Holiday Special 2022 | Acquired

How do I open again welcome what is this show what are we doing welcome to how I built this

No nothing against how I felt this but that's not

Welcome 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 am 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 then 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 ho ho ho ho. 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. Yep

Well listeners 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 gonna listen to this, but I don't think this is gonna be anyone's sort of first show

So we're gonna try and go a little a little deeper and nerdier than normal. We've got a little agenda

We're gonna 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. This is a great time to talk about one of our big partners ServiceNow

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Yes service now's now assist will be integrated with Microsoft co-pilot and will be available directly from office apps

Starting with Microsoft teams the AI's are integrated into one seamless user experience without actually sharing data

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It's pretty awesome for both companies and especially awesome for enterprise users

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Go over to service now comm slash acquired and when you get in touch just tell them that Ben and David sent you

With 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 a 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. I 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 this year anyway, that feels like three years ago

Well, we knew that at the end of the year

she was gonna drop midnight it seemed appropriate that in the year where she was gonna put on the

Concert and announced the tickets for the concert series with the most amazing human history that we should of course kick the year off

With a Taylor episode predicting the future as usual here on acquired

I think 2023 might need to line her up for a follow-up. We should do an acquired session 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 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 like there's two nights in Seattle here and

I'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 a hundred 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

Like 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 Stratecari and he's like the obvious thing

that I should do is raise prices to maximize revenue, but then that's pretty quickly gonna lead to limiting my reach and impact I think

Taylor cares a lot about her reach and impact and she 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

You 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 right if she did that would be like

That would truly be a farewell tour because I would create so much right off into the sunset so much negative reaction

Which of course would create even more demand if you knew it was her farewell to her

This is making me think that what 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 markets are bigger than you can ever imagine

The demand is larger than you can ever imagine even in niche products like like first trajectory or 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 ten bands of the year

And that's kind of it

But why 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 pick 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 men of the labels

Yeah

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

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 the labels

There's also so much less friction right as hard as it was and 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 ticket 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

Yeah

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 the thing I was thinking about when I was caught up in the Friday night

Is it Friday night whenever it was that people are like Twitter's going down like it's gonna basically turn off tomorrow and I like

Mentally knew 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 in that thing is interesting what I start

Reading the New York Times many times a day and going deep into many of the sections

I'm certainly not gonna log into you can't really even get that same kind of

Experience or understanding no that's 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

Is 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 tech talk

Yeah, but I think it would be a much less efficient experience

Because it's all video

The number of new tidbits of information you can consume per minute and Twitter is high and reasonably low in tick-tock

Yep, it's ten to twenty versus two to three. Yeah, all right. Well. I don't know how we got from t-swift to

Yeah format lists except for the pre-robust format that you fleshed out here well

You know me I can't not prepare for an episode even a holiday special okay next one on my list

Sony Sony Corporation, which I didn't think would be that interesting when we started doing 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 and 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 and 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

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 two to like that crazy coda about spider-man is

Nuts in the back of my mind. I've been percolating it could be fun to do a whole episode just on Xbox

Hey, we need to do a Microsoft

Series yeah 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 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 gonna 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?

Sorry 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 photos 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 one of these big tech companies a year for two reasons one

You know for Microsoft for Apple. I think those are gonna 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 cuz 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

I even have a lot of fear around like doing a three-part Microsoft series where like are people gonna be like I'm just out for

The next three months because next year listeners what we've decided is and this is a little bit approximate

But we're gonna average it every month. We're gonna do a season episode and a special so either a season being like

Apple part 1 or a special being an interview with someone or an acquired sessions or something that kind of doesn't fit the normal

Format and like 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

Carbouts for extended carbouts later one of my favorite video game podcasts resonant arc. They're a video game story book club

So they choose a game. Yeah, and then they'll do you know, 10 to 20 episodes playing through the game

Dissecting the story all the 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 large 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. Mmm

Yeah, we got to think about the right way to do this

Maybe I'm too focused on the downside and maybe it will turn out that like while 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

What can we bring to the world in the Amazon? I think that has become

this year

As some of these 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 get by doing because there's lots of voices out there saying lots

Of things. Yep. Spoiler alert. This is part of why we haven't covered Twitter cuz like there's nothing new to add

Yeah, all the best tech journalists in the world are covering it every single day

I mean you have Matt Levine you have Dan Primack every single day

They're reporting the newest thing with not just reporting but true analysis behind it

You have then Ben Thompson the following day writing a reaction piece. That's like here's my

Even 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 a choir to add to the conversation is go do a hundred hours of research on Enron 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

Who knows if it was coincidental or not, but I think at least two major news outlets have run pieces in the past week

What's a title like how FTX compares to Enron? 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. Yeah. Let's say we this is a holiday special

We can break the format. Yeah, every time people read us in and they're like, oh you gotta do a take on this

