Holiday Special 2023
02:25:44 Share

im loving that you also busted out the holiday swetter feels very appropriate yes， i purchased this holiday swetter at the seeadl nordstrom for our 2019 liveshow at the university Washington like two months before the pen devocate thats right and i think i were last year to i feel like you did yeah we were right behind me i wish were doing it again this year but uh seems prudent to a not have a father of a toddler hopped on airplane and then sit in a confinance base with me her five hours right now lot of terms of my life right now thank you for your percautions who got the true is you is you who got the true now？

podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them im Bengilbert， im David Resinthall and we are your hosts you see what i did there David？

i did i did no technology no technology yes！

i motion to uh you know the whole board of directors here that we drop technology from our intro since i crunch the numbers and four of the fourteenepisodes we did this year were technology companies uh alright？

well， its good thing that there are no other board members required besides you and me because i am in full agreement unanimous and otherwise we would have had a deadlocked vote there one to one thats true and uh i dont think our charder really actually？

ever accounts four what to do in that circus did so yes， listeners if you count lockied Martin， its five if you count visa its six but the minority of the episodes that we did in twenty twenty three were tech companies， which is a very fascinating evolution to me based on where acquiredstarted analyzing technology acquisitions that actually went well， but of course， we will keep doing deep episodes on tech companies， since we are nerds and thats where we spent you know our whole careers so far so if you liked the programming in Assembly language on air from Nvidia， or i guess Assembly language sudo code or our qualcom episode where we try to describe how the cdma Protocol works were still here for you were just going to do a lot of LV image nfl cost， these a custom Nike and the you know mixtender so what are we doing here？

today， well， David and i are gonna bring you good tidings， good cheer， hopefully and keep you company thats happyholidays cheers！

cheers！

ive got my uh cinnamon and feuse hot chocolate here its delicious oh！

youre feeling very festive！

yes， we are here to uh keep you company on your long drives or flights or workouts or housecleaning or whatever over the holidays on our agenda today is a recap of acquiredthis year both the state of the franchise from the board of directors themselves we will also be giving you some new tidbits on our favorite episodes behind each one of them why we picked them？

how they came to be what listeners help us select that sort of thing weve got to talk about how we see acquiredfitting into the broader media landscape how are views about the show and the stuff that we cover have changed over time whats store for acquiredin twenty， twenty four new carvouts and answering listener questions from the slack and then at the end of the episode were going to share a little bit about David in my investing lives and how those will be changing in twenty， twenty four as a David！

you and i are gonna get to do much more of our investing together i know its gonna come full circle we started， but that majora investing together and uh！

we will but first listeners i mentioned in one quick line on the Charlie interview and have not said anything on any social media or anything like that sense but uh i am a parent what ijoining David on the parenting journey with a proxy a one month old here at the Gilbert household？

Ben Jenny i are so so so happy for you guys parenting uh as you know！

now is the most joyous difficult wonderful biggest thing you will ever do in your life and there is no way to understand or describe it until you become one so welcome to the club thank you i think thats right i think any words that i would say about what its been like so far are words that other people triedto use to describe it to me and i found them largely meaningless i mean i could say the same things that everyone else always says and theyve been some amazing things written i think i read the poligram article on kids i read the fourth trimasterwait but why peace i ve read you read the Michael Louis book right the Michael Louis book yeah that was good but like i dont know the words kind of bounce off you youre like well， why would that be fun？

why would that be rewarding？

why would waking up at three am to change a diper and sue the you know screen me like why is that but its uh actually more can household put it to me in a really lovely way where he just said what greater gift could you have then helping another human another member on your family whois new to the world than their most intense time of need and you know that intense time of need come to slit doesn or two thousand times a day but the sort of privilege of being able to suthsomeone when they are experiencing that sort of intense emotion you know they may not be fully formed。

but babies are people to so absolutely yeah well！

so great that is big bigchange number one since we last reconvened here big change number two is geeky reported about this already but you are joining me fulltime next year on required im so so excited is about freakin time how David i wasa good to say it but yeah i cant wait you are so just fired up to double down on acquiredand it feels very fun to be going all in on it together and on the one hand it feels like its been a long timecoming on the other hand acquiredhas been such a slow burn over the last eight plus years that there was not like an obvious moment to do it so was one of these moments for you sort of lookback and youlike wow， how am i not spending all of my waking time and energy on this when um you know it is something that is just you dont its our lifework as our friend Patrick or shangacy likes to say about the types of enterpner is looking for a like this is definitively our lifework and it wasnt only started and somewhere along the way gradually it just became that yeah totally and the way its going to work itransitioning to adventure partner at psl at pinersquare labs currency at all so still get to keep my boardseeits， which i think keeps me sharp for the show and stay a friend of the family there so um excited to sort of change by role at psl but of course， all of my real time and energy going forward is required um so happy not only for as a you know fifty percent。

shareholder and acquiredbut uh even more so like youre my best friend didnt this means were gonna spend even more time together and uh just outside of the show， outside of anything that that means for us are business you do the episodes all of which are gonna get so much better get us brings me joy im so happy thanks man so we should say before we get too far in this is not investment device this whole show Dave and i may have investments in the companies we discuss in the show is for information on entertainment purposes only somebody here has did follow the rules and keep us ive got a nice scripse thats well belt out in front of me i also must apologize to listeners i am comminant hot from podcaster paturty leave here and if anything i say is completely incoherent i am on pretty minimal sleep so thank you for bearing with me all the parentout there will understand appreciate you being here as do i yeah well lets start the twenty twenty three acquired yearn review recab it dude this has been freakin wild having your talking about like acquiredis been a slow burn you know we have doubled every year and weve always been this example of exponential growth that like it starts small and mean of first year we doubled from two to four listeners you know， like， but there wasnexactly that no i work to backwards one time i think it was like five hundred or a thousand or something actually crunch that number but there is a number you can figure out in your once since you know what our current numbers are yup but small base it was like small base kind of small base still pretty small base you know there were many years where nobody would have imagined that this would be either of our full time gigs now and i actually when i looked it up last year on our holiday special i was both pretty excited and proud to announce and also terrified that we had hit a quarter million listeners to the pod felt like wholycrap thats a big number this is like real what we do and i was terrified because i was like we talk all the time Ben talks all the time about how we doubled every year like how on earth are we gonna do that right you were like you should stop saying that cause its eventually gonna not be true yeah， cuz its about to end！

which is true eventually， it will not be true of course， i mean unless literally we start expanding galactically or something going like that yeah and the question is how big is the address ble market for people who want to in an audio only medium consume you know for hour essentially books conversational audio books about business histories often in kind of an soterric way and granted you and i have gotten much better at becoming storytellers over time， but each one of those sort of concentric circles kniches it down and i think you and i just thought that that address ble market was you know a hundred thousand people or something at first but now we know its at least half a million yes！

so the big news we hit half a million listeners this year， which is pretty well hopefully we can put up the chart the Ben Gilbert acquiredchart that you make obsessively every monthshowing our episode growth over time。

which at some point i do want to stop making cause i said last year on the show like at the holiday special i dont think growth is inherently virtuous for us for the goals of our business here and yet i am the person whos sort of obsessively trying to compile the numbers in figure out is it going to double again organically since we dont advertise or anything and so i want to be known for the Ben Gilbert chart i only fix so cause its actually a tothetical to how i think about what we do but i do make the chart i do put a lot of thought into it and what episodes will do what and trying to predict the numbers i think a lot of people described it as virtuous to oh i dont pay attention to the analytics i think to each zone i pay a lot of attention to the analytics i think that helps you become better at making a product the people like i dont understand why you would immerse yourself in every single number you possibly could all the time that may lead you to a different outcome， but that outcome as long as your measuring correctly seems to be make something that people want more so yes！

i obcessonly look at the numbers i look at the completion rates i think thats super important well and related cyber to that thank you to all of you the yes half a million of you now for spending all this time with us this year theres a lot to discuss so you know for me icant gone back and forth you started saying i think about two years ago growth is not a goal i dont know the growth is good for required and i sort a noted my head but i wasnt totally sure this year i think is really helped crystalize my thoughts on this as weve grown so much i do completely agree with you growth in and of itself should not be a priority and in fact can be very detrimental to what i think we both wanted do here if we optimize just for growth， what i think weve done this year goes back to the very started this episode in you changing the intro we went from a poi cast about great technology companies and the stories in playbooks behind them to apache by great companies and the stories in playbooks behind them and yes， we have continued to grow in the tech world and certified coordinate， and i think that audience and audience potential is way bigger than we ever realized， but weve also added everybodyelse in the world now who is interested in business runsarbrand and thinkabout brand management or runsaretailer or runsa large hardware business like homedeeppo or something like that you know and also all around the world two i mean some of our biggest episodes this year were a not American companies b even if they were American companies， they were truly global brands and global companies a lot of what we do if we just want adoptimize for growth， we would do differently we would not make four hourepisodes we would release more frequently， etc。

etc itinteresting growing from a podcast about great technology companies to a podcast about great companies is certainly a growth， strategy or a by product of doing that is growth because the address blemarket is larger， but i think it would fail if that wasnt just you and i following what are natural interests were people ask us all the time how do you pick episodes and the answer is you and i talk for hoursa a day we wanderrun our house on our neighborhoods putting on Airpods and calling each other in talking about you know whats currently in our email unbox were researching what we need to do to ship an episode prep for guests that sort of thing and one of the conversations that always is happening is what are you？

which is didnright now？

how of your viewshifted over experience of time what is fascinating to you now？

and i think the growth is sort of a by product of our obsessions shifting and becoming these durable businesses and trying to understand what makes a company worthy of being a century long company regardless of where it came from or how was funded or what technologies were used in creating it i think thats been whats so cool for me and my big lessons and takeaways from everything weve done this year is that those stories and studying the lvmhs。

the cosgoes， the nikeys of the world if anything thats like even more important than studying the great technology companies for building a great technology company yes， we found this just incredible response， especially to the lvmh episode of like wow here these lessons that are not well talked about unknown in our world right？

it is kind of strangebecoming canon i never thought acquiredwould get to the point where when we do a episode on something， it has the possibility to become an undertown of themes that people are discussing and certainly years， one through six or seven that was never the case but with lvmh， with cosgo may be with portia， certainly with Nike i think there was an element of we release the episode and suddenly we noticed the discussion。

especially amongst the texfear about that topic massively picked up or people would go on cnbc and make a point that we made and i call you Dave and go like i wonder how that comparison got made this is great maybe they didnt listen to the episode but what was cool is that enough people now have been consuming this untalking about it and getting value out of it it gets in the water it gets the water yeah its wild my favorite was a friend of mine whos a vc at lights feed texted me about two except a the casko episode came out and said dude ive gotten three pitches this week from startups where at some point in the deck， they talk about how their business model is similar to cost。

yes， i dont over tutorunhorn on this， but that has been a huge change this year that we have never seen in previous years is once we do an episode it sort of gets in the water yeah！

alright， so lets talk about the episodes so we started the year actually with the nfl， which i think a lot about that episode still absolute day and because the visa episode that we finish the year with was like the nfl code a part two then we did LVMH， which i feel like we have even more to talk about Nintendo Lockied Portia Nike CASGO， Nvidia part three and then visa and then our interviews this year and we should talk about our kind of change in strategy from what used to be specials last year to acquiredinterviews this year Daniellec doracosswshay。

Frober Jenson from Nvidia and then Charlie but lets stick with the season first of that what was your favorite that we did this year like Ben Gilberts personal favorite episode i think the most interesting businesses or businesses that sort of tickle me are Costco and visa because theres a purity to them coscos is the purity of the way that the puzzle pieces fit together in a way that is just artful its almost like a discovery of laws of physics the way that saw price and Jim Sang a goal and the rest of the crew of sort of built that business over the years its just beautiful its like watching a ballet i think that we like into that in the episode these are on the other hand is like the best operating leverage business i mean today of over fifty percent net income margins they seem like theyre locked in forever you know for better for work as we described on the episode， but if you ask what now， someone like what is the best at scale business model its probably visa to do the sort of a least work for the most free cache flow you look at cosgo not that much free cache flow crappton of work its almost like the complete opposite over in visa land total opposits but you ask me what my favorite episode was and my favorite episode was elvim h because it was so not on my radar at all and not something that i valued at all and i scorned luxury before doing the research and i didnt understand any of the history and now i feel like a whole new world has been open to me of understanding brandonvalue and i you have a whole closet in your housefilled with Louis baggs i do not i do not i only own one thing from one luxury brand in all my possessions and actually that item is not made by lvmh did youdoesgonna leave it at that well， i i wanna reveal it on a twenty twenty four episode we are planning oh！

