't feel, but now that the, now that the news is out there, all of a sudden, things are baked into the stock price. So is it worth it for us to negate somebody else's story just to have the, the stock price come down? You know, sometimes the answer to that is yes, and sometimes the answer to that is no, and just let it be and sort of let the fact that Bloomberg didn't match the story speak on its own as, look, you know, we weren't able to confirm this.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  So we're not really in the business of slamming other people's erroneous reports, but sometimes it is sort of necessary to do that if the market has moved one way or another.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Right. And it's interesting that your incentives are kind of the opposite. I mean, in a lot of publications these days, the incentives are around page views and, and you know, they're, they're CPMs. And what they want to do is make something seem splashier than it is so they, they get more attention. And for you guys that, you know, you don't want to be the boy that cried wolf and you have a responsibility to the, you're, you're paying customers to deliver them what you believe is the most accurate representation of, of the, the news. So you actually have an incentive not to downplay things, but certainly to, to play them accurately. And if others are overplaying them, then you might be incentivized to give your, your customers the, the kind of edge by, by making sure to downplay it just to negate the overhyping.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely, absolutely, which actually I think makes this place sort of a good place to work because you don't get caught in that game. You can sort of feel good about yourself when you go home at night that your sole obligation is to just be as right as possible.

• 19:16David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, your incentives are aligned with the truth.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely, and that helps a lot when we cover M and A because I am reliant on people that are directly involved in these transactions to give me the information to put out these stories. In other words, we can hear all sorts of information from indirect sources. Maybe they're bankers that aren't working on a deal, or maybe they're rival executives, or maybe they're ex-board members, or maybe they're friends of an executive, or maybe they're traders who have a financial incentive on their own. Well, none of those sources are good enough for us to publish something on because they're not direct.

• 19:57David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  So when Bloomberg runs a story, as someone who reads it, you can be certain of the fact that this is not indirect information. There have been a number of cases where I have put out a story and it's happened to be the day before earnings or something like that. There was a big, there was a company called Synaptics, which is based in California, and it was a takeover target for a Chinese conglomerate for about nine months. And I put out a series of stories, basically, that said, the Chinese conglomerate is interested, they're interested in this price, they've done due diligence, they've lowered it to this price, they're still in talks, and then eventually the thing died. And it was a whole

• 20:38Speaker 03

  lifecycle story of interested, lowered price, thing over. There were like four stories all along the way. And I was the only one that reported it. For whatever reason, no one matched this story. But I knew who my sources were, and they're directly intimately involved in the process. So from both sides, not just one side. So no one has an incentive to lie here. And that also should be pointed out, that we have to get both sides sourcing in order to run a story, to be comfortable with the fact that it's right. So everyone is given a chance to sort of weigh in here before we publish things. So I got a number of emails, I got a number of emails from traders saying, you know,

• 21:20Speaker 03

  you're being played, you're being manipulated here. This is, no one else is matching these stories. Someone is playing you to manipulate the stock and make money off it. But of course, I know who's doing this. And I mean, there's, there's no way. We'd all go to jail. And they have, and it's just not their job to do that. So, you know, it's one of those things that I sort of have to explain to people. Like, no, you don't understand the way Bloomberg sourcing is done. I'm not getting this information from traders. It doesn't work that way.

• 21:46David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Is that, so across the industry, this is great transition, the kind of other thing we wanted to talk, another, one of the several things we wanted to talk about is how, what are the nuts and bolts of how this works? So is that, is that standard across the industry? Or is that unique to Bloomberg that you need, and is it, you know, for you to feel comfortable going with a story that you have direct sources from both sides of a deal? Is, is that your standard? And is that standard across the industry?

• 22:15Speaker 03

  So this can be, in general, that is the standard. There can be exceptions. If we know something is really in hot pursuit, and we know the Wall Street Journal is chasing it, and we know the Financial Times is chasing it. There are certain times where if we are so certain of one side of the source, let's say it's the CEO of a company that we've gotten to tell us something on background. All this stuff, by the way, is, it's never on the record. It's all anonymously sourced. So the whole job is based on relationships with people. So if we have an existing relationship with the CEO, or the chairman of the board of a company, and they've told us something, at that point, what we'll probably do is

• 22:59Speaker 03

  we still will reach out to the other side to say, we're running this. But we may only give them a very short amount of time to sort of get back to us before, before we say, right, like, at least give them the chance to say, no comment. And then, and then basically what we'll say is, all right, we've given them the chance. They didn't wave us off the story. We know our other source is so strong here, that we'll go with it. And in those cases, you will see some stories that we run attributed to just a person familiar with the matter. But everything else will be attributed to people familiar with the matter. And by and large, that means that people on both sides have weighed in.

• 23:35David Rosenthal?

  That means both sides. Interesting.

• 23:38David Rosenthal?

  Wow, this is, that's so cool. Yeah, I had no idea. And these are the words that, you know, I mean, we read, it's sort of like, we read a lot of these articles, given what we do on this show. And I think the bad, probably if you're not in the industry, that like, eyes just gloss right over that, like, what does that mean? Like, but, but coded in that language is, are these, are these indications about like, what the genesis of the story is?

• 24:03Speaker 03

  So, so I'll give you a little bit more. So there's a lot of inside baseball things that you would never know to look for unless you're talking to a reporter. You can sometimes glean where the information is coming from, based on who the reporter is. So, people that cover M and A, you have to look up what these people do and what their jobs are. So on a given story, there may be three bylines. The first byline is typically where the main information has come from. Almost all major news organizations does this. So the person with the first byline usually has gotten the critical, or maybe the first piece of information to kick off a scoop. This is based purely on fresh news scoops.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Well, sometimes on a deal, reporter number one is, let's say, the activist investor reporter. So you know that the information came from the activist, because otherwise, that person wouldn't be on the story. In other cases, maybe the first, the first byline is, let's say, you know, Verizon just bought Yahoo. Well, we have a different Verizon reporter than a Yahoo reporter. Same with the Wall Street Journal, same with Reuters. Take a look at who the first byline is. If the first byline is the Yahoo reporter, then the main information came from Yahoo, or someone involved with Yahoo. So then maybe the last byline is the Verizon reporter. Then you could say, all right, well, then that person probably just called Verizon

