Reverse Interview: Ben and David at Vanta
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Welcome. I'm here with David and Ben from Acquired, and we're going to try to turn the tables on them a little bit and ask them some questions. I have some questions prepared to kick it off. A few folks have sent me questions, which is great. Before we start, A, thank you. B, where did you get those shoes? And where can we get a pair? Yeah. So for folks who can't see the video, I have my Lama shoes on, my official all-hand shoes. I

Ben, you want to briefly introduce yourself? Sure thing. Hey, everyone. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm one half of the Acquired podcast, background in engineering, product management, today a general partner at Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle, writing seed stage investments, and have a burgeoning podcasting seven-year bootstrap project turned media empire.

And I'm David Rosenthal. I'm the other half of the burgeoning media empire. I feel a special internet kinship with Christina because I, too, started an early career as an associate at a venture capital firm and never intended to be a founder. Are we founders? I don't know what we are. You're definitely founders. But we're something that's not that, just like you. Excellent. Well, maybe to start a little bit of softball, but what's your founding story?

I tried to listen to your first episodes. I tried to do my research. I'm not nearly as good as y'all. We'll get to that in a moment. But it sounded like you went out for drinks at some point. All good podcasts are started over beer. Yes. That's a line. You're thinking about like what makes some acquisitions work, some don't. Somehow decided to start a podcast late 2015, but like...

What was that actually like? What happened? It's funny. The first episode came out in October of 2015, but when we went out for drinks, it was February. And so I think all good creative ideas, it needs some amount of activation energy to get over the hump of the default state of doing things, which is nothing. So...

You have to remember, this is before every millennial had a podcast. So now there's over like two and a half million podcasts. I think at that point, there were about 100,000 podcasts, like all other internet media forums are super long tail distributed. So

As weird as it is to say, there weren't that many good podcasts, which is certainly not a problem now. We had been fans of the medium for a long time. I listened to like a lot of very nerdy Apple podcasts. The talk show with John Gruber was what I'd listened to for six, seven years already at that point. And I pitched David on two different ideas, one of which was acquired and the other of which was republished.

What was the other one? It was, we didn't know how to title it, but it was companies that successfully created $2 billion innovations. And my postulate was like, there aren't that many. So let's do a podcast trying to highlight the ones that did. And you were like, well, I hate that idea because we will very quickly run out of episodes. Yeah.

Well, that was a problem with the original vision for Acquired, too, which was we're going to do a podcast about technology acquisitions that went, you know, really well. And we got like seven. And yeah, but, you know, you start small. Yeah. For folks that don't listen now, it's also IPOs and company stories. So, you know, Swift. Yeah.

To that point, like kind of like the best startups, you all like had your market, your addressable market, and you just expanded over time, right? So from acquisitions to companies to corporate analysis to pop stars, did y'all think about that as it was happening? Like how conscious was that? Super conscious. And we were really nervous about becoming bland. I think like the natural state of...

companies and media properties, in my opinion, is they overgrow their mandate and lose sight of the job to be done with their customers. And I thought the thing that made Acquired good and cool originally was like we have this very specific format for evaluating acquisitions. And like,

We stick to it. And we're not the people that like randomly also have interviews and this, that, and the other thing. And I think like it took really actually you starting the Slack community, David, and like us aggressively serving our audience to realize the job to be done with our listeners wasn't,

Help them formulaically understand acquisitions. It was tell the stories of great businesses, how they came to be and analyze their strategy. And like one implementation of that is the format that we currently have, but like there could be others. And so I think it was like understanding what our audience, why they trusted us with their time. How did you do that? My recollection of how this kind of happened is conversations with

our audience for sure helped inform but but mostly it was just like our own thoughts as we went along and being like is this still interesting what would be interesting to us and just sort of trusting our gut on that like we started like doing a couple little like the slack community was like oh the slack was like brand new this is how old we are we're like this would be fun what if we just launch a free slack and tell everybody to join and see what happens and

And then that worked really well. And then we were like, well, what if we do IPOs? And like, add that. That doesn't seem like too much of an expansion. And then we just kind of kept dreaming bigger and bigger. And I think one of the things that...

