Acquired - Holiday Special 2022

0:00How do I open again? Welcome. What is this show? What are we doing? Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this. Welcome to how I built this.

0:30Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures. And I'm David Rosenthal, and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco. But today, Ben, you are hosting me at your lovely home here in Seattle. Welcome to the studio. It's great to be here. And we are your hosts. Ho, ho, ho.

0:59Oh, oh, oh, happy holidays. Happy holidays. Man, I don't know about you, but ready to put a bow on 2022. Well, we have much to talk about. Yeah. Well, listen, normally I have like a script, like a thing that I'm looking at in front of me to know what to say now, but I don't really on this one other than to say, join the Slack. There are great people there, including probably you if you're listening to this episode. We don't think this is an entry point for a lot of people into acquired. We think this is probably If you're a fan, you're going to listen to this, but I don't think this is going to be anyone's sort of first show. So we're going to try and go a little, a little deeper and nerdy or than normal. We've got a little agenda. We're going to recap 2022 for the show for tech for us. Talk a little bit about what's ahead in 2023. We've got some extra, extra fun carve outs. Indeed. All right. Listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on acquired. Legora.

1:57the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, 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.

2:26They 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...

2:39drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legora's bet 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.

2:59And 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 LaGora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries and crazily they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR in about 18 months truly insane numbers and that is the real test

3:51Plenty 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.

4:12With that, this is not investment advice. This is probably the episode of the year where we will come closest to things that might be interpreted as investment advice as we talk about things that we have liked and didn't like and predict the future and all that. So do your own research. All right, David, what are we starting with? All right. I think we got to recap 2022 despite the craziness of the year of 2022 in the broader world tech markets economy. This is a pretty great year for the show.

4:42I have down here my signature acquired episodes and favorite memories from the year. We started the year with Taylor Swift. Yes. Isn't that crazy that that was like January? That feels like three years ago. Well, we knew that at the end of the year, she was going to drop midnight. It seemed appropriate that in the year where she was going to put on the concert and announce the tickets for the concert series with the most admit in human history that we should of course kick the year off with a Taylor episode predicting the future as usual here on acquired.

5:12I think 2023, we might need to line her up for a follow-up. We should do a required session with Taylor. With Taylor. Naturally. Taylor, we'll come to you. We'll come to your studio. Or maybe the long pond. Yeah, long pond, great. I was reflecting on this. It's pretty crazy that I think that the announcement was that they had 900 stadiums worth of demand showing up to ticketmaster.com and there's 50 shows. I think it's something like 35 stadiums but a lot of them have two nights. There's two nights in Seattle here.

5:41I'm sure not all 900 stadiums worth can be counted as like actual demand like I have to imagine when you know there's a U2 concert or something there are 100 stadiums worth of demand for 50 shows or something like that so clearly not necessarily all purchase intent or not all purchase intent at the available prices but still there was just no way to service the amount of demand.

6:05Like I actually don't know how you solve this problem. Do you make all tickets $10,000 so that you actually find the correct price equilibrium for the demand. You know, kind of like we were talking about on our most recent episode with Ben Thompson and Stratekery and he's like the obvious thing that I should do is raise prices to maximize revenue but then that's pretty quickly going to lead to limiting my reach and impact. I think Taylor cares a lot about her reach and impact and.

6:30She could probably make the most money on this tour by having $10,000 tickets exclusively and still fill all 50 stadiums. I don't know what the price, maybe $2,000 tickets, she could do it. But if you're playing for a 50 year career, then you sort of have to like nurture the fan base over time and recognize that the that would be like that would truly be a farewell tour because that would create so much right off into the sunset. So much negative reaction.

6:56which, of course, would create even more demand if you knew it was farewell tour. This is making me think though, reflecting back on that episode 11 months ago, so I don't remember exactly everything we said, but I don't remember talking as much about the obvious point that this raises for me, which is Taylor is a rock star in the internet. She's probably like the first really, really big internet rock star, and the thing about the internet is The market's are bigger than you can ever imagine. The demand is larger than you can ever imagine. Even in niche products like like first detector year for acquired like these niches are bigger than you could ever imagine. Now think about a mainstream pop star. So the internet enables two things. It enables the niches to exist. So there's way more artists that can make a living today. I think that if you think back to like the 60s or something where the labels would pick the 10 bands of the year and that's kind of it. But

7:55Why is it that Taylor Swift is bigger than the Beatles? Like would the Beatles have had this much demand to when the only promotion that existed was from the labels in a sort of like the labels picked the winners and then those are the winners world. Well, there's multiple things going on here like one is the disintermediation or at least the reduction of power of the middle man of the.

8:22Labels yep and everything else in the middle of the value chain and like so much more the value is now accruing directly to Taylor But that's not an argument for why there's so much more demand I think there also is a lot more demand for Taylor than there was for the Beatles Just because the internet having several ways to reach a customer means that the most popular artist in the world is going to have just way more distribution period. Way more distribution, way more touch points. There's also so much less friction, right? As hard as it was in all the news about how hard it was to get tickets to these Taylor concerts, everybody knew when they were going on sale that it was happening. Right. Through social media and the mainstream media amplifying that. And it was hard to secure a ticket, but very easy to log on to.

9:13ticket master or maybe not that easy, but compared to, I don't even know how you would have gotten a ticket to a Beatles show back in the day. I assume you have to like go to the stadium box office and line up that day that they're going on sale. And you would only know when they're going on sale because of radio ads and print ads. Maybe you read about it in the newspaper. This is a thing I was thinking about when I was caught up in the Friday night. Is it Friday night? Whenever it was that people were like, Twitter's going down. Like it's going to basically turn off tomorrow. And I like Mentally new, this is a system that would degrade slowly and fade into a relevance, not it's going to turn off tomorrow, but putting myself in the headspace of Twitter doesn't exist soon. I was like, how would I know if stuff is taking off? How will I know what the general consensus is around something? How will I know that the tenor has shifted and this thing is not interesting anymore and that thing is interesting? What I start...

10:11reading the New York Times many times a day and going deep into many of the sections, I'm certainly not going to log out. Would you really even get that same kind of experience or understanding from that super kind of centralized publication? Correct. And it's the centralization that makes it like less valuable. You'd never be able to like say, oh, nobody's talking about that because the New York Times.

10:33is not a place where you go to find out if people are talking about something. It's a place where you get news. And so you'd literally have to, like, in person go to events and have a bunch of conversations to know what people are talking about. Okay, Twitter doesn't exist tomorrow. Where do you go to find out what people in the world are talking about right now? I think it's TikTok. Yeah, but I think it would be a much less efficient experience because it's all video.

11:01The number of new tidbits of information you can consume per minute in Twitter is high and reasonably low in TikTok. Yep. It's 10 to 20 versus 2 to 3. Yep. All right. Well, I don't know how we got from T-Swift to. It's a hard special, dude. It's all in real quick. Yeah. Formatless. Except for the pre-robust format that you fleshed out here. Well, you know, I can't not prepare for that episode. Even a holiday special. Okay. Next one on my list. Sony. Sony Corporation.

11:28which I didn't think would be that interesting when we started doing that. It was your idea to do it, right? I know, it was, but I found myself being like, God, is this actually an interesting company? I had wanted to read made in Japan, because I'd heard it was amazing. But as I looked back at like trademark acquired episodes, TSMC, The New York Times, like I just didn't think it would be one of those, and it very clearly, especially in the numbers, did become one of those, it has it all. I mean, it has the genius founder, it has the Probably the most adversity that we've ever talked about in any founding story in all the acquired. It's really hard to think offhand of a greater adversity that a company and founders have ever come than Japan in 1945. It also has so many chapters. I mean, the craziest thing to me is if you look at the business, as of the time we did the episode, they had five separate business units, all of which did a double digit percentage of their revenue. So it's super diverse.

12:27and all of which did a double digit percentage of their operating income. So like you have five businesses that are all reasonably the same size in top and bottom line in one house. Well, and that we got well over two hours into the episode before we mentioned PlayStation. And then like the PlayStation story in and of itself, we could do an episode. I mean, the fact that we got from like rice cookers and World War II to like that crazy Kota about Spider-Man is nuts.

12:55In the back of my mind have been percolating, it could be fun to do a whole episode just on Xbox. A, we need to do a Microsoft series at some point. We've talked a lot about and around Microsoft on the show, but we've never covered Microsoft and Apple. We've not done Microsoft, we've not done- Or Google. We have not done the Google IPO. Apple, Google, Oracle. If we just wanted to cheat and like spike the numbers as much as possible, we just like, Take the whole next season and just do, you know, fang, basically. I think we should do one of those companies a year, not even a season. I think one a year. It's going to take three episodes to do each one. We were able to fit Amazon into two episodes, but Amazon is only a, what, 27-year-old company. And we didn't talk about a bunch of stuff. Right. That was the way we skipped it. We didn't really talk about Alexa at all. Right.

13:51Sorry, everybody, if we just lit up here. Although I think there's enough voice personalization in those devices that if a piece of media says the A word, I don't think it lights up anymore. Well, it might be because I have the Sonos ones and the firmware and the Sonos ones is different than the ones that Amazon actually makes. But mine will just like light up when people say things that are not that word and are just like in a movie. Like when dialogue sounds too much like that name. Like that word. Yeah. Interesting. Here's my proposal. I think we should do.

14:19One of these big tech companies a year for two reasons. One, you know, for Microsoft, for Apple, I think those are going to be three plus episodes to do it, right? Yeah. Even at acquired length episodes. So it's a huge lift. But also, I think we should spread it out. Like you said, you know, the cheat code would be if we just do them all back to back, right? But we have a diversity of interests here on acquired. We want to go for many years.

14:44I even have a lot of fear around doing a three-part Microsoft series where people are going to be like, I'm just out for the next three months. Because next year, listeners, what we've decided is this is a little bit approximate, but we're going to average it. Every month, we're going to do a season episode and a special. So either a season being like Apple Part One or a special being an interview with someone or an acquired session or something that kind of doesn't fit the normal format. And that literally means that It's like, oh, you're doing a three-part Microsoft thing? Well, I'm out for Q1 on acquired. I actually think about this. I've experienced this on one of my carve-outs for extended carve-outs later. One of my favorite video game podcasts, Resident Arc. They're a video game story book club, so they choose a game. Yep. And then they'll do, you know, 10 to 20 episodes playing through the game, dissecting the story, although, like, literary from a literary perspective. It's really cool. I love it. But if they choose a game that I don't have a

15:41large affinity for then it's anywhere from one to two months that I'm not listening to that show. Right. And three months is certainly long enough for someone to permanently change behavior. I don't think it's good for us if someone decides to take a three month break from acquired because it's not 100% chance they come back. Yeah, we got to think about the right way to do this. Maybe I'm to focus on the downside and maybe it will turn out that like what we may alienate some people. It's the largest thing in acquired history because I was shocked that we'll keep going here on big episodes, but that the Amazon episode was by far the biggest in acquired history. When David pitched me on this idea, I was like, hmm, I don't know. Brad Stone has written some excellent books on this. There's been documentaries. Jeff Bezos is the most studied CEO in the world, I think, until this recent Elon madness.

16:33What can we bring to the world in the Amazon? Which by the way, I think that has become this year something's crystallized for me about acquired and the show and what we do. I think that should always be our lens. Like what can we add? Yeah, by doing it because there's lots of voices out there saying lots of things. Yeah. Spoiler alert, this is part of why we haven't covered Twitter because like.

16:56There's nothing new to add. All the best tech journalists in the world are covering it every single day. I mean, you have Matt Levine, you have Dan Primak every single day. They're reporting the newest thing with not just reporting, but true analysis behind it. You have Ben Thompson, the following day writing a reaction piece that's like, here's my...

17:17Even more thoughtful take on what happened you have Casey Newton who has a whole platform dedicated to this and a bunch of access and a bunch of insiders sending him stuff breaking it real time on Twitter So it was one of these things where we're like there's no daylight here for us to talk about it We actually felt the same way about FTX which I mean you could argue that We did have a part to play in FTX because Sam was on the show last year, but like There was so much good coverage and good reporting going on and we're not reporters and we don't do stuff in real-time blah blah blah that it felt like the right way to Have acquired add to the conversation is go do a hundred hours of research on and Ron and try and sort of Indirectly draw as many parallels as we can like we don't want to hit people over the head with like this is just like an FTX where they had this it's more like how can we Bring up ideas for people that they can draw their own parallels. It's been interesting to watch this past week at

18:12Who knows if it was coincidental or not, but I think at least two major news outlets have run pieces in the past week with a title like how FDX compares to NRON. It was obvious. It's obvious to draw that parallel. They were probably in the works anyway. Yes. Is it worth sharing more on that now? Yeah, listen, this is a holiday special. We can break the format. Yeah. Every time people write a sentence, they're like, oh, you got to do a take on this. It's like, I almost never have a take in real time. Yep.

18:42That's not what we do. I suppose the traditional acquired format of a company, buying another company, we are some of the most well-positioned people in the world to have a take on why that acquisition happened, what will make it go well, what could kill it? Just like you killed grading this season, which by the way, I love that I was so surprised. It has its place sometimes. Yeah, yeah, but like, look, things seem to evolve. Next year is gonna be our eighth year.

