Acquired

Seinfeld - Full Episode (Audio)

31K views · 1w ago · 3:50:19

As you know, most of the time, Acquired episodes are audio-only. But this episode, there's a full video version! And it was only fitting to release it on Netflix, the streaming home of 'Seinfeld'. Seinfeld, which ended three decades ago, has been watched by 72 million Americans so far THIS YEAR.

Topics: Jerry Seinfeld's Stand-Up Origins (1954-1988) · NBC Pitches a Late-Night Special (1988) · Enter Larry David (1988) · Fin-Syn Rules & The Castle Rock Deal · Making the Pilot & Test Screening Disaster (1989) · Rick Ludwin Saves the Show (1989-1990)

The Home Depot: How America's aging houses built the best stock of the last 45 years (Audio)

72K views · 1mo ago · 3:35:04

The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie... if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate.

Topics: Bernie Marcus's Early Career and meeting Arthur Blank (1972) · Ken Langone & Handy Dan (1970s) · Ken Buys Handy Dan, Bernie & Arthur Fired · Ross Perot Almost Buys Home Depot · Pat Farrah & The HomeCo Interlude · First Stores & Early Model (1979)

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire (Audio)

53K views · 2mo ago · 4:32:57

In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corporate raiders circled, salivating over offers to sell off the film library to MGM and offload the parks to hotel operators. But what followed instead was the greatest turnaround in media history under Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. Beauty and the Beast. The Lion King. Broadway.

Topics: Disney in Chaos (1984) · Eisner, Wells, Katzenberg Arrive (1984) · Animation Renaissance & CAPS Tech (1989) · Flywheel Extensions: Home Video, Retail & Broadway · Challenges & ABC/ESPN Acquisition (1994-1995) · ESPN: Disney's Accidental Goldmine

The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio)

78K views · 4mo ago · 4:31:29

The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it's the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual property rights to the childhood memories of billions of people (including, likely, all of you) and is a reliable, predictable profitable business. But it didn't start that way.

Topics: Walt's Early Life & Artistic Calling (1901-1919) · From Commercial Art to Laugh-o-grams (1919-1923) · Hollywood, The Alice Comedies & Oswald's Loss (1923-1928) · Mickey Mouse & The Synchronized Sound Breakthrough (1928) · Flywheel Terminology Unpacked · Snow White: Walt's $1.5M Folly (1934-1937)

Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio)

140K views · 5mo ago · 3:48:06

Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, on behalf of 50 million clients (including, likely, many of you). And yet Vanguard itself is essentially a communist organization — it has no shareholders, makes no profits, and operates more like REI than Fidelity. If you own a Vanguard fund, you own a piece of the firm itself.

Topics: Jack Bogle's Early Life & Family Ruin (1929) · Princeton Thesis & Mutual Funds Emerge (1949-1951) · Joining Wellington Management (1951) · The Go-Go Years & Fidelity's Ascent (1958-1965) · Jack Takes the Reins & The Ivest Merger (1965) · The Go-Go Bust & Jack's Crisis of Conscience (1970-1973)

Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio)

80K views · 6mo ago · 3:59:20

Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermes sells that many Birkins and Kellys roughly every 2 years, and Rolex moves that many watches every 3 months.

Topics: Beginning · Enzo Ferrari's Early Life & Tragedies (1898-1919) · Scuderia Ferrari: Enzo's Racing Dream (1920-1933) · The Prancing Horse & Ferrari's Branding · First Ferrari Road Cars & Le Mans Victory (1947-1949) · F1 & The Tragedies of Enzo's Life (1950s)

Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio)

61K views · 7mo ago · 4:28:32

Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality television.

Topics: Origins of F1: Britain, Italy, and Monaco · Bernie's Entrance · Bernie Consolidates Power · F1 as a Global TV Sport (Except America) · F1's Incredible Engineering Achievements · Senna's Crash and a New Era for Safety

The NFL: How small-town teams became America's most valuable sports empire (Audio)

31K views · 9mo ago · 4:17:17

The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday... and sometimes Saturdays and holidays too) to watch the world’s most beautiful ballet of violence. It generates the most revenue of any sports league globally and sets new records for team valuations each year. But it wasn’t always this way.