OK， alright， you heard it here first， there will be at least 1 Luxury episode in twenty twenty four is that what you tell me yes！

absolutely and i should say i own probably a lot of things are lvamage， but none that i would consider Luxury i dont mean like a lugiviton suitcase i mean like i have some would feel whisky in the closet that lvmagesomehow over the last few years came down wouldnfilwisky， i think theres a lot of those sorts of things that who Ive bought a lot of things at duty free shoppers or yeah， yeah！

youtukingabout an item that is truly a luxury item， which is on a whole different rubric it has a sense of place， it has a sense of place， it is not a premium item you could look at it through a certain lands and say this is utterly ridiculous currenlike how on earth is this you know peace of raw material worth that right i only own one of those things yes， OK？

OK would you describe anything that you own that way other than things that are obviously that way other than some like Louis on suitcase that you have or some i dont know what you have！

but youve got some rolexes yeah i have some watches but honestly those are mostly from my dad my dadis really into watches and a few of those sort of trickled to me over the years i was thinking about an impropairing for this i do not and maybe part of that is having a two year old umm， which is not good for the health of the objects in your home but uh！

i was thinking about that i was like you know i i would like to change that and have something that is meaningful on a different level beyond just what it physically is yep i guess any jewelry would count as that oh yeah and these things may not be branded the way that were talking about luxury branding but like a diamond engagement ring is inherently not premium but luxury yeah and i certainly i would count my wedding ring amongst that or a real world nft for the crypto folks out there oh boy i lets keep a moving here which by the way i think is actually the best way to think about diamonds i spent some time recently looking into labgrowing vs mind diamonds and theres an interesting i know are a diet tribe here but you ask me about my favorite episode and lvch came up in here year so there is a fixed supply of diamonds in the world and there is a rate at which humans can mind them so regardless of the intrinsic qualities of diamonds it is a thing that can only come out at a certain volume and largely they go through the gia to be identified with a serial number and actually gets laser etched microscopically on to the diamond so these things are like you know verified that they came out of the ground and you know the year they were mind and you know where they were mind and all that stuff yeah the beers would be a fun episode to do someday totally and the labgrown diamonds are chemically identical and its a huge accomplishment of human kind that we figured out how to do this and on the one hand theyidentical you look at them， you write， click， you download the jpeg and like these things are identical but on the other hand， we are only going to get better more slice style at creating labground diamonds and so they will asometotically approach zero maybe not zero， but some number every year presumably they should get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper whereas for something that were there is a known finite supply of them like gia certified number etched diamonds theres a strong argument for that to hold its value to the except that you care about it engagement ring holding its value， but that will hold its value much longer or uh much more durable and it truly the best way to articulated is well if you believe that this jpeg has value。

but that other jpeg doesnt have value and that other jpeg is the exact same bitmap is this one like why do you believe that oh i see its got a nonchain location able its literally the exact same thing with diamonds all right we were gonna have to do a debears episode something cause this warrants a full required deep dive i think Yup agree David Rosendall what was your favorite episode this year i was thinking about this to not by the lead my favorite episode was Nike but i dont think it was our best episode i think our best episodes this year were lvmh， cosgo and visa and ive come to think the theres a sweet spot for you and me in terms of preparation and are sort of emotional states preparing for unleading up to an episode that leads to it being good and i dont think it was bad i think it was perfectly acceptable but my level of work preparation an emotional concern and stress heading into Nike was the peak that it is ever been about an acquired episode yeah， you are a wreck i mean how many books did you read overted and part of that was it was the first episode of the season part of that was i went to stanfordbusiness school， which is the night management center and this is filled night and ive never met failed night but i felt an extra dead of gratitude to him and obligation to do every right and then part of a two was our friend David litsky at fast company was rellingus following along with us as we were making it， which was super cool the article that hero was a wonderfall and very complimentary yeah， hes a talented writer but all of that stew you know i felt like OK， i really got out bring it on this one and what was interesting thats why is my favorite iproud of all the work that i and we did for it but i think i finally went too far if you look at that episode i was trying too hard hmm！

which may not come out in the final edit i gotta be honest if you go back and look listeners， you may not hear it i could hear it in the first edit and certainly what were recording here alive， i mean the number of things that we end up cutting is massive but David i completely agree with you until this year i dont think i would have agreed with the statement that the quality of our episodes is governed just as much by our headspace the day of recording as it is by the quality of the research that we did and now， i believe that that is a mentally the case that the flow of the episode， the excitement about the topic， the clarity of the points that were trying to make its about treating it like Sunday if youre an nfl player and having a game day routine in the way that teaches you how to perform your highest this is out incredibly um self ackrandizing here but this is how we come to think about it like nfl Sunday when were going out here！

i go back to our nffl episode at the beginning of the year it takes me right back to playing football in high school the games that i prepared the hardest for felt like i really put the effort in those were not the ones where i played the best the ones were i played the best or when you play lose， you know， you go out there and you have fun and you enjoy yourself and you let it flow and like it is the exact same with a card episodes all right i wasnget a share at this but now that were on the topic so at the top of my shownotes document for every episode theres two things written one is what should the listener take away from this and i have some bullet points of make sure you nail these points and are clear about these things and the other one is a one liner that i have written that says have fun labyougoodat this matchers are powerful and those things are so important i think you know i just again for focus you are listening who are we have been athletes i suspect this will resonate thats the passed part of my life that it resonates with all of those are important have fun yougonna play your best when you have an fun you do a labrelated to that but also， we can i to me make me think about your team your team made to do you and i were a team and then the last piece made is most important the yougood at this the sports psychology element the selfconfidence element huge yep i mean who are we to think that we can go make these ridiculous episodes well！

thats exactly the headspace that i get into that causes episodes to be bad when we restarted episode and listers we restarted this episode we get fifteen minutes and we were like yeah， it feels forced and we restarted it i can guarantee the the quality this episode is already better but yeah， thats the sort of negative selftalk that i start getting into who are you the whatever credentials what qualification are you sure you look under every rock those are the things that start ripping me apart if i start thinking them moments before according so thats why Nike is my favorite episode cause i feel like this way of thinking about what we do finally click for me its like you gotta like take yourself pass the breaking point before you realize i might need to think about this differently it is funny how doing the episodes and studying these people these businesses teaches us things that we internalize in our own business i would not have been able to describe acquiredas a luxury brand or a luxury product prior to LVME age and luxury is probably still not right its probably i dont fit ulter premium or if its just like a prestige brand？

i want to talk about this later in the episode but my quick take is we are not a luxury product but we share a lot of traits yeah！

scarcity is kind of the biggest one and thats a thing where i was unable to understand what to do with our scares city before studying lvme h but an afterwards i sort of came to the realization of oh， we should embrace the fact that we only have the throughput to be able to do one episode a month and rather than trying to figure out how to scale that there is a very fair path to owning it and staying a boutech little shop thats you and i and Steven are wonderful editor who works with us on a contract basis and this is the team this is what we do and we can only make so much and if we make more the quality drops or we have to scale in some way that feels unnatural to us and thats OK rather than every other person the poicast ecosystem that we had spoken with up until that point was well you have to figure out how do you layer that second show or how do you introduce more hose or how do you get research assistance？

you dont have to do that and the boutickiness is one of our greatest strengths and that was something i think i was trying to run away from for a while and now people ask whats gonna be different for acquiredwhen you go full time you doing way more episodes no absolutely not were gonna make the same number or fewer of even better episodes we get to be careful or were going to turn into dan Carlin here and do what episode year hardcore history yeah， i know！

said the legsrestrategy， which was part of our preparation for lvmatch was reading this incredible book the legsrestrategy， which contains the twenty four antilaws of marketing and i just want to call out antilove marketing number 18 you should have this on your desk i put it on my desk head of recording this episode， but i actually have had it on my desk for large persons of this year antilove marketing number 18 do not relocate your factories？

yeah！

this is our version of that right wenever gonna relocate our factories and we happen to be in a particular business that scales extremely elegantly with a word of mouth go to market and a product that is infinitely replicatable and a revenue string that scales nearly in lock step with the size of the distribution and i say nearly is important we should talk about nearly later， but we do have a business model that lets you grow the business indefinitely without compromising it all and like if you are nlvmatch， you do have to go build another factory in order to go serve more customers theres not sort of that infinit scaling that can happen by the virtue of the internet and media on the internet yep so to put about on the very easy question of what was your favorite episode yeah it so far you spent a lot of time not answering me uh no i did it was Nike Nike was my favorite？

but i think um the other part of the coin question of what was our best episode i think visa was our best episode nice， there were others that are more impactful i think elvim h that episode alone i think completely changed acquired as did cosql as did coske， but visa i think was the perfect blend of like an nfl Sunday gone extremely right we prepared the right amount and we played least we had fun， we left we were remembered that we were get at this i think you can see it in the finish product yeah its the ones where we didnput too much pressure on ourselves that i think came out the best yep which for me were lvch cosko， before we move out of talking about our season episodes the year to the interviews that we did this is the perfect time to talk about one of our favorite companies stats ig yes and mamm it has been a big year for static to when we had vj on acq to earlier this year they were already a pretty impressive kind of series be stage startup with a killer team and early product marketfit and all that but whathappensense in the scale that theyoperating at now is pretty wild this is where we get lucky in being very choosing with our sponsor sometimes these things happen to them well were midflate yes， so i ask them for some fun statsthat we can share publican i give focus a sense of scale of what happened in 20234 static so the first one in the past month stateshipped actuallive product experiments to over one point to billion and users around the world now thatstatisnot de duplicated across apps， so theres some overlap in terms of actual people， but i mean even if you cut that in half to approximate actual flesh in blood human people out there， thats almost ten percent of the worlds population crazy okay， so thats one two static now processes about a hundred and thirty billion thats with a b events per day from its customers that is one point 7 million events every second， so the infrastructure that stats signow has to support these data volumes is pretty wild， especially since the company was founded less the three years ago it and its not likely just execute these events they then take all the data from them run huge statistical jobs across the whole corpus to compute the experiment results that their customers are running for all these c to one billion plus and users it is just while that this rate theyre going to need to call up Andy Jazzy and the talk about some of those aws bills yes and its funny i hadnt thought to make this comparison until right now so you said one point seven million events a second if you look at the visa numbers， i just pull up my visa notes visa does 86 transactionspersecond so thats what 20X muchthreeputitstatsegthenatvisa so thats on the metrics side that they can share publive on the customer side stat seg added arguably almost all of the most important ai companies in the world this year including Microsoft atlassian and thropic many many others a long of course， with regular old companies like notion and ui， path and lattice and brax， and friends of the show rec room many many others the team also kept shipping superfast， but the started the year they had just one core product， which was hosted product experimentations today theyre a full fledged product understanding platform they have dedicated feature flagging， warehousenative experimentation and product analytics yep！

we cant wait to see， where theyre going in twenty twenty four so if your team wants the best platform in the world， for making data driven product decisions you should reach out statom slash acquiredand as always， there is special white glove onboarding for all acquiredlistenersare huge thanks to static so in January David， i looked at each other。

and we said we should stop doing specials specials is what we call the nonseason episodes that we did on the feed until this year and they were almost all interviews in practice but anything that wasnacanoical season episode yep and the reasons that we decided we wanted to discontinue them were as David？

you said， there almost always an interview and what is an interview an interview is uh episode where you have a person who is not a part of your enterprise something you control come on the show and say something that they very likely are going to say someone else to so by theyre very inherent value of it it is not an end of one product whereas when we make a coscopisode thats an end of one product and so no matter how good you do the interview you are starting on your back foot in terms of can you create this diamond this unique thing in the world the way that we can on a season episode and also， there are other people and other podcastors out there who are world class interviewers yep and they are incredible mastersoftheare craft and we were kind of looking at what we were doing and be like why are we doing this to yup and you could see it the numbers every time we would do one even with the biggest names you know these people were youre like i imagine that really moved the needle for you know it didnt every single time we did a special it had less downloads than the most recent season episode we did。

which is crazy neveronce was a special our biggest episode ever to your point about analytics that was telling us something and that was screaming at us in the face for years。