That we learned from that. And then we got a bunch of reinforcing feedback from the audience was like, look, if you guys are interested in something, we feel that as listeners. If you're not interested in something, we also feel that. And so that kind of gave us a lot more confidence to listen.

do Taylor Swift and pop stars and you know, what have you, I think the risk in creating a product for yourself is that it's a small market. So like, we were fortunate that like, this is a little bootstrap thing we were doing not some big venture scale business. And so we felt no pressure or mandate to make sure that we like created the largest possible addressable opportunity. And it was coincidental and fortunate that by chasing our own like,

problem to solve or things we were curious in about that happened to be a large enough market, in particular, because the people that we then attracted, it's like the Bezosian, you get the shareholders that you ask for, like, we're super smart founders and people at tech companies and hedge fund managers and university endowment people, fountains. Yeah. So I think there was like a, there's like a core tenant that we have that's treat the audience as smart. And as long as you do that, good things will continue to happen.

You call it a little bootstrap business. You don't have to give numbers, but just for folks who maybe are not me, what's the sense of size, scale of your burgeoning empire?

250,000 subscribers across a bunch of different podcast platforms. Every episode gets about 100,000 downloads in the first three months. What's kind of cool about that is that's doubled every year for seven years. You know, in the early days, it was like, well, we started the first year where we have like, I don't know, 1000 2000 people would listen to every episode and you grow double that for seven years. And you're like, shoot, I've got like,

More people than can fit in the biggest sports stadium in the world are listening to our audience. And they're just like, wow. And by growing reasonably slowly, it is a curated group. That's the other thing. Reasonably slowly. But it really is. Like, it feels slow in the moment. It doesn't feel like being here at Vanta where, like, there's a zillion new people joining in every all-hands event.

I'm sure we could like look at the Slack analytics and it would look like that in the community, but it doesn't, it doesn't feel like any episode is like meaningfully bigger than our next highest episode. To your specific question, this was not a business at all for three and a half years, three years, like literally zero revenue. It was just like reluctant sponsorships. Like we were hardcore, no sponsorships. We, uh, we formed a Washington state LLC like a couple of years in just as like, we should probably do that.

And then over the past few years, revenue has been kind of ramping on that same curve to the point where, like for me at least, it's now being founder, co-host, whatever I've acquired is like, that's what I do. Former venture capitalist. Former venture capitalist. Now podcast co-host. Former venture capitalist is the best title.

Yep.

Yep, Vanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time here on Acquired. Jeff Bezos, his idea that a company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste better, i.e. spend your time and resources only on what's actually going to move the needle for your product and your customers and outsource everything else that doesn't. Every company needs compliance and trust with their vendors and customers.

It plays a major role in enabling revenue because customers and partners demand it, but yet it adds zero flavor to your actual product. Vanta takes care of all of it for you. No more spreadsheets, no fragmented tools, no manual reviews to cobble together your security and compliance requirements. It is one single software pane of glass that connects to all of your services via APIs and eliminates countless hours of work.

for your organization. There are now AI capabilities to make this even more powerful, and they even integrate with over 300 external tools. Plus, they let customers build private integrations with their internal systems. And perhaps most importantly, your security reviews are now real-time instead of static, so you can monitor and share with your customers and partners to give them added confidence. So whether you're a startup or a large enterprise, and your company is ready to automate compliance and streamline security reviews like

like Vanta's 7,000 customers around the globe and go back to making your beer taste better, head on over to vanta.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. And thanks to friend of the show, Christina, Vanta's CEO, all acquired listeners get $1,000 of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired.

Awesome. So we have a question, actually, of an employee named Utsav, who's on the call. He runs a podcast called Software at Scale. He interviews engineering leaders about building software at scale. And he was curious, how do you all foster the community you have over the last few years around Acquired? You mentioned the Slack community. You might want to explain that a little bit. But also, I'm sure it's broader than just that. Yeah. I think the most important thing is what Ben said, which is you get the community and listeners and the behavior you ask for and

the model that you set for that is what people follow. I don't think we have ever had a trolling or abuse problem in our community. Maybe occasionally on Twitter, something will happen. Not maliciously. There's some spam. Yeah. But in the Slack community, never. And we have 12,000 people in there now. So I think it was just modeling that behavior. Like if you're Barstool Sports, you're going to get a rowdy community. If you're acquired, you're not. Yeah.

