Chase Center + Summer Update (Audio)

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   Hello, Acquired listeners, and happy summer, David.

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:04

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

3. BGBen Gilbert0:08

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

4. DRDavid Rosenthal0:12

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

5. BGBen Gilbert0:17

   [laughing]

6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:17

   -can possibly be.

7. BGBen Gilbert0:20

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

8. DRDavid Rosenthal0:23

   Yep.

9. BGBen Gilbert0:24

   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?

10. DRDavid Rosenthal0:47

    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.

11. BGBen Gilbert1:20

    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.

12. DRDavid Rosenthal2:04

    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.

13. BGBen Gilbert2:21

    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.

14. DRDavid Rosenthal2:44

    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.

15. BGBen Gilbert3:21

    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.

16. DRDavid Rosenthal3:34

    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.

17. BGBen Gilbert3:55

    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.

18. DRDavid Rosenthal4:43

    That is a mind-blowing sentence. [chuckles] That is not something that we ever, ever thought-

19. BGBen Gilbert4:48

    No

20. DRDavid Rosenthal4:49

    ... would even be remotely within the realm of possibility.

21. BGBen Gilbert4:52

    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.

22. DRDavid Rosenthal5:52

    It was a major event.

23. BGBen Gilbert5:53

    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.

24. DRDavid Rosenthal6:07

    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.

25. BGBen Gilbert6:29

    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]

26. DRDavid Rosenthal7:42

    I was gonna say the same thing. Yeah.

27. BGBen Gilbert7:43

    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.

28. DRDavid Rosenthal7:55

    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.

29. BGBen Gilbert8:26

    Right.

30. DRDavid Rosenthal8:27

    But this proved us wrong. [chuckles]

Episode duration: 21:52