which is when you make a unique product that is the thing that people are here for you have a format and a product that people want so make that dont go do something thats one click over in the commodity spectram we try all sorts of things we try to do the tcq sessions where we really like you know， try to make it feel more casual and wepoor wine and i think all the different specials we did and sessions we did and collabs we did theres something to be learned from to bring into mainstream acquired and what interviews now are yes， so heresware the lesson we learned around dont clutch your pearls too tightly we swarm off we said you know what were done yeah， we had made the decision that there was never going to be another interview one acquired this is going to be a great year going forward where once a month， we have this very pure thing that we do thats release a lvmagestyle episode and then we have the opportunity to fly to stock home and interview Daniel ec about Spotify and then we get the opportunity to interview the ceo of the then eightbillion dollar market cap Uber and we would call each other and say we said we were gonna do this so what do we do what we had decided you know we have a cq two and we started calling that the acquiredinterview show yeah briefly for like two weeks legitimately！

this is where the rubber hit the road we were going to put Daniel and Ara on acq two and that was the decision and we were ready to do it that we just kind of look to each other and were like what are we doing here right？

we are getting far too precious and i think our precious ness has made acquiredwhat it is i believe that but you can get too precious asekeydois awesome but it has one tenned the distribution of acquired and thats great because it lets us play around with stuff and it lets us do followups to episodes where we dont feel like every single person that listen to this big episode would want to listen to the followup and we get to talk about coming companies its a lower states thing for us to do an acq to episode， which is great to have as a part of our ecosystem， but it was really dumb and im really glad we didngo through with it to put the ceo so Spotify and Uber there and so the year went on we had the opportunity to that interview jenson as hes becoming the most highlighted ceo of one of the top five most important companies in the entire world， and then of course， we get to spend time with Charlie Mongergosh a month and a half before you passed away， which is i feel so unbelievably lucky yeah well！

were come back to Charlie！

but it turns out with interviews the answer is we still dont do interviews we dont do specials acquiredis what it is except for you know Charlie and Johnson well。

i think theres a couple themes here to it all kind of stumped into realtime with Daniel and Ara those interviews actually happened on the calendar pretty close to one another and then i think we kind of crystalize this by the time Jensen and Charlie happened we still can do something unique in special and in most cases i dont want to say this will be every case going forward but if you look at those for interviews that we did this year they were all the cos or you know sort protagonist in charleys case of companies that we had covered extensively on acquired and i think that to me is at least one example， there may be more of how we can do something unique in special and thats not to take away from all the other many masters of their craft out there， like Patrick or shadows and many others that are world class interviewers of which i dont think we are in a vacum， but incaseswherewevedone， a hundrehoursofworkerinnvidiouscaseinvirtuscacemany hundreds of hours of work on these companies i think we then can do something special with the protagonist that other people cant do right this is something that my dad would always say to me when i was younger。

hes like i legitimate dont think im the smartest person but i do think im the hardest working and whether it was in school or whether in his career the answer was grind for more hours and become the most knowledgeable to make the most inform decisions and i kind of feel that way as an interviewer im not under raw circuin you know plane vanilla walking into a pretty new subject hes gonna be just a lights out interviewer but the place where i can be one of the best in the world this if i have done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of research on a topic you know， we can start with jenson on the reva one twenty eight， and thats not how other interviews are gonna start right？

and that was just obvised us i think that was your idea to do it youdislike of course， we have to start with the reival one twenty eight right？

you cant know a story is whilespretag is no sastory！

but try to get as closesyoucan sometimes a degree save ourselves from ourselves here but im glad that we didnt cut these and i think it can end up well， weget to the stats in a second， but clearly they have ended up being something special， but the cool thing about the core thing that we do rseasonepisodes is like that is the natural byproduct its not like we need to go carve out time to do a hundred hours of work to go interview jenson or Charlie its like Nora weve already just done that is the core thing that we do right so to throw out the opportunity to continue doing those would have been really silly yep so you might be wondering Charlie Margo was by far biggest episode ever Jensen was bigger than any previous season episode Dara and Daniel were right around the ballpark of what are season episodes were doing at that point in time when we had interviewed them。

we sort of figured out there is a style and a type of person where the episodes behave as end of one episodes the sort of decake curves look similarly over time of people seeking them out on an evergreen way you know we have seen just as many people 92 days later which is what today is referencing the jencein interview that we would see referencing the Nike episode 92 days later these things if we do them rightstage just as ever green and so you know we want to stay as precious as possible about them and so what does that mean like how can we change acquiredbusiness to make it so that the answer is we dont do interviews on the the main show in lessof course， its an interview that we need to do on the main show and after some earlyconversation， we had with some of the sponsors for next year we just sell them differently i think that was a key insight for us we used to do in a season， six main episodes and six specials and we would sell them and both and say hereso youll get in this period of time and thats still how we sell the sponsorships for the season you know， that is gonna happen over six months you know its gonna be about once a month well， give you a heads up as soon as we know with a topic that were gonna be covering and we would try to do the same thing with specials and that job us to create specials， which is entirely the wrong thing to do right it was broken。

it was slot filling you dont get not to take away from our guest we had incredible guess， but the conversation themselves were slot filter we had slots that we needed to fill that works for us with the season episodes， because were going to make an episode want some out thats in our control， but with interviews you cant slot fill if you want them to be special if yousitting around？

waiting serendipidously for a Charlie longer， a Jenson interview to happen， which is basically what weve decided the strategy is forguess you cant have pre sold a commitment to your partners that youve gonna do you know six of those every six months exactly so stay tuned for how this will work in practice， but the way we think about it for next year and summeronly conversations seems like this is going to work is you get the next three interviews we promise you theyre going to be world class and we have no idea when they will come out and theyre probably going to come out next year but we cant tell you much pon that and i think that to the accent that we find and continue to find great partners who want to work with us as sponsors in that way thatworks really well to make sure that the content bar is where it needs to be the audience is happy and that we can frankly blow it out of the water the way that we do on the season episodes for our sponsors so what does that mean for acq to i should say acq two next year is gonna be so much better because theres all this inbound that we get for acquire that weve decided does it make sense on acquiredand what that means is we are getting freezy good guest for acq two so i would feel silly not to point people tore that when i know whatcoming next year so yeah im excited about that too so i completely obviously agree with you。

you know on the implications for the business model and not slot filling and you cant predict when serendipiously， youve gonna get a chance to interview jencerin or interview Charlie but this is our opportunity what interviews do we want in a perfect world to do in the next sedo set of time here？

for required well。

David， i think thats the right question and i think the answers sort of obvious you should have to look at our episode list i mean who are the people that we feel like weve studied the way that we studied jenson， but we have another conversation with yet i mean its Bernard are no its more as chain its film night its Bob iger i think there are people who stories we know！

but we dont know and those would make sure special interviews then im gonna give you a hallpass on this one because uh years one month into parenting and lord knows i have empty and sympathy for you but you miss the obvious one that i was teaching you up for there which weve going to make rpo weve gonna shoot our shot right here tailor if you are listening or travel me if you can make an intro or travisiif you can make an intro will maybe have you on for a little segment of it well go to the longpart studios we can meet a you know anywhere at a posh restaurant around your on the south American lake of the tour you know will fly down there literally anywhere anytime yeah！

absolutely！

um alright！

lets talk about Charlie！

lets talk about Charlie first！

we just have to you we said the episode but again say a huge thank you to enjoy marks whos become such a good friend of the show i feel like Andrey sends us more research material than like Andrey is like a source for every episode were not just gonna write his name and the sources but like ten sources from every episode are things that Andrew Texas like have you found this have you found that have you found that the minute that we solidify what the next episode is gonna be we text Andrew and say you do like all right what do you get？

and hes always get something not to mention hes got like a twenty company long requestless with a reason for why each of those companies should be acquired episodes goof making the the appeal and so he always uh celebrates when we pick one off of his list so big big thank you to anjue he is literally the acquiredmvp of twenty twenty three its not you！

its not me， its Andrew， and also are other friends to who know who he is thankyou to them for making that happens i think it was just a it was a life experience i dont know what else to say i cant believe we got to do it theres a strangeness that comes and if anybodywhois listening to this is like a longform journalist？

like a new yorker writer or something like that or has written a book on a company or maybe even like a PhD research association you sort of know this feeling where even though something happened in real life youve done enough research about it where it feels like a story to you and yes at some point you meet the protagonist and youre like oh right youre like a person in addition to being the main character of a story that i know very well and that in virtuous case， theres a cult following of millions and millions of people who all know the story who can all site passages from you know the description it is its like a religiant Charlie is a person， a wonderful person in addition to being this character and i think a figure yeah， yeah， the serility of the moment i think hit me the most when there was a question， we ask Charlie and he responded im not interested in being anymore of a good rule that i rdm yes， and you could sort of see that even though its works so well for him to get so much of his wisdom to the masses and he has he in warned both have been these incredible teachers their whole you know last fifty plus years in addition to the main job of being great investors， capital allocators， operators there are sort of these educators on the side but that education and universe that theycreated has blown up to the point where i think it waisa little bit heavy at least on Charlie yeah， its almost like the bird in he carries to get his wisdom out is that he has to sort of be treated as a guru or a character in a story rather than just a person and i guess i have no idea what Charlie would say to that obviously！

but i think for people who find themselves in those positions you know， Steve Jobs was that for sure obviously， warren and Charlie are that jency may be on his way to becoming that novel has become that yeah！

Taylor Swift is that a hundred percent its almost like the Batman thing whats the line from Batman begins restarting about the sort of uh frailness of being a person and then when he becomes Batman， he says as a symbol i can be increruptable！

i can be ever lasting something elemental is that sort of idea totally all these people are both people and symbols and ive just imagining once you become a symbol， you cant have two options you could be monit or you could embrace it and i think Charlie would say look its gonna wait on you no matter what no matter what one you choose theres no going back its going away on you and so you might as well embrace it yeah！

one other behind the scenes point to make， which i think listeners might find interesting on these for Daniel Dara Jenson and Charlie， they all were these massive lead time interviews they dont just get coordinated a couple weeks before and the story behind to them was Charlie was a maybe sixmonth thing it was once we started digging into COSCO and rue suggested hey， what if you interviewcharly for a followup Jenson， i think we originally reached out to Nvidia before we started our Nvidia part one research almost two years ago and said hey， would Jenson when this was a very different time for required， we thought the dreams to interview Jenson， not the dreams to go learn as much as we can about Nvidia until the story ourselves we reach out and said Queen interviejenson and even though we had a good friend of the show whois able to introduce us to someone on the executive team we got a you know can response of very busy the sort of thing and it wasnt until like we did the work and then we made part one in part two where then it caught a media attention and the folks there were like these we should do something together and it still took another year to figure out exactly what the thing was to do together and when and same thing with dariaduber， we met uh actually， friend of the show Brad gerstner had his investor day for all timeter and uh， i met dara there and i think it took probably nine months after that to figure out a good time to you know on the earnings calendar on the pr calendar when it could actually make sense to the interview the way it happens with Daniel was we said uh？

Daniel was the quickest what did we say like our next time？

were in Stockholm wedlove to do it he was like oh yeah next time we hear lets do it what it turns out of all uh those for cast characters only one has a professional podcast studio in his office and uh that would be the one who runs a podcasting company so we happened to find ourselves in starcombut uh that actually was a highlight for me this year i know it was only three days David but that crazy i mean we have three beautiful days in may in stockhome what a gorgeous gorgese city the run we did a couple runs around the city while we are there and just make sure to kind of take it all in and the people Spotify were so nice hosting as i mean just bold out the red carpet yep by the way i just want to say i know a lot of people are lambasting Spotify podcasting strategy i think people are entirely missing the force through the trees on calling that a failure completely， Greg i think Spotify in their musicbusiness has gotten to scale and has no potential to create a high operating leverage business theyre always going to be giving the same percentage of the prophets to the record labels who have an unbelievable amount of bargaining power over them so the question is what do you do？

next audiobooks is a goodbat podcastingsagoodbat something where you can eventually gain operating leverage and the fact that they did the huge Rogan deal they bought the ringer they bought gimlet well if you look at the dollar sense today youre like jeez theyve spent a lot of money but they havent generated a lot of profit from podcasting yet they totally bootstrap their way to become thescale player in podcasting， so to the extent that there is a big pile of money waiting to be the scale player in podcasting there well positioned to make it given the half billion dollars or three quarters of a billion dollars that they spent oncontent they now have bootstrapped to scale yep that was the price of entry and like we see it in our analytics Spotify is the majority of consumption of acquiredout there no， it is our largest single player but i dont think its over fifty percent yet but one stat thats interesting is from Spotify rapid for podcasters they make a rapth to give to you in addition to the ones to distribute to your audience is that 76 percent of the people who listen to Spotify acquiredon Spotify foundus this year that is crazy on platform growth and i think the corresponding status we group something like a hundred and 76 percent on Spotify。

or something like that often already decently sized base yeah！

so i mean in many ways im predisposed to think podcasting is more interesting and important in the world that it is but if you sort of right off the idea that Spotify will ever make decent margins in music they needed to make another bat this feels like a pretty good bat this an audio box yep！

i think the other side that we see avetis thisleading to some of our um you know discussion of acquiredthe franchise and twenty twenty four podcasting is a great business i do not doubt that it is a very valuable！

very large market for them to be yep if you can figure out how to make being the scale player translate into lots of profits， which no one has done yet well。

no one has done yet and the previous scale player almost like a did not start you dont like i didneven run the race apple yeah！

which as we talk about before we are imentingly grateful for because it enabled this open free podcasting medium that we have today， which is to our advantage yes， alright， so David that was the content this year and before we shift over to the state of the franchise here at acquiredwe want to tell you listeners about our friends at crusal yes！

