Acquired - 2017 Holiday Special

0:00That is definitely the best news in a long time. Yeah. Dick Kassala has a good tweet. Roll tide. Welcome to episode 51 of acquired the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rezenthal. And we are your hosts. We are coming to you from mid-December in a second annual acquired holiday tradition, the holiday special. David, are you excited? I'm so excited. I'm jealous because Ben has a glass of rosé and I am in the office and we don't yet have any wine here. Beer here. So I'm toasting you in spirit. We'll have to do that in person at our meetup and we'll talk about that in a moment.

1:07All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Lagora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

1:20Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts, and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lagores Bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

2:16And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.

3:08Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

3:38Talk about tech M&A, recent news that happened, and more importantly, we actually have more DM activity than there is chatter in the main feeds. So cool to see the connectivity among you listeners who are getting to know each other better by being listening to this show. Yeah, we're almost at, we're almost at 1100 now. Our growth is accelerating. It's going to get exponential. That's cool. My data's old. I gotta look.

4:05Well, speaking of listeners, getting to know each other better, we mentioned it on the last show, and we gotta drive the point home. We're gonna be in San Francisco. David's already down there. I'll be flying down Thursday, January 18th. Mark your calendars. It'll be in the evening. We are still figuring out venue, but we're super excited to hang with our listeners for a few hours.

4:27denseest concentration of listeners is in the Bay Area. New York and Seattle are up there too, but the Bay Area has certainly been growing the fastest and excited to always go to spend time down there. Yeah, and special shout out and thank you to pre- longtime listener who has been helping organize and pull this together. So thank you and this is we can't wait to see y'all. Not only to organize but to really I'm spark the whole thing. I think this is the thing. David and I keep talking about haven't done and pre thanks for inspiring us to do it. And that is PR33T, if you're looking in the acquired Slack. All right, David, what else? We've got an announcement for next year. We do. We are going to be evolving the format a little bit in 2018.

5:20Big things happening in acquired. We're going to have to put the old format back in the acquired museum that we talked about. That's right. It's scheduled for construction some time and I haven't gotten a date yet from the crew.

5:35sometime in the next decade. Don't worry though, we're not making major changes to the show, but we are going to move to a season format. We thought after 50, now 51 episodes, it would be better to block this into a traditional podcast season format, and that's going to let us do a few things which we're excited about.

5:57Yeah, we're most excited because it basically gives us a framework to try new things. So if we want to do something kind of radical, at the very longest, it can last one season. Of course, we still can change things on the fly, but can add or remove sections or change the format for seasons at a time. And those seasons will be six months, approximately 10 episodes. And one of the things we're most excited about is to do mini series. So we've been doing it kind of informally with things like the Disney saga, and talking a lot about basically different episodes that string together and tell a single narrative. David and I have been thinking a lot about, well, what are trends that we really want to cover and what are things that we really want to be thoughtful about and learn more on our own and have an impetus to do kind of a wider body of research before doing the episodes? And so I think you can probably expect one mini series as a part of the season early next year.

6:53of this season and if it works well, hopefully each season going forward. So we're thinking this will be probably probably around three episodes out of the 10. So seven, you know, normal standard acquired episodes and three for a mini series that we're going to change up in each season if it works well. That's right. And the most important thing is the name, which we are hyper creatively calling season X.

7:19No, it's gonna be season two. Season ten. We're skipping seasons. We're actually releasing season two and season ten simultaneously. Ten is actually marked by a Y, but you'll get it. It makes sense. We put a lot of time into this. Ben, this is your cheesy joke for the episode. This is what happens when Ben drinks, where is it? That's right, that's right. I thought about earlier making the joke that our Meetup was gonna be down and acquired HQ 2 in San Francisco. Perfect. Perfect. I guess I did. Well, that will definitely be a prediction for 2018, waiting in the show. Where is HQ 2? Oh, I've actually, this isn't in my notes, but I do have strong conviction around a prediction for that. Oh, all right. Well, save it for 2018. I'm adding it to the doc now. All right, David. Okay.

8:14anything else before we dive into the 2017 year in review. No, let's do it. All right, so listeners, in 2017, we recorded 21 episodes. This being our 22nd and David and I have gone through and handpicked each of our favorite. So David, why don't you go first? What was your your favorite episode? So, well, I'm going to start with my runners up for I've got two runners up for you.

8:41Uh, you know, it's like, I love to give multiple grades. You know, I just can't. I'm troubled. We try and have a format. I know. Okay. Well, real quick, my runners up are the snap IPO and square IPOs. Both great shows near and due to my heart, but my winner I cannot not pick our last episode beats. That was just too much fun. I mean, anytime you're talking about, you know, Jimmy Ivy, and who's probably the coolest person alive and Dr. Dre in the same building, starting a company on the beach, getting acquired by Apple, largest acquisition ever. It just doesn't get any better than that. No, no. Somebody's been watching the documentary. So good. Yeah, if you come on that later. Listeners, the defiant ones that HBO documentary was freaking awesome. Like, if you like the episode, even if you don't, if you like, like,

9:40Wrap or entrepreneurship or scrappy founder stories or Reflections on pop culture in the last 50 years like you got to go watch the defiant ones So good. Yeah, my favorite was one of your runners up the square IPO I felt like that was one where You know sometimes on the show we're all over the place and sometimes we've Occasionally we have really good structured thinking and I thought in that one we just not on this episode I thought in that one, we, I will stand by the conclusion we made on that one forever. And I felt like all of our reasoning to get there was really well-founded. I love the fact that we really got into like why the narrative was the way that it was about the company, when it IPO'd, and basically poked all the holes in it. And that it's a really sound company with solid fundamentals today that continues to do what it was doing when it was a private company. And everyone just looked at it wrong.

10:38Yeah, pumped about the company square and pumped about about that episode. I stand by my grade on that one unlike the YouTube episode where we gave a C and every time I see some new article about YouTube, I'm like, we really, we really have to redo that episode. Yeah, we really should. Maybe that would be a fun thing to do in season two or maybe season three is revisit, you know, that could be a mini series at some point revisiting.

11:02We should revisit Instagram, we should revisit YouTube, especially where we are wrong and why. Yeah. I'm not on the surface without doing the research yet. I'm not 100% convinced we were wrong on YouTube. We'll be given a C.

11:19Yeah, and it was largely around opportunity cost and basically spending a whole bunch of time and money on what we kind of called a distraction for the break even business of YouTube, but I'm way more bought in on what it does for the rest of Google and the Google ecosystem than I was before. I mean, it's an incredible product. I'm going to talk more about it on this show, but it's also still not clear that it makes money, right? Haven't had actually profitable while. Yeah, but I think that's about right. Yeah.

