Holiday Special 2022

How do I open again? Welcome. What is this show? What are we doing? Welcome to How I Built This.
No, nothing against How I Built This, but that's not us. All right, let's start.
Okay. Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight.
Another story on the way. You got the truth.
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco. But today, Ben, you are hosting me at your lovely home here in Seattle.
Welcome to the studio. It's great to be here.
And we are your hosts. Ho, ho, ho.
Ho, ho, ho. Happy holidays.
Happy holidays. Man, I don't know about you, but I'm ready to put a bow on 2022.
Well, we have much to talk about. Yep.
Well, listeners, normally I have like a script, like a thing that I'm looking at in front of me to know what to say now. But I don't really on this one other than to say, join the Slack.
There are great people there, including probably you if you're listening to this episode. We don't think this is an entry point for a lot of people into Acquired.

We think this is probably, if you're a fan, you're going to listen to this,

but I don't think this is going to be anyone's sort of first show.

So we're going to try and go a little deeper and nerdier than normal.

We've got a little agenda.

We're going to recap 2022 for the show, for tech, for us.

Talk a little bit about what's ahead in 2023. We've got some extra, extra fun carve outs.
Indeed. Okay, listeners, now is a great time to introduce a new friend of the show who many of you will already be very familiar with, Claude.
Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic, and it's quickly becoming an essential tool for us in creating Acquired and the go-to AI for millions of people and businesses around the world. Yep.
We are super excited to be partnering with them because Claude represents exactly the kind of step change technology that we love covering here on Acquired. It is a powerful tool that fundamentally changes how people work.
And Ben, I know you have used Claude for some Acquired work here recently. Yes.
So I used to take four to six hours to put all the dates from my raw notes into a table at the top of my script on recording day. And you know, this is a hundred different dates that are all sort of laid out.
It's a tedious task, but all the data is there in my raw notes. So on the Rolex episode, I tried just feeding all of that into Claude and asking it to do that for me, which worked perfectly.
And I could just export the table and paste it right into my notes. Super easy.
So that freed up an extra half day that I used instead to focus on explaining the section on how a mechanical watch actually works. Oh, so awesome.
Made the episode so much better on both fronts. I was just chatting with Claude today to brainstorm ideas for something big that you and I are working on for this summer.
And it was insanely helpful. Listeners, stay tuned on that front.
Yes. So listeners, by using Claude as your personal or business AI assistant, you'll be in great company.
Organizations like Salesforce, Figma, GitLab, Intercom, and Coinbase all use Claude in their products. Whether you're brainstorming alone or building with a team of thousands, Claude is here to help.
Yep. And if you, your company, or your portfolio companies want to use Claude, head on over to Claude.ai or click the link in the show notes.
With that, this is not investment advice. This is probably the episode of the year where we will come closest to things that might be interpreted as investment advice as we talk about things that we have liked and didn't like and predict the future and all that.
So do your own research. All right, David, what are we starting with? All right.
I think we got to recap 2022. Despite the craziness of the year of 2022 in the broader world tech markets economy, this is a pretty great year for the show.
I have down here my signature acquired episodes and favorite memories from the year. We started the year with Taylor Swift.
Yes. Isn't that crazy that that was like January? That feels like three years ago.
Well, we knew that at the end of the year, she was going to drop Midnight. It seemed appropriate that in the year where she was going to put on the concert and announce the tickets for the concert series with the most amazing human history, that we should, of course, kick the year off with a Taylor episode, predicting the future as usual here on Acquired.
I think 2023, we might need to line her up for a follow-up. We should do an Acquired session with Taylor.
With Taylor, naturally. Taylor, we'll come to you.
We'll come to your studio. Or maybe the Long Pond.
Yeah, Long Pond. Great.
I was reflecting on this. It's pretty crazy that I think the announcement was that they had 900 stadiums worth of demand showing up to Ticketmaster.com.
And there's 50 shows. I think it's something like 35 stadiums, but a lot of them have two nights.
There's two nights in Seattle here. And I'm sure not all 900 stadiums worth can be counted as actual demand.
I have to imagine when there's a U2 concert or something, there are 100 stadiums worth of demand for 50 shows or something like that. So clearly not necessarily all purchase intent or not all purchase intent at the available prices, but still there was just no way to service the amount of demand.
Like, I actually don't know how you solve this problem. Do you make all tickets $10,000 so that you actually find the correct price equilibrium for the demand? You know, kind of like we were talking about on our most recent episode with Ben Thompson and Stratechery.
And he's like, the obvious thing that I should do is raise prices to maximize revenue. But then that's pretty quickly going to lead to limiting my reach and impact.
I think Taylor cares a lot about her reach and impact.

And she could probably make the most money on this tour by having $10,000 tickets exclusively and still fill all 50 stadiums. I don't know what the price, maybe $2,000 tickets,

you could do it. But if you're playing for a 50 year career, then you sort of have to like nurture the fan base over time and recognize that the, right.
If she did that, that would be like,

uh, that would truly be a farewell tour because that would create so much right off into the

sunset, so much negative reaction, which of course would create even more demand if you knew it was

her farewell tour. Uh, this is making me think though reflecting back on that episode 11 months ago so i don't remember exactly everything we said but i don't remember talking as much about the obvious point that this raises for me which is taylor is a rock star in the internet.
She's probably like the first really, really big internet rock star. And the thing about the internet is the markets are bigger than you can ever imagine.
The demand is larger than you can ever imagine. Even in niche products, like for Stratechery or for Acquired, these niches are bigger than you could ever imagine.
Now think about a mainstream pop star. So the internet enables two things.
It enables the niches to exist. So there's way more artists that can make a living today, I think, than if you think back to the 60s or something, where the labels would pick the 10 bands of the year, and that's kind of it.
But why is it that Taylor Swift is bigger than the Beatles? Would the the Beatles have had this much demand too when the only promotion that existed was from the labels in a sort of like the labels pick the winners and then those are the winners world? Well, there's multiple things going on here. Like one is the disintermediation or at least the reduction of power of the middle men of the labels and everything else in the middle of the value chain.
And so much more of the value is now accruing directly to Taylor. But that's not an argument for why there's so much more demand to see her live.
There also is a lot more demand for Taylor than there was for the Beatles. Just because the internet having several ways

to reach a customer

means that the most popular artist

in the world

is going to have

just way more distribution,

period.

Way more distribution,

way more touch points.

The labels.

There's also so much less friction, right?

As hard as it was

and all the news

about how hard it was

to get tickets

to these Taylor concerts,

everybody knew

when they were going on sale

that it was happening

through social media and the mainstream media amplifying that. And it was hard to secure a ticket, but very easy to log on to Ticketmaster or maybe not that easy, but compared to I don't even know how you would have gotten a ticket to a Beatles show back in the day.
I assume you have to like go to the stadium box office and line up the day that they're going on sale. And you would only know when they're going on sale because of radio ads and print ads.
Maybe you read about it in the newspaper. This is a thing I was thinking about when I was caught up in the Friday night.
Is it Friday night? Whatever it was that people were like, Twitter's going down. Like it's going to basically turn off tomorrow.
And I like mentally knew this is a system that would degrade slowly and fade into irrelevance, not it's going to turn off tomorrow. But putting myself in the headspace of Twitter doesn't exist soon.
I was like, how would I know if stuff is taking off?

How will I know what the general consensus is around something?

How will I know that the tenor has shifted and this thing is not interesting anymore and that thing is interesting?

Would I start reading the New York Times many times a day and going deep into many of the sections?

I'm certainly not going to log into Facebook. But you can't really even get that same kind of experience or understanding from any kind of centralized publication Correct, and it's the centralization that makes it less valuable You'd never be able to say, oh nobody's talking about that because the New York Times is not a place where you go to find out if people are talking about something, it's a place where you get news, and so you'd literally have to, like, in person, go to events and have a bunch of conversations to know what people are talking about.
Okay, Twitter doesn't exist tomorrow. Where do you go to find out what people in the world are talking about right now? I think it's TikTok.
Yeah, but I think it would be a much less efficient experience because it's all video.

The number of new tidbits of information you can consume per minute in Twitter is high and reasonably low in TikTok.

Yep.

It's 10 to 20 versus 2 to 3.

Yep.

All right.

Well, I don't know how we got from T-Swift to Twitter and TikTok.

It's a holiday special, dude.

It's a holiday special.

Yeah.

Formatless.

Except for the pretty robust format that you fleshed out here.

Well, you know me.

I can't not prepare for an episode, even a holiday special. Okay, next one on my list, Sony, Sony Corporation.
Which I didn't think would be that interesting when we started doing it. It was your idea to do it, right? I know it was, but I found myself being like, God, is this actually an interesting company? I had wanted to read Made in Japan because I'd heard it was amazing.
But as I looked back at like trademark acquired episodes, TSMC, the New York Times, like I just didn't think it would be one of those. And it very clearly, especially in the numbers, did become one of those.
It has it all. I mean, it has the genius founder.
It has the probably the most adversity that we've ever talked about in any founding story in all of Acquired. It's really hard to think offhand of a greater adversity that a company and founders have overcome than Japan in 1945.
It also has so many chapters. I mean, the craziest thing to me is if you look at the business as of the time we did the episode, they had five separate business units, all of which did a double digit percentage of their revenue.
So it's super diverse and all of which did a double digit percentage of their operating income. So like you have five businesses that are all reasonably the same size in top and bottom line in one house.
Well, and then we got well over two hours into the episode before we mentioned PlayStation. And then like the PlayStation story in and of itself, we could do an episode on.
I mean, the fact that we got from like rice cookers and World War II to like that crazy coda about Spider-Man is nuts. In the back of my mind, I've been percolating.
It could be fun to do a whole episode just on Xbox. A, we need to do a Microsoft series at some point.
We've talked a lot about and around Microsoft on the show, but we've never covered Microsoft. And Apple.
We've not done Microsoft. Or Google.
We have not done the Google IPO. Apple, Google, Oracle.
If we just wanted to cheat and

spike the numbers as much as possible,

we'd just take the whole next

season and just do

Fang, basically. I think

we should do one of

those companies a

year. Not even a season, I think one a year.

It's going to take three episodes to do each one.

We were able to fit Amazon into

two episodes, but Amazon is only a, what, 27-year-old company? And we didn't talk about a bunch of stuff. Right.
That was the way we skipped it. We didn't really talk about Alexa at all.
Right. Sorry, everybody, if we just lit up here.
Although I think there's enough voice personalization in those devices that if a piece of media says the A word, I don't think it lights up anymore.

Well, it might be because I have the Sonos ones and the firmware on the Sonos ones is different than the ones that Amazon actually makes. But mine will just like light up when people say things that are not that word and are just like in a movie, like when dialogue sounds too much like that name.
Like that word. Yeah.
Interesting. Here's my proposal.
I think we should do one of these big tech companies a year for two reasons. One, you know, for Microsoft, for Apple.
I think those are going to be three plus episodes to do it, right? Yeah. Even at acquired length episodes.
So it's a huge lift. But also I think we should spread it out.
Like, because like you said, you know, the cheat code would be if we just do them all back to back. Right.
But we have a diversity of interests here on Acquired. We want to go for many years.
I even have a lot of fear around like doing a three-part Microsoft series where like, are people going to be like, I'm just out for the next three months? Cause next year, listeners, what we've decided is, and this is a little bit approximate, but we're going to average it. Every month, we're going to do a season episode and a special.
So either a season being like Apple part one or a special being an interview with someone or an acquired sessions or something that kind of doesn't fit the normal format. And like that literally means that it's like, oh, you're doing a three-part Microsoft thing.
Well, I'm out for Q1 on acquired. I actually think about this.
I've experienced this on one of my carve-outs for extended carve-outs later. One of my favorite video game podcasts, Resonant Arc.
They're a video game story book club, so they choose a game. And then they'll do 10 to 20 episodes playing through the game, dissecting the story, all the literary, from a literary perspective.
It's really cool. I love it.
But if they choose a game that I don't have a large affinity for, then it's anywhere from one to two months that I'm not listening to that show. Right.
And three months is certainly long enough for someone to permanently change behavior. I don't think it's good for us if someone decides to take a three month break from acquired because it's not a hundred percent chance they come back.
Yeah. we got to think about the right way to do this.
Maybe I'm too focused on the downside and maybe it will turn out that while we may alienate some people, it's the largest thing in acquired history because I was shocked that, and we'll keep going here on big episodes, but that the Amazon episode was by far the biggest in acquired history. When David pitched me on this idea, I was like, hmm, I don't know.
Brad Stone has written some excellent books on this. There's been documentaries.
Jeff Bezos is the most studied CEO in the world, I think, until this recent Elon Madness. What can we bring to the world in the Amazon? Which, by the way, I think that has become, this year, something that's crystallized for me about Acquired and the show and what we do.
I think that should always be our lens. Like what can we add by doing it? Because there's lots of voices out there saying lots of things.
Yep. Spoiler alert, this is part of why we haven't covered Twitter because like, what can we add? There's nothing new to add.
All the best tech journalists in the world are covering it every single day. I mean, you have Matt Levine, you have Dan Primack every single day.
They're reporting the newest thing with not just reporting, but true analysis behind it. You have then Ben Thompson the following day writing a reaction piece that's like, here's my even more thoughtful take on what happened.
You have Casey Newton who has a whole platform dedicated to this. And a bunch of access and a bunch of insiders sending him stuff, breaking it real time on Twitter.
So it was one of these things where we're like, there's no daylight here for us to talk about it. We actually felt the same way about FTX, which, I mean, you could argue that we did have a part to play in FTX because Sam was on the show last year, but like there was so much good coverage and good reporting going on and we're not reporters and we don't do stuff in real time, blah, blah, blah, that it felt like the right way to have a choir to add to the conversation is go do a hundred hours of research on Enron and try and sort of indirectly draw as many parallels as we can.
Like we don't want to hit people over the head with like, this is just like an FTX where they had this. It's more like, how can we bring up ideas for people that they can draw their own parallels? It's been interesting to watch this past week.
Who knows if it was coincidental or not, but I think at least two major news outlets have run pieces in the past week with a title like How FTX Compares to Enron. It was obvious.
It's obvious to draw that parallel. They were probably in the works anyway.
Is it worth sharing more on that now? Yeah, yeah. This is a holiday special.
We can break the format. Yeah.
Every time people write us in and they're like, oh, you got to do a take on this. It's like, I almost never have a take in real time.
Yeah. That's not what we do.
I suppose the traditional acquired format of a company buying another company, we are some of the most well positioned people in the world to have a take on why that acquisition happened, what will make it go well, what could kill it. Just like you killed grading this season, which, by the way, I love that.
I was so surprised and thrilled when you threw it. Yeah, yeah.
But like, look, things need to evolve. Next year is going to be our eighth year into the show.
I thought Ben Thompson just said it perfectly on our most recent episode with him where he was like, you know, when I was young, I used to think when I got old that I would like still be cool and I would never be one of those old people. And now that I'm old, I'm like, old, quote unquote, relatively.
Now that I'm older, I think two things. One, being old is pretty great.
And two, I look at my peers who are still trying to be young and it just looks kind of sad.