Criso as you know by now is a cloudinfrastructure provider specifically built for AI workloads and powered by clean energy so Nvidia is one of their major partners incresos data centers are filled with all the latest hopper GPUs linkedupwith。

infinaband and optimize for the best possible performancefor all viewworkloads yep CRISO strategy is super straightforward make the best AI cloud solution for customers using the best available GPU hardware on the market and invest heavily in an optimized cloud software Stack yup and doitall usingstranded energythat otherwise would causeenvironm and instead used that energy to lower the costofrunning your ai workloads yep has an aicompany crusolike acquiredhas had a great twenty twenty three with a pretty incredible growth so to wrap up the year they and we wanted to highlight one of their customers that started building on cruise o the beginning of this year just as a baby startup and closed a one hundred and two million dollar series a series a series a from a whole bunch of great ventureinvestors at Cliner， emergency locks and Nvidia itself called together AI yep！

together AI is actually its selfa cloud that allows customers to train and run their own instances of open source models like Lamatoo and stable diffusion， and their secret source is that they enabled really fast and performance inference so once the models are finetuned in trained to customers use cases they can scale their applications really fast and really big and guess what part of that performance optimization under the hood comes from together building on crusos infrastructure its a huge success yep there are a bunch more stories like this coming so if you？

your company or your portfolio companies could use lower cost and more performance infrastructure for your ai workloads checkoutcrusoclouddotcom slashaquiredthatcru soweclouddotcom slashaquiredor click the link in the shownotes OK！

David lets talk about acquiredthefranchise yeah well to kick things off on that front i feel like you had a all more to say on uh our discussion earlier about is growth good i mean certainly this is relevant yeah！

so my thinking on this has gotten simpler， which is basically i am extremely open to fully saturating the niche of smart people who care about what makes businesses work and great technologies successful endurable in the world and i think last year again i was being too precious about like i dont think its good for our lives if we become too famous， i mean Abby productifpodcasting is youre not on video that often so you actually do get to stay less famous than youtubers or less visually recognizable， which is good i just kind of generally believe recognizability is fun until you get to a certain level and then its bad and then you cant put the geneine back in the bottle and your list horrible and i would like to not become that but if we can keep doubling and doubling doubling， it turns out the set of people who like studying business history and beingthoughtful about it can writeus with little tidbits saying oh， i happened to think about it this other way and have thoughtful responses and want to be a part of the required community if that turns out to be five million people or ten million people great thatonly goodness， but i think my Vue on growth is we have a natural governer to our growth， which is the universe of that set of people is a fixed number and im just not interested in discovering a second market outside of that so to the extent that we can stay true to making the stuff that we love to make and serving that group of people and i just dont ever want to like you could say lower the bar or create some different product or whatever but to appeal to a different mass audience that part is not really interesting to me yeah！

this has become more evident to me to in um some of our episodes this year like particularly the portia episode that we did with dug tomio have blown up on YouTube YouTube lets completely put a quire decide for a second my feeling is about YouTube are like it is an amazing platform it is an incredible gift to the world that YouTube exists and one of my carbouts leader in the episode is going to be the QB school on YouTube， which is a former nfl quarterback who makes amazing detailed breakdowns of what is actually going on every week on your like favorite teams oh， thats awesome its incredible like the fact that that is available and accessible for free im literally gonna subscribe to that right now oh， itamazing jtosoleven well talk more about a player go subscribe if you care it all about football even if you dont， thats said for our episodes theyve gotten bigon YouTube if you go look at the comments total it is a hundred percent not even the same universe of experience that dequiredslack community is and like this kind of crystalize for me what youtalking about of like anybodywhois the type of person who really cares about knowledge understanding these great businesses the stories we tell them learning from them come on it like we want as many people of those in the world the YouTube comment world outthere is not what we want right and im not trying to be pretentious im not saying like you must have thought about it as much as i have in order to be a part of that no i feel like this has been an eight year journey for us and for me a twentyyear journey of learning about what makes these technologies in these businesses become powerful forces in our world anyone whois anywhere on that journey including farpassed you and i David on that journey i would love to have a relationship with either two way through the slack or even if its just one way through people listing to acquire so im not saying like i just want a appeal to the people who are like ah heresagochao on there！

actually is an if power thats not that its the curious thoughtful people who are not in the YouTube comments of the portia episode this had never happened to any of our episodes before until this year we were not exposed to this part of the internet will nothing had like algorithmically blown up yes and reached a lot of people quickly the only way anybody had really heard of acquireduntil this year was their friend told them and that is always gonna be a really high quality way to grow your audience but if an audience growth quickly， its like the masses just enter and you get who shows up yep i think for both of us this really kind of clarified what we really want and meant by this uh were little worry about growth like its not the wherery about growth its that we want to keep this you know place thats about knowledge yeah well and last year i think we were talking about we were getting a little bit um shaky about the impact on our business from growing the show because getting larger wasnt equating to growing the size of our revenue and it also was creating problems for the classic sort of startup and growth stage companies that had been our long time sponsors where we were going to them and saying OK the audience is four times bigger than when we work with you two years ago， lets have a conversation about what it should cost response of the show it was just like an immovable object meeting a nonshoppable force there just wasnt anything to be done and so weve had to get creative and figuring out what do we do to continue to grow the business？

well， it doesnt be commensurate with the audience， but the audience growing should make acquire a more viable platform for larger sponsors， deeper partnerships ways that we can sort of increase both the size of our business。

but also like the durability and importance in the world of our business yep so as we started experiencing some of the growth that we talked about we realize that wed kind of hit a scale now， where acquiredis a viable platform in partner to new spodders that we can work with and just a talk about what those are for season， fourteen starting in January two of r， three sponsors are going to be jp Morgan specifically， jp morgands payments， division and service now both of which are incredible companies we are super excited to work with them but in both of those cases， we new those companies and new those people there for several years now right？

we should say the teams that have decided to partner with us from each of those companies have been longtime acquiredfans and weve got no no over the course of years and years and years and the answer has sort of always been hey， we should do something together and then like we talk about it for a while and then the answer is always kind of like OK， youre sort of this like little nitch maybe theres something you do and now the conversation is very much like oh， wow， you show up in the world in a big way with an important set of people and youre now in this category that we can totally work with you as a durable partner that we want to like build this deeper relationship with an especially now that were in our eighth year its a very different thing to be partner with acquiredthan it was when we were in our thirdyear。

its not like a scrappy startup thing its the trustedentity in the world yep it would have been odd for fortune 500 stowework with us before recently and now starting to work with their teams how would jp Morgan thinks about their brand and their positioning and their kind of whole set of marketing activities is a completely different animal than how startups and you know earlier stage tech companies do yep and its an intensely coordinated effort with a calendar that is already full by the time youre finishing twenty twenty！

three twenty four is largely known theres a whole set of events there is a set of campaigns that are going to happen at different times and these things are adaptable but my gosh the level of forsite and planning that weve gotten to work with from those teams has just been like a whole different animal than what were used to and we love the nimbleness of small companies and that enables us to do special things together and sort of our fun task for next year， which ive excited to unveil some of the stuff were doing will be to bring that custom thing that were able to do with these small company is in create native content for the medium and do other collaborations with them as a company for example， the way that we invest in our sponsors or the way that we speak at their conferences and things like that to bring that to like large fortune 500 enterprises and thats such an amazing dance like the way that these marketing organizations are able to figure out OK， can we talk about this partner of hours and in what way？

can we talk about it and how much leeway？

can we give Ben and David to natively work in an acquiredtheme from six episodes ago and trust them that in this episode its gonna come across right on air it takes a very special marketing department to be able to behave the way that the vantas and the modern treasure is in the vouches of the world do well stuarding a 2030 hundred year brand and the few other things you got operousleave i think the goal is to be able to continue to work with these sort of recent product market fit you know series beish companies that we always work with， so between the backcatalog between interviews we will figure out ways that we can still work with those companies because frankly， those are the types of companies that David and i love using for required i mean work customers of vouch and we use modern treasure we like playing with it， we like following the founders on their journeys we like having the founders on ack two， so we can kind of learn about how there building their companies we also like getting the exposure to be able to invest， so its also to be able to build these really tight relationships with those companies especially when theyre founded like i just keep going back to dmi training is co founders coming up to us at our very first liveshow after they had come out of YC into telling us about this tiny little moderder treasure at the time and you just look at the behemethod out of money that they move now there are dozens of companies in the acquire ecosystem that we have relationships with that we want to be able to。

continue to be a partner to and just figure out the right way to structure that yeah and just as importantly dozens if not more than dozens that are going to be coming up over the dex set years yeah！

David， what yougetting to here is now that were both full time on acquiredwe finally have the opportunity to do our investing together and undo it anyway， thats uniquelyacquiredand that is sort of native to acquired， and so theres no bigannouncemen or anything but thats the thing to share with the acquiredcommunity is ivenerating these little angel checks into probably tanish of our sponsors at this point and ack two guests and companies weve gotten to know when were finally going to be able to kind of do that at scale and do it together in a way that were not spending a lot of our time hearing stage pitches or anything like that， but for companies that we already know well！

davenire are going to join our investing forces and invest more in those growth stage market leading to companies yep and is an earlyexample of this are great friends over advance theyre ceo Christina have been um very very kind guinepigs for us so vantays been a long time partner the show weve helped to grow their business and last year Kinect garden ventures the earlystage angelist fund that i run with my friend nap we did a ten million dollar spv in fanted seriesb and that was a great test of can we invest in a market leading company and put meaningful capital to work so thats a playbook that were now going to be able to run， more often！

more and together and specifically as a part of acquired， i just have this funny a thing that happened so much of the less two three years， which is uh company is raising great up round from you know one of the best few investors in the world in technology companies and says would you like an allocation i can give you one or two or ten million dollars in this big growth round and i you know right some little angel check and like thats been great but its time to do more with that opportunity yep this is all part of you coming full time and its time its time for all this to happen yeah its time so thats sort of the state of what were thinking about for investing， which weve put into action early next year and sort of the direction that are sponsorships have been going to and we should say were excited to welcome back for next season in the third slot friends of the show， pilot and venta are splitting slot number three so first three episodes are going to be Vanta， second three are going to be pilot and i think we figured out a nice balance to be able to work with fortune 500 so sort of a scale platform and also to be in business both investing and on a sponsorship basis for their go to market with growth stage companies all of which we are super excited about。

but you and are super clear with each other， and we want to be super clear listeners with all of you two the show is the most important thing acquiredis the show that is what you and i love doing that is why you and i are full time podcasters now and all of our effort is gonna go into the show right its what were both excited about？

but its also if you just think about the mongorism， you know you show me the behavior not show you the incentives its literally the thing that makes it all work if you look at the acquiredflywheel， it is produce unbelievably high quality deep dives on these companies and try to create some of the deepest business content in the world in a very very approachable fun conversation away and share the learning journey that were on with everyone and like you said minute ago were really clear with each other like i feel like that mantra comes up on our phone call once a week or something the quality of the episodes is all the matters and you know we just spent ten minutes talking about how were evolving the franchise and working with fortune 500 and you know how were gonna be doing more investing together all the stuff the only thing that matters that drives all of it is quality of episodes yes！

so on that front weve got some fun stuff planned for next year episode one we are already deep in research for were not going to give it away what it is but it is a new category for required？

