SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours)

1. DRDavid Rosenthal0:00

   [chuckles] We keep biting off a lot in these episodes. [chuckles]

2. BGBen Gilbert0:03

   I mean, you're telling the history of modern Japan.

3. DRDavid Rosenthal0:04

   We need to do a, like, two-year-old company. We need another FTX soon. [chuckles]

4. BGBen Gilbert0:08

   Where, like, literally enough days haven't passed for us to make the episode long. [upbeat music]

5. DRDavid Rosenthal0:14

   Yeah. [chuckles] Exactly.

6. SPSpeaker0:15

   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?

7. BGBen Gilbert0:32

   Welcome to season ten, episode three of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal0:47

   And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

9. BGBen Gilbert0:52

   And we are your hosts. Listeners, today, we are telling the story of the company that Steve Jobs idolized and modeled Apple Computer after, the Sony Corporation.

10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:03

    Literally modeled himself after. [chuckles]

11. BGBen Gilbert1:06

    [chuckles]

12. DRDavid Rosenthal1:06

    You know the story, right, of the black turtlenecks and the Sony connection?

13. BGBen Gilbert1:10

    Enlighten us.

14. DRDavid Rosenthal1:11

    [chuckles] Well, so the story goes that Steve idolized Sony, went over to visit, and saw that there was a uniform that Sony employees had, and he was like: "That's a great idea! I want Apple to have a uniform. Where did you get that [chuckles] uniform?" And so he brought it back. He, like, made a proposal to Apple, and people were like, "NFW." [chuckles]

15. BGBen Gilbert1:36

    And didn't the Sony employees have uniforms because, like, clothing was scarce after World War II?

16. DRDavid Rosenthal1:41

    [chuckles] Yeah, I think that was part of the origin. So Steve decided, "Okay, if Apple can't have a uniform, I'm gonna have a uniform." And so he went to Issey Miyake, the famous Japanese designer, who had made the Sony uniform, and got him to make him a hundred black turtlenecks.

17. BGBen Gilbert1:57

    Amazing. There's so much about our generation that we remember from Sony growing up: the Trinitron TVs, DiscMans with advanced CD skip protection, thirty seconds worth. You know, even more recently, the excellent professional line of cameras that Sony makes, and actually, David and I are both recording on right now.

18. DRDavid Rosenthal2:17

    As well as Sony headphones right now, right?

19. BGBen Gilbert2:19

    That's right.

20. DRDavid Rosenthal2:19

    Yeah.

21. BGBen Gilbert2:20

    But Sony goes so much deeper than that, and also so much more broad than that today, expanding into a, uh, very special type of conglomerate. David, did you know that they own a division that exclusively makes a tiny dog robot?

22. DRDavid Rosenthal2:35

    [chuckles] I did know that.

23. BGBen Gilbert2:37

    [chuckles]

24. DRDavid Rosenthal2:37

    Do they still make that thing?

25. BGBen Gilbert2:39

    Yeah, they do.

26. DRDavid Rosenthal2:40

    You might say it's the Tesla bot of old, the precursor.

27. BGBen Gilbert2:43

    You might say that, yes. They are the second largest Japanese company by market cap, behind only Toyota. They're the largest video game console company and the largest video game publisher in the world. They're the largest music publisher and the second largest record label, which, for those of you who listened to the T-Swift episode, you now know the difference. And they have the third largest Hollywood film studio on top of all of that. So we have a wild story going all the way from World War II to Spider-Man to tell you here today. But first, we wanna introduce you to our presenting sponsor, Vanta, the leader in automated security and compliance. Now, as you know from the T-Swift episode, we are huge fans of Vanta and their approach to the whole compliance process: SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and more. And we've got CEO and co-founder Christina Cacioppo back with us today. Well, Christina, you've shared with us how SOC 2 came to be. What is the traditional way that people go about getting a SOC 2 certification, and how is Vanta different?

28. SPSpeaker3:49

    Pre-Vanta, step one was, again, go read the SOC 2, uh, standard, see the, like, "We solemnly swear we protect data in a good way." Uh, figure out what that means for your company. Go and do that. Try to make sure that you've really done that. Call in an auditor who's gonna come in and ask and say: "Hey, you said you solemnly swore this. Now prove it to me." And you might say: "How do you prove this?" And you're like, "Ah, well, you know, show me that you've encrypted all your, you know, data at rest in AWS, that you use SSL on your websites, and it's up to date," you know, this, that, and the other. "Show me that by logging into these systems and taking screenshots. Mail them to me." You know, you'll mail this person hundreds of screenshots. They will say: "Thank you so much," uh, you know, go back to their office or their home office, look at all the screenshots, and, you know, write this up into, like, a seventy-page report that roughly says, you know, "We went to the company and saw that they have these practices and confirmed they're in place, and so you can trust them." That's really how it works. [chuckles] It's always surprising when you explain that to people in software. These are not things that, you know, founders enjoy doing or honestly can, can justify prioritizing. Um, I think this is just part of why startups didn't get SOC 2s until a few years ago. So we looked at that as kind of engineer product managers, and we're like: "Well, that seems inefficient." [chuckles] Like, I could build you some tools for that. And if you wanna think about the security of a company or whether they're trustworthy, looking at screenshots from last Tuesday is probably reasonable for last Tuesday, but, you know, it doesn't tell you anything about today or tomorrow or next month. So what we did with Vanta was break down the standard, figure out, you know, a... we call it sane default of a definition. Then we connect with the tools the company uses, so AWS, G Suite, GitHub, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, pull configuration information out, so we can be like: "Are you actually encrypting, you know, data at rest?" That's helpful to the company 'cause they can see how far along they are, what they're doing. It's helpful to the auditor because they, they can see all of that, too, and in much higher fidelity than they got historically, and so it's easier and faster for them to write that seventy-page report, um, and give it to the company to accelerate the company's sales.

29. BGBen Gilbert6:05

    ... Our thanks to Vanta, the leader in automated security and compliance software. If you are looking to join Vanta's two thousand plus customers to get compliance certified in weeks instead of months, you can click the link in the show notes or go to vanta.com/acquired for a ten percent discount.

30. DRDavid Rosenthal6:22

    Such a great company story, Vanta.

Episode duration: 3:04:05