Holiday Special 2023

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.

Who got the truth?

Is it you?

Is it you?

Is it you?

Who got the truth now?

Is it you?

Is it you?

Is it you?

Sit me down.

Say it straight.

Another story on the way.

Who got the truth?

Welcome to season 13, episode five, 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 Rosenthal.

And we are your hosts.

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 of Acquired 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, NFL, Visa, Costco, Nike, 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.

Ooh, 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 over the holidays.

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, 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 of Wait But Why piece.

I've read.

You read the Michael Lewis book, right?

The Michael Lewis book.

Yeah, that was good.

But like, I don't know, 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.

Is about freaking time, huh, David?

I wasn't going to 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.

I'm 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 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 podcast or 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 at Backwards one time.

I think it was like 500 to 1000 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.

Yep.

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.

No.

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, four hour, 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 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 will 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 make 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.

And a related side part of 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 and you 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 everybody else in the world now who is interested in business and

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 calling each other

and talking about, you know, what's currently in our email inbox, what we're researching,

what we need to do to ship an episode, prep for guests, that sort of thing.

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 worthy of being a century

long company, regardless of where it came from or how it was funded or what technologies

were used in creating it.

I think that's been what's so cool for me and my big lessons and takeaways from everything

we've done this year is that those stories and studying the LVMHs, the Costco's, the

Nike's of the world, if anything, that's like even more important than studying the great

technology companies for building a great technology company.

Yes.

We found this just incredible response, especially to the LVMH episode of like, wow, here are

these lessons that are not well talked about and known in our world.

Right.

It is kind of strange becoming canon.

I never thought Acquired would get to the point where when we do an episode on something,

it has the possibility to become an undertone of themes that people are discussing.

And certainly years one through six or seven, that was never the case.

But with LVMH, with Costco, maybe with Porsche, certainly with Nike, I think there was an

element of we released the episode and suddenly we noticed the discussion, especially amongst

the tech sphere about that topic massively picked up or people would go on CNBC and make

a point that we made and I'd call you David and go like, I wonder how that comparison

got made.

This is great.

Maybe they didn't even listen to the episode.

But what was cool is that enough people now have been consuming this and talking about

it and getting value out of it.

It gets in the water.

It gets in the water.

Yeah.

It's wild.

My favorite was a friend of mine who's a VC at Lightspeed texted me about two weeks after

the Costco episode came out and said, dude, I've gotten three pitches this week from startups

where at some point in the deck they talk about how their business model is similar

to Costco.

Yes.

I don't want to overtude our own horn on this, but that has been a huge change this year

that we have never seen in previous years is once we do an episode, it sort of gets

in the water.

Yeah.

All right.

So let's talk about the episodes.

So we started the year actually with the NFL, which I think a lot about that episode still

to this day.

Absolutely.

And we did the Visa episode that we finished the year with was like the NFL CODA part two.

Then we did LVMH, which I feel like we have even more to talk about.

Nintendo, Lockheed, Porsche, Nike, Costco, NVIDIA part three, and then Visa.

And then our interviews this year, and we should talk about our kind of change in strategy

from what used to be specials last year to acquired interviews this year.

Daniel Ek, Dara Khasroshahi from Uber, Jensen from NVIDIA, and then Charlie.

But let's stick with the season first.

Of that, what was your favorite that we did this year?

Like Ben Gilbert's personal favorite episode?

I think the most interesting businesses or businesses that sort of tickle me are Costco

and Visa, because there's a purity to them.

Costco's is the purity of the way that the puzzle pieces fit together in a way that is

just artful.

It's almost like a discovery of laws of physics, the way that Sol Price and Jim Senegal and

the rest of the crew have sort of built that business over the years.

It's just beautiful.

It's like watching a ballet.

I think that we likened it to that in the episode.

Visa, on the other hand, is like the best operating leverage business.

I mean, they have over 50% net income margins.

They seem like they're locked in forever, for better or for worse, as we described on

the episode.

But I wouldn't ask someone like, what is the best at scale business model?

It's probably Visa to do this sort of least work for the most free cash flow.

You look at Costco, not that much free cash flow, crap ton of work.

It's almost like the complete opposite over in Visa land.

Total opposites.

But you asked me what my favorite episode was, and my favorite episode was LVMH.

Because it was so not on my radar at all, and not something that I valued at all.

And I scorned luxury before doing the research, and I didn't understand any of the history.

And now I feel like a whole new world has been opened to me of understanding brand and

value.

And now you have a whole closet in your house filled with Louis bags.

I do not.

I do not.

I only own one thing from one luxury brand in all my possessions.

And actually, that item is not made by LVMH.

Dude, you're just going to leave it at that?

Well, I want to reveal it on a 2024 episode we are planning.