19:12into the show. Yeah, I thought Ben Thompson just said it perfectly on our most recent episode with him where he was like, you know, when I was young, I used to think when I got old that I would like still be cool and I would never be one of those old people. And now that I'm old, I'm like, an old quote unquote, you know, relatively. Now that I'm older, I think two things. One being old is pretty great. And two, I look at my peers who are still trying to be young and it just looks kind of right.

19:39sad. Like you got to change, you got to evolve. And the show has changed and evolved to a point where I think like we are a different show than the show that used to do. Oh, breaking, you know, emergency pod. Whole Foods got lots today. Cancel everything today so we can do some quick research. There are times where it still makes sense for us to do those. Like John Foley bringing in a new CEO, the Barry McCarthy connection. And that is to take that as not aged well. Yeah, I think you're right. That it's okay that.

20:08were something different now than what the show was. I'm curious what everybody listening thinks. Yeah. Last point on this FTX saga, which again, we're watching it play out in real time. I don't know that that's where acquired shines because we try to make evergreen pieces that sort of stand the test of time. And like every week, it's so different than it was the previous week. These are kind of excuses. We probably just should directly say we totally had Sam on. We wanted to tell the extraordinary story of FTX, which was extraordinary. I mean, now in a different way than we thought. You could not argue that it is an extraordinary story. I do want to say I'm sorry if the exposure that FTX got from acquired and every other publication in the world, but from acquired. We used our platform to Sam and to FTX and yeah, I do feel bad about that. I don't think there's any way we could have known at the time.

21:05And they don't want to stop having interesting people and companies on the show, you know, up and coming company. So, but yeah, like, you know, it sucks. I'm like, a lot of people lost a lot of money. Yeah. So, sorry, if you were like on the fence on FTX and you were like, I don't know if this thing's legit or not, and then acquired legitimize that for you. Next. Just to, if you have not listened to the Sony episode, I'm sure most of you have, but like, It's so good. Oh my gosh. Talk about like the office. We made this thing. It's amazing. You should listen. Sony, the story story. Whether you like our telecom or not, but just like it is a vastly underappreciated company and an underappreciated journey overcoming adversity. Yep. Okay. Sony, dude, we did in video this year. We did a lot this year. Yeah. Try to think.

22:00which of our silicon episodes I feel the strongest about in terms of like enlightening me about the way the world works. I think it's first TSMC but Nvidia is the thing that's the most interesting about the Nvidia story I think is Jensen bet the company three separate times and truly bet the company like if this initiative fails it will go to zero and it worked three separate times. The first time is when they shipped the card in whatever it was nine months instead of two years and they designed the whole thing in emulation, never tested it and shipped it to customers. And it worked. I mean, it worked enough. And maybe I'm forgetting the story in its entirety, but I think there was a bet the company moment around programmable shaders and then a third one around the like

22:58Seven-year investment before the market was there in AI and CUDA and building their own developer ecosystem. Obviously open AI existed. Trying to remember if Dolly was out at the time when we did the Nvidia episode. Certainly GP. Well, interestingly enough, I think Dolly won was, but it got no acclaim. Right. The one that lit the world on fire was Dolly too. Was Dolly too, yep. But now as we record this chat GPT came out last week, like we were thinking about the, you know, AI Renaissance and how important AI is, like just in a general sense when we did those episodes. And video stock had that crazy run long before we did the episode, like two years before we did the episode at the beginning of COVID. And so it's interesting that I don't think that was around gaming. I think that was around AI, the thing that was sort of selling that story. And so it in a way, the like craziest and video balls that were sort of buying at the top and

23:53selling the story as much as humanly possible. When did it peak? I don't know, late 2021, maybe they were kind of right. I don't think they knew that the next year would make AI's developments as obvious as it has, but everybody who believed that AI was going to be this complete step change in the way that we use computers.

24:16and decided that buying and video at a very high price was the way to endorse that belief. Like that ended up happening very quickly soon after. Yeah. The moment when it really hit me was when we were recording the LP episode that we did with Jelle at Mutiny. And that's just kind of literally was like, oh yeah, we have a GPT-3 based feature in our product. Right. And I was like, whoa, okay, you are dynamically rewriting copy on your customer's websites.

24:46using GPT-3. Okay, that kind of blows my mind. Yeah. Like I can now see the business use cases for this. You say you can see them, but we're in this very interesting moment where we've all seen three pretty amazing proof of concepts in the last six months. We saw Dolly II, GBT-3, and now chat GBT, which To me is actually the most interesting because the most meaningful changes that it changed the modality that you interact with the AI model, but it's either the same or I think it's like GPT three and a half or something. It's a very similar model, but we're interacting with it in a new way and it's stateful rather than being stateless as it sort of can preserve state and you can ask it more questions about. And so I think

25:33There's a little bit of a like a crypto moment here where it's the first time someone explains to you a decentralized world computer. You're like, whoa, that unlocks a whole world of possibilities and you say, what are they? And someone says, let me think about that. Yeah. Yeah. I feel very similar with chat GPT right now. I'm looking at I'm like, whoa, this unlocks a whole world of possibilities. And someone says, what is it? And I'm like, I feel better than I did about the decentralized world computer, but I still can't articulate to you like, when the app store launched, like, oh, this will be an $80 billion on demand car service market. That that's not, well, I think this is just naturally how markets play out though, right? Like we look back now and we're like, oh, when the app store launched, it was obvious, but was it at the time? I think we probably would have felt very similarly back in that moment of like, oh, apps on your phone. Cool. When I first saw the iPhone, I thought this

26:29device changes everything, because I was like, I wanted one so bad. I mean, I had a coworker in Cisco. So many times between the keynote and when it was like six months before the phone came out, I was so hyped for it. I just remember seeing the device in my coworker's desk at Cisco and thinking like, I need one of these things. This is like so much of the money that I have would be used to buy one. So I think I bought the 3G the next year or six months in or something. I got one day one.

26:56I didn't camp out overnight, but I waited in line for hours. I got day one release. I got the original one. I just graduated from college. It was the summer I graduated. I graduated, but I hadn't started work yet, but I had my signing bonus. I was like, this is where I am spending my money. I waited in line, just to wait in line. I went to the Apple Store. I didn't have enough money. I was 17, 18.

27:20That's great because you had to pay full price. There was no carrier subsidization for the original iPhone. Correct. And so it was fun. I brought my little point in shoot camera. I took pictures of all the people getting their first iPhones and playing with them and setting up. Did your dad go with you? No, I want my friend, George. I remember feeling like this device is amazing. I remember really wanting to make apps for it. So I made this to do list apps. I would make apps until the next year. Right.

27:43I sort of missed that whole first year of, like, you can't make apps. I don't think I was thinking about it then. But like, the app that I made was a to-do list. It's not like, I was like, oh my God, this is going to be a way that you can hail cars, or order groceries, or it was like, let me do the smallest possible thing on this. And I think that's actually just how I think about products. I'm not a Travis Kalanick-like person. I think I always sort of think in terms of like, what product can I fully conceptualize of and see in my head?

28:11and understand all the hard stuff involved in it and draw a nice neat box around it and just work towards shipping that thing that I can fully imagine. It's almost like I want to be able to do everything myself, which is why I think acquired has sort of come out the way that it has, rather than us doing a bunch of hard stuff. I very much shy away from like, ooh, you'd have to like send a bunch of people into grocery stores and like, figure out all their inventory to load it, I just wouldn't do that. But the idea of like, okay, there's this really nice neat package called an acquired episode and it contains these components and David and I can make it ourselves. What do you think what would have happened otherwise would be if we did the hard stuff? Well, one thing we've been very explicit about in a trade-off for the show and acquired as an entity in a business is we don't wanna

29:09I have a lot of employees. We don't want to be a team. We don't want to have. We have more shows. I think we would have tried to turn it into a network. We would have taken people up on the book offers. There could be like a Netflix show. There could be. I'm trying to think, is there anything we could have done or still do that would just be like a fundamentally different thing? Like everything you're describing would be building a gimlet or the like and like. Yeah. That would be great. You know, we probably would make more money. But that's like, no.

29:38want to do. But is there anything that would be like an Uber versus a to-do app? It depends what on the believability spectrum you're willing to call part of acquired. Like, we could have launched a new podcast app for acquired another podcast and then try to talk about it with Glow. We did. Glow is originally going to be a new app with payments built in. That would have been a boondoggle. Yeah. I'll validate your point. When the app store first came out, you could stare at it and go, this is going to change everything. But it was only a select few people who actually saw the particular massive use case with the new thing. Yeah. And that's how I feel about chat GPT right now. I'm like, this thing's scary powerful. And I don't actually know what to do with it. Most people, I think, are also in the same mode that you and I are of like, oh, I can see how this could rewrite copy dynamically on a website. Right. And I see that being, but that's the to do list version of what? Right. I can do. Yep.

30:36Man, this is fun. We're only like halfway through the year, too. Okay, so we did in video. Yep. That was so fun. And I learned so much. And now it's just so much more important. Almost like T-Swap to do the same dynamic. Yep. Then we did Amazon. And when I include Walmart in Amazon, I'm so glad we did Walmart first. That's why I haven't my head. I was like, did we do two episodes on the Amazon or three? We really did three. Yeah. Episode one was Walmart. Yep.

31:06In order to understand the role of retail in America today, you sort of first need to understand that everything we think of as a retailer or most things we think of as retailer are actually discounters. Yes, and I totally didn't get that before doing the Walmart episode. I was like, well, there's like stores.

31:28like Walmart and Target and there's department stores which are like more expensive and opinionated and then the brands that have sort of their own stores but like I didn't conceptualize that the most commonplace that you buy things are actually discounters. And Walmart was really the company that single-handedly created the wave of the modern store period which then Amazon could take digital. Yes. Yes.

31:58I was so blown away learning about with Walmart, how much of a tech company they were. Like, I think we sit on the episode and I still think that they were the first applied technology company in America. I think this is a silly. I think you've said this a few times now. I don't agree with that. Okay. Okay. So technology at its purest definition is anything that enhances the productivity of a human. So the wheel is technology because with the same number of calories burned, you're able to go farther or a navigational instrument, which means you're able to get somewhere in a shorter amount of time. So maybe you could go a bit to apply digital technology. What makes me want to say that is they were a company who did business in an established sector.

32:54And they transformed the way they worked in ultimately the whole sector by applying technology to it. So did standard oil by applying technology to the old way that you used to extract oil from the ground. Fair enough, I mean, I guess like you could say the car companies or the lighting, the way people light their homes. But those, I guess the distinction I'm trying to draw, which may not be a valid one, is I think in all those cases, the business was the technology. Here, it was a separate existing part of the economy that they were in that business and they used technology to transform the way they do it. Maybe it's a meaningless distinction. It's interesting. I just feel like today, Walmart would have been a hot venture back startup. Well, it's interesting. The question with applying technology to an existing market is always

33:48What are you using the technology for? I always think about this with tech-enabled businesses. Okay, what are you using technology for and how does it make your financial statements of your business at maturity look better? Are you using it to consolidate back office operations to make your company more operationally efficient and thus lower your cost structure and thus with the same amount of revenue, you just run at better margins. Were you using it because you're able to get better distribution. Like the internet enables you to generate way more revenue because you're able to reach way more customers on the same set of costs. And so I always think about it as like, what are you actually using technology for in your business and does that make it a meaningfully better business than non-tech-enabled incumbents? I think there's a lot of stuff in the world today that is a tech-enabled thing that is not all of that tech-enabled when you look at the financials. But what might as a perfect example of a

34:48tech-enabled business that is like the right way to do it. And why? What previously large number did it collapse in their financials to a small number because of technology? Well, certainly the coordination of the distribution and the way Walmart built their supply chain was vastly different than all of the their two four traditional retailers.

35:13and way more efficient and made their financials work in a way that just wouldn't work for other retailers. Legitimately enabled them to have lower prices to get more customers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a strong argument. Agreed to disagree that they were the first that sort of like Brock technology, but yeah, that's a good point. Benchmark. Benchmark was super cool. I mean, that pinched me moment for you and I both. I think we should lean into that format as much as possible going forward of we tell a story and then we have the protests on. I think acquired has been a bunch of iterations to find our way to that format. That does feel like the platonic ideal of an acquired, a way acquired talks about a topic. I do think it's probably you and I spending three hours diving deep from everything we can find telling the story in the way that we sort of see it.

36:07I used to think, oh, we can make us different and better is we're going to spend more time preparing than any other interviewer. We're going to take this super seriously. We only do one of these interviews a month. This is like, which is a tactic, not a strategy. Exactly. And like, yeah, we probably do more preparation for our interviews than 80, 90% of other interviewers out there. But there are other really good interviewers like Ben Thompson. Yep.

36:34Patrick goes on to see exactly, but what we did with benchmark, that's something that only we can uniquely do. It's interesting. I only is aggressive, but it's something that our format and the set of trade-offs that we make in our business makes it easier for us to do that than for someone else. I always think about strategy is about trade-offs. Like what's the original Michael Porter journal entries called competitive strategy?

