Acquired - NeXT (Live show at the GeekWire Summit)

0:00All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired. LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. 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?

0:30So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review where you.

0:49drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lugora'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.

1:09And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over 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.

2:01Plenty 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. I feel very antiquated my use of text at it now that.

2:27That's right. I still hate next product. It is. It's unbelievable. There's so much still there. There's a chance. From the next. Totally. The screenshot icon finally changed it. It was that big camera until Yosemite. And it finally changed that little thing. That was like the last asset remaining. Crazy. I know.

2:57Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Send me down. Say it straight. Another story. Hello, Geekwire. Hey, Geekwire. Awesome. Well, welcome to episode 23 of acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. On today's episode, we will be covering a cornerstone of technology today.

3:27apples 1997 acquisition of next so Yeah, I think this is one that we've been talking about doing for a very long time The original tagline of our show was technology acquisitions that actually went well and Kind of we've deviated from that a little bit and we've we've gotten into talking about all sorts of acquisitions recent ones once we think didn't go well But this one is super super true to our roots so excited to be here and talk about it today. Yeah, this is gonna be a blast and big big. Thank you to Geekwire. Yeah, I'm talking everybody for posting us here. This is our first live show. So we're streaming on Facebook. You guys will get to see how the sausage is made. Thanks for sticking with us. And we will post it on iTunes and our website acquired.fm once we edit it. With that, we'll dive in. So next, Lake Ben was saying, I've been looking forward to doing this one for a long time as both...

4:26devoted Apple users, both of us. This is really the story of how, you know, what I love about it is it's kind of like this is the hero story of Steve Jobs, you know. He had initial success, the initial arc, and then he was off in the wilderness and next for 10 years, then he comes back to Apple.

4:45And here we are today where Apple is the most valuable company in the world. How did this happen? And truly like a drama, right? I mean, you can't script this stuff. They've literally made three movies about it because of how kind of crazy this journey is. So we want to focus just today on kind of the part picking up and when Steve started next and how that went integrating that into Apple. Yeah. So we start our journey in 1984, a very good year. It was the year I was born.

5:15And Steve Jobs is still at Apple for the first time. The company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak. And what's going on at this time is the personal computer has happened driven by Apple and the Macintosh, Apple's public company, very valuable. But computing has entered a new wave, and we're in the era of the workstation at this point. And I had to do a bunch of Googling and Wikipedia, because I really had no clue what a workstation was. I think there were a bunch of these in college in the computer lab somewhere and they were made by Sun and I didn't really know what they did. This is dating us a little bit. Yeah, dating us a little bit. So workstations, it turns out, are really just personal computers on steroids for the time. Now they're like pitifully...

6:03pitifully underpowered. But what kind of defined a workstation was a, quote, 3M computer. And a 3M computer had one megabyte of memory, megabyte of memory, had a megapixel display that could display one megapixel's worth of content. And it had a megaflops of computing performance. That is, floating point operations per second bin. And sometimes people added a fourth M to the definition of a workstation. And that was a mega penny, which was how much these things cost, which was about $10,000 a pop. So these are not personal computers. They're mostly used at universities for research, for scientific research, for technical research, large corporations use them. But these aren't the like the server mainframes of the old day. These are single use computers.

6:56that are networks that people can log into them, but one user uses them at a time. Gotcha. So that's what's going on. And Apple is kind of in a quandary because this is the computing error of the workstation, but Apple has no offer.

7:09in the workstation. They are a PC company, and just down the street from them, Sun Microsystems has been started from Stanford, Stanford University Network, hence the Sun Microsystems. And Sun is the darling of technology. They are the fastest growing company in America in the 1980s. They go from founding to $1 billion a revenue in six years. So Steve's still at Apple.

7:35All this is going on. He's no longer the CEO. John Skelly is the CEO. And to put this in context around times that that computers have been released. This is right after the Macintosh is released, right? A couple years after the Macintosh is released. So this is this 1984 and Steve gets put in charge of a new division at Apple called the super micro division. And that combines the Macintosh and the Lisa and his remit is to basically start Apple's entry into this workstation market. And so he's working on a top secret project codenamed the Big Mac. And the goal, what he's trying to do is to take a workstation-powered computer, a 3M, and get rid of the 4M and sell it for $500. He wants to put workstation-esque power into personal computers, make them affordable to everybody.

8:30students and individuals. So that's what he's working on. And it's not unfortunately going so well. So it turns out with the technology at the time it's really hard to build these workstation computers with off-the-shelf components and cheaper components. And so Steve isn't doing too good a job. And Scully and the board are starting to lose faith in him. So in May of 1985, Scully, the CEO, and Arthur Rock, who is a venture capitalist on the board. Be wary of venture capitalists. Says the VC. Says the venture capitalists. So they decide that enough is enough, and they're going to remove Steve from being in charge of this new division, the super micro division, and they're basically going to just have him be a figurehead for the company.

9:23They sideline him. He actually, his office gets moved across the street to essentially an empty building. And he's still at Apple at this point. He's still the chairman of Apple, but he has no day-to-day responsibilities. And so he refers to this as kind of being offered. He calls it being in Siberia. And so for the summer of 1985, he's just hanging out. He has nothing to do. But he's thinking about this problem.

9:50And this goes on for the summer. And an interesting thing happens. So over the summer, while Steve's hanging out, he ends up meeting this guy named Paul Berg. And Paul is a Nobel laureate in chemistry. He's a professor at Stanford in the chemistry department. And he's won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. And he complains to Steve. And he says, hey, we've got these workstations.

10:17sun workstations at Stanford. But they're really, really expensive. And I'm trying to teach all these undergrads about DNA and recombinant DNA. And there's no way they can't get enough time on the workstations to use them to model DNA computationally.

10:34Wet labs are even more expensive than that. They can't work with it. Actually, and so they're having a really hard time learning how to do this. And so this just like doubly strikes the fire and Steve. He can't handle this. He sees this problem. And so he says, we need to get these powerful computers into the hands of students to be able to learn and build new things. And we need to get the price point down. But we can't compromise on the power.