• 25:28Speaker 03

  to check up on that the information from the Yahoo side was right. So you can sort of figure out where the, the information came from. It's not always a leak, though, which is very important, I think, for people. We're not talking about strategic leaks all the time. And, and we actually talk about this, if you go to episode seven of my Deal of the Week podcast. I talk about this with the other two M and A reporters at Bloomberg. A lot of the information simply comes from, you know, what I would say to some degree is coincidence, which is I have been trying to get a meeting with a person for weeks or months, and finally, this person has said yes. And so I have lunch or coffee with them and I'm able, I'm able to ask the right questions to the right person and get information.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  And then I come back to the office, you know, well, maybe it's seven at night at that point. And we made a decision at Bloomberg. This story is not so important that it needs to go out at seven at night. We'll put it out tomorrow. So then the story goes out tomorrow, but like, you know, I had to have some sort of, you know, parent teacher conference with my kid in the morning. So the story eventually goes out at like three o'clock in the afternoon. Well, there's no strategy to that, but I think a lot of people read in, and in fact, you see it all the time on Twitter after stories have broken. Why did this story come out when it did? Like, there's way less into that than you think, almost all the time. Like, the story went out when it did because like I got around to writing it when I did and I met with the right person at the right time.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  I would say 80% of the stories fall into that bucket and 20% of the stories fall into there's some sort of reason for why the story is going out right now.

• 27:05Ben Gilbert?

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• 27:19David Rosenthal?

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• 27:43David 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.

• 28:01Ben 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.

• 28:17David 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.

• 28:34Ben 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?

• 28:43David 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. From your perspective, generally, do the players in the stories understand all of this coded language as well? Like, let's take Yahoo Verizon, for example, which I know you spent a ton of time on that story. You know, byline comes out and say, you know, on one of the pieces of information, and let's say it's a critical story, and the Verizon reporter is first on the byline. Does Yahoo, do people at Yahoo then understand that means that, okay, like,

• 29:26David Rosenthal?

  this information is probably coming from Verizon? Or is this, is this kind of, you know, the backroom baseball?

• 29:36Speaker 03

  So it depends on who at Yahoo you're talking about. So your general CEO or CFO or board member has no idea by and large. So they rely on their own internal media relations. Or in the case of an M and A deal, they actually hire outside PR firms. And these people absolutely know. In fact, many of them are former journalists. So they are hired specifically to help companies figure out, A, where the information's coming from and then B, to sort of craft the story and to work with reporters. So all the M and A reporters know the major external PR firms that are hired on deals very well. We speak to them all the time. So the companies are called, there's one that's called Brunswick.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  There's one that's called Sard Verbinen. There's one that's called Joel Frank. There's one that's called Abernathy McGregor. There's a handful of other ones, but those are the major ones that are hired specifically to deal with M and A transactions. So when one company decides it's going to sell itself or is engaged in a sales process, they then hire one of these external firms. And sort of the PR at that point is then pushed in their direction. So in many cases, you actually stop dealing with the company directly.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  And then you sort of start dealing with the PR firms. So for instance, in Yahoo's case, Yahoo had a pre-existing relationship with Brunswick. But a lot of the communication, you know, trying to figure out if stuff was right or not, ends up going through Brunswick rather than Yahoo. The Yahoo internal PR system also is still a method of getting at what information is right and wrong, and they were certainly still involved in that process. But it really does depend on how sophisticated the company is, whether or not they keep the PR internally or sort of hand it off externally.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  That's really interesting. It sort of leads me to start thinking about your week and your day. How do you decide, you know, what you're going to chase down and when you're going to do sort of long lead things where you should be aggressively trying to get this lunch or this coffee set up? And how do you decide, hey, this is the panic button? And then in terms of amount of media created, like how many stories do you write a week? You do one podcast a week. What's the total amount of media that you create?

• 31:54Speaker 03

  So on a given week, I'd say I probably write two to three stories on average. There's certainly no quota for that. In terms of what I'm focusing on, I have a chase list that I keep for myself that is built on sort of a running list of tips that I've gotten from everyone I speak with. So that runs the gamut of company executives, company corporate development type people, bankers, lawyers, board members, consultants that are hired by some of these companies, private equity firms, PR people. I'm sure there's a few other people that are in there in that mix at all, but those are the general people that I'm meeting with that are at the level that they'd actually

• 32:39Speaker 03

  know sort of what's going on. That's sort of my rotating cast of characters that I'm meeting with on a given day. Then, when I have to sort of narrow in on something, so you know, sometimes these sales processes I'm coming up with purely out of the blue, and so, you know, nothing had been reported on this, and then suddenly I'm able to break a story and now, and now there's a whole circus around it. So, one of the stories I broke was Verizon was actually, had started talks and was interested in buying AOL. So this is before the Yahoo thing. So that was a story that sort of, there was no narrative around that. And then, my colleague Scott Moritz and I broke that story, and now all of a sudden it's sort of out there. So now everyone's chasing it.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  For the Yahoo story, you know, Yahoo eventually decided like they would go public with that and sort of admitted that they were going to sell the company. So then like the whole, the whole world is on the Yahoo story. And then it's, so, so, so it then becomes very high profile for me, so to your question about what to chase. Because now I know that that is going to be a really competitive story, and I know that Yahoo is a big enough company that like everybody's going to care about that. So I'm going to pay more attention to breaking a Yahoo story than any of the sort of, you know, deals of lesser significance, either by name recognition or by size, that may come along that's still sort of technically under my umbrella beat of all technology media and telecom companies, which is my beat at Bloomberg.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  You know, I may let a $3 or $4 billion deal pass without really chasing it if I'm close to breaking some news, even if it's just incremental news on Yahoo, because I know it's going to get a lot more readership and it's going to get a lot more attention, both internally and externally. Now, beyond name recognition, the other general metric I use is size. So I'm trying to, you know, at Bloomberg, we sort of pride ourselves on breaking the biggest deals. So if I can break a $15 billion deal, that's going to be a lot more important to me than breaking a $1 billion deal. And really, we don't even pay attention to deals that are under $1 billion unless they come with some big name recognition.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  So maybe a company used to be worth a lot more and now they aren't anymore, or for some other reason, you know, a lot of people happen to know this company because they're consumer-facing or whatever it may be.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  So you're saying if we've got some small M&A that we want to sweep under the rug, just wait till Verizon's going to pull an acquisition and then do it then?

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying.

• 35:07David Rosenthal?