37:03And it's great. For anyone who hasn't read it, it was in the Harvard Business Review. I think when it first came out, something like 20 pages, it's very code, and it's very straightforward. And he talks a lot about how there's operational efficiency and there's strategy. And operational efficiency is we're just going to be better. We're going to be more efficient. We're going to do it for cheaper costs. You and I are going to do more research than anybody else. But there's real strategy, which is trade-offs. It's the Southwest model of strategy. Right. There's sort of the Southwest model of like, we are going to have a

37:32different model for where we keep planes than every other airline. We're not going to use the hub and spoke model. We're going to every where that we fly to in a constraint set of places that we fly to is going to be a pseudo hub for us. And we're going to keep our planes sort of diversified and we're only going to have one model of airplanes. So that way they're easier to service. And there's a whole bunch of trade offs involved with that. But that's our strategy. Even though it comes a lot of downsides, we're going to lean into the upsides. And I think like the lean into the upsides thing for us is

38:01If you're doing a super high velocity show, benchmarks probably not going to feel like you're giving them a unique spotlight in a way to do something like that. If you do things that may or may not enable deep trust from listeners, then there's people that are not going to want to come on the show because they don't know how they're going to come across. But if you always sort of lean into this, we have very few guests. We Think there are people that you really should hear from which by the way, this is why the SPF thing burns me up so much is cuz like we try to be ridiculously selective then it enables you to Create content with people that otherwise are not going to go do the circuit Yep not to mention when we do three hours of content about the thing before it enables us to come in with that prepared. That's what I was gonna say to there's an element in the case of the benchmark episodes

38:59It actually was all pre-planned in advance that we were going to do the episode just us and then we were going to do the dinner with them. That was planned before we even released the first episode. But I do that we've experienced in the past with the show. There are times where we will engage with a company or a CEO or a firm before having done any acquired content on them. And they're like, they don't engage fully. Right.

39:27And then we do an episode just us and then it completely changes. Yep, the tenor of the conversation. Yeah, it's like being willing to do the work to prove that you're as serious about caring about this topic as you say you are. And by us having the format of you and I just doing these deep dives on companies, that is a differentiated strategy than an interview show. Yep. Okay. And Ron kind of talked about it at super recent. I have nothing to add other than one. I think it's fun to add little corrections and additions as we go through here. Yeah, we've got a few of these. On the Enron one, I neglected to point out that there is a company today called Enron Oil and Gas that's like an $80 billion company publicly traded as EOG. Yeah, listener emailed us about this. Yep. That's the upstream production business. So the oil and gas industry over the last 30 years is sort of fragmented into upstream and downstream. And midstream. Oh, that makes sense.

40:22And I think EoG is sort of their upstream business that spun off. But it is a publicly traded company that still bears the Adron name. Yeah. I should have looked this up. Did they change the name officially to EoG or is the actual name? I don't know. That's a good question. It's a good question. It is actually called EoG Resources. Like the name of the company is EoG. That makes sense. Like the Accenture to Arthur Anderson. Yeah. Although there is after many rebrands and iterations, some subset of Arthur Anderson was preserved as a tax organization that is now called Anderson Tax again. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Because I guess tax is separate from audit, right? They had tax audit and consulting. Consulting became Accenture. I assume audit is went away entirely. And I think they spun off tax in its own new name that is now Anderson Tax. Anderson Tax. Interesting. Which is crazy to me that there was enough brand equity.

41:19in Anderson left to sort of go great. You would have thought bad. There's got to be a story there. It could be an LP episode. It could be an LP episode. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a long time friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF that everyone would not and you're done. But in an AI first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

41:50Yup, your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote shadow AI running with no security review at all. Right.

42:11And 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!

42:34Which 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.

42:52Trust 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. We talked a minute ago about trade-offs when we were talking about it.

43:22the bench work, two-parter. One in your mind are the biggest trade-offs that we make here, unacquired. I think we make a ton of trade-offs. I think we are maybe two-of-fault, purest organization. That's the first one, two people. You'll look at it the whole organization here. Not a lot of content. A common wisdom is to release content every week. We don't do that. That has downsides.

43:47such as it's hard to become a top show in the charts if you're not constantly producing new content it works against the algorithms but it has upsides of now we can go do really really deep research. A second one being really long episodes that's a massive trade off like lots of people don't want to listen to you when you do that but the people who do really like it. Another one being people often ask like you do another show bring another host you could leverage the podcast feed to promote other.

44:14episodes of your new spin-off show with your new host where you have some of the economics of that there's like a lack of purity to me that that's not acquired then that's I don't know why we would do that it doesn't fit in the box it's one of those things where it's like sure you could make more money doing that but it goes in the too hard pile I think you and I have a really big too hard pile yeah in some ways that strategy it's like if you actually believe in the set of trade-offs that you have then you have to be willing to have a really big too hard pile when there's a lot of people telling you there's low-hanging fruit to be done

44:43but often that low-hanging fruit is counter to your strategic trade-offs. It's interesting. I feel like you've always been this way, I think, in your life. I'm cranky. You're so, you're not cranky though, you're wonderful. But I'm cranky about things like this. You're persnickety, you're not cranky. I'm persnickety. You're persnickety. Yes, for sure. Jerry Seinfeld said it really well on the Tim Ferriss show, which is one of the best podcast interviews in history.

45:13That's my first car out of the way. Tim asks, how does he come up with all the bits? How does he observe things? And his comment is, there's so many things that annoy me. I sit there and all I can see in the world is all the things are a little bit wrong and that just really bother me. And then I write them down. And then I polish, polish, polish, polish, polish. And I'm not Jerry Seinfeld and I don't, it's not to that extent. Very different application. Right. But it's similar. We ship an acquired episode. All I can see are the 16 ways that we could have made it better.

45:42I'm proud that it's out there, but like, really all I can see are the flaws. I think my hunch is right that you've always been this way. Yes. I've become much more this way over time. I used to be not this way at all. I used to be like, I believe you can do everything. Trade-offs, like the older Jim Moore, the cult's coach of the playoffs, like playoffs. I was like, trade-offs. Trade-offs. As I become older though, like I...

46:09completely have shifted and embrace trade-offs. Oh, yeah, you don't even answer email. I mean, it's honestly crazy. It's like a joke now, yeah. It's not a joke, but I'm trying to get a hold of it. I feel so bad. The only person I feel bad about with it is you. Because I really, you bear a huge brunt to that. Thank you. You're also pretty good about like, I said, I was going to be done working today at six. And so I'm just like, not really doing anything after six, even if the text look kind of important. That's fine. Well, that's called parenthood. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, parenthood is probably forced you to lean into some of that more. Yes. I was leaning this way anyway for sure, but like it was like a massive like title wave. I felt like I was at like a water park like in a wave machine came along and like I was heading this direction anyway floating along and then just like whoosh.

46:59The issue now that you're doing it pretty aggressively is you and I amplify each other because I have this thing where I'm like, oh, this is a thing that David would say, not worth it. This is probably a good time to talk about this. We did a lot of live stuff this year. Yeah, let's talk about this. Some of which were super cool. There were some amazing. Wonderful opportunities we got in 2022. But for lots of reasons, they're way harder than doing you're in my normal thing.

47:24And are they worth it? Are they that much incredibly mentally better for how much harder they are for us? Probably not. In almost all cases, there are cases where it is, but in almost all cases, no. And so I think this is one of the things where like you inspire me to be more persnickety. You ask the question and then I went to a place of like, oh, well, that's easy. We should not do anything live because the juice is almost never worth the squeeze, which is probably too far. Like there's probably some middle ground where it's like, if Pishbook offers us the ability to do another arena show, like, oh my God, we should do an arena show. But the litany of things that make this way harder and frankly way less listenable after the fact that it's actually the worst product most of the artifacts of. So let's recount this sort of like cool life stuff we did this year. We did the arena show. It still is like,

48:15Serial. I can't say that without laughing at least number two of the year. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. We did the arena show. We then also did a big live show in another country. Yeah. For the first time. Yep. Uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in Barcelona, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, production effort. Totally. I was down to Francisco for three days. We set up three cameras. We bought a bunch of new microphones. We tested all the microphones. Big production lift. Big, big production lift. I mean, guests. So things that make production harder. Guests. Yes. Total wild card. They might cancel on you. They might reschedule blah, blah, blah. They might not use the equipment. We send them. Yes. In person changes it way harder. Like you and I are sitting here now. It took an extra hour to set this up to have this beautiful, roaring fire next to us. Yeah. We haven't even mentioned. Yeah.

49:14these three cameras, although now that I'm looking at it, there's only two cameras on because here's a trade-off we make. We don't have an engineer. We don't have a sound person or a video person who works with us. So if you've been watching this on video for, I don't know how long, the last like, I'm gonna guess that thing shut off half hour ago. We lost their camera. So talk about trade-offs, and especially in... I knew I said a bruh, my camera. Especially in shooting stuff like live in person.

49:43There's a whole new web of things that could go wrong that just don't happen when it's you and I on Zoom. Now at a live audience, that massively compounds it. First of all, the sound quality is going to be way worse. So that bothers me as a personickity person. The audience gets antsy in their seats because no one can sit still for four hours. No one wants to attend a four hour. I mean, when you're at a sporting event, you have time, quarters, you go get concessions, you whatever. So it makes the product different and I think worse for the 150 plus thousand people who are going to listen after the fact. So it's this interesting compromise where for all those people, it's a worse product, but for the people in the room, that's what we're optimizing for in the moment. And I don't even know that we optimized for that. It's so funny. My, ah, they were in a show. Like, let's just take a second. It was so cool. Amazing. It was so cool. And everybody who came, the fact that so many people came and flew in from

50:41All over the world yeah, we did Brooks run with people in the morning. We did a dinner with some sort of like friends at the show and previous guests and sponsors that I before at canless who we've had on the show and that adapting it was so special. Yeah, but it's so you know looking back on I went to talk like is you actually Live this again yourself this year, but the farther we get from it the more in my mind and in my emotions the space the arena show occupies is just like Jenny in my wedding like all the ups the amazing this special feelings of it and like my most moving memories looking back on both events are just a huge amount of stress and being like

51:21Are people having fun right now? Like, is this going well? I mostly remember the upside of both of my wedding. I remember the upside too. But every time I think about it, I can't not think about us being on stage in the middle of the show. And when we got to Actu and Anu was on it, we didn't have Breaks planned. And people needed to go to the bathroom and get food. And H-book was paying for all the free food and booze and everything up. And so of course, people were gonna go after the first...

51:48Act ends it's like okay. Well, that was a good time to go take advantage of the open bar. Of course, it's just like oh, we should have had that better anyway all that to say Some of the live shows we've done are the most special experiences of the year. Yes, they have hidden value for acquired in a bunch of ways like getting to actually talk with real people like getting to hang out with the thousand people that came to the arena show like life changingly cool to get to meet so many folks. And also always always remember that night especially the after party afterwards. Yes. Walking into Queen and Beer Hall is very cool. And just hanging out for hours. And also at least 10 if not 20 times as much work for a product that I continue to believe was worse for people who listen to it than our average acquired episode. Yeah. So it's like again, it's a set of trade-offs that

52:42We just have to be intentional about making next year rather than being like, ooh, that would be a fun conference to forget. Oh my god, I forgot about Capitol Camp. Oh, Capitol Camp, yeah. That was so cool. That was cool. That was a relatively low tradeoff because Patrick and Brent and Clayton and the team there, they took care of everything. Yep, absolutely. It was different too because we created a talk for it. So it was less issues.

53:09because there was no guest, so there was no guest risk. But it was the first time I'm such a con VC. It was a technology risk as a guest risk. But the only thing that we had done that was similar was the acquired top 10, the best acquisitions of all time episode that we did. And so we had a little bit of confidence that you and I could produce a talk about a thing that wasn't the entire history and strategy of a company, but that was a totally new format for us.

53:39I'm curious what you think. I'm so glad we did capital camp in like that. You know, work time was a fun switch up, but I think it was an inferior format to the normal show. Like, yeah. I was thinking like, we put together a deck for it and like, I mean, you did most of it, but like, it was a set of pictures. A set of pictures, but like, I made a deck in years.

54:00Yeah, that was cool though. I mean the nice thing about doing that is then we have a product we can sort of like take on the road to I think we can share this publicly You gave that talk again at an internal fund rise event. Yes, which was super cool I would love to do more of that like I got to meet everybody at fund rise like the you know our biggest partner for the year and like the whole team like all 300 people at the company were there at the off site It was very cool all this to say it leads me to believe that Much like all the other trade-offs we make, we just need to figure out how do we 80-20 it? What are the things that we care the most about and how do we not do the long-tailed stuff? So I think it means pick like one episode per year to do a massive live show and throw the acquired Super Bowl slash wedding. And maybe once a year is even too often because God it's a lift. But two, then feel free to do a bunch of in-person stuff with our partners, with our sponsors, with people that we like work with.

54:55on the show anyway and want to just like continue to build deeper relationships with but those aren't necessarily episodes. Yep. That has been a huge highlight for me for the year is I think we have found a way. I don't know that anybody would have thought was like possible as a podcast as a media business to like really build deeper relationships with our sponsors and our partners. I think almost every single one of them we did something like the fundraise all hands or, you know, a conference. And most of them now, a very large percentage of our sponsors we've invested in. Yeah. What, five of them? I think five. Yeah. Vanta, we should talk about Vanta in a big way. Modern Treasury, vouch, mystery, standard metrics. We've invested in. And what was standard metrics called when they sponsored? Quaster. Quaster. Quaster. That was the original name. Yeah. Back in the day. Just like we...

55:51For listeners in our audience, we've kind of always thought, I think it's been one of our core tenants from the beginning of, we treat our audience as equals to more impressive than us. When we started the show especially, now even the folks who are listening to us are the folks who we want to invest in, we want to do business with, we want to do. Well, that's what eats me alive when I get something wrong in an episode and it's a black mark to me and I can't do anything but see it as like, I'm thinking.

56:17of the people who I know listen to the show who are listening to that and thinking up he didn't quite get that right because that's how I envision our audience not that we didn't always think this way but it's really come to be realized now we think of our sponsors the same way as our partners as like these are amazing companies like how can we build as deeper relationship with them as possible yep totally agree i mean the sponsorship model is another way that we make a pretty significant trade off so we only do six months season-long sponsorships, and we are ridiculously choosy about the people that we do that with. And because it's a six-month-long thing to an audience of 250,000 people that happen to be probably the most valuable audience in the world in terms of CEOs, founders, engineers, capital allocators, certainly the set. I mean, the set. It would be hubris of us to

57:16claim that we, singularly, are required to have the most valuable audience in the world. So it's a big ticket item whenever a sponsor decides that they want to work with us for the duration, for the reach, and for the magnitude of who you're reaching when you reach them. And so It's like a big freaking commitment. And there's a trade off there in our business model, which is we're not going to work with that many people when we do, but when we do, we want to go as deep as possible. And so that means that we can't do things like engage with agencies or engage with dynamic ad insertion networks or a lot of other things that would make our lives easier. It probably also means that we can't outsource sales. Like you and I are the ones talking to the CEOs of the companies who sponsor, which again,

58:09Lots of trade-offs. They're very busy people. They're often hard to get a hold of but they're people that we get to build really real relationship with. This is one of my favorite trade-offs. We've made kind of like I've been saying is like these are the types of people who we would want anyway to build deep relationships with. So why wouldn't we lean into that as much as possible? On the completely opposite end of the spectrum though something that I think highlights the trade-off and that I've really come to appreciate this year.

58:34In the very beginning of acquired we could did YouTube and we've been saying for years and years we gotta re-tube YouTube. At this point it's almost a Muguffin. Yeah. Where like it's like Seattle's NBA team. It's like maybe we should never redo it so we can always talk about the fact that Seattle's gonna get an NBA. Of course acquired is gonna redo YouTube. But I was so negative on YouTube in the episode. And the intervening years I feel like I've just been a journey for me of like really coming to appreciate what a incredible product and business. YouTube is and this year my big YouTube appreciation has been they enable for many many creators people to make their livelihoods with the exact opposite tradeoff of what we do. You can just focus on content and you if you have an audience and can build an audience can make a good to great living on YouTube.

59:27and never engage with business. Never engage with. This is how I felt as an app developer. I was like, wow, there's a money fountain. I write software, I upload it to the store and money comes out the other side. Which obviously like, that's not the decision we would make. But for the long tail, you know, and mask my and other niches of media that don't have as valuable an audience has us. That is an amazing thing. And most.

59:53Creators don't want to be business people like we want to be business people. We want to be entrepreneurs, right? By the way, I think it makes the content better that we are because then you get first-party insights rather than like if we were journalists sort of shooting from the sidelines like some of the stuff I've already talked about on this episode today is the strategic conversation that came out of a board meeting that I was in earlier and so like us Engaging in business makes the show what it is to it's funny That reminds me of another trade-off. What are the things? Really, this is driven by being a parent, but I don't do boards anymore. I just can't. Never say never, but man, thinking back on time in my life when I was on five, six, seven boards, you are now. I'm on three. That's what makes it work. It's like you pick very few companies and you go very deep. I mean, it's a very acquired way of doing it.

1:00:51Three is a manageable number, but even so like to do it right, you really got to engage. Yep. All right. What's next on the agenda? Relatedly, show growth. Show growth. It was so fun talking to Ben Thompson about this and his growth trajectory and curve. We pretty amazingly doubled our audience again this year.

1:01:17which has basically been true every year since we started seven years ago. This is always one of these things where if a startup is only doubling year over year in the first two or three years, it's like, okay, well, it's not going to be a breakout company. But if you can actually keep doubling for seven, eight, nine years, the numbers get pretty big. And so it feels very different transitioning from 2020 to today, sort of looking over a two year span, where even from last year to today, so we hit over a quarter million subscribers, which was 62,000 just 24 months ago. So that's the crazy, like that's the place where this sort of like out years of compounding is starting to show up for us. And the thing that's been crazy to me is there still have been some

1:02:11kind of step change like the Amazon episode was that was a step change for us for sure yeah I think the previous highest episode to Amazon had gotten just over a hundred thousand downloads and that one got a hundred and seventy thousand yeah and the first 90 days and the first 90 days and when we say a quarter million that is the unique number of people who listen to it's basically our monthly active listener account across all platforms who engage with at least one episode because Not all of you listen to every episode, sadly. The cool thing about podcasts and for us and you know, that it is an open ecosystem that's not controlled by algorithms, it does mean growth takes longer and it's harder and you have to do these step change functions, but then people become subscribers and they stick around. Amazon was a huge step change moment for us in terms of growth.

1:03:08Many of those new people subscribed right and so thus the subsequent episodes benchmark and Ron like the two benchmark episodes were both way higher than the hundred thousand that we were at before Amazon And then and Ron now is charting to look pretty similar to Amazon early or only five or six days in but like it is Which would be livable how I don't think is a reflection on you know the benchmark episodes I think we're great. We're such a cool experience, but It's more niche chronological capital firm versus like Amazon everybody cares about Amazon. Yes. Yes. Exactly. There's also this chronological thing where like every three or four episodes is our biggest episode ever and not necessarily because the content is more interesting but because when you find a podcast you like you stick around. So there is this sort of like cumulative effect where we drop a new episode if we had dropped this in 2016.

1:03:59it would have gotten a couple thousand listens, but because it's dropped on top of the entire base of people who are subscribed to Acquired, it's really meaningful. And I thought Ben brought up this really interesting point where he sort of asserted podcasts are great because they're really sticky, but they're terrible to grow. He basically said, I don't know how you would grow a podcast if you didn't also have a writing platform that was easily forwardable because podcasts are really hard to share. And that sort of explains the reason why no matter how hard we try, we've really never been able to more than double in any year because podcasts are sort of an inherently unsurable mechanism. So unless there's something that happens like you get feed dropped for free in an NPR podcast that brings you 100,000 new listeners right away or we had Nvidia part

1:04:52to I think got a large promotion on Spotify. And that brought us a bunch of new listeners that were subscribing to us this year. Yeah, they have. We really only started kind of more directly working with January with the Taylor Swift episode, which is why was our stat 98% of the people who listen on Spotify today were not listening. Found us this year. Last year. Yeah. And we should be clear about what I mean by directly working with Spotify. We're not owned by Spotify, there's no economic relationship or ad sales or like like we've been saying we do all that in house that's our business model, but they assign you a creator manager. There's people that we know that we can contact relationships at Spotify in a way that we don't have with any of the other platforms. I mean, I think technically we have a manager at Apple, like I don't know who that person is. We don't have someone's email addresses, but they're not assigned there. Yeah. Spotify has done a great job of.

1:05:45At least from my perspective you know engaging with us as creators and I think starting good balance between like Podcasting is an open ecosystem with all the benefits and trade-offs that we've just been talking about Yep, but you could also like do it better than Apple Apple has been such a terrible stored high of this industry. You've brought this up before terrible in one respect, but like They're the reason why we have a direct connection with the listeners. Yeah, it's them indicating the creation of a platform in an intermediary is the reason why we have this really sticky relationship with listeners. Such a good point, such a good point. Their internal strategy failure and execution too. Like, I just feel like if you're an Apple shareholder, you should be really angry at management about how they have mismanaged.

1:06:35Like, fumbled the ball on podcasting. But delighted in many other ways. But delighted in another way. You know, for us, yeah, I agree. Especially the type of business we have. Yeah. And acquired is really enabled by the lack of algorithmic stranglehold on this medium. So it does sort of beg this interesting question that Ben throughout, which is, how do you grow a podcast when you don't have a secondary shareable component? And I think we have tried to do this with the acquired website.

1:07:05Each episode has a page that page has a bunch of show notes that page has a transcript. There's a reason to consume it on that page. You can sign up via email on that page. You can join the Slack from that page. The Slack now has almost 15,000 members. Our preferred way to share an episode is the page because we sort of feel that that URL is like a Nice way to package it up for someone and say listen to this unfortunately our episodes are four hours long so It doesn't come with a deep link like it would be really nice if as you scroll down the page and as you move through the transcript or as you watch the video or as you consume the audio that was always Updating the URL so that if any given point you copy the URL. It's like this is exactly like overcast has the share time that you can do it on YouTube to yeah, but like

1:08:00Those are inherently flawed because you don't know if someone likes to use that platform. So like when I share that overcast link with people, I'm like, are they going to be like, what is this podcast player that I don't use? Why are you sharing it to me in this weird way? There's a bunch of reasons that contribute to podcast being sort of inherently unsherable. Our episodes being really long make them especially hard to share sort of moments insights. And there's been a zillion and sort of like clip apps over the years. But I do think actually, you know, we have not.

1:08:29Grown in the same way that like a viral product grows but we've had really nice growth as a podcast and I think actually growth happens because we infiltrate a network particularly a company network and then we get shared within the company like in a company Slack or teams or just friend networks within within a company. Yeah, it's kind of interesting like I'm not particularly interested in additional growth. Yeah Like, especially at this point. Yeah. I mean, it's great. It would be nice. And I think Ben was kind of making this same point in the episode we did with him. For all of us, additional growth is great, but not by trading off any of the things that we really care about that drive our business. Right. Or changing the audience mix. I was wildly relieved this year from the... How many people took the survey? 1,500 people or so that answered the survey. Which, thank you, if you did. Yeah, thank you.

1:09:24that the audience mixed a pretty much the same from two and a half years ago, the last time we ran a survey, which was awesome. I was like, wow, we managed to get 200,000 more of basically the same type of person, and it was heartening talking to Ben because it sounded like he thought that he had bumped up against the market, that he was starting to saturate and then sort of accelerated through it again. And so it feels like Ben.

1:09:49I think he probably has close to a million people that consumestrategory.com for free in a given year. And so if he doesn't feel like he's bumping up against the Tam and we have a reasonably overlapping audience, that feels like pretty good proxy for us to say, well, we could probably at least 4x from here, but I don't really have like a strong desire to do. I think it would make our lives generally worse if we did. I think it would be neutral.

1:10:17I mean, in some ways it would be better in some ways it would be worse, but if we were a video podcast, it would make it worse because we're right at the limit right now. We're like, we have all the benefits of when we drop an episode, it really matters to the people that we care about it, mattering to, and we don't get recognized on the street. The episode with Ben was about Stratkery, obviously. So we didn't really talk about this, but I kept thinking about him wanting to explore more and we should do here. Our business model is very different than Ben's.

1:10:46Growth, again, like, nice to have for us comes with some set of trade-offs. There's some downsides to it, some upsides. Neutral to, you know, I don't know, you could argue, maybe you think it's slightly negative to growth, maybe I think it's slightly positive. Like, it's in the neutral zone. But because of our business model and everything we were talking about, like the deepening of the engagement with the right people and the right sponsors, that's what drives...

1:11:13our excitement about the business and the business itself in a way that for Ben it's different because he actually does need to grow his business to keep growing the number of consumers because some percentage of them will convert to paying right you're saying for his revenue to grow he must grow the number of subscribers which means if subscribers are always a fraction a fixed fraction of the set of people are reading anything on Sir Tech or he must grow the top line whereas what you're saying for us is The revenue is not necessarily directly connected to audience size. Right. It's connected, but it's not directly connected. And as we evolve the business model more, I mean, this is a good place to talk about Vanta. That's a good point. One of our couple biggest sponsors and partners on the show this year.

1:12:01we and kind of through kindergarten and YouTube invested almost $10 million in the company this year. So like, that's a very- Mostly kindergarten, very small. Yes, very, very small. And most of that capital came from the acquired audience community, like the LP capital that back that SPV came in very large part from the acquired audience. And so that's not like growing the audience.

1:12:29Of course, increases the number of super high-quality people. And we care about growing the high-quality people in the audience and the bigger that size is great, but it's not directly tied to the business. And that was a transformational moment for us. I'm actually an amazing company, but that's a whole new...