11:00Yep. So by the end of the summer, he's been thinking about this. He decides to resign from Apple and start a new company to pursue this vision of finally getting the workstation affordable and merging it with the personal computer. Now, of course, Apple's business had been selling into education, not necessarily into these universities that needed these for super horsepower reasons, right? Of doing a lot of really complex stuff, but- So the students selling to computer labs for- undergrad and high school students to use. That was a big part of their business. It feels a little competitive. So, here's what happens. September 13th, Jobs Resigns.

11:40And there have been books written about this, and movies, all of which tell slightly different stories. So here's his best we can figure out what happens. Jobs resigns on September 13th. And he tells the board he's going to start a new computer company. And he's going to take several people from the super micro division with him. Those people are Joanna Hoffman. If you saw the Michael Fassbender movie, this is Scarlett Johansson. I think plays her. She's one of the stars in the movie.

12:08Bud Tribble, George Crow, Rich Page, Susan Barnes, Susan Carey, and Donald Lewin. So he takes these employees with him, and Apple Board says, OK, two weeks later they sue jobs for two things. One, stealing trade secrets from Apple, and employees.

12:28and two, a breach of fiduciary duty as the chairman and board member of Apple, basically resigning and then going and starting a new computer company. So absolutely wasting no time. I mean for anyone who's been in these environments a lot of times they drag on and on and on and years later get a cease and desist or things like that. This is immediate action. Immediate action. Like, company Steve founded two weeks later.

12:50BOOM lawsuit that scully hits him with and this is one of the things that just totally destroys his relationship with scully Because it's unclear that it was not good before then but like then he's Susan and so Steve Steve gives this interview in Newsweek, which is awesome. We'll link to this in the show notes This is right after he leaves Apple and he says and he's asked about this and he says It's hard to think that a two billion dollar company with 4,300 plus people couldn't compete with six people in Blue Jeans. Thus is the classic startup story, right? Classic startup story. So they eventually, they pretty quickly settled the case. And the terms of the settlement, they settled in January 1986, are that next to the new company, Steve is starting, can not compete with Apple. And Apple gets to review any products that next makes and releases before, next releases them. And if they determine them to be competitive, then they can sue again.

13:47So Steve's okay with this, but he's just had enough. In February, he sells all of his Apple stock except one share so that he can still go to shareholder meetings. Such a Steve move. So they get underway and Steve's just had this wild experience at Apple and much ink has been spilled on this. But he decides he really wants to do things his own way this time.

14:15not going to be beholden to an external CEO, not going to be beholden to a board. So, what does he do? He spends $100,000 right off the bat. Well, first off, he puts $7 million of his own money into the company to get it started. And he spends $100,000 right off the bat to get a really famous graphic designer and brand consultant to Paul Rand.

14:38to come up with the name and the branding and the logo of this company and Paul delivers a 100 page brochure naming the company next all capital except the lowercase E which stands for education and coming up with the logo which is it at an exact 28 degree angle and an exact 28 degree angle so the next logo is rotated it precisely 28 degrees now for a lot of people who have commissioned logo work and kind of brand books before. A lot of times there's an iterative process where you get options and you review and you pick from one of the three things like that. This was, you know, Paul Rand goes away into a cave, comes back with one fully formed idea and says here you go. 100 pages on this one idea. And the 100K was delivered out front. Yeah. It's a, so, but Steve loves it. He goes, so the second thing he does,

15:30He rents office space and you know like they're like a brand new startup like you're gonna get a scrappy like you know co-working space like no not for Steve he finds the most expensive real estate in Palo Alto rents a pretty big office with a staircase in it designed by I am pay the famous architect and and and and That's their first office. Later on, they moved to Redwood City into a whole complex designed by IMP. And they're like, Ames chairs everywhere and like $10,000 leather sofas and whatnot. So that's what he does on the setting up the company. He also decides that he has some new management theories that he wants to test out. So the company is not a company. It's a community. And there are members of the community. There aren't employees. This sounds very like Valve, before Valve.

16:20And so, everybody can see each other's salary in the company. There's complete transparency. But that's not that interesting, because there are only two salaries in the company. If you joined before 1986, you made $75,000 a year. If you joined after 1986, you made $50,000 a year. That's it, everybody. It's really interesting to think about this in the context of Apple's secrecy now. This was jobs sort of laying out, okay, we're gonna give...

16:47this a chance. We're gonna let everybody know everything about, you know, other employees within the company, about all the secrets of the company. And we're gonna see if making them kind of community members allows us to not be so tight with our secrecy. And kind of at the point that that was violated, which of course it's gonna happen when you start to hit scale. That's when you switch modes and said, nope, you know, the rest of the time, you know, when we go back to Apple, this is gonna be an entirely top secret, very controlled top down organization.

17:16What's super did he talks a little bit about this like he'd just come from this political ouster at Apple and he's trying to avoid politics And that's like the whole genesis of why he does it this way and obviously it doesn't really work But interesting that you know, he does this experiment and for a long time next did eventually change this and had different salaries and everything, but he's super idealistic at the get go And so the only question is kind of like, well what is next actually gonna do? And it's this big secret, like everybody wants to know what is next doing, like they know they're targeting education, and they want to make powerful computers, but like what is it exactly? And around this time, Ross Perot of Ross Perot fame failed presidential candidate. Here's about...

18:06What Steve's up to and he decides he wants to get involved and Ross actually Some people know this but not all he's actually a technology entrepreneur himself. He founded two technology companies that were acquired one by GM and one by one by Dell and eventually And so he invests $20 million in next at a $125 million valuation. Remember, this is 1986-87. So, you know, thinking about with inflation and the fact that they're pre-product. Like, this is a company with a hundred and fifty- There's not- They have a brand book. They have a BS, exactly. Exactly. Very expensive logo. They have an expensive logo and Steve Jobs. Nothing else. So, $20 million in 1987 dollars. So, they start getting to figure out, like, what they're going to do. And so, they're obviously, you know, the plan is they're just going to build the Big Mac.