11:48You know, David, you're in early stage VC. You don't necessarily invest in things that make money. So, you know, what do you care? That's a low blow, but a low blow. Speaking of what you want to move into our personal 2017's. Yeah, yeah. We thought we'd add this section to the show this year, especially when we're doing our holiday episode here and we talk a lot about Topical things on the show and companies and stories but we don't talk that much about ourselves Yeah, I thought that was like the right thing to do but we've gotten a lot of feedback from listeners People in person and people from who messaging on us on the slack saying like you guys mentioned early what you did You know, you like you can look us up on LinkedIn or whatever but that we don't actually ever talk about our day-to-day So it's so funny like as acquired's getting bigger. I mean

12:41At a certain point, I think it was maybe kind of the beginning of this year, or maybe into last year. We passed a threshold where I don't know about you, Ben, but way more people in the world now know me as co-host of a choir than anything else I do in life, which is so great. And yet, Ben and I spend a small portion of our waking hours dedicated to a choir. To the acquired media empire. Hey, museum coming.

13:09Yeah. 2019. That's right. But yeah, so for me, 2017 was about as big a year as you can get. Almost exactly a year ago, at the end of 2016, Jenny, my wife, finished her PhD, which itself was an incredible accomplishment and I am, was and am so proud of her, took her six and a half years. And I would, woo, indeed. And I was also, thinking about and embarking on a new journey that I am on now. And so that was things coincided. And at the beginning of this year, I left Madrona at the VC farm where I was in Seattle, left working them their full time.

14:03And Jenny and I actually spent the first couple months of the year living in Europe. We moved to Paris for a couple months to celebrate her finishing and starting a new journey for both of us. And David, during that period, your carve-outs were way, way better than mine. Oh, man. I had so much time for carve-outs. It was magical. My carve-out is real.

14:25Yeah, I just got back and it was so great Yeah, definitely back to the real world now But it was great because little little known fact by by actually most people in my life, but now to be known by the acquired audience. I was a French literature major in college. And Jenny was a natural, natural path to be seen. Yeah, natural path to being a technology VC, her early stage technology VC, but I lived in France and college and for a summer and Jenny also studied abroad there. And neither of us had been back since her time in college. So it would have been 10 years.

15:05really amazing to have a chance to go back to a special place for both of us. And then this summer we moved back to the States and moved to San Francisco, which has been great. And I loved Seattle. Still spend a lot of time there, but also loved San Francisco and Jenny's from here. And it's just such a... such a...

15:29amazing city that has so much history and is so much you know is the epicenter of tech but is also just so much more than tech and Silicon Valley so it's been great you know exploring this new city and then also I've been working on working on my new thing with my partner and my business partner unfortunately we can't talk just yet about what it is coming soon in 2018 but the founder journey has been everything it's cracked up to be. It's been wonderful, crazy, scary, awesome, terrifying, you know, I think a bunch of people at the end of the year have been asking me, you know, how's it been? And both I had no idea the direction it was gonna go and like could never have foreseen all the daily twists and turns along the way. And yet at the same time we're like moving along exactly

16:22in the direction and pace that we thought we were in the bigger picture and it's just been such a cool experience and really has helped me build a lot empathy for you know all the other founders out there that we cover on the show that I've worked with NBC and I'm sure you know as we know from our survey many of you out there as well so that's been my 2017 but the one of the best things for sure has been acquired. And especially now that we don't live in the same city, I'm just so glad we keep doing this and it's turned into much more than either of us, I think, ever would have expected. So thanks Ben for being my co-host along the way. Dude, yeah, likewise. You know, it's caused us to make a nice, nice AV investment. I never thought I'd be a person with an office with four microphones and Mike stands behind me, but here I am.

17:12Dude, one of the things I enjoyed most about the Defiant ones was all of the shots of, you know, Dre and all the other artists in the studio. And, you know, pop filters, like we have, you know, Dre quality pop filters on our microphones. It's the cheap, it's like seven bucks. It's the cheapest part of the whole set up, but it makes it look the most legit. I know. We are totally legit.

17:37Well, David, it's funny how we have, you know, very different 2017's but parallel in a lot of ways. And one of the ways that you were just mentioning is, you know, there's all these crazy ups and downs in sort of the founder journey, but you are exactly in the direction doing exactly the things where if you were to have drawn the line, you know, what you first started, where you thought you'd be. I'll tell this story in media's rest. So talking about a conversation I had, yesterday with one of our investors, and I went through an update deck of everything that's going on with the company, and he goes, looks great. It's exactly where I would have pegged to you guys. I haven't heard from you in a few months, but this is great. Thanks for letting me know, right on track. And in my head, I was thinking, right on track, like all but, you know. Every day is an adventure. I know. I know.

18:33So my year, I think I've talked about this a couple times on the show, but my normal job is I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, which is a startup studio that's based in Seattle. It's sort of a new model for entrepreneurship that sits somewhere in between being the actual operating founder of a company and being an investor. Our model is that we start companies partnering with a great entrepreneur at sort of various stages, either we work with them from the moment that we come up with the idea together or sort of in that first early week or month. Or we have an idea internally in the studio, it's about 20 people heavily biased toward engineers. We prototype things, we talk to customers about it, we try and bring it to market. And if that's going well, then we start finding people who are really domain deep who are amazing founders and work with us. And constantly trying to find different ways to plug in with

19:27with great founders that are along various parts of their entrepreneurial journey, so branching out the model a little bit. One thing that I did this year that's that's very different is sense July. I've been the interim CEO of our most recent spinout called Taunt and Taunt is an esports company for folks who haven't been tracking esports is this insane phenomenon where people watch other people play video games competitively to the tune of 300 million people per year. It's growing very quickly every year. It's huge in Asia and growing quickly in the West and what Haunt does is it's a way for people to have more fun being fans of esports and to compete with their friends while they're watching in sort of a live fantasy type experience. So you and your friends compete against each other and it's a social competitive app. Boy, the number one thing switching from my...

20:22job as a, you know, basically serially starting these ideas and then working to transition off them to start the next one to sort of running with one, at least in this interim capacity, has been a remarkable, I weigh underestimated how much focus I would need to have. I've basically stopped doing not only everything at PSL, but so many other things in my life because running a company just requires ridiculous, ridiculous focus. And every single day, it's a battle of all the really important things that need to happen that won't happen today. Actually, the T.A. McCann, who's another awesome founder and investor in the Seattle area, calls this itindy important things I'm not doing yet. And he keeps a conscious list of things that are like extremely important, super high priority things, but like not

21:17you know, it's either not as urgent, it's not a hair-on-fire problem, as other things, or it's just not as high-priority as some other high-priority things. I would describe the rest of my life as I worked a lot, but I didn't, you know, like if I ever needed to leave work at three or something and not check in for the rest of the day, that was kind of fine. And it's...

21:39Being in the founder mindset really means it's really not the case. There are sometimes things that just absolutely must must be done today, this hour. Maybe the number one skill is constantly being able to.

21:55Be on all the time be ready for anything and play schedule Tetris and understand that Whatever you looked at and thought your day was going to be at the beginning of the day may actually not be the correct prioritization given new information and having to juggle that on the fly And a lot of you out there are probably laughing and know this well and have been in this situation a lot I've started other things before but never a venture back thing where we were sort of quickly building a team quickly and market and Yeah, the biggest thing is really being able to quickly adapt and reprioritize on the fly. You have multiple, you know, handful of people that like depend on you. You know, I mean, that's one thing that's not our structure here. And so I'm lucky that I don't have that particular challenge of being a founder. Still have a little bit more kind of autonomy. But I got to imagine like, you know, in some ways, you know, as

22:53founder and CEO of something like you have the least amount of freedom. Yeah. And at least in the pre-product market fit stage, where you're actually not sure what the North Star is, like you have an idea, you have a value or a mission that's a North Star, but there's not a defined implementation yet. There's a lot of, there's a lot of thrashing. And you know, you try and reduce CPU thrash, but ultimately you are switching back and forth a lot of things and there is high switching cost to that. Yeah.

23:23Is there ever? Is there ever? Despite all the things that we have going on in our lives, like I said, I'm just so glad we keep... 22 episodes you gave me. I'm proud of us. Oh my God. Like, yeah, I mean, I'm with the other than my time when Jenny and I were, you know, hanging out, galavanting around Europe. We were not exactly galavanting, but, you know, when my carveouts were much better, in fact, than like I basically have done nothing else except work and acquired this year.

23:53Yeah, that's the other thing is I think my carveouts probably suffered because there's weeks where I'm like, I'm supposed to have read something that was not an email since the last time we recorded. Yeah. I am in that boat too. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture.

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24:40Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote shadow AI running with no security review at all. Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading-agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's governance, risk, and compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues drafts the fixes and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half. In half!

25:11Which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta companies like ramp cursor and snowflake all stay audit ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor every AI tool the whole environment and that's the real value.

25:30Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at Vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

25:56Well, should we review our 2017 predictions that we made last year? Sounds great. See how we do. How wrong were we? Well, let's see. Okay, so my first one, should we trade off each of ours? Yeah, it's okay. So my first one was...

26:16that aggregation theory was going to become even more important. Bentomson's seminal aggregation theory was going to become even more important in 2017 than 2016. I think I kind of nailed that one. I mean, it wasn't a very controversial prediction. I think in 2017 it has become super clear that the biggest tech companies, you know, the Facebooks, the Amazon's, the Google's, the Apple's have just consolidated.

26:43so much power in the space, continue to consolidate even more power. And that is, you know, kind of, I think a direct result of, you know, everything that's implied by creation theory. And Ben is actually, Thompson has actually shifted a lot of his writing, I think, to this, you know, what is the consequence of this? Yeah, I mean, it changed our economy, it changed our political structure, it changed...

27:07It literally changed the way that people interact with other humans. If you look at a society as a collection of political, social, and economic changes, it is the driving force behind the biggest change of all three of those. If you want to talk about income inequality, if there's a variety of things, I think aggregation theory is the thing driving most of those. Yeah, and super specifically, in the startup tech ecosystem, we're at a moment now where pretty much any kind of product and company that you have. If you wanted to do user acquisition, like you have two choices, you have two destinations like Google or Facebook, you know. It's it's striking and everything else is a growth hack. Yeah, and everything else is like your role in the dice. Yeah, super interesting. I saw a great tweet earlier by patio 11, the frequent commenter on hacker news and I think he now works on on Stripe Atlas.

28:05It was a great tweet storm. It will include this in the show notes of great advice that you can't hear too many times and that you should just, people should continue to talk about even though they feel it's old hat because there's always new people that can benefit from hearing it. And one of the observations was that the hardest thing to do in a B2B company is sales. And the hardest thing to do in a B2C company is distribution.

28:31If you're starting a consumer company, you basically have Facebook or Google to go to and you're effectively just paying attacks to get to their customers and they get bigger and they get better. And every single company that that that bootstraps their business or not bootstraps me Coca-Cola pays those companies huge amounts of money per year. Everybody does in order to reach their customers because they have all the customers and that just fuels the flywheel even more. So it is.

28:58You know, the hardest thing to do in consumer is distribution and they have the lock on distribution. I just noticed one of my predictions from last year is the big aggregators get bigger. I think this is a prediction. Basically the same thing. All right, check on that one. Yeah. Another one that I had, I think the rest of my are kind of hard to check in on. I said people get more serious about universal basic income. I think the people who were already proponents of universal basic income got further entrenched in that view based on our political and economic structure now. I don't think that it picked up any traction in any way. I think the experiments continued. I think a lot of great books were written on it. I don't think it's really picked up steam. My next one, I said we would see more tech IPOs in 2017 and 2016 and we did.

29:48But we didn't see that many more. So there were 26 in 2016 and 33 in 2017. I'll call it. I qualify that. That's more, but nowhere near the heyday of the earlier 2000s. There's so many companies that have raised so much money in the private markets and need to exit one way or another.

30:14and they still have not exited. And this is a trend that I think will continue into 2018. But some of the big ones, big IPOs we did see in 2017, some of which we cover here, Snap, Blue Apron, StitchFix, Cloudera, Octa, MealSoft, Roku, MongoDB, and Seattle Native Redfin. That's right. When public in 2017. Good companies in there, just not a ton of them. Yeah. Yeah.

30:43Another one that was one of mine last year was the commoditization of machine learning and that the value is in the data itself and not in the actual machine learning algorithms or infrastructure to do that. That's absolutely played out. Looking at reinvent this year, looking at a lot of Google clouds announcements, there really are more and more machine learning off the shelf tools and it really is all about not only having the data.

31:08But having the data in a great format, you're processing pipeline, and correctly labeling and cleaning data to be used by machine learning. I'll disclaim the here that I'm not an expert on this, but we haven't really seen new math in any way that has radically changed what people are doing with machine learning. It's much more about the availability of tools, more people having access to those tools, and a big thing is just the compute being more and more available, there's some newer models that the people are using, but it's largely about making it more available and less expensive for companies to hire the large teams that was previously required to do data science. Yep. Well, so in contrast to a new exciting technology becoming easier to use and more widely available, my

32:03prediction or I guess question more for 2017 is we will see if VR becomes a big thing or not. And, uh, well, unfortunately for the VR industry, at least for the moment, it's still not a big thing. So we'll see. I wouldn't, you know, call a VR and AR out per se. I don't think this is the yet to at least the 3D TV of technologies, but AR is more in, like AR did great, or AR at least has a path to becoming mainstream.

32:33A path, but it's still not here. No. Here's the speculative question is, how do you call that earlier? I mean, there were plenty of VR naysayers, but looking back on it, I mean, what are the signals that people just weren't going to buy the devices at the volume that we were all hoping?

32:53Earlier, so you don't make those investments so you don't spend years your time working on those companies Some people are going to weather the storm and do great and when it finally does become a thing if it becomes a thing but you know how How do you spot that? Yeah, I don't know I mean the Kickstarter, you know numbers for Oculus were really good all along the way and then you know there their dev kit shipments But the vibe is an incredible piece of hardware. I don't know. I mean, I guess the thing is it's just still not easy to access for most people for your mainstream consumer. You still need to do a lot of work to get the payoff of the incredible experience and spend a lot of money. It's not as easy as just downloading the number one app in the App Store like Coinbase.

33:45Yeah. Yeah, that was something we did not predict. No, nowhere in here. Does it say anything about crypto? No. Well, we missed that, but we did. In fact, I would say I may miss it again. Yeah, I don't have anything in my 2018 predictions about crypto. Probably should. All right, my last one was, I said, the mega trend of urbanization would continue.

34:14I think it probably did. I don't have a great way to measure, but more people in the world, all around the world, moving to cities, doesn't seem to be abating anytime soon. Nope. And mine was, does it become more expensive to produce physical stuff? David, I honestly can't remember my rationale behind this. Well, I think you were saying that, like, as you know, like take China, for instance, you know, as the middle class rises, is it going to become more expensive actually to produce stuff?

34:43physically injecting physical goods. Right, right. Well, the cost of DRAM went up. Component cost of smartphones went up. But I think that probably has to do with more like more business, like structural business dynamics than it does rising labor costs. Yeah, I'm not sure that that actually happened. If anything, I think more and more returns are going to capital as opposed to labor around the world. All right.

35:10final section to round out a review of 2017, before we look forward bravely and boldly into 2018, our top acquired theme of 2017. So unlike last year, when we did this, we reviewed themes that we talked about most on the show in 2016. That's actually way too long. Way too long and not that interesting. So we're taking a more qualitative approach this year and what we think, looking back on our body of work for this year, what stands out to each of us as the most impactful or interesting theme that we've discussed on the show. So for me, it's actually a pretty recent one that I think I first brought up on the Stitch Fix episode, but then also talked about on the Beats episode. And that's this concept of the way to

36:08really, you know, as an investor make outsized returns, but as a company and as a founder to really have a large, large impact as opposed to a smaller impact is to do something, you know, make a, have a thesis with a company or an investment that is...

36:25Obviously, you want it to be correct, but being correct is not enough. You have to also be correct and non-consensus, not obvious. And this was something that Andy Radcliffe, one of the founders of Benchmark, and one of my professors in business school talks a lot about, and he took this idea from Howard Marks at Oak Tree. But it's really, really powerful when you internalize it. And if you look at, you know, Stitch Fix, as I mentioned, in Beats, you know, but I think also Square, Starbucks, Snap, all of these are companies and products that They were both the correct product for the time. But before they were started, nobody thought who's going to go to a store to drink coffee? People buy coffee beans to drink at home? Or who's going to pay a lot of money for headphones that aren't reference headphones?

37:11$2 ones that you get with your, you know, iPod or, you know, an iPhone are good enough for, you know, a snap, like Facebook, Dominace, social media, like why do you need another, like, you know, method of sharing photos with one another? And I think it's a really powerful idea. Again, both for investing, obviously, but also as a founder and product design as well. Yeah, I totally agree. It's a good theme. Mine, I don't think we explicitly called this out on a show, but we talked about it in many of these episodes in 2008 call it we started maybe 2007 we started first hearing about social media and it was a term that I don't think I had quite understood and dissected for a few years of really like what is what does it actually mean I get that we're calling Twitter social media like I understand that what does it imply

38:06as you dig into it and really understand like okay it means basically everyone is a citizen journalist and it won't just be for this in this short form capacity of course you have the rise of medium you have YouTube you have basically the rise of the internet allowing anybody to become a creator where instead of a one-to-many world where you have publishers that push out to a very small number of publishers that push out to millions of people you have you know everybody on earth able to push content to everybody else else on earth it and build followings in different ways. It really makes all media truly social and all media, the future of media much more about do you have a compelling message rather than are you able to fit in with a body of content that has existed today? And in the ability to be non-conforming, which David actually fits in pretty well with your tech theme, to be able to be differentiated by be non-conforming and still get distribution on that,

39:05That was a new piece of value that was unlocked and the biggest thing to come of all that is that the internet and social media really removed gatekeepers. It removed a lot of the power that was held by people that controlled the very few that could actually publish that you had to fit in with, that you had to be conforming. And you see this in so many different manifestations of which one of one amazing thing for the world is the fact that Times person of the year was the silence breakers. I mean, for the first time, there were people, there were women primarily that were able to stand up and talk about their stories and know that they weren't going to be silenced for that by the people that controlled all the distribution because you don't have to be afraid in this world. And there are ways to get your message out even if you don't go through those gatekeepers trying to silence you. Yeah, totally. And like,

40:02You can tell your story on your terms, too. I mean, Ben Thompson's person of the year was Susan Fowler, the uber. Oh my god. He talked about it. Yeah, on her own blog. Like, you know, she didn't have to go to, you know, the New York Times to get them to break the story and have them tell it on their terms. And like, who knows what happens. Like, yeah, on her own blog, like she wrote it, she hit publish on her terms.

40:26It's pretty incredible. And of course, there's negative repercussions to this too. Of course, you start to get into, you know, you only start reading things from that are lower quality because they don't have editorial process that are only confirmation bias thing. I mean, there's of course many problems with it, but the removal of gatekeepers by social media broadly is finally coming to fruition. But I would, what's super interesting though is like, I would say like, yes.

