EVERY SPOKEN WORD
20 min read · 3,987 words- 0:00 – 0:24
Summer check-in and the six-week episode pause to prep a mega live show
- BGBen Gilbert
Hello, Acquired listeners, and happy summer, David.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Happy summer indeed! I feel like a kid let out of school.
- BGBen Gilbert
I know. You just got back from Hawaii. Are you feeling refreshed?
- DRDavid Rosenthal
I am feeling as refreshed and relaxed as the father of a three-month-old and three-year-old-
- BGBen Gilbert
[laughing]
- DRDavid Rosenthal
-can possibly be.
- BGBen Gilbert
Yeah, I bet. We'll get to that in carve-outs, I'm sure.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Yep.
- 0:24 – 1:20
Chase Center live show announcement: venue, partner, and Mark Zuckerberg on stage
- BGBen Gilbert
Listeners, we, after 10 years straight of never taking any time off of Acquired, we're doing, like, six weeks off over the summer, and it turns out that doesn't actually mean six weeks off of work for you and I, David. It means six weeks of not making an episode, because we are putting all of our energy and focus into September 10th at the Chase Center. David, what are we doing?
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Hell yeah! Chase Center live show in partnership with our good friends at J.P. Morgan Payments. This is gonna be, as many of you have already heard, the biggest thing that we have ever done. This is where the Warriors play. It's the brand-new arena in the middle of downtown San Francisco, and Mark Zuckerberg is gonna be there with us on stage. He's only one of the acts that we are planning. We've been very, very busy. We're pulling out all the stops. It's gonna be an amazing event.
- 1:20 – 2:04
How to attend: tickets, URL, and the community ‘Omaha for tech’ vision
- BGBen Gilbert
Yeah, we'll have some fun surprises for everyone that we're not planning to share in advance. So if you're free September 10th, or if you can make yourselves free, be in San Francisco. It's funny, we announced many months ago on the show, "Save the date," but then we actually haven't had an episode since tickets have been on sale. And so despite the fact that we emailed a lot of you, and we tweeted, and we put it in the Slack, David and I were on the phone yesterday, and we were like: Huh, we should probably let people who just listen to the podcast and don't follow Acquired anywhere else know about it, too. So acquired.fm/sf. We really hope to see you there. Our goal is really just to feel like the biggest celebration and community of like-minded listeners possible, almost like the Omaha for tech or Omaha on the West Coast.
- 2:04 – 2:44
Listener-led meetups and surrounding events: make your own plans
- DRDavid Rosenthal
It's gonna be great. Listeners are organizing a bunch of events around the show itself in the days before and after. It's gonna be really kinda like the Omaha weekend. So if you wanna stay up-to-date on all of that, look for announcements in the Slack in the coming weeks.
- BGBen Gilbert
Yep, and feel free to plan your own, too. At the end of the day, even before announcing this on the podcast here, there are several thousand of you who have bought tickets and are coming, and so no one venue, except for the Chase Center, is gonna hold us all anyway. So if you're coming and you wanna plan dinners or happy hours or company meetups or anything, please just feel free to take the initiative. Do that, post in Slack. We'd love for it to happen.
- 2:44 – 3:21
Ticket pricing and accessibility: $100 floor, $50 everywhere else (fees included)
- DRDavid Rosenthal
The other thing we should say here, there's two ticket prices, all-in price. It's $100 for floor seats, which are almost gone at this point in time, and $50 for everywhere else in the arena. That's it. That's all in. That includes Ticketmaster fees. We're pretty sure this is the cheapest event that has ever been put on- [chuckles] -ticket price-wise at the Chase Center. Definitely not the cheapest event production budget-wise, but we're really proud of that. We want this to be open and available and accessible to everybody. We want as many of you there as can make it. This is, like, a party that we wanna throw for everyone.
- 3:21 – 3:55
Behind the scenes: whirlwind months (new baby + WSJ feature)
- BGBen Gilbert
Yep. Well, David, now that we have a few minutes here, and we're not mid-episode, should we reflect on the last few months in Acquired land? We thought listeners would be interested in a little bit of a peek behind the scenes.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Uh, it's been a hell of a ride the last couple months, Ben. [laughing] I don't think I've even, really till leaving for Hawaii, whatever it was, ten days ago, had a chance to stop and reflect on this. My second daughter was born at the end of April, and then the Wall Street Journal article about us came out, I think, like, two weeks later, so it's just been a whirlwind.