There are also ways to grow audience quickly, which feel like a smash and grab job. Like you can spike your Twitter following by saying something super controversial and deciding that like you're going to make yourself the martyr of the moment about some issue. And like a lot of people do that. A lot of people succeed in that. But it has the cost long term of...

attracting trolls. And I think like, as long as you're willing to like, not grab at easy growth and do that stuff, which never has felt authentic to either of us personally, then it it makes large scale community more sustainable.

And specifically about the question asked of how do you foster that, David, you've been really good about being diligent at identifying people who have made connections in the community and then highlighting and celebrating that. So like when founders meet in the Slack or on an LP call or surfacing, hey, this company is looking to hire these three key roles and we like put it in the email that we send out when that person has been very participatory in the community. It's the general like platform role of trying to create way, way, way more value than you capture. Yeah.

So for folks who haven't listened to Required, try to summarize a little bit, right? Long episodes and one to seven hours, depending. Really in-depth research into companies. We are the hardcore history of technology. Yes. Okay, that's about it. You guys are really good at the internet, too. You go and find...

New Peloton CEOs, YouTube that has 1400 views, whatever. What is your secret to all this research? And also, how good are you? There's this amazing startup. It's really awesome. It's going to change the world. It's called Google. But like, seriously, that's like, you would be amazed. But everyone else has Google.

But not everybody else uses it. People don't scope with date operators. So if we want to get a feel for like... This is the good stuff. In 2014, what was the media narrative around Facebook at time of IPO? Which is like 100% different than today or even six months ago. You can scope...

to make sure you're only getting results from a certain date. And absent doing that, you're never going to find those articles because good luck searching Google or searching any website for like Facebook earnings announcement or like is Facebook going to be successful? Like you'll never find it unless you're specifically looking at certain dates. So that's like one example. David's favorite one is industry conferences on YouTube. When you're doing research on say, alumni Zoom interviews of your high school CEOs, high school principals, like

Yeah, like it's just, it's a common thing to Google that person's name and look for recent articles about them. But like, I think if you're doing willing to do like 5% more work than the large group of people you are pseudo competing with, most of the time that shows up as like 200% the product, because I think most people sort of like stop in the same place, which is like, well, I read three or four recent articles. And if you're like, well, like, come

come on, there's got to be something from before. Like, let me look on different platforms. Let me see if there's an old Quora to talk about a customer, an old Quora answer, which are usually awesome, or like a weird subreddit dedicated to the company where people are finding more unique stuff than we're finding. The internet's a big place. And I feel like we just have like 15 or 20 different little ways to search for stuff that's not right on the surface. So a bit of principle of like, do 5% to 10% more. Yeah.

And it actually pays off. Yeah. Well, I think we have a secret weapon too, which is we publish 16 stories per year. We do interviews too. And that's much easier to prep for. But, you know, most other podcasts feel and canonical wisdom. People tell us Spotify told us the other day, we need to be a weekly podcast. Like that is the accepted behavior. We're like, that's not our advantage is being a, you know, 16 times a year podcast. And that gives us the time to do podcasts.

20 Google hits instead of three. 16 episodes a year. But I imagine you're practicing kind of what you do constantly. Like, how do you practice acquired without quote unquote doing acquired? Like, what is all the other stuff you do?

So we almost never like rehearse episodes, but we will can episodes if they're feeling bad. So like we've had one that we've never released. We had an interview that we got halfway through and bagged it and said, hey, can we come back another day? It's just not working. Which was it TSMC or Standard Oil? Standard Oil part. We got an hour and a half in and we both just were like, can we start over in three hours? So there's sort of like...

Because we're not never a live show, we always can be treating the real thing as if it's a rehearsal and we can throw it away if we want, which I think is helpful. The other answer is the way we practice is we play, you know, we only do 16 episodes a year, but then we do the interviews and then we do the LP show. So we are publishing 50 times a year. We're doing this every week. But the big stories are not as frequent.