18:57that jobs is working on at Apple. So they rent out a big factory in Fremont, California that can produce up to 150,000 machines per year. And they start getting to work. And as they start working on the computer, you know, they're building the hardware, they're building the software. They have to revise the pricing a little bit. So they announce in in 1987, that they're gonna launch, and it's gonna launch at that $3,000 price point. So not $500, but also not $10,000, that workstations were normally at that time. So somewhat compelling, okay. As usual, they announced the launch, they announced it's gonna happen, I believe they announced it was gonna happen in 1987, it gets delayed.

19:44And it gets delayed a long time. So the company basically goes dark. And then late 1988, they emerge again with a big gala event called the Next Introduction. Now, it's interesting to kind of look at the hallmarks of Apple and looking back in this sort of DNA of where they came from.

20:04During the next days, they're announcing price points, they're missing them. They're announcing ship dates, they're missing them. That's not a thing that Modern Apple does. They were very clearly scarred by this and kind of came out of it and said, that's not what we're going to be. Yeah, so nowadays, Apple announces an event like one week before the actual event. This is the announced years before they actually launched anything. But the next gala, I mean, that sounds a lot like the Modern Apple keynote. Yes, and this was...

20:31One of the, you know, when you look at the time, so this is one of the scenes in the Michael Fazbender movie. This is the middle scene. This keynote, when jobs launches the next computer, finally. Everybody's been waiting for this. It's at the Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and it's pretty incredible.

20:53They have a violinist, one of the key features of the next machine, which by the way is a one-foot cube of all black magnesium. Of course it is. Most computers at the time look super ugly, right? And they're huge, and this is also huge, but it is solid black magnesium. And they have it on stage, and they bring a violinist from the symphony up. And one of the key features, like I was saying, is It has digital signal processing and it can play real audio for one of the first times on a computer instead of kind of the standard 8 bit a lot of times you turn on a computer You'd hear a beep it would make Nintendo like noises very different than today. This is real audio and so the violinist plays a duet with the next computer on stage and this is

21:42The whole gala, everybody who attended it, got a framed poster commemorating this monumental event, the launch of Next Computer. Talk about a lack of product market fit. For those of us in startups today, they're thinking, what's that killer use case that justifies user actually shelling up for my product? That's a very expensive tech demo. Very expensive. And also famously, also chronicled in the movie, nobody from Apple is invited to this.

22:113,000 people attend the event, not a single person from Apple is allowed in the doors. That's just vengeful. So they announce the actual device, and it's super cool. We'll link to this in the show notes. Somebody a couple of years ago got their hands on one of these things on the initial next computer and did an unboxing of it. It's on YouTube. It's amazing. Put it in the show notes. It's in the show notes. So what is this thing? They announced the specs.

22:3925 megahertz, Mulderola 68-030, CPU, whatever that means. 25 megahertz was a lot at the time, has configurable from 8 megabytes up to 64 megabytes of RAM. So like the benchmark for workstations was one megabyte of RAM. They have 8 to 64, so...

22:59Knock it out the park on that 17 inch mega pixel grayscale display 10 base two ethernet. This is a networked computer And that's key right this this is something that the Macintosh was not set up to do I mean that when they conceived of the Mac early on it was it was standalone I mean the ethernet wasn't a thing We we were not living in a world with the internet or even precursors to the internet yet and and this is a kind of brand new idea that this computer and this operating system is going to be built to network from the ground. The internet doesn't exist. In fact, the internet gets invented on this computer, which will come to in a second. The worldwide web. The worldwide web, yes. But the worldwide web did not exist. And one of the features that they're most proud of about this machine is it has a 256 megabyte magneto-optical drive, which instead of a hard drive, they think this is better technology.

23:53except the problem is, they put that in, so there's no hard drive, there's no floppy drive. It's just this big cassette thing you put in there that's magnetic or somehow. That's the only storage on the computer. So you can't transfer anything off the computer because the hard drive that the operating system runs on is the thing that you plug in and out of the computer. And Java's like, well, but you're networks here on the Ethernet, so that's how you transfer files. But nobody...

24:20else's on the network, so it's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Right, it's like you know where you want to be skating, you know where the puck is going, but there's no ice between you and them. Yeah, this is like removing the headphone jack in 1988. They realize pretty quickly after launch that's a bad idea and they ship a new version with an actual hard drive and a floppy disk to drive, so they fix that. But more importantly, and here's where we start to get into like what is the real value of next?

24:49the software and the operating system that they create at next over these couple of years is just incredible. I mean, there's that moment from when Steve Jobs launches the iPhone in 2007 in the super famous presentation. He says it's five years ahead of anything the competition is doing on the market. This was...

25:09At least five years ahead, next step is the operating system that jobs that next made for the computer. It's at least five if not a decade ahead of anything else anyone's doing. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year, an audit or a static PDF, then everyone would not, and you're done.

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26:42Trust 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 a thousand dollars off Vanta at Vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for a thousand dollars off and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

27:08So it's worth talking about kind of the technology innovations that came out of Next, or at least that next put into production for the first time. A lot of it dates back to when Steve Jobs was at Apple and got the preview from Xerox Park of what the research technologies were that they'd been working on. And famously, it's the graphical user interface in the mouse. This is when Steve Jobs raids Xerox Park in Palo Alto and steals the graphical user interface and that becomes the Mac.

27:37That's what Ben's referring to. Yeah, and so, you know, the math gets that, right? For the first time, there's Bill Gates famously kind of freaked out at the demo watching the drawing on screen where the Mac is moving the mouse and it's moving around slowly. And Steve's saying, you know, yes, we got this from Xerox Park. What they didn't kind of pull from that was...