Like you got to change.

You got to evolve.

And the show has changed and evolved to a point where I think like we are a different show than the show that used to do.

Oh, breaking, you know, emergency pod.

Whole Foods got bought today.

Cancel everything today so we can do some quick research.

There are times where it still makes sense for us to do those, like John Foley bringing in a new CEO.

The Barry McCarthy connection. That is a take that has not aged well.
Yeah, I think you're right, that it's okay that we're something different now than what the show was. I'm curious what everybody listening thinks.
Yeah. Last point on this FTX saga, which again, we're watching it play out in real time.
I don't know that that's where Acquired shines because we try to make evergreen pieces that sort of stand the test of time. And like every week, it's so different than it was the previous week.
These are kind of excuses. We probably just should directly say we totally had Sam on.
We wanted to tell the extraordinary story of FTX, which was extraordinary. I mean, now in a different way than we thought.
You cannot argue that it is an extraordinary story. I do want to say I'm sorry if the exposure that FTX got from Acquired and every other publication in the world, but from Acquired caused you to...
We lent our platform to XAM and to FTX. And yeah, I do feel bad about that.
I don't think there's any way we could have known at the time. And I don't want to stop having interesting people and companies on the show, you know, up and coming companies.
So, but yeah, like, you know, it sucks. And like a lot of people lost a lot of money.
Yeah. So sorry if you were like on the fence on ftx and you were like i don't know if this thing's legit or not and then acquired legitimize that for you next just to if you have not listened to the sony episode i'm sure most of you have but like it's so good oh my gosh talk about like the office of a fraud we made this thing it's amazing you Sony story.
The Sony story. Whether you like our telling of it or not, but just like it is a vastly underappreciated company and an underappreciated journey overcoming adversity.
Yep. Okay, Sony.
Dude, we did NVIDIA this year. We did a lot this year.
Yeah. I'm trying to think which of our Silicon episodes I feel the strongest about in terms of enlightening me about the way the world works.
I think it's first TSMC, but NVIDIA is... The thing that's the most interesting about the NVIDIA story, I think, is Jensen bet the company three separate times and truly bet the company.
Like, if this initiative fails, it will go to zero. And it worked three separate times.
The first time is when they shipped the card in whatever it was, nine months instead of two years, and they designed the whole thing in emulation, never tested it and shipped it to customers. And it worked.
I mean, it worked

enough. And maybe I'm forgetting the story in its entirety, but I think there was a bet the company

moment around programmable shaders. And then a third one around the like seven year investment

before the market was there in AI and CUDA and building their own developer ecosystem. Obviously, OpenAI existed.
I'm trying to remember if Dolly was out at the time when we did the NVIDIA episode. Certainly GPT-3 was- Well, interestingly enough, I think Dolly 1 was, but it got no acclaim.
Right. The one that lit the world on fire was Dolly 2.
Was Dolly 2, yep. But now as we record this, ChatGPT came out last week.
We were thinking about the AI renaissance and how important AI is just in a general sense when we did those episodes. NVIDIA Stock had that crazy run long before we did the episode.
Like two years before we did the episode. Yep.
At the beginning of COVID. And so it's interesting that I don't think that was around gaming.
I think that was around AI, the thing that was sort of selling that story. And so in a way, the craziest NVIDIA balls that were sort of buying at the top and selling the story as much as humanly possible, when did it peak? I don't know, late 2021, maybe.
They were kind of right. I don't think they knew that the next year would make AI's developments as obvious as it has.
But everybody who believed that AI was going to be this complete step change in the way that we use computers and decided that buying NVIDIA at a very high price was the way to

endorse that belief. Like that ended up happening very quickly soon after.

The moment when it really hit me was when we were recording the LP episode that we did with

Jalé at Mutiny. And at some point just kind of-

Oh, just cavalierly. It was like, oh yeah, we have a GPT-3 based feature in our product.

Right. And I was like, whoa, okay, you are dynamically rewriting copy on your customer's

Thank you. Oh yeah, we have a GPT-3 based feature in our product.
Right. And I was like, whoa, okay, you are dynamically rewriting copy on your customer's websites using GPT-3.
Okay, that kind of blows my mind. Yeah.
Like I can now see the business use cases for this. You say you can see them, but we're in this very interesting moment where we've all seen three pretty amazing proof of concepts in the last six months.
We saw Dolly2, GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, which to me is actually the most interesting because the most meaningful change is that it changed the modality that you interact with the AI model, but it's either the same or I think it's like GPT three and a half or something. It's a very similar model, but we're interacting with it in a new way and it's stateful rather than being stateless as in it sort of can preserve state and you can ask it more questions about.
And so I think there's a little bit of a like a crypto moment here where it's the first time someone explains to you a decentralized world computer. You're whoa that unlocks a whole world of possibilities and you say what are they and someone says let me think about that yeah yeah i feel very similar with chat gpt right now i'm looking at i'm like whoa this unlocks a whole world of possibilities and someone says what is it and i'm like i feel better than i did about the decentralized world computer but i still can't articulate to you like when the app store launched, like, oh, this will be an $80 billion on-demand car service market.
Like that's not... Well, I think this is just naturally how markets play out though, right? Like we look back now and we're like, oh, when the app store launched, it was obvious.
But was it at the time? I think we probably would have felt very similarly back in that moment of like, oh, apps on your phone. Cool.
When I first saw the iPhone, I thought this device changes everything because I was like, I wanted one so bad. I had a co-worker at Cisco.
So many times between the keynote and when it was like six months before the phone came out.

I was so hyped for it.

I just remember seeing the device at my co-worker's desk at Cisco and thinking like, I need one of these things.

This is like so much of the money that I have would be used to buy one.

So I think I bought the 3G the next year or six months in or something.

I got one day one.

I didn't camp out overnight, but I waited in line for hours.

I got day one release.

I got the original one.

I just graduated from college.

It was the summer I graduated.

I graduated, but I waited in line for hours. I got day one release.
I got the original one. I just graduated from college.
It was the summer I graduated. I graduated, but I hadn't started work yet, but I had my signing bonus.
And I was like, this is where I am spending my money. I waited in line just to wait in line.
Like I went to the Apple store. You didn't buy one? I didn't have enough money.
I was 17, that's right because you had to pay full price there was no carrier subsidization for the original iPhone correct and so it was fun I brought my little point and shoot camera I took pictures of all the people you know getting their first iPhones and playing with them and setting up did your dad go with you? no I went with my friend George I remember feeling like this device is amazing I remember really wanting to make apps for it so I made made this to-do list app. And you couldn't make apps until the next year.
Right. I sort of missed that whole first year of like, you can't make apps.
I don't think I was thinking about it then. But like the app that I made was a to-do list.
It's not like I was like, oh my God, this is going to be a way that you can hail cars or order groceries. Or it was like, let me do the smallest possible thing on this.
And I think that's actually just how I think about products. I'm not a Travis Kalanick-like person.
I think I always sort of think in terms of like, what products can I fully conceptualize of and see in my head and understand all the hard stuff involved in it and draw a nice neat box around it and just work towards shipping that thing that I can fully imagine. It's almost like I want to be able to do everything myself, which is why I think Acquired has sort of come out the way that it has rather than us doing a bunch of hard stuff.
I very much shy away from like, ooh, you'd have to like send a bunch of people into grocery stores and like figure out all their inventory to like load it. I just wouldn't do that.
But the idea of like, okay, there's this really nice, neat package called an acquired episode and it contains these components and David and I can make it ourselves. And what do you think the, uh, what would have happened otherwise would be if, uh, if we did the hard stuff? Well, like one thing we've been very explicit about in a trade-off for the show and acquired as an entity in a business is we don't want to have a lot of employees.

We don't want to have a team.

We don't want to have.

There'd be more shows.

I think we would have tried to turn it into a network.

We would have taken people up on the book offers.

There could be like a Netflix show.

There could be. I'm trying to think, is there anything we could have done or still do that would just be like a fundamentally different thing like everything you're describing would be building a gimlet or the like and like yep that would be great you know we probably would make more money but that's that's like not what we want to do but is there anything that would be be like an Uber versus a to-do app? It depends what on the believability spectrum you're willing to call part of Acquired.
Like we could have launched a new podcast app for Acquired and other podcasts and then tried to... We thought about it with Glow.
We did. Glow was originally going to be, yeah, a new app with payments built in.
That would have been a boondoggle. Yeah.
I'll validate your point. When the App Store first came out, you could stare at it and go, this is going to change everything.
But it was only a select few people who actually saw the particular massive use case with the new thing. Yep.
And that's how I feel about chat GPT right now. I'm like, this thing's scary powerful and I don't actually know what to do with it yet.
with it most people i think are also in the same mode that you and i are of like oh i can see how this could rewrite copy dynamically on a website right and i see that being but that's the to-do list version of what right ai can do yep man this is fun we're only like halfway through the year too okay so we did nvidia yep that was so fun and i learned so much and now it's just so much more important almost like t-swift you know the same dynamic yep then we did amazon and when i include walmart in amazon i'm so glad we did walmart first first that's why i have in my head i was, did we do two episodes on Amazon or three? We really did three. Episode one was Walmart.
In order to understand the role of retail in America today, you sort of first need to understand that everything we think of as a retailer or most things we think of as retailer are actually discounters. Yes.
And I totally didn't get that before doing the Walmart episode. I was like, well, there's like stores like Walmart and Target and there's department stores, which are like more expensive and opinionated.
And then the brands that have sort of their own stores. But like I didn't conceptualize that the most common place that you buy things are actually discounters.
And Walmart was really the company that single-handedly created the wave of the modern store period, which then Amazon could take digital. Yes, yes.
Well, and I was so blown away learning about with Walmart, how much of a tech company they were. Like, I think we said on the episode and I still think that they were the first applied technology company in America.
I think this is a silly, I think you've said this a few times now. I don't, I don't I don't agree with that okay like it is okay so technology at its purest definition is anything that enhances the productivity of a human so like the wheel is technology because with the same number of calories burned you're able to go farther or a navigational instrument which means you're able to get somewhere in a shorter amount of time.
So, I mean, maybe you could scope it to like apply digital technology. What makes me want to say that is they were a company who did business in an established sector.
Yep. And they transformed the way they worked and ultimately the whole sector by applying technology to it.
So did Standard Oil by applying technology to the old way that you used to extract oil from the ground. Fair enough.
I mean, I guess like you could say the car companies. Or the lighting, the way people light their homes.
But those, I guess the distinction I'm trying to draw, which may not be a valid one, is I think in all those cases, the business was the technology. Here, it was a separate existing part of the economy that they were in that business and they used technology to transform the way they do it.
Maybe it's a meaningless distinction. It's interesting.
I just feel like today, like Walmart would have been like a hot venture-backed startup. Well, it's interesting.
The question with applying technology to an existing market is always, what are you using the technology for? I always think about this with tech-enabled businesses. Okay, what are you using technology for and how does it make your financial statements of your business at maturity look better? Are you using it to consolidate back office operations to make your company more operationally efficient and thus lower your cost structure and thus with the same amount of revenue you just run at better margins? Or are you using it because you're able to get better distribution? Like the internet enables you to generate way more revenue

because you're able to reach way more customers

on the same set of costs.

And so I was thinking about it as like,

what are you actually using technology for in your business?

And does that make it a meaningfully better business

than non-tech enabled incumbents?

I think there's a lot of stuff in the world today that is a tech-enabled thing that is not all that tech-enabled when you look at the financials. Yep.
But Walmart is a perfect example of a tech-enabled business that is like the right way to do it. And why? What previously large number did it collapse in their financials to a small number because of technology? Well, certainly the coordination of the distribution

and the way Walmart built their supply chain

was vastly different than all of the

theretofore traditional retailers

and way more efficient and made their financials

work in a way that just wouldn't work for other retailers.

Legitimately enabled them to have lower prices to get more customers.