1:12:46It was at least an insight. You could sort of test the hypothesis of like, because you and I have invested small amounts personally in our sponsors before, because we get insight into their business from getting to work directly with CEOs on those, and we're like, and to see what our audience resonates with with the products. Right. That's a really interesting thing. We should invest a little bit, but you're inside of, okay, this is a growth round. This is a company that's doing really well. I can sort of see how well they're doing both from getting to like, Look at the investment pitch, but also the reaction of our community to the sponsorship. Right. Could I invest a meaningful amount of capital in this? How could we put together a meaningful amount of capital? And do I, as a host of acquired, have relationships with the owners of capital, the stewards of capital, who want to invest in this opportunity? It was a really interesting way for you to sort of like prove out that hypothesis a little bit.

1:13:36Yeah, there is no strategic plan for kindergarten adventures. Period. It is very much like a... You all may be shocked that there's no strategic plan. But it's not like we did an offsite like we didn't do a end of your special for kindergarten like we're doing now for a acquired and discuss our strategy and say, you know, I think we should find an opportunity to do a $10 million SPV this year. But no, it came naturally from everything we're talking about here on a quiet. Yep. And just to put a finer point on the...

1:14:05business being not entirely connected to the audience size there were years where the audience would 2x but revenue would 10x just because it was a wildly under monetized asset but there were several years where revenue was zero yeah this was not a business that's true but you know who's to say that we necessarily have the business model optimized do I think that there should be more sponsorships and episodes know in fact I think we should probably be a little bit tighter on them and shorter on them and find more ways to make the sponsorship segments even more differentiated where we're not just giving the high level pitch on the company but doing more vouch insurance 101 type stuff where we can sort of like Find a key insight with the company and story tell that together. I think leaning into The strategic differentiation that we have on and I know that sounds like jargon but like

1:14:59We are, I think the only ones who work this closely with our sponsors. So what does that enable us to do that no other podcast could do? I think that's like the lens that I want to keep taking to it. And so to your point, the business is probably still unoptimized and it will probably grow directionally with audience, but can grow in other ways too. All right, listeners.

1:15:22Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. 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.

1:15:49Exactly. 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. Yep. AI Control Tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system, every AI agent visible and secure in one place.

1:16:16And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise. The workflows, governance, approval, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security. ServiceNow already runs more than 100.

1:16:35billion workflows annually, and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates. And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all?

1:16:58So 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, David was next on the year in review agenda. Next we got to talk about next year, 2023, looking ahead. Okay, first question for us, what episodes, topics, guests are we thinking about, which would be what's on the docket?

1:17:26Hang on, let me bust out my list. One that feels like an obvious one we should do at some point next year is open AI. Yeah, absolutely. We talked about doing it at various points this year, and especially like fitting in with the whole Nvidia, the series, but now it feels like we got to do it. We almost did it 12 months ago. Like I remember last year over the holidays doing some prep work for it. And that I think would have been kind of disastrous because we would have done it.

1:17:53I think way undersold like we wouldn't have been would have been way too early. Yeah. If we do end up doing it and do it, you know, relatively early next year. It's sort of ironic that the next Elon company that will cover after our old SpaceX episode is open AI. We didn't do anything on Twitter. It is crazy. God, he's got his fingers and everything.

1:18:16The Twitter is just, oh my gosh, there's just so much drama. There's so much drama. I don't like having just drama on a choir. That is true. I think part of the reason why we haven't done a Twitter episode since we interviewed Dick Costello in early 2021 maybe. Yeah, way before all this is like the story feels less like a business story and more like a TMZ story, which isn't our cup of tea. Yes.

1:18:41I don't ever want to feel like TMZ. I won't say that, like, I'm not interested in reading all the TMZ drama about it. It's totally fascinating. And, you know, if you can run a company on 80% less people than you were running it before and nothing goes terribly wrong, that's super interesting for the world to know. Now, of course, it does look like all sorts of things are growing wrong, but to the extent that they can turn it around and the business can be generating as much revenue as it was before on a massively lower cost basis, I'm very curious to know what the second order effects of that are. But the story that we know so far is T.M.C. Discuss. But yeah, like that's not the, we don't actually know that, yeah. Right. And everything that is being discussed is, yeah, it's just drama. Okay, so open AI, that's a good candidate. Yep. I was perusing the world's richest people list the other day. And some for acquired ideas or just that's what you do in every set. You know. The lots of the names are very familiar to us and acquired listeners.

1:19:39The one that is not is Bernard Arno, which one of the world's top five wealthiest people and not in tech, not in finance, but in luxury brands. I think it'd be pretty interesting to go down the path of like really deeply unpacking brand power and brand power over generations and the concept of a house of brands and what brands mean to people and why you can know that it's the exact same leather that you're buying elsewhere, but because it has this mark on it, you pay 500 times more for it. I would love to figure out what the right starting place is for luxury and do that on acquired. Yeah. The point, the reason to do it is what you said they under like brand. Right. How did these amazing durable brands get built? Yeah. I continue to want to do epic health care. I think they're like a huge

1:20:32force in the American economy. And I don't know if that episode will be a hero's journey or a villain, but is it an Enron or a Nvidia? I suspect without having done any research, I suspect more of an Enron. Yeah, they're probably not a fraud, but just a open question, whether it's good for the world. Yes, creates some value. Certainly captures a lot of it. Does it capture more than it creates open question? One thing I definitely want to do more of and figure out how it's going to involve his sessions. So we did the session with Jason Calicanas. Yep. That was really fun and felt like a really cool way to do something orthogonal to the core acquired approach but still really fun. Maybe sessions or a format like sessions ends up being

1:21:24what we do with Protagonists of Stories after we've done an episode just us on them. Yeah. Maybe we keep doing it with interesting people, maybe both. But that felt like a really cool, different type of interview than just a standard podcast interview. I feel like if sessions evolves into talking to people who do fascinating work about things that aren't necessarily their work, That's a pretty interesting use of the format. That's something that I want to explore because that statement can kind of take two directions and I think either would make for an interesting session's reason for existence. One is talking to the CEO of Fortune 500 company about things that aren't their company. They probably think about a lot of really interesting stuff and have a bunch of really interesting ideas and they probably can't say a lot of the most interesting thoughts they have about their company because they're publicly traded and there's

1:22:20All sorts of SEC stuff involved, but there's other conversations we have with them. Yeah, but they're people and like they have feelings and emotions and those aren't the reasons people typically are trying to get them to come on podcasts. Yeah, that's one thing actually that my wife Jenny pointed out to me after listening to the session we did with Jason and she was like, it was interesting. It was good. You guys could have gone way harder on diving into the emotional side of Jason's lived experience and his feelings and like especially when he mentioned, you know, Tony Shea's passing and how that really impacted him and led to him deciding to make some changes in how he approached life and his work for the next few years. She was like, that was an opportunity that you just let fall on the floor. You could have gone way deeper into that. Yeah. I think that's a great point. The other thing that I was sort of implying in that statement is we could have people on almost as a prop.

1:23:19Like, we're not interviewing them, but they're instead a piece of whatever discussion you and I wanted to have anyway. Like, you know, what if we had Eric Vischria just like hanging out next to you on the couch and we weren't talking about benchmark, but Eric was just like chiming in on a lot of this stuff and sharing his ideas. He's not the subject of the interview. He's a piece of the show. He's a part of the conversation. He's a foil to bounce ideas off of. I would for sure do that with Eric. That would be amazing and a great privilege. You know who would be truly the most interesting person to have as playing that role would be Peter Fenn. Oh yeah. You're right. Sorry, I was the Peter's as the example. Oh my gosh. The whole benchmarker is amazing. That dinner was amazing. There were a few things that Peter said when we were talking about the principal program and Blake, one of us, a camera foosmeer you asked to know.

1:24:13So why do you guys have a principle? You know, it didn't like a junior investment person when clearly like your whole ethos is you don't do that. And Peter's response, well, it was like a, because forced consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, which is a famous quote from, I can't remember where it's from now, it's from some. And it just like it like left out of it. It just like that was the immediate response that left out of him. And it's like, wow, I never thought that that would show a bonafide guest. Yeah. Yeah, that was great.

1:24:43Peter's one of a kind. He is one of a kind. Other episodes that I want to do, I want to do into it. I think that's a far more interesting and successful business than people realize. In the vein of consumer brands, we got to do Nike at some point. Oh yeah. I want to continue going back in time from Walmart and do Sears. Nike's one that I really want to do. I know he said we don't do lies. I actually don't think this should be a live show. I want to go on site. I want to go to Oregon.

1:25:12Go to Eugene. Get a workout in. But I feel like there's like, I don't know, I may just be curious to see I've never been, but the facility's there and like because it's such an athletic, like a physical thing, I want to go see what it's like. That's a good point. Yeah, it feels like something we need to experience more physically. I don't know, you could make that argument for a lot of them, like TSMC. The episode would have been much better if you and I got to witness chips being fabbed and feel what it was like to be in a bunny suit.

1:25:41The little bit I know I ended mostly from the last dance, but like one of the key key moments in Nike's history is the signing of the deal with Michael Jordan. Yeah, but like what did it feel like when Michael came out to the campus? Yeah, there's feeling the history there has to be a big thing. All right, so before we get to our extended carve-outs in sort of reviewing 2020 to you and I both had big 2022's. So that's probably worth, uh, worth chatting about a little bit. We did, I love this is, uh, we didn't intended this way. This is becoming much like the benchmark dinner that we recorded everything. I was like, before dinner, extreme want to eat dinner before we got a lot of good comments of like, why are they just sitting there with cheese and on their plates? Like, aren't they going to eat, aren't they going to eat real food and like we did afterwards? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like that would not make for good video content. Clean, clean, clean, clean, yeah. Uh, audio or video.

1:26:35We are going to you after we finish recording here. We're gonna go out to celebrate the holiday dinner for acquired for the two of us, but I feel like this is like the prerecord. This is the recording version. So at which we would definitely talk about our personal lives. Well, you had probably the biggest event that you had. Yes. I got married. It was wonderful. I was here. It was great. You were here. It was really cool because in some ways, I thought it wasn't going to feel different afterwards. I think a lot of people in our generations were like, date for a long time and live together and feel like life partners, but there's something totally different about being married. Having the ring on every day as a reminder, and the sense of longevity associated with it is really cool, and a really totally different psychological place than I thought. Well, and you go through this process and project together on the wedding. From the moment you get engaged until the wedding,

1:27:31Is this like, you know, you're like a butterfly going into like a caterpillar going into cocoon. It's like a transformational period. Yes. And I say like I was here. You did the wedding at your house right after moving like. I didn't want to play the 2022 venue game. Yeah. Two times more people got married this year. It was just like, you're not getting a venue. And if you are, you're getting a terrible date and you're paying a lot of money for it, and you're not going to get any of the things that you want out of it. That was probably half of CPI inflation right there.

1:28:00David was one of my groom's men. You and I have some great pictures together. Thank you for coming up and being a part of it. You did an amazing job given that, you know, you two planned it all yourself. You were the venue. It was at your house. Like it was, uh, we're literally sitting where the DJ was like DJing onto the dance floor out there. It's so fun going to weddings after having been married because you're like, Oh, God, I just get to enjoy all of the the fruits of the couple's labor.

1:28:30Yeah, it really is when people say it's like the happiest day of your life. No doubt the happiest day of my life. And I think the like energy and love and just overwhelming force that you feel from your closest friends and family when you're like walking down the aisle and you feel all that energy on you is crazy and it's an indescribable moment really. Yeah, it was super cool. That was I think the biggest personal life event plus for you this year.

1:28:57Let's see. We took a vacation to Italy. I'd never been to Italy before. That was like a absolutely spectacular time. Rome, Cinquotera, Florence, Copri, God, the island of Copri's incredible. I've never been. It's just wonderful. Have you been to Greece? I've not. Okay. I was curious how it compares to Greece. I think it's similar to some of the sort of Greece islands. This one has some cool history associated with it because at one point the Roman Emperor was sort of fleeing. And I don't know if it was paranoia or is legitimate, but just thought that everyone in Rome was coming to try to kill him. And so he fled to Capri and ruled from the island where he could sort of see in every direction to sort of fortify his remote work before remote work. Yeah, that's like one of my pre-digital nomad. Yes. That's a cool thing about Italy and...

1:29:55every European country compared to here, but I feel like especially Italy, the sense of history, especially for us to your history buffs, like, you know, you walk around Rome or Florence, and Rome is special with Florence, and its own right is still ancient history compared to America, but like Rome, like, you're talking about the ancient Roman times. And you, I mean, actually walking around the forum is wild because you're like literally looking at pillars that are 3,000 years old, at least 2,000 years old. Yeah. So.

1:30:24We're thinking about where to go on a honeymoon and probably early to mid next year. And I want to go back to Italy. This is a magical place. This is the problem as you get older and you have cool travel experiences. You're like, I want to go back to those places, but you also want to experience new places in the world. I will die without seeing most of the world, no matter how much I travel. And so should I try and put a dent in?