  Getting buried. Yeah, wait until Verizon's going to do an acquisition on a Friday and then do it on a Friday.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Take it out with the trash.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  So this leads to a, this leads to a point that David and I had been talking about since kind of a couple of years ago before we were doing Acquired. And we were thinking about, you know, if we were going to do a podcast, maybe this would be an interesting area to go after because it sure seems like nobody talks about these deals after they're done. People talk about them when they're announced, people talk about them when they close, but there's never this like retrospective or like, did that actually go well? Or trying to understand, you know, what trends were, can we extrapolate from these deals that have gone well and hence us starting this podcast? Why is that in your opinion?

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Like, why do we not see this sort of coverage later on beyond just the fact that, you know, that information is less actionable at that point?

• 36:08Speaker 03

  So one of the reasons is it's much harder. It's much harder to write a good, comprehensive story on that. And it would necessarily be sort of a featurey type story because you'd really have to dig in and sort of start at the beginning. Look, you guys do a good job of it on this podcast, but from a reporter's standpoint, we need to decide, do I want to spend the work on sort of figuring out exactly how good this acquisition was from a culture standpoint, from a financial standpoint? You know, I have to go back, I have to figure out, you know, sort of exactly how this acquisition may have been profitable or unprofitable.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  A lot of times, the numbers are masked because once a big company buys a little company, they don't necessarily need to break out all of the numbers that used to be publicly available when that first company was public.

• 37:03David Rosenthal?

  We joke on this show that's why we love lawsuits.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Right. Exactly.

• 37:09David Rosenthal?

  Because we get to dig into them.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Exactly. The numbers all of a sudden become public or other things that were hidden, for sure. But I mean, the biggest reason is what you said, that it's not actionable. The main reason is that my incentive here, particularly at Bloomberg, is to move markets. I mean, it's something that is very well-known here. Like, the goal is to provide value to a Bloomberg subscriber that's trading on information. So at Bloomberg, it's very cut and dry, which is like, if you have the time, you know, 80% of your day should be trying to break news on live deals. And the other 20%, I mean, these are just made up numbers, but I'm saying, whatever. The other 20% is sort of your own time. So if I wanted to write a story like that-

• 37:55David Rosenthal?

  It's your Google time.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Right. It's Google time. Exactly. That's right. It's Free Project, Google X, or whatever they call it at Google.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  So then it's up to me on what to do. So, look, we are, this isn't quite what you guys do on the podcast, but we did decide as a team that we're going to take on a project for next year where we do oral histories of certain deals. So that's something you can expect for Bloomberg. So we will go back in time and talk to the people that were involved, let's say 10 years ago. I think we're going to try to do them around acquisitions or anniversaries of acquisitions. So we're going to go back and talk to the people that were involved and ask them why they did this, what they were thinking at the time. It won't really be a look at sort of how successful or unsuccessful the acquisition was. So that's not quite what you're getting at.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Those really are sort of what I read in Harvard case studies typically, Harvard Business School case studies at business school. So for people that have actually gone to business school, I think you do see that a lot of the time. But those are not publicly available in general for people. So you really don't see that very much. So one of the reasons, yeah, is it's not actionable. And the other reason is that it's just sort of hard to do it, given the fact that you have mandates to do other things.

• 39:12David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it's a little bit like, it's like getting news on Facebook versus reading articles on Medium or something like that, or Longreads.com or something like, you know, it's the, you want the dopamine, like the dopamine hits of, which for you guys is moving markets and for the news industry, like there's a lot more, in aggregate, there is a lot more dollars and value and buzz in that than there is on the, you know, the hard going back and eating, you know, like a whole plate full of vegetables.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  I do think that another part of it is that the general public really just wants to know the headline information. So, you know, what company is buying what company and how much is it? And then like they sort of move on. So that's how, that's how the news, I mean, all the news cycle works like that in all forms and fashions of life. What's the headline news? Okay, I got it. We'll just move on. That's sort of what our culture is like now. So even in what you're talking about, which is like, was an acquisition successful or not? You know, almost all I want to know, it can be sort of told on a gut level. So like, have I read how successful Facebook buying Instagram was? Like, no. Like, do I know that Facebook buying Instagram was really successful?

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do. I'd like to know maybe how successful it was, but like, once I know how much money Facebook gained from Instagram, which would require some analysis, like, that's about all I need to know. You know? I don't really need to like, read the sort of the why behind that. People that are really involved in this stuff and do it for a living, I'm sure would. But you know, then all of a sudden, now you're dealing with sort of a new form of media, which is like, all right, well, if I'm only writing something to the people that are really involved in this, now I'm almost working for a trade publication, rather than the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg. So I'm going to write something that's really focused on, from an audience perspective, about who I'm writing for.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's something we think about with this show all the time. David and I have looked at our numbers. We probably had three sort of check-ins since we started the show, trying to figure out, okay, what's the future of this thing? You know, this is like a side project for both of us. And you know, you start looking around at other technology podcasts, like, whoa, how big could it get? But you're right, it's super niche. It's this thing that it's people that are in the M and A world, or in startups, and hope to one day be in the M and A world. And you know, that's got a ceiling. And I think you talking about the fact that it kind of fits under that moniker of trade publication is the best way to succinctly put it that I've heard yet.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's something that I think about too, for my podcast, which is, I mean, it's an M and A podcast, so I think to myself, like, all right, well, people that have some sort of demonstrated interest in M and A, which pretty much means you work in the business, will listen to this. And how do I get out of that box? How do I grow an audience for my podcast too? So just this past week's episode is Rob Kindler, who's the head of M and A at Morgan Stanley, global head of M and A. And his brother is a stand-up comedian, Andy Kindler. So I had them both on the show. So I'm trying to figure out ways myself of like, all right, well, maybe Andy Kindler fans will listen to this thing. And it's not just the M and A crowd. And like, I've got to think to myself, how do I grow the audience here, so that it's

• 42:30Speaker 03

  not just sort of the standard fare of people that work, you know, and sort of live and breathe this industry?

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Well, I can tell you that I think your idea to do the, what you and the team have decided to do with kind of more of the feature piece around anniversaries, just looking at what people have told us about this show has a lot of merit because when we do certain episodes, for example, the Snapchat and Facebook acquisition that wasn't episode, that has a tremendous backstory and there's drama and there's, you know, listening to David run through the acquisition history and facts there is enjoyable in its own right just as a form of entertainment. So I think that there have been a few instances where we had a more dramatic history reading there and that is something that we continually have people tell us. You know, I actually am not that interested in M&A, but I listened

• 43:19Speaker 02

  to that episode specifically because my friend told me it was interesting and I loved hearing that story.