Topics: Welcome to the Remastered NFL Episode · Origins of Football & the Forward Pass (1869-1905) · The Founding of the NFL (1920) · Bert Bell's "Any Given Sunday" Philosophy (1946) · Pete Rozelle Transforms the League (1960) · The Creation of the Super Bowl (1966)

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

61K views · 10mo ago · 2:47:37

Guest: Michael Lewis

Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or video. Hardly the standard-issue playbook for podcasting success! And yet well over a million smart, curious and exceedingly busy humans share their (your!) valuable time with us every month. Why?

Topics: Recording in Google's Garage · Michael Lewis Shares His First Impressions of Acquired · Learning Scarcity from the NFL and Hermés · From Acquisitions to Broader Stories: Acquired's Journey · Embracing the 'Too Hard Pile' from Munger and Buffett · Applying Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers to Acquired

ACQ2: The Insane Productivity of Andrew Ross Sorkin

34K views · 10mo ago · 1:16:35

Today we sit down with Andrew to answer exactly that question. We dive into his philosophy on interviewing, his start as a teenage freelancer at the New York Times, how he built DealBook from a daily column into a media empire, and his actual daily routine that somehow fits all of this into 24 hours!

Coca-Cola: The Complete History & Strategy (Audio)

104K views · 11mo ago · 3:53:33

Coca-Cola is... sugar water. And somehow it’s also America, Christmas, summertime, friendship and happiness. Today we tell the story of how The Coca-Cola Company amazingly transmogrified a beverage into emotion in all of our collective psyches, and ALSO built one of the most incredible scale economy businesses of all-time.

Topics: Patent Medicines & the Birth of an Industry · Dr. John Pemberton & the "Miracle Drug" Cocaine · Creating the Secret Formula (1886) · Frank Robinson's Genius & the First Coupon · Asa Candler & Building a National Brand (1890s) · The $1 Bottling Deal: A Fortuitous Mistake

Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)

23K views · 11mo ago · 1:59:42

It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film” — the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, Barry Diller, and cameos from around the Acquired Cinematic Universe including Christina Cacioppo, Ben Clymer, and Howard Schultz.

Topics: Jamie Dimon · Intermission · Andrew Ross Sorkin · Meredith Kopit Levien · Acquired Wordle · Trivia with the Audience

Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio)

68K views · 1y ago · 3:28:21

Guest: Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000+ at normal supermarkets. Their parking lots are famously terrible and they're constantly out of your favorite items. Shoppers brave long lines and cramped aisles while overly-friendly employees in Hawaiian shirts try to chat them up.

Topics: Founding "Pronto Markets" and the 7-Eleven Threat · Redefining Grocery with Liquor and Tiki · Early Trader Joe's: Pioneering California Wine · Embracing Health Foods · Differentiated Private Label Products and Fair Trade Repeal · Joe Coulombe Sells Trader Joe's to Aldi Nord Founder

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio)

131K views · 1y ago · 4:06:38

Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). They employed nearly all the top AI talent: Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei — more or less everyone who leads modern AI worked at Google circa 2014.

Topics: The Innovator's Dilemma: Google's AI Challenge · From PageRank to language models: Google's Early AI Foundations · Parallelizing Language: Jeff Dean's Google Translate Revolution · Sebastian Thrun and Geoff Hinton: Laying Google X Foundations · Unsupervised Learning: Google Brain's Cat Paper Breakthrough · From AlexNet to DeepMind: The GPU AI Revolution

ACQ2: How to Live in Everyone Else's Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke)

21K views · 1y ago · 1:48:41

Guest: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke

Tobi is one of the most thoughtful people in the technology industry. He's also one of the very few people who started as a programmer -- just trying to solve his own problem -- and still runs his company as CEO today even as it approaches a $200B market cap. Tobi has done this in two big ways: first, a willingness throw away his past beliefs in the face of new data, growing into the leader the company needed.

Topics: How Abstraction Layers Shape (and Limit) Software's Potential · AI's Role in Unlocking Human Potential and Unnoticed Shifts · Why This Era is the Golden Age of Humanity and How to Engage with AI · How AI Tools Redefine Success and Empower Problem Solvers · Shopify's AI Mandate and what Tobi calls "Context Engineering" · Shopify Stock and how Leadership is like a Jazz Band

Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio)

79K views · 1y ago · 4:11:33

In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its next six years from 2005 to 2011, Google built seven (!) more billion+ user products: Gmail, Maps, Drive and Docs, YouTube, Chrome, Android, and Photos — all either started from scratch internally or acquired as startups that were still in their infancy.

