SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours)

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

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

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

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

Yeah. [chuckles] Exactly.

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?

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.

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

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.

Literally modeled himself after. [chuckles]

[chuckles]

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

Enlighten us.

[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]

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

[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.

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.

As well as Sony headphones right now, right?

That's right.

Yeah.

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?

[chuckles] I did know that.

[chuckles]

Do they still make that thing?

Yeah, they do.

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

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?