which is i donthink weever touched it and all 28 episodes or whatever and its what of the largest categories of spend for most countries gdps in the world yeah i think category every countries gdp in the world depending on their level of dsfunction yeah， yeah！

good point anyway， were rd deepin the research the story itself like industry aside financials a side you know market cap a side this is a sentry long incredible story to so im really really pumped it turns out theres a lot of them out there we often get the question are you are afraid youre gonna run out of episodes to do no everywhere we look， theres like some new fascinating multigeneration business that younever expects could of thrive throughall these times that they have and have five unique amazing venietes to tell through their whole history to today like as long as we want to keep doing this there will be fullto keep doing it this year it was brands and luxury and retailers itll be been of this other thing hopefully next year but like we look around the corner and theres all new category of companies to cover yep so wepump for that benyouhave already spilled the beans that another luxury luxury brand is in the works absolutely！

absolutely！

what else we get cooking wehit some big tech we have to it feels like a obligatory nod well hit something in the sort of entertainment gaming streaming world and we could keep naming categories but one listener question that we got that i think is worth chatting about here is how do we handle current events because there are lots of episodes that would be very appealing to do for example， the dozens of request we got two weeks ago or three weeks ago for open ai after the boardroomdrama， we very much have moved away from current events and i think that is in part because of what we talked about earlier that we want to create end of one content and the way to create the most possible commodity content is to try to cover the current new cycle that literally everyone else is covering concurrently i think thats a way to get completely drowned out in the noise create something thats not special and create something that even if you blow it out of the water has a shelf life in this world of about eight hours and so we have decided to move as far away from that as possible and the other reason i think is a little bit our disposition where David when you are looking at something brand new thats unfolding in real time i think weve really started trusting our gut that theres probably more here than there seems to appear on the surface and years ago i dont think we felt that i think we thought Uber is going public cover Uber even three years ago Airbnb is going to public cover Airbnb and you know there was an acquiredway to do it were most of the episode could actually focus on you know the last ten years and only a little bit at the end was focused on the last few months but the more current an event is the less evergreen value that it will have and the more likely it is that you could really blow it like i feel superselfconscious that we interviewed sambakemen free and like you know were not investigative journalist we wert going to spend the time to like try to unfold and dig up hey is this all legit its like a sequoia had just invested a huge amount of money like everyone and all the possible signals had validated this person in this company it was seemingly， enormously free cache， low positive and yet yeah！

we regret doing it we totally regret doing it and were gonna try our best not to set ourselves up to do something like that again in the future。

so the question becomes what should you do and what we are structually well set up to do is these huge retrospectives where the story is written and the story is known and is about really synthesizing it and applying it to todays world where there is just no way that we are ever going to do the sort of uh investigative journalism and frankly like investment diligence soften with private information that you need to do to get a real time story right it is structually impossible for us so swear it off i think thats the answer i would even go so far as to say you know something that ive taken from especially the last couple years of acquiredis the story is always deeper than you think and so lets even say we were set up to doinvesticative journalism and deep diligence that we would then share with the public on a company in realtime in realtime！

i still think its impossible to get it right i mean look at the best bcse out there， they are at least on the diligence and investing side of the equation making these calls in real time and the very best of them only get it right what twenty percent the time i most you know， thirty percent of the time i dont think it is possible to do i mean out fraud is different yes， im not talking about fraud。

im just talking about getting the story right like the story of Uber that we did on you know ipo day back when we did that episode like that was not the full story of Uber yeah to revisit the sbf interview in particular i have it listen to it a longtime i do think weve generally had our whatsabouts enough to always sort of be questionaskers in terms of like hey， this seems really crazy how did that happen and you and i have sort of never been the types to be like everyone should be extremely excited about this and we urge you to go get involved with this now i always sort of chuckle when we say theyre not investment advice！

but thats more my demeanor i truly mean it was like hey Ive done a certain amount of work on this im going to tell you what i learned and also i am not recommending you act on this in anyway ever and i think that fortunately our disposition especially among some of the crypdo and web three media was a little bit more of that but weve learned lessons from that and those lessons are you get to choose the games you play and we dont need to play the current manias game totally and as much as i want to take as a kind personal compliment all the things youre saying and apply it to myself to but i really gotta give credit to you i think this is a big part of the demeanor that you bring in your personality to the show like you are a optimist as we both are and weve talked about a lot on the show but a skeptic well in the big picture youre an optimist yeah and i think this is one of the things that makes us are really good team like in terms of that actual goal and what were trying to do here and acquiredhim what it is and what we wanted to be we are a hundred percent aligned and you do are really good job keeping us in check on this front thank you and if we didnhave you。

then we would just tell stories of old retailers and old oil companies that you know Carey no， no risk associated with them hey， maybe we should do that because those are our biggest episodes yeah thank you all take the compliment and you do need both you need someone whos staying a tune to like maybe this is this new thing everyone is talking about as a breakthrough interesting thing and you also need the hey lets pay attention a history and i think someone asked a question this lack do you consider yourselfjournalist？

and i if anything cause wegot， the question are you analyst or you journalist are you were certainly not reporters？

but i think on that spectram weve shifted much war toward historians than journalis i dont ever expect that we are going to get a story right about something in flight but hopefully given you know couple months to prepare we can get the story right about something thats happened over a long period of time with a lot of perspectives where people are willing to share everything they sort of know since the hashes are married and like does anyone have the story right on what happened in the open ai boardrome right now i dont think so i dont think so with it you know reflecting on this to i think ironically moving to this role as hour and we do my over the past couple years official you know job function an identity of being historian versus venturecapitalist investor has made me a much better investor yeah aint the truth and for me specifically when i was only an investor or investor was the primary thing everything we were just talking about， were both strengths and weaknesses for me， i would fall in love with companies， deeply in love with companies and obviously for people who listen to us i still do this with acquired episodes with the companies we cover and that was a great strength to like you can really help companies and founders can really feel like you are on their team in aligned in pulling with them and also just purely in terms of making the right investments having a bit， more arms， length， objectivity and perspective helps shifting my focus to the show certainly has made me a better investor like i just look at like the investments that Ive done and Ive been more active in the past few years than i was when i was a vc and you know you and i are going to be even more active together going forward i never would have expected this。

but it is really help me turns out knowing history is very helpful in analyzing the present yes and just having this other thing bemyobsessionhas right allowed me to have a little more arms length its also very nice because what it does is it puts most things in your two hardpile like the fact that your main job isnt to go pick early stage companies like when the whole world is your too hardpile because you need to research and acquire episode only the no brainers end up actually grabbing your time a hundred percent yes， the no brainers that dont take up weeks and weeks of your time to decide if you should do it or not are the ones that end up actually becoming the investments that you do and especially when you can sort of take something youve learned from history and apply it to the present i think thats the David rosenthall sweet spot yes， its funny marketing in particular i think um doing acquiredhas made me such a more savvy marketer perhaps the most useful that i am in board rooms now is being like a reality check on are you actually reaching people a in a medium thats gonna confer to what you want them to do and be with a messaging that people will care about cause most of the time most people are creating lots and lots of copy and work product that nobody cares about at all and negos for podcast and negos for startups and i think breaking through and creating something were people know oh i should pay attention to this thats still so rare yeah！

were having this discussion you and me on zoom a couple months ago with world class investor and the sort of frame that we put on it was taste oh ho this conversation yeah you cant really teach it you certainly can develop it but this is a version of that yeah OK whats next on the docket well keeping on this topic of audience Q&A couple weeks ago we got this kind email from listener Martin from Scotland in it， he had a list of questions for us and said if you have time to answer a few， though i would really appreciate it and wed look at it and we said gosh， these are awesome questions should this be the entire episode this should be our holiday special so thank you Martin， we are going to dive into a bunch of them here and they are just fantastic so number one what is the book or books？

youve given most as a gift and why or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life then you want to go first yeah！

i am not actually a huge bookgift or i love the practice i just never remember to do it great that when people are able to do that i think a huge one for me is psychology a money theres a recency bias on it can we mention more in houseout the top of the show good friend of the show great great human i mean truly i massively changed the way that i personally invest yeah， me too face on that book in the way that i just think about spending my time and family and demeanor throughout the day another one is this book and i havent read in by twelve fourteen years， itcalled the artist way by Julia cameran oh！

yeah， Tim Ferris loves this book right？

yeah， i ready as a part of a college class uh cool class at all high state called personal creativity， an innovation and one of the mechanics in the book is called morning papers and the rule is you must write three pages stream of consciousness before getting out of bed in the morning and it is so cool cause it flushes out all the crap from your head so that you can go and have a clean slate to start the day and youre not wasting your time processing youre not like wasting cpu cycles in your brain processing something and roominating on something that you really just need to get out get on the page and then you can focus on other things or perhaps focus on that thing but at least now you have a little bit clarity on it because youve written i should do it more often but i think its amazing practice and kind of like a i hate the phrase but the life hack that i remember feeling like it really worked for me while i was doing it David will you give your answer？

im a turn around a look at my bookshelf to find a third one i have a bunch more books to talk about later in the episode， but the one that ive gifted the most is a book called transitions by William bridges， which was first given to me by benemygood friend mark in Seattle， Ben have i given you this book i dont think so youve mentioned it okay， we need directify this right away watch your Amazon deliveries im gonna send it to you not like anythings randomly showing up to my house three times a day from Amazon right house right youfind it again in like six months or so when youre cleaning out your basement this book is a super cool concept there was written i think in 1980 and the idea is about major transitions in your life could be a good transition like having a baby welcoming a new family member could be a bad transition like a death in the family or career related i was losing a job something like that but the thisist of the book is that when this happens in your life and it will many times a little gruesome but you need to sort of kill your old self and be reborn as your new selfthat sounds super we will but if you actually think about it， it makes sense your identity who you thought you were beforea major transition it has to change there is no way around youll go through the fivestages of you do denial angerv all the stuff this book is a great sort of way to streamline that process but you have to accept that that you that you were before is no longer and then you can create the new you and i found it incredibly helpful both for big challenges in my life and for great positive stuff like having a baby alright thats awesome i will uh watch my front doorstep my third one is a classic thinking fast and slow by column interverse key its just everything you think you know about the way your brain perceives the world how you make decisions is wrong and reading it doesnt make you get any better but at least makes you aware of how wrong your decision making is unless you pay unbelievably closeattention and right down exactly why the decision is being made and look at all the data even then youre probably get it wrong then there is a very fun Easter egg that is gonna be buried later in this episode free you defined related to this book recommendation oh sweet so Ben and listeners can go on a little treasure hunt great 2 next question what purchase of 2 dollars or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory this is a super easy one for me a no brainer myzoji rushie hot water heater for people who dont know about these and i think this is probably most of the world outsideof Japan this is a device that sits on your kitchen counter and keepes several gallons of water at a set temperature constantly im a huge tea drinker i use this thing for five times a day and have for the past decade plus it is amazing！

i said it at 95 degrees i drink green tea everyday i resteve my teapot constantlythroughout the day and like it is unquestionably make my life better and probably will extend my lifespan by like several years from tricking tons of green tea everyday wow thats awesome zojirooshi is a brand willing to idin the shownotes Zoji Rushi is the brand its a Japanese company everybody in Japan has one of these things awesome mine might be a pair of Nike shoes so living in Seattle rains all winter or at least its wet all winter and theres a particular pair im Gonna look up what it actually is so that if you want to buy it you can call the Nike mense Pegasus for Cortex and the gortex is so good it makes winter running possible and they even have a few of the color ways theyre not like totally insane so that you can kind of wear them as every day sneakers but i basically weared them all day everyday in the winter and it makes me far less afraid to go out in the world because i dont like having wet feed amazing OK！

next one is the timparius question i dont think anybodys ever asked us that before if you had a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it metafarcally speaking what would it say and why maybe the most random factiveout me i was a French literature major in college particularly a um 17 than 18 sentry a French literature expert i hardly an expert but thats what i majored in in college and um a something that is stuck with me from then and the order i get and the world we live in becoming more the world it is has stuck with me more and more is the last line of voltairs can did you fote cultiv no to zhadam we must cultivate our own garden and especially today like this to so much in the world you dont have any control over the only thing you have control over is your garden and cultivating your own garden for us thats acquiredand for me thats acquiredin my family and you know maybe some other things over time but just focus on what is in your control and be great at that and be good at that be great and be good at those things and that is what you can do at least those are the words that i have come to live by i love that i actually dont have my own answer to this question there are someone else that i know that has a answer to this question that i quite like so im just gonna recant their story but i should go find some words to live by a good friend of mine his dad had a saying when he was growing up that uh he would always remind his kids just be kind hey whatever the thing is just be kind you know someone might be being a jerk to you and you know they deserve some kind of reprofession but you should just be kind and certainly the world will figure out a way to deal with this persons action at some point and uh the thing my friend did is at some point as his dad was getting older he asked him to um write down the model on a piece of paper and sign it and he wouldngot a tattoo on his back oh wow just be kind signed by his dads name i love i now know who youtalking about thats amazing yeah i i think thats the coolest i often remind myself of that of theres almost nothing to be gained by me exuting anything but kindness in this moment and it doesnt mean let someone roll all over you。

but it does mean just always realize that you know its kind of the Michelle Obama thing of when they go low。

we go high yougoinghigh is never gonna hurt you in the long run theres never any reason not to be kind right i love that thats so good what is one of the best ormostworthwhile investments you have ever made could be an investment of any type tivating the relationship with my wife hands down hundred percent and the second best is cultivating the relationship with you no！

which has led to so many things that have made my relationship with my wife and building a family possible and there is no ifans or boutsaboutthat the house imestandingit is thanks to acquire the lifestyle i enjoy is a hundred percent acquire the fact that i wander around all day listening to audiobooks the thing that is done to my demeanor in my personality truly the life that myself and my family enjoy is because of what you and i have built and thank you 好，好！