Yeah. Yeah.
That's a strong argument. Agree to disagree that they were the first that sort of like brought technology, but yeah, that's a good point.
Benchmark? Benchmark. Benchmark was super cool.
I mean, that like a pinch me moment for you and I both. I think we should lean into that format as much as possible going forward of we tell a story and then we have the protagonist on.
I think acquired has been a bunch of iterations to find our way to that format. That does feel like the platonic ideal of an acquired, a way acquired talks about a topic.
I do think it's probably you and I spending three hours diving deep from everything we can find telling the story in the way that we sort of see it. I used to think, oh, what can make us different and better is we're going to spend more time preparing than any other interviewer.
We're going to take this super seriously. We only do one of these interviews a month.
This is like... Which is a tactic, not a strategy.
Exactly. And like, yeah, we probably do more preparation for our interviews than 80, 90% of other interviewers out there.
But there are other really great interviewers like Ben Thompson. Yep.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy. Patrick O'Shaughnessy, exactly.
But what we did with Benchmark, that's something that only we can uniquely do. It's interesting.
Only as aggressive, but it's something that our format and the set of trade-offs that we make in our business makes it easier for us to do that than for someone else. I always think about strategy is about trade-offs.
Like what's the original Michael Porter journal entries called competitive strategy. And it's great.
It's like for anyone who hasn't read it, it was in the Harvard Business Review, I think when it first came out, something like 20 pages. It's very cogent.
It's very straightforward. And he talks a lot about how there's operational efficiency and there's strategy.
And operational efficiency is we're just going to be better.

We're going to be more efficient.

We're going to do it for cheaper costs.

You and I are going to do more research than anybody else.

But there's real strategy, which is trade-offs.

It's the Southwest model. The former is not a strategy.

Right.

There's sort of the Southwest model of like, we are going to have a different model for

where we keep planes than every other airline.

We're not going to use the hub and spoke model.

Everywhere that we fly to in a constrained set of places that we fly to is going to be a pseudo hub for us. And we're going to keep our planes sort of diversified and we're only going to have one model of airplanes.
So that way they're easier to service. And there's a whole bunch of trade-offs involved with that.
But that's our strategy. Even though it comes with a lot of downsides, we're going to lean into the upsides.
And I think like the lean into the upsides thing for us is if you're doing a super high velocity show, Benchmark's probably not going to feel like you're giving them a unique spotlight in a way to do something like that. If you do things that may or may not enable deep trust from listeners, then there's people that are not going to want to come on the show because they don't know how they're going to come across.
But if you always sort of lean into this, we have very few guests. We think they're people that you really should hear from, which by the way, this is why the SPF thing burns me up so much is because we try to be ridiculously ridiculously selective then it enables you to create content with people that otherwise are not going to go do the circuit yep not to mention when we do three hours of content about the thing before it enables us to come in with that prepared that's what i was going to say too there's an element in the case of the benchmark episodes it actually was all

pre-planned in advance that we were going to do the episode just us and then we were going to do the dinner with them that was planned before we even released the first episode but i do that we've experienced in the past with the show there are times where we will engage with a company or a CEO or a firm before having done any acquired content on them.

And they're like, they don't engage fully. And then we do an episode just us.
And then it completely changes the tenor of the conversation. Yeah, it's like being willing to do the work to prove that you're as serious about caring about this topic as you say you are.
And by us having the format of you and I just doing these deep dives on companies, that is a differentiated strategy than an interview show. Yep.
Okay. Enron kind of talked about it.
It's super recent. I have nothing to add other than one.
I think it's fun to add little corrections and additions as we go through here. Yeah, we've got a few of these.
On the Enron one, I neglected to point out that there is a company today called Enron Oil and Gas that's like an $80 billion company publicly traded as EOG. Yeah, a listener emailed us about this.
Yep. That's the upstream production business.
So the oil and gas industry over the last 30 years has sort of fragmented into upstream and downstream. And midstream.
Oh, I think too. Midstream sense.
And I think EOG is sort of their upstream business that spun off. But it is a publicly traded company that still bears the Enron name.
Yeah. I should have looked this up.
Did they change the name officially to EOG or is the actual name Enron Oil and Gas? I don't know. That's a good question.
It's a good question. It is actually called EOG Resources.
Like the name of the company is EOG. That makes sense.
It's like the Accenture to Arthur Anderson. Yeah.
Although there is, after many rebrands and iterations, some subset of Arthur Anderson was preserved as a tax organization that is now called Anderson Tax again. Oh, interesting.
Yeah. Because I guess tax is separate from audit, right? They had tax audit and consulting and consulting became Accenture.
I assume audit is what went away entirely. And I think they spun off tax in its own new name that is now Anderson Tax.
Anderson Tax. Interesting.
Which is crazy to me that there was enough brand equity in Anderson left to sort of go back to Anderson. Right.
You would have thought that... There's got to be a story there.
It could be an LP episode. Could be an LP episode.
We talked a minute ago about trade-offs when we were talking about the benchmark, two-parter. What in your mind are the biggest trade-offs that we make here on Acquired? I think we make a ton of trade-offs.
I think we are maybe to a fault, purist organization. I think that's the first one, two people.
You're looking at the whole organization. Okay.
Not a lot of content, right? A common wisdom is to release content every week. We don't do that.
That has downsides, such as it's hard to become a top show in the charts if you're not constantly producing new content. It works against the algorithms.
But it has upsides of now we can go do really, really deep research. A second one being really long episodes.
That's a massive trade-off. Lots of people don't want to listen to you when you do that, but the people who do really like it.
Another one being people often ask, like, do another show, bring another host. You could leverage the podcast feed to promote other episodes of your new spinoff show with your new host where you have some of the economics of that.
There's like a lack of purity to me that that's not acquired then. That's, I don't know why we would do that.
It doesn't fit in the box. It's one of those things where it's like, sure, you could make more money doing that, but it goes in the too hard pile.

I think you and I have a really big too hard pile.

Yeah.

In some ways, that's strategy.

It's like if you actually believe in the set of tradeoffs that you have, then you have to be willing to have a really big too hard pile when there's a lot of people telling you there's low hanging fruit to be done.

But often that low hanging fruit is counter to your strategic tradeoffs.

It's interesting.

I feel like you've always been this way, I think, in your life. I'm cranky.
You're not cranky, though. You're wonderful.
But I'm cranky about things like this. You're persnickety.
You're not cranky. I'm persnickety.
You're persnickety. Yes, for sure.
Jerry Seinfeld said it really well on the Tim Ferriss show, which is one of the best podcast interviews in history. That's my first carve out of the night.
Tim asked him, like, how does he come up with all the bits? Like, how does he observe things? And his comment is, there's so many things that annoy me. I sit there and all I can see in the world is all the things are like a little bit wrong and that just really bother me.
And then I write them down and then I polish, polish, polish, polish, polish. And I'm not Jerry Seinfeld and I don't, it's not to that extent.
Very different application. Right.
But a similar. Like we ship an acquired episode.
All I can see are the 16 ways that we could have made it better. I'm proud that it's out there, but like really all I can see are the flaws.
I think my hunch is right that you've always been this way. Yes.
I've become much more this way over time. I used to be not this way at all.
I used to be like, I believe you can do everything. Trade-offs, like the old Jim Moore, the Colts coach of the playoffs, like playoffs, trade-offs, trade-offs.
As I become older, though, like I completely have shifted and embrace trade-offs. Oh yeah.
You don't even answer email. I mean, it's honestly crazy.
It's like a joke now. Yeah.
It's not a joke when I'm trying to get ahold of you. I feel so bad.
The only person I feel bad about with it is you. I really, you bear a huge brunt to that.
Thank you. You're also pretty good about like, I said I was going to be done working today at six.
And so I'm just like, not really doing anything after six, even if the texts look kind of important. That's fine.
Well, that's called parenthood. But that's true.
Yeah. Parenthood has probably forced you to lean into some of that more.
Yes. I was leaning this way anyway, for sure.
But like, it was like a massive like tidal wave. But I felt like I was at like a water park, like in a wave machine came along.
And like, I was heading this direction anyway, floating along and then just like, whoosh. The issue now that you're doing it pretty aggressively is you and I amplify each other because I have this thing where I'm like, oh, this is a thing that David would say, like, not worth it.
Like, this is probably a good time to talk about this. We did a lot of live stuff this year.
Yeah, let's talk about this. Some of which were super cool.
Like, there were some amazing opportunities we got in 2022. But for lots of reasons, they're way harder than doing you're in my normal thing.
And are they worth it? Are they that much incrementally better for how much harder they are for us? Probably not. In almost all cases, there are cases where it is, but in almost all cases, no.
And so I think this is one of the things where you inspire me to be more persnickety. You ask the question, and then I went to a place of like, oh, well, that's easy.
We should not do anything live because the juice is almost never worth the squeeze, which is probably

too far.

Like there's probably some middle ground where it's like, if PitchBook offers us the ability

to do another arena show, like, oh my God, we should do an arena show.

But the litany of things that make this way harder and frankly, way less listenable after

the fact, it's actually a worse product.

Most of the artifacts of, so let's recount this sort of like cool live stuff we did this year. We did the arena show.
It still is like... Surreal.
I can't say that without laughing. Pinch me moment at least number two of the year.
Yeah, yeah. Wow.
We did the arena show. We then also did a big live show in another country for the first time.
In Portugal. With Solana.
With Solana at Breakpoint. That was a whole nother crazy set of experience and amazing.
Yep. We did the LP show live at the TCV event.
Yep. The benchmark dinner, although it wasn't a live public event, the amount of production effort that we had.
I was down in San Francisco for three days. We set out three cameras.
We bought a bunch of new microphones. We tested all the microphones.
Big production lift. Big, big production lift.
I mean, guests. So things that make production harder.
Guests. Yes.
Total wild card. They might cancel on you.
They might reschedule, blah, blah, blah. They might not use the equipment we send them.
Yes. In person changes it way harder.
Like you and I are sitting here now. It took an extra hour to set this up to have this beautiful roaring fire next to us we haven't even mentioned yeah these three cameras although now that i'm looking at it there's only two cameras on because here's a trade-off we make we don't have an engineer we don't have a sound person or a video person who works with us so if you've been watching this on video for i don't know how long long, the last, like, I'm going to guess that thing shut off half hour ago.
We lost a third camera. So talk about trade-offs.
And especially in- I knew I should have brought my camera. Especially in shooting stuff like live in person, there's a whole new web of things that could go wrong that just don't happen when it's you and I on Zoom.
Now, at a live audience, that massively compounds it. First of all, the sound quality is going to be way worse.
So that bothers me as a persnickety person. The audience gets antsy in their seats because no one can sit still for four hours.
No one wants to attend a four-hour. I mean, when you're at a sporting event, you do halftime, quarters, you know, you go get concessions, you whatever.
So it makes the product different. And I think worse for the 150 plus thousand people who are going to listen after the fact.
So it's this interesting compromise where for all those people, it's a worse product, but for the people in the room, that's what we're optimizing for in the moment. And I don't even know that we optimized for that.
It's so funny. My, um, man, the arena show, like it, let's just take a step back.
It was so cool. Amazing.
Um, it was so cool. And everybody who came, the fact that so many people came and flew in from all over the world.
Yep. We did a Brooks run with people in the morning.
We did a dinner with some sort of like friends of the show and previous guests and sponsors the night before at Canlis, who we've had on the show and that adapting episode. It was so special.
Yeah. But it's, you know, looking back on it, because you actually live this again yourself this year, but the farther we get from it, the more in my mind and in my emotions, the space, the arena show occupies is just like Jenny and my wedding.
Like all the ups, all the amazingness, special feelings of it. And like my most vivid memories looking back on both events are just a huge amount of stress and being like, are people having fun right now? Like, is this going well? Like, you know, I mostly remember the upside of both of them, of my wedding.
Oh, I remember too you know but every time i think about it i can't not think about uh you know us being on stage in the middle of the show and uh when we got to act two and anu was on and we didn't have breaks planned and like people needed to go to the bathroom and get food and pitch book was paying for all the free food and booze and everything up and so of course people are going to go act ends, it's like, okay, well, now's a good time to go take advantage of the open bar. Of course.
And it's just like, oh, we should have planned that better. How did we not plan for that? Anyway, all that to say, some of the live shows we've done are the most special experiences of the year.
Yes. They have hidden value for Acquired in a bunch of ways, like getting to actually talk with real people, like getting to hang out with the thousand people that came to the arena show, like life-changingly cool to get to meet so many folks.
And also- I will always, always remember that night, especially the after party afterwards. Yes.
Walking into Queen Anne Beer Hall was very cool and just hanging out for hours. And also at least 10, if not 20 times as much work for a product that I continue to believe was worse for people who listened to it than our average acquired episode.
So it's like, again, it's a set of trade-offs that we just have to be intentional about making next year rather than being like, ooh, that would be a fun conference to speak at. Oh my God, I forgot about Capital Camp.
Oh, Capital Camp, yeah. That was so cool.
That was cool. That was a relatively low trade-off because Patrick and Brent and Clayton and the team there, they took care of everything.
Yep, absolutely. It was different too because we created a talk for it.
So it was less issues because there was no guest. So there was no sort of like guest risk.
But like it was the first time. I'm such a like VC.
What was their technology risk? Is their guest risk?