• 43:23David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, that is absolutely something we've found and been spot on on this show. And our listeners can tell us, you know, if you disagree, but I doubt you will. Like, people listen to us for the stories, you know, and that's like, that's what's so interesting that we've found is this difference between, you know, news versus stories versus analysis and getting that balance right, you know. Obviously, our listener base and potential listener base is much smaller than Bloomberg's, but I find it fascinating like how those three pillars of what's going on, you know, vary by medium.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, my idea for the, I don't know if I should give this away because like my competitors at the Wall Street Journal are listening, they'll take the idea, but I'll at least tease you guys that it's sort of what you're hinting at where that there is sort of an anniversary coming up of a counterfactual, a deal that did not happen. So that is what, that's sort of what the oral history that I'm thinking of doing is to talk to the people that were involved and sort of why it didn't happen and like what the world would have looked like if it did.

• 44:21David Rosenthal?

  Oh, so cool.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:23David Rosenthal?

  Well, that's, I mean, I think, I think thus far, our latest episode on Android is probably on track to eclipse this, but I think our most popular episode is Snapchat.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  It's neck to neck with LinkedIn because we did that one, like, that was the first time that, you know, not that we were anywhere close to breaking news there, but it was still at the top of the news cycle when we released that episode. So I think it was a lot of people asking their friends, what do you think of this LinkedIn thing? And we had already put up an episode, so people would say, you really should listen to that at this podcast episode to hear about it.

• 44:51David Rosenthal?

  But that was like, that was like a spike when it was relevant in the news, but Snapchat just keeps getting tons of downloads. And I think it's because of this like, oh, it's this anti-history, you know, like what, what the world could have been if Snapchat were part of Facebook.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I also, I think a lot of people are simply just fascinated with Snapchat. I know I am, in part because, I mean, I'm 34 years old and like, I can't figure out how to use Snapchat. Like, so I, it's the first, like, company that has a product where I'm like, I am aged out of this at this point. Like, I don't know what this thing is.

• 45:25David Rosenthal?

  It's depressing.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Really not intuitive to me. I don't fully understand why it's popular. That said, I do see, uh, sort of a Snapchat model here that where I feel like other, other companies are, we're all sort of moving towards something. You know, I just actually, um, we, we just met with, uh, the whole, uh, executive team at, at LINE, the Japanese company that does its messenger service. Uh, and they were sort of explaining to us how, uh, in Japan, uh, LINE and some other companies have sort of taken the path of having your whole ecosystem done through its platform. So online, you know, you can order a cab through LINE. You

• 46:09Speaker 03

  can, you basically, yeah, you, you order your meals through LINE. So, all of these other independent apps in this country are sort of housed within one ecosystem with LINE. And you can see Snapchat developing into that. Certainly, Facebook is trying, but you know, Facebook Messenger is still sort of very much independent of Facebook and sort of that your core Facebook, your newsfeed, your pictures. It's not quite all lined up in the same sort of bubble ecosystem. Obviously, like, I think even the new iOS 10 for Apple, you're sort of seeing things move in this direction a little bit, but you know, I-

• 46:45David Rosenthal?

  There's an app store baked into iMessages.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. So, you know, I think Snapchat has it right where they've realized, oh, this sort of, you know, housing form of chat and, and, and general communication can also be used to do other things.

• 47:00David Rosenthal?

  One of the questions we were gonna ask you is, uh, you know, a section we always do on the show is tech trends and, you know, what this deal represents in tech trends. And I, I think that's a perfect one of, you know, that we were gonna ask you, like, what tech trends do you see, you know, covering the landscape, um, that are, that are coming? And absolutely, how messaging, like, you can look to Asia and see how messaging has evolved into this operating system there. Um, and then the question I think is, like, is, is, and if so, if so, when will that start to be the reality, you know, in the US as well?

• 47:36David Rosenthal?

  Major wave that's happening in Asia and the question is, is that coming here to the US too?

• 47:42Speaker 03

  I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this one because here's a tech trend that has not happened yet, but I'm, I want, so before I was an M&A reporter at Bloomberg, I covered media for three years and then I transitioned into this role of covering all technology, media and telecom.

• 47:57David Rosenthal?

  Covering media at a media organization is like the ultimate naval.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  For sure, absolutely, totally right. Look, you're around a lot of people that sort of came from organizations that you're covering from too. So it's sort of like, you know, oh, like I need like a Time Inc. source. Like, well, like just walk three rows down and like that guy used to be the managing editor at Time, that type of thing. So here's my question to you. We have seen the way a lot of consumerish media tech companies are valued for years now has been based on users, whether it's MAUs or some other form of just user growth. That has been the main way that a lot of these media-ish companies have been valued.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  But at some point, and we're already seeing it with some, like, let's say Twitter, the growth stalls. But there's still value to these products, but the way Wall Street has valued them, basically there just seems to be a cap and then they may turn into sort of zombie-like companies because the user growth isn't there and they're not making any money. So what's the way out? Well, right now, the answer seems to be like they just sort of give up or sell. But I wonder if one day we see some of these user, these media, tech media companies that have always been based on users, if they can somehow formulate a new way of generating revenue through some degree of subscription, which we have not

• 49:25Speaker 03

  seen. So, you know, Twitter has never thrown out a subscription fee, certainly Facebook hasn't, and they've never wanted to because the way Wall Street has valued them, that would actually be sort of anathema to what they're going for. But, you know, at one point, but, but, but we have seen among more traditional media companies that have gone online, they Have transitioned to something that you would call a subscription model, which is the paywall. So you now have to subscribe to the New York Times or subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. So is it just a matter of time before this sort of traditional media that has gone online meets the new media that has not done this? And do we see some of these older new media companies go subscription?

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Well, Alex, I think you're forgetting about the vibrant community over at app.net, the subscription-only Twitter.

• 50:19David Rosenthal?

  That is a blast from the past.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  So I, you know, I look at this as a, I think the reason why there is a little bit of success with paywalls at publications and why I think that would be the nail in the coffin for any, any form of kind of like new media that involves, let's call it social media, is that traditional media doesn't require network effects. And the, you know, let's say Twitter, for example, absolutely does. And as soon as people are, you know, my sources are no longer on Twitter, like the people that I want to be following because they decided not to subscribe, it's less valuable for me. And then I don't get that content, so I'm incentivized not to subscribe. And I think that there's this like unidirectional

• 51:04Speaker 02

  value creation that happens from traditional media companies to their readers. And there's this like massively bidirectional interconnected web on social media where if, if people start falling out of the ecosystem, you know, then everybody else is less incentivized to play, to pay also.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  Isn't it possible, though, that some of these systems become so sticky and invaluable to our life, that if you present people with the option of having to pay some sort of really small micro payment, which you can then slowly move up over time, that people wouldn't just drop out?