27:59Object-oriented programming so in traditional programming like you look at the way that that DOS was running there's routines and it's moving It's it's kind of advancing linearly. There's branching to subroutines and for the first time with object-oriented programming You have the ability for software to model real-world objects And so you know this dog has properties and has methods you can call on those properties like bark or like back up or like walk forward and This was only really embodied in small talk at the time, which was not a very popular language. Well, at the end, to not dive too deep into the technical details here, but essentially, this is all modern software, right now written this way. Right. And the idea of creating software technology using...

28:50all the non-object on your programming, you just wouldn't do it. That'd be trying to drive across country in a golf cart. You wouldn't do it. So the kind of breakthrough here is by...

29:03using Objective-C, which is incredible how long that has actually lived, licensed at next, and then eventually became kind of the core toolset that's used to now develop Mac applications and iOS applications. Swift is being adopted, but Objective-C is still the bread and butter of Apple software development. It enabled next to move much faster than traditional programming methods, and for people to build much more complex programs that they would otherwise.

29:33great quote. So when he finally comes back to Apple after the acquisition a couple years later, the first time he's on stage at the first Apple keynote right after Apple acquires next. This is January 97. January 97. He says, I want to tell you guys a story. Steve's famous for telling a story and he says, you know, when I went, this is a quote from him. When I went to Xerox Park in 1979 and saw the original genesis of the graphical user interface there, They actually showed me three things. And I was so blinded by the first that I didn't hang around to find out about the other two. And it took me years to rediscover them. The first, of course, was the graphical user interface. But the other two things.

30:11The second was object-oriented programming. They had it all running back in 1979. And the third was networking. They had several hundred altos. Altos was the concept computer that Xerox Park had designed. They had several hundred altos hooked up to network printing, network file service, email, all in 1979. If I'd only stayed there for another 20 minutes, he's making a joke.

30:36But he realizes, and this kind of goes back to what he was trying to do with the Big Mac. It's the combination of those three things. It's the graphical user interface. It's object-oriented programming that allows software developers to develop really powerful, very useful graphical programs for the first time. And then it's networking. And that's what's going to enable this new wave of computing. And it's probably worth fast-forwarding at this point. So next.

31:06kind of cuts their losses. There comes a point where Nex says, you know what, this hardware thing, it's hard. We have extremely expensive computers that aren't selling very well. They only ever sold 50,000 units in total. And they were... And by the way, when the thing finally came out to retail, guess how much it cost? Sound 10 grand? $10,000, which was the price that all work stations cost at the time. So nobody buys these things. Yeah. So Nex decides, okay, we're going to be a software company.

31:33And what they do is they kind of separate out next step, which was the operating system. And then they had kind of the mock kernel underneath, which they sort of brought in house. They separated that out and they said, OK, we're just going to start selling this thing to other computer manufacturers.

31:49We're not going to be what we know of Apple today is an entirely vertically integrated software and hardware company. They're moving away from that. It's just software. And that was kind of invoked during that time, because that's when the Mac was in the era of the clones. I mean, the Mac OS ran on other people's hardware, which is totally mind-blowing for those of us today who know, well, what do you mean? iOS only runs on iPhones.

32:13But it's super important. And because of the power of this operating system, and we mentioned earlier, but just to give a sense of what is the real implication of this power, the World Wide Web is invented on this operating system, on a next computer, actually. So Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, invents the World Wide Web, and it's possible because of object-oriented programming and networking, obviously.

32:36and also fun other history of this computer. John Carmack at Id Software, John's now the CTO, I believe, of Oculus. John wrote the video game Doom, video games Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D, all on Next, which is amazing. Wow, wow. And those were the first 3D games that, you know, ever, you know, equally revolutionized the game industry. So that's the power that this enables. Yeah, and it's interesting kind of taking a step back and realizing, okay, so.

33:10very clear recognition of the technologies that were going to be transformational and really like the foundation of what the future of competing will be really unable to bring it to market in a meaningful way at next. I mean, all the ideas were right, all the way that they brought a product to customers, you can chalk it up to timing, you can chalk it up to price, just wrong, just poorly executed. And so they needed an out.

33:37Yep, they need it now. And so they pivoted eventually to just selling software. They stopped selling hardware. They do that in 1993. It's funny, one of the pieces of software they come out with is this thing called WebObjects, which is one of the first internet application servers, and Dell actually builds their e-commerce site on it, so when you bought a Dell, you're like, dude, you're getting the Dell, like, that was powered by next in the... Yeah, basically what WebObjects do is they make it so that, you know how you go to a website, and it's not always the same as every other time you go to that website, it's got dynamic content on it, WebObjects was like the first ever system to do that. And this thing is like...

34:12still in use, so the iTunes store, people wonder why iTunes is so clunky and slow and crappy today. It still runs on web objects, which is insane. For any of the iOS developers and the Mac developers listening, for better or for worse, a lot of these technologies have stayed with us for a very, very long time.

34:32Finally, meanwhile, while this is going on, Apple is just like they have lost their way. They are getting creamed in the market. On the PC front, this is the era of Windows in the early 90s, to mid 90s, Windows 3.0, then Windows 95, Apple is getting decimated. They have no offering for enterprises.

34:56in the workstation market, which is cooling down, but still a huge, huge cut market. And all of NT was doing phenomenally well. Steve Jobs, and in 97 stands up on stage in January, and praises.

35:08The incredible advancements brought by Microsoft and NT and says, Apple, what's Apple been doing? We've fallen behind. And of course, easy for him to blame while he's not at the company, but incredible to be. But he was totally right. And so Apple is asking about, they're trying to create a next-generation operating system. By this point in time, everybody's recognized the power of what we're talking about, and Apple just can't do it. They have two competing projects, three at various points, trying to build a modern operating system.

35:35They all fail. It's wild to think about. I mean, you can chalk it up to organizational politics, or you can chalk it up to the technology just being incredibly hard, but they were building an operating system code name. I think Copeland was the first version, and then they were going to have a second release called Gershwin. There was kind of projects going on in parallel for...