There's also like something to collecting super fans in the right places. Like Christina, if we ever are curious about anything in security or security broadly, like rather than us spending four hours to orient ourselves, like I probably would DM you in the Slack and say like,

Give me the three places I should start and help me find the narrative in here. Like, where's the forest through the trees? And we asked like three or four people who should know, like we did that for Square and like the episode suddenly fell into place. Like the narrative we were telling from a former employee that was like, we checked it with two or three other people. Then suddenly we were like, oh, this is the undertold real narrative behind what's interesting about this business.

And I feel like that those shortcuts are huge, too. Yeah, asking for help. It's like in school, you're sort of trained, you can't, you know, ask for help on your homework and in real life, like all the time. Ask all the time. Yeah. Such a great point. Yeah. Cool. One more podcast question, at least for me. Lots of people start podcasts, maybe after drinks at a bar. Most of them do not go for seven years and seven hour episodes and all of that. What makes you all different? I think we just actually like it. Like the

The numbers are fun to look at in the analytics afterwards. And like now I'm, of course, like any other person running any business, like hooked on the dopamine hit of like, all right, how to do let's let's open it up and see. Like, I will never profess to be one of those people that's like, oh, I don't look at the analytics. Like I look a lot at the analytics. I send David. And like if you look through our iMessage history, it's like all these screenshots of like, OK, well, I made another spreadsheet and then I graphed it this way. And like, if you think about it, here's that. So anyway, that aside, I think it's like we actually are completely obsessed. And we found a thing that like

If we weren't doing Acquired, I wouldn't have a reason to investigate quite as many things. But if you're like, you have four hours, here's a Wikipedia page to start on, go down the internet rabbit hole, I'd be like, there's no greater way that I'd like to spend my time than this. And I think that is not universally true.

I think the other thing is like, we're, we're actually really good friends. Like, it's just like, I can't imagine I could never do this without you. Like, and doing it together is the most fun thing. Like we finished recording a five hour session for an episode and we're like, no bathroom breaks. We'll just go. And like, we both get to the end and we're like, that was amazing. When are we doing the next one? Yeah. How early did you know this was like going to be a thing in your lives?

Eight months ago. Wait, really? I didn't know that at all. Well, it just doesn't. It's the funny thing about only doubling per year. In the first few years, it just doesn't feel meaningful. By year four, when we're like, okay, so we have like 10 plus thousand listeners or whatever it was, teens of thousands. You're like, we're still not like in the top 50 even tech podcasts. And so it still feels recent to me where we're like, oh, there's a real...

I'm curious, too, actually, for you and Vanta and the company. You guys were bootstrapped for a long time. We were bootstrapped, too. We're a two-person Washington State LLC, so we hadn't raised a bunch of money. There was no expectation that this was going to be a thing. And then we just kind of woke up one day and we were like, oh, it is. What was your experience like with that? A little more constructed, honestly. It's like...

The goal was always to make it a Vanta thing and have it grow like this. And I think the early days, it was a little bit of having worked in VC and seen how the incentives can get a little crosswise and how companies can kind of just like lose their center and be like, oh, we're doing well because Shiny VC thinks we're doing well. And you're like, look, Shiny VC is trying to do their job and is probably a smart person, but like it doesn't matter what they think.

And half the time, let's be honest, three quarters of the time, they really don't know what's going on. They try. Everyone's trying. Everything's hard. General universe framework is kind of a conscious like, no, no, no. Like we're doing well. We're going to believe that we have the cash to sustain this. Why? Why not? Right. And so kind of focusing on.

on that was like very conscious but the goal was always to grow very quickly yeah I mean the kind of joke in the early days and it was something we were proud of and also like mortified by was like oh we just can't spend all of our money like poor us

Right. And then you're like, actually, that's not funny anymore. It's not funny at all. You know, and it's this like cute line that like VCs get excited about. But then if they really think about it, they're like, well, they're probably just not investing as they should. They're not running the business well. That is also true. And, you know, there are counterexamples to us, too. Like there are podcasts, podcast companies out there that have raised a lot of money, raised large funds, you know, like. Yeah. When's your Spotify deal coming? Oh.