But the only thing that we had done that was similar was the acquired top 10, the best acquisitions of all time episode that we did. And so we had like a little bit of confidence that you and I could produce a sort of talk about a thing that wasn't the entire history and strategy of a company, but that was a totally new format for us.
I'm curious what you think. I'm so glad we did Capital Camp and like that, you know, work time was a fun switch up, but I think it was an inferior format to the normal show.
Like, I was thinking like, but we put together a deck for it and like, you did most of it. It was a set of pictures, a set of pictures, but like I made a deck in years.
Yeah. That was cool though.
I mean, the nice thing about doing that is then we have a product we can sort of like take on the road too. I think we can share this publicly.
You gave that talk again at an internal Fundrise event. Yes, which was super cool.
I would love to do more of that. Like I got to meet everybody at Fundrise, like the, you know, our biggest partner for the year and like the whole team, like all 300 people at the company were there at the offsite.
It was very cool. All this to say, it leads me to believe that much like all the other trade-offs we make, we just need to figure out how do we 80-20 it? What are the things that we care the most about and how do we not do the long tail of stuff? So I think it means pick like one episode per year to do a massive live show and throw the acquired Super Bowl slash wedding.
And maybe once a year is even too often because God, it's a lift. But two, then feel free to do a bunch of in-person stuff with our partners with our sponsors with people that we like work with on the show anyway and want to just like continue to build deeper relationships with but those aren't necessarily episodes yep that has been a huge highlight for me for the year is I think we have found a way.
I don't know that anybody would have thought was like possible as a podcast, as a media business to like really build deep relationships with our sponsors and our partners. I think almost every single one of them, we did something like the Fundrise All Hands or, you know, a conference.
Most of them now, a very large percentage of our sponsors, we've invested in. Yeah.
What, five of them? I think five, yeah. Vanta, we should talk about Vanta in a big way.
Modern Treasury, Vouch, Mystery, Standard Metrics, we've invested in. And what was Standard Metrics called when they sponsored? Quaestor.
Quaestor. That was their original name.
Yeah. Back in the day.
Just like we, for our listeners and our audience, you know, we've kind of always thought, I think it's been one of our core tenants from the beginning of like, we treat our audience as like equals to like more impressive than us. Like when we started the show, especially now, and even the folks who are listening to us are the folks who we want to invest in.

We want to do business with.

We want to do.

Well, that's what eats me alive when I get something wrong in an episode and it's a black mark to me and I can't do anything but see it as like, you know, I'm thinking of the people who I know listen to the show who are listening to that and thinking, oh, he didn't quite get that right.

Because that's how I envision our audience.

Not that we didn't always think this way, but it's really come to be realized now.

We think of our sponsors the same way as our partners as like, these are amazing companies.

He's like,

Thank you. I envision our audience? Not that we didn't always think this way, but it's really come to be realized now we think of our sponsors the same way as our partners as like, these are amazing companies.
Like how can we build as deep a relationship with them as possible? Yep. Totally agree.
I mean, the sponsorship model is another way that we make a pretty significant trade-off. So we only do six month season long sponsorships And we are ridiculously choosy about the people that we do that with.
And because it's a six-month-long thing to an audience of 250,000 people that happen to be probably the most valuable audience in the world in terms of CEOs, founders, engineers, capital allocators. Certainly the set.
I mean, it would be hubris of us to claim that we singularly had acquired have the most. But of our niche of media, the listeners to our niche of media, I think unquestionably are the most valuable audience in the world.
So it's a big ticket item whenever a sponsor decides that they want to work with us for the duration, for the reach, and for the magnitude of who you're reaching when you

reach them. And so it's like a big freaking commitment.
And there's a trade-off there in

our business model, which is we're not going to work with that many people when we do.

But when we do, we want to go as deep as possible. And so that means that we can't do things like engage with agencies or engage with dynamic ad insertion networks or a lot of other things that would make our lives easier.
It probably also means that we can't outsource sales. You and I are the ones talking to the CEOs of the companies who sponsor, which again, lots of trade-offs.
They're very busy people. They're often hard to get a hold of, but they're people that we get to build really real relationship with.
This is one of my favorite trade-offs we've made, kind of like I've been saying is like, these are the types of people who we would want anyway to build deep relationships with. So why wouldn't we lean into that as much as possible? On the completely opposite end of the spectrum, though, something that I think highlights the trade-off and that I've really come to appreciate this year, in the very beginning of Acquired, we did YouTube.
And we've been saying for years and years, we got to redo YouTube. At this point, it's almost a MacGuffin.
Yeah. Where like, it's like Seattle's NBA team.
It's like, maybe we should never redo it so we can always talk about the fact that- Oh, of course Seattle's going to get an NBA team. Of course Acquired is going to redo YouTube.
But I was so negative on YouTube in the episode. And the intervening years, I feel like have just been a journey for me of really coming to appreciate what an incredible product and business YouTube is.
And this year, my big YouTube appreciation has been they enable for many, many creators, people to make their livelihoods with the exact opposite trade off of what we do. You can just focus on content and you, if you have an audience and can build an audience, can make a good to great living on YouTube and never engage with business, never engage with ad sales.
This is how I felt as an app developer. I was like, wow, there's a money fountain.
Yeah. I write software, I upload it to the store and money comes out the other side.
Which obviously like, that's not the decision we would make. But for the long tail, you know, and mass marketing and other niches of media that don't have as valuable an audience as us.
That is an amazing thing. And most creators don't want to be business people.
Like we want to be business people. We want to be entrepreneurs.
Right. By the way, I think it makes the content better that we are.
Because then you get first party insights rather than like if we were journalists sort of shooting from the sidelines. Like some of the stuff I've already talked about on this episode today is the strategic conversation that came out of a board meeting that I was in earlier and so like us engaging in business makes the show what it is too it's funny that reminds me of another trade-off one of the things like really this is driven by being a parent.
But yeah, I don't do boards anymore.

I just can't.

Never say never.

But man, you know, thinking back on times in my life when I was on, you know, five, six, seven boards.

And as you are now.

I'm on three.

Okay, that's more manageable. It sort of makes it work.

It's like you pick very few companies and you go very deep. I mean,

it's a very acquired way of doing it. Three is a manageable number.
But even so, like to do it right, you really got to engage. Yep.
All right. What's next on the agenda? Relatedly, show growth.
Show growth. It was so fun talking to Ben Thompson about this and his growth trajectory and curve.

We pretty amazingly doubled our audience again this year. Which has basically been true every year since we started seven years ago.
Which, this is always one of these things where if a startup is only doubling year over year in the first two or three years, it's like, okay, well, it's not going to be a breakout company. But if you can actually keep doubling for seven, eight, nine years, the numbers get pretty big.
And so it feels very different transitioning from 2020 to today, sort of looking over a two-year span where... Even from last year to today so we we hit over a quarter million subscribers which was 62 000 just 24 months ago i know so that's the crazy like that's the place where this sort of like out years of compounding is starting to show up for us and the thing that's been crazy to me is there still have been some kind of step change.
Like the Amazon episode. Yeah.
That was a step change for us. For sure.
Yeah. I think the previous highest episode to Amazon had gotten just over 100,000 downloads and that one got 170,000.
Yeah. In the first 90 days.
In the first 90 days. And when we say a quarter million, that is the unique number of people who listen to, it's basically our monthly active listener account across all platforms who engage with at least one episode.
Because not all of you listen to every episode, sadly. The cool thing about podcasts and for us and that it is an open ecosystem that's not controlled by algorithms, it does mean growth takes longer and it's harder and you have to do these step change functions.
But then people become subscribers and they stick around. Amazon was a huge step change moment for us in terms of growth.
And many of those new people subscribed. Right.
And so thus, the subsequent episodes benchmark Enron. Like the two benchmark episodes were both way higher than the 100,000 that we were at before Amazon.
And then Enron now is charting to look pretty similar to Amazon. Early, we're only five or six days in.
But like is unbelievable how steeply... I don't think it's a reflection on the benchmark episodes.
I think we're such a cool experience, but it's more niche. It's a venture capital firm versus Amazon.
Everybody cares about Amazon. Yes, yes, exactly.
There's also this chronological thing where every three or four episodes is our biggest episode ever, and not necessarily because the content is more interesting, but because when you find a podcast you like, you stick around. So there is this sort of like cumulative effect where we drop a new episode.
If we had dropped this in 2016, it would have gotten a couple thousand listens. But because it's dropped on top of the entire base of people who are subscribed to Acquired, it's really meaningful.
And I thought Ben brought up this really interesting point where he sort of asserted podcasts are great because they're really sticky, but they're terrible to grow. He basically said, I don't know how you would grow a podcast if you didn't also have a writing platform that was easily forwardable because podcasts are really hard to share.
And that sort of explains the reason why no matter how hard we try, we've really never been able to more than double in any year because podcasts are sort of an inherently unshareable mechanism. So unless there's something that happens like you get feed dropped for free in an NPR podcast that brings you 100,000 new listeners right away.

Or we had NVIDIA part two, I think, got a large promotion on Spotify. And that brought us a bunch of new listeners that were subscribed to Spotify.
To us this year. Yeah, they have.
We really only started kind of more directly working with them in January with the Taylor Swift episode. Which is why, what was our stat?

98% of the people who listen on Spotify today were not listeners last year. And we should be clear about what I mean by directly working with Spotify.
We're not owned by Spotify. There's no economic relationship or ad sales.
Or like we've been saying, we do all that in-house. That's our business model.
But they assign you a creator manager. There's people that we know that we can contact.
Relationships at Spotify in a way that we don't have with any of the other platforms. I mean, I think technically we have a manager at Apple.
Like, I don't know who that person is. No, no, no, no.
We found someone's email address, but they're not assigned there. Yeah.
Spotify has done a great job of, at least from my perspective, you know, engaging with us as creators. And I think striking good balance between podcasting is an open ecosystem with all the benefits and trade-offs that we've just been talking about.
Yep. But you can also do it better than Apple.
Apple has been such a terrible steward of this industry. You've brought this up before.
Terrible in one respect, but they're the reason why we have a direct connection with our listeners yeah it's like they're abdicating the creation of a platform and an intermediary is the reason why we have this really sticky relationship with listeners such a good point such a good point their internal strategy failure at apple and execution too like i just feel like if you're an Apple shareholder, you should be really angry at management about how they have mismanaged, like fumbled the ball on podcasting. But delighted in many other ways.
But delighted in other ways. You know, for us, yeah, I agree.
Especially the type of business we have at Acquired is really enabled by the lack of algorithmic stranglehold on this medium. So it does sort of beg this interesting question that Ben threw out, which is how do you grow a podcast when you don't have a secondary shareable component? And I think we have tried to do this with the Acquired website.
Each episode has a page. That page has a bunch of show notes.
That page has a transcript. There's sort of a reason to consume it on that page.
You can sign up via email on that page. You can join the Slack from that page.
The Slack now has almost 15,000, over 14,000 members. Our preferred way to share an episode is the page because we sort of feel that that URL is like a nice way to package it up for someone and say, listen to this.
Unfortunately, our episodes are four hours long, so it doesn't come with a deep link. Like it would be really nice if as you scroll down the page and as you move through the transcript or as you watch the video or as you consume the audio, that was always updating the URL so that at any given point you copy the URL.

It's like this is exactly like Overcast has the share time stamp.

Yeah.

And you can do it on YouTube, too.

Yeah.

But like those are inherently flawed because you don't know if someone likes to use that platform.

So like when I share that Overcast link with people, I'm like, are they going to be like, what is this podcast player that I don't use? Why are you sharing it to me in this weird way? There's a bunch of reasons that contribute to podcasts being sort of inherently unshareable. Our episodes being really long make them especially hard to share sort of moments, insights.
And there's been a zillion sort of like clip apps over the years. But I do think actually, you know, we have not

grown in the same way that like a viral product grows, but we've had really nice growth as a

podcast. And I think actually growth happens because we infiltrate a network, particularly

a company network. And then we get shared within the company, like in a company Slack or Teams or

just friend networks within a company. Yep.
It's kind of interesting. Like I'm not

Thank you. network and then we get shared within the company like in a company slack or teams or just friend networks within within a company yep it's kind of interesting like i'm not particularly interested in additional growth yeah like especially at this point yeah i mean it's it's great it would be nice and i think ben was kind of making this same point in the episode we did with him for all of us additional growth is great but not by trading off any of the things that we really care about that drive our business.
Right. Or changing the audience mix.
I was wildly relieved this year from the, how many people took the survey? 1500 people or so that answered the survey, which thank you if you did. Yeah, thank you.
That the audience mix stayed pretty much the same from two, two and a half years ago, the last time we ran a survey, which was awesome. I was like, wow, we managed to get 200,000 more of basically the same type of person.
And it was heartening talking to Ben because it sounded like he thought that he had bumped up against the market, that he was starting to saturate and then sort of accelerated through it again. And so it feels like Ben, I think he probably has close to a million people that consume Stratechery.com for free in a given year.
And so if he doesn't feel like he's bumping up against the TAM and we have a reasonably overlapping audience, that feels like pretty good proxy for us to say, well, we could probably at least 4x from here. But I don't really have like a strong desire to do.
I think it would make our lives generally worse if we did. I think it would be neutral.
I mean,

some ways it would be better. In some ways it would be worse.
But if we were a video podcast,

it would make it worse because we're right at the limit right now. We're like,

we have all the benefits of when we drop an episode, it really matters to the people that we care about it mattering to and we don't get recognized on the street the episode with ben was about strategy obviously so we didn't really talk about this but i kept thinking about him wanting to explore more and we should do here our business model is very different than ben's and growth again like nice to have to have for us. Comes with some set of trade-offs.
There's some downsides to it, some upsides. Neutral to, I don't know, you could argue maybe you think it's slightly negative to growth.
Maybe I think it's slightly positive. It's in the neutral zone.
But because of our business model and everything we were talking about, the deepening of the engagement with the right people and the right sponsors that's what drives our excitement about the business and the business itself in a way that for ben it's different because he actually does need to grow his business to keep growing the number of consumers because some percentage of them will convert to paying him right you're saying for his revenue to grow he must grow the number of subscribers which means if subscribers are always a fraction a fixed fraction of the set of people audience are reading anything on strategic he must grow the top line whereas what you're saying for us is the revenue is not necessarily directly connected to audience size right it's connected but connected, but it's not directly connected. And as we evolve the business model more, I mean, this is a good place to talk about Vanta.
That's a good point. One of our couple of biggest sponsors and partners on the show this year, we, and kind of through kindergarten and you too, invested almost $10 million in the company this year.
So like, that's mostly kindergarten very small yes very small and most of that capital came from the acquired audience community like the lp capital that backed that spv came in very large part from the acquired audience and And so that's not like growing the audience,

of course, increases the number of super high quality people.