40:55Social media has definitely removed people, individual people and organizations of people who were gatekeepers. But like we were talking about with the just growth and consequences of aggregation theory earlier, there are now technologies that are gatekeepers. So if you want to market to people in any sense, you need to pay the toll to Google and Facebook. Yeah, there's different taxes along the delivery now than there were before.

41:25They're more obvious and they're more monetary like it's it's less about paying your dues and more about paying money and you know even Outside of marketing like in terms of getting your voice heard Yes, you can do it on via social media and on these platforms But you also have to pay the toll you have to pay the toll with your attention and your contribution of that content to that platform which is going to monetize the attention that it generates Yep and everybody is either paying the toll to do distribution or paying the toll, I'm sorry, paying the toll to do acquisition or paying the toll by giving their content to Facebook and Google with accelerated mobile pages, with the subscription platforms are both launching, with Facebook, Instagram articles, in all forms,

42:15Yes, some of the best content in the world is being contributed as part of the bargain that people that the publishers are striking with the platforms Indeed indeed All right listeners now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show Service now if you are running a large enterprise AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part Yeah, the hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks are real. Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI Control Tower.

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44:03So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, 2018 predictions. 2018. Here we come. Well, maybe I'll start off because it's a program. I didn't plan it this way. My first prediction is that the consequences of aggregation theory continue.

44:31Did you make the most like cop out predictions? I really, I need to like, I need to go out on a limb more. Clearly my brain too much in the second half of this year has just been tied up in my work. I've not been able to, been able to make a really interesting and compelling predictions here. All right, I'm just gonna stop there. I've got more, but you go next. I'll force you to make a call.

44:59Here we sit on December 12th, 2017. What is the price of Bitcoin on December 12th, 2018? Oh, okay. Well, I'm gonna force you to make a prediction after this. And it's 17,000 ish today. Yeah, 17,000 ish today. I mean, I don't know. It depends on so many things, but I'm going to wildly pick a number out of thin air. I'm going to say the price of Bitcoin on December 12, 2018 will be $28,000. I like it. I like it. And 52 cents. What's your buy? Buy your futures right there. You heard it first. $2,000.

45:56But I do think it's gonna, I think it's gonna get up to 30 first, 30,000 first. Up to 30, down to two. Yeah. So you and I are an order of magnitude apart. Yeah. I'm curious what it's gonna get to in the next two weeks alone. I mean, I think people are gonna get coin base for Christmas. You think people are gonna give each other Bitcoin for Christmas? That should be our carve out. Yeah.

46:20I think people are going to get phones, they're going to download the number one app in the app store. It's going to be coin-based. People are going to think they're being clever and people are going to think they're doing the thing that the .com stock people did when it was like, I'm going to buy my grandson a tech stock for Christmas and write it up. Like, here have some Cisco. It's going to be that.

46:42Wow, wow, stocking stuffer of Christmas 2017. We got to release this before Christmas, so I'm not wrong before this area. Yeah, we're doing intentionally doing this show a little earlier this year than last year, so that we can get it out before Christmas, so that Carbelts can be used to stocking stuffers. Yeah, and for everyone doing a long drive, you have this to listen to. All right, okay, so my question back to you, prediction.

47:10We referenced it earlier in the show. Where is Amazon HQ 2? Amazon HQ 2 will be in Toronto. Oh, wow. You're going with the dark horse. I am. Canada. I am. They said it's the North American HQ 2. Yeah. I think you think they were, you think they have Canada in mind all along? I do.

47:33I think Toronto because it gives them diversification in case tax stuff goes crazy in the US. I mean, it's not looking like it's going to hurt corporations right now. But Amazon has been extremely conscious of tax law and done insane things to their business model to make sure that they give customers the best deal possible since they're very inception. So I think they're very conscious of that. I think they want to diversify politically as well as have an economic center around tax to do that. And I also think, you know, as I used to work at Microsoft, we hired a ton of Waterloo grads, really great computer science school. I think they're going to do plop right down the same way they did next to the University of Washington. Wow. Well, my prediction is somewhere in Texas, probably Dallas slight edge over Austin, but Austin also.

48:29Big front runner. That's not a bad call. If you're not going to go to Canada, go to a red state. Well, Texas is a very, very diverse state. It's been a lot of time in Texas for a lot of reasons, including Jenny's mom's family is all from Texas outside the Houston area and still lives there. There is a very good chance potentially in the next presidential election. But if not by then, the next one for sure that Texas will be able to state. I believe it.

48:58Did you know that the demographics are changing incredibly rapidly? Did you know Dallas-Forest Fort Worth is the number four metropolitan area in the United States? Yeah, it's enormous. You got New York, LA, Chicago, and then Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington. And it's not far behind Chicago. It's 9.5 million and 7.2 million. Yeah, interesting. Bigger than the Bay, well, the Bay Area is split into the San Francisco Area and the San Jose Area. I bet if you combine the two of those.

49:26It's up there. How's Dallas's tech community? Listeners, if you're in Dallas or have connections with Dallas, would love to kind of explore that a little bit further.

49:39So reach out on Slack or you know, it seems like One big theme that a lot of that I hear over and over and over again is people start companies for other people in Silicon Valley Why don't we start companies for people in the rest of the United States And then there's lots of arguments about well, you know people are harder to reach and I don't understand their pain points and blah blah blah like there's a ton of people in Dallas Seems like that's a rich market to if you believe that people in Dallas behave differently and used and use different services then people in the Bay Area would. That feels like a huge group of people that you can go start companies for. Yeah, to our earlier discussion. How are you going to reach people in Dallas the same way you're going to reach people in the Bay Area, Facebook and Google? All right, my money's on Texas, but Canada, we've got Texas. All right. All right, what's your next one? My next one is that

50:38This current mega consolidation era that we're in will continue and and accelerate in 2018. We're in the midst right now of a Disney time Warner M&A transaction that includes sort of part of the company Where we we covered the Qualcomm Broadcom Disney Fox or Disney Fox. Yep. We covered the the Qualcomm Broadcom and What was the third major one that just oh the non-tech, but CVS and Etna, and I think we're just gonna see huge M&A continue through 2018. I think the political climate is right for these companies to combine. You know, you enter these.

51:23You enter these areas of lots of new companies being created and companies not combining for a while. So you have sort of proliferation in an industry and then followed by big errors of consolidation and I think we are charging into a consolidation era. You think across multiple industries or particularly in the tech industry. Let's see. The regulatory argument would argue across multiple industries and the tech argument that I would make is that let's see, you would see consolidation after a period of sustained innovation, new company creation, which would come from a lot of availability of early stage capital. So I guess if the cost of capital got more expensive and private company funding was less abundant, then you would start to see more consolidation. I think, I don't know if that logic totally holds, but

52:21All right, my last one is I seriously believe we have been in the midst of major disruption that has been happening in the venture capital ecosystem over the last few years. But it's been disruption that's been happening at the capital formation and raising parts of the ecosystem as so much money has come into the asset class, both in terms of existing, you know, well-known VC firms raising much larger funds and getting bigger as as money has come in and and new entrance like soft bank like bringing a hundred billion dollars in a new fund into into the asset class all of that is is likely to continue but I think we're gonna start to see we we are starting to see

53:12a second order effect of that in the VC ecosystem, which is, I think there is a serious retilling of the soil, I would say, of what true early stage investing is and company building, and who does it and who's great at it? Because what's happened is the series A, quote unquote, firms that used to be the early stage firms that invested when companies were getting started and those beginning days, they don't do that anymore because they're so much bigger now, because they have so much more capital. So they wait until later. So I don't know. Maybe we'll see some turnover in who the quote unquote best firms, top tier firms are at the traditional, you know.

54:01sandhill road set but there's this whole really thriving ecosystem underneath it you know like you're part of it Ben and PSL and and and so many other firms are and and it's all All kind of emerging, you know, underneath. It's like, it's like Clay Christians in action here and say what you will about ICOs, but I mean, there's no denying that that that is a super transformative way to finance early-stage companies if, you know, if that were to continue. Yep. Indeed. Indeed. Hmm. All right. Well, I have another one and then I've won one question to close with.

54:40So, one prediction I have is that we're going to start seeing smaller, more intimate communication networks rise instead of broad social networks as people start to react to the lack of comfort with things being public and a shift toward a desire for more private communication and private broadcast of themselves. And this is a prediction that has people making this bet for a long time. Path tried to make it in 2010-2011.

55:09earlier than that, even I think. Yeah, maybe not that much earlier. Yeah. And you know, I'm just not sure the timing was right for that. I think Facebook had so much more, there was still so much more growth available for the user experience in terms of there are so many more people rapidly coming on to this thing. And it's becoming the de facto way that I communicate with anyone in the world. So it makes it sort of hard to disrupt.

55:34I do think now that it's actually a perfect time for Facebook to be experimenting with monetizing WhatsApp, that private communication networks are going to start occupying more of people's time than public communication networks did. I've noticed, and this could be entering a different phase of life, but I do way less activity that could be broadcast to my social network on Facebook, and I spend way more time in a variety of private slacks.

56:01I even spend less time on Twitter and more time and in Slack and in messenger groups. And I really do think that people are just finally having the reaction to, I don't want to have all my stuff be public all the time and sort of culling that. And of course, you're not actually going to cull it on those platforms where you already have all the connection. You're not going to shrink those social graphs. You're just going to move to new ones. And of course, that's why Facebook acquires the new ones because they, you know, they need to stay king of that.

56:29Yeah, it's interesting man path is just looking at blast from the past I used to actually really enjoy path which for listeners who don't know this was the sort of private mobile app social network. I guess you could call it that from sometime around 29 10 11 that had a lot of buzz and really was like beautifully designed really oh my god the infinite that that button, the path button that was like a radial menu. Yes, yes, you're right. You clicked it and then it expanded out into like all the different types of media you could post. Yeah, and they had parallax scroll down. So you would pull down and different parts of the page would move at different ratios. Yeah. Oh, that's right. Way ahead of the time. Anyway, that might be a fun episode to do at some point, because they like about by a Chinese conglomerate of some sort. Yeah, I just, I just looked it up. Down kick out. I'm not sure.

57:29Where they are based, but interesting. Yeah, I also saw an interesting tweet that's gonna reveal one of my carveouts early, but it was a Josh Elman tweet. Josh is a partner at at Greylock talking about we've had this extreme shift toward individualism.

57:48and how everything is so tailored for us now with, basically everybody has their own personalized news feed, everybody has the, you log in to any technology product now, and it's so tailored for you that it's starting to put us in silos a little bit, and it's starting to make us feel extremely isolated. And we may see products, he suggested that this is why things like HQ trivia, where everybody is all in one room, all together, all at the same time, you know, 400,000 and people strong. We're going to start to see the rise of products that make us feel part of a collective again, and part of something greater than our individually tailored selves. And I think there is really something to that. You know, if you let yourself, you can just become more and more isolated. And I've noticed it in my lifestyle to create, you know, craft a life that's like more and more specifically designed for me, which is awesome in many ways, but is kind of isolating. Yeah. I know a lot of a lot of

58:46folks in tech are thinking about that broadly and some founders are working on ideas in that space. You know, we're broadly on that theme. It is definitely a counter trend that maybe will come to fruition in 2018. Yeah. And then I have one more sort of question. So I'll pause it something first. Talking about being mobile first or moving to mobile today, I think is a lot about is very similar. Talking about you know, being a PC or doing something with software from, you know, many years ago. And- It just seems like an irrelevant question. Right, it's like, well, yeah, I assumed. And I'm wondering, you know, are we nearing the end of mobile? And I don't mean that in something is going to replace mobile. Like I don't think it's going to be the AirPods in the watch and you're not going to have your phone.

59:41But it's almost like are we going to enter somewhere between like voice assistance in your house and your phone and like it's all part of a constellation of devices where you have sort of machine learning built experiences for you. There's some AR component like Are we moving away from the mobile era and into this sort of like ecosystem of highly tailored devices era and will that kind of actually happen in 2018? Okay, I'm gonna go out on a limb here. I think we're moving into the era of the end of eras. Like, there's no, you know, it's just the internet now and like There's no difference between mobile and web or desktop or voice assistant or AI. It's just like the internet. It's like you can access it through multiple modalities. It's just a high-falute explanation for something that all those investment research memos have said for four years. Yeah, but no, where I'm going with this is like you access the services that you

1:00:52want to interact with through multiple modalities. You access them through your keyboard and mouse and through a touchscreen and through your voice and through your wrist or through your glasses. It's all the same and they're all everywhere. Yeah, omnipresent technology. You want to do carveouts? Let's do it. Okay, so just like last year, we are keeping our mega extended carveout section. So we're going to do each pick one carveout from all of the categories of carveouts that we typically cover. So we have books and I'm going to do separate fiction and nonfiction article podcast.