Topics: The Web: Google's Strategic Weapon Against Microsoft · Google Maps and Docs: Expanding the Web Platform · YouTube: The Early Days of User-Generated Video · YouTube: From Risky Acquisition to Giant Business · Chrome: Google's Entry into the Browser Wars · Chrome: Google's Browser Achieves Market Dominance

How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor) [ACQ2]

25K views · 1y ago · 1:13:20

Guest: Bret Taylor

Is AI just better software? Or something completely different that requires a new paradigm to understand? Today we sit down with Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, two of the best product builders in the world to tackle that question. Bret and Clay are the co-founders of the AI company Sierra.

The Jamie Dimon Interview: How JP Morgan Became an $800 Billion Bank

255K views · 1y ago · 1:06:02

Guest: Jamie Dimon

We sit down with Jamie Dimon for a live conversation at Radio City Music Hall, covering the incredible journey from his 1998 firing at Citgroup (where he was widely expected to become CEO) to building the most powerful bank in the world. Today JPMorgan Chase is a juggernaut — the most systemically important non-governmental financial institution in the world, with over twice the market capitalization of its nearest competitor. But it certainly wasn’t always this way!

Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio)

112K views · 1y ago · 3:39:30

We tell the story of the single greatest business ever created: Google search. From its origins as a Stanford research project called BackRub, Google became the front door to the internet. Today it’s an essential service for over half the world, and one that generates more profit than ANY other US company — more than Apple, Microsoft, or Berkshire Hathaway.

ACQ2: Building the Savannah Bananas with Jesse Cole, Founder and Owner (Audio)

6.8K views · 1y ago · 1:13:46

Guest: Jesse Cole

The Savannah Bananas have created a whole new sport. It’s baseball, but it’s not. It’s fast-paced, exciting, and incredibly entertaining. For example, if you're batting, and you step out of the batter’s box... it’s a strike. If you bunt, you’re out. If a fan catches a foul ball... you’re also out. Games are capped at two hours with no exceptions. It’s sacrilegious to traditional baseball fans everywhere.

The Steve Ballmer Interview

120K views · 1y ago · 2:59:20

Guest: Steve Ballmer

We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listened to our Microsoft episodes and had some thoughts to share — and boy, did he deliver. Steve takes us point-by-point through the original IBM DOS deal that started everything, how he built Microsoft's enterprise business from scratch, and offers his candid reflections on missing mobile and search.

ACQ2: From Almost Sold to Market Leader | Plaid & Zach Perret

11K views · 1y ago · 59:07

Guest: Zach Perret

We sit down with Zach Perret, CEO of Plaid, to discuss the remarkable journey of Plaid and the broader fintech landscape over the past several years. Zach takes us blow-by-blow through journey of almost getting acquired by Visa, the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic... which quickly reversed with ZIRP tailwinds, and how Plaid navigated the volatile market conditions to build a diversified business.

Behind The Scenes: Acquired Live at Chase Center, Presented by J.P. Morgan Payments (2024)

4.3K views · 1y ago · 9:24

Our friends at @jpmorgan put together a very cool video going behind the scenes of our Chase Center live show from 2024. This has a bunch of footage that we've never shared before, plus a little "history of Acquired"! The YouTube Code ID is FGMN4GL22DCN7WVB

Epic Systems (MyChart)

71K views · 1y ago · 3:57:02

What if we told you that the most important company in US healthcare was run from a farm in rural Wisconsin? And that farm contained the world’s largest subterranean auditorium, as well as Disneyland—style replicas of Hogwarts and the Emerald City? What if we told you that the person who started, runs and owns this establishment has legally ensured that it will never be sold, never go public and never acquire another company?

ACQ2: Why Duolingo Worked (with Luis von Ahn, CEO)

18K views · 1y ago · 1:03:22

(Episode originally released Nov 10, 2024) Duolingo has fundamentally changed the landscape of self-guided education, starting with language learning. It is now a $9B publicly traded company in a space where everyone thought you could never build a large and exciting company. We’re joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn.