PODCAST · business
ACQ2 by Acquired
by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with experts on topics related to Acquired. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.
Episodes
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The Insane Productivity of Andrew Ross Sorkin
Andrew Ross Sorkin does the work of about five people. He founded and writes the DealBook newsletter for the New York Times. He hosts Squawk Box on CNBC every morning at 6am. He runs the DealBook Summit, which has become the premier annual interview event across business, policy, and technology.…
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How to Live in Everyone Else's Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke)
Tobi is one of the most thoughtful people in the technology industry. He's also one of the very few people who started as a programmer -- just trying to solve his own problem -- and still runs his company as CEO today even as it approaches a $200B market cap. Tobi has done this in two big ways:...
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How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor)
Is AI just better software? Or something completely different that requires a new paradigm to understand? Today we sit down with Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, two of the best product builders in the world to tackle that question. Bret and Clay are the co-founders of the AI company Sierra. Brett's...
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Building the Savannah Bananas (with Jesse Cole, Founder and Owner)
The Savannah Bananas have created a whole new sport. It’s baseball, but it’s not. It’s fast-paced, exciting, and incredibly entertaining. For example, if you're batting, and you step out of the batter’s box... it’s a strike. If you bunt, you’re out. If a fan catches a foul ball… you’re also out....
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Undoing a $5 Billion Acquisition and Building a Durable Standalone Plaid (with Plaid CEO Zach Perret)
We sit down with Zach Perret, CEO of Plaid, to discuss the remarkable journey of Plaid and the broader fintech landscape over the past several years. Zach takes us blow-by-blow through journey of almost getting acquired by Visa, the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic… which quickly...
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The Art of Selling Enterprise Software (with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott)
We sit down with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott for a masterclass in the art of enterprise sales — a topic where Bill ranks as one of the all-time greats by any measure. Bill started his career as a bag-carrying salesman at Xerox in New York City (alongside Howard Schultz!) back in 1983, and rose…
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Building Web Apps with Just English and AI (with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch)
Vercel has become the infrastructure platform powering modern web development over the past several years, with companies from Stripe to Adobe to Runway all building their front ends on them. Today we’re joined by founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch, who shares why Vercel has been uniquely successful...
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How ARM Became The World’s Default Chip Architecture (with ARM CEO Rene Haas)
ARM is an incredibly unlikely story. They were founded in Cambridge, England in 1990 to design a new chip architecture just for low-power devices (like the Apple Newton!), leaving the “serious computing” on desktop and servers to Intel’s x86. Now, nearly three decades later, ARM is the dominant...
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Why Duolingo Worked (with Luis von Ahn, CEO)
Duolingo has fundamentally changed the landscape of self-guided education, starting with language learning. It is now a $9B publicly traded company in a space where everyone thought you could never build a large and exciting company. We’re joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Luis...
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Building the Open Source AI Revolution (with Hugging Face CEO, Clem Delangue)
We sit down with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue to understand the current state of the open source AI ecosystem. Hugging Face is the leading platform to host and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications. They also have a compute offering for AI builders to train their models directly…
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Joe Montana Interview Live from Modern Treasury Transfer
We sit down with legendary quarterback Joe Montana to discuss his transition from one of the greatest athletes of all time to… one of the great venture investors today. Joe shares some of the lessons that he learned winning Super Bowls with the 49ers that he applies to his investing career at...
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Building a Disruptive Payments Company (with Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski)
The tenacity required to build Klarna over the last 19 years is astonishing. Despite several headwinds and changes in the payments landscape since founding, Klarna is used today by 150 million consumers globally, processing two million payments a day. Founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski joins...
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The Space Industry in 2024, and How to Build a Satellite Company
The space industry is one of the most fascinating areas of technology in 2024. The reduction in launch costs and proliferation of satellites make all kinds of new businesses possible. Today we are joined by Austin Link, the co-founder and CEO of Starfish Space (where Ben and PSL Ventures are...
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The Software Behind Silicon (with Synopsys Founder Aart de Geus and CEO Sassine Ghazi)
If you’ve been waiting for us to venture back to the land of semiconductors, you’re in luck! On our NVIDIA and TSMC episodes, we explored two components of the silicon value chain: the fabless chip companies that design chips and the foundries that manufacture them. Today, we dive into the…
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The Scientific Journey Behind Ozempic (with Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, Novo Nordisk's Chief Scientific Advisor)
On our Novo Nordisk episode, we covered the business of Ozempic, the GLP-1 taking the world by storm. On this episode, we dive into the science of the molecule semaglutide (and its predecessor liraglutide) with the world expert on the topic, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen. Lotte is Novo Nordisk’s Chief...
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Visa Follow-Up and Today’s Payments Ecosystem (with Gaurav Ahuja)
We’re joined by Imprint cofounder and Thrive General Partner Gaurav Ahuja to dive deeper into the modern payments ecosystem and Visa’s current place within it. Gaurav was one of our research sources for the Visa episode, and we wanted to bring his insights to you all too. We discuss whether Visa...
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Morgan Housel
We sit down with Morgan Housel, who is one of our very favorite authors and has also become a good friend of the show over the past few years. Morgan’s last book The Psychology of Money had a huge impact on both of our personal financial philosophies (and by extension Acquired’s!), and Morgan was...
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Doug Demuro on Analyzing the Car Industry, Creator-Led Businesses, and Porsche Episode Follow Up
While preparing for our Porsche episode with Doug DeMuro, we had a lot more than Porsche to discuss… but the episode was already over 3 hours! We decided to save the rest for its own episode, released here on ACQ2. Doug helped us understand what’s going on with the car industry supply chain in...
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Generative AI in Video and the Future of Storytelling (with Runway CEO Cristobal Valenzuela)
We sit down with RunwayML’s CEO Cristobal Valenzuela to discuss the incredible tools they’re bringing to film and video creators (including last year’s Best Picture “Everything Everywhere All at Once” from A24), and the history + current state of the “visual” branch of generative AI. We cover how...
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Saving the Planet with Better AI Data Centers (with Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller)
We sit down with Crusoe Energy CEO Chase Lochmiller to talk about the two “hard to imagine” tasks they’ve undertaken: 1) building a new AI cloud infrastructure provider from scratch, and 2) colocating and powering it with stranded energy from some of the harshest and most remote locations on…
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Comparing the Dotcom Crash to Today (with Tom Cowan from TDM)
Every now and then, we come across super interesting and under-the-radar (at least to us!) public markets folks like NZS Capital who make us think differently about the art of investing. TDM is another one of those groups — founded 18 years ago in Australia, they’ve compounded a single, private...
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Generative AI Moats in B2B with Emergence Capital’s Jake Saper
How do you build defensible business value in an era when, as AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli said on our last ACQ2 episode, the “cost of intelligence is going to zero”? Longtime friend of the show Jake Saper and his partners at Emergence Capital have been refining their thesis for this brave new world...
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AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli on the Transforming the Company — and Venture Itself
Since joining AngelList as CEO in 2019, Avlok Kohli has presided over perhaps the most unexpected and astounding transformation in the venture ecosystem: taking AngelList from an SPV provider to a company that is quickly becoming the software platform for the entire industry. Today, AngelList...
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Retool CEO David Hsu on Finding Product-Market Fit via Sales
David Hsu has one of the most interesting founders journeys in tech today. After growing up in Silicon Valley, he left to study both philosophy and computer science at Oxford in the UK, then returned immediately afterward to found an internal enterprise tools company. Fast forward to today, and...
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Ben and David on My First Million
Ben and David joined Sam and Shaan of "My First Million" to talk about scaling to a large podcast, the company they would like to own, the CEO's you don't want to compete against, and the 100+ year history of Nintendo. If you liked this and want more of Sam and Shawn, subscribe to the MFM YouTube...
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The Future of Cloud Data Collaboration (with Samooha Co-Founder Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan)
On our AWS episode, we talked briefly about the next chapter of cloud: data warehouses. But what makes them so powerful? Why do enterprises rely on them? And how will cloud customers collaborate on data stored in multiple clouds? We sit down with Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, the co-founder and CEO…
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Democratizing the Tools of Big Tech with Statsig CEO Vijaye Raji
Statsig CEO and former Facebook VP Vijaye Raji joins us to discuss democratizing the tools of big tech. Before starting Statsig, Vijaye spent 10 years at Facebook where he led the development of their mobile ad product (yes — THAT mobile ad product that’s the core of FB today). We talk all about...
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Capital Formation and the LP / GP Relationship (with Altimeter’s Meghan Reynolds)
We sit down with Altimeter Capital’s head of Capital Formation Meghan Reynolds (who previously was TPG’s global co-head of Capital Formation for 10 years) to talk about everything that goes into the LP - GP relationship at venture funds. We cover how (and why) to think strategically about Capital...
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Crypto Self-Custody 101 (with Austin Federa)
The Acquired community's own Austin Federa joins us for a 101 primer on how to self-custody your crypto assets, and why it’s the only truly safe way to hold them. Given all the current turmoil (and fraud) in crypto-land, we were thinking “how could we do something to help the Acquired community...
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Netflix's Journey, Building TCV, and Investing Through Downturns (with TCV co-founder Jay Hoag)
We had the rare opportunity to interview Jay Hoag, cofounder of the first tech crossover investing firm, TCV, at TCV’s Engage Summit in Half Moon Bay earlier this fall. Jay and Rick Kimball started TCV back in 1995 and have been part of the private-to-public journeys of storied companies like...
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Consumer Investing in 2022 (with Brian O'Malley of Forerunner Ventures)
We sit down with Brian O’Malley of Forerunner Ventures to talk about where in the cycle we are right now for consumer investing. We touch on the macro environment (obviously!), but also how to navigate between and around the current generation of platform incumbents, and where the next…
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The Profitable B2B Growth Playbook and Mutiny’s Story
The CEO of Mutiny, Jaleh Rezaei, joins us to talk about the playbook to profitably grow a B2B company — something particularly useful for founders in 2022! Jaleh was Gusto’s first head of marketing (and before that worked at VMware and Sequoia), and has since gone on to build Mutiny, which helps...
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Kindergarten Ventures’ Vanta investment, and building a new Strategy for Venture (with Thomas McGannon)
Kindergarten Ventures LP (and fellow podcast host over at Unlimited Partners) Thomas McGannon interviews David about Kindergarten’s investment thesis for their recent large investment in Vanta. Along the way they discuss KV’s overall strategy, how it fits into Acquired, and why it’s…
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Reinsurance, Climate + Kindergarten Ventures (with Nat Manning)
We sit down with Kettle cofounder — and David’s Kindergarten Ventures partner — Nat Manning to discuss the fascinating world of reinsurance, risk and climate. We couldn’t think of a better and more appropriate conversation to have on the LP Show, and this was an absolute blast. Tune in and enjoy!...
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The 2022 State of Crypto + Web3 with Solana's Austin Federa
We sit down with long (long!) time-acquired community member Austin Federa to discuss the current state of crypto and Web3. By day Austin is the head of marketing & communications at the Solana Foundation, where he was one of the earliest employees. But many of you also know Austin from his…
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Dissecting ProfitWell's Acquisition (with Patrick Campbell)
What does a $200 million+ acquisition look like up close? How much time, focus, and communication happens between the first conversation and closing the deal? And when do the CEOs of each company just need to use the "red phone" and have a direct conversation without the 86(!) lawyers in the…
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David Interviewed on "Unlimited Partners"
David is the first guest on a new podcast, Unlimited Partners! This is a wide-ranging interview where upon listening, even Ben learned some new things about David :) Unlimited Partners is hosted by long-time friend of the Acquired community, Thomas McGannon. UP is his journey to learn - what…
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Travel for the Creator Economy
We sit down with TrovaTrip co-founders Nick Poggi and Lauren Schneider to talk about travel for the creator economy. This one is very close to home since Ben is on their board! TrovaTrip is a marketplace that enables creators to easily plan trips to places around the world with their audiences....
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Reverse Interview: Ben and David at Vanta
We dropped by Vanta's all-hands in SF a few weeks ago for Christina to interview us for a change! We decided to turn the mics on and record it as an ACQ2 episode. We discussed lessons learned from building Acquired, the shape of the show's growth trajectory, how we think about the business, and...