And we care about growing the high quality people in the audience.

And the bigger that size is great,

but it's not directly tied to the business.

And like that was a transformational moment for us.

And obviously Vanta is an amazing company,

but that's a whole new business.

It was at least an insight.

You could sort of test the hypothesis of like, because you and I have invested small amounts personally in our sponsors before, because we get insight into their business from getting to work directly with CEOs on those. And we're like, that's really interesting.
And we see what our audience resonates with, with the products. Right.
That's a really interesting thing. We should invest a little bit.
But your insight of, okay, this is a growth round. This is a company that's doing really well.
I can sort of see how well they're doing, both from getting to look at the investment pitch, but also- But also the reaction of our community to the sponsorship. Right.
Could I invest a meaningful amount of capital in this? How could we put together a meaningful amount of capital? And do I, as a host of Acquired, have relationships with the owners of capital, the stewards of capital who want to invest in this opportunity. It was a really interesting way for you to sort of like prove out that hypothesis a little bit.
Yeah. There is no strategic plan for kindergarten ventures, period.
It is very much like a- Y'all may be shocked that there's no strategic plan. But it's not like we did an offsite.
We didn't do an end of year special for kindergarten like we're doing now for Acquired and discuss our strategy and say, you know, I think we should find an opportunity to do a $10 million SPV this year. But no, it came naturally from everything we're talking about here on Acquired.
Yep. And just to put a finer point on the business being not entirely connected to the audience size.
There were years where the audience would 2x, but revenue would 10x just because it was a wildly under monetized asset. Well, there were several years where revenue was zero.
This was not a business. That's true.
But who's to say that we necessarily have the business model optimized? Do I think that there should be more sponsorships in episodes? No. In fact, I think we should probably be a little bit tighter on them and shorter on them and find more ways to make the sponsorship segments even more differentiated where we're not just giving the high level pitch on the company, but doing more vouch insurance 101 type stuff where we can sort of like find a key insight with the company and storytell that together.
I think leaning into the strategic differentiation that we have on. And I know that sounds like jargon, but like we are, I think, the only ones who work this closely with our sponsors.
So what does that enable us to do that no other podcast could do? I think that's like the lens that I want to keep taking to it. And so to your point.

Thank you. with our sponsors.
So what does that enable us to do that no other podcast could do? I think that's like the lens that I want to keep taking to it. And so to your point, the business is probably still unoptimized and it will probably grow directionally with audience, but can grow in other ways too.
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All right, David, what's next on the year in review agenda? Next, we got to talk about next year, 2023. Yes.
Looking ahead. Okay, first question for us.
What episodes, topics, guests are we thinking about? Oh. What should we, what's on the docket? Hang on, let me me bust out my list one that feels like an obvious one we should do at some point next year is open ai yeah absolutely we talked about doing it at various points this year and especially like fitting in with the whole nvidia the series but um it's funny now it feels like we gotta do it we almost did it 12 months ago like i remember last year over the holidays doing some prep work for it and that i think would have been kind of disastrous because we would have done it and i think way undersold like we wouldn't have been would have been way too early yeah if we do end up doing it and do it you know relatively early next year it's sort of ironic that the next elon company that we'll cover after our old SpaceX episode is OpenAI.
We didn't do anything on Twitter. We haven't done any revisiting of Tesla.
It is crazy. God, he's got his fingers in everything.
The Twitter is just, oh my gosh, there's just so much drama. There's so much drama.
I don't like having just drama on Acquired. That is true.
I think part of the reason why we haven't done a Twitter episode since we interviewed Dick Costolo in early 2021, maybe. Yeah, way before all this.
Is like the story feels less like a business story and more like a TMZ story, which isn't our cup of tea. Yes.
I don't ever want to feel like TMZ. I won't say that like I'm not interested in reading all the TMZ drama about it.
It's totally fascinating. And if you can run a company on 80% less people than you were running it before, and nothing goes terribly wrong, that's super interesting for the world to know.
Now, of course, it does look like all sorts of things are going wrong, but to the extent that they can turn it around and the business can be generating as much revenue as it was before on a massively lower cost basis. I'm very curious to know what the second order effects of that are.
But the story that we know so far is TNC. But yeah, like that's not the, we don't actually know that yet.
And everything that is being discussed is, yeah, it's just drama. Okay.
So open AI, that's a good candidate. Yep.
I was perusing the world's richest people list the other day and saw- For acquired ideas or just that's what you do in your free time? You know. The lots of the names are very familiar to us and acquired listeners.
The one that is not is Bernard Arnault, which one of the world's top five wealthiest people and not in tech, not in finance, but in luxury brands. I think it'd be pretty interesting to go down the path of really deeply unpacking brand power and brand power over generations, and the concept of a house of brands, and what brands mean to people, and why you can know that it's the exact same leather that you're buying elsewhere, but because it has this mark on it, you pay 500 times more for it.
I would love to figure out what the right starting place is for luxury and do that on acquired. Yeah.
The point, the reason to do it is what you said, the under like brand. Right.
How did these amazing, durable brands get built yep i continue to want to do epic health care i think they're like a huge force in the american economy and i don't know if that episode will be a hero's journey or a villain but is it an enron or a nvidia i suspect without having done any research i suspect more of an enron yeah they're probably not a fraud, but just a... Open question whether it's good for the world.
Yes. Creates some value, certainly captures a lot of it.
Does it capture more than it creates? Open question. One thing I definitely want to do more of and figure out how it's going to evolve is sessions.
So we did the session with Jason Calacanis. That was really fun and felt like a really cool way to do something orthogonal to the core acquired approach, but still really fun.
Maybe sessions or a format like sessions ends up being what we do with protagonists of stories after we've done an episode just us on them. Maybe we keep doing it with interesting people, maybe both, but that felt like a really cool, different type of interview than just a standard podcast interview.
I feel like if sessions evolves into talking to people who do fascinating work about things that aren't necessarily their work, that's a pretty interesting use of the format. That's something that I want to explore because that statement can kind of take two directions.
And I think either would make for an interesting Sessions reason for existence. One is talking to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company about things that aren't their company.
They probably think about a lot of really interesting stuff and have a bunch of really interesting ideas. And they probably can't say a lot of the most interesting thoughts they have about their company because they're publicly traded and there's all sorts of SEC stuff involved.
But there's other conversations we can have with them. But they're people and they have feelings and emotions.

And those aren't the reasons people typically are trying to get them to come on podcasts.

Yeah.

That's one thing actually that my wife Jenny

pointed out to me after listening to

the session we did with Jason.

And she was like,

it was interesting.

It was good.

You guys could have gone way harder on diving into

the emotional side of Jason's lived experience and his feelings. And like, especially when he, he mentioned, you know, Tony Shay's passing and how that really impacted him and like led to him deciding to make some changes in how he approached life and his work for the next few years.
Like she was like, that was an opportunity that you just let fall on the floor. Like you could have gone way deeper into that.
Yeah. I think that's a great point.
The other thing that I was sort of implying in that statement is we could have people on almost as a prop, like we're not interviewing them, but they're instead a piece of whatever discussion you and I wanted to have anyway. Like, you know, what if we had Eric Vichria just like hanging out next to you on the couch and we weren't talking about Benchmark, but Eric was just like chiming in on a lot of this stuff and sharing his ideas.
He's not the subject of the interview. He's a piece of the show.
He's a part of the conversation. He's a foil to bounce ideas off of.
I would for sure do that with Eric. That would be an amazing and a great privilege.
You know who would be truly the most interesting person to have as playing that role would be Peter Fenton. Oh, yeah.
You're right. Sorry, I used Eric as the example.
Oh, my gosh. The whole benchmark crew is amazing.
That dinner was amazing. There were a few things that Peter said when we were talking about the principal program and Blake, one of us, I can't remember if it was me or you asked, so why do you guys have a principal, like a junior investment person when clearly your whole ethos is you don't do that.
And Peter's response, well, it was like, because forced consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, which is a famous quote from, I can't remember where it's from now. It's from some famous.
It just like, it like leapt out of him. It just like, that was the immediate response that leapt out of him.
And it was like, wow, I never thought that that would show up on a podcast. Yeah.
Yeah. That was great.
Peter's one of a kind. He is one of a kind.
other episodes that i want to do i want to do into it i think that's a far more interesting and successful business than people realize in the vein of consumer brands we got to do nike at some point oh yeah i want to continue going back in time from walmart and do sears nike's one that i really want to do i know we said we don don't do lives. I actually don't think this should be a live show.
I want to go on site. I want to go to Oregon, go to Eugene, get a workout in, but I feel like there's like, I don't know.
I mean, just be curious to see. I've never been, but the facilities there and like, because it's such a athletic, like a physical thing, I want to go go see what it's like that's a good point yeah that feels like something we need to experience more physically I don't know you could make that argument for a lot of them like TSMC the episode would have been much better if you and I got to witness chips being fabbed and feel what it was like to be in a bunny suit the little bit I know i think it's mostly from the last dance but like

the one of the key key moments in nike's history is the signing of the deal with michael jordan yep but like what did it feel like when michael came out to the campus yeah there's feeling the history there has to be a big thing all right so before we get to our extended carve outs in sort of reviewing 2022,

you and I both had big 2022s.

So that's probably worth chatting about a little bit. I love this is a, we didn't intend it this way.
This is becoming much like the benchmark dinner that we recorded everything. I was like before dinner, because we didn't want to eat dinner before.
We got a lot of good comments of like, why are they just sitting there with cheese and on their plates? Like, aren't they going to going to eat aren't they going to eat real food and like we did afterwards yeah yeah but like that would not make for good video content clink clink clink yeah uh audio or video content we are going to after we finish recording here we're going to go out to uh celebrate celebrate a holiday dinner for acquired for the two of us but i feel like this is like the pre-record this the recording version. So at which we would definitely talk about our personal lives.
Well, you had by far the biggest life event that you had. Yes.
I got married. It was wonderful.
I was here. It was great.
You were here. It was really cool because in some ways I thought it wasn't going to feel different afterwards.
I think a lot of people in our generation sort of like date for a long time and live

together and feel like life partners.

But there's something totally different about being married, you know, having the ring on

every day as a reminder and the sense of like longevity associated with it is really

cool and a really totally different psychological place than I thought.

Well, and you go through this process and project together. Yes..
From the moment you get engaged until the wedding, is this like a butterfly going into like a caterpillar going into a cocoon? It's like a transformational period. And I say like, I was here.
You did the wedding at your house right after moving. I didn't want to play the 2022 venue game.
Two times more people got married this year. It was just like, you're not getting a venue.
And if you are, you're getting a terrible date and you're paying a lot of money for it and you're not going to get any of the things that you want out of it. That was probably half of CPI inflation right there was my venues.
David was my groomsman. You and I have some great pictures together.
Thank you for coming up and being a part of it.

You did a amazing job given that, you know, you two planned it all yourself.

You were the venue.

It was at your house.

Like it was, uh.

We're literally sitting where the DJ was like DJing onto the dance floor out there.

It's so fun going to weddings after having been married.

Cause you're like, oh good.

I just get to enjoy all of the fruits of the couple's labor. Yeah, it really is.
When people say it's like the happiest day of your life, no doubt the happiest day of my life. And I think the like energy and love and just overwhelming force that you feel from your closest friends and family when you're like walking down the aisle and

you feel all that energy on you is crazy and it's an indescribable moment really yeah um it was it was super cool that was i think the biggest personal life event what else for you this year let's see on 2022 we took a vacation to italy i'd never been to italy before that was like a absolutely spectacular

