Holiday Special 2023

I am loving that you also busted out the holiday sweater. Feels very appropriate. Yes, I purchased this holiday sweater at the Seattle Nordstrom for our 2019 live show at the University of Washington. It's like two months before the pandemic hit. That's right. And I think I wore it last year, too. I feel like you did. Yeah, we were right behind me. I wish we were doing it again this year, but it seems prudent to not have a father of a toddler hopping on an airplane and then sit in a confined space with me for five hours right now. A lot of germs in my life right now. Thank you for your precautions. Welcome to Season 13, Episode 5, the season finale and holiday special of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Resenthal. And we are your hosts. Did you see what I did there, David? I did. I did. No technology. No technology. Yes, I motion to, you know, the whole board of directors here that we drop technology from our intro since I crunched the numbers. And. Four of the 14 episodes we did this year were technology companies. All right. Well, it's a good thing that there are no other board members required besides you and me because I am in full agreement. Unanimous. And otherwise we would have had a deadlocked vote there one to one. That's true. And I don't think our charter really actually ever accounts for what to do in that circumstance. So, yes, listeners, if you count Lockheed Martin, it's five. If you count Visa, it's six. But the minority of the episodes that we did in 2023 were tech companies, which is. A very fascinating evolution to me based on where Acquired started analyzing technology acquisitions that actually went well. But, of course, we will keep doing deep episodes on tech companies since we are nerds and that's where we've spent, you know, our whole careers so far. So if you liked the programming and assembly language on air from NVIDIA or I guess assembly language pseudocode or our Qualcomm episode where we tried to describe how the CDMA protocol works, we're still here for you. We're just going to do a lot of LVMH. LVMH, NFL, Visa, Costco, Nike and the, you know, mixed in there. So what are we doing here today? Well, David and I are going to bring you good tidings, good cheer, hopefully, and keep you company. Yes. Happy holidays. Cheers. Cheers. I've got my cinnamon infused hot chocolate here. It's delicious. Oh, you're feeling very festive. Yes, we are here to keep you company on your long drives or flights or workouts or house cleaning or whatever. On our agenda today is a recap of Acquired this year, both the state of the franchise from the board of directors themselves. We will also be giving you some new tidbits on our favorite episodes behind each one of them, why we picked them, how they came to be, what listeners helped us select, that sort of thing. We're going to talk about how we see Acquired fitting into the broader media landscape, how our views about the show and the stuff that we cover have changed over time, what's in store for Acquired in 2024. 2024, new carve-outs, and answering listener questions from the Slack. And then at the end of the episode, we're going to share a little bit about David and my investing lives and how those will be changing in 2024. As David, you and I are going to get to do much more of our investing together. I know, it's going to come full circle. We started both at Madrona investing together and well, we'll just have to talk about this later in the episode. We will. But first, listeners, I mentioned in one quick line on the Charlie interview and have not said anything on any social media or anything like that since, but I am a parent. I'm joining David on the parenting journey with approximately a one-month-old here at the Gilbert household. Ben, Jenny and I are so, so, so happy for you guys. Parenting, as you know now, is the most joyous, difficult, wonderful, biggest thing you will ever do in your life. And there is no way to understand or describe it until you become one. So, welcome to the club. Thank you. I think that's right. I think any words that I would say about what it's been like so far are words that other people tried to use to describe it to me, and I found them largely meaningless. I mean, I could say the same things that everyone else always says. And there have been some amazing things written. I think I read the Paul Graham article on kids. I read the fourth trimester Wait But Why piece. I've read. You read the Michael Lewis book, right? The Michael Lewis book. Yeah, that was good. No, no, no. The words kind of bounce off you. You're like, well, why would that be fun? Why would that be rewarding? Why would waking up at 3 a.m. to change a diaper ensue the, you know, screaming? Like, why is that? But it's. Actually, Morgan Housel put it to me in a really lovely way, where he just said, what greater gift could you have than helping another human, another member in your family who's new to the world in their most intense time of need? And, you know, that intense time of need comes a dozen or two dozen times a day. But the sort of privilege of being able to soothe someone when they're experiencing that sort of intense emotion, you know, they may not be fully formed, but babies are people too, so. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, so great. That is big, big change number one since we last reconvened here. Big change number two is GeekWire reported about this already, but you are joining me full-time next year on Acquired. I'm so, so excited. It's about freaking time, huh, David? I wasn't gonna say it, but. Yeah, I can't wait. You and I are so just fired up to double down on Acquired and it feels very fun to be going all in on it together. And on the one hand, it feels like it's been a long time coming. On the other hand, Acquired has been such a slow burn over the last eight plus years that there was not like an obvious moment to do it. So it was one of these moments where you sort of look back and you're like, whoa, how am I not spending all of my waking time and energy on this when, you know, it is something that is just, you know, it's our life's work as our friend, Patrick O'Shaughnessy likes to say about the types of entrepreneurs he's looking for. Like, this is definitively our life's work. And it wasn't when we started and somewhere along the way, gradually, it just became that. Yeah, totally. And the way it's going to work, I'm transitioning to a venture partner at PSL at Pioneer Square Labs here in Seattle. So I still get to keep my board seats, which I think keeps me sharp for the show and stay a friend of the family there. So I'm excited to sort of change my role at PSL, but of course, all of my real time and energy going forward is Acquired. So happy, not only for as a, you know, 50% shareholder in Acquired, but even more so, like, you're my best friend. And this means we're going to spend even more time together. And just outside of the show, outside of anything that that means for us, our business, you know, the episodes, all of which are going to get so much better. It just, it brings me joy. I'm so happy. Thanks, man. So we should say before we get too far in, this is not investment advice. This whole show, Dave and I may have investments in the companies we discuss in the show is for informational and informational purposes. So if you're interested in investing in a company, entertainment purposes only, somebody here has to follow the rules and keep us. I've got a nice script that's well built out in front of me. I also must apologize to listeners. I am coming in hot from podcaster paternity leave here. And if anything I say is completely incoherent, I am on pretty minimal sleep. So thank you for bearing with me. All the parents out there will understand and appreciate you being here, as do I. Yeah. Well, let's start the 2023 Acquired year in review recap. Dude, this has been freaking wild. I mean, you were talking about like Acquired has been a slow burn. You know, we have doubled every year and we've always been this example of exponential growth that like it starts small. And, you know, first year we doubled from two to four listeners, you know, like, but no, it wasn't exactly that. No, I worked it backwards one time. I think it was like 500 to a thousand or something. Actually, I should crunch that number, but there is a number you can figure out in year one, since you know what our current numbers are. But small base, it was like small base, kind of small base, still pretty small base, you know. There were many years where nobody would have imagined that this would be either of our full-time gigs. And I actually, when I looked it up last year on our holiday special, I was both pretty excited and proud to announce and also terrified that we had hit a quarter million listeners to the pod. Felt like, holy crap, that's a big number. This is like real what we do. And I was terrified because I was like, we talk all the time. Ben talks all the time about how we double every year. Like how on earth are we going to do that? Right. You were like, you should stop saying that because it's eventually going to not be true. Yeah, because it's about to end. Which is true. Eventually it will not be true. Of course. I mean, unless literally we start expanding galactically or something like that. Yeah. And the question is, how big is the addressable market for people who want to, in an audio only medium, consume, you know, or our essentially books, conversational audio books about business histories, often in kind of an esoteric way. And granted, you and I have gotten much better at becoming storytellers over time, but each one of those sort of concentric circles niches it down. And I think you and I just thought that that addressable market was, you know, a hundred thousand people or something at first, but now we know it's at least half a million. Yes. So the big news, we hit half a million listeners this year, which is pretty wild. Hopefully we can put up the chart. The Ben Gilbert acquired chart that you make obsessively every month showing our episode "Growth Over Time." Which at some point I do want to stop making, because I said last year on the show, like at the Hollywood holiday special, I don't think growth is inherently virtuous for us, for the goals of our business here. And yet I am the person who's sort of obsessively trying to compile the numbers and figure out, is it going to double again organically since we don't advertise or anything? And so do I want to be known for the Ben Gilbert chart? I don't really think so because it's actually antithetical to how I think about what we do. But I do make the chart. I do put a lot of thought into it and what episodes we'll do what and trying to predict the numbers. I think a lot of people describe it as virtuous to, oh, I don't pay attention to the analytics. I think to each his own, I pay a lot of attention to the analytics. I think that helps you become better at making a product that people like. I don't understand why you wouldn't immerse yourself in every single number you possibly could all the time. It may lead you to a different outcome, but that outcome, as long as you're measuring correctly, seems to be making a difference. something that people want more. So yes, I obsessively look at the numbers. I look at the completion rates. I think that's super important. Well, and related sidebar to that, thank you to all of you, the half a million of you now for spending all this time with us this year. There's a lot to discuss. So for me, I've kind of gone back and forth. You started saying, I think about two years ago, growth is not a goal. I don't know that growth is good for acquired. And I sort of nodded my head. But I wasn't totally sure. This year, I think, has really helped crystallize my thoughts on this as we've grown so much. I do completely agree with you. Growth in and of itself should not be a priority. And in fact, can be very detrimental to what I think we both want to do here if we optimize just for growth. What I think we've done this year goes back to the very start of this episode. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a great point. And I think that's a great way to kind of add to what you said about changing the intro. We went from a podcast about great technology companies, and the stories and playbooks behind them, to a podcast about great companies, and the stories and playbooks behind them. And yes, we have continued to grow in the tech world and sort of our core niche. And I think that audience and audience potential is way bigger than we ever realized. But we've also added runs a brand and thinks about brand management or runs a retailer or runs a large hardware business like Home Depot or something like that, you know, and also all around the world, too. I mean, some of our biggest episodes this year were, A, not American companies. B, even if they were American companies, they were truly global brands and global companies. A lot of what we do, if we just wanted to optimize for growth, we would do differently. We would not make four-hour episodes. We would release more frequently, et cetera, et cetera. It's interesting. Growing from a podcast about great technology companies to a podcast about great companies is certainly a growth strategy or a byproduct of doing that is growth because the addressable market is larger. But I think it would fail if that wasn't just you and I following what our natural interests were. People ask us all the time, how do you pick episodes? And the answer is you and I talk for hours a day. We wander around our house and our neighborhoods putting on AirPods. And one of the conversations that always is happening is, what are you interested in right now? How have your views shifted over X period of time? What is fascinating to you now? And I think the growth is sort of a byproduct of our obsessions shifting and becoming these durable businesses and trying to understand what makes a company worth it. And I think that's a big part of what we're doing. And I think that's a big part of what we're objects in your home. But I was thinking about that and I was like, you know, I would like to change that and have something that is meaningful on a different level beyond just what it physically is. Yeah. I guess any jewelry would count as that. Oh, yeah. And these things may not be branded the way that we're talking about luxury branding, but like a diamond engagement ring is inherently not premium, but luxury. Yeah. And I certainly I would count my wedding ring amongst that. Or a real world NFT for the crypto folks out there. Oh, boy. All right. Let's keep it moving here. Which, by the way, I think is actually the best way to think about diamonds. I spent some time recently looking into lab grown versus mined diamonds. And there's sort of an interesting, I know we're on a diatribe here, but you asked me about my favorite episode and LVMH came up and here we are. So there is a fixed supply of diamonds in the world and there is a rate at which humans can mine them. So regardless of the intrinsic qualities of diamonds, it is a thing that can only come out at a certain volume. And largely they go through the GIA to be identified with a serial number and it actually gets laser etched microscopically onto the diamond. So these things are like, you know, verified