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Composer (with CEO Benjamin Rollert)
We sit down with Composer CEO Benjamin Rollert to talk about bringing serious financial firepower to the people, wallstreetbets-style. Composer opens up to anyone the same level (or better) of tools that top quantitative hedge funds hire armies of PhDs and computer scientists to build internally....
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TradFi vs. Crypto, Explaining BNPL, and What's Next in Fintech (with Bain Capital Ventures' Christina Melas-Kyriazi)
We sit down with Bain Capital Ventures' newest fintech Partner Christina Melas-Kyriazi to talk about everything happening right now in fintech, and the experience of helping build Affirm and the BNPL space from crazy idea to massive consumer finance category. Anyone interested in the history and...
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Ben and David on "Capital Allocators"
In late 2021, Ben and David were guests on Ted Seides' podcast, "Capital Allocators". The episode kicked off Ted's "Venture is Eating the Investment World" mini-series. From Ted: David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert are venture capitalists and hosts of the Acquired podcast. Acquired is one of my...
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10-K Diver: Building a Top Fintwit Account and Teaching Finance Principles to Everyone (Pseudonymously!)
Get a cup of coffee. We sit down with the voice of one of our favorite Twitter accounts, 10-K Diver, to talk about his journey building one of the most widely followed (and respected!) fintwit accounts out there. We had a blast and — of course — learned a ton from one of the greats!! You can get...
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NZS Capital Part II: What’s Going on in Today’s Markets? (Plus more Semiconductors!)
Back by popular “Acquired demand” (plus we really wanted to have this conversation for our own edification!!), friends of the pod NZS Capital return to talk about what’s going with the current market gyrations, and for a much-needed refresher on how to invest when — surprise — knowing the future…
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Race Capital, Crypto Investing, and FTX + Solana’s Early Days
It has been dubbed "one of the best venture investments of all time" by Packy McCormick, generating over a 4000X return in 3-and-a-half years. Today, we are talking with Chris McCann and Edith Yeung, the earliest investors in Solana, and partners at Race Capital. They also unbelievably were the...
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Italic & a New Era of Online Retail
We sit down with Jeremy Cai, the CEO of new retail pioneer Italic, for a fascinating discussion of how they're upending the traditional manufacturer-brand-retailer model by taking the opposite approach of earlier DTC startups. Rather than elevating brand and cutting out retail, Italic cuts out…
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2021 Recap: Acquired x Not Boring x The Generalist
Originally broadcast live on New Years Eve: we raise a glass (of coffee haha) and recap 2021 with our besties Mario Gabriele from the Generalist and Packy McCormick from Not Boring. Thank you for making 2021 an incredible year for all of us at ACQ, NB + TG, and may 2022 be filled with great…
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Mission-Driven Founders, Global Investing, and Canva (with Wesley Chan)
Last month, Ben sat down with Wesley Chan at Web Summit for a quick, 18-minute interview. The conversation was supposed to be about global investing in 2021 as an early-stage VC, but the conversation turned mostly into the origin story of Wesley's (unbelievably good) seed investment in Canva....
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Blue Origin and the 2021 Space Landscape (with Rob Meyerson)
Today we're excited to have a longtime friend of the Acquired family on ACQ2, Rob Meyerson. Rob was the President of Blue Origin for 15 years, and today is an investor and advisor to space industry startups. Ben recorded this interview live at the fantastic aerospace industry conference, ASCEND,...
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Ben and David on "This Week in Startups" Holiday Special
Ben and David go on "This Week in Startups" with Jason Calacanis for a holiday special! Discussion includes: - Talking TWIST and All-In this year with everything from politics to weight loss to private jets - Acquired's year and some of Ben and David's biggest insights from episodes - VC,...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with experts on topics related to Acquired. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.
HOSTED BY
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does ACQ2 by Acquired have?
ACQ2 by Acquired currently has 112 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is ACQ2 by Acquired about?
ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with experts on topics related to Acquired. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.
How often does ACQ2 by Acquired release new episodes?
ACQ2 by Acquired publishes regularly with 112 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to ACQ2 by Acquired?
You can listen to ACQ2 by Acquired on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts ACQ2 by Acquired?
ACQ2 by Acquired is created and hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal.
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