1:01:37music, TV or movie, or both, and app are categories. We're thinking this is also why we wanted to get this episode out. Ahead of the holidays for all of the upcoming travel that lots of people have for airplanes, car rides, or maybe stocking stuffers for some of these. We wanted to get these out to you before the season. I will start off with my first carve out fiction.

1:02:05Book is actually a trilogy, is Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy, which is the first book of which is The Golden Compass, which is a fantasy sort of, you know, young adult fiction, but also like, you know, can very much be read and enjoyed by adults, kind of like Harry Potter, like very similar to Harry Potter trilogy. And I had not read it growing up, Jenny had. And he just wrote, came out with the first book of the second trilogy.

1:02:35many many years later and so he's writing a new trilogy the first book of that just came out I haven't read it yet because I just finished the original but really good super fun. It's like it's like Harry Potter meets like sci-fi meets steampunk with a female protagonist and just like really really well done and it's all a it's all a complete inversion and retelling of paradise lost really really fun I only have one book this year that I, I'm gonna say makes the cut, Shudog. It was so good. Talked about it a bunch on, on when, whatever episode it was where it was my carve out. And David, it was your carve out night. I've forgotten that. But the, the story of, of Phil Knight and the creation of Nike, just like, page turner, thriller, but nonfiction. And so freaking well written.

1:03:33Yeah, that would be if you have somebody on your holiday list that, you know, enjoys business or shoes or just good, you know, autobiography sports. Yeah, sports put this, you know, under the tree or menorah or, you know, whatever your object of celebration is, this holiday season.

1:03:58My nonfiction is actually, I'm repeating my carve out from, I think the last episode, just because I finally, I finished reading it since it was so good, is wooden on leadership, speaking in the sports and shoes, arena, John Wooden, legendary coach of UCLA, and wooden on leadership is his book, Expanding on his philosophies of leadership, and in particular his pyramid of success.

1:04:24And what I didn't talk about on Carbouts last time is, I just think this is so cool. His definition of success. I really want to try and keep this in mind in my own life and in my own, you know, new endeavors now. And John Wayne says, you know, people think about success as like achieving something or like setting goals and hitting them or having anything, you know, externally visible. But he said, that's not what success is at all. To him, success is, I'm quoting here, Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable. So nothing about like results, nothing about external perception, the only measurement that you can truly, you know, both measure and and feel fulfilled by of success is whether you made the effort to become the best that you can be at whatever you're trying to do. And it's so great because it's like,

1:05:19You can always ask yourself, did I actually put my total effort into this? If yes, it doesn't matter what the outcome is. If no, then no, I wasn't successful. That's how he coached his teams. I think still the winningest coach in college basketball history. He would go multiple seasons without losing a game in one ten national championships, I think. But he never cared about the outcome of the game. It was always just about...

1:05:46getting his players and his teams to do the best that they were capable. It's a great mantra. Great mantra, especially in this day and age where there's so much that feels out of our control in life and in tech. All you can control is whether you make yourself the best you can be. My article, so the second category is the best article we read this year, or at least the The one that we feel is not worthy of a carve-out. It actually happened in December of 2016, but I think it was after we recorded the holiday episode. It is the New York Times magazine cover story called The Great AI Awakening. And this was the first piece that I read that really brought a...

1:06:33Not only an understanding, but a compelling narrative to why AI machine learning is so transformative to the era that we live in, and it tells the story of the recreation of Google Translate using, I believe, a neural network instead of sort of structured top-down rule-based architecture, and pitting them against each other. It's good narrative, it's told really well, been many probably better pieces written since then. And I'm sure it was a little dumb down or sensationalist relative to more industry papers or industry articles that have been written before, but really landmark to see that on the cover of the New York Times magazine and really well done. Man, it's time moves so fast these days.

1:07:25That, yeah. I totally remember that article and in my head that came out like five years ago and it came out one year ago. Yeah. Okay, my article is much shorter but is a Fred Wilson blog post from earlier this year called founder friendly, and it was about the Uber situation and the benchmark lawsuit against Travis Kalanick and that whole saga. And he was Fred, who's a great VC at Union Square Ventures, founder, co-founder of Union Square Ventures. He was responding to a tweet that Dan Primak put out saying that Primak tweeted, let me find the exact quote here.

1:08:13RIP quote unquote founder friendly 2010 to 2017 and the point being that like you know a VC and a great VC like benchmark suing the CEO of portfolio company is like the end of this era of like VCs just sucking up to founders and being founder friendly and founders should watch out for VCs and Fred had this response was like you know sometimes like what's most friendly to founders is is Be doing what's best for the company or his point his point was that As a VC and a board member, you need to do what's best for the company and that isn't always sucking up to founders. And often in the long run, what's best for the company is also best for the founders. And I don't mean necessarily here to apply in one way or the other on the Uber situation particularly, but I think this was the beginning of a sea change and I think the relationship between VCs and founders and boards and founders. I think for the better, not in just bringing power.

1:09:09away from founders and back to VCs, but just more of a balance of like going from an era where founders can do no wrong to like do what's best for the company and for all the stakeholder's involved. My podcast is an episode of the Ezra Client Show with Yvonne Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, and I can't actually remember if this was one of my carveouts or not. I think Sapiens was, and I think maybe the podcast was, but awesome interview.

1:09:35If you haven't read Sapiens, that's also a great book. It's like a primer on... many, many things that are core to the human condition, archeological stuff, psychological stuff, evolutionary biology, a lot of sociology of why we treat people the way we do today in different groups and how that falls out of different evolutionary things. And you've all just a great thinker. And he talks a lot about, he actually does a 60 day meditation retreat, silent meditation retreat to start off every year, which sounds freaking nuts. But I hope...

1:10:08I don't know, I think I'm gonna make it a 2018 resolution to do a three-day. I'd love to do like a meditation which we just do. Honestly, I've been just doing headspace and playing around with some meditation apps and trying to get into a dabble a little bit. This notion of like... 60 days. Oh my God. Yeah, but the notion of meditating alone, actually focusing on your breath and not letting your mind wander, It's impossible. It's very difficult to do that for like five or ten seconds. I totally see how this is an incredibly trained art and just very interested to see. It's almost like a CrossFit thing, the people that meditate, you're very aware that they meditate, but I think it's something where if you can really refine the practice and get good at it, I can see how that can change you as a person.

1:11:09I did a bunch of exploration with meditation in in grad school and did I haven't done any full day retreats but a half day retreat actually as part of a class at Stanford in grad school and it was it was really cool it was very very difficult even just a half a day of sitting there but let's go I remember listening to that show too and thinking 60 days oh my goodness yeah okay my podcast Carvout for the year is also I think I did have this also as one of my Carvouts at some point during the year is the episode of the Bill Simmons show with Jimmy Ivy and we've been talking about him a lot lately but literally the coolest human alive go listen to it. I'm queuing that up now literally grab my phone. I'll jump forward my music also related to this whole Jimmy Ivy and ecosystem although.

