The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories

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

[chuckles] Let's do it.

[laughing]

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?

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.

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

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

Years, in fact.

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.

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-

Maybe at some point.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.