Well, we don't have a Rogan-style deal, but we did just do a big partnership with them at the beginning of this season for video, which is amazing. Spotify has been so good to work with. The video product is really cool. For anybody who...

spotify as your main podcast player when you listen to us when you listen to all in when you listen to this weekend startups and a few other pods video will pop up and then it's synced like this is really hard to do on the back end so like you can watch the video for a while stop go for a walk listen to the audio and it all stays synced versus like we used to post video on youtube and like oh i could watch on youtube but then if i want to go for a walk like anyway it's cool do you have any vaccine tips for us i'd

That's on the subject of Joe Rogan and Spotify. No, you don't have to answer that. No comment. Okay, I'm going to ask one or two more and then we'll turn it over to audience questions and Vantan questions. Let me start with the spicy one. So you're known for grading companies in your episodes. You're sitting at a company. Curious who could grade Vanta based on what you know about us.

Well, we have the best. We have an out. We just turned the question around. For companies that like, we can't grade Vanta yet. Like, we don't know what's going to happen. So we put it back on the founder. How would we grade Vanta though? This is actually a good. Yeah, or like, what would an A plus outcome look like versus a

solid B. So my gentleman's B like, all right. So we have the great, great benefit of at this point, mostly getting to pick the sponsors that we work with, which is like, I can tell. Cause I get pinged by people who ask me about the sponsorship all the time. Oh really? Yeah.

It's like the spots that you did contribute greatly to that because it tells a pretty fascinating story about why you should be interested in compliance and security and dot dot dot Vanta. But I actually think it has a lot to do with the nature of the format and the way that you handled it. But all this to say,

We get a lot of cold email about, hey, so-and-so wants a sponsor. And we kind of analyze the business to decide, like, should we? Because our goal is to build long-term relationships with companies that we feel like our audience being lots of founders and technical folks like

Is it going to work out for them? And we want, we need our sponsors to be successful in order for that to mean that we have a good business on our hands. And so when I was thinking about Vanta, I was kind of looking at it and I was like, I don't totally understand yet how they price, but this thing feels good.

super, super sticky. And like once you get a certain certification, I was like, again, knowing very little about the industry, I was like, I think you kind of need it forever because you start attracting customers that will start requiring it. And it seems really unlikely that someone would ever rip you out and put someone else in. I'm sure it happens. But I think the way I would analyze it would be like, one, is it true that it's sticky?

like really sticky? And then two, can you capture, you know, an appropriate amount of value that you're creating over time? Because it's also one of these things where I could see people not understanding how valuable it will be for the customers they can attract by having a certain certification. And so they aren't willing to pony up even though it makes tons and tons and tons of sense for them. So I...

pricing feels hard to me for your business. Yes, it is. We still price in the way we priced three years ago, which I don't think it serves customers. I don't think it serves us. I think it's a tremendous opportunity for Vanta, truly. The other thing I would say real quick is we're actually working on our favorite themes from seven years of Acquired. We're going to do a cool event around. But one of them

the Jeff Bezos saying when he launched AWS, which is the analogy to German beer brewers in the 1800s when electricity was invented that we made you talk about. This is like our hobby horse, you know, and it's just so true with tech and startups. Like don't, don't do stuff that doesn't make your beer taste better. Like all that matters is your product. And Vanta is like all of our partners, like Vanta, Vouch, Modern Treasury, like you go down the list and like, this is just such a deep theme. It,

It's crap that is not your core competency that you don't want to do. And if you could find someone to do it that's like really, really, really good at it and set it and forget it, it's worth a lot of money. Like that, it's funny, we're actually thinking about, we're like, should we be on TikTok? And David and I sort of looked at each other and we're like, hello, other elder millennial. Like, are we going to be effective at doing TikTok? Probably not. Is there someone who could help us with that? Yes. Should we pay good money for that? Yes. Like as long as you can find a...

outsource provider of something you view as non-core that said it and forget it like you should always do that cool okay some questions that are in slido that i'm going to read out for folks emmet is there a podcast that doesn't exist today what opportunities are there in the podcast landscape

The landscape is so different than when we started. You know, the other thing that we we got incredibly lucky with is we got featured in our first year by Pocket Casts, Apple, Spotify wasn't doing podcasts yet, but that was amazingly beneficial. That game's done. Like it used to be that if Apple featured you.