35:55How are we going to build a next generation operating system? And they just couldn't do it. And honestly, it kind of reminds me the longhorn days at Microsoft. Oh God. Yeah. It turns out operating systems are hard, and organizations are even harder. And so you look at Apple, and eventually, they kind of said, OK, enough is enough. We're going to look elsewhere to try and buy. And they had a couple options. They had a couple options. For a modern operating system, they could buy to replace Mac OSX.

36:23OS 9. It was system 7 at the time. Right, right. The future operating system was supposed to be Mac OS 8, which ended up just being an incremental bump, and then OS 9, which was another incremental bump. Yep. And then finally, what they were envisioning for years, not even until 2001, was Mac OS 10. Yeah. And so at the end of just before Christmas, 1996, they buy next, steved out for $429 million.

36:50that go to next shareholders, including Ross Perot. And separately, one and a half million shares of Apple stock that go to Steve Jobs. Yes, so David, you want to talk about that as a VC based on a return on invested capital. How was the next exit? Well, over its lifetime, next raise. So they raised the money from jobs. They raised the money from Ross Perot. Canon, the large camera printer computer manufacturer ends up investing another kind of hundred to hundred and thirty million dollars in the company as well So they got sold for more money than they raised but like not that much more money like this was not a home run eggs like nobody was getting rich off off next

37:38And Steve gets one and a half million shares of Apple stock because he's going to come on board at Apple as a consultant. So he's going to come and help Apple with this transition as the official plan. And so the acquisition closes in February 1997. And Steve's a consultant and some of these events that we're talking about, he comes on stage and he clearly, like the dichotomy between How Steve talks about the future in his vision and how Gil Amelio who is the CEO of Apple at the time who you know looked like he actually was like quite technical and a bit of fair childhood my conductor and all that but he looked like he'd never met a developer in his life like Yeah, when you watch their Keynote it's just kind of going back and watching a lot of these old Keynotes over again And in preparing for this podcast it is incredible to see the dichotomy between Gil standing up there and not really comming in the audience's attention and saying things that like it's so important for Apple to you know

38:35our core audience and developers. Right, it's not taking a position on anything. And, you know, we've all seen managers like that or leaders like that that, you know, don't really take a side and you walk out and you're like, well, I didn't disagree with any of that, but I wasn't inspired. And then Steve comes on stage for, you know, just a few minutes to say, like, hey, here's where I think we're going. And it's just captivating. Yeah, it's nice and like huge applause. And so pretty quickly, acquisition closes in February.

39:02Over the July 4th weekend, Steve convinces the board of Apple that Gil has no idea what he's doing. Yeah. And he needs to go. And the next week, Apple fired the board, Fires Gil. So the company doesn't have a CEO. They start a CEO search. And really, there's only one candidate. September of 1997, Steve Jobs is instated as the interim.

39:28The ICEO. The ICEO, the interim CEO of Apple. And he remained interim CEO until 2000. So for three years, he was interim CEO. Now, well, he's interim CEO, the board doesn't exactly stay intact, right? He's... Yeah, he basically takes those three years. And it ultimately takes five years from the time Apple acquires next for OS 10 to come out. So they spend five years building taking the next operating system and baking it into the full product of the MAC. But during that time, I mean, Steve, like, there's the technical and product challenges of shipping that, but he cleans house and completely revamps Apple. There's a good, I looked up the article that came up on CNET, the day that the acquisition was announced, and kind of how people were billing it at the time, and kind of awesome that like,

40:26When this acquisition happened, CNET, like, existed, was a website, was a news organization. And they're still archives. And, like, the worldwide web was invented on next computers five years earlier. I know, I know. So the thing that they say in the article is, next cross-platform development environments in the enterprise and internet.

40:46and intranet space, allow developers to write once and deploy across a range of internet and client server platforms. Amelia said that Apple expects to ship products with the next operating system in 1997. That's the same year that the acquisition closed. The way that Amelia was looking at this is, we're going to get this company, we're going to start integrating their technologies, we're going to keep shipping our products. We'll just slap this OS into our hardware like no big deal.

41:12what we know today is like it didn't ship in ninety seven or ninety eight or ninety like it shipped in two thousand one and by that point apple had dramatically less products mean this is the this is the time where you know there's there's developers uh... at uh... nineteen ninety seven worldwide developer conference in in july six months after he after the acquisition closed saying to steve hey so you know uh... i worked on open dock for many years and we've invested a lot in it uh... what you know What about open doc and Steve says yeah, yeah a lot of you worked on things that we had to put a bullet in the head of

41:47and I feel your pain and continues to go on and then paint the story of like Apple has no focus focuses about saying no we're doing all these different things it's not iterative improvements that we need to do it's it's like dramatic dramatic changes so what's really interesting is to look at screenshots from next or next step or actually open step the operating system that they ended up implementing and you look at OS 10 today or or even steps along the way it is incredible how many pieces of next you can find in or of next step you can find in in macOS 10 I mean you look at at next I had a dock

42:23nothing else had a dock at the time. That was like a new UI paradigm. It's amazing how many pieces of next you can find in your iPhone. Right. In your Apple Watch. In there. In 97, Steve is demoing the next step development tool chain. And he's like, here's interface builder. And here's all these tools that people still use today to develop iPhone apps. So the very core fundamentals of what made the iPhone possible came from the next acquisition. Yep.

42:52So at this point, you know, wrapping up the history in fact, which was very long, but these stories are just, we love stories on this show and like, this is one of the best. This is one of the greatest of all time. And so we all know what happens. Steve comes back. 2001, they launched OS 10, they launched the iPod. What did they launch the iPod? Was it also 2001, I think?

43:16when they launch the iPod. They launch the iPod, then they launch the iPhone, then they launch the iPad, then they launch the Apple, you know, all this stuff. And it's all next. The incredible thing is, yeah, when they first launched the iPhone, they say, and it runs OS 10.