1:30:49that as much as possible, or should I say, there's just one spot in Hawaii that I really like, and so every single year I'm going back there. Clearly the answer is both. Maybe you had some of the plan for carve outs, but I feel like I'm decently up on the latest tech and gadgets and stuff, but you're like, you made some interesting decisions about your potential technology. Oh, we're gonna do an Apple, Apple Your Owners. Yeah, can we do an Apple Your Own review for Ben? Yeah, let's do it. So got the iPad Mini for acquired.

1:31:19We both are rocking the mini because it's very, very good for on stage. As we did live stuff, it's just game. This is the perfect device for live events and any kind of where you're not sitting in front of a computer monitor. Yeah. Easy to hold it in one hand. I really want the big iPad Pro, but I basically know use for it. Like this is actually the device that suits my use case.

1:31:41I think a little over a year ago, I got the MacBook Pro 16 inch, which is- Which has the lovely fire. This is our fire, which is the finest computer I've ever owned. The display is amazing. Yes, the display is unbelievable. I mean, everything about this thing is nuts. I do have envy. The M2 MacBook Air, I think, is sexy. So thin, so light. A lot of the capability of this one, but when I'm traveling, And because what we do is so everything intensive, it's bandwidth intensive, it's storage intensive, that's gear intensive. You just need like a desktop computer with you all the time. We're transferring hundreds of gigabytes back and forth after we record for all the multiple camera videos. I want the good webcam that comes on this computer in case we have to do a remote episode.

1:32:31I want the screen space because I'm also a venture capitalist and I'm doing spreadsheety things. I have a hard time with a travel computer. So if they made an 18 inch computer and they made it three pounds heavier, I might buy that one too. When you're doing purely personal travel, do you not bring this and just bring the iPad? No, absolutely. You're still bringing that. Yeah, they're purely personal travel. What are you talking about? There's not a single day where I'm on personal vacation where I'm not.

1:32:58also doing something. That's true. That's true. Even for yours truly. I mean, we're small business owners. There are things every single day where there's no one else that can do it and so either it doesn't happen or we have to do it. And that's on top of like me being a professional venture capitalist where like there's real obligations that come with and that you don't necessarily need the heaviest computer you can find for but like You need to be pretty responsive on a lot of things. And sometimes if you're. That's true. Like if you need to, um, you need real computer. We need to make edits to an episode or something. I need to post that audition. Yeah. Yeah. And I could do that on a smaller computer and maybe this is totally overkill. Like when you got here today, I had left to go to a board meeting and then a lunch and then meet someone for coffee for an nonprofit that I'm working with. And none of those things required a computer, but I.

1:33:53brought my backpack with my computer in it to all three, even though I knew I would never take it out. Because if something came up, I would need to be able to like get away for five minutes, do something on my computer, put it back in my bag, and then go back to whatever I was doing. I love it. You just never know. You never know. And I'm probably overly paranoid on that, but it's like the one time you get burned, changes your behavior forever. Okay, so opposite of this, I'm where I thought you were gonna start. So I really like to take pictures.

1:34:19I'm a very big nerd about like understanding all the physics and as much of the black box that Apple will let you understand of the computational photography engine. But I also have like, I think it's tendonosis. Some things up with my wrists. They fatigue super easily and I get basically tennis elbow. It's probably from having my computer with me all the time and like constantly. It's having me a bunch of computer. Yeah.

1:34:41So I have the iPhone 13 Mini. It's the correctly sized phone. It's the correct weight for a phone. It's the correct sort of reachability for a phone, which I know Apple used to name a feature, which is a stupid feature. And so I was like, gosh, there's no iPhone 14 Mini. I would pay literally anything. I don't know if that is exactly right, but like four or five X, the current iPhone prices for an iPhone 14 Pro Mini. Yeah. Like Apple.

1:35:08If there's a test window and a lab somewhere, please send it to me. I will again, like no price sensitivity around it. But I was like, I should try the new phone and just like play with the cameras and stuff. I got it. As you would suspect, it was too big. It was too heavy. I waited 13 days until the 14 day return deadline, returned it, went back to my 13 mini. And I'm thinking about buying another 13 mini because like at some point the batteries can die on this one. And if they never make another mini again, like want to have one.

1:35:35like on impulse storage. It's just like my Nike's upstairs that I've got stacked in the closet. It is the perfect size phone. So I have, I have a 12 mini right now. I didn't upgrade to the third. I probably should have. I'm very right now before they run out. Well, I realized I finally need to upgrade the 12 mini and the biggest driving factor for me as a new parent was the camera. And so I actually went, I haven't gotten it yet. It's because it's on. But I went to the 14 pro. Wow. Which I have never had any of the pro.

1:36:04iPhone's like I care about technology a lot but I was just never compelled by I don't care them didn't used to not care that much about photography yeah and so it's never that compelled by the pro versions and I really cared about size but now with a little one if I was a parent I think I would buy the 14 pro also well it's a double whammy when I cared most about size was for portability when out and about. Which that part of your life has gone away. That part of my life is particularly like exercising. Now my exercise is primarily walking a stroller, which has a lot of carrying capacity. And I didn't care that much about photo quality. I took very few photos before. I mean, and now just like some of the best advice, I love talking to people who have older kids and being like.

1:36:51because you just realized time just slips away. Like we got a kid and almost universally, I wish I'd taken more photos, I especially wish I'd taken more videos throughout the end. So like, ah, all right, so the pro I have on order, but I'm conflicted about it. Like I'm really going to miss the form factor. You are. You're really going to miss it. Yeah. It's like not going to fit in your pocket. Yeah. It's going to be. It's going to be a transition. And also the camera mountain on this one is so large that the phone actually rocks when you're leaving it on a table and typing. It's fascinating to see the set of trade-offs. Apple's been okay with in the name of getting the very best photos that they can out of this thing. As a parent now, I'm like, I see the business reason for doing that. Right. Okay, so keep going on the line up because you've got another important large device. Yeah, so I bought the Apple Watch. You're having trouble lifting your arm back. It's really heavy. I just want to say the Apple Watch 14, the Apple Watch Ultra.

1:37:47which I'm sure next year this is going to be the Apple Watch Ultra 2 or the Apple Watch 2 Ultra. I'm curious how they'll name it. Apple Watch Ultra 2nd Generation, I imagine. I know what they'll do. Anyway, this thing is actually super light relative to how large it is. And you've made the joke about lifting your arm. I like don't feel it anymore. And I think that happens with all watches over time. You sort of like get used to the weight. But one of the big things that sold me on it is because I thought the reason I was going to hate it was the weight. I like put it on and I'm like, this, I think it's the titanium remarkably light for how large it is. It's big.

1:38:16for sure it's big. It's beautiful though. This screen is super clear. You can look at pictures on it. It's really bright. It's 2,000 nits, so it has a flashlight button because it functions as a fairly effective flashlight. The battery lasts almost three days, which is totally game-changing. I think I've tracked every single night of sleep for four or five years now. That's a use case I really care about. I haven't done anything extreme in it yet. I've climbed Mount St. Helens. You got this great.

1:38:44Photo behind me. Yeah, that's Iceland that I did with my dad. He used to do this big backpacking trip every summer. And I have not adventured in this thing yet mostly because I've just been doing less adventuring over the last year or two. But I totally expect to use it for these stated purposes. But it's been awesome for me, even not for the ultra type purposes that it's advertised for. The photo viewing I would imagine is a really, I would never think I want to view photos on my wrist, but like actually, I think they could use it. There's a good number of times where I'm like, okay, cool. I saw it clearly enough now where I don't need to also pull it up on my phone. When you're getting photos in a text chat. Yes, exactly. The other interesting thing is the screen is just large enough where it kind of feels like a small phone and less like a big watch. And I think it's the edge-to-edge display, the fact that they have the raised bezel around it.

1:39:37It has an on-screen keyboard that you can use the finger swiping on and so I literally can just like swipe on the keyboard to respond to text messages. So I can't decide if that's like really nerdy and like Casio mid 80s and like that's not actually useful but I've probably done it 30 or 40 times since I've gotten it to respond to text messages real quick and that's been pretty nice. The one thing I wish they'd added that to me would be a...

1:40:04Maybe that killer feature, but like a really, really nice to have would be some sort of biometric authentication in the watch. Because what I don't like is when I, well, maybe with the ultra, I wouldn't have to take it off to charge it as much, but when I put my watch back on after charging it, then I got it into my pincode every time, which you know, like, first one. And less. I don't understand why they can't put a touch ID.

1:40:25Sensor, I mean, I know the trend save as much space as possible. Right. But like, no, that's good. You're right. There's no biometric on it. But I think a feature that it does have is if you put it on and then you take out your phone before you need to type in the passcode on your watch and you face ID on your phone, your watch is auto unlocked. Yes, that is true. But I've found that to be kind of janky. I have found that to be kind of janky to you. Yeah. You can't, like, Reliably trust that it's gonna work totally agree. I'm like why do I still need to type in a passcode? I swear I shouldn't need a passcode right now and One of the things I found maybe I need a different watch band to solve the problem, but toddlers really like to grab shiny things with screens and especially ones that are on your wrist while you're changing diapers And so the amount of times a day that I enter my passcode on my watch is a lot larger than it used to be shall we say?

1:41:14All right, so let's go with your Apple, we'll go reverse order for you. Give me your Apple lineup and then let's get into your year interview. Ooh, okay. So I'm still rocking the 2020 original OG M1 MacBook Air, which is so much more performant machines out there like this now, but like, I still have tons of headlight. I'm not sure you'd notice the performance difference. Yeah, and like the leap forward that that M1 chip was was just incredible. I mean, performance.

1:41:44battery life price point. Yeah, it's crazy. I don't know what these 2020 original M1 MacBook Airs are going for on like eBay or Craigslist or whatnot right now. Yep. Whatever they're going for like I bet $500 is maybe less the amount of performance and longevity that you can get for that dollar amount. Yeah, it's crazy. You're right. If it's only $500, it's way better than Let's say you have like a 2018 or 2019 Intel machine. It's so worth it to trade up to even an old M1 because they're just not that different after three years. Yep. Totally. I can't imagine anything that a normal human would need to do on a computer that the M1 MacBook can't handle. Yep. Okay. So keeping that. Okay. Okay. So there's that. We talked about my phone. I'm currently rocking the 12 mini.

1:42:41very mixed emotions about transitioning to the 14 Pro. Yep. And I'm rocking the original SE Apple Watch. I forgot they made a watch SE. They have two now. There's a new SE2. I don't know exactly what the SE2 has feature set. I'm very tempted by the ultra for all the reasons we discussed. I highly recommend it. My decision for going with the SE originally was it didn't have the always on screen and I...

1:43:10actively did not want the always on screen. How do you find you? Do you find it distracts you at all? I like it now. Especially with the wayfinder watch face that comes on the ultra when it's off. You still see the watch hands, but everything else it's a black background. And then when you turn it, it's got sort of the white face comes on. So I like it. Nice. I did not like the always on display on the phone when I had the 14 pro. It was like loud. It felt like the phone didn't.

1:43:37It's like really on. Yeah, but on the on the watch it yeah, it's subtle. It's not like noticeable. I will say to I was in a coffee meeting today where I did need to call an Uber so that I could get back here so that we could record and like it was quite nice being able to like have the watch at a super What's the social like thing about checking your watch and your watching it like being able to see the time when I was looking at it at like 170 degree angle and I used to definitely be the person that's jerking my wrist or tapping it to try to see the time. So that's like... That is one. Yeah, I'll do like, I'll put my hands under the table and then tap it like serif dishesley. Yeah. And then on the iPad side, the iPad mini, I had the one really only negative experience besides the amount of work that we and Pitchbook put into the arena show was my old iPad got stolen after the arena show. Criminal. Literally, criminal.

1:44:34I could still see it on the map on the find my devices. It was somewhere up north gate or somewhere like north of Seattle. It's like one of these things you're like, just because I know where that is, it does not mean I should go there and get out. Definitely not. Oh man. But the mini, I really like the mini. It's not nearly as good for watching and consuming content. I have an old iPad that we keep in the kitchen for when I'm doing the dishes and stuff. And that, you have promotion on, right? The minis don't have a promotion display, the 120 Hertz.

1:45:03Yeah. Oh, no, I've got like an old old iPad though. It only has promotion. I feel like you used to have one with a promotion display. You know what? Maybe it does. I think it's an original, the first iPad Pro that they made in 2017. Yeah, that one did. Okay. You're right. It does have promotion. It does have promotion. Because that I actually missed when I was downgrading from the new iPhone down to the 13 mini because the non pro iPhones have never had promotion. Right. That's the goes up to 120 Hertz refresh rate on the screen. Yeah. Yeah. Butter. The mini is great though for Event, it's also really good. I've stopped. I use a Kindle Oasis that I use for reading fiction at home, but when I travel, I no longer bring the Kindle Oasis and I use this as a Kindle. It's great for that. I find, like for outdoor stuff, you can't beat the Kindle. I also find that night reading in bed, the iPad, even in the lightest setting is kind of too bright. That's true. When going to the beach,

1:46:00I'll still bring the Kindle. I wouldn't feel good bringing this to a beach. Yeah, that's a good point because they're not waterproof. Unlike iPhones, iPads are not waterproof. The device that's still in my lineup that blows my mind is in 2012 as a college graduation gift. My uncle got me the $70 Kindle. And that is still the Kindle that I use and take on vacation. It's such a good product. They're like industrial strength. Yeah. And super light. Like I looked at getting the Oasis, but it's actually heavier than my 2012 model. The nice thing about the Oasis is it's got the page turn buttons, which I like. And the paper white is a really nice. Yep. I'm envious of the paper white, for sure. My Kindle is actually worthless in bed because you need to light it with a... Right. Jenny and I got the Oasis for that very reason. Jenny's a night owl and I'm a morning person. And Jenny's a huge reader. She has a PhD in literature.