It's like I almost never have a take in real time. Yeah

That'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 when you throw it. Yeah. Yeah, but like look things seem to evolve next year

It's gonna be our eighth year into 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 it old quote-unquote and 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 sad

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 today cancel everything today

So we can do some quick research and there are times where it still makes sense for us to do those like John fully

Bring in a new CEO the Barry McCarthy connection and that is a take that has not aged. Well, yeah

I think you're right that it's okay that

Were something different now then then what the show was? I'm curious what everybody listening. Thanks. 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 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 in now in a different way that we could not argue that it is an extraordinary story

I would do want to say I'm sorry if the exposure that FTX got from acquired and every other publication

But we like 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 and I don't want to stop having

interesting

People and companies on the show, you know up and coming companies. So but yeah, like it, you know

It sucks and 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 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 of a frog. We made this thing. It's amazing. You should listen

Whether you like our telecovert or not, but just like it is a

Vastly underappreciated company and an underappreciated journey overcoming adversity

Yep. Okay, Sony

Dude, we did Nvidia this year

We did a lot this year. Yeah trying to think which 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

Right and then a third one around the like

Seven-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 episodes certainly GP

Well, interestingly enough, I think Dolly one was but it got no acclaim, right?

The one that lit the world on fire was Dolly to was Dolly to yep

But now as we record this chat GPT came out last week

Like we're thinking about the you know

AI Renaissance and how important AI is like just in a general sense when we did those episodes

Nvidia 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 Nvidia bulls that were sort of buying at the top and selling the story as much as humanly possible

When 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 gonna be this complete step change in the way that we use computers and

Decided that buying Nvidia at a very high price was the way to endorse that belief like that ended up happening very quickly soon after

The moment when it really hit me

Was when we were recording the LP episode that we did with jalet at mutiny and I'm just cavalierly was like

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 customers websites using 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 to GPT 3 and now chat GPT

Which to me is actually the most interesting because the most meaningful change is 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 3 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 in it sort of can preserve state and you can ask it more questions about and so I think

there'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 dollar 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 device changes everything because I was like I wanted one so bad

So many times between the keynote and when it was like six months before the really came out

I was so hyped for it

I just remember seeing the device my co-workers 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

I 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 don't have enough money. I was 17 18. That's right. Cuz you had to pay full price

There was no carrier

Subsidization for the original iPhone correct and so it was fun to just I brought my little point-and-shoot camera

I took pictures of all the people

You know getting their first iPhones and playing with him and setting up and did your dad go with you? No

I went with 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 to make apps until the next year, right?

I 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 gonna 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 and 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 like loaded

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

And what do you think the what would have happened? Otherwise would be if

If we did the hard stuff

Well

like 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 want to have a lot of employees. We don't want to have a team. We don't 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 yep, that would be great

You know, we probably would make more money

But that's that's like not what we want 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 was originally gonna be a new 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 gonna 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

Like this thing's scary powerful and I don't actually know what to do with it. Yeah, 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 AI can do. Yep

Hmm, man, 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 Swift, you know 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 have in my head. I was like did we do two episodes on Amazon or three?

We really did three. Yeah episode one was Walmart. Yep in 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 like 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 common place that you buy things are actually discounters and Walmart

Was really the company that single-handedly created the wave of the modern store period?

Yeah, which then Amazon could take digital

Yes. Yes. Well, and I 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 I don't agree with that. Okay, like it is. Okay, so technology at its purest definition is

anything that

Enhances the productivity of a human

So like the wheel is technology because what 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, I mean maybe you could scope it to like apply

technology what makes me want to say that is they were a company who did

business in an established sector, yep, and they

transformed the way

They worked and 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 use technology to transform the way they do it. Maybe it's a meaningless distinction

It's interesting. I just feel like today like Walmart would have been like a hot venture back startup

Well, it's interesting the question with tech applying technology to an existing market is always

What 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 or

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 that tech-enabled when you look at the financials. Yeah, but Walmart is a perfect example of a

Tech-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. Yep, and the way Walmart built their supply chain

was vastly different than all of the

Their two for traditional retailers and way more efficient and made their financials

Work in a way that just wouldn't work for other other retailers legitimately enabled them to have lower prices to get more customers

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a strong argument agree to disagree that they were the first that sort of like brought technology

But but yeah, that's a good point

benchmark

Benchmark benchmark was super cool. I mean that like a pinch 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 away 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. I used to think oh what we can make us different and better is we're gonna spend more time preparing

Than any other interviewer. We're gonna 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 percent of other interviewers out there, but there are other really great interviewers like Ben Thompson. Yep Patrick

See exactly, but what we did with benchmark, that's something that only we can uniquely do

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 and it's great

It's like 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 cogent. It's very straightforward and

he talks a lot about how

There's operational efficiency and their strategy and operational efficiency is we're just gonna be better. We're gonna be more efficient

We're gonna do it for cheaper costs. You and I are gonna do more research than anybody else

But there's real strategy which is trade-offs, right? It's the south warmer is not a strategy, right?