- 3:55 – 6:07
Wall Street Journal impact: #1 on Apple & Spotify and massive subscriber growth
- BGBen Gilbert
Yeah, it's funny. It's been one of these things... People have asked: What is the impact on the Wall Street Journal profile? And it's hard to disambiguate the two things that happened concurrently. That piece, which is the best encapsulation of what Acquired is, that has ever been published. There's sort of been two canonical pieces. David Lidsky's wonderful piece in Fast Company last year, following the production of the Nike episode, really dives into the making of an episode and what that is all about. And this one is kind of like, what is Acquired today, and how did this thing come to be? And what happened [chuckles] is, when that article came out, Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
That is a mind-blowing sentence. [chuckles] That is not something that we ever, ever thought-
- BGBen Gilbert
No
- DRDavid Rosenthal
... would even be remotely within the realm of possibility.
- BGBen Gilbert
No, and what that led to is number one has staying power. Because if anybody opens up Apple Podcasts right now and hit the Browse tab, you can very clearly see the number one podcast is the one centered on your screen that you're curious about checking out. So all of the goodness that came from the WSJ piece was then massively amplified over the course of weeks and months because we just stayed the number one podcast in this self-fulfilling prophecy way across both giant podcasting platforms. So to just add some numbers to that, because we've gotten the question so many times, we were thinking, "We should just talk about it on air," three hundred and seventeen thousand new subscribers or followers, depending on whether you're using Apple or Spotify's parlance, have followed the show since the Wall Street Journal piece went live. And for context, in January, coming into the year, we estimated our listener base was about five hundred thousand people.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
It was a major event.
- BGBen Gilbert
Yes. And so, David, I had always sort of been of this belief, especially when I'm working with startups, like, don't count on a single press article being trajectory-changing for you.... That's generally true, except when it isn't.
- 6:07 – 8:29
Why this press moment worked: the right audience and breaking assumptions
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Yeah. [chuckles] Like all the companies we cover on the show, it's the exceptions that prove the rule here. But it was a wonderful piece. Ben Cohen, who wrote it at the Journal, is an excellent journalist. I have the utmost respect for him. He writes the Science of Success column at the Journal that this was part of. It was just one of those lightning-in-a-bottle moments. I don't know how to describe it otherwise.
- BGBen Gilbert
Yeah. So part of this is a welcome to all of you who are new listeners to the show. You know, David and I have been doing this for close to ten years now. The audience has grown slowly, and it doubled organically every year for the first nine years. And one way to think about that, because we don't really do paid marketing, what that means is the whole audience base, on average, told one friend, who stuck around and listened to the show every year. So in some sense, that's almost nothing to write home about, but on the other hand, it actually just kept happening. And the cool thing is, it meant that it built the audience base that we really wanted, 'cause everyone personally recommended it to a friend rather than having an explosive growth moment. And so that's why the Slack is such a wonderful and civil place. You know, it's not like this community that sort of showed up out of nowhere. It's this community that's been slowly building organically by inviting other people who they know in from the real world over time. And then if I could say, what would be the single best growth event if we were gonna have a outsized external force that brought a bunch of audience? The Wall Street Journal is the exact right audience to join the rest of you. [chuckles]
- DRDavid Rosenthal
I was gonna say the same thing. Yeah.
- BGBen Gilbert
WSJ subscribers are among the most well-educated, thoughtful businesspeople in the world, who love nerding out on this stuff. We're delighted to have anybody here who just found out because you read the WSJ.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Totally. The other thing that was just so surprising about this... Hell, I used to work at The Wall Street Journal a long, long time ago, briefly, early in my career, so I identify with it deeply and love the publication and was so glad they were gonna cover us. But I at least have always believed that people aren't gonna discover podcasts by reading about a podcast or in another medium. If you read about something, you're probably not gonna go open up your phone and your podcast player and hit subscribe, or you're in some other modality.
- BGBen Gilbert
Right.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
But this proved us wrong. [chuckles]
- 8:29 – 10:08
A growth philosophy lesson from their own show: outliers, idiosyncrasy, and unpredictability
- BGBen Gilbert
The dirty secret behind Acquired is every episode is about the exception. Every company we talk about is the most extreme outlier. I often find myself wondering, even though we have this playbook and these lessons learned, is the real playbook that you can't learn any lessons because they're such extreme outliers? You know, these big tech companies, they're all monopolies or near monopolies in the largest and most profitable markets in the world. Well, like, no one else's business is that, and so the lesson you can draw from a cash gusher that is extremely difficult to disrupt, eh, some of the things you can apply to building your business, but it's much more interesting, which is, of course, why we do the history and facts, to go look at them in their first few years of life to understand how they catapulted to the position, rather than trying to learn something about the companies as you perceive them today.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
It feels like a visceral manifestation to you and me of this takeaway from all of our episodes. Every great success story is idiosyncratic. [chuckles]
- BGBen Gilbert
Yes.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
You can't plan this, and they all are their own journeys. It's why we can make a four or five-hour episode about all these different companies, and it's not just, "Well, they did the same thing that the other companies did."
- BGBen Gilbert
Yeah. Part of this takeaway for me is it's sort of unclear if and what would ever be a large, outsized growth event. Like, when you look at our chart, it's perfectly smooth for almost a decade until there's this one point where you can see, whoa, something clearly happened, and numbers jumped up from May to now. And I don't know that you can ever really plan for those. So a PR person emailed me: "How did you pitch that piece to the Journal?" And I was just laughing, like-
- DRDavid Rosenthal
We didn't. Yeah. [chuckles]
- 10:08 – 11:13
Group ticket buys and company offsites: how to coordinate
- BGBen Gilbert
There's no way you could possibly anticipate something like this happening and then execute a PR strategy to try to make it happen. Maybe other people know differently, but I've never once seen that be the way that things like this happen. Well, let's see. Things we wanted to do today, chat about the arena show. Oh, one other note on that, a few people have emailed us and said, "My whole company is coming." We even had a parent email us and say, "My thirteen-year-old wants to have his birthday party by bringing all of his friends to the live show," which is the coolest thing ever.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Coolest thing ever.
- BGBen Gilbert
And crazy, that's real. If you're interested in something like that, too, email us hello@acquired.fm for big group ticket buys, and there's a special office that we can hook you up with that helps deal with that.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Yeah, we've had a few companies get in touch with us and say, either they're remote-first companies or they're located somewhere else, and like, "Oh, we're gonna do our fall offsite as a company in San Francisco for the live show," which is super cool. So yes, if you wanna do anything like that, hello@acquired.fm. We'll make it happen. We'd love to have you here.
- 11:13 – 12:44
Show structure update: main feed stays the deep-dive format; interviews move to ACQ2
- BGBen Gilbert
Yep. The other thing that we wanted to do, we've got one more sort of announcement on show structure and then carve-outs. So the show structure thing is, as you may have guessed or observed, the thing that makes Acquired episodes unique is the format of David and I sitting down, doing the hundreds of hours of research, coming together with separate prepared minds, with separate understandings of the history, and with separate beliefs about what made this business work, and then doing our four-hour format to tell the story and unpack why the business worked. And that's very different than an interview show, where you have a great guest on, where everybody knows their name, and you interview them, and then you say, "So long, folks," and you sign off.... There are many of those shows, and there are many excellent, excellent of those shows. Occasionally, we do have the opportunity to interview someone like Jensen, like Charlie, like Dara from Uber, where we have covered the business in the past, or perhaps someone like Howard Schultz is willing to spend the five, six hours with us that it takes to do our standard format with them present. But what we've basically done is we've decided that the main show, with few exceptions, is for doing our core four-hour format of David and I together. Occasionally, we will follow that up with an interview with the protagonist after we've had a chance to really do our thing, but that kind of leaves us with a whole bunch of opportunity
- 12:44 – 13:34
What’s coming on ACQ2: semis deep dive, Joe Montana, and more CEOs
- BGBen Gilbert
to do great interviews, but just that are not quite Acquired. And so ACQ2 has really become the place where we're doing all of that now. And so if you like interviews like the one we did with the Synopsys founder and the Synopsys CEO to kind of do a deep dive on the state of semis today, or the next one we have coming out is an interview with Joe Montana, who managed to shift from being one of the best football players of all time, you know, many times Super Bowl MVP.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
To a really excellent venture capitalist. [chuckles]
- BGBen Gilbert
To an exceptional investor, yes!