• 51:42Speaker 03

  If you had to pay a penny to stay on Facebook, would you do that?

• 51:47David Rosenthal?

  I mean, that's a lot of pennies.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  My whole life's on Facebook. All my pictures are on Facebook.

• 51:51David Rosenthal?

  Well, it's interesting. WhatsApp, you know, took this, took this approach.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  That is true.

• 51:55David Rosenthal?

  That, you know, it was a dollar a year to use.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  And free for the first year, crucially.

• 51:59David Rosenthal?

  Free for the first year and then a dollar a year.

• 52:03David Rosenthal?

  I think it's super interesting what you're saying. I think, well, the cynic in me says, Alex, come on, that would require actual creativity and, you know, that would be Silicon Valley is creative on the surface, but you know.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the more like the cynic in me says, people don't pay for things and people especially don't pay for, well, I guess, as I say, people don't pay for like entertainment. People don't pay for websites, but.

• 52:29David Rosenthal?

  Well, here's where I think you could do it, though.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  But, but of course, they do pay for entertainment. They pay for TV, for instance. Now, I mean, that's eroding a little bit, but that's still like 100 million people that pay for TV in this country.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Ooh, would they do a rev share? Like, could you see Twitter influencers getting paid out a percentage of their followers?

• 52:50David Rosenthal?

  From producing the content? Yeah, well, Ben, I mean, the correct to the point that Ben's bringing up is unlike a Wall Street Journal or a Bloomberg or New York Times, you know, Twitter and Facebook don't pay their reporters to generate content. It's dependent on people being on the system.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Or even like YouTube. That's actually the interesting middle ground.

• 53:10David Rosenthal?

  Well, YouTube does pay.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Is YouTube, right. So they pay their high end content creators and they have a subscription service called YouTube Red.

• 53:17David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yep. But where I think this could work, I actually think Bloomberg is, could be a really interesting model here that people haven't really tried in this area in tech, is you guys, just like we were talking about in the beginning of the show, you monetize the, the information and the meaning of what you do and sell that as a very, very expensive subscription to people who care a lot about that. And yet for Ben and me, we go to Bloomberg.com and get your news and read your reporting for free. It would be super interesting, you know, Twitter especially, I think, could do that if they made the right investments.

• 54:01David Rosenthal?

  Like, what is the data that in aggregate is generated from Twitter, from the fire hose, quote unquote, that is very valuable to people? You know, and it's interesting, like, there is clearly demand for this. There are third party companies that do this. There's DataSift. There was, oh, the company Topsy that Apple bought. And there are a few others. But obviously, as a third party, like, you're not going to be able to do that anywhere near as well as Twitter itself could.

• 54:28David Rosenthal?

  There could be a huge latent revenue stream.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. I mean, obviously, what the the the the big fear there is you don't want to disincentivize your power users from using Twitter. So it needs to be something where it's very purely additive for them to actually pay for whatever it is that they're getting, rather than, you know, sort of have them feel like they're targeted to pay more money.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  Right. Does Bloomberg use paywalls at all?

• 54:58Speaker 03

  We don't. We don't because we have the terminal. So we've decided that we're not. Now, again, that that that is a discussion that I know has happened here before, the sort of the idea of should we use a paywall? So the decision so far has been no, because we sort of have this built in paywall in our system. But, you know, one day, I suppose that could change.

• 55:20David Rosenthal?

  Super. It's it's you're bringing me back here to my to my days at at the Journal and in media. And they're very happy memories in one regard. But on the other hand, business models of media are tough.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Look, it's this, you know, we're talking about Twitter, sort of social media in general. And one point that I that I do want to make here, which, again, sort of, it speaks to an issue that we have sidestepped, but the issue still remains, which is, as a reporter now, I no longer really, if I have a reputation of being right, I actually don't really need Bloomberg's infrastructure anymore to move markets. So there I'll give you a real world example, which is when Comcast acquired Time Warner Cable. I got that information at like

• 56:14Speaker 03

  9:30 at night. And I had it sourced. I we were good. I knew I was 100% right. But it was 9:30 at night, and the Bloomberg infrastructure, sort of among among like my editors, like no one was at work. They're all at home. So I had to sort of figure out, and I was also sort of new to this role. So I had to figure out like, how do I alert the right people here to get them all online? So that they can approve my sources so that we can actually write this thing. And not only do the sources have to be approved, but then I have to write four paragraphs. An editor needs to read those four paragraphs. An editor then needs to queue up headlines.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  We need to make the decision to redhead, as I talked about before, which of course, that requires sort of a new level of authority. So in the amount of time that it took for me to figure out all of the different levers that needed to be pulled, the right people to contact, the phone calls to be made that first weren't answered and then were, in that amount of time, David Faber, who at CNBC, got the news and just sent out a tweet. And he broke the story on Twitter, which CNBC sort of allowed him to do. Well, I had the story at least 42 minutes before he did, because he just broke it instantly. So, you know, it made me think like Twitter has sort of upended this. Like, I don't need Bloomberg anymore.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  Like, I could have broke this thing on my own, but, but, but, you know.

• 57:43David Rosenthal?

  That's gotta be so frustrating. That's like as a venture capitalist, when you're misinvesting, when you pass on Facebook, you know?

• 57:48Speaker 03

  Right. But, but, but of course, I do need Bloomberg because they're paying my salary. So I would have to be a real entrepreneur and be confident enough that like I could sort of start my own thing on my own, you know, and just sort of use my own channels.

• 58:02David Rosenthal?

  You have the example, right, of, of, you know, Kara Swisher and, and, and Walted at Recode, you know, who have done this. But still, even though, I mean, they, they got acquired by Vox.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  Well, exactly. And, and they make their money in part through their conferences business. The better example might be the information, which is Jessica Lessons, which charges, I mean, they, so they, they are a subscription media model like we were talking about. They charge, you know, several hundred dollars per year for their information. And I don't know exactly how successful they've been at getting people to pay for their information. But, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's not sort of a slam dunk here. Obviously, like Bloomberg has enough else going for it that, like, I'm not, like, you know, if, if you're listening to this, bosses, I'm not leaving.

• 58:50David Rosenthal?