Oh, okay.

All right.

You heard it here first, there will be at least one luxury episode in 2024.

Is that what you're telling me?

Yes, absolutely.

And I should say, I own probably a lot of things that are LVMH, but none that I would

consider luxury.

I don't mean like a Louis Vuitton suitcase.

I mean, like, I have some Woodinville whiskey in the closet that LVMH somehow over the last

few years came to own Woodinville whiskey.

I think there's a lot of those sorts of things that where I've bought a lot of things at

Duty Free Shoppers or, yeah.

You're talking about an item that is truly a luxury item, which is on a whole different

rubric.

It has a sense of place.

It has a sense of place.

It is not a premium item.

You could look at it through a certain lens and say, this is utterly ridiculous.

Correct.

And like, how on earth is this, you know, piece of raw material worth that?

Right.

I only own one of those things.

Yes.

Okay.

I'm curious.

Would you describe anything that you own that way?

Other than things that are obviously that way, other than some like Louis Vuitton suitcase

that you have or something?

I don't know what you have, but you've got some Rolexes.

Yeah, I have some watches, but honestly, those are mostly from my dad.

My dad is really into watches and a few of those sort of trickled to me over the years.

I was thinking about it in preparing for this.

I do not.

And maybe part of that is having a two-year-old, which is not good for the health of the 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.

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 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.

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 weed, 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 of the season.

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 talented writer.

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 that 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.

You 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 know, you go out there

and you have fun and you enjoy yourself and you let it flow.

And like 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.

You'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 and I

were a team.

And then the last piece, maybe it's the most important, but 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, it feels forced.

And we restarted it.

I can guarantee you that the quality of this episode is already better.

But yeah, that's the sort of negative self-talk that I start getting into.

Who are you?

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 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 in 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 is what we do.

And we 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 episodes.

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 important, 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?

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 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.

Well, David, before we move out of talking about our season episodes this year to the

interviews that we did, this is the perfect time to talk about one of our favorite companies,

Statsig.

Yes.

And man, it has been a big year for Statsig too.

When we had Vijay on ACQ2 earlier this year, they were already a pretty impressive kind

of series B stage startup with a killer team and early product market fit and all that.

But what's happened since and the scale that they're operating at now is pretty wild.

This is where we get lucky in being very choosy with our sponsors.

Sometimes these things happen to them while we're mid-flight.

Yes.

So, I asked them for some fun stats that we can share publicly with everyone to kind of

give folks a sense of scale of what happened in 2023 for Statsig.

So the first one, in the past month, Statsig shipped actual live product experiments to

over 1.2 billion end users around the world.

Now, that stat is not de-duplicated across apps, so there's some overlap in terms of

actual people.

But I mean, even if you cut that in half to approximate actual flesh and blood human people

out there, that's almost 10% of the world's population.

Crazy.

Okay, so that's one.

Two, Statsig now processes about 130 billion, that's with a B, events per day from its customers.

That is 1.7 million events every second.

So the infrastructure that Statsig now has to support these data volumes is pretty wild,

especially since the company was founded less than three years ago.

And it's not like they just execute these events.

They then take all the data from them, run huge statistical jobs across the whole corpus

to compute the experiment results that their customers are running for all these 1 billion

plus end users.

It is just wild.

At this rate, they're going to need to call up Andy Jassy and talk about some of those

AWS bills.

Yes.

And it's funny, I hadn't thought to make this comparison until right now.

So you said 1.7 million events a second.

If you look at the Visa numbers, I just pulled up my Visa notes, Visa does 8,600 transactions

per second.

So that's what, 200 times as much throughput at Statsig than at Visa?

So that's on the metrics side that they can share publicly.

On the customer side, Statsig added arguably almost all of the most important AI companies

in the world this year, including Microsoft, Atlassian, Anthropic, many, many others, along

of course with regular old companies like Notion and UiPath and Lattice and Brex and

friends of the show Rec Room, many, many others.

The team also kept shipping super fast.

At the start of the year, they had just one core product, which was hosted product experimentations.

Today they're a full-fledged product understanding platform.

They have dedicated feature flagging, warehouse native experimentation, and product analytics.

Yep.

We can't wait to see where they're going in 2024.

So if your team wants the best platform in the world for making data-driven product decisions,

you should reach out Statsig.com slash acquired.

And as always, there is special white glove onboarding for all acquired listeners.

Our huge thanks to Statsig.

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 a 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 too.

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 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

and they are incredible masters of their craft.

And we were kind of looking at what we were doing and be 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.

We tried all sorts of things.

We tried to do the ACQ sessions where we really like, you know, try 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, you know, release a LVMH style episode.

And then we have the opportunity to fly to Stockholm and interview Daniel Ek 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 ACQ 2 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 ACQ 2.

