Chase Center + Summer Update (Audio)
Ben Gilbert (host), David Rosenthal (host)
In this episode of Acquired, featuring Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, Chase Center + Summer Update (Audio) explores acquired’s summer update: Chase Center live show and growth surge Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal announce and promote Acquired’s September 10th live show at San Francisco’s Chase Center, presented with J.P. Morgan Payments, featuring Mark Zuckerberg plus additional surprise guests.
Acquired’s summer update: Chase Center live show and growth surge
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal announce and promote Acquired’s September 10th live show at San Francisco’s Chase Center, presented with J.P. Morgan Payments, featuring Mark Zuckerberg plus additional surprise guests.
They explain that their summer “time off” is largely dedicated to producing the event, with listeners encouraged to organize meetups around the show via the Acquired Slack.
They reflect on a recent Wall Street Journal profile that propelled Acquired to #1 on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, adding 317,000 new followers—an exceptional, hard-to-plan inflection after years of steady organic growth.
They close with carve-outs, including parenting-focused travel/gear recommendations and a couple of entertainment/product picks.
Key Takeaways
The Chase Center show is positioned as a community “Omaha for tech.”
They want the event to feel like a large-scale listener celebration, with people planning dinners, happy hours, and company meetups around the main show in San Francisco.
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Accessibility is a deliberate choice in pricing and scale.
Tickets are $100 for floor (nearly sold out) and $50 elsewhere, all-in including fees—intentionally low for the venue to maximize attendance rather than margin.
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A single press moment can be trajectory-changing—rarely.
Despite their general belief that one article usually isn’t transformative, the WSJ profile became “lightning in a bottle,” driving Acquired to #1 on Apple and Spotify and sustaining discovery through chart visibility.
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Sustained chart position creates compounding growth via platform UX.
They describe a self-reinforcing loop: being #1 increases curiosity clicks, which helps maintain #1, amplifying the WSJ-driven spike over weeks/months.
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Community quality is tied to historically organic, friend-to-friend growth.
They attribute the Slack’s civility to nearly a decade of gradual audience building through personal recommendations, and they see WSJ readers as a strong fit for that culture.
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Acquired is doubling down on its core format; interviews move to ACQ2.
They reaffirm the main feed’s identity: deep, researched, multi-hour narratives with Ben and David’s synthesized perspectives, while ACQ2 becomes the home for interviews (e. ...
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Big successes (and big growth events) are often idiosyncratic and unplannable.
They connect their own experience to a recurring show theme: outliers don’t follow a replicable playbook, and you often can’t manufacture the inflection—whether for companies or for a podcast.
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Notable Quotes
““Chase Center live show… the biggest thing that we have ever done.””
— David Rosenthal
““Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.””
— Ben Gilbert
““Three hundred and seventeen thousand new subscribers… since the Wall Street Journal piece went live.””
— Ben Gilbert
““Every great success story is idiosyncratic.””
— David Rosenthal
““It’s sort of unclear if and what would ever be a large, outsized growth event… I don’t know that you can ever really plan for those.””
— Ben Gilbert
Questions Answered in This Episode
What, specifically, should attendees expect the Chase Center show format to be—more like a classic 4-hour episode, a panel, or something closer to a variety live event?
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal announce and promote Acquired’s September 10th live show at San Francisco’s Chase Center, presented with J. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
They mention “fun surprises” and multiple acts beyond Zuckerberg—what categories of guests or segments are you aiming for (operators, founders, entertainers, historians)?
They explain that their summer “time off” is largely dedicated to producing the event, with listeners encouraged to organize meetups around the show via the Acquired Slack.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How did the Wall Street Journal feature come about if you didn’t pitch it—what factors made Ben Cohen choose Acquired, and what did the reporting process look like?
They reflect on a recent Wall Street Journal profile that propelled Acquired to #1 on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, adding 317,000 new followers—an exceptional, hard-to-plan inflection after years of steady organic growth.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What do you think actually drove the sustained #1 ranking: the WSJ audience fit, the Apple/Spotify browse UX, or pent-up demand from prior episodes?
They close with carve-outs, including parenting-focused travel/gear recommendations and a couple of entertainment/product picks.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
With the audience expanding so quickly, what concrete steps are you taking to preserve the Slack/community culture that you credit to organic growth?
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Transcript Preview
Hello, Acquired listeners, and happy summer, David.
Happy summer indeed! I feel like a kid let out of school.
I know. You just got back from Hawaii. Are you feeling refreshed?
I am feeling as refreshed and relaxed as the father of a three-month-old and three-year-old-
[laughing]
-can possibly be.
Yeah, I bet. We'll get to that in carve-outs, I'm sure.
Yep.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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