That would make your podcast. It was like my first app. Like I got 20,000 downloads a day when I shipped an app in 2009 because, oh my God, you shipped an app. Thank God. Let's feature them in the app store. Exactly. Getting featured in the app store. And some people have taken that as like, well, this game is done. You can't break through.

But you can break through like all in has broken through. And so I think the well, I can't I don't have a specific answer of something I want. I think the more different you are, the better. And like the less you adhere to rules of like must be weekly, must be an interview based podcast, must be X, must be Y, like break all of those rules. Because the more different you are in a sea of two and a half million podcasts, the better.

I don't know, because I don't, like in the Peter Thiel parlance, like I don't have a secret here that is exploitable. But I would say the framework for the secret is probably, is there something that's shrouded in mystery where if you're thinking about starting a podcast, you have unique access to be able to unshroud that. Like to go back to the all-in example, it's like, hey, check out some billionaires talking publicly about their private jets instead of trying to be as sort of like veiled as possible about it. Like that's catnip for so many people to be like,

okay, I'll listen to this. This is crazy. And they're, and they're giving hot takes about the world I'm in. And I think the question is like, what other things right now are either not well understood because they're just difficult to understand and you can uniquely be good at explaining them on a show or like you have a unique position to be like, F it. I'm like, and I'm, this is how it really is. Yeah.

Security and compliance. That goes back there. You sort of mentioned this with your seven-year wrap-up, but Tina was curious how the podcast has changed your perspective on startups, like things you used to believe about startups or tech companies you no longer do. Yeah. For me, so I started my career as an indie iOS developer, and I was pretty sure that

I had such good product chops that I could make a better widget and that was a durable competitive advantage. Like if you would have asked me in 2012, I would have told you for sure like,

That app sucks and I can design a better one. Then... Path will take over the world. The people will see it. Exactly. It's canonical. Have them seen the radio menu. Exactly. Were you at USB when Path was big? Yeah, and the bubblegum UI. Wow. It was beautiful. It had such a lasting impact on design, too. For only 10,000 users. But it inspired so much more to come after. I mean, the Google floating action button feels derivative. And what I guess doing Acquired has shown me is...

That is in Hamilton Helmer's seven powers parlance, like during the takeoff phase of a business, unique UI or better whatever it is, user experience in some way, shape or form is a better way to sort of wedge into the market and make your presence known. But it's not a durable competitive advantage. Like strategy is a real thing. And.

All profits are arbitraged away eventually unless you have something that makes it so other people can't compete with you quickly. That to me has been the big realization of like, okay, zoom out and don't look at in months, but look in years and decades, all profits will get competed away and less and figure out your unless and

Otherwise, enterprise value goes to zero because you're free cash flow negative or neutral. Our board member, Andrea Takoya, is like software, recurring revenue software businesses. It's just like the best business anyone has ever created. They're wonderful businesses.

The flip side of that is like competitive advantage is really real. And it's easier than ever to start a SaaS business. It's harder than ever to scale them and it's more expensive than ever to scale them. But I think Patrick from ProfitWell does this analysis showing like it used to be that, you know, you had a reasonable way to break through as a vendor, but everyone now has 7,000 vendors for every single, there's some chart that got really, really packed.

For me, it's trying to figure out the unless, like finish the sentence of why is it that people are going to have a hard time competing with us, either existing incumbents because they're too big and therefore X, or other startups because we've somehow closed the door behind us. And that, you know, sounds monopolistic to say, but like you do need to figure out how to create a big wake behind you such that it's difficult to do exactly what you're doing. And do you think the seven powers framework works for startups?