1:46:57I mean, cuter or two, but she puts me to shame. She would stay up reading it, and I'd be with the light on. And in fact, I'm just like, I'm buying you this, turn the light on. It's for you and for me. It's for you, but mostly for me. All right, so your 2022 personal year. Oh, 2022 personal year. Well, this was the year of adjusting to life as a parent. Our daughter was born towards the end of 2021. So that was like, most of the year was preparing and then like, The first couple months are like, I mean, of course we're thinking back now on the FTX interview when we when we had Sam on. Was that your first interview back? It was in there. I mean, I was still in the fog of war. Like it was, I know we released the interview. Oh, we switched it with the Michael of its episode. I think Michael, we interviewed Michael first. Right. That's right. That's right. But all of that, she was no more than two months old.

1:47:55probably less. Like, it's such a fog. Yeah, there's first few months. But then this year is being Jenny went back to work and she works in person. She works at San Francisco Ballet. Like it's in person physical art form. They put on physical performances. She needs to be in the office every day and weekends and nights. So yeah, this year was just about figuring out life like with a lot of changes. But we met early in college. So we were like, Babies, you know, and then we were you were together for 17 years before having a kid 16 years 16 years yeah 16 years before having a kid which were wonderful 16 years and I'm glad we had all that time together pre-baby But we hadn't had to like really renegotiate our relationship in a long time, so it was like oh wow flexing old muscles again Yeah, I bet but the last time was when we got married and like We didn't expect it, you know, it's pretty hearing you talk about them

1:48:47things are different when you get married. Like they really are. All your life systems have to change. Your notion of self is only about one person, but after you're married, your notion of self includes another person whose emotions you can't actually feel. So like when you're like looking out for yourself, you have to account for things that you currently don't know, which I think is this like very interesting phenomenon. Yeah.

1:49:16And that is so true about getting rid of it. But then having a kid, I think that's like the biggest, well, so many huge things. But one is like, you know, have this other being like, when you get married, yes, you have to account for the other person and you're like, in it together, you're no longer just you. Right. But then you're checking on your decisions. You're like, you know, it's like a responsible doll. Hopefully. You know, can keep themselves alive. Can like, if we're going late recording an acquired episode, she'll be fine. Right. Right.

1:49:44When you have a kid, that's great. Yeah, like you can't like 24-7 somebody needs to have as like a pretty foreground in their mental processes. Like I need the like algorithm of how I'm behaving needs to have at the forefront keep this kid alive and happy. Yeah. And they're incapable of doing so their own and you know, you love this person.

1:50:11So incredibly much in just really like unfathomable ways and so it's like Yeah, how do you like then integrate that back with your life? So that was it's been a lot of figuring that out for us hmm And now like we're now at such a good age not that it's still difficult She's a little over a year old now 14 months like it's so fun like it's always been fun. I've always I've not been I think a lot of parents and especially a lot of dads They don't love their kids immediately. And that's a very normal thing of like, you know, what mom's to have this, but like kid pops out and you're like, whoa, you know what? But there's no instant love. I had the instant love, like instant, like very, very powerful. And I still feel that, but like also like as they become more of a person, like she's walking now, she's talking like a little bit like, but she's like so clearly has a personality and like every day and like,

1:51:02Oh wow, like you are even more of a person than you were yesterday and like it's so fun. And it's like also a lot easier than the just like the early days are so physically demanding. Like on everybody, especially moms, but like any caregiver. So one of these things that like you can describe it, but having not experienced it, I don't actually know what it's like. It's like, oh cool. There's no way. Cool words, David. Yeah, right. Exactly. Highly highly recommended, but in due time. Yeah. Other stuff for you this year, personally.

1:51:31It's sort of crazy looking back on it, like so much changes when you parent, but we were both intentional about this, but also I think it just naturally happened because it is important in part of our lives. We didn't actually travel any less, like we didn't travel in the early early months, but we did, what do we do? Eight or nine trips with the baby in 2022, including going to Portugal. We made that a family trip when we went for breakpoint, which like, Actually, it was great. Like, really hard. Very different. It seemed very hard. I got to say from the outside. It was hard. It was hard. But I'm really glad we did it. I'm really glad we did it. Then the other big thing for us this year, we'd spent a lot of time over the last couple of years thinking about where we wanted to live in general and then in anticipation of having a baby and then after having the baby, Jenny and I went around the axle so many times about California. California and probably the Bay Area, Jenny's family's there and we...

1:52:30genuinely really love it there. But do we move to the suburbs? Where do we move? Do we stay in the city? We were in the city before and we ultimately decided to stay in the city, to stay in the same neighborhood. We moved houses, but plan for now is we're just like gonna stay for the perpetuity in the city and which some people I think are like, that's crazy. Why would you live in San Francisco? Period. Especially post-pandemic.

1:52:55Why would you raise kids in San Francisco? It's actually great. For us, it's been amazing. We can walk, we don't have to drive, we don't have to get in the car. There's so much great stuff. She really enjoys it. She's a city kid. After breakpoint, we went out in the countryside in Portugal for a couple of days. The baby was so bored. Really? Get me back to Lisbon. It's actually been really great for us staying in the city.

1:53:24We'll see as she gets older, but that's the plan. That's great. 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. Yep.

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1:54:30Carvettes? Carvettes, let's do it. All right, should we start with books? Let's do it. All right, I can't remember if I recommended this one because I read it over the holidays last year. I think it might have been my first carve out of 2022. Project Hail Mary. Oh, yeah. I think I read it on your recommendation. That's right. Ken Vouch, very good. I think it's the best fiction I've ever read. Definitely the best sci-fi I've ever read. I think it's the best fiction I've ever read. The premise arrives at you in real time as you read it, so I don't want to give away the premise.

1:54:59Unless otherwise stated, this is a spoiler-free car vats. The coolest thing about Project Hail Mary is how it is basically all in our universe. There's no big leap. Like in Star Trek, you have to like take this leap of like, well, there's warp drive. And you don't really understand how it works. And that's fine. And now that we accept this black box, now we can go to other stuff. There's not like an accepted black box.

1:55:25in Project Hail Mary. There's just like all the known rules of physics that we know about. And then you go from there. It's hard sci-fi. I think it's in the term, right? Is that what they call it? Yeah, where it's like everything is like laws of physics, expressions for everything. Right, so that was super cool. Another book that I finished about two months ago that I thought was exceptional and every single person who listens to a choir should read it. I think it expands even broader than this audience, but this audience in particular would...

1:55:52eat it up called the psychology of money. We got to talk to Morgan recently. That was really fun. And when we hopped on that call with him it was like I was two thirds through the book. And so it was really fun like getting to talk about some of the concepts with him while I was in real time digesting them. But he's unbelievably pithy. I need to read the book. I haven't read it. I need to read it and yes I agree. Total class act. I suspect it's a really good one to read now.

1:56:18post 2020 and 2021 bubble when like everything was crazy. It would have been great to read it during 2020. But it includes, I think I've made it a carve out before the Morgan's essay, How All This Happened. And every chapter of Psychology of Money is one of his essays. And so if you liked, if you read How All This Happened, which is an amazing path of world war two through today through the American economy and a lot of politics and why different things happened and how everything led to the next thing the psychology of money is awesome because it incorporates all of that sort of like factual history with just really good perspectives and some citations of research on what actually makes people happy and what investment strategies work when your goal is happiness.

1:57:11I certainly don't account for enough of that in my own financial planning. Yeah. Mori makes a very strong argument in the book to basically put as much into S&P 500 index funds when you're as young as you possibly can and just never sell anything. It's like the most boring style of investing possible that will probably be whatever you do. Yep. I gotta pick that up and read it. That'll be good over the holidays book. Anything else you got in books?

1:57:40I do actually, I'm halfway through it. And I was tempted to not talk about it because I want to use it for a future carve out. But it's already so good. And this is another one where like listeners of the show will especially eat this up. The power law by Sebastian Maloney. Is it worth reading even if you're already steeped in the industry? Yes. You and I have done research on 250 companies and all these venture funds and talk to the people that started a lot of these venture funds and Sebastian knows more. It just goes deeper. I mean, you just talked about these investments that like We think we've talked about the best investments of all time. There are more. And like he cites them all numerically. He cites returns on early venture capital funds. He takes you all the way through product venture capital. Like, I mean, there's George Dorio and then Arthur Rock. And he talks about like how all those partnerships sort of led to the next ones and how certain structures were bad. And then the invention of the private limited partnership fixed all these problems. You're going to love it. Okay. Might find that under the tree.

1:58:37That's all I got for books. Oh, that's all I got. All right. My books, I've got two acquired books that I can't believe we did both of these episodes this year. And we completely whiffed on this very obvious sort of like pun and fun moment. You know what I don't like whiff? I know. I'm embarrassed by this. Like mostly for me, this is like an ultimate like David Rosenthal, like dad joke moment.

1:59:03My top two acquired books and they genuinely are also my top two acquired books for the year. Made in Japan and made in America. I made that joke. Did you? Totally made that joke. I can't believe I've got that. I swear I did. Did you? I'll have to go back through the transcripts. Or at least like observed that in some capacity. Maybe it was a tweet. Maybe I just have dad brain. But isn't that crazy that they're both named that? And they're both so good. Yeah. I agree. I highly recommend non-acquired books that I read this year.

1:59:33I think I did this as a car about the Godfather series, the books, Mario Puzzo's books. They are so good. As good or better than the movies in the movies are, in my opinion, some of the best of all time. And then the other one is Masters of Doom. I don't know if I talked about that on the show. We've thought about doing an id episode. And then Lex did that huge interview with Carmack, so felt less urgent for us to do it.

1:59:57Really well written book and then the author of Masters of Doom David Kushner just did a Follow-up piece I think in vanity fair of a follow-up interview Did you see I think ties in this to you with Stevie case who's the CRO Advanta and Stevie is a prominent figure in the book and she was the first the first or one of the first professional female gamers ended up working Did she work at id? She may have worked briefly at id, but then she joined Romero at his next company after Romero and Carmack broke up. Crazy. Anyway, crazy story. And then she went on, she came out to Silicon Valley, ended up working at Twilio, and now is the CRO at Vanta. Tell me about this. I'm not sure I read the article, but I remember hearing, yeah. Yeah. So good. Both the book and the follow up article. Great. So Stevie's story is amazing. So that's my article, Carvout 2, which is our next category.

2:00:52Mine was, how all this happened? Yeah, perfect. Podcasts? Podcasts. I already mentioned Resonant Arc, my favorite video game podcast. Got it all in. Resonant Arc and all in are like my go-to must-listen every episode. Yep. Two shout outs, though, that I discovered this year and have become friends, David Centera, and the Founders Podcast. Yep. Of course.

2:01:14wonderful show and we've become close with David and like when you hear David on the show, he is exactly that save way in real life too. Like it's so great. He's come out to California, we've hung out a bunch, love him. The other one, I've been a huge MKBHD fan on YouTube as I know. You have been to the Waveform podcast that they do is great. I've started like regularly listening. I really like it.

2:01:37our buddy David Emel, who's on the MKBHC team. He's regularly on a co-host on that. They rotate through the team on the waveform podcast. And it's in the same vein as kind of the Verge podcast. It's all about the products of tech, but it's really well done. I've become an increasingly large fan of the Verge. I don't know how I sort of slept on it. In my head, it was like, oh, another one of these end gadget gizmodo type things. But that was wrong. It is my This is embarrassing to say new favorite publication. Neelye is so smart and I'll basically go listen and Neelye talk wherever he is. That is a way for sure get me to go listen to an episode of whatever the podcast is. So I sort of like first and over COVID I think was like I'll listen to Neelye in any situation. And then like with the verge redesign I sort of I don't think I realize how unbelievably thoughtful the team there is and how strategic they are.

2:02:36They're one of the few publications that thinks about the fact that they're a business too, and thinks about the way to marry their business with their editorial, and how they can uniquely show up in the world based on what they do differently than other people. And I think the new verge redesign is genius. I don't know if it'll work or not, but I love the attempt. They're also one of the few news sites in the world that actually gets a ton of direct traffic. So that's a huge thing that plays to their advantage that then they can do interesting things with. There's people that come to them to solve a problem in their life or to fill a need. It's so true. I mean, even me, I mean, you're way deeper in the product side, as a fan of the product side of tech than I am, but anytime there's a new Apple device or there's a couple places I will go directly. I will go to MKBHD and all the various properties that he and they have now, and I'll go to the merch. And I might consume some other stuff that comes to me on social media, but I'll directly go to those two properties.