好 i have the same answer i actually didnt write down Jenny， but i should thank you for reminding me yes， jeny i love you uh yeah did of nothing more dad and probably therapy thats probably the second yeah agree i started doing weekly therapy id done it often on before but i started doing it weekly committing to that this year and its just ementally helpful yep and if you feel like its not helpful just switch there are basio eventually find someone is helpful for you yep alright， what is an unusual habit or absurd thing that you love i eat a starbox spinach feta and cage free egg white byte rap every single day and i have four years and years and years and i actually go to Starbucks and buy them still in the package cold uh by like ten at a time and then ill just make him every morning at home we were in the airport flying back from la we were at lax after interviewing Charlie monker and you got one of these at the Starbucks at lax and ive noticed about you for years and i just kind of look at you and i was like Ben i think you have eaten more spinach fitter apps than any other human beingin the world and you thought about it you really like yeah！

i think thats right because i think ive consume probably close to three thousands of them， 哈哈哈 this is a base this is the very best then gilver trivia that excess when did you start uh i mean it guess around ten years ago i mean i get really ramped like seven ish years ago so maybe two thousand five hundred but wow， yeah pretty much everyday！

breakfast or a lunch speaking of special unique interviews that only we could do i i dont even need to finish that sentence uh were just gonna leave one day yeah， OK！

im not even gonna answer that because i cant top that in the last fiveyears what new beliefbehavior or habit has most improved your life yes！

i was gonna say adding weekly， therebe this year and related to that just listening to my instings in particular my physical reactions to things like i family you know it takes a while to train your instags so like i dont know if i just listen to my instinks and followed my instings when i was twenty five that that would have been the right thing but pretty dialed at this point on like whats right for me and i find that i have physical reactions in my body to things and like listening and tuning into that usually！

is the right way to go yeah i like that i and just being more aware of it i think you have a good sense of that too if somebody is a one percent hockster， i notice you get like physically， uncomfortable and try to create distance between you and them yes！

i dont thats just me i dont know if everybody has up。

i think mine is a thing that im still working on but the amount that i have done it has dramatically improve my life be more present be a better listener the answer is almost always tune in more to the person that youtalking to and really understand them and i think listen harder is usually the way to better understand what someone else around you want and its often not what theyre saying its whattheyfeeling my therapis regularly uses the phrase its about the feeling is not the content and if you can figure out how to be present listen better and meet someone else at their feelings level and figure out how do i you dont even have them make their feelings feel better because they might feel fine but how do i tune into you emotionally and not try to just have a conversation about the content yousaying youre much more likely to both have a positive outcommon have a better rest of your day dude youre gonna crush parenting well， easier said than done yeah right！

easier said than done when um you know youre on hour like three of uh intense feelings shall we say， what device would you give a smart driven college student about to enter the quota quote real world and what advice should they ignore oh！

man lets see some advice i gave like three years ago that i really deeply is harvest when everyone else is harvesting and build skills when theres no harvesting to be done and in particular this person had the opportunity to go work at i think is a big consulting thing and make good money first year and they were thinking about doing that or working for a nonprofit as our first job cause there part was in the right place like they just wanted to do good for the world work and i was like we are not weird time where i dont know when its gonna end but everyones making stupid money right now just like while theres harvesting to be done go participate in that and you should build the best foundation you can but i promise you there will be a time where this job opportunity is not available to you and you will look back at a few years of making a small salary in your first few years out of school and kind of wish that you had built a little bit more of a foundation because i just think this time is gonna end and like it sort of flies in the face of be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful！

yeah！

this is kind of be greetingwhaanothersigreedy and you dont build when others are fearful and be mindful that youre in this temporary moment but like when there is opportunity to harvest， harvest yeah！

reflecting on the twenty twenty to twenty twenty two timeframe that is a huge takeaway for me bill girly as for years， said this you gotta play the game on the field well。

yeah， benchmark is very good at that yes！

yes， yes， they are my answer i would just repeat what i said on the art of investing pipcast that we went on a few months ago which those guys have just built such a great show i mean theyre teachers theyb been teachers for years yeah， Rick and pallor investors in capital allocators and you know great partners to the people that they work with but like even their domain or in one on one conversations is that of a learner in a teacher yeah so wonderful what i said there literally two college students was uh both the following your own path has never been more rewarding in this world that we live in and never been harder like theres so much pressure out there social media everything else about the world we live in there so much pressure to conform and that makes standing out and following your own path that much more valuable oh！

harder and valuable yep people are underrated like in my harvesting comment， it was interesting that what i did was to describe to job opportunities i think theres another way to make decisions， which is surround yourself with if youre ambitious person with the most intelligent people， you possibly can who are the closest to ground zero for your industry be where the interesting thing is with the people who are the best added this is the mark entries and uh i totally go to Denis yes， always go to Denis， always go to Denise and they cant just be smart they have to be like unbelievably trust were the people were the of your time in partnership and thats the harder thing i think to suss out over time thats hard advice to give a college student yep！

i dont think those two things are at odds i dont theyre at odds either！

but your circle of opportunity get smaller when you require more constraints when you require both of them in the last fiveyears what have you become better at saying no to distractions？

invitations， etc what new realizations and or approaches helped any other tips oh！

man， David， theres a thing that you do that im so much worth at， which is you never feel compelled to respond you never feel like somebody else can give you a task to do its not my most flatering quality but its the thing that allows you to give energy to the people in your life that matter the most you thats the thing that i have longed the jealous of is like im very OK with somebody emails me a form email that ive never heard of them or their name its like very easy to archive that its harder when its like somebody that i met three years ago that i really enjoyed getting coffee with and now i have aid of those in my inbox and i just i want to at least say i dont the bandwidth for this right now but like you do those eight times and suddenly two hours have gone by its actually taken away some of your your energy and your life force exact yeah， yeah and you do it to me sometime so like i sort of know like what feels like to be on the receiving indifference but like you have a remarkable tendency to truly wake up every morning and say what actually is important and needs to get done and you dont do the other stuff and its kind of OK if that has a little bit of collateral damage， yeah！

i was gonna say the same thing and i you said it for me like i said this is not my most flattering natural tendency but as ive thought about this over the years what ive come back to is i reach out to lots of people how do i feel if i dont get a response to all those i feel fine and you know i assume that folks that i reach out to have something going on theybusy and especially now having kids its just like i get it for them and i get it for me more its like you do theres nobody more important to me than my daughter nobody can you you dont like OK outside that circle like you are my most important people and theres only so many hours in the day its like a version of you gotta put the yourmask on beforehelkingothers its like i gotta put those relationships on beforeothers yep and everythings a tradeoff like in a vaccine sure you should give your time in your life first everyone but you have a fine item out and so its a priority thing yep OK， last one when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused or have lost your focus temporarily what do you do？

what questions do you ask yourself？

this is so easy and this is the perfect one to end on we go make a great acquiredepisode and this has been such a gift to me inmylifebecauseup until we started doing acquiredan up until acquiredbecame my full time job three years ago i didnhave anything good i could control like that i dont know what i would have answered to that question like so much of everything was out of my control when your adventure investor， you doncontrol anything oh！

my gosh yeah yeah what you mean just go do a good deal and that way in ten years youll know if it was good or not right exactly oh were so luckynow that we have this thing that we do that we can do and well get at we know how to do were no matter how badthings get or you know matter whatgoing on we can just go in a lab and like we know we can make a great episode and we also know its the best thing we can do no matter how good or bad things are going its always the best thing we can do its an interesting derivation that i want to take this down ive had this life advice that ive been thinking about to give to my son when hes old enough to understand life advice which is not right now oh you can have to wait a while you would scream in my face and which is interesting that he can listen to all of this i dont think he ever to will but its crazy that theres like hundreds of hours of his dad talking like do you ever think about that yeah that our kids will get to watch us sort of grow up i guess theres not video until five or so but still like listen to us sort of form who we became assuming that we do this for decades and decades to come but one of the pieces of life advice and David i was telling you about this on our walk nla up run in Canyon we were down there interviewing curly was that when your a young person you should try to become singularly productive and i mean productive in the economics， sense that you are able to soup to nuts within your control， make something of economic value and put it in the world in a way that you own the design， engineering， creation， marketing distribution， monetization， and like everybody shouldnt do that like the corporation is a great structure that enables people to work together in a creative way to produce an output， but your life is way better if you have the capability to singularly produce something on your own， and then its always your choice of how much stuff outside your control you want to let in you might be a singularly productive individual who then goes on to be Craig feed Ricky and you know run all of apple software but then its your choice youre not reliant on a bureacratic structure for you to thrive in politic inside of this is another one of those paradoxes i think in that the way the world works today this has on the surface can a never been harder organizations are bigger！

things are more complex， things are more interdependent the idea that you could as a person and especially a youngperson be able to do that is hard to fathom and yet its also never been more true than ever all you need is an internet connection and you can find and learn some version of this yep pretty wild alright well as we sort of drift towards the end to borrow a bin Gilbert phrase， uh driftors of our twenty twenty three holidayspecial and are traditional extended carvouts we have a very special carvout to kick things off this might be my favorite sponsorship segment of all time so for our last segment for this year with blinkist and their parentcompanygo one we have something really really special little treat for listeners from David and his email penpel yes， so one of the many amazing things about doing acquired is the people all of you who listen and then we get to meet many of you and build relationships with you sometimes this really blows us away so we asked blink ist if we could highlate two of those people who have been important to us over the past couple years and have blinkistbuildbookshelves for them to share with you all of the books that have been most important to them in their lives and careers so the first of those people is someone that is kind of surreal for me to say here but has been a huge supporter of the show and a mentor of mine now for the past few years hetoldmewhenwefirstmet that he will never come on the show and has reiterated that threor foretimes yes， whats we tell you who this is youunderstandwiremany of you will understand why but he did say that if there ever were another opportunity to pass along some wisdom he would love to do it and this is the perfect value so our first holiday bookshelf is from mark Leonard the founder and co of constellation software so if you go over to blinkus dot com slash mark youfind an annotated list of marks favorite books with some very rare insights from him on why he values them yeah！

mark is a absolute legend in uh sort of value investing circles right up there with warren Charlie and if you dont know mark or no of mark？

its worth looking up consolation software anything you can clean on the internet is gonna be totally fascinating about the company that theyve built yeah were very lucky to get to know em so our second holiday book shelf is from another good friend who in the um opposite vein of mark is i think maybe more publicly well known as a business biography expert than just about anybody in the world and willlet him tell you his own top favorite books here i think maybe for the first time ever that hedubness davidsenra welcome to the acquiredholiday special thanks for thinking of me！

thanks for having me David！

i know this is like picking your favorite childrenbut your favorite business biggefis of Tony！