1:12:05Everything in music is related to him. I discovered Bruce Springsteen and the Eastern Band have multiple live albums. I had growing up there live in New York City album from their reunion tour, which was fantastic, but there is I think probably their best.

1:12:24Live album is live at the Hammer Smith Odeon in London. In 1975, this is early, early days, right after Born to Run comes out. And this is just an amazing show. Bruce writes about it in Born to Run in the autobiography. Whatever your streaming service of choice is, go listen to this now. It's just the boss at his best with the band. Sweet.

1:12:50My music I'm sure this was a car about a mine Odessa's new album a moment apart. I know that I listen to this over and over again. I know that it's new at anecdotally and the Spotify your top tracks of 2017 reinforced it. It's my work music. It's my morning music. It's my workout music. It's so good and It's weird somebody asked me their day three bands. You would take to your grave and like I have longer bands that have like staying power the other two the Beatles and Radiohead, and I'm like, it's weird, but they're newer, they're trendy, but Odessa makes the cut. And we can revisit that in like five years, but that's how I feel right now. Radiohead. Yeah, man. I mean, Radiohead's great, but like, you put them in the same category as the Beatles and Odessa. Well, for...

1:13:39take to my grave. I mean, they're more than Odessa. I think Odessa is three. And I'm not in my radio head. I'm more in Odessa phase right now than a radio head phase, but like, you know, radio had got me through college. Fair enough. It's a thing about music. In fact, the pizza episode that Jimmy and Dray just totally identified, like music is about, it's like, you identify with a certain point in your life with certain activities. Like, it's just such, it's an emotional thing.

1:14:08I totally hear you yet. There's saw like mid-2000s hip-hop dance tracks that we're in. It just take me right back to that specific moment of time in college. Anyway. Okay.

1:14:25My TV and movie for 2017, I was gonna do the Define ones, but we can't do too much. It's a recency bias already. I didn't watch that many movies in 2017, but I just on an airplane trip last week, finally watched Creed, the latest Rocky movie. And I think probably, I think the last.

1:14:53Hard to imagine them following up on that watch. I'll say that and they probably made Creed 2 but Really really really good and very worth watching cool Mine is Blade Runner 2049 It's a movie the other that I thought saw in theaters and embarrassed to say I'd never watched Blade Runner the original All the way through so I watched I think at the addition I watched was the the final cut or the There's a few different remastered versions but watch that the night before and then went and saw 2049 in theaters the next day and you know it's what it's it's both visually incredible and one of those thinker movies that you're thinking about for for days after and especially in our AI apocalypse that we're in definitely interesting to think about yeah I'm gonna add one additional movie carve out hasn't come out yet but obviously

1:15:47the last Jedi is, it hasn't even come out yet, but it's definitely. Say to say, look, if they already recently did a new trilogy, then for Ryan Johnson, then I'm pretty sure we're going to love it. Yeah. I'm pretty sure it's going to be awesome. Yep. All right. App app. So my app for the year joking says the guy who.

1:16:12I told you I would talk about YouTube later in the episode. We gave it a C on acquired. I'm not sure it deserves more than a C. But my app of the year is YouTube. I have been spending a lot more time in YouTube this year. And I feel like on the episode we did on the company, I was very critical of like, YouTube's not a destination site. Like who goes to YouTube? You just follow links there. You do, you know, embeds. That's the only YouTube content you watch.

1:16:39I've been re-engaging with the main app and the feed, and there's great stuff that they surface for you in there, and very personalized based on your watching history. I find myself often when I'm bored at home, just open up YouTube and see what it recommends for me. Wow, that's a behavior I know people do that it just hasn't materialized for me. I actually extremely rarely watch something on YouTube, and I know that sounds weird, but you know, I never want, it's actually just not a good modality for me. I never, I never want to play sound on my phone. It's too much of a commitment really for me to browse through and that's why Twitter's better or Facebook's better. Maybe 2018 will be the year that I start browsing the YouTube news feed. So I was totally in the same mode as you didn't understand it at all. And then I don't know why for some reason I just picked it up one day and it was like, oh wow, this is really entertaining and the feed is like

1:17:36Very personalized to me. Yeah, that's right. Listeners, you are listening to the insightful show acquired, where we realized that YouTube is cool. If we didn't already know that we were too old and not cool anymore, like now, it's our least for me. That's right. Well, here, so I have, I've already given away my app app of the year, which is HQ, which I talked about on the last episode.

1:18:05My biggest observation around this, when David, you sent me the framework to go through and figure out my app of the year, went through my home screen. So I got the iPhone 10. So I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven by four. There's 28 apps on my home screen, including the dock. Zero of them came out in 2017. And that's I think an interesting point about the end of the mobile era. Like there is very, very, very rarely a new app.

1:18:35that becomes a part of my daily or even weekly life. The closest would maybe be, I started using in light and photo fox and some other photo, specialized photo editing apps that now that you can do a lot more powerful sort of pro style tools on the iPhone. But I actually don't think those are 2017 either. I just don't actually think there's new apps that are habit forming.

1:19:05in my daily life and maybe I'm just like not not one of the cool kids anymore and you know there's plenty of those and I'm not involved like musically was 2016 I mean there's been there's been a rise of of new consumer apps I guess I have TBH on my phone but it's not at the beginning HQ was not not on my home screen either But I think it's telling. It's nowhere near the velocity that it used to be. No, I mean, pull out your phone. Do you have anything on your home screen that came out this year? No, I did the same exercise and that's how I ended up with YouTube. I was like, okay, there's nothing new on my phone this year. What have I interacted with differently or more than last year? And that's how I got YouTube. Yep. All right, so you heard her here first. A couple old men doing a podcast.

1:19:53It's welcome to 2018. David actually bought an older phone. Pretty soon I'm going to be telling the kids to get off that one. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

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1:20:54So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. I think that's how we've got. Have a safe drive, a safe travel, to wherever you're going. Enjoy the time off work. And if you've ever thought, hey, they say that thing about reviews, and that's nice, and that's for other people to do, we actually mean that for you too. So we would love.

1:21:22Love, love as soon as we sign off here. Or right now, I don't have anything else important to say if you leave us a review on iTunes. That's all we've got. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. We'll see you in season two. See you in season 10. Or two.