The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   All right, two episodes in a row from a hotel room. Let's do it.

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:04

   [chuckles] Let's do it.

3. BGBen Gilbert0:05

   [laughing]

4. SPSpeaker0:06

   Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Hm. 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 Gilbert0:23

   Welcome to this special episode 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.

6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:36

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

7. BGBen Gilbert0:42

   And we are your hosts. This episode is something that David and I have been thinking about for a long time.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal0:50

   Years, in fact.

9. BGBen Gilbert0:51

   It is called The Acquired Playbook, and it is basically what we've learned from doing Acquired. Like, people often ask us the question: "Okay, cool, you guys have analyzed, like, 200 companies and spent an ungodly amount of hours doing that. Like, what are the takeaways?" This episode is the takeaways.

10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:11

    It was back in, like, 2018, I wanna say, that we had a major book publisher come to us and be like, "Hey, would you wanna do a book out of Acquired?" And this was the idea we had, and then we were just like-

11. BGBen Gilbert1:22

    Maybe at some point.

12. DRDavid Rosenthal1:23

    [sighs] Let's just keep doing episodes instead, but maybe at some point. So consider this the first draft.

13. BGBen Gilbert1:29

    We don't know if this talk was good yet. We are in our hotel rooms at Capital Camp, and we are about to go on stage and give it, so this is sort of fun. This is the first time we've ever recorded one of these before doing the episode itself.

14. DRDavid Rosenthal1:41

    And before we jump in, for one final time this season, a huge thank you to our presenting sponsor of all of our special episodes, the Solana Foundation. And Solana, as you all definitely know by now, is a global state machine and the world's most performant blockchain. And when we say performant, that means that developers can build Web3 applications on top of it with super low transaction fees compared to other infrastructure platforms out there you may know of. And the reason that you can do that is that the Solana blockchain is literally a feat of engineering genius.

15. BGBen Gilbert2:21

    If only we could talk to people involved in the engineering genius behind Solana. [chuckles]

16. DRDavid Rosenthal2:26

    You know where I'm going with this. Because it's the last special episode of the season, I am talking to the co-founders of Solana itself, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal. We are pumped to close out the season here with you guys. As a quick refresher, can you tell us what the Solana network was built to accomplish?

17. SPSpeaker2:51

    It's a public blockchain, so it was built as a faster version of Ethereum, and that's kind of a very, very high-level way to talk about it. But our initial vision, like the slide deck and everything in, in those super early days, said that it's blockchain at Nasdaq speed. And the big dream idea is, imagine you have, um, a global computer that doesn't matter where you're at, but this computer perfectly synchronizes all information on it as close to the speed of light as possible. So when news travels around the world, you know, so does the information through this thing. Because if you can get to that speed of light update speed, you're as fast as news, you're as fast as the fastest markets. It doesn't really matter if, you know, Nasdaq has, like, sub-nanosecond whatever trading, because that doesn't trade on news, it's just trading on statistical noise. The other thing about Solana is it's very, very energy efficient. So a single Solana transaction is about, like, two or three Google searches. So if you think of it as using a web service, this is a network that, you know, takes as much energy as a regular web service. In comparison to the proof of work chains, this is, like, a million times more energy efficient. To me and to Raj, this was really important that that was true.

18. DRDavid Rosenthal4:08

    That's amazing. And we got all into, in our episode with y'all a year ago, into your background as a systems engineer at Qualcomm and leading into the proof of history and how the network is architected. What's happened with Solana since?

19. SPSpeaker4:24

    Oh, man, a lot of ups, some downs. We've had crazy amount of traction. I think by number of active accounts, we've passed all the other chains.

20. SPSpeaker4:35

    Yeah, right now we're at two million daily, uh, six million weeklies, and then 18 million monthlies, which is the highest of any blockchain and passed all the other ones about 60 days ago. And last time we spoke, [chuckles] we were basically close to zero.

21. DRDavid Rosenthal4:53

    In the midst of all this incredible growth, the markets, and in particular, the crypto markets, have changed quite a bit since we spoke last as well. You started Solana in the middle of the last crypto winter. What advice would you have for founders out there?

22. SPSpeaker5:07

    So bear markets are hard for, like, mid-stage companies because they see their, like, revenues and everything else shrink, but I think they're actually great for seed-level companies that are just small teams of engineers with, you know, running on ramen, that have a bright idea and a lot of energy to go execute on it. Your competitors that are bigger are forced to prioritize and forced to take less risk. For people that are just really hungry to build the next big thing, don't need a lot of funding, and that was our story. We actually had a lot of competitors that raised 100 million rounds, like, with... on a white paper [chuckles] right before we got, like, our little bit of seed funding.

23. SPSpeaker5:49

    The first seed was a little over $3 million, and that was more or less enough. The next round was, like, 13, but a ton of it got wiped out 'cause most of it came in in Eth. Uh, and before we found a custodian and were able to sell any of it, a lot of that value got wiped out, [chuckles] unfortunately. So it's altogether, like, less than $10 million, I think, to mainnet.

24. DRDavid Rosenthal6:11

    Wow! For teams out there that are working on applications, what's the best way to get in touch with y'all, and how can Solana help?

25. DRDavid Rosenthal6:19

    ... So we have a Discord, we have a really strong community there. If you're a builder, you should definitely join that one, and also, like, Anchor. There's a lot of groups outside of just our main one. One kind of more fun way to do it would be to join any of the hacker houses. Just show up and start building with a bunch of people face-to-face, and, like, really feel the energy of, you know, working on something together and, like, exchanging ideas and, and seeing things fail.

26. DRDavid Rosenthal6:45

    Awesome. Thank you so much. It's an amazing feat to be the largest blockchain out there. Super cool. Our hat is off to you.

27. BGBen Gilbert6:53

    Now, as always, this is not financial advice. Please do your own research. Dave and I do lots of research, but you may come to different conclusions, and we may have financial interests in the things that are discussed on this show.

28. DRDavid Rosenthal7:06

    Indeed, and speaking of different conclusions, this would be a fantastic episode to discuss in the Acquired Slack. We want to hear what your favorite lessons are from all of these, like, hundreds and hundreds of hours [chuckles] that we've done at this point. This would be awesome. So acquired.fm/slack if you're not already a member. We hang out in there. It's a great, great, great community, as you will hear us talk about in this talk.

29. BGBen Gilbert7:30

    All right, join the Slack, and then, uh, this is 12 of our favorite playbook themes, but there are certainly more, so I'd love to hear from you. All right, on to the talk.

30. DRDavid Rosenthal7:40

    So we thought we would be really clever here with our first one, both because this genuinely is one of our favorite themes, and we thought, "Well, this will be counter-positioned. Everybody's gonna talk about, you know, it's May 2022-

Episode duration: 1:07:57