43:32That was a big selling point. This is not a phone like we know phones today with an embedded operating system. This is a computer in your pocket and to prove it, it's running a variant of the operating system that exists on your computers. And that was huge and ridiculous and people at Blackberry didn't believe it. They'd look at the scroll performance and say, you can't do that on a phone. We just don't believe you. And so I think that when you look at this was before it was dubbed iOS, it was a variant of OS 10. And then when they launched but you know, the iPad, they say, and we're renaming it iOS, it runs on the iPhone and the iPad, then they launch the watch, then they launch the TV, all these things are kind of built off that same Darwin kernel and the core of what they acquired in the next. Yep, and there we go, the rest, as they say, is history. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow.

44:28If 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.

44:50Exactly. 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. And ServiceNow can do this.

45:19because 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. Service now already runs more than 100.

45:37billion 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? So 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. Let's move on to our next segment of the show, which is acquisition category. This will be a fun one. What do you think? What we do is we categorize the acquisition and we've got a couple.

46:24categories, and we decide which it represents. Yeah, so we normally decide if something's a product acquisition, a business line acquisition, a people acquisition, which oftentimes happens and happens in kind of like aquahires, a technology acquisition, is it a core piece of technology that's not productized, or is it, you know, other, is it some new thing? And when you look at this, like Apple had been trying to create a technology that they really couldn't create, it was an ex-generation operating system with multitasking, with networking, with protected memory, all these different things.

46:54but it's not the technology they acquired. You'd be silly to make the case that this was anything but Steve Jobs. I mean, this is like, this is a great slide. The ultimate people acquisition, oh yeah, Gill Emilio is listing all the reasons they acquired next. Yeah, the CEO at the time, literally at...

47:12Is it a Macworld, I think, has this slide on stage. He's presenting these slides about rationale for the next acquisition and he has all the stuff that they're getting that he flips to the next slide. And it just says Steve Jobs, the only thing on the slide. The only thing on the slide. The reasons we acquired next. So I mean, yes, we're still using next technologies today. Yes, they were incredibly forward thinking, but the company needed Steve back. Yep.

47:38I mean, it's hard to argue with that. Steve is... I'm just... I mean, I've read all the books about him. I've watched so many of his keynotes. I've watched all the movies about him. Every time I read it, and this just like going in and doing a lot of this primary source research, this is gonna be my tech theme later. But I am just so struck by like...

48:02His level of thinking, you know, it is so rare that you see that you find something like that and when you watch this keynote with Gil on stage and Steve on stage at the same time I mean like I said Gil was he was a fair child semi-conductor. He had been you know a long-time technology CEO Yeah, he turned around a national semi-conductor. He's kind of a national semi-conductor. You know, he looks like a child compared to this. It's like it's like you know Steve is just a metamong boys, you know, or you know A person among small people. Yeah, special guy we miss him. Totally. Okay. So you want to go and do what would have happened otherwise? This is fun. So what would have happened otherwise? I think it'd be fun to talk about the other option that Apple had. Yeah, so Jean-Louis Guesset was an Apple employee who kind of opened Europe to Apple. He came in in the early days, new Steve Jobs well, left Apple to start his own company. Well, before he left Apple.

49:01when Steve got fired and left Apple, Jean took over the super micro division. He literally replaced Steve Jobs. I didn't know that. Yeah, he literally replaced, so this is a, he's French Jean-Louis. Great guy, he has a blog now, which is awesome, Monday note. And he replaced Steve Jobs, but then he left and started his own company. So two people that both kind of walked through that, that revolving door of that division of Apple, both went and started very, very similar companies. Yeah. And B, which created BOS, was kind of the other candidate they were vetting other than next. And ultimately, the reason that Apple didn't end up making that acquisition of B, you know, number one, I continue to go back to the fact that they all sort of knew they needed Steve back, but...

49:48They just couldn't come to the same agreement on price Jean-Louis wanted 300 million for the company Apple I think was willing to shell out 120 125 somewhere there And they just couldn't get the deal done as with you know many other deals I'm sure a lot of our listeners have been involved with yeah But kind of amazing that, like, there were these two operating systems that Apple could have acquired. And should have built in house, right? Like, both of those leaders were at Apple. Right, they were chartered with building this and the organizational politics at Apple at the time didn't let it happen. Didn't let it happen. This is why Steve Jobs hated politics. Did you see that next was planning an IPO? Yes. That was one of the kind of bargaining chips on the table was. Yeah, so this company that, you know, finally had actually

50:30has a product out there, this operating system that is not the business that they were hoping to build, but is a decent business, is planning to IPO later in the year. And we don't know if that actually would have happened, but it is interesting that that's an alternate future for us. I think there must have been a little bit of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field there, too, like how they could have gone public.

50:55Had a, they eventually became profitable as a software-only business, but like they were not making a lot of money. No. But you've Steve Jobs. Right. Anyway, so they ended up getting acquired obviously by Apple, not going public, but that would have been interesting. Yeah, I'm going to paint this picture as next had a fighting chance, but probably would not have done very well in the long term. And I don't think Apple would be in business. Yeah, no.

51:23Like, they were getting creamed. I mean, there was that famous quote, right? Who said, was it Michael Dell? Michael Dell said that, like, they should just shut down the company and give the money back to shareholders. They were just getting creamed. Yeah. So, all right, tech themes? Tech themes. Yeah. So, I mean, the big one for me is like, you hear this all the time in investor pitches. It's all about the people. I think this is one that's just so clearly illustrative of We often talk about like 10x engineers sometimes there's just like 10x leaders and people that They're truly inspiring and then the other part of that is is How much of a difference it makes to have the founder of a company leading that company that that they command a different level of respect from employees And when they say this is our strategy people people believe it and people do crazy things and March to those orders and

52:15The other thing that I was kind of thinking about in this is Steve makes a plea to developers to start building on this new operating system that they're building that will eventually sort of in some forked way become macOS 10 and you don't like as Microsoft can see with Windows Phone recently, or a lot of people trying to start sort of like competing app stores and things like that, it's really hard to win over a developer ecosystem. And it's really hard to say, you know, developers were open for business. This is a platform for you. And Steve managed to really make the plea in a very authentic way and say, hey, everyone who's a Mac developer.