Tony three so i wanted to do some that i actually loved and where there was actually a an acquire the founders overlap and the very first recommendation would be the new stripe press edition of portrays omanack that just happened to be published a week after he passed away， theres something on the back theres a quote from trolling mongo， and he says theres a old two part rule that often works wonders in business science and elsewhere， number one take a simple basic idea and to take it very seriously and so i really feel that you and i are taking traeliser vised heart were just taking a very supply idea of learning from history and then we take it very very seriously and then the idea that we got to spend time with him in his very last year i dont take that lately to the degree that i can and you guys definlydid it with your excellent interview with him so i can really think being a Stuart of his ideas and trying to push it for to passion so it theyre not forgotten is a very important part of like my mission OK， you number two im looking forward to because this was actually my personal favorite episode that you did this year this book is almost impossible to find so its the dream of Salomao my life in the idea of huministic catalism by Brunela Koochanneli and i had to have him on my list out of you know three hundred printers set of study for the podcast suit for its shocking how many of them made the mistake of over optimizing for their professional success at the detriment to their personal life， their relationships in their happiness and brunelo along with soul， price and adthorpe is really upthere with how i want a powder in my own life， and he says Ive always been firmly convinced that in orders is successfully stand out you need to focus on one single project representing the dream of your life and then it just speaks to the first class person that he is in the first class organization that you runs the podcast comes out it became very popular him in a team listen to it and they send me a hand written note Ive never felt paper thatmore luxurious in this and then they do the most Italian thing ever they send me a bottle of there koochanneli olifile 哈哈哈 so again just hes very thoughtful is very obvised when you read the book and it just you could tell by the way hes running the company that hes paying attention everything i whatsnumber 3 OK so number 3 number 4 actually related you find these weiredhard definedbooks and so this is one of onwhereits like a bleu my mind that the fact that in that nineteen eighties， the richest American was somebody a no one ever heard of and so theres only one book on em and its this book called the invisible billing air Daniel Ledwig is a bigraphy of Daniel Ledwig written by Jerry Shields and the book starts off saying that this photographer located the richest man in the world and no photogressier been taken of him and like what are you talking about？

and then you learned that Daniel was just excessively focused on just his work he had no other hobbies besides physical fitness and building his business and he did that to again to he died and what i love about it is you just find somebody that is completely focused on doing the best job possible for his customers and for his own sense of satisfaction of building a business that he is proud of and that is operating the way i would describe his approach is business its like an artist painting a canvas so number four is the taste of luxury you gotta pronounce this name Bernard are now can you just pronounce the whole thing so you have that butgered all the French names in this up so fun the taste of Luxury Bernard are no and the moat hennessy Louis vatan story OK， so this is on the list one because i highly suspect he might be the best around the planet that still operating a running is company right now and if you think about the fact of he knows everything down from the Chinese details， which theres crazy stories about this to the big strategy to the capital allocation decisions i dont know if theres another more towton entrepreneur than him his relentless dedication to really pay attention to every aspect of his business is something that trying to do for mine but the quite episode on lvme h is one of the best episodes of any podcast Ive ever heard， no uh not just required any podcast its incredible i cant tell you how many people i sent that to how many times a listen to it， and then you were kind enough we were together at your house of services go and you were kind enough to give me this book， which allowed me to do the podcast because at the time you had a copy that you spent several hundred dollars on and then if i wanted or the book， the book was like i think three thousand dollars yeah， not i think the important thing is identifying an opportunity that no one else sees there is a great writer subject in that i really like， and he actually wrote something about mark Leonard is that the foundation of a great career is based on finding an earned secret and exploiting it for multiple decades and the reason， this book is so amazing， which cause it ends and Bernard is 42 years old yeah， it ends at the beginning and he is saying hey， uh， these luxury brands uh theyre kind of hard to compete with because if you are to have one it， usually， you know fifty a hundred years old and then everybody from the outside is telling them this is a quote i remember people telling me it does not make sense to put together so many of these brands but it was a success， it was a recognized success and for the last ten years， every competitors trying to imitate and so the book and hes calling a shot， he said hey， we seem to be good assets i dont just gonna keep buying them and then just keep compounting， and then you fast for thirty years， later years or richest man on the world well！

i gotta tell you giving you the book was a selfish act on my part because i already read the book i wanted your episode on it i didnt just do it out of the goodness of my heart OK speakingof number five！

so this is sole price retail revolutionary written by his son Robert price this is another acquiredfounders crossover the episode i made on the sole price i titled purposely the most influential retailer to every live because if you look at the people were on records saying they benefit from ideas from him， Sam Walton， Jim Synnigo， Jeff Bezos， Bernie market its like it all stems from this guy so really the reason i pick this is one its a perfect crossover for your guys excellent cosgoepisode but this goes back to finding people that you admire not just for their business success but theyre success in life imagine that your son after you pass away writes a biography on your life and this is one of the last paragraphs he dont mind let me just go and read this whole paragraph soul was a poster child for the American dream his immigrant parents were born in a small Russian village so was the first in his family to graduate college he earned a law degree he became an exceptionally successful businesman and philanthropus and he celebrated seventy years of marriage he was a good father who instilled high values in his sons and he never walked away from responsibility it doesnt get much better than that ah amazing well！

David so fun for you and David sender to get to have that conversation love David wish i could have joined you and thanksfordoing that while imonpodcast patterny you can find his bookshelf at blinkus dot com slash senra and our thanks to blinkus for allowing us to share our good friends bookshells with you for the holidays well！

for then youre in my traditional extended carvouts to end the holiday special i have a special family one that i want to start with if thats OK hmm so my brotherin law Dave Jenny sistersun Dave is the most beloved member of our entire family including my daughter who no doubt about it loves him way more than mom and dad hes the best he until this year was a earlyemployee at a fetch back start up here in tiff tisk he changed jobs and he joined a company called mill this year it was tell me about the company i was pretty skeptical honestly the start mill was founded by matrogers who matt was Tony fidels co founder at nest back in the day and mil is the nest thermostat version of a compost bin whois an internet connected compost bin oh， i have heard of this yes and uh i first was like OK deep im glad your passionate about this i can imagine how many people out there really need an internet connected compost pin then he join the company and you send this really great socialgal support the family will get one this thing is freaking awesome i was totally wrong even obviously this is seedo i just sort of be the luxury good i mean its not a luxury good its compos been but like its a premium good i did not realize how much i needed this thing for basically my entire adult life ive had fruit flies in my kitchen on and off in the compost bin and if i didnt free fly， you know its compost bend like it you know the compost in your kitchen this thing rostsyourcompost overnight and is internet connected it runs overnight you put all the food scraps in there it rows in churns it turns it into chicken feed and every morning it gets fully roast which means no smell， no mass， and it absorbs this thing is like a black hole of compost its a big band we will go weeks as a family of just putting everything in there， no empdding， no go into the garbage， no smell， no nothing and then when it gets full your app tells you you put it in a box they send you a bunch a box is like a bag in a box is sended off to them and they sell it is chicken feed this is like the most brilliant thing ever i was so skeptical and i am a hundred percent conference mill dot com im not to say it it my brotherin law actually， this is the best thing i bought this year did you or did you not get your for free no i paid for i didnget any discount this is not anyway an endorsement and no theres no paid the only connection i have to the company is that my brother in law joint them and i thought it was a really bad idea。

哈哈哈 right！

im trying to decide if like your problems or real problems at this point， or if youre like youve gotten so comfortable in life that side。

but youre like solving these like really i recognize that i just recommended an internet connected compos bin gag but it really is awesome but its a great one i mean yes！

i recognize the value of good gadgets ibeen using a June of an for the last six months also life changing you might be like why do you need a small event instead of your big oven and why doesnt need to be on the counter and subspit is federapps oh， everymorning Spanish Federapps in the June its perfect OK i have a lite of carvouts go for Ive save my baby related ones for later my tv show my wife and i just bench watch is like holy crap good some of the best tv ive watched in a longtime， very different genre than succession， but like succession level quality its called silo on apple tv it is excellent its based on a book maybe book series and the four tv adaptation is just very good dialogue the cinetografees good， the sets are really impressive the promise is just beautiful and so simple， and the promise is uh this is gonna be spoiler free there is a civilization of humans that exist in a silo like a big silo i dont want to say the exact number of people cause some might consider that uh spoiler but like you know a civilization in a silo OK and on earth or in outer space or presumably on earth is the promise and it is all about people trying to figure out whats going on because it opens with this idea that at some point it will be safe to leave the silo we dont know when that day will be， but we know that day is not today and its a whole civilization of people live in an asylo， the sounds like a great promise thats the setting and im giving no plot details about like what then transpires but its awesome and its great sifi as you know im not a tv person but that is up my alley the female lead is the woman from the most recent the last two mission impossible whos a really good actress and uh who elsesinit the woman from the office machine Jones is also in it goodshow highly recommended shesequence is daughter separate i think thats right yeah， super cool so that is awesome for less good tv but still very entertaining part of our maturity leave maturity live has been uh watching alias need of us watched it back in 2002 and its like a jj Abrams early jj Abrams a Jennifer gardeners the lead youve already done this is a carval but i like there have i there yeah have it recarval thats fine its great i mean it gets worse as the seasons goon， but uh seasons one， two in three are great very worth watching a product that ive been loving i just got some new warby Parker glasses i believe theymade out of vino but the frame is called Amari am Ari they are much lighter than any other glasses frames that ive ever gotten and its like totally game changing to feel like theyre sort of just floating on your face all day some might view them is not a stylush as some of the more stylish options there are my add homeglasses for sure yeah！

one of your carvouts i picked up recently hook a slides actually didnget the slides i got the or a the recovery shoes hoke a slides so good yeah， i got the same technology in the kind of more shoe， more includes ah form factor i think they also called the auras o Ra so great best how should have ever had per your recommendation well！

happy your recommend another one is a feature of a product that i found a couple days ago that is forgeinunsane， so ive had this thing where as iPhone cameras have gotten better and better the computational photography like uh what apple does to photos make them look a certain way and isort have gotten used to that way that photos look and now that im using the big camera again because we have a baby ive gone back to im using the alpha seven cs and i this kind of like very flexible lens that can either be a wide or a zoom lens that were going to use actually for some of coming interviews next year to get a tighter shot on the subject ibeen using that and ive been feeling like how these image are so graining like basically anything that i shoot indoor feels like it has this really terrible grain and you look and of course its like the superhigh iso but the iPhone does so much smoothing that Ive like forgotten that film grain is a thing and so like roomshipped this unbelievable ml powered d noise feature i found out about it because uh nei Patell was just on the talk show with John Groober and he is right to say it totally pegs your gpuse while youre using it but it is pure magic you open up lightroom， you select the photos you can even select like ones that dont seem noise edu and you come back and its like unless you crank the settingway up they look totally realistic it doesnt look overly ai， but your photos just all get like magically way better so huge codos to the Adobe team ivenso impressed with everything that theyre cranking out and ai side like i think there are the enterprise company that is probably the best at rapidly commercializing these generative ai advancements this one is immediately useful for me for everything that i shoot not with my iPhone yeah！

this is a who we did that acq to episode with um Chris from runway like this sector application of ai in imageen video were only just crashing the surface the surface is already unbelievable and like yeah！

i just cant wait for whats coming yep totally agree i think i may have may have made this a carve out at some point， but i want to rehighlight it because its been at least twelve months because i remember reading it over Christmas last year its an article by dark Thompson called the Eureka theory of everything is wrong yes， this is awesome its so good i just re readed its just such a pleasant reminder that its not about the idea， its about the implementation， and its often about the unsexy distribution work the article highlights a number of different instances where we know the famous inventor， but we dont know about the heroic effort made by governments around the world to actually roll things out like vaccines and things that are you know a huge part of the public good i highly recommend it reading it if youre in for sort of a perspective changing， read on what is important to advance society forward love it all right ill jump in with a couple before we get back to you first。