2:03:34And I feel like my impression of Neil is that like he is world class on the product side of tech, but he also gets the business side. Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure, which is super rare. Super rare. And like his his like legal background, he gets all the like interesting IP copyright stuff that's going on in technology. I just feel like he's There's that Scott Adams, Aferism, you don't want to be top 1% at anything. You want to be top 25% at the right three things and figure out how to marry them together. I feel like that's Eli. I'll also say I think the verge has been the thing that's surprisingly the most helpful for me for acquired research this year. I did a ton of Qualcomm research on the verge because they've done so much reporting on Qualcomm over the years.

2:04:21So big Verge fan. I know that's we don't have a publication. It's like a category. But they've got podcasts. Yeah, they don't have podcasts. So back to podcasts. I already said the episode of Tim Ferriss with Jerry Seinfeld from a couple of years ago. So good. The episode of Huberman Lab. What alcohol does to your body? Oh, yeah. Dude, it's scary, scary stuff. And like moderation is also bad. There's no like, well, I only had one drink this week and that's devastating to your body versus zero and this is certainly not medical advice but go listen to that podcast it's just unbelievable the research studies that he's citing where it's just so much more bad for you in every way than I ever thought and I thought it was bad for you yeah you were already starting to drink less yeah yeah I mean we both open tonight with cocktails but um well you gotta live yeah this is a celebratory of it that's right that's right my last podcast recommendation is smearless any episode

2:05:17So fun. It's just so fun to go live in their world for an episode. Even like that one for a while, right? The last six months or so. Yeah, I feel like you've been making on that. All right. Music. Music. I don't think I discovered any new music this year. I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift Midnight's. I did a ton of prep for our wedding, creating a bunch of different playlists for like different segments of the day. Well, that's right. You put together all the playlists yourself too, right? Yeah. I mean, the DJ.

2:05:45did all the work that a great DJ does, but I sent him very highly manicured playlist that took several months to put together with a lot of opinion in it. So, you know, here's the dance, here's the cocktail hour, here's dinner, here's... So I was looking at my likes, Spotify, you're in review, and I was like, all this is like my favorite songs from over the course of my life and my wife's life, and that's where most of my music listening went this year. I'll also say most of my audio time, like even when I'm in the gym now, is...

2:06:13podcasts or audible books mostly in service of acquired research. I just listen to way less music than I used to. I feel like you do a large part of your acquired book research via audiobooks, right? Almost exclusively. Wow. It was painful for me to read the whole Qualcomm book, but the only way it was available. Yeah. Whereas I've gone the total opposite direction. I pretty much only do physical paper copies for acquired research. I admire your attention span.

2:06:42I'm interested to try, I do have an Apple pencil for, all right, Padminis. And I wish I could write with the Apple pencil directly on the board. Yeah, I bought that and I thought it'd be so cool and I never used it. I agree, I agree. It's just like, I don't know if it's a DRM thing or like a font size thing that changes the page, but like really just want to be able to write with the Apple pencil directly on any book the same way I do on a physical book and for whatever reason the tech gods just have new.

2:07:12Let me do that. I have new music. Oh yeah? Shockingly. You would not think that me knowing me and as a new parent would discover new music this year. But the baby loves Olivia Rodrigo. Ah! Less so now, but when she was like, I don't know, between ages like two months and six months, they'll go through moments. Right.

2:07:40Olivia Rodrigo almost without fail turn on driver's license like She would just be a wrapped in attention and like immediately calm down amazing. We're like I guess we have a teenager like So I listen to a lot of Olivia Rodrigo this year, huh, and she's very talented. Huh, very impressive. All right, I got out to to my Spotify TV and movies. Yes Andor was my carve out very easily everything here because I did none. I rewatched Black Panther recently. It was just as good. Great. But that's all I got. So Andor, I saw the new Top Gun that was unbelievably fun. Like put that on a big 4K TV with some surround sound and just enjoy. Jenny and I watched that on a laptop. Yeah. We got to go. I think they're re-releasing it in theaters for the release. Yeah. We can go upstairs after this and watch it's a 75 inch like.

2:08:36It's a very good experience. I watched everything everywhere all at once, the movie, and that movie gives you all the feels. That is a great, great movie. Great one to watch together, if you're looking for something to watch with your partner, weird movie, kind of a sci-fi, kind of a rom-com. It's like a family dynamics movie, sad parts, happy parts, and visually stunning.

2:09:04So, and great acting. I don't even really want to talk about what it's about because it's one of these that I just don't want to spoil it, but basically everyone will like this movie. Great. Good holiday movie. Great holiday movie. I haven't watched season one yet because it felt like I just wanted to catch up as soon as possible because everyone was talking about it. I'm now up to date on White Lotus season two. That is a wild show. It's basically the premise is like you get, I don't know, eight to ten.

2:09:31Rich people that show up at this beautiful hotel the white lotus in Sicily and there are in three or four different groups so the plot sort of follows different groups But the thing that runs through everyone is like everyone is extremely set in life very wealthy and like deeply unhappy and then crazy problematic stuff ensues from there and it's visually stunning and the acting is great and You're simultaneously very mad at all these characters for doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing, but you also totally understand the characters are so well-established that you understand based on their flaws as humans, why they're falling into these traps. Are they real people? Is it reality or is it fiction? No, fiction. Yeah, just very well written fiction. And the first one was in Hawaii. So I think it's almost a completely different cast, but like sort of same general premise in Italy. So each season is a different set of... I think that's what they're doing. Yeah.

2:10:26Lastly, I watched a lot of TV this year. The vow on Netflix is great like trash TV to leave on in the background. It is two seasons long and it is a documentary about a cult and unbelievably, the cult leader is so wrapped up, I mean, maybe not unbelievably for a cult leader in self glorification that like. That sounds very believable for a cult leader. 15, 20 years ago, he started recruiting filmmakers to join the cult so they would shoot all this footage so there's all this like very very high production value footage over the entire life of the cult all the way through the trial which was only a few years ago is the nexium cult and like dude went to prison for life and the bunch of other people went to prison because like they did terrible cult stuff and the whole thing is just like perfectly documented the entire time because I think it was like part of the

2:11:25a rest that like all this document, all these stuff became a little footage, yeah. So maybe they maybe Netflix bought it, I don't know, but either way, very, very good background TV. Great. Apps. The only new app that I started using this year that had any meaningful impact was our baby monitor app. I just like everything's justified.

2:11:48What about you? Do you have any? I have a few apps since moving houses that are sort of tied to like IoT type things. The only one that's not that I really like that I started using this year is Flighty, which is Ryan Jones. He's an indie developer. He previously did Weatherline, which was my favorite weather app. And Flighty is sort of like the modern trippet. The best way to explain it is like unbelievably good UI to tell you real-time information about your flight.

2:12:15tied into like every available API with every available airline. So you get information from flighty before the airline, notifies you of it, and often before it even displays on gates when you're in the airport. Okay. I got to push before I get this for flying back in a couple days. Dude, when when you get like a 30 second heads up on a change before the massive people are behind you, it's very. That's huge.

2:12:40Very valid. That is an edge. That's alpha. That's alpha right there. Although now we just gave it to everybody. I think he was even featured in the Apple Keynote. So we're not giving anybody any distribution here that they didn't otherwise already earn. But Ryan's just amazing indie developer. It's been really fun to like watch. I haven't met him or anything, but watch the success of his apps over the years. And this is just a fantastic experience. Be fun to do.

2:13:05Maybe it'd be an LP show or two, but we should have some indie developers. Yeah. Like those are interesting business stories. Totally. All right, products. I have one that actually comes with an app. Great. Mine is the Robo Rock S7 Max. Robo Rock S7 Max, can I guess, is this a Robo vacuum? Yes. It's the competitor to Rumba.

2:13:29And I think it's a Xiaomi company. You know how Xiaomi owns large steaks and a whole bunch of companies that they manufacture for? I think it's that. But it's just like, I had a room, but I actually returned it to get the Robo Rock instead. And the S7 Max is the worst product name of all time, but it's the souped up self emptying. Also has a lightweight mop built in. It's the first time I've actually had a robot where you actually can say, This thing is robust enough that it's just gonna make my life easier without failing or getting stuck or needing some kind of intervention. It just does its job. What's preventing me from ever seriously considering robot vacuums is stairs. So you just need one for each floor? Exactly. Yeah. Or you can move it, but yeah. I went for two robot rocks. Given the Xiaomi involvement or potential, I would imagine you could probably

2:14:24Get two for less than the cost of a- No, they're very expensive. Oh, they're very expensive. Oh, wow. I was expecting that too. No, they're premium priced. Oh, interesting. But great. Fantastic product. Yeah. I guess that is the solution you just do. One for each floor. Yep. Yeah. Interesting. Or get used to carrying it. It's fine. I'm going to guess. You're going to walk upstairs to like go to bed, see me as well, just like carry this thing under your arm and set it down and then start it in the morning or something. It's great. I never thought about that. Just save you a thousand bucks right there.

2:14:55All right, that's all you got. That's all you got. Okay, let's see, I'm intentionally gonna limit a parenting product to just one. I could really do a whole other show. That's a point you should curious. Yeah, like this is maybe. Maybe you could do a list. Yeah, let's just want this. Yeah, maybe, well, I mean, not all, but it's a subset too. So my just one, this is a super pro tip that never would have thought of, but diaper bags are like.

2:15:23Big. You know, brilliant idea. I wish I could take credit for this, but I can't. Put the key essentials of a diaper bag, which are diapers, wipes, changing pad in a pouch. You know, you can get like a nice like pouch or whatever, like printed or like, you know, I don't know where ours is from. And then you could just move that pouch into whatever bag or you could either carry the pouch yourself or put it in your backpack or put it in whatever, like rather than having a dedicated diaper bag, keep the core essentials of the diaper bag.

2:15:54in a pouch that you can then put in other things. God, dude, this show is getting worse than ours. Listeners, if you're still listening, I'm sorry. We'll be back next year with better content. Oh, boy. But by the way, at some point, if I'm ever apparent, I'm totally going to be like, yeah, for all this. I'll just do that. I'll make a list for you. Good. On the universal product appeal, a couple of quick ones. One.

2:16:23I went back actually to the Apple keyboard. I had a mechanical keyboard, which I really liked, but I went back to the Apple one for Touch ID built in. It's so convenient. It is really nice. It's so convenient. I have the Microsoft ergonomics sculpt 2 and I love it, but I think I typed my password two dozen times a day more than I would if I just had my... I seriously doubt they'll do this, but actually they could sell for a hundred bucks and make a ton of margins. A little standalone Touch ID, dongle.

2:16:53I believe that's true. Yeah, totally. A bunch of Elgato gear, including the sound panel. Their sound panels are so good, so easy to put up. I don't know if listeners noticed from... By the way, we have four Elgato lights in this room right now. An Elgato Stream Deck. David and I use the Elgato preamps, the Wave XLR. And then also the wide camera that somehow turned off again is mounted on the Elgato.

2:17:21Boom arm, where my mic is normally on my desk. Yep, it makes such good stuff. The sound panels in particular are really, really good and really they have frames around them and then sticky stuff to mount. So I could literally, I've put up a, I don't know, probably 12 of them in total took less than an hour. Oh, we also use the cam link. The cam link for the way that we pipe our cameras into our computer as webcams. Yep. Huge, huge Elgato fans.

2:17:50Nice. All right, and then you added the agenda a final new carve out section of places. Places here. Coppery. That is mine. That you already. Yeah. Disgust. Yes. Any for you? No, we didn't really go anywhere new despite all our travels. We've been to Portugal and Lisbon before. We went back to Santa Barbara. We try and go there every year, at least once a year. That's the beach for us. Santa Barbara's.

2:18:19Just amazing, lovely, lovely play one of the loveliest places on Earth and very accessible from California. We got to find more, we did the EA episode down there. We got to find more acquired related reasons to get triplets down there. He's got to figure it out. That's right. Well, with that listeners, I think we will see you in 2023. We would love to see you in the Slack. We'll be hanging out there over the holidays.

2:18:44If you want to listen to the LP show, we actually just recorded two other great LP shows that'll be coming out soon. You can join and get those two weeks early at acquired.fm slash LP or you can search acquired LP show in any podcast player and get access to them two weeks after LP's get them. Anything else, David? One very, very important last thing. A big thank you to all of you. We talked about it a lot on this episode. We truly have the best audience.

2:19:14in the world, the best community in the world. Ben and I just pinter ourselves like literally on a weekly, if not daily basis, that we get to do this, that I get to do this as a living. And it's all thanks to you all. We just get so much joy out of putting this show together. We can talk for hours just about the year and all the fun. Whether that has interesting to other people or events to be seen, but Every business should know their source of power, and their source of differentiation, and ours is all of you. So thank you so much for being on the journey with us. It's been an amazing seven years, and here's to seven more. And do you? Happy holidays. Happy holidays.