time. Rome,

Cinque Terre,

Florence, Capri,

God... been to Italy before.
That was like a absolutely spectacular time. Rome, Cinque Terre, Florence, Capri.
God, the island of Capri is incredible. I've never been.
It's just amazing. It's beautiful.
Have you been to Greece? I've not. Okay.
I was curious how it compares to Greece. I think it's similar to some of the sort of Grecian islands.
This one has some cool history associated with it because at one point the Roman emperor was sort of fleeing and I don't know if it was paranoia or is legitimate, but just thought that everyone in Rome was coming and tried to kill him. And so he like fled to Capri and ruled from the island where he could sort of see in every direction to sort of fortify his remote work before remote work.
Yeah. That's like one of my...
He was a pre-digital nomad. Yes.
That's the cool thing about Italy and every European country compared to here, but I feel like especially Italy, the sense of history, especially for us two history buffs. You walk around Rome or Florence.
Rome Rome especially. Florence in its own right is still ancient history compared to America.
But Rome, you're talking about the ancient Roman times. And actually walking around the Forum is wild.
Because you're literally looking at pillars that are 3,000 years old. At least 2,000 years old.
Yeah. So we're thinking about where to go on a honeymoon, probably early to mid next year.
And I want to go back to Italy. This is a magical place.
This is the problem as you get older and you have cool travel experiences. You're like, I want to go back to those places, but you also want to experience new places.
The rest of the world, right. Like I will die without seeing most of the world, no matter how how much i travel and so should i try and put a dent in that as much as possible or should i say you know there's this one spot in hawaii that i really like and so every single year i'm going back there clearly the answer is both both maybe you had some other plan for carve outs but like i mean i feel like i'm like decently up on like the latest like tech and gadgets and stuff but like you're like you had some other plan for carve outs, but like, I mean, I feel like I'm like decently up on like the latest, like tech and gadgets and stuff, but like, you're like, you, you made some interesting decisions.
Oh, you're going to read my Apple, Apple year in review. Yeah.
Yeah. Can we do an Apple year in review for Ben? Yeah, let's do it.
So got the iPad mini for acquired. We both are rocking the mini cause it's a very, very good for on stage as we did more live stuff.
It's just game. This is the perfect device for live events and any kind of where you're not sitting in front of a computer monitor yeah easy to hold it in one hand i really want the big ipad pro but i've basically no use for it like this is actually the device that suits my use case i think a little over a year ago i got the macbook pro 16 inch which which is, which has the lovely, this is our fire, which is the finest computer I've ever owned.
It's a tank. It's heavy.
Yes. The display is unbelievable.
I mean, everything about this thing is nuts. I do have envy the M two MacBook air.
That thing is sexy, like so thin, so light, a lot of the capability of this one. But when I'm traveling, and because what we do is so everything intensive, it's bandwidth intensive, it's storage intensive, the SD slot, having like, you just need like a desktop computer with you all the time.
We're transferring hundreds of gigabytes back and forth after we record for all the multiple camera videos. I want the good webcam that comes on this computer in case we have to do a remote episode.
I want the screen space because I'm also a venture capitalist and I'm doing spreadsheet-y things. I have a hard time with a travel computer.
So if they made an 18-inch computer and they made it three pounds heavier, I might buy that one too. When you're doing purely personal travel, do you not bring this and just bring the iPad? No, absolutely not.
Oh, so you still bring this? Yeah, yeah. Purely personal travel, what are you talking about? There's not a single day where I'm on personal vacation where I'm not also doing something.
Yeah, that's true. Even for yours truly, that's true.
I mean, we're small business owners. Yeah, we are.
There are things every single day where there's no one else that can do it. And so either it doesn't happen or we have to do it.
Yep. And that's on top of like me being a professional venture capitalist where like there's real obligations that come with.
And that you don't necessarily need the heaviest computer you can find for. But like you need to be pretty responsive on a lot of things.
And sometimes if you're, that's true, like you need real computer. We need to make edits to an episode or something like, I need to bust out audition.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I could do that on a smaller computer and maybe this is totally overkill. Like when you got here today, I had left to go to a board meeting and then a lunch and then meet someone for coffee for a nonprofit that I'm working with.
And none of those things required a computer. But I brought my backpack with my computer in it to all three, even though I knew I would never take it out.
Because if something came up, I would need to be able to get away for five minutes, do something on my computer, put it back in my bag, and then go back to whatever I was doing. I love it.
i love it you just never know you never know and i'm probably overly paranoid on that but it's like the one time you get burned changes your behavior forever okay so opposite of this and where i thought you were gonna start so i really like to take pictures i'm a very big nerd about like understanding all the physics and as much of the black box that Apple will let you understand of the computational photography engine. But I also have like, I think it's tendinosis.
Something's up with my wrists. They fatigue super easily and I get basically tennis elbow.
It's probably from having my computer with me all the time and like constantly being punched over a computer. So I have the iPhone 13 mini.
It's the correctly sized phone. It's the correct weight for a phone uh it's the correct sort of reachability for a phone which i know apple used to name a feature which is a stupid feature and so i was like gosh there's no iphone 14 mini i would pay literally anything i don't know if that is exactly right but like four or five x the current iphone prices you have a high willingness to pay for an iphone 14 pro.
Like Apple, if there's a test one in a lab somewhere, please send it to me. I will, again, like no price sensitivity around it.
But I was like, I should try the new phone and just like play with the cameras and stuff. I got it as you would suspect.
It was too big. It was too heavy.
I waited 13 days until the 14 day return deadline deadline. Returned it, went back to my 13 Mini.
And I'm thinking about buying another 13 Mini because at some point the battery's going to die on this one and if they never make another Mini again, like... You'd want to have one in cold storage.
It's just like my Nikes upstairs that I've got stacked in the closet. It is the perfect size phone.
So I have... I have a 12 Mini right now.
I didn't upgrade to the 13. I probably should have.
Dude, you totally should. You should upgrade right now before they run out.
Well, I realized I finally need to upgrade the 12 mini. And the biggest driving factor for me as a new parent was the camera.
And so I actually, when I haven't gotten it yet, it's because it's on back order. But I went to the 14 Pro.
Wow. Which I have never had any of the pro iPhones.
Like I care about technology a lot, but I was just never compelled by, I don't care that, didn't, used to not care that much about photography. And so I was just never that compelled by the pro versions.
And I really cared about size, but now with a little one. If I was a parent, I think I would buy the 14 Pro also.
Well, it's a double whammy. What I cared most about size

was for portability when out and about.

Which that part of your life has gone away.

That part of my life is particularly like exercising.

Now my exercise is primarily walking a stroller,

which has a lot of carrying capacity.

And I didn't care that much about photo quality.

I took very few photos before. I mean, and now just like some of the best advice i love talking to people who have older kids and being like because you just realize time just slips away like when you have a kid and um almost universally i wish i'd taken more photos i especially wish i'd taken more videos uh throughout and so like like all right so the pro i have on order but i i'm conflicted it.
Like I'm really going to miss the form factor. You are.
You're really going to miss it. Yeah.
It's like not going to fit in your pocket. Yeah.
It's going to be. It's going to be transition.
And also the camera mountain on this one is so large that the phone actually rocks when you're leaving it on a table and typing. It's fascinating to see the set of trade-offs Apple's been okay with in the name of getting the very best photos that they can out of this thing.
Which as a parent now, I'm like, I see the business reason for doing that. Right.
Okay. So keep going on the lineup because you've got another important large device.
Yeah. So I bought the Apple Watch.
You're having trouble lifting your arm there. It's really heavy.
I was about to say the Apple Watch 14, the Apple Watch Ultra, which I'm sure next year there's going to be the Apple Watch Ultra 2 or the Apple Watch 2 Ultra. I'm curious how they'll name it.
Apple Watch Ultra second generation, I imagine, is what they'll do. Anyway, this thing is actually super light relative to how large it is.
And you made the joke about lifting your arm. I like don't feel it anymore.
And I think that happens with all watches over time. You sort of like get used to the weight.
But one of the big things that sold me on it is because I thought the reason I was going to hate it was the weight. I like put it on and I'm like this.
I think it's the titanium remarkably light for how large it is. It's big for sure.
It's big. It's beautiful, though.
The screen is super clear. Like you can look at pictures on it.
It's really bright. It's 2000 nits.
So like it has a flashlight button because it functions as a fairly effective flashlight the battery lasts like almost three days which is totally game-changing if you i think i've tracked every single night of sleep for four or five years now and so that's like a thing that i that's a use case i really care about i haven't done anything extreme in it yet like i've climbed mount saint St. Helens.
Got this great photo behind me.

Yeah, that's Iceland

that I did with my dad.

He used to do this big

backpacking trip every summer.

And I have not adventured

in this thing yet,

mostly because I've just been

doing less adventuring

over the last year or two.

But I totally expect to use it

for the stated purposes.

But it's been awesome for me,

even not for the ultra type purposes that it's advertised for. The photo viewing, I would imagine, is a really...
I would never think I want to view photos on my wrist, but actually, I think that could be quite useful. There's a good number of times where I'm like, okay, cool.
I saw it clearly enough now where I don't need to also pull it up on my phone. When you're getting photos in a text chat.
Yes, exactly. The other interesting thing is the screen is just large enough where it kind of feels like a small phone and less like a big watch.
And I think it's the edge to edge display. The fact that they have the like, you know, raised bezel around it.
Bezel around it. Yeah.
It has an onscreen keyboard that you can use the finger swiping on. And so I literally can just like swipe on the keyboard to respond to text messages.
So I can't decide if that's like really nerdy and like Casio mid eighties and like, that's not actually useful, but I've probably done it 30 or 40 times since I've gotten it to respond to text messages real quick. And that's been pretty nice.
The one thing I wish they had added that to me would be a, maybe not killer feature, but like a really, really nice to have would be some sort of biometric authentication in the watch. Cause what I don't like is when I, well, maybe with a ultra, I wouldn't have to take it off to charge it as much.
But when I put my watch back on after I'm charging it, then I got to enter my pin code every time, which, you know, like first world problems. But like, I don't understand why they can't put a touch ID sensor.
I mean, I know they're trying to save as much space as possible in there. Right.
But like. No, that's good.
You're right. There's no biometric on it.
But I think a feature that it does have is if you put it on and then you take out your phone before you need to type in the passcode on your watch and you face ID on your phone, your watch is auto unlocked. Yes, that is true.
But I found that to be kind of janky. I have found that to be kind of janky.
I can't like reliably trust that it's going to work. Totally agree.
I'm like, why do I still need to type in a passcode? I swear I shouldn't need a passcode right now. And one of the things I found, maybe I need a different watch band to solve the problem, but toddlers really like to grab shiny things with screens and especially ones that are on your wrist while you you're changing diapers and so the amount of times a day that i enter my passcode on my watch is uh a lot larger than it used to be shall we say all right so let's go with your apple we'll go reverse order for you give me your apple lineup and then let's get into your year interview oh okay so i'm still rocking the 2020 original og m1 macbook.
Yep. Which there's so much more performance machines out there like this now, but like I still have tons of headroom.
Right. I'm not sure you'd notice the performance difference.
Yeah. And like the leap forward that that M1 chip was, was just incredible.
I mean, performance, battery life, price point. That's crazy.
I don't know what these 2020 original M1 MacBook Airs are going for on eBay or Craigslist or whatnot right now. Whatever they're going for, I bet $500-ish, maybe less.
The amount of performance and longevity that you can get for that dollar amount is Yeah. It's crazy.
Crazy. You're right.
If it's only $500, it's way better than let's say you have like a 2018 or 2019 Intel machine. It's so worth it to trade up to even an old M1 because they're just not that different after three years.
Yep. Totally.
I can't imagine anything that a normal human would need to do on a computer that the M1 MacBook can't handle. Yep.
Okay. So keep that guy.
Okay. So there's that.
We talked about my phone. I'm currently rocking the 12 mini, very mixed emotions about transitioning to the 14 pro.
Yep i'm rocking the original se apple watch i forgot they made a watch se they have two now there's a new se2 i don't know exactly what the se2 has feature set i'm very tempted by the ultra for all the reasons we discussed highly recommend it my decision for going with the se originally was it didn't have the always on screen and i actively did not want the always on screen how do you find you does it do you find it distracts you at all i like it now especially with the wavefinder watch face that comes on the ultra when it's off you still see the watch hands but everything else it's a background. And then when you turn it, it's got sort of the white face comes on.

So I like it.

Nice.

I did not like the always on display on the phone when I had the 14 Pro.

It was like loud.

Yeah.

It felt like my phone didn't.

It's like really on.

Yeah.

But on the watch, it's subtle.

It's not like noticeable.

I will say too, I was in a coffee meeting today where I did need to call an Uber so that I could get back here so that we could record. And like, it was quite nice being able to like have the watch at a super, what's the angle? Because there's a social thing about checking your watch, but having it like being able to see the time when I was looking at it at like 170 degree angle.
And I used to definitely be the person that's like jerking my wrist or like tapping it to try to see the time. So that's like, that is one.
Yeah. I'll do like, I'll, I'll put my hands under the table and then like tap it like surreptitiously.
Yeah. And then on the iPad side, the iPad mini, I had the one really only negative experience besides the just amount of work that we and pitchbook put into the arena show was my old ipad got stolen after the arena show criminal literally criminal i could still see it on like the map on the find my devices it was somewhere up like north gate or somewhere like north of seattle and like but it's like one of these things you're like just because i know where that is it does not mean i should go there and get it No, definitely not.
Oh, man. But the Mini, I really like the Mini.

It's not nearly as good for watching and consuming content i have an old ipad that we keep in the kitchen for when i'm doing the dishes and stuff and that you have promotion on right like the minis don't have a promotion display the 120 hertz yeah no. I've got like an old, old iPad that I don't think has ProMotion.

I feel like you used to have one with a ProMotion display.

You know what?

Maybe it doesn't.

I think it's an original, the first iPad Pro that they made in 2017.

Yeah, that one did.

Okay.

You're right.

It does have ProMotion.

It does have ProMotion.

Because that I actually missed when I was downgrading from the new iPhone down to the 13 mini because the non-Pro iPhones have never had ProMotion.

That goes up to 120 hertz refresh rate on the screen. Yeah.
Butter. The mini is great though for events.
It's also really good. I've stopped, I use a Kindle Oasis that I use for reading fiction at home.
But when I travel, I no longer bring the Kindle Oasis and I use this as a Kindle. It's great for that.
I find like for outdoor stuff, you can't beat the Kindle. Yeah.
I also find that night reading in bed, the iPad, even in the lightest setting is kind of too bright. That's true.
When going to the beach, I'll still bring the Kindle. I wouldn't feel good bringing this to a beach.
Yeah, that's a good point because they're not waterproof. Unlike iPhones, iPads are not waterproof.
The device that's still in my lineup that blows my mind is in 2012, as a college graduation gift, my uncle got me the $70 Kindle. And that is still the Kindle that I use and take on vacation.
It's such a good product. They are like industrial strength.
Yeah. Yeah.
And super light. Like I looked at getting the Oasis, but it's actually heavier than my 2012 model.
The nice thing about the Oasis is it's got the page turn buttons, which I like. And the paper white is a really nice.
Yeah. I'm envious of the paper white for sure.
My Kindle is actually worthless in bed because you need to light it with a... Right.
Jenny and I got the Oasis for that very reason.