The startup incumbent, right? Like that seems clearer, but in the age where there's 9,000 SaaS companies every day and UI can be copied and all of that. Can you Hamilton Helmer yourself there? I think Hamilton Helmer and Seven Powers is very helpful for a company at Vantos stage. I think Hamilton would probably be the first to say,

And in the takeoff phase, it's about finding product market fit. That is a very different thing. And he would say, we just did another episode with him that we're going to release soon. And you got two mountains to climb as a company and as a founder. The first mountain is product market fit.

And then you, you know, naturally as a founder, you get there, you're like, oh, I've made it. This is great. I'm exhausted. Like I want to relax for a bit. Everything rolls downhill now. It's all easy. It's all easy. When I go to sleep, the company doesn't go to sleep. Right, right, right. And that feels amazing. And it should feel amazing. But like your job is only half done and you got a whole nother mountain to climb, which is like, okay, how are you going to build power? How are you going to build durability? How are you going to deal with new entrants and why are you not going to be path? Yeah.

How can you raise your price 10x all the time? Exactly. It shows up in pricing power. Yeah. Yeah, that's very real. It's hard. And it's like super different for every business. Yeah. Reading the seven powers framework, to your point, will not tell you how to achieve power in your business. It'll help you. Like you need creativity to come up with the sort of like set of raw ideas that could create power in your business. But then I think it's the framework to help analyze, okay, which one of these is actually doable? Yeah.

Yeah, I was going to ask actually, when you've seen people just like dive in well, they're reading the book, they're like using the framework, they're like brainstorming, like what is the equivalent of like use Google's data operators for this? For building power in your business? Oh man. Gosh, if you knew, you should go back to being an investor. Yeah, it's tricky. It's so easy in hindsight, right? To look and say, oh, Netflix has scale economies. But like if you're Netflix eight years ago, how do you figure out like

you know, if we grow faster than anybody else and have more customers, then we can pay more for any given piece of content and therefore maintain our lead. I'm thinking back to the interview we just recorded with Hamilton and his partner Chen Yi, who's awesome, total rising star. One of the things that the thrust of what they said that I

like as good a shortcut to me as any is making sure you're figuring out how you create more value for your customers, your ecosystem than you capture and make that sustainably grow. Like if you can do that, you'll get power. Right. It's not that lock-in comes from doing things that are user hostile. It comes from things that are growing the pie and grow your value and the customer's value such that they can't go get that value if they switch to an other. And like Netflix is a beautiful example, right? Like the longer a period of time that Netflix exists,

the more valuable it is to their customers, regardless of anything changes, you know? And so like, Oh, okay. Something like that. I can't tell you what it is for your business, but like if you can figure that out, that's the path to power. Yep. Okay. One last question. I know we're slightly over, so obviously folks need to drop, you should drop, but that creating more value than you're extracting and doing that continuously. You mentioned that when you're talking about building the acquired community, sort of top voted question from Rick, um,

in building that community, like what worked, what didn't, what fell flat again. So I'm going to go back to the search operators, but yeah, any specifics.

Empowering channel leaders was a thing that David asked me if we could do. And I was like, I don't know if we should do that. Like several ideas actually that David's asked me, I'm like skeptical of it first, then we try it. Austin Federer leads the digital assets channel. It's like, I don't know, 50% of the value of the acquired Slack is in the digital assets channel. It's people talking about crypto sharing like,

things that you won't read about for two or three more weeks. And Austin runs marketing at Solana and was, I don't know, probably employee 20, something like that. Empowering people within your community when they're passionate about something and running with it, I think is the number one experiment that succeeded. I think any experiments that have failed have been things that were overly reliant on you and I to...

do all the work of creating it and that doesn't scale and on an ongoing basis yeah because we are not a startup that is scaling with headcount like there are things that just atrophy without us paying attention to them us making an episode and releasing in podcast feed and on youtube and like that scales because that thing can deliver to dms as the community scales uh that that does does not sadly excellent well thank you all so much for coming by entertaining the questions really nice to have you this is such a joy

And for folks who are in the San Francisco office, we're all going to stick around for lunch. So please come out for that. And otherwise, for folks who are on Zoom, thank you so much. Happy All Hands. Happy Wednesday. See y'all on Slack. Thanks, Vantans.