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.

ACQ 2 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 ACQ 2 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 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 Munker, 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 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 crystallized 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

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.

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 it is 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 REVA 128.

And that's not how other interviews are going to start.

And that was just obvious to us.

I think that was your idea to do it.

You were just like, of course, we have to start with the REVA 128.

Right.

You can't know a story as well as protagonist 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 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.

So you might be wondering, Charlie and Margot 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 1 episodes.

The sort of decay curves look similarly over time of people seeking them out in an evergreen

way.

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.

So we want to stay as precious as possible about them.

So what does that mean?

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.

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 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 the 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, 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 ACQ 2?

I should say ACQ 2 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 ACQ 2.

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 on the implications for the business model

and not slot filling.

And you can't predict when serendipitously you're going to 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 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 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.

Or Travis, if you can make 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, you know, anywhere at a posh restaurant around New York City.

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.

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 request list with a 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, uh, 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 yes, at some point you meet the protagonist and you're like, oh, right.

You're like a person in addition to being the main character of 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, uh, 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 interested in being any 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

it weighs a little bit heavy, at least on Charlie.

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 100%.

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 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 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, part two, where then it

caught NVIDIA's attention and the folks that 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, uh, Daniel was the quickest.

What did we say?

Like, oh, 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, uh, 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 of 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, 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 is 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 podcasters.

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 will 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 it 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 because it enabled

this open free podcasting medium that we have today, which is to our advantage.

Yes.

All right.

So David, that was the content this year.

And before we shift over to the state of the franchise here at acquired, we want to tell

you listeners about our friends at Crusoe.

Yes.

Crusoe, as you know, by now is a cloud infrastructure provider specifically built for AI

workloads and powered by clean energy.

So NVIDIA is one of their major partners and Crusoe's data centers are filled with all

the latest hopper GPUs linked up with InfiniBand and optimized for the best possible

performance for all of your workloads.

Yep.

Crusoe strategy is super straightforward.

Make the best AI cloud solution for customers using the best available GPU hardware on the

market and invest heavily in an optimized cloud software stack.

Yep.

And do it all using stranded energy that otherwise would cause environmental harm and

instead use that energy to lower the cost of running your AI workloads.

Yep.

As an AI company, Crusoe, like acquired has had a great 2023 with a pretty incredible

growth.

So to wrap up the year, they and we wanted to highlight one of their customers that started

building on Crusoe the beginning of this year, just as a baby startup and closed a $102

million series A.

Series A.

Series A from a whole bunch of great venture investors at Kleiner, Emergence, Lux and

NVIDIA itself called Together AI.

Yep.

Together AI is actually itself a cloud that allows customers to train and run their own

instances of open source models like Lama two and stable diffusion.

And their secret sauce is that they've enabled really fast and performant inference.

So once the models are fine tuned and trained to customers use cases, they can scale their

applications really fast and really big.

And guess what?

Part of that performance optimization under the hood comes from together building on Crusoe's

infrastructure.

It's a huge success.

Yep.

There are a bunch more stories like this coming.

So if you, your company or your portfolio companies could use lower cost and more performant

infrastructure for your AI workloads, check out Crusoe cloud.com slash acquired.

That's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes.

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 his 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 technology is 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 5 million people or 10 million people, 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 DeMuro 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, the stories we tell and learning from them, come on in.

Like we want as many people of those 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 Porsche 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.

Yes.

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 worried about growth.

It's that we want to keep this 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, OK, 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 size of our business, but also like the durability

and importance in the world of our business.

So as we 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.

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 we talk about it for a while.

And then the answer is always kind of like, Okay, you're sort of this 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 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.

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 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's 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 large Fortune 500 enterprises.

And that's such an amazing dance.

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 on ACQ too.

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.

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 angel checks into probably 10-ish of our sponsors

at this point and ACQ2 guests and companies we've gotten to know.

And we're finally going to be able to kind of do that at scale and do it together in

a way that we're not spending a lot of our time hearing early stage pitches or anything

like that.

But for companies that we already know well, David and I are going to join our investing

forces and invest more in those growth stage market-leading tech companies.

And as an early example of this, our great friends over at Vanta and their CEO, Christina,

have been very, very kind guinea pigs for us.

So Vanta has been a longtime partner of the show.

We've helped grow their business.

And last year, Kindergarten Ventures, the early stage angel list fund that I run with

my friend Nap, we did a $10 million SPV in Vanta's Series B.

And that was a great test of can we invest in a market-leading company and put meaningful

capital to work.

So that's a playbook that we're now going to be able to run more often.

More and together and specifically as a part of Acquired.

I just have this funny thing that's happened so much over the last two, three years, which

is a company is raising great up round from one of the best few investors in the world

in technology companies and says, would you like an allocation?