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Yeah.
- BGBen Gilbert
And we've got several other public company CEOs lined up that we're gonna be doing on ACQ2 soon. So while David and I are taking some time to breathe, prep for the arena show, if you're feeling like you wanna experience some more Acquired, and you've already gone through the back catalogue, ACQ2 is the place to tune in for those as they come out.
- 13:34 – 17:33
Carve-outs: parent edition (running stroller) and Hawaii family vacation hack
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Indeed. All right, to bring us home here for our little summer session, carve-outs.
- BGBen Gilbert
Carve-outs.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Ben, we were about to hit record, and you stopped, and you said, "Wait a minute, I gotta walk around my house." I am so excited to hear what you came back to us with.
- BGBen Gilbert
All right, so we may have to start doing this on the show, or we may hear a revolt if we start doing this, I don't know. Now that you and I both have small children, there's, like, a whole second category of goods that are parent-related. [chuckles]
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Baby carve-outs. Yeah, parent carve-outs.
- BGBen Gilbert
So I'll do my parent carve-out first. On the holiday special, I gave two stroller recommendations, so in keeping with tradition, I'm doing a third stroller recommendation.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
[laughing]
- BGBen Gilbert
My Father's Day gift-
- DRDavid Rosenthal
That is the most Ben Gilbert thing ever. I love it. Wait, was your Father's Day gift a stroller?
- BGBen Gilbert
It was.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
[laughing]
- BGBen Gilbert
It was a running stroller-
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Yes.
- BGBen Gilbert
... 'cause it kind of perfectly aligned with my son turning six months old, which is when it's reasonably safe for them to be in a running stroller, and I will tell you, he loves it. Running through the park near our house, the trees whizzing by, whether it's wake time or nap time, it's great. I get the miles in. I've been ramping up my running again, which is, you know, now that I have a nine-month-old, a thing you can kind of start doing again. But the Thule or Thule, I don't exactly know how to pronounce it.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
I never know how to pronounce it, yeah.
- BGBen Gilbert
Thule? I'm gonna mess it up with my American, but I think it's colloquially referred to in America as Thule.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
T-H-U-L-E is the brand, right?
- BGBen Gilbert
Yes. The Urban Glide 3 is excellent, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking about running with a small child.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
It's funny, I never got into the running stroller, running with children thing. I think I would really enjoy it, but it's so hilly here in San Francisco.
- BGBen Gilbert
Yeah, I can't imagine pushing that thing up, you know?
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Yeah, I've been more in carrier mode and then doing hikes with the baby in the carrier, which I'm now back in that world with baby number two here. Well, okay, great. We' trade off. You did your parent carve-out. I'm gonna do my parent carve-out, then I'll kick it back to you. So mine actually is what you started the show off with, was my time in Hawaii. So our second daughter just turned three months old. We wanted to do a family vacation while we're having this little Acquired hiatus and before Jenny goes back to work, and we were thinking, "What could we possibly do with, like, a three-year-old and a three-month-old in tow that is gonna be the least bit enjoyable or relaxing as a family vacation?" [chuckles]
- BGBen Gilbert
The least bit.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
And we scoured the Earth, and the best idea that we came up with was the Disney resort in Hawaii, and it was awesome. Let me tell you, this place, it's called Aulani. It was perfect. So it is not the nicest resort. It is not a Disney park. There's no, like, rides or stuff. You know, as far as Disney goes, it's actually fairly light touch, so it's not the best Disney experience. It's not the prettiest beach.
- BGBen Gilbert
Boy, you are really selling it.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
It is not spiky in any category, but the Venn diagram of needs of, like, you have a young family, you are a harried parent, you want something like a Hawaii vacation, where you can have some hope of getting a little bit of relaxation in, and everyone will have a good enough time. Like, man, it nails the center of that Venn diagram. It was truly, like, the very best trip we could have done at this stage in our lives. [chuckles]
- BGBen Gilbert
That is great to know.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Highly, highly recommend for anybody in the same life phase. Although there were people of families of all phases there. There weren't many non-families there, I will say, but there were big family reunions happening. There were parents with pre-teens. There were parents with teens. I was, like, a little surprised by that, but, I mean, hey, who doesn't love Disney, and who doesn't love Hawaii? Yeah, I highly, highly, highly recommend it, especially with young children.