Jenny's a night owl and I'm a morning person. And Jenny is a huge reader.
She has a PhD in

literature and I'm a huge reader too, but she puts me to shame. She would stay up reading at

night with the light on and finally I'm just like, I'm buying you this. Turn the light off.
It's for you and for me. It's for you, but mostly for me.
All right. So your 2022 personal year.
Oh, 2022 personal year. Well, this was the year of adjusting to life as a parent.
Our daughter was born towards the end of 2021. So that was like, most of the year was preparing.
And then then like the first couple months are like it's i mean of course we're thinking back now on the ftx interview when we when we had sam on was that your first interview back it was in there i mean i was still in the fog of war like it was uh i know we released the interview uh oh we switched it with the michaelitz episode. I think Michael, we interviewed Michael first.
Right. That's right.
That's right. But all of that, she was no more than two months old.
Probably less. It's such a fog.
Yeah, those first few months. But then this year, Jenny went back to work, and she works in person.
She works at San Francisco Ballet. It's an in-person physical art form.
They put on physical performances. She needs to be in the office every day and weekends and nights.
So yeah, this year was just about figuring out life with a lot of changes. But we met early in college.
So we were like babies. You were together for 17 years before having a kid? 16 years, 16 years.
Yeah. 16 years before having a kid, which were wonderful 16 years.
And I'm glad we had all that time together pre baby, but we hadn't had to like really renegotiate our relationship in a long time. So, uh, it was like, Oh wow.
Flexing old muscles again. Yeah, I bet.
But the last time was when we got married and like, we didn't expect it you know, hearing you talk about things are different when you get married. Like they really are.
All your life systems have to change. Your notion of self is only about one person, but after you're married, your notion of self includes another person whose emotions you can't actually feel.
So like when you're like looking out for yourself, you have to account for things that you currently don't know, which I think is this like very interesting phenomenon. Yeah.
And that is so true about getting married. But then having a kid, I think that's like the biggest, well, there's so many huge things, but one is like, you now have this other being like when you get married, yes, you have to account for the other person and you're like in it together.
You're no longer just you. Right.
But that other person is like a responsible adult, hopefully, you know, can keep themselves alive. Can like, if we're going late recording an acquired episode, she'll be fine.
When you have a kid, that's very-

Kid starves.

Yeah. You can't 24-7, somebody needs to have as a pretty foreground in their mental processes.

I need the algorithm of how I'm behaving needs to have at the forefront, keep this kid alive and

happy. And they're incapable of doing so their own.
And, you know, you love this person so incredibly much in just really like unfathomable ways. And so it's like, yeah, how do you like then integrate that back with your life? So that was, it's been a lot of figuring that out for us.
And now like we're now at such a good age, not that it's still difficult. She's a little over a year old now, 14 months.
like it's been a lot of figuring that out for us. And now, like, we're now at such a good age.

Not that it's still difficult.

She's a little over a year old now, 14 months.

Like, it's so fun.

Like, it's always been fun.

I've always, I've not been, I think a lot of parents,

and especially a lot of dads,

they don't love their kids immediately.

And like, that's a very normal thing of like,

you know, moms too have this,

but like, kid pops out and you're like, whoa.

You know?

Right.

But there's no instant love. I had the instant love like instant uh like very very powerful and i still feel that but like also like as they become more of a person like she's walking now she's talking like a little bit like but she's like so clearly has a personality and like every day and like oh wow like you are even more of a person than you were like, it's so fun.
And it's like also a lot easier than the just like the early days are so physically demanding, like on everybody, especially moms, but like any, any caregiver. It's one of these things that like you can describe it, but having not experienced it, I don't actually know what it's like.
It's like, oh, there's no way. Cool words, David.
Yeah, right. Exactly.
Highly, highly recommend it, but, uh, you know, in due time. Yeah.
Other stuff for you this year, personally? It's sort of crazy looking back on it, like so much changes when you parent, but, um, we were both intentional about this, but also I think it just naturally happened because it is important and part of our lives. We didn't actually travel any less.
Like we didn't travel in the early, early months, but we did, what did we do? Eight or nine trips with the baby in 2022, including going to Portugal. We made that a family trip when we went for breakpoint, which like actually was great.
Like really hard, very different. It seemed very hard, I gotta say from the outside.
It was hard, it was hard hard but i'm really glad we did it i'm really glad we did it then the other big thing for us this year we'd spent a lot of time over the last couple years thinking about where we wanted to live in general and then in anticipation of having a baby and then after having the baby jenny and i went around the axle so many times about California. We were

pretty sure we're going to stay in California and probably the Bay Area. Jenny's family's there.
And we genuinely really love it there. But do we move to the suburbs? Where do we move? Do we stay in the city? We were in the city before.
And we ultimately decided to stay in the city, to stay in the same neighborhood. We moved houses.
But the plan for now is we're just going to stay for the perpetuity in the city

and which some

people I think are like, that's crazy. Why would you live in San Francisco, period? Especially post-pandemic.
Why would you raise kids in San Francisco? It's actually great. Like for us, it's been amazing.
We can walk. We don't have to drive.
We don't have to get her in the car.

There's so much great stuff.

She really enjoys it.

Like she's a city kid.

Like after breakpoint,

we went out in the countryside

in Portugal for a couple of days.

The baby was so bored.

She was like,

get me back to Lisbon.

Oh, wow.

So it's actually been really great

for us staying in the city.

We'll see as she gets older,

but that's the plan. That's great.
All right, listeners. It is time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.
It's funny, David. Statsig has gone from this little startup when we first started working with them a couple of years ago to this total powerhouse now.
I know. It's wild.
I was looking it up and they have added all these customers since we started working together. OpenAI, Figma, Atlassian, Vercel, Notion, tons more.
At this point, if there's a growth stage tech company out there, there's pretty good chance they're using Statsig. Yep.
So listeners, if you are unfamiliar with Statsig, they basically took what was the standard product infrastructure at every big tech company, and they built it as a standalone company. This includes advanced experimentation tools, A-B testing, feature flags, product analytics, session replays, and more.
So if you're building the next great software company, this sort of infrastructure is essential because it allows your product and engineering teams to release things quickly, measure the impact of them, and track progress over time. Totally.
So, I mean, as we've talked about on the show forever at companies like Facebook or Netflix, data was just a part of how everything was built, which contributed to all the crazy bottoms-up organic growth that they had. Now with Statsig, you can get that from day one at your startup.
And today, they're not only trusted by startups, but also by more mature

enterprises like Bloomberg and Microsoft and Electronic Arts. Turns out that a single system for data-driven product decisions is useful at any scale.
Yeah. And by the way, the scale they're operating at is completely insane.
They process over 2 trillion events per day now. By the way, David, this is updated.
The last I checked, it was 1 trillion. And then this morning I pulled it up $2 trillion.
And they handle releases to billions of end users. If you're listening to this podcast and you've used software in the last few years, there is a very good chance you've been a part of many experiments orchestrated by Statsig.
Yeah, it's just awesome. And as they've gone upmarket, they've also started to offer some interesting deployment models, like being able to run the whole thing natively inside your existing data warehouse, or just using Statsig's fully hosted solution.
If you want to leverage Statsig to grow your business, there are a bunch of great ways to get started. Statsig has a very generous free tier for small companies, a startup program with a billion free events that's $50,000 in value, and significant discounts for enterprise customers.
To get started, go to statsig.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Thank you, Statsig.
Carveouts? Carveouts. Let's do it.
All right. Should we start with books? Let's do it.
All right. I can't remember if I recommended this one because I read it over the holidays last year.
I think it might have been my first carve out of 2022. Project Hail Mary.
Oh yeah. I think I read it on your recommendation.
That's right. Ken Vouch.
Very good. I think it's the best fiction I've ever read.
Definitely the best sci-fi I've ever read. I think it's the best fiction I've ever read.
The premise arrives at you in real time as you read it. So I don't want to give away the premise unless otherwise stated.
This is a spoiler free uh carve outs the coolest thing about project hail mary is how it is basically all in our universe there's no big leap like in star trek you have to like take this leap of like well there's warp drive and you don't really understand how it works and that's fine and now that we accept this black box now we can go to other stuff there's not like an accepted black box in project hail mary there's just like all the known rules of physics that we know about and yeah it's uh it's hard sci-fi i think is the term is that what they call it yeah where it's like everything is like laws of physics explanations for everything right so that was super cool another book that i finished about two months ago that I thought was exceptional and every single person who listens to Acquired should read it. I think it expands even broader than this audience, but this audience in particular would eat it up called The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
We got to talk to Morgan recently. That was really fun.
And when we hopped on that call with him, it was like I was-thirds through the book and so it was really fun like getting to talk about some of the concepts with him while i was in real time digesting them but he's unbelievably pithy i need to read the book i haven't read it i need to read it and yes i agree total class act i suspect it's a really good one to read now post 2020 and 2021 bubble when like everything was crazy it would have been great to read it during 2020. Right.
Also. Yeah.
Yes. But it includes, I think I've, I've made it a carve out before the Morgan's essay, how all this happened.
And every chapter of psychology of money is one of his essays. And so if you liked, if you read how all this happened, which is this amazing path of World War II through today, through the American economy and a lot of politics and why different things happened and how everything led to the next thing, the psychology of money is awesome because it incorporates all of that sort of like factual history with just really good perspectives and some citations of research on what actually makes people happy and what investment strategies work when your goal is happiness.
I certainly don't account for enough of that in my own financial planning. Yeah.
Morgan makes a very strong argument in the book to basically put as much into S&P 500 index funds when you're as young as you possibly can and just never sell anything. It's like the most boring style of investing possible that will probably beat whatever you do.
Yep. I got to pick that up and read it.
That'll be good over the holidays book. Anything else you got in books? I do actually.
I'm halfway through it. I was tempted to not not talk about it because I want to use it for a future carve out, but it's already so good.
And this is another one where like listeners of the show will especially eat this up. The Power Law by Sebastian Malady.
Is it worth reading even if you're already steeped in the industry? Yes. You and I have done research on 250 companies and all these venture funds and talked to the people that started a lot of these venture funds.
And Sebastian knows more. It just goes deeper.
I mean, he just talks about these investments that like we think we've talked about the best investments of all time. There are more.
And like he cites them all numerically. He cites returns on early venture capital funds.
He takes you all the way through product venture capital. Like, I mean, there's George Dorio and then Arthur Rock.
And he talks about like how all those partnerships sort of led to the next ones and how certain structures were bad. And then the invention of the private limited partnership fixed all these problems.
You're going to love it. Okay.
I might find that under the tree. That's all I got for books.
Oh, that's all you got. All right.
My books, I've got two acquired books that I can't believe we did both of these episodes this year and we completely whiffed on this very obvious sort of like pun and fun moment. You know, I don't like whiffs.
I know I'm embarrassed by this. Like mostly for me, this is like an ultimate like David Rosenthal, like dad joke joke moment my top two acquired books and they genuinely are also my top two acquired books for the year made in japan and made in america i made that joke did you totally made that joke oh i can't believe i swear i did did you we'll have to go back through the transcripts or at least like observed that in some capacity maybe it was a tweet maybe i just have dad brain.
But isn't that crazy that they're both named that? And they're both so good. Yeah.
I agree. Highly recommend.
Non-acquired books that I read this year. I think I did this as a carve out.
The Godfather series, the books. Yep.
Mario Puzo's books. They are so good.
As good or better than the movies. And the movies are, in my opinion, some of the best of all best of all time yeah and then the other one is masters of doom i don't know if i talked about that on the show we've thought about doing an id episode and then lex did that like huge interview with carmack so felt less urgent for us to do it but um a really well-written book and then the author of masters of doom david kush, just did a follow-up piece, I think in Vanity Fair, of a follow-up interview.
Did you see, I think, did I send this to you? With Stevie Case, who's the CRO at Vanta. And Stevie is a prominent figure in the book.
And she was the first, the first or one of the first professional female gamers, ended up working she work at id she may have worked briefly at id but then she joined Romero at his next company after Romero and Carmack broke up oh crazy anyway crazy story and then she went on she came out to Silicon Valley ended up working at Twilio and now is the CRO at Vanta tell me about this I'm not sure I read the article but I remember hearing yeah, yeah. Yeah.
So good. Both the book and the follow-up article.
Great. Huh, cool.
Stevie's story is amazing. So that's my article carve out too, which is our next category.
Mine was how all this happened. Yeah, perfect.
Podcasts? Podcasts. I already mentioned Resident Arc, my favorite video game podcast.
Got it all in. Resident Arc and All In are like my go-to must listen every episode.
Two shout outs though that I discovered this year and have become friends, David Tenra and the Founders Podcast. Of course, wonderful show.
And we've become close with David. And like when you hear David on the show, he is exactly that same way in real life too.
Like it's so great. He's come out to California.
We've hung out a bunch. Love him.
The other one, I've been a huge MKBHD fan on YouTube, as I know you have been to. The Waveform podcast that they do is great.
I've started like regularly listening. I really like it.
And our buddy David Immel, who's on the MKBHD team, he's regularly on a host, a co-host on that. They rotate through the team on the Waveform podcast.
And like it's in the same vein as kind of the Verge podcast. Like it's all about the products of tech, but it's really well done.
I've become an increasingly large fan of the Verge. I don't know how I sort of slept on it.
In my head, it was like, oh, another one of these like Engadget Gizmodo type things. But like, that was wrong.
It is my, this is like embarrassing to say new favorite publication. Like, Neelai is so smart.
And I'll basically go listen to Neelai talk wherever he is. Like, that is a way for sure get me to go listen to an episode of whatever the podcast is.
So I sort of like first and over COVID, I think was like, I'll listen to Eli in any situation. And then like with the Verge redesign, I sort of, I don't think I realized how unbelievably thoughtful the team there is and how strategic they are.
They're one of the few publications that thinks about the fact that they're a business too, and thinks about the way to marry their business with their editorial and how they can uniquely show up in the world based on what they do differently than other people. And I think the new Verge redesign is genius.
I don't know if it'll work or not, but I love the attempt. They're also one of the few news sites in the world that actually gets a ton of direct traffic.
So that's a huge thing that plays to their advantage that then they can do interesting things with. There's people that come to them to solve a problem in their life or to fill a need.
It's so true. I mean, even me, I mean, you're way deeper in the product side as a fan of the product side of tech than I am.
But anytime there's a new Apple device or there's a couple places I will go directly. I will go to MKBHD and all the various properties that he and they have now.
And I'll go to The Verge and I might consume some other stuff that comes to me on social media, but like I will directly go to those two properties. And I feel like my impression of Neel Eye is that like he is world-class on the product side of tech, but he also gets the business side.
Oh yeah, for sure. For sure.
Which is super rare. Super rare.
And like his legal background, he gets all the like interesting IP copyright stuff that's going on in technology. I just feel like he's, there's that Scott Adams aphorism.
You don't want to be top 1% at anything. You want to be top 25% at the right three things and figure out how to marry them together.
I feel like that's Eli. I'll also say, I think the verge has been the thing that's surprisingly the most helpful for me for acquired research this year.
Like I did a ton of Qualcomm research on the verge because they've done so much reporting on Qualcomm over the years. So big verge fan.
I know that's, we don't have publication as a category, but. I think they've got podcasts.
Yeah, they do. Accounts in podcasts.
So back to podcasts. I already said the episode of Tim Ferriss with Jerry Seinfeld from a couple of years ago.
So good. The episode of Huberman Lab, what alcohol does to your body.
Oh yeah. Dude, it's scary, scary stuff.
And like moderation is also bad. There's no like, well, I only had one drink this week and that's devastating to your body versus zero.
And this is certainly not medical advice, but go listen to that podcast. It's just unbelievable.
The research studies that he's citing where it's just so much more bad for you in every way than I ever thought. And I thought it was bad for you.
Yeah, you were already starting to drink less, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we both opened tonight with cocktails, but, well, you gotta live.
This is a celebratory event. That's right, that's right.
My last podcast recommendation is Smartless. Any episode, so fun.
It's just so fun to go live in their world for an episode. You've liked that one for a while, right? Last six months or so.
Yeah. I feel like you've been big on that.
All right. Music.
Music. I don't think I discovered any new music this year.
I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift Midnights. I did a ton of prep for our wedding, curating a bunch of different playlists for like different segments of the day.
Oh, that's right. You put together all the playlists yourself too, right? Yeah.
I mean, the DJ did all the work that a great DJ does, but I sent him very highly manicured playlists that took several months to put together with a lot of opinion in it. So, you know, here's the dance, here's the cocktail hour, here's dinner, here's, so I was looking at my like Spotify year in review and I was like, all this is like my favorite songs from over the course of my life and my wife's life.
And that's where most of my music listening went this year. I'll also say most of my audio time, like even when I'm in the gym now is podcasts or audible books, mostly in service of acquired research.
I just listen to way less music than I used to. I feel like you do a large part of your acquired book research via audiobooks, right? Almost exclusively.
Wow. It was painful for me to read the whole Qualcomm book, but the only way to get it was a paperback book.
Whereas I've gone the total opposite direction. I pretty much only do physical paper copies for acquired research.
I admire your attention span. I'm interested to try it.
I do have an Apple Pencil