There's sort of the Southwest model of like we are going to have a different model for where we keep planes than every other airline

we're not gonna use the hub-and-spoke model we're gonna

everywhere that we fly to in a constrained set of places that we fly to is going to be a

pseudo hub for us and

We're gonna keep our plane sort of diversified and we're only gonna have one model of airplane

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's comes a lot of downsides

We're gonna lean into the upsides and I think like the lean into the upsides thing for us is if you're doing a super high-velocity

show

Benchmarks probably not gonna 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 gonna want to come on the show because they don't know how they're gonna come across

but if you always

Sort of lean into this we have very few guests

we

Think they're 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, too

There's an element in the case of the benchmark episodes

It actually was all pre-planned in advance that we were gonna do the episode just us and then we were gonna 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 and then we do an episode just us and then it completely changes

Yeah, 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. It's 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 dollar company

Publicly traded as EOG. Yeah listener wrote 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 and midstream

Oh, I just think yeah, that makes sense

And I think EOG is sort of their upstream business that spun off

But it is a publicly traded company that still bears the Enron name. Yeah, I should have looked this up

Did they change the name officially to EOG or is the actual name?

It's 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. 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

Cuz I guess tax is separate from audit, right? They had tax audit and consulting and consulting became Accenture. I

Assume audit is what went away entirely and I think they spun off tax and its own new name that is now Anderson tax

Anderson tax

Interesting which is crazy to me that there was enough brand equity in

Anderson left to sort of go right you wouldn't think that you would have thought that there's got to be a story there

It could be an LP episode could be an LP episode

We talked a minute ago about trade-offs when we were talking about the benchmark. Yeah, two-parter

What 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 to a fault purest

Organization that I think that's the first one or two people. Okay, you're looking at the whole organization. Okay, not a lot of content

Right a common wisdom is to release content every week

We don't do that that has downsides such 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 hosts

You could leverage the podcast feed to promote other

Episodes of your new spin-off show with your new hosts 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, but 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 like I'm 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?

That's my first carve out of them

Tim asked him like how does he come up with all the bits like has he observed 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 like 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 a similar like we ship an acquired episode all I can see are the 16 ways that we could have made it better

I'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 old uh Jim Moore the Colts coach of the playoffs like playoffs. I was like trade-offs trade-offs

as I become older though, like I

Completely 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

I feel so bad. The only person I feel bad about with it is you

I really you bear a huge brunt of that. Thank you

you're also pretty good about like I said I was gonna be done working today at six and so

I'm just like not really doing anything after six even if the text looked kind of important. That's fine

Well, that's called parenthood, but that's true

Yeah parenthood has 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 tidal wave

But 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 the issue now that now that you're

Doing it pretty aggressively as you and I amplify each other because I have this thing where i'm like

This is a thing that david would say like not worth it

Like this is like probably a good time to talk about this

We did a lot of live stuff. Yeah, let's talk about this and like some of which were super cool

Like 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 and are they worth it?

Are they that much incrementally 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 pitch book 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. It's actually a worse product most of the artifacts of

So let's recount this sort of like cool live stuff we did this year. We did the arena show

It still is like surreal. I I can't say that without laughing. It's me moment 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

For the first time yep, uh in in portugal with salona with salona at breakpoint

That was a whole nother crazy set of experience and amazing. Yep. We did the lp show live at the tcv event

Yep, the benchmark dinner

although it wasn't a

live public event

The amount of production effort that totally I was down in san 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, these 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 our camera. So talk about trade-offs and especially I knew I should have brought my camera

especially in shooting

stuff

like live in person

There's a whole new web of things that could go wrong that just don't happen when it's you and I on zoom

Yep 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 persnickety 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

But I mean when you're at a sporting event you have time quarters, you know, 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 um

The arena show like it let's just take a step back. It was so cool. I'm amazing

Um, it was so cool and everybody who came the fact that so many people came and flew in from

All over the world. Yep. We did brooks run with people in the morning

We did a dinner with some sort of like friends of the show and previous guests and sponsors the night before at canless

Who we've had on the show and that adapting it was so special. Yeah, but it's you know, looking back on it

I'm going to talk about because 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 and my wedding

like all the ups a hundred percent amazingness special feelings of it and

Like my most vivid memories looking back on both events

Are just a huge amount of stress and being like are people having fun right now? Like is this going? Well, like, you know

I mostly remember the upside of both of them of of of my wedding

Oh, I remember the upside too, you know

but every time I think about it, I can't not think about uh, you know us being on stage in the middle of the show

And uh when we got to act two and anu was on and we didn't have breaks planned and like people needed to go to