I can give you $1 or $2 or $10 million in this big growth round.

And I write some little angel check.

And that's been great.

But it's time to do more with that opportunity.

Yep.

This is all part of you coming full time and it's time.

It's time for all this to happen.

Yep.

It's time.

So that's sort of the state of what we're thinking about for investing, which we'll

put into action early next year and sort of the direction that our sponsorships have been

going to.

And we should say we're excited to welcome back for next season in the third slot.

Friends of the show, Pilot and Vanta are splitting slot number three.

So first three episodes are going to be Vanta.

Second three are going to be Pilot.

And I think we figured out a nice balance to be able to work with Fortune 500s as sort

of a scale platform and also to be in business, both investing and on a sponsorship basis

for their go to market with growth stage companies.

All of which we are super excited about.

But you and I are super clear with each other.

And we want to be super clear listeners with all of you, too.

The show is the most important thing.

Acquired is the show.

That is what you and I love doing.

That is why you and I are full time podcasters now.

And all of our effort is going to go into the show.

It's what we're most excited about.

But it's also if you just think about the mongerism, you know, you show me the behavior

and I'll show you the incentives.

It's literally the thing that makes it all work.

If you look at the acquired flywheel, it is produce unbelievably high quality deep dives

on these companies and try to create some of the deepest business content in the world

in a very, very approachable, fun, conversational way and share the learning journey that we're

on with everyone.

And like you said a minute ago, we're really clear with each other.

Like, I feel like that mantra comes up on our phone call once a week or something.

It's like the quality of the episodes is all that matters.

And, you know, we just spent 10 minutes talking about how we're evolving the franchise and

working with Fortune 500s and, you know, how we're going to be doing more investing

together and all this stuff.

The only thing that matters that drives all of it is quality of episodes.

Yes.

So on that front, we've got some fun stuff planned 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.

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, like industry aside, financials aside, you know, 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 like some new fascinating multi-generation business

that you'd never expect could have thrived through all these times that they have and

have five unique, amazing vignettes to tell through their whole history to today.

Like, 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 like, we look around the corner and there's a whole new category of companies to cover.

Yep.

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 or three weeks ago for open

AI 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

N of 1 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 is going public, cover Uber.

Even three years ago, Airbnb is going public, cover Airbnb.

And there was an acquired way to do it, where most of the episode could actually focus on

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.

I feel super self-conscious that we interviewed Sam Bankman Freed, and we're not investigative

journalists.

We weren't going to spend the time 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 in 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 investigative journalism, and frankly, 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 of 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 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.

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 generally 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 Web3

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 mania's game.

And as much as I want to take as a kind personal compliment, all the things you're saying and

apply it 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.

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.

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 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 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?

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 of 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 like, does anyone have the story right on what happened in the OpenAI boardroom right

now?

I don't think so.

I don't think so either.

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 arms

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 in analyzing the present.

Yes.

And just having this other thing be my obsession has allowed me to have a little more arms

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.

A hundred percent.

Yes.

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 be 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.

We're 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.

Okay.

What's next on the docket?

Well, keeping on this topic of audience Q and a, a couple of 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.

Like 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, great human.

I mean, truly, I massively changed the way that I personally invest 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.

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 it 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, 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 everything you 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.

Then 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 can 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.

Zojirushi is the brand.

It's a Japanese company.

Everybody in Japan has one of these things.

Awesome.

Mine might be a pair of Nike shoes.

Living in Seattle, it rains all winter, or at least it's wet all winter.

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.

The Gore-Tex is so good.

It makes winter running possible and they even have a few of the colorways that are

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.

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, Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

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 is 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, 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.

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 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?

Could be an investment of any type.

Cultivating the relationship with my wife, hands down, 100%.

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 100% Acquired.

The fact that I wander around all day listening to audiobooks, 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 absurd 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.

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 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?

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 wow.

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.

One day, yeah.

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 I'm pretty dialed at this point on what's right for me.

And 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, you're on hour 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 timeframe, 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 months ago, which those guys have just built such a great show.

I mean, they're teachers.

They've been teachers for years.

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 to college students was both the following your own path has never

been more rewarding in this world that we live in and never 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.

I totally go to Denny's.

Yes.

Always go to Denny's.

Always go to Denny's.

And they can't just be smart.

They have to be like 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 of them.

All right.

In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to?

Distractions, invitations, etc.

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 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.

Now I have eight of those in my inbox.

I want to at least say I don't have the bandwidth for this right now.

But 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, yeah.

And you do it to me sometimes.

So I sort of know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it.

But 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.

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 I assume that folks that I reach out to have 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 there's nobody more important to me than my daughter.

Nobody.

My wife and you.

Okay, outside that circle, 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 force 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 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.