  What you can't have is an independent, though, and this is like the ultimate tech trend for me, is they don't have the redhead, right? Like, they don't have the... The customer relationship and proprietary data channel to your customer, you know, the financial traders, right? Like, or whoever the equivalent is in whatever industry. If you control that, you

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Well, but all you need is that to initially build the trust. And now that Alex has that, if Alex were to tweet, I would suspect that he would be able to move markets on his own.

• 59:22David Rosenthal?

  This is why Twitter needs to build a redhead.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  In fact, there was one time several years ago, I think it was, I think it was Shutterfly being for sale, although that might not be right. But there was one instance several years ago where I thought that we had, this actually changed Bloomberg's tweeting policies, this one mistake I made, where I thought the story had gone out and tweeted something and actually front run my own story. And so I was a real life test case where I did move markets. My tweet was picked up by traders and the stock moved like 5% because I said Shutterfly had hired catalysts to sell themselves or whoever it was.

• 1:00:02David Rosenthal?

  Wow.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  And then, and then we realized the story hadn't gone out. We immediately pushed out the story at that point. But you know, there was like nine seconds of confusion there, where I had basically beat my own story. And then we, and then we re, we sort of huddled up as an organization and we were like, okay, from now on, Bloomberg reporters can't tweet out stories until the story has a link involved to it. So that we're sure the story has gone out to the world. Now, again, we've, we've even amended that policy by now we have a link that only terminal subscribers can see, so that we can tweet out with this

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  link. And then you can, so the normal web link doesn't go out still until 15 minutes after the fact. But we keep sort of coming up with like, you know, little incremental amendments to this in order to sort of try to keep up with like the general world of social media with this built in 15 minute, you know, difference. And I imagine that if I speak to you next year or two years from now, like the rules will have changed again.

• 1:01:11Ben Gilbert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:11David Rosenthal?

  Wow.

• 1:01:12Ben 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.

• 1:01:25David Rosenthal?

  Yep, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Logora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

• 1:01:42Ben Gilbert?

  So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.

• 1:01:57David Rosenthal?

  And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Logora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

• 1:02:21Ben Gilbert?

  And they recently launched Logora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective, then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.

• 1:02:40David Rosenthal?

  And Logora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Logora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Logora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months.

• 1:03:10Ben 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.

• 1:03:35David Rosenthal?

  One quick topic we wanted to cover before we move into follow-ups and carve-outs is any advice, you have so many of our listeners that work at startups, our entrepreneurs, our aspiring entrepreneurs, and maybe this is earlier in the lifecycle than where you play of companies, but the press for startups is like such a black box. Like, if I'm a startup CEO or founder, and I just have no idea how you work, I have no idea how to get in touch with you, should I, should I invest in building relationships? Any thoughts from your end, being on that side of the table of, you know, how entrepreneurs can best interact with you?

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  Well, you absolutely should try to build a relationship. But the way you should try to build a relationship is to know what our job is. So, and that very much depends on who you build the relationship with. So there, certain outlets are going to cover startups much more closely than others. So, you know, Bloomberg plays in sort of the the big gameland, where like, we're going to write a lot of stories about Uber, but like, we're not going to write any stories about your piddling, you know, million-dollar valuation startup at this point.

• 1:04:46David Rosenthal?

  You're not covering Series A funding announcements.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  No, no. But, you know, TechCrunch is, or like whoever, whoever it might be that's sort of covering that at that level. So, so yes, build a relationship with a Bloomberg reporter, but don't expect us to sort of curry you favor and write about your startup that like, nobody knows, because we just don't do that here. Like, it's just, we don't have the audience for it. So know where we're coming from. It's not personal. It's just that like, our editors are not going to allow us to write that story. However, you know, the day that you guys, you know, all of a sudden, you've, you've put out a Series B, Series C, Series D, and now like, you're in, you know, you know, almost unicorn territory or unicorn territory, then yeah. Like, it's good that you put in the time to make a relationship

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  with the reporter, because now that your company is big enough to write about, like, now you're probably going to get a more favorable story, because you've spent the time having some lunches and coffee, and you've built a relationship with the reporter and the Reporter knows that he can go to you for access. You have to remember where the reporter's coming from, too.

• 1:05:50David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  What we want is exclusive information. That's what we want. This happens all the time with smaller M and A deals with me that are sort of pitched at me. And like if a deal sort of with two companies that like no one's really ever heard of, and it's right on that billion dollar line, like we might cover it or we might not. If you give us the information exclusively, if this is a Bloomberg scoop, we'll cover it. If you wait and put out some sort of press release or you give it to somebody else first, like we're not going to cover it. It doesn't give us any value. So you need to figure out, and this is maybe the best piece of advice I can give to an entrepreneur that wants to build a relationship with the press. Ask the reporter what matters to them. And then figure out a way that you can give the reporter what matters to them.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  So for Bloomberg, it's exclusive information. For somebody else, maybe it's, you know, I don't know, a sit down interview with the CEO or whatever it may be. But figure out what it is that the reporter wants. And whatever that is will be dictated by what the organization finds meaningful. And then, you know, down the road, if you're able to sort of cash in on that, then I think you'll get sort of the positive result you're looking for from the press.

• 1:07:00David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, and it's probably always exclusive information, but it's what type of exclusive information?

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:07:06David Rosenthal?

  For you, it's a deal. For another type of organization, it's a sit down interview.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  That's so right, David. And that's, I think, the important part to make, which is, in many ways, you can sort of give out eight different scoops on the same story. You know, just sort of piecemeal your information and give one person one piece of exclusive information and give another press outlet another, you know, piece of exclusive information. And then, you know, Recode, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and Bloomberg can all sort of say that they had scoops. And because you've sort of divvied out the information, you've now gotten seven different stories instead of one with six others ignoring you.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 1:07:47David Rosenthal?

  In VC, we call that a party round.

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 1:07:51David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. This has been awesome.

• 1:07:57David Rosenthal?

  I've had so much fun with this, like I said, reliving my old glory days in the media and tech press.

• 1:08:04Speaker 03

  How long were you at the Journal, David?

• 1:08:07David Rosenthal?

  I was there for just a year, so a very short stint. But so I can't speak as any sort of expert, but it was a lot of fun. I think I was the youngest person there by about 30 years.

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  Right, naturally, yes. So now you'd only be the youngest person by 25 years or whatever, maybe.

• 1:08:25David Rosenthal?

  20, 20 years.

• 1:08:29David Rosenthal?