that they came out of the ground and you know the year they were mined and you know where they were mined and all that stuff. Yep. De Beers would be a fun episode to do someday. Totally. And the lab grown diamonds are chemically identical. And it's a huge accomplishment of humankind that we've figured out how to do this. And on the one hand, they're identical. You look at them, you right click, you download the JPEG and like these things are identical. But on the other hand, we are only going to get better Moore's law style at creating lab grown diamonds. And so they will asymptotically approach zero, maybe not zero, but some number every year. Presumably they should get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Whereas for something where there's a known finite supply of them, like GIA certified number etched diamonds, there's a strong argument for that to hold its value to the extent that you care about it. You care about an engagement ring holding its value, but that will hold its value much longer or much more durably. And truly the best way to articulate it is, well, if you believe that this JPEG has value, but that other JPEG doesn't have value and that other JPEG is the exact same bitmap as this one, like, why do you believe that? Oh, I see. It's got an on-chain location and it's literally the exact same thing with diamonds. All right. We're going to have to do a De Beers episode at some point because this warrants a full acquired deep dive, I think. Yep. Agree. David Rosenthal, what was your favorite episode this year? I was thinking about this. To not bury the lead, my favorite episode was Nike. But I don't think it was our best episode. I think our best episodes this year were LVMH, Costco, and Visa. And I've come to think that there's a sweet spot for you and me in terms of preparation and our sort of. emotional states preparing for and leading up to an episode that leads to it being good. And I don't think Nike was bad. I think it was perfectly acceptable. But my level of work preparation and emotional concern and stress heading into Nike was the peak that it has ever been about an acquired episode. Yeah, you were a wreck. I mean, how many books did you read? Over 10. And part of that was, it was the first episode. Part of that was, I went to Stanford Business School, which is the Knight Management Center, and this is Phil Knight. And I've never met Phil Knight, but I felt an extra debt of gratitude to him and obligation to do it right. And then part of it too was our friend David Litsky at Fast Company was trailing us, following along with us as we were making it, which was super cool. The article that he wrote was wonderful and very complimentary. Yeah, he's a talent. But all of that stew, I felt like, okay, I really got to bring it on this one. And what was interesting, that's why it was my favorite. I'm proud of all the work that I and we did for it. But I think I finally went too far. If you look at that episode, I was trying too hard. Which may not come out in the final edit. I got to be honest, if you go back and look, listeners, you may not hear it. I could hear it in the first edit. And certainly while we're recording here live, I mean, the number of things that we end up cutting is massive. But David, I completely agree with you. Until this year, I don't think I would have agreed with the statement that the quality of our episodes is governed just as much by our headspace the day of recording as it is by the quality of the research that we did. And now I believe that that is immensely the case. The flow of the episode, the excitement about the topic, the clarity of the points that we're trying to make, it's about treating it like Sunday. If you're an NFL player and having a game day routine in the way that teaches you how to perform at your highest. This is going to sound incredibly self-aggrandizing here, but this is how I've come to think about it. Like NFL Sunday, when we're going out there. I go back to our NFL episode at the beginning of the year. It takes me right back to playing football in high school. The games that I prepared the hardest for felt like I really put the effort in. Those were not the ones where I played the best. The ones where I played the best are when you play loose. You go out there and you have fun and you enjoy yourself and you let it flow. And it is the exact same with acquired episodes. All right. I wasn't going to share this, but now that we're on the topic. So at the top of my show notes document for every episode, there's two things written. One is, what should the listener take away from this? And I have some bullet points of make sure you nail these points and are clear about these things. And the other one is a one-liner that I have written that says, have fun, laugh, we're good at this. Mantras are powerful. And those things are so important. I think, you know, just again, for folks who are listening, who are, or have been athletes, I suspect this will resonate. That's the past part of my life that it resonates with. All of those are important. Have fun. You're going to play your best when you're having fun, you know, laugh related to that. But also it kind of, to me, makes me think about your team, your teammates, you know, you and I were a team. And then the last, maybe it's the most important, the you're good at this, the sports psychology element, the self-confidence element is huge. Yep. I mean, who are we to think that we can go make these ridiculous episodes? Well, that's exactly the headspace that I get into that causes episodes to be bad. When we restart an episode and listeners, we restarted this episode, we got 15 minutes in and we were like, eh, it feels forced. And we restarted it. I can guarantee the quality of this episode is already better. But yeah, that's the sort of negative self-talk that I start getting. Who are you to, what are your credentials? What qualification? Are you sure you looked under every rock? Those are the things that start ripping me apart if I start thinking them moments before recording. So that's why Nike is my favorite episode, because I feel like this way of thinking about what we do finally clicked for me. It's like, you got to like take yourself past the breaking point before you realize I might need to think about this differently. It is funny how doing the episodes and studying these people in these businesses teaches us things that we internalize in our own business. I would not have been able to describe Acquired as a luxury brand or a luxury product prior to LVMH. And luxury is probably still not right. It's probably, I don't know if it's ultra premium or if it's just like a prestige brand. I want to talk about this later in the episode, but my quick take is we are not a luxury product, but we share a lot of traits. Yeah. Scarcity is kind of the biggest one. And that's a thing where I was unable to understand what to do with our scarcity before studying LVMH. But then afterwards, I sort of came to the realization of, oh, we should embrace the fact that we only have the throughput to be able to do one episode a month. And rather than trying to figure out how to scale that, there is a very fair path to owning it and staying a boutique little shop that's you and I and Steven, our wonderful editor who worked with us on a contract basis. And this is the team. This can only make so much. And if we make more, the quality drops or we have to scale in some way that feels unnatural to us. And that's okay. Rather than every other person in the podcast ecosystem that we had spoken with up until that point was, well, you have to figure out how do you layer that second show or how do you introduce more hosts or how do you get research assistance so you don't have to do that. And the boutiqueness is one of our greatest strengths. And it was something I think I was trying to run away from for a while. And now people ask what's going to be different for Acquired when you go full time. You're doing way more than that. And I think that's a great No, absolutely not. We're going to make the same number or fewer of even better episodes. We got to be careful or we're going to turn into Dan Carlin here and do one episode a year. Hardcore history. Yeah, I know. So the luxury strategy, which was part of our preparation for LVMH was reading this incredible book, The Luxury Strategy, which contains the 24 anti-laws of marketing. And I just want to call out anti-law of marketing number 18. You just have this on your desk? Well, I put it on my desk ahead of recording this episode, but actually I've had it on my desk for large portions of this year. Anti-law of marketing number 18, do not relocate your factories. This is our version of that. We're never going to relocate our factories. And we happen to be in a particular business that scales extremely elegantly with a word of mouth go to market and a product that is infinitely replicatable and a revenue stream that scales nearly in lockstep with the size of the distribution. And I say nearly is We should talk about nearly later. But we do have a business model that lets you grow the business indefinitely without compromising at all. And like if you are an LVMH, you do have to go build another factory in order to go serve more customers. There's not sort of that infinite scaling that can happen by the virtue of the internet and media on the internet. Yep. So to put a bow on the very easy question of what was your favorite episode? Yeah, so far, you spent a lot of time not answering me. No, I did. It was Nike. Nike was my favorite. But I think the other part of the coin question of what was our best episode, I think Visa was our best episode. There were others that are more impactful. I think LVMH, that episode alone, I think completely changed Acquired. As did Costco. As did Costco. But Visa, I think, was the perfect blend of like an NFL Sunday gone extremely right. We prepared the right amount. And we played. We played least. We had fun. We laughed. We remembered that we were good at this. I think you can see it in the finished product. Yeah. It's the ones where we didn't put too much pressure on ourselves that I think came out the best. Yep. Which for me were LVMH, Costco, and Visa. Yep. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year. If you had an audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore. Yep. Your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote shadow AI running with no security review at all. Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's governance, risk, and compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half. In half! Which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake. All stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment. And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of Acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com. V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. So, in January, David and I looked at each other and we said, we should stop doing specials. Specials is what we called the non-season episodes that we did on the feed until this year. And they were almost all interviews in practice, but anything that wasn't a canonical season episode. Yep. And the reasons that we decided we wanted to discontinue them. were, as David, you said, they're almost always an interview. And what is an interview? An interview is an episode where you have a person who is not a part of your enterprise, something you control, come on the show and say something that they very likely are going to say somewhere else to. So, by their very inherent value of it, it is not an end-of-one product. Whereas when we make a Costco episode, that's an end-of-one product. And so, no matter how good you do the interview, you are starting on your backlist. You are starting on your back foot in terms of, can you create this diamond, this unique thing in the world, the way that we can on a season episode? And also, there are other people and other podcasters out there who are world-class interviewers. Yep. And they are incredible masters of their craft. And we were kind of looking at what we were doing and being like, why are we doing this too? Yep. And you can see it in the numbers. Every time we would do one. Even with the biggest names, you know, these people where you're like, I imagine that really moved the needle for you. No, it didn't. Every single time we did a special, it had less downloads than the most recent season episode we did, which is crazy. Never once was a special our biggest episode ever. To your point about analytics, that was telling us something and that was screaming at us in the face for years. Which is, when you make a unique product, that is the thing that people are here for. You have a format and a product that people want. So make that. Don't go do something that's one click over in the commodity spectrum. And we tried all sorts of things. We tried to do the ACQ sessions where we really like, you know, tried to make it feel more casual and we'd pour wine. And I think all the different specials we did and sessions we did and collabs we did, there's something to be learned from to bring into Mainstream Acquired. And what interviews now are. Yes. So here's where the lesson we learned around don't clutch your pearls. Too tightly. We swore them off. We said, you know what? We're done. Yeah. We had made the decision that there was never going to be another interview on Acquired. This is going to be a great year going forward where once a month we have this very pure thing that we do. That's release a LVMH style episode. And then we have the opportunity to fly to Stockholm and interview Daniel Eck about Spotify. And then we get the opportunity to interview the CEO of the then $80 billion market cap Uber. And we would call each other and say, we said we weren't going to do this. So what do we do? Well, what we had decided, you know, we have ACQ2 and we started calling that the Acquired interview show. Yeah. Briefly for like two weeks. Legitimately, this is where the rubber hit the road. We were going to put Daniel and Dara on ACQ2. And that was the decision. And we were ready to do it. Then we just kind of looked at each other and we're like, what are we doing here? Right. We are getting far too precious. And I think our preciousness has made. Acquired what it is. I believe that. But you can get too precious. ACQ2 is awesome, but it has one tenth the distribution of Acquired. And that's great because it lets us play around with stuff. And it lets us do follow ups to episodes where we don't feel like every single person that listened to this big episode would want to listen to the follow up. And we get to talk about up and coming companies. It's a lower stakes thing for us to do an ACQ2 episode, which is great to have as a part of our ecosystem. But it was really dumb. And I'm really glad we didn't go through. We didn't go through with it to put the CEOs of Spotify and Uber there. And so the year went on. We had the opportunity to then interview Jensen as he's becoming the most highlighted CEO of one of the top five most important companies in the entire world. And then, of course, we got to spend time with Charlie Munger, gosh, a month and a half before he passed away, which is I feel so unbelievably lucky. Well, we'll come back to Charlie. But it turns out with interviews, the