52:51Why don't you come and you know you you're gonna have to rewrite a lot of stuff because this is very different but make a bet on us and develop your application We can give you this power this power in this operating system that you couldn't have otherwise right right but that to me it's like the power the power of a founder there and then once you have like a tipping point in the network effects that come from building an ecosystem on a platform that you can kind of just keep rolling with that. And the big bargaining chip that affords you. That perfectly dovetails with I have two tech themes. On the show we do, this is actually my favorite segment of the show. We talk about having gone through this whole history, what are some like eternal truths about just the way business, technology, startups,

53:40have, you know, operate that we can kind of pull out of this. Yeah. And I have two. The first one is just what you were saying, Ben, is that the, or related to what you're saying in technology, like there's this concept of like iteration, not just iteration, but like you're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants. And this.

53:59A lot of the history and facts, we've talked about a lot of pretty deeply technical stuff, like object-oriented programming and networking and workstations and think about tech companies today. It's Snapchat and messaging and interacting with your friends and spectacles and doing this amazing stuff and flying drones. But all that's only possible because of these building blocks at the operating system level at the deep geeky stuff.

54:27that needed to be built and installed first. So that's one. But two is something I've been thinking a lot about, also related to your first one. What made Steve what he was, right? And we haven't released our last episode yet, but we interviewed Kathleen Phillips, who's the CFO Zillow, talking about the truly acquisition.

54:52And in a follow up on that, we talked about Snapchat Spectacles. And I referenced this tweet that we both read that I thought was super cool that Bill Gurley had retweeted and commented on when Snapchat announced Spectacles. And John Collison, who's one of the brothers who's the co-founder of Stripe, he tweeted, Quote, I'm always impressed by how flamboyantly original Snapchat are. Ghost codes, invisible UI, filters, sunglasses, and girly responds and he says, uh, that's a really great thing to identify and recognize. And I've been thinking about that because I totally agree. But like, what is that originality? And it's not really exactly originality. Like, um,

55:34There were QR codes before Snapchat did them. In fact, Snapchat acquired a company to do that. They acquired a company doing it. There were glasses you wore on your face. And it took video before Snapchat spectacles. You know, there were messengers before them. They weren't first, but they were the first thus far, and we'll see how Spectacles perform.

55:55the first to make a real product that just works and is delightful and solves a need for a user. I think that's what this originality means, and that's what Steve was. Objectorian programming, all this stuff existed at Xerox Park before next. Objectorian programming, networking, all this stuff was out there. Workstations, blah, blah. But it was technology, it wasn't a product. It wasn't something that...

56:21you plugged it in and it just worked and it delighted you and it solved your need. And I think that's like, I don't know, I've just been noodling, especially like as a VC, this is what we look for. So many times we meet founders, we meet companies, and they're doing something cool that's hard technically, and the question is just like, okay, like the question I always ask is like, what data do you have, what signal do you have that people want this?

56:48And so many times you get this blank stare back, you know? Like, well, what do you mean? This was never possible before. That's not what I asked. That's not what I asked. Like, why are people gonna use this? And I think that's what these, you know, whether it's Evan Spiegel, Snapchat, whether it's Steve Jobs, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg, or any of these, or Instagram, right? Instagram was not the first...

57:08app that made your photos look good. It's dramatic, made your photos look good. But that's not Instagram. It's building this whole solution and having the vision to do that. I think it's a famously difficult task to take hard complicated problems that are solved in research lab environments and get those into a mass market product. Let's take two super famous examples. Microsoft has...

57:32hundreds or a thousand of PhDs at Microsoft research that do incredible work and do pioneering research and they try their best to partner with with product teams, but it's you know not super often that one of those things gets surfaced in a product in a big way and you know the company's growing and it's doing getting way better at that But it's it's like a famously difficult problem to sit in the organization in the right way to make your kind of very forward-looking things that may dangerously obsolete your current thing. You know, something that you bring back into product. And in fact, when Apple, my second example is when Steve went back to Apple, they had kind of an advanced technology division. And that was purely for the, it was a research lab is people that were kind of playing around with like, what if we could get this into a computer at some point?

58:20dismantle that. Steve killed that. Totally the opposite of what we're talking about. You want to get those things into product and reorganize and said, look, everybody who's doing that pioneering research, you need to be doing it with the lens of how are we going to build this into this product and how does it fit into the story of this product that we're trying to ship. I think that is what is so scarce in technology, in startups, and in business like the ability to take a potentiality, whether it's technology or something else, and turn that into a product that, like, just works and that people want. It's so scarce. And I think that's what, you know, for all the Steve's foibles and all his craziness and, like, he was just so good at that. It's impressive. So. Yeah. Okay. Should we wrap this one up? You want to grade it?

59:15That's great. We were going back and forth on text over this last night. A couple episodes ago, we did the Android acquisition by Google. You look and you can kind of figure out the main reason for Android to be there is to make it so that when people are searching on mobile They're not always searching from iPhones and Google doesn't have to pay Apple for all those searches So that stays and that gets them like four billion dollars a year in revenue. They otherwise would have had to give up big number right like for for kind of a small acquisition So I want to like talk about the next acquisition and what it did for Apple in the context of that being in a plus of kind of like

59:57saving the company $4 billion a year. There was leaked things in the Oracle trial that Android as a division has made about $31 billion since being acquired. When you look at the things that have happened at Apple since the next acquisition, it's like a sci-fi story compared to those numbers. Like if that was our bar for A+. Apple does like $250 billion a year in revenue now.