  Couple of quick follow-ups, and this will be fun, having Alex on the show here. So we do, we have three quick sections to wrap up the show. One is follow-ups on things that have happened with deals we've covered in past episodes. Two is hot takes, which are any M&A deals that have happened in the last couple of weeks. So we do a 30 seconds or less quick analysis of. And then three is carve-outs, which are fun unrelated items we talk about. But Alex is probably up on a lot of this stuff, so feel free to chime in if you like. Or Ben and I will lead, but any thoughts, please chime in. First follow-up we have is Instagram.

• 1:09:13David Rosenthal?

  Alex, you were joking about, you know, yeah, Instagram is probably good. I have no idea how good it is.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  The A plus of Instagram keeps on rolling.

• 1:09:19David Rosenthal?

  It is our, on this show, Instagram is our benchmark for the best deal, the highest rated deal that we have ever had on this show. So they announced this week that they now have, we've talked in the past with follow-ups about user numbers. Also going back to our conversation, Alex, that we just had on social media and aggregating users and the value of users. They announced this week that they have 500,000, more than 500,000 active advertisers. So separate advertisers, organizations buying ads on Instagram over 500,000. That's up from 200,000 in February.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, any, by... It's interesting because advertisers are where the revenue comes from. So it's interesting to look at that. But just by looking at the growth of that, I mean, it's been, what, eight months since February and seeing Instagram's ad program is, what, like two, three years old now? So seeing like in eight months to grow that much, probably most thankfully due to the fact that the ad, the advertiser portals are integrated. If you're going and you're an advertiser that already is using Facebook, you check a box, upload some different assets and boom, now you have an Instagram ad. They've really like, talk about synergies. They've really leveraged their relationship and the tools that they have for Facebook

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  advertisers to have a whole new, you know, incredible growth channel there with Instagram.

• 1:10:45David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  Next one?

• 1:10:47David Rosenthal?

  Next one we have real quick is Amazon. Obviously, Amazon wasn't acquired, but has been an acquirer on several companies we've talked about and reference a lot. Just today, share price hit 800 bucks a share. Ben, you're trying to time the market on buying Amazon.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  I can tell you, property values.

• 1:11:06David Rosenthal?

  Not that we give investment advice on this show.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Property values in Seattle are now at an all time high. The Amazonification of Seattle is something really incredible to watch and the economic growth in the region from this company, starting, you know, right in the center of the city and kind of exploding outwards and is now in three or four separate neighborhoods overtaking downtown. You know, we've talked a lot about their, their strategy before. I think I couldn't be more bullish. I still am stupidly trying to time the market and wait for investors to cool a little bit so I can get in, but I continue to say I should just buy in now.

• 1:11:45David Rosenthal?

  And for the investors on the show, not advice, but if you are looking for a derivative way to play the Amazon story, you should invest in Seattle real estate.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 1:12:00David Rosenthal?

  Hot take, we only have one this week, real quick, a small deal, but interesting one, relevant to our episode on Waze and discussion of the future of automotive and transportation and technology is Ford buying Chariot.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, this one's interesting to me. So Chariot is basically the, the public bus system, but better and with fewer stops and subscription based. I believe it was only in San Francisco.

• 1:12:26David Rosenthal?

  I believe it was only in San Francisco.

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you pay, I think it's like a hundred, a hundred bucks or something and you get access to, uh, to these, you know, great buses that pick you up at a

• 1:12:36David Rosenthal?

  Shuttles, yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So as far as Ford breaking into, um, you know, this trend of a service based or subscription based car ownership or self-driving cars, you know, transportation is changing in a lot of ways. This doesn't like seem that interesting to me. Like it seems like there was a lot more things they could have bought that would have signaled to me, oh, they're, they're doing something, um, you know, really transformative. And, and here, I'm not totally sure what the play is.

• 1:13:08David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I'm not either. It was a small deal, but, but, uh, definitely, you know, we saw GM buy Cruise earlier this year.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Which, you know, Cruise, that game changing, right? Like you drop this thing on the top of your car and it can become self-driving. Are you kidding me?

• 1:13:21David Rosenthal?

  Bloomberg probably covered that deal, probably not Chariot.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're, we're obsessed with this sort of self-driving car. And, you know, that's why they, the sort of the, you know, we decided to redhead that Apple McLaren story, even when McLaren later came out and denied it, which by the way, uh, as sort of an aside topic, they didn't have to deny that. So I was a little, I don't know why they publicly denied it because based on our sourcing, they had at least had conversations with Apple. They, they phrased it, we're not in talks right now. Um, so I'm not, I'm not really sure why they denied it rather than just stayed silent, but whatever. I'm sure they had their own reasoning for, for doing that.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  And it was interesting. Did it, did it positively affect them? Because then the rumors seriously negatively affected Apple's stock.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  So, you know, you never know in these cases, like because it's seriously negatively affected Apple's stock, that may have been why they came out and denied it. Apple may have gone to them and said, please do this. Uh, Apple, I can tell you from a reporter's standpoint is like, Sort of one of the few companies that acts as like the mafia. I mean, the amount of fear that they put into other. I heavily covered when Apple was seriously considering coming out with their own TV product. Back in, I want to say 2013, 2014. And they were in, I was covering media then. So they were in discussions with Comcast and Time Warner Cable and other companies to potentially

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  figure out if they wanted to sort of own the programming themselves or just sort of be like a partner with the cable companies and use their programming. And it was so difficult to get information from the media companies because they basically said like, "Apple told us not to say anything." And you just, that was, I had never heard that from any other company that these, that the company had done business with.

• 1:15:06David Rosenthal?

  Like, Apple's not your boss.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  They were, exactly. They were free to talk about every other company they did business with but Apple. But it was like, no, no, no. Like, you know, we can't, I think Steve Jobs was still alive then too. So like, maybe it was a Steve Jobs thing.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  Katie Cotton was their head of PR and apparently, you know, that was much, much tighter back in that era than nowadays.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  I'll throw in one more hot take for you guys, which is just, I'm curious to see what happens with the Yahoo sale to Verizon now that Yahoo has said that 500 million of their users were breached in this big data breach from whatever sort of state-sponsored hacker, you know, hacked into their system back in 2014. I don't know if this will have any sort of repercussion on the Verizon deal, but already you're starting to hear sort of outsider speculation that, you know, if this does turn out to be a big deal, maybe Verizon would push to try to alter the price of the deal. So I don't know.

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  A lot of that stuff will certainly come out in the next, you know, days, weeks, months.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  Interesting. Do you know if that's precedented to alter the price based on something like this? Or any event in general?

• 1:16:19David Rosenthal?