- 17:33 – 20:26
Carve-outs: sunglasses find, Ray-Ban Meta nod, and Netflix NFL docuseries
- BGBen Gilbert
All right, great to know. All right, my adult carve-out [chuckles] I don't know, that's what- [laughing] My, uh, carve-out that anyone can appreciate is a sunglasses brand called Meller, M-E-L-L-E-R. When I was at my buddy's wedding in Crete earlier this summer, I was out walking around the shops, and I forgot my sunglasses 'cause I left super early in the morning, and I just grabbed these 'cause they were at the store, and I was like: Oh, those look pretty cool. They are the highest quality lenses that I have ever had in a pair of sunglasses, and maybe it's 'cause I just always buy cheap, throwaway sunglasses 'cause I lose them all the time, but fifty-nine bucks-... polarized. It's the type of lens where you put them on, and you can see things that are further away clearer. Normally, when you put some form of glass in front of your eye, it-
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Distorts a little bit, yeah.
- BGBen Gilbert
Right. It's not gonna get any better than your own clear eyesight, but I noticed that I put these on, and I can suddenly see better than I can with my own plain eyes, so-
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Wow!
- BGBen Gilbert
I'm, like, now a loyalist. Meller, M-E-L-L-E-R sunglasses.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Is it a EssilorLuxottica brand, or is it an indie?
- BGBen Gilbert
That's a great question. I mean, my general answer when anyone asks, "Is that EssilorLuxottica?" would be, "Yes, of course it is," just because it's the default answer for all the brands you know.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
It's a safe bet. Yeah.
- BGBen Gilbert
You know, Ray-Bans and Oakleys and everything, but I don't think so.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Well, speaking of, I am intentionally wearing my Ray-Ban Metas here to prepare.
- BGBen Gilbert
I see you are.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
I especially enjoyed these in Hawaii. They were great.
- BGBen Gilbert
Yeah, they look great. But no, I don't think, unless my quick Google was wrong, that I think Meller is not EssilorLuxottica.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Independent. Wow! Wow. The question is, for how long? Well, to bring it home on our summer carve-out theme, my carve-outs for everyone are... It's summertime, which means, sadly, no NFL. But with the little baby, I finally got around to watching the Netflix Quarterback series from last year and then the new Receiver series. They're so good. I love them both. The Quarterback series especially, there's no other position in sports, or at least sports that I am familiar with, that are, like, large team sports where so much of the game hinges on that one person. Just following, like, the amount of mental work that goes into being an elite NFL quarterback, and then just the pressure that these guys are under is so immense. Receiver was funny, too. Like, I enjoyed Receiver almost equally as much, but it's so funny to watch the difference between the preparation and the pressure that the quarterbacks are under versus what the receivers are doing. [chuckles] Very, very different stakes, although they are obviously the receiving end of what the quarterbacks are throwing.
- 20:26 – 21:52
Wrap: final push for tickets, Slack meetups, and thanks to J.P. Morgan Payments
- BGBen Gilbert
All right, on my list. Well, with that, listeners, thank you for tuning in to our Ben and David randomly hop on a call, and you get to listen summer [chuckles] mini episode here. We really hope to see you September 10th in San Francisco. We're gonna have a blast. Mark Zuckerberg and other special guests will be there. And yeah, feel free to organize any meetups, lunches, dinners, anything you'd like in the Acquired Slack, acquired.fm/slack, and tickets are available now at acquired.fm/sf. A huge thank you to our friends at J.P. Morgan Payments for just pulling out all the stops. Their team is so awesome. It's like the Acquired team has tripled or quadrupled in size for a few months here while we all do this together. It really does feel like we are one.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
Yeah, it's not just that their name is on the building, which it is, but they are performing a heroic amount of work and effort to make this hopefully the best live event that you've ever been to, and we cannot wait.
- BGBen Gilbert
Yep. All right, with that, listeners, thank you, and we'll see you next time.
- DRDavid Rosenthal
We'll see you in September.
- SPSpeaker
Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Huh. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 21:52
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Transcript of episode 1444rkhQwVc