1:00:26and probably would have gone out of business. Number one, if this acquisition didn't happen, they're the most valuable company in the world, as David said. Not only would they have gone out of business, and now this reverse course, the technology that they acquired in next is core and fundamental to every single product that they ship today. It's the core of the Mac, the core of all the iOS devices, everything we've been talking about. Developers who are listening to this, You use interface builder and like Steve demoed interface builder as a feature of the next development platform in 1997 and these things continue to ship and It is the we were talking about this before the show Apple has done approximately a trillion dollars in revenue Since Steve came back. Give or take give or take a billion. No, a trillion. I like GDP style. I know I know and I wish I wish we had

1:01:21You know, we have nothing higher to give than an A plus but this is by far the best acquisition we've ever looked at and I think probably ever will look at yeah It is hard to argue with I mean what's what's funny like It's so this is such a like illustrates like it's better to be lucky than good, you know like Gil Emilio Completed the single greatest acquisition of all-time Gil Emilio. Who is Gil Emilio? He's the George Lazenbee of Apple CEOs. Exactly. Nothing against Gil Emilio. But what's so funny is he didn't see any of this. This was not some brilliantly crafted move on his part, brilliantly crafted on Steve's part. But yeah, I mean, this is just the sheer numbers. You cannot argue.

1:02:12I don't think you can argue that this isn't the greatest acquisition of all time. I mean, it literally created a trillion dollars in revenue. That's just goofy. That's like a fake number. That's a fake number. Where we were texted last night, I was like, I texted bed, I was like, it's like, you know, you were like, you know, we I message last night. Yeah, I message last night. And you know, it's like Steve changed the game on the field. And it's like, yeah, like they're playing football. And like Apple was like behind by like 30 points in the fourth quarter. And Steve like ran a play that scored a thousand point touchdown.

1:02:45You just can't, you can't, so yeah, A plus, like for sure. No doubt. Yeah. All right. You want to talk about Carvots? Yeah, let's do Carvots quickly. Cool. Go ahead. This really made me think it was a great podcast I listened to in the last week. The Ezra Client Show is one of my favorite podcasts.

1:03:05He interviews people, he's the creator and editor-in-chief at Vox, I believe. And he has great guests on that range from all different walks of life. And of course, I listen to the episodes that are particularly nerdy. And so he had Stuart Butterfield on, who is the creator of Flickr and Now Slack. And Stuart's just a phenomenally interesting character with a philosophy background and raises a lot of really interesting points.

1:03:31About Slack about how they got there about the founder journey a lot about the similarities and differences of You know he started two companies that started as a kind of crazy out there never ending game and ended up being a super widely a do widely used consumer product and Talking about sort of how how they got there and one of the interesting points that he brought up was that When they were building what would eventually become slack? They used IRC and then built all kinds of tools on top of IRC. I didn't know they used IRC. Yeah, they actually did. It's all this criticism of like it's just IRC, like it actually is just IRC. So when they were starting out building that.

1:04:13Snapchat's just QR codes. I know, right? This is the point. They had a team of developers and there's three technical co-founders and someone else they hired and they would encounter these problems with chat when it was like, okay, we should build something to make this chat thing a little better. So they'd pull those developers off of product and they'd spend a couple cycles and make their thing that would become slack a little bit better and then they'd go back and then they kind of had a lot of bake time. They'd use it for like three or four months and then they'd go in and say, we actually need to make it a little bit better and they'd go and make it a little bit better.

1:04:42And when you compare that sort of product development where a person is solving their own need very, very directly at an acute pain point, with the way that product organizations often work, which is like the PM will propose the product and they'll dispatch and there'll be divergent ideas and people argue over it, there's a lot more ego in the room. And what Stuart's thrown out there is, you know, when we're just trying to solve our own problems and like, Nobody wins by having our internal tool be better except that sort of everyone wins, there's a lot less ego in the equation. And it's kind of an interesting way to develop software. And you know, we're not all gonna go and set out to start very expensive never-ending games to create a different product, but it is like interesting to think about how can we, how can we kind of spoof that environment where we're all users of the product, we're all using it to solve our own pain point internally and take the ego out of the equation.

1:05:37That's super cool. I got to listen to to that packet there as a client show as we're client show with guest Stewart Butterfield awesome mine for the week is this super fun Verge and eye-opening verge article big investigative piece that they did last week of the week before on DJI the drone company DJI released or announced their new product the Mavic Pro This thing is amazing. It's the sizeable water bottle and it's a drone. It applies for 27 minutes. You can fly it four and a half miles away from you with RockSoul and 1080p video. It fits in your pocket. It's amazing. But they went and they did this profile like, what is DJI? It's this company. It's based in Shenzhen. And who are they? How do they hire? And it turns out that DJI runs this...

1:06:26robot wars competition. So like you ever seen like battle bots. Yeah, they do a university competition in China That's like the most coolest battle bots you've ever seen and they get teams from 200 universities in China to Create teams and this is like you know NCAA football of China and and then they come they work Work for you know forever and then they come and they compete and the winners DJI just tires them. And so they get the smartest people. And this is all about robotics and machine vision and autonomously operating robots. So the rules of the game are that you can't see what's happening on the field. You have to rely on your robot sensors and most of it's autonomously driven. And they fight each other and their goals and stuff.

1:07:20And so as a result, DJI now has like over 1,000 PhDs working on computer vision and machine understanding. And that's all baked into stuff like enabling this drone, you know, the size of a water bottle that you can do stuff like you can just tap on yourself on the image and then it'll track you. Like it knows who you are. It can follow you as you run around and it won't crash into anything. It has sent an avoid. I'll just done with computer vision.

1:07:49And it was like this glimpse of the future. And then at the interview, Frank Wang, the CEO of DJI, he's like, yeah, this is about robotics. Like drones like, sorry, like first product, but we're going to build robots that are going to like do agriculture and like, serve you in restaurants, like all this stuff. This is like the future of robotics. It felt a little bit like, you know, Steve Jobs, Xerox Park moment. It was, it was pretty cool. Nice. So we'll link to it in the show notes. We will. All right, listeners.

1:08:17Now 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. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly.

1:08:44The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers. And how fast you can use that signal to guide what you shipped next. This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved. So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences, or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks especially to the geek wire folks for having us and for setting this all up. Really appreciate it. And if you're new to the show and would like to subscribe, find us on iTunes or your favorite podcast client, tweet at us at acquired FM and yeah, have a good one.