a book that i alluted to earlier in the episode the luxury strategy by Zhang Noel Caffer and Vincent Bestian this book was a core part for both you and me in lvmh prep and its so good its so counterintuitive and worth reading for anybody who has a brand any company that has brand what is everybody even you know like enterprise software SaaS company you have a brand you should read this book im just gonna read you have tweeted this and i think maybe even on air said the mobile to say them again thisbookcontainsthe 24 antilaws of marketing 一 forgetaboutpositioning luxury is not comparative 2 does your product have enough flaws the three do not pander to your customerswishes keep noneothersiest out do not respond to rising demand dominate the client make it difficultforclientstobuy protected clients from nonclients the role of advertising is not to sell communicate to those you are not targeting the presumed price should always seem higher than the actual price luxury sets the price priced is not set luxury raise your prices as time goes on in ordered increase demand think about that one keep raising the average price of your product range do not sell keep stars out of your advertising cultivate closenest to the arts for initiates that was seventeem number 1824 i just like this is acquired right here it smacks me in the face 18 do not relocate your factories we talked about that earlier and then it continues do not higher consultants， do not test， do not look for consensus， do not look after group synerges， do not look for cost reduction just sell marginally on the internet its so good its good to get the reminders to yeah thats one the next one i wanna mention i also talked about earlier in the episode is the qbschool on YouTube so jto Sullivan who was like a tenyear long journeymen backup quarterback in the nfl he briefly started for the 49ERS i think in like the late 2 thousands after he finished playing wenting got a PhD in leadership studies and then started this YouTube channel where he breaks down quarterbacks performances every week and does behind the scenes of like basically just lets you ride along with how a quarterback and an nfl offense from like the offensive coordinator down to the quarterbacks coach down to the players like what is actually happening there was a quote that i think we cut from our nfl episode but that kind of sums up whatgoing on here from one of the books that we read it， said that baseball fans love baseball， because they think they understand the game football fans love football！

because they know they dont understand the game i played football for ten years and this is the first time im like getting a glimpse of understanding the game its so good this guys awesome i cant wait thats totally been a thing that weve done this fall as you know we are getting ready for the birth of our sun and then as web been on the couch a lot is like watch an insane amount of college football and nfl games yeah！

im all over this YouTube channel you just watch these games in the drama so compelling uh， but whatgoing on？

is at such another level yes！

the production of football and the story lining around the teams in the players its the great ad scale storytelling of our time and to your point theres a whole nother thing going on underneath it all its funny the carvet i was gonna do next before you jumped in with a couple is a mightna football man in cast oh， yeah， its been so good this year i actually didnget into it until this is i just didnt watch that much and a fell until this season because i group a browns fan and enough said well， yeah， but i watched a lot of nfl this year and Eli and Ferney would who doesnt know about manning cast what youre watching Monday night football？

you can choose either to watch the normal announcers or theres a completely second production using the same cameras plus， a couple cameras in patent manning and Eli management homes where theyre basically just like watching the game on zoom together its a holdiver from the pandemic and they have guests on like they had will fair along， but i think its actually better without guess like even when its just Eli and patent analyzing the game， its similar to what youtalking about David， its a little bit of like helping you understand whatgoing on behind the scenes， but of course by two brothers that are very fun to be around and they often act like theystild you know eight and ten years old i would say like if you think about um。

the nfl broadcast thats one level then theres like manning cast thats like several clicks deeper in getting a window into whats going on and then qbsquo is like as far to the other side of this factor as you could go well still being really fun like that is a great host but like its technical！

its very technical cool are at a pump OK were entering the baby product section of recommendations is that OK with you ive got one other first that i want to throw out lay it on me？

which is going to be a recommendation the nobody because you vollardy seen it the air is tour i havent watched she yet oh you hold like up yeah， i available at home now right？

also did we call that or did we call that its been two years since we did the t swift episode uh amazing should about start well！

like we said open invitation Taylor you know we will fly to wherever you are its true do you gotta watch it like when the baby sleeping maybe over？

the course of two naps because uh its a longmovie， but um shes just on another level from anybut i mean shes times person of the year this year and it is one of the best movies period that ive ever seen not just like concert film awesome cant wait are i baby recommendations go for it i feel like i finally have strollers dialed oh！

now granted i only have a one monthold so like the needs massively change over time but i forever i was trying to figure out for nonparentout there figuringout the right car seatstroller combos for all the different needs like at home travel when there are different ages。

you have different needs right now we have a lean setup like theres a way to be dialed in your setup by just having for strollers but im pretty pumped where we landed with two im super pumped for your recommendations because i really trust you on this like Ben you are such a optimizer like when it comes to this stuff？

this is your real house so i i cant wait alright so heres the current setup and this is after buying a few other strollers and returningthem because there were things i didnt like about them ergonomically so the upbaby Vista is the home stroller thats the one thats like big you dont want to be a in the business of like folding that and taking it and that has the newborn bed in it this is like the Chevy suburban of strollers yes， oh its you do not ever want to pick the singup but its got great shocks we take it on a trail nearest and the arebreed eminc at all and the fact that has a huge basin out on it a lot of his naps happen there so i can go on walks while the babies napping even as a newborn， which for a lot of strollers， newboards cant nap if theyre sort of like upright or or newboards cant sit you know in in a normal looking store so you need a basin at store so thats the home situation， the travel situation， and we have a like floanyy where yet but we will at a month or so is the jewels JOOLZO airplus a e r plus OK， have not heard of this device i hader but we went to nordstrom and we uh tested all the strollers amazing and the one that we had ordered i really hated the way that the handle bars sat and made my wrists feel so i we got this some the jewels airplus instead and it has adapters for the car seat that we bought the clickland oh， yeah and it just snaps right in so， this jewels airplus is superlights eleven pounds it fits in the overhead of a airplane so when we travelled starting in a month， will be able to do that when were home， it always sits in the back of the car and so like whenever we take the baby out about we leave the baby in the car seed and we just snap the car see which by the way is like the safest you know the clickling is like the safe car c yeah yeah you do not want to be transferring babyout of car c when babys asleep ever no so the car c just snaps right and so forlike doctors visites and stuff we just take the traveler with the car seats napped in no interruption to sleep it took a lot of finagling but this is where were arrived for now the optimizations are some people recommend the tooli running stroller in addition to this wolf to see if thats a category， we depend to you not at that phase yet yeah and other people are swearing by this in fact listor the show Alex i think text me i dont he text me a lot about this stroller and i i think hes probably there number one fan theres a car seat that converts to a stroller yeah！

the Dona the Dona i was literally waiting with beta breath for your opinion on the Dona that may enter the rotation i haventry it yet yeah， uh Berry the lead here um also， Jenny nier expecting number two this year day congratulations i was wondering talk about it obviously ban rd new， but i i appreciate the fains surprise there and we are considering this is among the consideration。

said and whether we would change our strategy it also okay late on me so the dona is sort of like a different philosophy of what if your car seed could become a stroller and so that way when youre going on vacation you should bring a traveler you just keep the baby in the car seed all the way until you get to gateck then you check the Dona or if youre so balled as to get a seat for your newborn， then i think they can stay in it im not exactly sure how that works and then when you get there so the tradeoff then is like is the Dona actually， a good enough stroller for like five mile walks and that i dont know when we go on vacation， we just try to do like tons and tons of walking and so thats the thing that im playing with with is the dunagan enter the rotation or do we rely on the air？

okay！

im waiting with beta brat for your verdict on that yeah stay tuned at the risk of acquiredgetting a lot more boring i think we have to keep discussion of baby products to a minimum what this is nicher here like yeah for the right nich this is riveting content yep either spend offshow or well have to keep these like oh create like a bonus section at the end of the episode or something yeah！

yeah i just think about like oh what are my kid you know my daughters two now shes like you know she certainly not an adult but like its he knows fast like shes she eats people food yeah， she especially she is basically an adult at this point you sent me that picture her nicosco hot dog oh， yeah， totally well， lets be clear the button i hate the hot dog she hate the button， which was her choice my kids related carvout i was having trouble coming up with any them and this is named that kid related but is her favorite movie whicheverybody should watch i cant believe i hadnt seen it till now is coco the pixaremoviee oh， yeah， coco is good about dailis martos its so good ive now seen it like ten times i will probably see it about 5 hundred moretimes in my life and um Disney plus despite all the term mile and i grin all that to helloa drug to helloa drug for a parent hey！

thats also， where you can find great throws such as alias yeah！

alright well， thats it for extended carvouts slash holiday uh present suggestions this year from acquired we have one more section to closeout the year and that is thankusefirst we are just the biggest thankyou in the world to are wonderfuleditor Steven Steven， you are and everybody listening im sure well agree。

the single best podcast editor in the business is unbelievable hands down its not even close and for people who are curious about how this works Steven does a first pass after we send him eight nine hours of raw audio internigate into sort of a candidate episode and thats getting rid of likes and ums and all that but its retakes， its reduce its David and i think ah， i feel like that didncome across right i didnmake the point susynct enough one and i try to make it more susync then he senses back this release kindited， which we then also tera part and has you know a hundredmore edits of like this factis wrong this little part of the sentence is extraniest delete this number the hey can we move this section to this part and then does a complete second pass after a weeksworth of work to deal with us on a complete second copy edit so thank you so much Steven youre the best and it comes out just sounding imaculate imaculate Steven youre！

the man thankyouformaking the show what it is secondthank you for this year is once again MVP of acquired Andrew Marks not only for Charlie， but really forbeingour thoughtpartner behind like every episode and relationships that weve built a name you know now heading into next year investing helping us think through that oh what were thinking thoughtpartners we should think friend of the showmarkbridge who is a good friend of mine appearance at all a good friend of davidss well gave me transitions runsov very cool as a founder！

a very cool company called at present， which is a marketplace for very unique and cool jewelry pieces for women David and i are actually both the small investors in the company and customers and customersthats right probably the most expensive thing i ever bought i bought through at present aha， but Marc is beneson tons of episodes especially berker sure he actually suggested LVMH good thought partner on Nike so mark thank you for everything youdone in helping acquire to yes speaking of LV image Adam Pretzker helps us a ton on lvmh Adam of course was one of the founders of general Assembly and now has assembled brands and Kate。

which they just sold him was a fantastic outcome for everybodythere Adam really gave us a window into actually building and running one of these companies yep！

the whole team at Nvidia initially the people that were willing to speak with us about the episodes we were doing just to help with the research for the episode to make sure we got it right， but then subsequently their entire Communications team for hosting us and putting up with all of our request and being willing to build the insane， three screens setup and film it with three cameras and do everything we wanted to the production standards we wanted and way more at Nvidia hq so thanks to the awesome team there thank you to dug dumero for consenting to join the crazy acquiredepisode process for she i donthink do what he was getting into when he agreed to this no， but he did all the research to and you know for someone who has two businesses that hes trying to you know run at the same time you know he started with a headstart on the history of poor show， but he really did a ton of work to prepare for that and had all this facts and figures ready at hand let us into his garage for the whole day yeah， dog rocks also ithink about buying my next car and like ive been watching so many dog videos to prepare he also totally set the bar for if and when we ever have another voice on a season episode that is how were going to do it like an expert guest host that we love that format welike your feedback on it to but we thought that was the perfect amount of guest research and what they brought to the table and how we loop them in with the episode and interacting with David and i we we were just like this is a ten out of ten！

ten out of ten at this such a high quality guy on every dimension yeah and then on the research dimension you know thank you to um i mean dozens， dozens of people who help us with research for our episodes this year too many to name here and many of you dont want to be named but your people who have way better things to do with their time than chat with me and banner about a pockest episode were working on did to cos and cos a public！

etc imitsligrateful and foremost these folks they do it cause they listen and so they sort of know the product thats gonna come out theotherside， thank you also for a listening cause i think thats sort of the superpower of acquiredis the fact that now there are people who listen who can really help us make sure that we get episodes right so we love getting these notes i mean we cant respond to all but people who join the slack or email us required fmgmail dot com and say hi heresathing that i know a lot about in my industry experience if you ever do， it feel free to reach out we totally do when we do those episodes so thank you yeah！

thank you lets begin of the last most important thank you all you thiswhole thing would not happen without you listening you all are just a amazing community and we really appreciate you have a wonderful wonderful holiday season yeah all the best for a happy successful wonderful new yearhead and with that are huge thanks to static blink test by go one and crusal and click the links in the shownotes to learn more if you want to know everytime！

an upso drops you can sign up for email updates at acquireddatafm slash email we added to new things recently， emails include little hints at what the next episode will be and there also were were putting followups in corrections to previous episode so thanks to uh the two listeners who recently rode in correcting me on visa that it was not North Dakota but South Dakota that first changed there usery laws to support credit cards， which is why all of your credit cards or so many of them are bailed from there today， so will be including probably i know weve got three or four more visa tidbits that will toss in the email for that come talk about this episode with us after listening at acquireddatafmslash slack checkout ack two we just did this awesome visa follow up with our goodbodygorof ahuja from thrive capital hes been in the payments industry for over a decade founding companies， investing companies and helpput a finer point on a lot of the things we were describing in the current ecosystem today if you want some merch， youve got a sweet merch store acquireddatafm slash store and withatlisteners will see you next year we will see you next year。