for our iPad minis.

And

I wish I could write with the Apple Pencil

directly on the book. I find that to be a useless device.

I bought that and I thought it'd be so cool and I'd never use it.

I agree.

I don't know if it's a DRM thing

or a font size thing that changes the page

but really

I just want to be able to write with the Apple Pencil directly on an ebook the same way i do on a physical book and for whatever reason the tech gods just let me do that i have new music oh yeah shockingly you would not think that me knowing me and as a new parent would discover new music this year but the baby loves olivia rodrigo less so now but when uh when she was like i don't know between ages like two months and six months they'll go through moments right olivia rodrigo almost without fail turn on driver's license like she would just be a wrapped in attention and like immediately calm down amazing we're like i guess we have a teenager like so i listened to a lot of olivia rodrigo this year huh and she's very talented huh very impressive all right i got out my Spotify, uh, TV and movies. Yes.
Andor was my carve out very recently. Everything here.
Cause I've, I did none. I rewatched a black Panther recently.
It was just as good. Great movie.
But that's all I got. So and, or I saw the new Top Gun.
That was unbelievably fun. Like put that on a big 4k TV with some surround sound and just enjoy jenny and i watched that uh on a laptop uh yeah we gotta go i think they're re-releasing it in theaters for oh really yeah we can go upstairs after this and watch it's a 75 inch like like it's a very good it's a very good experience i watched everything everywhere all at once movie, and that movie gives you all the feels.
That is a great, great movie. Great one to watch together if you're looking for something to watch with your partner.
Weird movie, kind of a sci-fi, kind of a rom-com. It's like a family dynamics movie.
Sad parts, happy parts, and visually stunning. and great acting.
I don't even really want to talk about what it's about because it's one of these that I just don't want to spoil it, but basically everyone will like this movie. Great.
Good holiday movie? Great holiday movie. I haven't watched season one yet because it felt like I just wanted to catch up as soon as possible because everyone was talking about it.
I'm now up to date on White Lotus season two.

That is a wild show.

It's basically the premise is like you get eight to ten rich people that show up at this beautiful hotel, the White Lotus in Sicily.

And they're in three or four different groups.

So the plot sort of follows different groups.

But the thing that runs through everyone is like everyone is extremely set in life, very wealthy and like deeply unhappy. And then crazy problematic stuff ensues from there.
And it's visually stunning. And the acting is great.
And you're simultaneously very mad at all these characters for doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. But you also totally understand the characters are so well established that you understand based on their flaws as humans, why they're falling into these traps.
Are they real people? Is it reality or is it fiction? No, fiction. Yeah.
Just very, very well-written fiction. And the first one was in Hawaii.
So I think it's almost a completely different cast, but like sort of same general premise in Italy. So each season is a different set.
I think that's what they're doing. Yeah.
Lastly, I watch a lot of TV this year. The vow on Netflix is great, like trash TV to leave on in the background is, um, two seasons long and it is a documentary about a cult and unbelievably the cult leader is so wrapped up, maybe not unbelievably for a cult leader, in self-glorification that like- That sounds very believable for a cult leader.
15, 20 years ago, he started recruiting filmmakers to join the cult so they would shoot all this footage. So there's all this very, very high production value footage over the entire life of the cult all the way through the trial which was only a few years ago is the nexium cult and like dude went to prison for life and a bunch of other people went to prison because like they did terrible cult stuff and the whole thing is just like perfectly documented the entire time because i think it was like part of the arrest that like all this document all this stuff became public footage yeah so or maybe they maybe netflix bought it i don't know but either way very very good background tv great apps the only new app that i started using this year that had any meaningful impact was our baby monitor app.
I just like everything's ossified. What about you? Do you have anything? I have a few apps since moving houses that are sort of tied to like IOT type things.
The only one that's not that I really like that I started using this year is Flighty, which is Ryan Jones's. He's an indie developer.
He previously did did weatherline which was my favorite weather app and flighty is sort of like the modern trippet the best way to explain it is like unbelievably good ui to tell you real-time information about your flight and it's tied into like every available api with every available airline so you get information from flighty before the airline notifies you of it and And often before it even displays on gates when you're in the airport, I'm going to push before. I get this for flying back in a couple of days.
Dude, when, when you get like a 30 second heads up on a change before the mass of people are behind you, it's very valuable. That's huge.
Very valuable. That is an edge.
That's alpha. That's alpha right there.
That's alpha. there although now we just gave it to everybody i think he was even featured in the apple keynote so we're not giving anybody any distribution here that they didn't otherwise already earn but ryan's just amazing indie developer it's been really fun to like watch um i haven't met him or anything but watch the success of his apps over the years and this is just a fantastic experience It'd Be fun to do, maybe it'd be an LP show or two, but we should have some indie developers on.
Like those are interesting business stories. Totally.
All right. Products.
I have one that actually comes with an app. Great.
Mine is the Roborock S7 Max. Roborock S7 Max.
Can I guess what the, is this a Robo vacuum? Yes. It's the competitor to Roomba.
And I think it's a Xiaomi company. You know how Xiaomi owns like large stakes and a whole bunch of companies that they like manufacture for.
I think it's that, but it's just like, I had a Roomba and actually returned it to get the Roborock instead. And the S7 Max is the like, I mean, it's like the worst product name of all time, but it's like the souped up self-emptying also has a lightweight mop built in.
It's the first time I've actually had like a robot where you actually can say like, this thing is robust enough that it's just going to make my life easier without failing or getting stuck or needing some kind of intervention. It just does its job.
What's prevented me from ever seriously considering robot vacuums is stairs. So you just need one for each floor.
Exactly. Or you can move it, but I went for two Roborocks.
Given the Xiaomi involvement or potential, I would imagine you could probably get two for less than the cost of a... No, they're very expensive.
Oh, they're very expensive. Yeah.
Oh, wow. I was expecting that too.
No, they're premium priced. Oh, interesting.
But great. Fantastic product.
Yeah. I guess that is the solution you just do.
One for each floor. Yep.
Yeah. Interesting.
Or get used to carrying it. It's fine.
I mean, I guess you're going to walk up stairs to like go to bed.

So you may as well just like carry this thing under your arm and set it down and then start

it in the morning or something.

That's great.

I never thought about that.

Just save you a thousand bucks right there.

All right.

That's all I got.

That's all your product.

Okay.

Let's see.

I, uh, I'm intentionally going to limit a parenting product to just one i could really do a whole other show about this yeah like this is maybe i should do a list yeah listeners want this yeah maybe well i mean not all but it's a subset so my just one this is a super pro tip that i never would have thought of but diaper bags are like big, you know, uh,

brilliant. super pro tip that I never would have thought of, but diaper bags are like big, you know, uh, brilliant idea.
I wish I could take credit for this, but I can't put the key essentials of a diaper bag, which are diapers, wipes, changing pad in a pouch, you know, like you can get like a nice like pouch or whatever, like print it or like, you know, I don't even know where ours is is from and then you could just move that pouch into whatever bag or you can either carry the pouch yourself or put in your backpack or put it in whatever like rather than having a dedicated diaper bag keep the core essentials of the diaper bag in a pouch that you can then put in other things god dude this show is getting worse and worse listeners if you're still listening i'm listening, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, dude.
We'll be back next year with better content. Oh, boy.
But by the way, at some point, if I'm ever a parent, I'm totally going to be like, thank you for all this. I'll just do that.
I'll make a list for you. Good.
On the universal product appeal, a couple quick ones. One, I went back actually to the Apple keyboard.
I had a mechanical keyboard, which I really liked, but I went back to the Apple one for Touch ID built in. It's so convenient.
It is really nice. It's so convenient.
I have the Microsoft Ergonomic Sculpt 2, and I love it, but I think I type my password two dozen times a day more than I would if i just had my i seriously doubt they'll do this but actually they could sell for 100 bucks and make a ton of margins a little standalone standalone touch id dongle not done for sure yeah totally bunch of elgato gear including the sound panel their sound panels are so good so easy to put up i don if listeners noticed from... By the way, we have four Elgato lights in this room right now, an Elgato stream deck.
David and I use the Elgato preamps, the Wave XLR, and then also the camera, the wide camera that somehow turned off again is mounted on the Elgato boom arm where my mic is normally on my desk. Yep.
They make such good stuff. The sound panels in particular are really, really good.
And really, they have frames around them and then sticky stuff to mount. So like literally, I've put up, I don't know, probably 12 of them in total took less than an hour.
Oh, we also use the Cam Link, the Cam Link 4K, the way that we pipe our cameras into our computer as webcams. Yep.
Huge Elgato fans. Nice.
All right, and then you added to the agenda a final new carve-out section of places. Places.
This year. Capri.
That was my... That you already discussed.
yeah discussed yes any for you no we didn't really go anywhere new despite all our travels we've been to portugal and lisbon before we went back to santa barbara we try and go there every year at least once a year that's the beach for us santa barbara's just an amazing lovely lovely place one of the loveliest places on Earth and very accessible from California. We got to find more.
We did the EA episode down there. We got to find more acquired related reasons to go.
Yeah, that's right. Trip lives down there.
He's got to figure it out. That's right.
Well, with that listeners, I think we will see you in 2023. We would love to see you in the Slack.
We'll be hanging out there over the holidays.

If you want to listen to the LP show, we actually just recorded two other great LP shows that'll be coming out soon. You can join and get those two weeks early at acquired.fm slash LP, or you can search acquired LP show in any podcast player and get access to them two weeks after LPs get anything else david, David? One very, very important last thing.
A big thank you to all of you. We talked about it a lot on this episode.
We truly have the best audience in the world, the best community in the world. Ben and I just pinch ourselves literally on a weekly, if not daily basis, that we get to do, that I get to do this as a living.
And it's all thanks to you all. We just get so much joy out of putting this show together.
I mean, clearly we can talk for hours just about the year and all the fun that we have. Whether or not that's interesting to other people remains to be seen, but every business should know their source of power and their source of, and ours is all of you.
So thank you so much for being on the journey with us. It's been an amazing seven years, and here's to seven more.

Indeed. Happy holidays.