Taylor Swift (Acquired’s Version)

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   You're looking very good in that scarf, sir.

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:02

   Ah, as are you, fine sir.

3. BGBen Gilbert0:05

   Had to bust out the red scarf.

4. SPSpeaker0:07

   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?

5. BGBen Gilbert0:24

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

6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:41

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

7. BGBen Gilbert0:47

   And we are your hosts. She is Billboard's Woman of the Decade. She was the first woman to ever win the coveted Album of the Year Grammy twice, and now she's won it a third time. She was the highest paid celebrity in the world in twenty nineteen, more than Kanye, LeBron James, Roger Federer, or even Beyonce. Her fan base is so passionate, and she's accumulated so much power, that she is leveraging it to reorganize the power dynamics of the music industry in front of our very eyes, taking it back for artists and, of course, standing up for women everywhere. You knew her when she was fifteen, twenty-two, and now she's accomplished all of this at the still unbelievably young age of thirty-two.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal1:33

   That was, that was good. I, I re- I, I like that. I like that. [laughing]

9. BGBen Gilbert1:38

   You probably know her all too well. She's maniacal-

10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:41

    Oh, come on! Okay, okay. [laughing]

11. BGBen Gilbert1:44

    You could even say she's fearless, a mad woman-

12. DRDavid Rosenthal1:47

    Ah.

13. BGBen Gilbert1:48

    Or, David, or that she'll never go out of style. Today-

14. DRDavid Rosenthal1:53

    That-

15. BGBen Gilbert1:53

    Listeners

16. DRDavid Rosenthal1:53

    ... is true. [laughing]

17. BGBen Gilbert1:55

    We are telling the story of the business of Taylor Swift.

18. DRDavid Rosenthal1:59

    I have a fun, uh, little thing I wanted to do. I thought we should guess each other's favorite TSwift album.

19. BGBen Gilbert2:05

    Ooh! Let's see. I think yours used to be 1989, and now it's Reputation.

20. DRDavid Rosenthal2:16

    Ooh. Oh, man, re- oh, Reputation is so good. I did not like it at all before starting the research for this, and now I am such a fan. Uh, but no, 1989 is my number two. My number one is Fearless.

21. BGBen Gilbert2:30

    Fearless! An uncommon pick, my friend.

22. DRDavid Rosenthal2:32

    I know. I love it. I just love it. So good, and the song Fearless, so good.

23. BGBen Gilbert2:38

    All right, what's mine?

24. DRDavid Rosenthal2:39

    I think yours is 1989.

25. BGBen Gilbert2:41

    Mine was 1989, and I am an Ever- or a, uh, Folklore fan now.

26. DRDavid Rosenthal2:45

    Oh! Oh, and Folklore over Evermore.

27. BGBen Gilbert2:47

    You can't put Bon Iver on an album with Taylor Swift and expect me not to just immediately like the whole album the best. All right, listeners, we've got a killer story to tell you today, but first, we want to introduce you to our brand-new presenting sponsor, Vanta, the leader in automated security compliance. Vanta brings a fascinating approach to the whole compliance process, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and more. We have a guest with us today to tell us more about the company, the CEO and co-founder, Christina Cacioppo. We are insanely excited to be working with you and all of Vanta. I've been following your work across everything you've done in your career for a decade, so this is, uh, this is pretty special for us.

28. SPSpeaker3:29

    Thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to, uh, be on Acquired. I've been listening for probably four or five years at this point.

29. BGBen Gilbert3:36

    Well, to kick us off here in episode one, Vanta today provides the best solution in the market to get SOC 2 certified and, and stay that way. I know there's actually a fascinating history to SOC 2 and why it exists. Can you share that with listeners?

30. SPSpeaker3:50

    For sure. So, uh, it started in... Or there's a handful of, you know, different versions of SOC 2 before we know what it is now, different acronyms, but it started probably ten, fifteen years ago, um, with something called SOC 1, actually, with the accountants, and that was just a financial auditing standard. Uh, just trying to look at, do companies have the correct financial controls in place to rules around how they, how they handle financial matters in their company, and then what gets audited annually? Um, accountants were doing that. I think it was a good business. Uh, around that same time, right, businesses just started to digitize, come online, um, more in our parlance, software started eating more and more of the world. Uh, and so I think the accountants saw this, uh, you know, tremendous opportunity for, for sort of market expansion. Um, and so they, they started something called SOC 2, uh, which sort of like Java, JavaScript, like, these things aren't really that related, but what it is at a high level is just assurance that the business takes care of customer data well. And we just have seen this be, you know, kind of more and more important as software has eaten the world, as we've seen more data breaches of big companies, and sort of everyone is more aware of how much data there is about all of us on the internet. And so over the last five years, really the last two years, has just really taken off as, you know, there's more B2B SaaS. Large companies are buying software from smaller companies but want assurances around data security, and so it just, again, kind of snowballed. Interesting thing is this isn't a law. It's run by a professional association, the American Institute of CPAs. They make the standard. They update it every few years. They train their members, who are CPAs, in how to administer it. It's kind of this, you know, fascinating and a path-dependent thing, where you have accountants that are looking at financial data, and, and then over time, you know, again, saw, saw an opportunity to leverage their skills in a different area. And, and, you know, here we are in twenty twenty-one, twenty twenty-two, looking at SOC 2.

Episode duration: 2:39:18