answer is we still don't do interviews. We don't do specials. Acquired is. What it is, except for, you know, Charlie and Jensen. Well, I think there's a couple of themes here, too. It all kind of stumbled into real time with Daniel and Dara. Those interviews actually happened on the calendar pretty close to one another. And then I think we kind of crystallize this by the time Jensen and Charlie happened. We still can do something unique and special. And in most cases, I don't want to say this will be every case going forward. But if you look at those four. Interviews that we did this year, they were all the CEOs or, you know, sort of protagonists in Charlie's case of companies that we had covered extensively on Acquired. And I think that to me is at least one example. There may be more of how we can do something unique and special. And that's not to take away from all the other many masters of their craft out there, like Patrick O'Shaughnessy and many others that are world class interviewers of which I don't think. We are in a vacuum. But in cases where we've done a hundred hours of work or in NVIDIA's case and Berkshire's case, many hundreds of hours of work on these companies, I think we then can do something special with the protagonist that other people can't do. Right. This is something that my dad would always say to me when I was younger. He's like, I legitimately don't think I'm the smartest person, but I do think I'm the hardest working. And whether it was in school or whether in his career. The answer was grind for more hours and become the most knowledgeable to make the most informed decisions. And I kind of feel that way as an interviewer. I'm not Andrew Ross Sorkin, you know, plain vanilla walking into a pretty new subject. He's going to be just a lights out interviewer. But the place where I can be one of the best in the world is if I have done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of research on a topic. You know, we can start with Jensen on the Riva 128. And that's not how other interviews are going to start. Right. And that was just obvious to us. I think that was. It was your idea to do it. You were just like, of course, we have to start with the Riva 128. Right. You can't know a story as well as protagonists knows the story, but try to get as close as you can. Sometimes I think we save ourselves from ourselves here. But I'm glad that we didn't cut these. And I think it can end up. Well, we'll get to the stats in a second. But clearly they have ended up being something special. But the cool thing about the core thing that we do, our season episodes, is like that is the natural byproduct. It's not like we need to go carve out time to do 100 hours. of work to go interview to Jensen or Charlie, it's like, no, no, we've already just done that as the core thing that we do. So to throw out the opportunity to continue doing those would have been really silly. Yep. So you might be wondering, Charlie and Margaret was by far our biggest episode ever. Jensen was bigger than any previous season episode. Dara and Daniel were right around the ballpark of what our season episodes were doing at that point in time when we had interviewed them. We sort of figured out there is a style and a type of person where the episodes behave as N of one episodes. The sort of decay curves look similarly over time of people seeking them out in an evergreen way. You know, we have seen just as many people 92 days later, which is what today is referencing the Jensen interview that we would see referencing the Nike episode 92 days later. These things, if we do them right, stay just as evergreen. And so, yeah. You know, we want to stay as precious as possible about them. And so what does that mean? Like, how can we change Acquired's business to make it so that the answer is we don't do interviews on the main show unless, of course, it's an interview that we need to do on the main show. And after some early conversations we've had with some of the sponsors for next year, we just sell them differently. I think that was a key insight for us. We used to do in a season six main episodes and six specials. And we would sell them and both and say, here's what you'll get in this period of time. And that's still how we sell the sponsorships for the season. You know that it's going to happen over six months. You know, it's going to be about once a month. We'll give you a heads up as soon as we know with a topic that we're going to be covering. And we would try to do the same thing with specials. And that drove us to create specials, which is entirely the wrong thing to do. Right. It was broken. It was slot filling. You know, and again, not to take away from our guests, we had incredible guests, but the conversations themselves were slot filled. We had slots that we needed to fill. That works for us with the season episodes because we're going to make an episode once a month that's in our control. But with interviews, you can't slot fill if you want them to be special. If you're sitting around waiting serendipitously for a Charlie Munger or a Jensen interview to happen, which is basically what we've decided the strategy is for guests. You can't have pre-sold a commitment to your partners that you're going to do, you know, six of those every six months. Exactly. So stay tuned for how this will work in practice. But the way we're thinking about it for next year and some early conversations seems like this is going to work is you get the next three interviews. We promise you they're going to be world class and we have no idea when they will come out. And they're probably going to come out next year, but we can't tell you much beyond that. And I think that to the extent that we find and continue to find great partners who want to work with us as sponsors in that way, that works really well to make sure that the content bar is where it needs to be, the audience is happy, and that we can frankly blow it out of the water the way that we do on the season episodes for our sponsors. So what does that mean for ACQ2? I should say ACQ2 next year is going to be so much better because there's all this inbound that we get for Acquired that we've decided doesn't make sense on Acquired. And what that means is we are getting crazy good guests for ACQ2. So it would feel silly not to point people toward that when I know it's coming next year. So yeah, I'm excited about that too. So I completely obviously agree with you, you know, on the implications for the business model and not slot filling and you can't predict when serendipitously get a chance to interview Jensen or interview Charlie. But this is our opportunity. What interviews do we want in a perfect world to do in the next, you know, set of time here for Acquired? Well, David, I think that's the right question. And I think the answer is sort of obvious. You just have to look at our episode list. I mean, who are the people that we feel like we've studied the way that we studied Jensen, but we haven't had a conversation with yet? I mean, it's Bernard Arnault. It's Morris Chang. It's Phil Knight. It's, you know, it's, you know, it's a lot of people. It's Bob Iger. I think there are people whose stories we know, but we don't know. And those would make for special interviews. Ben, I'm going to give you a hall pass on this one because you're literally one month into parenting and Lord knows I have empathy and sympathy for you, but you missed the obvious one that I was teeing you up for there, which we're going to make our appeal. We're going to shoot our shot right here. Taylor, if you are listening, an intro or Travis, if you can make an intro, we'll maybe have you on for a little segment of it. We'll go to the long pond studios. We can meet you at, you know, anywhere at a posh restaurant around New York. You're on the South American leg of the tour. You know, we'll fly down there literally anywhere, anytime. Yep. Absolutely. All right. Let's talk about Charlie. First, we just have to, you know, we said in the episode, but again, say a huge thank you to Andrew Marks, who's become such a good friend of the show. I feel like Andrew sends us more research material than like Andrew is like a source for every episode. We're not just going to write his name in the sources, but like 10 sources from every episode are things that Andrew texts us. Like, have you found this? Have you found that? Have you found that? The minute that we solidify what the next episode is going to be, we text Andrew and say, you know, like, all right, what do you got? And he's always got something. Not to mention he's got like a 20 company long reason for why each of those companies should be acquired episodes, kind of making the appeal. And so he always celebrates when we pick one off of his list. So big, big thank you to Andrew. He is literally the acquired MVP of 2023. It's not you. It's not me. It's Andrew. And also our other friend too, who knows who he is. Thank you to them for making that happen. I mean, it was just, it was a life experience. I don't know what else to say. I can't believe we got to do it. There's a strangeness that comes. And if anybody who is listening to this is like a long form journalist, like a New Yorker writer or something like that, or has written a book on a company, or maybe even like a PhD research dissertation, you sort of know this feeling where even though something happened in real life, you've done enough research about it where it feels like a story to you. And at some point you meet the protagonist and you're like, oh, right. You're a story that I know very well. And that in Berkshire's case, there's a cult following of millions and millions of people who all know the story, who can all cite passages from, you know, scripture. It is. It's like a religion. Charlie is a person, a wonderful person in addition to being this character. And I think. A figure. Yeah. Yeah. The surreality of the moment, I think hit me the most when there was a question we asked Charlie and he responded, I'm not more of a guru than I already am. Yes. And you could sort of see that even though it's worked so well for him to get so much of his wisdom to the masses and he has, he and Warren both have been these incredible teachers their whole, you know, last 50 plus years. In addition to their main job of being great investors, capital allocators, operators, they're sort of these educators on the side, but that education and universe that they've created has blown up to the point where I think it weighs a little bit heavy, at least on Charlie. Yeah. It's almost like the burden he carries to get his wisdom out is that he has to sort of be treated as a guru or a character in a story rather than just a person. And I guess. I have no idea what Charlie would say to that, obviously. But I think for people who find themselves in those positions, you know, Steve Jobs was that for sure. Obviously Warren and Charlie are that. Jensen may be on his way to becoming that. Naval has become that. Yeah. Taylor Swift is that a hundred percent. It's almost like the Batman thing. What's the line from Batman Begins where he's talking about the sort of frailness of being a person. And then when he becomes Batman, he says, as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting. Something elemental. It's that sort of idea. Totally. All these people are both people and symbols. And I'm just imagining once you become a symbol, you're going to be a hero. You're going to be a hero. You're you kind of have two options. You could bemoan it, or you could embrace it. And I think Charlie would say, look, it's going to weigh on you no matter what. No matter which one you choose, there's no going back. It's going to weigh on you. And so you might as well embrace it. Yep. One other behind-the-scenes point to make, which I think listeners might find interesting on these four, Daniel, Dara, Jensen, and Charlie, they all were these massive lead time interviews. They don't just get coordinated a couple of weeks before. And the story behind each of them was Charlie was a maybe six-month thing. It was once we started digging into Costco, Andrew suggested, hey, what if you interview Charlie for a follow-up? Jensen, I think we originally reached out to NVIDIA before we started our NVIDIA part one research, almost. Almost two years ago and said, hey, would Jensen, and this was a very different time for Acquired. We thought the dream is to interview Jensen, not the dream is to go learn as much as we can about NVIDIA and tell the story ourselves. And we reached out and said, can we interview Jensen? And even though we had a good friend of the show who was able to introduce us to someone on their executive team, we got a canned response of, it's very busy, this sort of thing. And it wasn't until we did the work and then we made part one and part two where then it caught NVIDIA's attention and the folks there were like, geez, we should do something together. And it still took another year to figure out exactly what the thing was to do together and when. And same thing with Dara at Uber. We met, actually a friend of the show, Brad Gerstner had his investor day. for Altimeter. And I met Dara there. And I think it took probably nine months after that to figure out a good time to, you know, on the earnings calendar, on the PR calendar, when it could actually make sense to do the interview. The way it happened with Daniel was we said. Daniel was the quickest. What did we say? Like, next time we're in Stockholm, we'd love to do it. And he was like, oh, yeah, next time you're here, let's do it. Well, it turns out of all those four cast characters, only one has a professional podcast studio in his office. And that would be the one who runs a podcasting company. So we happened to find ourselves in Stockholm, which. That actually was a highlight for me this year. I know it was only three days, David, but that crazy. I mean, we had three beautiful days in May in Stockholm. What a gorgeous, gorgeous city. The run. We did a couple runs around the city while we were there and just made sure to kind of take it all in. And the people at Spotify were so nice hosting us. I mean, just rolled out the red carpet. Yep. By the way. By the way, I just want to say, I know a lot of people are lambasting Spotify's podcasting strategy. I think people are entirely missing the forest through the trees on calling that a failure. Completely agree. I think Spotify, in their music business, has gotten to scale and has no potential to create a high operating leverage business. They're always going to be giving the same percentage of the profits to the record labels who have an unbelievable amount of bargaining power over them. So the question is, what do you do next? Audiobooks is a good bet. Podcasting's a good bet. Something where you can eventually gain operating leverage. And the fact that they did the huge Rogan deal, they bought The Ringer, they bought Gimlet. Well, if you look at the dollars and cents today, you're like, geez, they've spent a lot of money, but they haven't generated a lot of profit from podcasting yet. They totally bootstrapped their way to become the scale player in podcasting. So to the extent that there is a big pile of money, waiting to be the scale player in podcasting, they're well positioned to make it given the half billion dollars or three quarters of a billion dollars that they spent on content. They now have bootstrapped to scale. Yeah. That was the price of entry. And we see it in our analytics. Spotify is the majority of consumption of acquired out there. No, it is our largest single player, but I don't think it's over 50% yet. But one stat that's interesting is from Spotify wrapped for podcast, they make a wrapped to give to you in addition to the ones to distribute to your audience is that 76% of the people who listen to Spotify acquired on Spotify found us this year. That is crazy on platform growth. And I think the corresponding stat is we grew something like 176% on Spotify or something like that. Often already decently sized base. Yeah. So, I mean, in many ways, I'm predisposed to think podcasting is more interesting and important in the world than it is. But if you sort of write off the idea that Spotify will ever make decent margins in music, they needed to make another bet. This feels like a pretty good bet. This and audiobooks. Yep. I think the other side that we see of it is this lead into some of our, you know, discussion of acquired the franchise in 2024. Podcasting is a great business. I do not doubt that it is a very valuable, very large market for them to be in. Yep. If you can figure out how to make being the scale player translate into lots of profits, which no one has done yet. Well, no one has done yet. And the previous scale player, almost like a did not start, you know, like didn't even run the race. Apple. Yeah. Which as we've talked about before, we are immensely grateful for it because it enabled this open free podcasting medium that we have today, which is to our advantage. Yes. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, if you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part. Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks are real. Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why, ServiceNow built the AI control tower. 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. And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise. The workflows, governance, approval, security controls, institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security. ServiceNow already runs more than a hundred 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. 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, how are we going to manage them all? 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 slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, David, let's talk about acquired the franchise. Yeah. Well, to kick things off on that front, I feel like you had a little more to say on our discussion earlier about is growth good? I mean, certainly this is relevant. Yeah. So my thinking on this, has gotten simpler, which is basically, I am extremely open to fully saturating the niche of smart people who care about what makes businesses work and great technologies successful and durable in the world. And I think last year, again, I was being too precious about like, I don't think it's good for our lives if we become too famous. I mean, a byproduct of podcasting is you're not on video that often. So you actually do get to stay less famous than YouTubers or less visually recognizable, which is good. I just kind of generally believe recognizability is fun until you get to a certain level and then it's bad. And then you can't put the genie back in the bottle and your life's horrible. And I would like to not become that. But if we can keep doubling and doubling, doubling, and it turns out the set of people who like studying business history and being thoughtful about it and can write us with little tidbits saying, oh, I happen to think about it this other way and have thoughtful responses and want to be a part of the acquired community. If that turns out to be great, that's only goodness. But I think my view on growth is we have a natural governor to our growth, which is the universe of that set of people is a fixed number. And I'm just not interested in discovering a second market outside of that. So to the extent that we can stay true to making the stuff that we love to make and serving that group of people, awesome. And I just don't ever want to like, you could say lower the bar or create some different product or whatever, but to appeal to a different mass audience, that part is not really interesting to me. Yeah, this has become more evident to me too. In some of our episodes this year, like particularly the Porsche episode that we did with Doug DiMero have blown up on YouTube. YouTube, let's completely put acquired aside for a second. My feelings about YouTube are like, it is an amazing platform. It is an incredible gift to the world that YouTube exists. And one of my carve outs later in the episode is going to be the QB school on YouTube, which is a former NFL quarterback who makes amazing detailed breakdowns of what is actually going on every week on your like favorite teams. Oh, that's awesome. It's incredible. Like the fact that that is available and accessible for free. I'm literally going to subscribe to that right now. Oh, it's amazing. JTO Sullivan. We'll talk more about it later. Go subscribe if you care at all about football, even if you don't. That said, for our episodes that have gotten big on YouTube, if you go look at the comments, it's awful. It is a hundred percent, not even the same universe of experience that the acquired Slack community is. And like this kind of crystallized for me, what you're talking about of like anybody who is the type of person who really cares about knowledge, understanding these great businesses, these stories we tell and learning from them, come on in. Like we want as many people in the world. The YouTube comment world out there is not what we want. Right. And I'm not trying to be pretentious. I'm not saying like you must have thought about it as much as I have in order to be a part of that. No, I feel like this has been an eight year journey for us. And for me, a 20 year journey of learning about what makes these technologies and these businesses become powerful forces in our world. Anyone who is anywhere on that journey, including far past you and I, David, on that journey, I would love to have a relationship with, either two way through the Slack or even if it's just one way through people listening to Acquired. So I'm not saying like, I just want to appeal to the people who are like, ah, here's a gotcha on there actually is an eighth power. It's not that. It's the curious, thoughtful people who are not in the YouTube comments of the Portia episode. This had never happened to any of our episodes before. Until this year, we were not exposed to this part of the internet. Well, nothing had like algorithmically blown up. And reached a lot of people quickly. The only way anybody had really heard of Acquired until this year was their friend told them. And that is always going to be a really high quality way to grow your audience. But if an audience grows quickly, it's like the masses just enter and you get who shows up. Yeah, I think for both of us, this really kind of clarified what we really want and meant by this. We're a little wary about growth. Like, it's not that we're wary about growth. It's that we want to keep this, you know, place that's about knowledge. Yeah. Well, and last year, I think we were talking about, we were getting a little bit shaky about the impact on our business from growing the show. Because getting larger wasn't equating to growing the size of our revenue. And it also was creating problems for the classic sort of startup and growth stage companies that had been our longtime sponsors. Where we were going to them and saying, okay, the audience is four times bigger than when we worked with you two years ago. Let's have a conversation about what it should cost to sponsor the show. It was just like an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force. There just wasn't anything to be done. And so we've had to get creative in figuring out what do we do to continue to grow the business? Well, it doesn't have to be commensurate with the audience, but the audience growing should make Acquired a more viable platform for larger sponsors, deeper partnerships, ways that we can sort of increase both the audience and the audience. The size of our business, but also like the durability and importance in the world of our business. Yep. So as we've started experiencing some of the growth that we talked about, we realized that we'd kind of hit a scale now where Acquired is a viable platform and partner to new sponsors that we can work with. And just to talk about what those are for season 14, starting in January, two of our three sponsors are going to be JP Morgan. Specifically, JP Morgan's payments division and ServiceNow, both of which are incredible companies. We are super excited to work with them. But in both of those cases, we knew those companies and knew those people there for several years now. Right. We should say the teams that have decided to partner with us from each of those companies have been longtime Acquired fans, and we've gotten to know over the course of years and years and years. And the answer has sort of always been, hey, we should do something together. And then, like we said, we're going to do something together. And then we talk about it for a while, and then the answer is always kind of like, okay, you're sort of this like little niche, maybe there's something to do. And now the conversation is very much like, oh, wow, you show up in the world in a big way with an important set of people, and you're now in this category that we can totally work with you as a durable partner that we want to like build this deeper relationship with. And especially now that we're in our eighth year, it's a very different thing to be partnering with Acquired than it was when we were in our third year. It's not like a. Scrappy startup thing. It's a trusted entity in the world. Yep. It would have been odd for Fortune 500s to work with us before recently and now starting to work with their teams, how a JP Morgan thinks about their brand and their positioning and their kind of whole set of marketing activities is a completely different animal than how startups and, you know, earlier stage. Tech companies do. Yep. And it's an intensely coordinated effort with a calendar that is already full by the time you're finishing 2023. 2024 is largely known. There's a whole set of events. There is a set of campaigns that are going to happen at different times. And these things are adaptable. But my gosh, the level of foresight and planning that we've gotten to work with from those teams has just been like a whole different animal than what we're used to. And we love the nimbleness of small companies and that enables us to do special things together. And sort of our fun task for next year, which I'm excited to unveil some of the stuff we're doing, will be to bring that custom thing that we're able to do with these small companies and create native content for the medium and do other collaborations with them as a company. For example, the way that we invest in our sponsors or the way that we speak at their conferences and things like that to bring that to like large Fortune 500 enterprises. And that's such an amazing dance. Like the way. The way that these marketing organizations are able to figure out, okay, can we talk about this partner of ours? And in what way can we talk about it? And how much leeway can we give Ben and David to natively work in an acquired theme from six episodes ago and trust them that in this episode, it's going to come across right on air. It takes a very special marketing department to be able to behave the way that the Vantas and the modern treasuries and the vouchers of the world do while stewarding a 20, 30, 100 year brand. And a few other things we've got up our sleeve. I think the goal is to be able to continue to work with these sort of recent product market fit, you know, series B-ish companies that we've always worked with. So between the back catalog, between interviews, we will figure out ways that we can still work with those companies. Because frankly, those are the types of companies that David and I love using for acquired. I mean, we're customers of vouch and we use modern treasury. We like playing with it. We like following the founders on their journeys. We like having the founders. We like having the founders on ACQ2 so we can kind of learn about how they're building their companies. We also like getting the exposure to be able to invest. So it's awesome to be able to build these really tight relationships with those companies, especially when they're founded. Like I just keep going back to Dimitri and his co-founders coming up to us at our very first live show after they had come out of YC and telling us about this tiny little modern treasury at the time. And you just look at the behemoth amount of money that they move now. There are dozens of companies in the acquired ecosystem that we have relationships with. That we want to be able to continue to be a partner to and just figure out the right way to structure that. Yeah, and just as importantly, dozens, if not more than dozens that are going to be coming up over the next set of years. Yeah, David, what you're getting to here is now that we're both full time on acquired, we finally have the opportunity to do our investing together and then do it in a way that's uniquely acquired and that is sort of native to acquired. And so there's no big announcement or anything, but that's the thing to share with the acquired community is I've been writing these little angels. for next year. Episode one, we are already deep in research for. We're not going to give it away what it is, but it is a new category for Acquired, which is. I don't think we've ever touched it in all 280 episodes or whatever. And it's one of the largest categories of spend for most countries' GDPs in the world. Yeah, I think it's got to be probably every country's GDP in the world. Depending on their level of dysfunction, yeah. Yeah, good point. Anyway, we're already deep in the research. The story itself, industry aside, financials aside, market cap aside, this is a century-long, incredible story too. So I'm really, really pumped. It turns out there's a lot of them out there. We often get the question, are you afraid you're going to run out of episodes to do? No. Everywhere we look, there's some new, fascinating, multi-generation business that you'd never expect could have thrived through all these times that they have, and have five. Five unique, amazing vignettes to tell through their whole history to today. As long as we want to keep doing this, there will be fuel to keep doing it. This year, it was brands and luxury and retailers. It'll be this other thing, hopefully next year. But we look around the corner, and there's a whole new category of companies to cover. So we're pumped for that. Ben, you have already spilled the beans that another luxury brand is in the works. Absolutely. Absolutely. What else we got cooking? We'll hit some big tech. We have to. It feels like an obligatory nod. We'll hit something in the sort of entertainment, gaming, streaming world. And we could keep naming categories, but one listener question that we got that I think is worth chatting about here is, how do we handle current events? Because there are lots of episodes that would be very appealing to do. For example, the dozens of requests we got two weeks ago, we got a lot of requests that we got two weeks ago, and we got a three weeks ago for OpenAI after the boardroom drama. We very much have moved away from current events. And I think that is in part because of what we talked about earlier, that we want to create end-of-one content. And the way to create the most possible commodity content is to try to cover the current news cycle that literally everyone else is covering concurrently. I think that's a way to get completely drowned out in the noise, create something that's not special, and create something that, even if you, blow it out of the water, has a shelf life in this world of about eight hours. And so we have decided to move as far away from that as possible. And the other reason, I think, is a little bit our disposition, where, David, when you and I are looking at something brand new that's unfolding in real time, I think we've really started trusting our gut that there's probably more here than there seems to appear on the surface. And years ago, I don't think we felt that. I think we thought, Uber's going public? Cover Uber. Even three years ago, Airbnb's going public? Cover Airbnb. And, you know, there was an acquired way to do it, where most of the episode could actually focus on, you know, the last 10 years, and only a little bit at the end was focused on the last few months. But the more current an event is, the less evergreen value that it will have, and the more likely it is that you could really blow it. Like, I feel super self-conscious that we interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, and like, you know, we're not investigative journalists. We weren't going to spend a lot of time on this. We weren't going to try to unfold and dig up, hey, is this all legit? It's like Sequoia had just invested a huge amount of money. Like, everyone and all the possible signals had validated this person and this company. It was seemingly enormously free cash flow positive. And yet, yeah, we regret doing it. We totally regret doing it. And we're going to try our best not to set ourselves up to do something like that again in the future. So the question becomes, what should you do? And what we are structurally well set up to do is, these huge retrospectives where the story is written, and the story is known, and it's about really synthesizing it and applying it to today's world, where there is just no way that we are ever going to do the sort of investigative journalism, and frankly, like investment diligence, often with private information that you need to do to get a real-time story right. It is structurally impossible for us, so swear it off. I think that's the answer. I would even go so far as to say, you know, something that I've taken from, especially the last couple years of Acquired, is the story is always deeper than you think. And so let's even say we were set up to do investigative journalism and deep diligence that we would then share with the public on a company. In real time. In real time, I still think it's impossible to get it right. I mean, look at the best VCs out there. They are, at least on the diligence and investing side of the equation, making these calls in real time. And the very best of them are the ones that are going to be the ones that are going to be the only get it right, what, 20% of the time? At most, you know, 30% of the time? I don't think it is possible to do. I mean, fraud is different. Yes. I'm not talking about fraud. I'm just talking about getting the story right. Like the story of Uber that we did on, you know, IPO day back when we did that episode. Like that was not the full story of Uber. Yeah. To revisit the SBF interview in particular, I haven't listened to it in a long time. I do think we've just had our wits about us enough to always sort of be question askers in terms of like, hey, this seems really crazy. How did that happen? And you and I have sort of never been the types to be like, everyone should be extremely excited about this. And we urge you to go get involved with this now. I always sort of chuckle when we say the not investment advice, but that's more my demeanor. I truly mean it. I was like, hey, I've done a certain amount of work on this. I'm going to tell you what I learned. And also, I am not recommending you act on this in any way ever. And I think that fortunately, our disposition, especially among some of the crypto and web three media was a little bit more of that. But we've learned lessons from that. And those lessons are you get to choose the games you play and we don't need to play the current manias game. Totally. And as much as I want to take as a kind personal compliment, all the things you're saying to myself, too. But I really got to give credit to you. I think this is a big part of the demeanor that you bring in your personality to the show. Like you are a optimist, as we both are. And we've talked about a lot on the show. But a skeptic. Well, in the big picture, you're an optimist. Yeah. And so I think this is one of the things that makes us a really good team. Like, in terms of the actual goal and what we're trying to do here and acquired and what it is and what we want it to be, we are 100% aligned. And you do a really good job keeping us in check on this front. Thank you. And if we didn't have you, then we would just tell stories of old retailers and old oil companies that, you know, carry no risk associated with them. Hey, maybe we should do that because those are our biggest episodes. Yeah. Thank you. I'll take the compliment. And you do need both. You need someone who's staying attuned to like, maybe this is this new thing everyone is talking about is a breakthrough, interesting thing. And you also need the, hey, let's pay attention to history. And I think someone asked a question in the Slack, do you consider yourselves journalists? And I, if anything, because we've gotten the question, are you analysts? Are you journalists? Are you, we're certainly not reporters, but I think on that spectrum, we've shifted much more toward historians than journalists. I don't ever expect that we are going to get a story right about something in flight, but hopefully given, you know, a couple months to prepare, we can get the story right about something that's happened over a long period of time with a lot of perspectives where people are willing to share everything they sort of know since the hatchets are buried. And does anyone have the story right on what happened in the open AI boardroom right now? I don't think so. I don't think so either. You know, reflecting on this too, I think, ironically, moving to this role as our and, you know, my over the past couple of years, official, you know, job function and identity of being historian versus venture capitalist investor has made me a much better investor. Yeah. Ain't it the truth. And for me specifically, when I was only an investor or investor was the primary thing, everything we were just talking about were both strengths and weaknesses for me. I would fall in love with companies, deeply in love with companies. And obviously for people who listen to us, I still do this with acquired episodes with the companies we cover. And that was a great strength too. Like you can really help companies and founders can really feel like you are on their team and aligned and pulling with them. And also, just purely in terms of making the right investments, having a bit more arm's length objectivity and perspective helps. Shifting my focus to the show certainly has made me a better investor. Like I just look at like the investments that I've done and I've been more active in the past few years than I was when I was a VC. And, you know, you and I are going to be even more active together going forward. I never would have expected this, but it has really helped me. Turns out knowing history is very helpful. Yes. And just having this other thing be my obsession has allowed me to have a little more arm's length. It's also very nice because what it does is it puts most things in your too hard pile. Like the fact that your main job isn't to go pick early stage companies. Like when the whole world is your too hard pile because you need to research an acquired episode, only the no-brainers end up actually grabbing your time. The no-brainers that don't take up weeks and weeks of your time to decide if you should do it or not. are the ones that end up actually becoming the investments that you do. And especially when you can sort of take something you've learned from history and apply it to the present. I think that's the David Rosenthal sweet spot. Yes. It's funny. Marketing in particular, I think doing Acquired has made me such a more savvy marketer. Perhaps the most useful that I am in boardrooms now is being like a reality check on, are you actually reaching people, A, in a medium that's going to convert to what you want them to do, and B, with a messaging that people will care about. Because most of the time, most people are creating lots and lots of copy and work product that nobody cares about at all. And that goes for podcasts, and that goes for startups. And I think breaking through and creating something where people know, oh, I should pay attention to this. That's still so rare. Yeah. We were having this discussion, you and me, on Zoom a couple months ago with a world-class investor. And the sort of frame that we put on it was taste. Oh, this conversation. Yeah. You can't really teach it. You certainly can develop it. But this is a version of that. Yeah. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Legora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world works. And it's a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, the world's best legal teams work. 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. Legora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? 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. 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. Legora'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. And they recently launched Legora 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. And Legora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Legora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora 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. 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 legora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, what's next on the docket? Well, keeping on this topic of audience Q&A, a couple weeks ago, we got this kind email from listener Martin from Scotland. In it, he had a list of questions for us, and said, if you have time to answer a few of them, I would really appreciate it. And we looked at it and we said, gosh, these are awesome questions. Should this be the entire episode? This should be our holiday special. So thank you, Martin. We are going to dive into a bunch of them here, and they are just fantastic. So number one, what is the book or books you've given most as a gift and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Ben, you want to go first? Yeah, I am not actually a huge book gifter. I love the practice. I just never remember to do it. It's great that when people are able to do that. I think a huge one for me is Psychology of Money. There's a recency bias on it. And we mentioned Morgan Housel at the top of the show, good friend of the show, great human. I mean, truly, I massively changed the way that I personally invest. Yeah, me too. Based on that book and the way that I just think about spending my time and family and demeanor throughout the day. Another one is this book, and I haven't read it in probably 12, 14 years. It's called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Oh, yeah. Tim Ferriss loves this book, right? Yeah, I read it as a part of a college class, a cool class at Ohio State called Personal Creativity and Innovation. And one of the mechanics in the book is called morning papers. And the rule is you must write three pages stream of consciousness before getting out of bed in the morning. And it is so cool because it flushes out all the crap from your head so that you can go and have a clean slate to start the day. And you're not wasting your time processing. You're not like wasting CPU cycles in your brain, processing something and ruminating on something that you really just need to get out, get on the page, and then you can focus on other things or perhaps focus on that thing. But at least now you have a little bit of clarity on it because you've written. I should do it more often, but I think it's an amazing practice and kind of like a, I hate the phrase, but life hack that I remember feeling like it really worked for me while I was doing it. David, while you give your answer, I'm going to turn around and look at my bookshelf to find a third one. I have a bunch more books to talk about later in the episode, but the one that I've gifted the most is a book called Transitions by William Bridges, which was first given to me by Ben and my good friend Mark in Seattle. Ben, have I given you this book? I don't think so. You've mentioned it. Okay. We need to rectify this right away. Watch your Amazon deliveries. I'm going to send it to you. It's not like anything's randomly showing up to my house three times a day from Amazon right now. Right. You'll find it again in like six months or so when you're cleaning out your basement. This book is a super cool concept. It was written, I think in 1980. And the idea it's about major transitions in your life. It could be a good transition, like having a baby, welcoming a new family member could be a bad transition, like a death in the family or career related, losing a job, something like that. But the thesis of the book is that when this happens in your life, and you will many times, it's going to sound a little gruesome, but you need to sort of kill your old self and be reborn as your new self. That sounds super woo woo. But if you actually think about it, it makes sense. Your identity, who you thought you were, before a major transition, it has to change. There is no way around it. And you'll go through the five stages of, you know, denial, anger, you know, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. This book is a great sort of way to streamline that process. But you have to accept that that you that you were before is no longer and then you can create the new you. And I found it incredibly helpful, both for big challenges in my life and for great positive stuff like having a baby. All right, that's awesome. I will watch my front doorstep. My third one is a classic thinking fast and slow by Kahneman and Tversky. It's just a great book to read. And I think you know about the way your brain perceives the world and how you make decisions is wrong. And reading it doesn't make you get any better, but at least makes you aware of how wrong your decision making is, unless you pay unbelievably close attention and write down exactly why the decision is being made and look at all the data. And even then, you'll probably get it wrong. Ben, there is a very fun Easter egg that is going to be buried later in this episode for you to find related to this book recommendation. Oh, sweet. So Ben and listeners, go on a little treasure hunt. Great. All right, next question. What purchase of $200 or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory? This is a super easy one for me. No brainer. My Zojirushi hot water heater. For people who don't know about these, and I think this is probably most of the world outside of Japan. This is a device that sits on your kitchen counter and keeps several gallons of water at a set temperature constantly. I am a huge tea drinker. I use this thing four or five times a day and have for the past decade plus. It is amazing. I set it at 195 degrees. I drink green tea every day. I re-steep my teapot constantly throughout the day. And it has unquestionably made my life better and probably will extend my lifespan by several years from drinking tons of green tea every day. Whoa, that's awesome. Zojirushi is the brand? We'll link to it in the show notes. It's a Japanese company. Everybody in Japan has one of these things. Awesome. Mine might be a pair of Nike shoes. So living in Seattle, it rains all winter, or at least it's wet all winter. And there's a particular pair. I'm going to look up what it actually is so that if you want to buy it, you can. Called the Nike Men's Pegasus 4 Gore-Tex. And the Gore-Tex is so good. It makes winter running possible. And they even have a few of the colorways. that are not like totally insane so that you can kind of wear them as everyday sneakers. But I basically wear them all day, every day in the winter. And it makes me far less afraid to go out in the world because I don't like having wet feet. Amazing. Okay. Next one is the Tim Ferriss question. I don't think anybody's ever asked us that before. If you had a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, metaphorically speaking, what would it say and why? Maybe the most random fact about me, I was a French literature major in college, particularly a 17th and 18th century French literature expert. I'm hardly an expert, but that's what I majored in in college. And something that has stuck with me from then, and the older I get and the world we live in becoming more the world it is, has stuck with me more and more, is the last line of Voltaire's Candide. We must cultivate our own garden. And especially today, like there's just so much in the world that you don't have any control over. The only thing you have control over is your garden and cultivating your own garden. And for us, that's acquired. And for me, that's acquired in my family and, you know, maybe some other things over time, but just focus on what is in your control and be great at that and be good at that. Be great and be good at those things. And that is what you can do. At least those are the words that I have come to live by. I love that. I actually don't have my own answer to this question. There's someone else that I know that has an answer to this question that I quite like. So I'm just going to recant their story, but I should go find some words to live by. A good friend of mine, his dad had a saying when he was growing up that he would always remind his kids, just be kind. Hey, whatever the thing is, just be kind. You know, someone might be being a jerk to you and, you know, you're not going to be a jerk. They deserve some kind of repercussion, but you should just be kind. And certainly the world will figure out a way to deal with this person's action at some point. And the thing my friend did is at some point as his dad was getting older, he asked him to write down the motto on a piece of paper and sign it. And he went and got a tattoo on his back of just be kind signed by his dad's name. And I love that. I now know who you're talking about. That's amazing. Yeah. I just think that's the coolest. I often remind myself of that, of there's almost nothing to be gained by me. I'm not going to be a jerk. I'm going to be a jerk. I'm not going to be exuding anything but kindness in this moment. And it doesn't mean let someone roll all over you, but it does mean just always realize that, you know, it's kind of the Michelle Obama thing of when they go low, we go high. You going high is never going to hurt you in the long run. There's never any reason not to be kind. Right. I love that. That's so good. What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you have ever made? It could be an investment of any type. Cultivating the relationship with my wife, hands down, a hundred percent. And the second best is cultivating the relationship with my wife. And the second best is cultivating the relationship with you, which has led to so many things that have made my relationship with my wife and building a family possible. And there is no ifs, ands, or buts about that. The house I'm standing in is thanks to Acquired. The lifestyle I enjoy is a hundred percent Acquired. The fact that I wander around all day listening to audio books, the thing that it's done to my demeanor and my personality, truly the life that myself and my family enjoy is because of what you and I have built. And thank you. I have the same answer. I actually didn't write down Jenny, but I should. Thank you for reminding me. Jenny, I love you. Yeah, ditto. Nothing more to add. And probably therapy. That's probably the second. Yeah, I agree. I started doing weekly therapy. I'd done it off and on before, but I started doing it weekly, committing to that this year, and it's just immensely helpful. Yep. And if you feel like it's not helpful, just switch therapists. You'll eventually find someone who's helpful for you. Yep. All right. What is an unusual habit or thing that you love? I eat a Starbucks spinach, feta, and cage-free egg white bite wrap every single day. And I have for years and years and years. And I actually go to Starbucks and buy them still in the package cold. I buy them like 10 at a time, and then I'll just make them every morning at home. We were in the airport flying back from LA. We were at LAX after interviewing Charlie Munger. And you got one of these at the Starbucks at LAX. And you got one of these at the LAX. And I've known this about you for years. And I just kind of looked at you, and I was like, Ben, I think you have eaten more spinach feta wraps than any other human being in the world. And you thought about it, and you were like, yeah, I think that's right. Because I think I've consumed probably close to 3,000 of them. This is amazing. This is the very best Ben Gilbert trivia that exists. When did you start? Yeah. I'm going to guess around 10 years ago. I mean, I think it really ramped like seven-ish years ago. So maybe 2,000, 2,500. But yeah, pretty much every day, breakfast or lunch. Speaking of special, unique interviews that only we could do, I don't even need to finish that sentence. We're just going to leave it at that. One day. Yeah. One day. Okay. I'm not even going to answer that because I can't top that. In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? Yes. I was going to say adding weekly therapy this year and related to that, just listening to my instincts in particular, my physical reactions to things. I've found it takes a while to train your instincts. So I don't know if I just listened to my instincts and followed my instincts when I was 25 that that would have been the right thing. But for me, I find that I have physical reactions in my body to things. And listening and tuning into that usually is the right way to go. Yep. I like that. And just being more aware of it. I think you have a good sense of that too. If somebody is a 1% huckster, I notice you get physically uncomfortable and try to create distance between you and them. Yes. That's just me. I don't know if everybody has that. I think mine is a thing that I'm still working on, but the amount that I have done it has dramatically improved my life. Be more present. Be a better listener. The answer is almost always tune in more to the person that you're talking to and really understand them. And I think listen harder is usually the way to better understand what someone else around you wants. And it's often not what they're saying. It's what they're feeling. My therapist regularly uses the phrase, it's about the feelings, not the content. And if you can figure out how to be present, listen, better and meet someone else at their feelings level and figure out how do I, you don't even have to make their feelings feel better because they might feel fine. But how do I tune into you emotionally and not try to just have a conversation about the content you're saying? You're much more likely to both have a positive outcome and have a better rest of your day. Dude, you're going to crush parenting. Well, easier said than done. Yeah, right. Easier said than done when, you know, on our like three of intense feelings, shall we say. What advice would you give a smart, driven college student about to enter the quote unquote real world and what advice should they ignore? Oh man, let's see. Some advice I gave like three years ago that I really deeply believe in is harvest when everyone else is harvesting and build skills when there's no harvesting to be done. And in particular, this person had the opportunity to go work at, I think it was a big consulting thing and make good money first year. And they were thinking about doing that or working for a nonprofit as their first job because their heart was in the right place. Like they just wanted to do good for the world work. And I was like, we're in a weird time where I don't know when it's going to end, but everyone's making stupid money right now. Just like while there's harvesting to be done, go participate in that and you should build the best foundation you can. But I promise you there will be a time where this job opportunity is not available to you and you will look back at a few years of making a small salary in your first few years out of school and kind of wish that you had built a little bit more of a foundation because I just think this time is going to end. And like it sort of flies in the face of be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. Yeah, this is kind of be greedy when others are greedy and, you know, build when others are fearful. And be mindful that you're in this temporary moment. But like when there's opportunity to harvest, harvest. Yeah. Reflecting on the 2020 to 2022 time frame, that is a huge takeaway for me. Bill Gurley has for years said this, you got to play the game on the field. Well, yeah. Benchmark's very good at that. Yes. Yes, yes, they are. My answer, I would just repeat what I said on the Art of Investing podcast that we went on a few weeks ago. I said, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. Which those guys have just built such a great show. I mean, they're teachers. They've been teachers for years. Yeah. Rick and Paul are investors and capital allocators and, you know, great partners to the people that they work with. But like even their demeanor in one-on-one conversations is that of a learner and a teacher. Yeah. So wonderful. What I said there, literally two college students was both the following your own path has never been more rewarding in this world that we live in and never been more rewarding in the world that we live in. been harder like there's so much pressure out there. Social media, everything else about the world we live in, there's so much pressure to conform. And that makes standing out and following your own path that much more valuable. So harder and valuable. Yep. People are underrated. Like in my harvesting comment, it was interesting that what I did was to describe two job opportunities. I think there's another way to make decisions, which is surround yourself with, if you're an ambitious person, with the most intelligent people you possibly can, who are the closest to ground zero for your industry, be where the interesting thing is with the people who are the best at it. This is the Marc Andreessen, go to Denny's. I totally believe that. Yes. Always go to Denny's. And they can't just be smart. They have to be unbelievably trustworthy people worthy of your time and partnership. And that's the harder thing, I think, to suss out over time. That's hard advice to give a college student. Yep. I don't think those two things are at odds. I don't think they're at odds either, but your circle of opportunity gets smaller when you require more constraints, when you require both them. All right. In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? Distractions, invitations, et cetera. What new realizations and or approaches helped? Any other tips? Oh, man. David, there's a thing that you do that I'm so much worse at, which is you never feel compelled to respond. You never feel like you're the best at it. Somebody else can give you a task to do. It's not my most flattering quality. But it's the thing that allows you to give energy to the people in your life that matter the most to you. That's the thing that I've long been jealous of. I'm very okay with somebody emails me a form email that I've never heard of them or their name. It's very easy to archive that. It's harder when it's somebody that I met three years ago that I really enjoyed getting coffee with. And now I'm like, oh, I'm going to do this. I have eight of those in my inbox. And I just, I want to at least say I don't have the bandwidth for this right now. But like you do those eight times and suddenly two hours have gone by. It's actually taken away some of your energy and your life force. Exactly. Yeah. And you do it to me sometimes. So like I sort of know like what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it. But like you have a remarkable tendency to truly wake up every morning and say, what actually is important and needs to get done? And you don't do the other stuff. And it's kind of okay if that has a little bit of collateral damage. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. Yeah. I was going to say the same thing. And you said it for me. Like I said, this is not my most flattering natural tendency. But as I've thought about this over the years, what I've come back to is I reach out to lots of people. How do I feel if I don't get a response to all of those? I feel fine. And, you know, I assume that folks that I reach out to have some kind of response to all of something going on. They're busy. And especially now having kids, it's just like I get it for them and I get it for me more. It's like, you know, there's nobody more important to me than my daughter. Nobody. My wife, you know, like, and you, you know, like, okay, outside that circle, like you are my most important people. And there's only so many hours in the day. It's like a version of you got to put your mask on before helping others. It's like, I got to put those relationships on before others. Yep. And everything's a trade-off. Like in a vacuum, sure, you should give your time and your life for us to everyone, but you have a finite amount. And so it's a priority thing. Yep. Okay. Last one. When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? What questions do you ask yourself? This is so easy. And this is the perfect one to end on. We go make a great acquired episode. And this has been such a gift to me in my life because up until we started doing acquired and up until acquired, it became my full-time job three years ago. I didn't have anything that I could control like that. I don't know what I would have answered to that question. Like so much of everything was out of my control. When you're a venture investor, you don't control anything. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean? Just go do a good deal. And that way in 10 years, you'll know if it was good or not. Right. Exactly. We're so lucky now that we have this thing that we do, that we can do, and we're good at, and we know how to do, where no matter how bad, things get, or no matter what's going on, we can just go in a lab and we know we can make a great episode. And we also know it's the best thing we can do. No matter how good or bad things are going, it's always the best thing we can do. It's an interesting derivation that I want to take this down. I've had this life advice that I've been thinking about to give to my son when he's old enough to understand life advice, which is not right now. Oh, you're going to have to wait a while. Yeah. And which is interesting that he can listen to all of this. I don't think he ever will, but it's crazy that there's like hundreds of hours of his dad talking. Like, do you ever think about that? Yeah. That our kids will get to watch us sort of grow up. I guess there's not video until year five or so, but still like listen to us sort of form who we became, assuming that we do this for decades and decades to come. But one of the pieces of life advice, and David, I was telling you about this on our walk in LA up Runyon Canyon. We were down there interviewing Charlie, was, that when you're a young person, you should try to become singularly productive. And I mean productive in the economic sense, that you are able to soup to nuts within your control, make something of economic value and put it in the world in a way that you own the design, engineering, creation, marketing, distribution, monetization. And like, everybody shouldn't do that. Like the corporation is a great structure that enables people to work together in a creative way to produce an output. But your life is way better if you have the capability to singularly produce something on your own. And then it's always your choice of how much stuff outside your control you want to let in. You might be a singularly productive individual who then goes on to be Craig Federici and, you know, run all of Apple software, but then it's your choice. You're not going to be able to do that. You're not going to have the choice. You're not reliant on a bureaucratic structure for you to thrive and politic inside of. This is another one of those paradoxes, I think, in that the way the world works today, this has on the surface kind of never been harder. Organizations are bigger. Things are more complex. Things are more interdependent. The idea that you could as a person and especially a young person be able to do that is hard to fathom. And yet it's also never been more true than ever. All you need is an internet connection and you can find and learn some version of this. Yep. It's pretty wild. All right, listeners, now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. 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. Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes. And that's why we're here. We're here to help you. 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. 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. 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 slash acquired to get started. Well, for Ben, you're in my traditional extended carve outs to end the holiday special. I have a special family one that I want to start with, if that's okay. So my brother-in-law, Dave, Jenny's sister's husband, Dave is the most beloved member of our entire family, including my daughter, who is a member of our entire family. So I'm going to start with her. Roast your compost overnight. and is internet connected it runs overnight you put all the food scraps in there it roasts and churns it it turns it into chicken feed and every morning it gets fully roasted which means no smell no mess and it absorbs this thing is like a black hole of compost it's a big bin we will go weeks as a family of just putting everything in there no emptying no going to the garbage no smell no nothing and then when it gets full your app tells you you put it in a box they send you a bunch of boxes like in a bag in a box you send it off to them and they sell it as chicken feed this is like the most brilliant thing ever i was so skeptical and now i'm 100 convert mill.com i'm not just saying it because dave's my brother-in-law actually this is the best thing i've bought this year did you or did you not get yours for free no i paid for it i didn't get any discount this is not in any way an endorsement no the only connection i have to the company is that my brother-in-law joined them and i thought it was a really bad idea all right i'm trying to decide if like your problems are real problems at this point or if you're like you've gotten so comfortable in life yes i know you're like solving these like really i recognize that i just recommended an internet connected compost bin but it really is awesome but it's a great one i mean yes i recognize the value of good gadgets i've been using a june oven for the last year and i've been using a june oven for the last year six months also life-changing you might be like why do you need a small oven instead of your big oven and why does it need to be on the counter instead spinach feta wraps oh every morning spinach feta wraps in the june it's perfect okay i have a litany of carve outs go for it i'll save my baby related ones for later my tv show my wife and i just binged watch is like holy crap good some of the best tv i've watched in a long time very different genre than succession but like succession level quality and i'm like oh my god i'm gonna have to do this again i'm gonna have to it's called silo on apple tv it is excellent it's based on a book maybe book series and the for tv adaptation is just very good dialogue the cinematography is good the sets are really impressive the premise is just beautiful and so simple and the premise is this is going to be spoiler free there is a civilization of humans that exist in a silo like a big silo i don't want to say the exact number of people but it's a big silo and it's a big silo and it's a big silo and people because some might consider that uh spoiler but like you know a civilization in a silo okay and on earth or in outer space or presumably on earth is the premise and it is all about people trying to figure out what's going on because it opens with this idea that at some point it will be safe to leave the silo we don't know when that day will be but we know that day is not today and it's a whole civilization of people living in a silo this sounds like a great premise that's the setting and i'm giving no plot details about like what then transpires but it's awesome and it's great sci-fi as you know i'm not a tv person but that is up my alley the female lead is the woman from the most recent the last two mission impossibles who's a really good actress and uh who else is in it the woman from the office rashida jones is also in it it's a good show highly recommend it she's quincy jones's daughter is that right i think that's right yeah super cool so that is awesome for less good tv but still very entertaining part of our fraternity leave maternity leave has been uh watching alias neither of us watched it back in 2002 and it's like a jj abrams early jj abrams jennifer garner's the lead you've already done this as a carve out but i like the have i yeah i mean re-carve out it's fine it's great i mean it gets worse as the seasons go on but uh seasons one two and three are great very worth watching a product that i've been loving i just got some new warby parker glasses i believe they're made out of vinyl but the frame is called amari a m a r i they are much lighter than any other glasses frames that i've ever gotten and it's like totally game-changing to feel like they're sort of just floating on your face all day some might view them as not as stylish as some of the more stylish options but they're my at-home glasses for sure yeah one of your carve outs i picked up recently hoka slides i actually didn't get the slides i got the aura the recovery shoes hoka slides so good yeah i got the same technology in the kind of more shoe more enclosed form factor i think they're also called the auras o r a so great best house shoes i've ever had per your recommendation well happy to recommend another one is a feature of a product that i found a couple days ago that is freaking insane i've had this thing where as iphone cameras have gotten better and better the computational photography like what apple does to photos makes them look a certain way and i've sort of gotten used to that way that photos look and now that i'm using the big camera again because we have a baby i've gone back to i'm using the alpha 7c's and i this kind of like very flexible lens that can either be a wide or a zoom lens that we're going to use actually for some upcoming interviews next year to get a tight fit and i've had this thing where as iphone cameras have gotten better and lighter shot on the subject i've been using that and i've been feeling like god these images are so grainy like basically anything that i shoot indoor feels like it has this really terrible grain and you look and of course it's like the super high iso but the iphone does so much smoothing that i've like forgotten that film grain is a thing and so lightroom shipped this unbelievable ml powered denoise feature i found out about it because nilai patel was just on the talk show with john gruber and he is right to say it totally pegs your gpus while you're using it but it is pure magic you open up lightroom you select the photos you can even select like ones that don't seem noisy to you and you come back and it's like unless you crank the setting way up they look totally realistic it doesn't look overly ai'd but your photos just all get like magically way better so huge kudos to the adobe team i've been so impressed with everything that they're cranking out on the ai side like i think it's probably the best at rapidly commercializing these generative ai advancements this one is immediately useful for me for everything that i shoot not with my iphone yeah this is uh we did that acq2 episode with um chris from runway like this sector application of ai in image and video we're only just scratching the surface the surface is already unbelievable and like yeah i just can't wait for what's coming yep totally agree i think i may have may have made this a carve out at some point but i want to re-highlight it because it's been at least 12 months because i remember reading it over christmas last year it's an article by derrick thompson called the eureka theory of everything is wrong yes this is awesome it's so good i just reread it it's just such a pleasant reminder that it's not about the idea it's about the implementation and it's often about the unsexy distribution work the article highlights a number of different instances where we need to be able to do something about it and i think it's a really good idea i know the famous inventor but we don't know about the heroic effort made by governments around the world to actually roll things out like vaccines and things that are you know a huge part of the public good i highly recommend reading it if you're in for sort of a perspective changing read on what is important to advance society forward love it all right i'll jump in with a couple before we get back to you first a book that i alluded to earlier in the episode the luxury strategy by jean-noel capital ferrer and vincent bestienne this book was a core part for both you and me in lvmh prep and it's so good it's so counterintuitive and worth reading for anybody who has a brand any company that has a brand which is everybody even you know like enterprise software sas company you have a brand you should read this book i am just going to read you have tweeted this and i think maybe even on air said them all but i'm going to say them again this book contains the 24 anti-laws of marketing one forget about positioning luxury is not comparative two does your product have enough flaws three do not pander to your customers wishes keep non-enthusiasts out do not respond to rising demand dominate the client make it difficult for clients to buy protect clients from non-clients the role of advertising is not to sell communicate to those you are not able to sell the role of advertising is not to sell the role of advertising is not to target the presumed price should always seem higher than the actual price luxury sets the price price does not set luxury raise your prices as time goes on in order to increase demand think about that one keep raising the average price of your product range do not sell keep stars out of your advertising cultivate closeness to the arts for initiates that was 17 numbers 18 through 24 i just like this is acquired right here it smacks me in the face 18 do not relocate your factories we talked about that earlier and then it continues do not hire consultants do not test do not look for consensus do not look after group synergies do not look for cost reduction just sell marginally on the internet it's so good it's good to get the reminders too yeah that's one the next one i want to mention i also talked about earlier in the episode is the qb squad on youtube so jto sullivan who was like a 10 year long journeyman backup quarterback in the nfl he briefly started for the 49ers i think in like the late 2000s after he finished playing went and got a phd in leadership studies and then started this youtube channel where he breaks down quarterbacks performances every week and does behind the scenes of like basically just lets you ride along with how a quarterback and an nfl offense from like the offensive coordinator down to the quarterbacks coach down to the players like what is actually happening there was a quote that i think we cut from our nfl episode but that kind of sums up what's going on here from one of the books that we read it said that baseball fans love baseball because they think they understand the game you , football fans love football because they know they don't understand the game i played football for 10 years and this is the first time i'm like getting a glimpse of understanding the game it's so good this guy is awesome i can't wait that's totally been a thing that we've done this fall as you know we were getting ready for the birth of our son and then as we've been on the couch a lot is like watch an insane amount of college football and nfl games yeah i'm all over this youtube channel you just watch these games and the drama is so compelling but what's going on in the nfl is like you know what's going on in the nfl is like you know what's going on in the nfl is like you know what's going on in the nfl is like you know what's going on is at such another level yes the production of football and the story lining around the teams and the players it's the great at scale storytelling of our time and to your point there's a whole another thing going on underneath it all it's funny the carve out i was going to do next before you jumped in with a couple is a monday night football manning cast oh yeah it's been so good this year i actually didn't get into it until this season i just didn't watch that much nfl until this season because i grew up a browns fan and enough said well yeah i'm not going to do that but i've watched a lot of nfl this year and eli and for anyone who doesn't know about manning cast when you're watching monday night football you can choose either to watch the normal announcers or there's a completely second production using the same cameras plus a couple cameras in peyton manning and eli manning's homes where they're basically just like watching the game on zoom together it's a holdover from the pandemic and they have guests on like they had will ferrell on but i think it's actually better without guests like even when it's just eli and manning's home it's like they're watching the game on zoom together it's a holdover from the analyzing the game it's similar to what you're talking about david it's a little bit of like helping you understand what's going on behind the scenes but of course by two brothers that are very fun to be around and they often act like they're still you know eight and ten years old i would say like if you think about um the nfl broadcasts that's one level then there's like manning cast that's like several clicks deeper in getting a window into what's going on and then qb school is like as far to the right as possible and then there's like a lot of people that are like the other side of the spectrum as you could go while still being really fun like jt's a great host but like it's technical it's very technical cool all right i'm pumped okay we're entering the baby product section of recommendations is that okay with you i've got one other first that i want to throw out lay it on me which is going to be a recommendation to nobody because you've all already seen it the heiress tour i haven't watched it yet oh you haven't watched it yet oh my god yeah it's available at home now right also did we call that or did we call it all that it's been two years since we did the t swift episode oh amazing should have bought stock well like we said open invitation taylor you know we will fly to wherever you are it is true dude you got to watch it like when the baby's sleeping maybe over the course of two naps because uh it's a long movie but um she's just on another level from anybody i mean she's times person of the year this year and it is one of the best movies period that i've ever seen not just like concert film awesome can't wait all right baby recommendations go for it i feel like i finally have strollers dialed now granted i only have a one month old so like the needs massively change over time but i forever i was trying to figure out for non-parents out there figuring out the right car seat stroller combos for all the different needs like at home travel when they're different ages you have different needs right now we have a lean setup like there's a way to be dialed in your setup by just having four strollers but i'm pretty pumped where we landed with two i am super pumped for your recommendations because i really trust you on this like ben you are such a optimizer like when it comes to this stuff this is your wheelhouse so i i can't wait all right so here's the current setup and this is after buying a few other strollers and returning them because there were things i didn't like about them ergonomically so the up a baby vista is the home stroller that's the one that's like big you don't want to be in the business of taking it and that has the newborn bed in it this is like the chevy suburban of strollers yes oh it's you do not ever want to pick this thing up but it's got great shocks we take it on a trail near our house and the the arboretum in seattle and the fact that it has a huge bassinet on it a lot of his naps happen there so i can go on walks while the baby's napping even as a newborn which for a lot of strollers newborns can't nap if they're sort of like upright or newborns can't you need a bassinet stroller so that's the home situation the travel situation and we haven't like flown anywhere yet but we will in a month or so is the jewels j-o-o-l-z air plus a-e-r plus okay i've not heard of this device i hadn't either but we went to nordstrom and we uh tested all the strollers amazing and the one that we had ordered i really hated the way that the handlebars sat and made my wrists feel so i we got this um the jewels air plus instead and it has adapters for the car seat that we bought the click link oh yeah and it just snaps right in so this jewels air plus is super light it's 11 pounds it fits in the overhead of a airplane so when we travel starting in a month we'll be able to do that when we're home it always sits in the back of the car and so like whenever we take the baby out out we leave the baby in the car seat and we just snap the car seat which by the way is like the you know the click ling is like the safe car seat yeah yeah you do not want to be transferring baby out of car seat when baby is asleep ever no so the car seat just snaps right in and so for like doctor's visits and stuff we just take the travel stroller with the car seat snapped in no interruption to sleep it took a lot of finagling but this is where we've arrived for now the optimizations are some people recommend the toolie running stroller in addition to this we'll that's a category we dip into you're not at that phase yet yeah and other people are swearing by this in fact listen to the show alex i think text me i don't he texts me a lot about this stroller and i i think he's probably their number one fan there's a car seat that converts to a stroller yeah the duna the duna i was literally waiting with bated breath for your opinion on the duna that may enter the rotation i haven't tried it yet buried the lead here um also jenny and i are expecting number two this year yay congratulations i was wondering if you're going to talk about it obviously ben already knew but i appreciate the faint surprise there and we are considering this is among the considerations said and whether we would change our strategy at all so okay laid on me so the duna is sort of like a different philosophy of what if your car seat could become a stroller and so that way when you're going on vacation you actually don't bring a travel stroller you just keep the baby in the seat check then you check the duna or if you're so bold as to get a seat for your newborn then i think they can stay in it i'm not exactly sure how that works and then when you get there so the trade-off then is like is the duna actually a good enough stroller for like five mile walks and that i don't know when we go on vacation we just try to do like tons and tons of walking and so that's the thing that i'm playing with with is the duna going to enter the rotation or do we rely on the air okay i'm waiting with bated breath for your verdict on this yeah stay tuned at the risk of acquired getting a lot more boring i think we have to keep discussion of baby products to a minimum well this is niche acquired here like for the right niche this is riveting content yeah either spin-off show or we're gonna have to keep these like we'll create like a bonus section at the end of the episode or something yeah yeah i was thinking about like oh what are my kids you know my daughter's two now she's like you know she's certainly not an adult but like it's you know it moves fast like she's she eats people food yeah she especially she is basically an adult at this point you sent me that picture of her eating a hot dog oh yeah totally well let's be clear the butt i ate the hot dog she ate the bun which was her choice my kid related carve out i was having trouble coming up with any of them and this isn't even that kid related but is her favorite movie which everybody should watch i can't believe i hadn't seen it till now is coco the pixar movie oh yeah coco it's good about toast it's so good i've now seen it like 10 times i will probably see it about 500 more times in my life and um disney plus despite all the turmoil and eiger and all that it's a hell of a drug it's a hell of a drug for a parent hey that's also where you can find great shows such as alias yeah all right well that's it for extended carve out holiday uh present uh suggestions this year from acquired we have one more section to close out the year and that is thank yous first we owe just the biggest thank you in the world to our wonderful editor, Stephen. Stephen, you are, and everybody listening I'm sure will agree, the single best podcast editor in the business. It's unbelievable. Hands down. It's not even close. And for people who are curious about how this works, Stephen does a first pass after we send him eight, nine hours of raw audio and turning it into sort of a candidate episode. And that's getting rid of likes and ums and all that, but it's retakes, it's redos, it's David and I saying, ah, I feel like that didn't come across right. I didn't make the point succinct enough. Why don't I try to make it more succinct? Then he sends us back this release candidate, which we then also tear apart and has, you know, a hundred more edits of like, this fact is wrong. This little part of this sentence is extraneous. Delete this number. Hey, can we move this section to this part? And then does a complete second pass. After a week's worth of work to deal with us on a complete second copy edit. So thank you so much, Stephen. You're the best. And it comes out just sounding immaculate. Immaculate. Stephen, you are the man. Thank you for making the show what it is. Second, thank you for this year is once again, MVP of Acquired, Andrew Marks, not only for Charlie, but really for being our thought partner behind like every episode and relationships that we've built. And, you know, now heading into next year and investing, helping us think through that. Oh, while we're thinking thought partners, we should thank friend of the show, Mark Bridge, who is a good friend of mine up here in Seattle, a good friend of David's as well. He gave me transitions. Runs a very cool, is a founder of a very cool company called At Present, which is a marketplace for very unique and cool jewelry pieces for women. David and I are actually both small investors in the company. And customers. And customers. That's right. Probably the most expensive thing I ever bought. But Mark has been a thought partner on tons and tons of episodes, especially Berkshire. He actually suggested LVMH, good thought partner on Nike. So Mark, thank you for everything you've done and helping Acquired too. Yes. Speaking of LVMH, Adam Pritzker helped us a ton on LVMH. Adam, of course, was one of the founders of General Assembly and now has Assembled Brands and Kate, which they just sold and was a fantastic outcome for everybody there. Adam really gave us a lot of support. He's been a great person. He gave us a window into actually building and running one of these companies. Yep. The whole team at NVIDIA, initially the people that were willing to speak with us about the episodes we were doing just to help with the research for the episodes and make sure we got it right. But then subsequently their entire communications team for hosting us and putting up with all of our requests and being willing to build the insane three screen setup and film it with three cameras and do everything we wanted to the production standards we wanted and way more. So thanks to the awesome team there. Thank you to Doug DiMero for consenting to join the crazy Acquired episode process for Porsche. I don't think Doug knew what he was getting into when he agreed to this. No, but he did all the research too. And for someone who has two businesses that he's trying to run at the same time, he started with a head start on the history of Porsche, but he really did a ton of work to prepare for that and had all of his facts and figures ready at hand. Let us send you his card. His garage for the whole day. Yeah. Doug rocks. Also, I'm thinking about buying my next car and like I've been watching so many Doug videos to prepare. He also totally set the bar for if and when we ever have another voice on a season episode, that is how we're going to do it. Like an expert guest host. We love that format. We'd like your feedback on it too, but we thought that was the perfect amount of guest research and what they brought to the table and how we looped them in with you. Yeah. And interacting with David and I, we were just like, this is a 10 out of 10. 10 out of 10. Just such a high quality guy on every dimension. Yep. And then on the research dimension, you know, thank you to, I mean, dozens, dozens of people who helped us with research for our episodes this year. Too many to name here. And many of you don't want to be named, but the people who have way better things to do with their time than chat with me and Ben about a podcast episode we're working on. And, you know, CEOs and CFOs of public companies, et cetera. Immensely grateful. And for most of these folks, they do it because they listen. And so they sort of know the product that's going to come out the other side. Thank you also for listening. Because I think that's sort of the superpower of Acquired is the fact that now there are people who listen who can really help us make sure that we get episodes right. So we love getting these notes. I mean, we can't respond to them all, but people who join the Slack or email us, acquiredfm at gmail.com and say, hi, here's a thing that I know a lot about in my industry experience. If you ever do it, feel free to reach out. We totally do when we do those episodes. So thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Speaking of the last and most important, thank you to all of you. This whole thing would not happen without you listening. You all are just an amazing community and we really appreciate you. Have a wonderful, wonderful holiday season. All the best for a happy, successful, wonderful new year ahead. And with that, if you want to know every time an episode drops, you can sign up for email updates at acquired.fm slash email. We added two new things recently. Emails include little hints at what the next episode will be. And they're also where we're putting follow-ups and corrections to previous episodes. So thanks to the two listeners who recently wrote in correcting me on Visa that it was not North Dakota, but South Dakota that first changed their usury laws to support credit cards, which is why all of your credit cards are now available. So thank you so much for listening. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. So many of them are mailed from there today. So we'll be including probably, I don't know, we've got three or four more Visa tidbits that we'll toss in the email for that. Come talk about this episode with us after listening at acquired.fm slash Slack. Check out ACQ2. We just did this awesome Visa follow-up with our good buddy Gaurav Ahuja from Thrive Capital. He's been in the payments industry for over a decade, founding companies, investing in companies, and helped put a finer point on a lot of the things we were describing in the video. So thank you so much. Have a great day. the current ecosystem today. If you want some merch, we've got a sweet merch store, acquired.fm slash store. And with that, listeners, we'll see you next year. We will see you next year. Subtitles by the Amara.org community