  It definitely has the potential to be materially adverse, which I presume all of the contracts. In another former life, I was an investment banker and yeah, all the, all the merger agreements and stuff will, until closed, will have.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:16:35David Rosenthal?

  Contingencies and max material adverse clauses.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:16:39David Rosenthal?

  I think this would definitely fall into that. Yeah. I don't know enough to speculate, but, but that, you know, if, if the breach is as bad as it sounds like it could be. You know, I mean, you're talking, it wasn't that long ago that the Sony hack happened and like the, the amount of value destroyed at that company and costs they had to incur is definitely material.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  Right. So who knows? This apparently happened in 2014 and like, I don't know what has been done with it since. So like, maybe that would suggest that it's not that material, but I don't know. Obviously Verizon's going to want to look into the details of this. So that might be something to keep an eye out on.

• 1:17:16David Rosenthal?

  We will, we will be on the case when it does. All right. Carve outs. Ben, what you got?

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  So my carve out, carve outs for, for new listeners is a thing that we do that is a book or a piece of media that we've consumed that may or may not be related to the, the topic of this podcast. And a lot of times I'll, I'll give an article or something that gave me pause and was something that I liked reflecting on or might be more philosophical or any of those things. This one, this time going kind of totally out there, there's a little recap video from Burning Man on Vimeo by user fill of drones. And it is one of the most just beautiful visual captures of any real life event I've ever seen.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  It is, it's a ton of drone footage. It's a lot of like, maybe Steadicam footage, but it's just this really tremendously beautiful recap of, of Burning Man this year. And Burning Man, I think it gets bigger and bigger every year and more and more technology arrives there every. So, you know, 10 years ago, it was something that you'd hear about, you wouldn't really get what it was, and you couldn't really get much about it. And now, you know, people are still grappling with like, what the heck is this thing if you've never been? Which, you know, I, for the record, I've never been. But now, the amount of media coming out of this, where we're seeing people is just like incredible creations, is super cool. So, we're gonna drop the link in the show notes. It's Burning Man 2016 by Phil of Drones on

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Vimeo. Go check it out. It's a super cool way to spend five minutes.

• 1:18:54David Rosenthal?

  Super cool. Mine is a quick one this week. New book that came out recently that I read called Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. This is a super fun book, quick read. It's about fundamental computer science algorithms like searching and sorting and scheduling and optimal stopping that you learn about in, you know, your intro CS classes in college or in high school. But then about like, what those algorithms are for like, laypeople who aren't CS folks, but how to apply them to your life. And it's super cool. It's like, how do you sort your closet based on optimal sorting algorithms?

• 1:19:38David Rosenthal?

  To how should you handle your email based on scheduling algorithms? To all sorts of stuff. How should you decide when to, when you found the right person to marry based on optimal stopping problems? It's very techie, but written by, from a humanities perspective. So I enjoyed it quite a bit.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  I think I've got one. I wish I had the time to read books now. I have two kids under three. So like, those days are, I assume they'll come back.

• 1:20:07David Rosenthal?

  You need optimization algorithms.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. That's what I need.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  Raising children in linear time.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  But, but I will, I'll give you one, because I thought it was very interesting, which is Ross Douthat wrote a column, an op ed column for the New York Times, talking about, it's, the headline was Clinton's Samantha Bee Problem. And it talks about how late night talk show hosts have Sort of vehemently swung to the left in this particular election. So now, you know, you have, whereas even four years ago, in sort of the Letterman, Leno, late night world, you know, these guys were, Letterman, I guess, sort of tilted

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  left, Leno was very middle of the road, but you just, other than maybe Jon Stewart occasionally, and even Jon Stewart would sort of pad his criticism of the right by saying, hey, look, you know, I'm a comedian first, and, you know, this is a fake news show. You're no longer seeing that. You're seeing John Oliver, and Samantha Bee, and Seth Meyers, and Trevor Noah, and a lot of these sort of late night characters really swing hard to the left and basically, you know, call out Donald Trump and Donald Trump supporters, you know, as being bigoted and racist, and there's no sort of middle ground here.

• 1:21:35Speaker 03

  And yet, he says, he juxtaposed this to the general public, where, you know, there's still a huge percentage of this country that votes Republican, and yet, there's a big mismatch now between what you see sort of on late night TV, and sort of your, maybe, random, averagely, you know, average picked American that maybe is an independent, or centrist, or Republican. And there's no real outlet on the late night spectrum for this. And, you know, what he makes of this is sort of like, basically, he likens it to what we saw in the 60s and 70s, where the culture really dramatically shifted leftward, and yet, we had Nixon, and then, you know, in 1980, we had Reagan. Oh, wow.

• 1:22:20Speaker 03

  And so, there was this sort of mismatch between the culture and the politics. And so, he's sort of hinting at, are we going to see this again if Trump is elected, where, you know, just the, the sort of, your general entertainment culture is really out of whack with your, your general politics in this country. So, interesting read, I thought. It got a lot of criticism on Twitter, but I didn't think it was particularly deserved.

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  Huh, huh. Well, I definitely have to read it.

• 1:22:51David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, me too. Um, there's a, no matter what you think about this election, it has been a bonanza for the media industry covering it.

• 1:23:03David Rosenthal?

  All right.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  Well, well, Alex, where can our listeners find you? Um, your podcast, your Twitter? Where do you want to send them?

• 1:23:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, so, uh, the podcast is called Deal of the Week. It's available on iTunes or you can find it on Bloomberg.com. And you can find me on Twitter at Sherman4949. Uh, I typically will tweet out the podcast. It's once a week. It's the episodes are about 25, 30 minutes. So feel free to subscribe on iTunes.

• 1:23:31David Rosenthal?

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

• 1:23:37Ben 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.

• 1:23:48David 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.

• 1:24:08Ben 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.

• 1:24:21David Rosenthal?

  So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com/acquired to get started.

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  And for our listeners, if you're listening to this episode and you have not yet subscribed but would like to hear more, subscribe from your favorite podcast client from iTunes or Overcast or any other client. And if you feel so inclined, we'd love a review on iTunes or tweeting about it. So thanks so much. We are at Acquired FM on, uh, on Twitter and we'll see you next time.

• 1:24:52David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And most importantly, thank you to Alex. This has been a huge treat for us and a lot of fun. Well, uh, we'd love to do it again sometime, cover, cover more aspects. But thanks so much for taking your time to be on our show.

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  My pleasure. Love doing it.

• 1:25:10Speaker 04

  Is it you, is it you, is it you? Who got the truth now? Huh?