The bathroom and get food and like pitch book was paying for all the free food and booze and everything up

And so of course people were going to go like after the first act ends. It's like, okay

Well, now is a good time to go take advantage of the open bar. Of course, I was just like, oh we should have

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 we just have to be intentional about making next year rather than being like oh

That would be a fun conference to speak at right. Oh my god. I forgot about capital camp. Oh capital camp

Yeah, that was so cool. That was cool. That was a relatively low trade-off because

Uh patrick and brent and clinton 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 because there was no guest so there was no sort of like guest risk, but like it was the first time

I'm such a like vc. It was a technology risk is the best risk

Uh, 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 like a little bit of confidence that you and I could produce a sort of talk about a thing

That wasn't the entire history and strategy of a company, but that was a totally new format for us

I'm curious what you think. I'm so glad we did capital camp and like that

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 but we put together a deck for it and like

But I mean you did most of it like it was a set of pictures a set of pictures

But like I made a deck in years

Yeah, 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 too

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 in what are the things that we care the most about and how do we not do the long tail of 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

On 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 deep relationships with our sponsors and our partners

I think almost every single one of them we did something like

The fund rise 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 quaestar quaestar. That was their original name

Yeah back in the day just like we for our listeners in our audience, you know

We've kind of always thought I think it's been one of our core tenants from the beginning of like we treat our audience as like

equals to like more impressive than us like when we started the show especially now and 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, you know

I'm thinking

Of 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 you know

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-month

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 um

hubris of us to claim that we singularly it acquired have the no but but of the you know our niche of

Media right the listeners to our niche of media. I think unquestionably are 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 lots 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

So we've made kind of like i've been saying is like these are the types of people

Who we would want any way 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

That was something that I think highlights the trade-off

And that i've really come to appreciate this year in the very beginning of acquired

We could did youtube and we've been saying for years and years. We got a retube redo youtube at this point

It's almost a macguffin. Yeah, we're 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 mv8

Of course acquired is gonna redo youtube, but I was so negative on youtube in the episode and the intervening years

I feel like have just been a journey for me of like really coming to appreciate

what a

Incredible product in 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 trade-off 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 and 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

Yeah, 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 yeah, but for the long tail

You know and mass market and other niches of media that don't have as valuable an audience as us. Yep. That is an

amazing thing and most

Creators 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 it I was in earlier and so like us

Engaging in business makes the show what it is, too

It's funny that reminds me of another trade-off one of the things so like really this is driven by being a parent

but uh

Yeah, I don't do boards anymore

I just can't

Never say never but uh, man, you know thinking back on times in my life when I was on

You know five six seven boards and uh as you are now and i'm on three

Okay, that's more managed. It sort of 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

Three is a manageable number. Yep, but even so like to do it, right?

You really gotta 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

Which has basically been true every year since we started seven years ago

Which 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 we hit over a quarter million subscribers, which was 62 000

Just 24 months ago. I know 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 kind of step change like the amazon episode. Yeah 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 in the first 90 days in 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

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

and

Many of those new people subscribed right and so thus the subsequent episodes benchmark enron

like the two benchmark episodes were

Both way higher than the hundred thousand that we were at before amazon

And then enron now is charting to look pretty similar to amazon early

We're only five or six days in but like it is

Unbelievable. 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 like it's a venture 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

It 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. Yeah, 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 formidable 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 unshareable 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 two. I think got a large promotion on spotify

Yeah, and that brought us a bunch of new listeners that were subscribing spotify to us this year

Yeah, they have we really only started kind of more directly working with in january with the taylor swift episode

Which is why was our stat?

98 percent. Oh, yeah of the people who listen on spotify today

Were not listening to 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 found someone's email addresses, but they're not assigned there. Yeah spotify has done a great job of

at least from my perspective, you know engaging with us as creators and I think striking 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 can also like do it better than apple apple has been such a terrible steward 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 like they're abdicating 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 at apple 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

Like fumbled the ball on podcasting but delighted in many other ways, but delighted in another way, you know for us as yeah

I agree, especially the type of business we have yeah at 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

Each episode has a page that page has a bunch of show notes. That page has a transcript

There's sort of 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 fifteen thousand fifteen over fourteen thousand 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 at any given point you copy the url

It's like this is exactly like overcast has the share time stamp. Yeah, and you can do it on youtube, too

Yeah, but like those 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 podcasts being sort of inherently unshareable our episodes being really long make them

Especially hard to share sort of moments insights and there's been a zillion sort of like clip apps over the years

But I do think actually, you know

We have not

grown

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. Yep

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 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 1500 people or so that answered the survey

Which thank you if you did. Yeah, thank you

That the audience mix stayed pretty much the same from two two and a half years ago

The last time we read 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

I think he probably has close to a million people that consume

Stratecory.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 forex from here

But I don't 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. I mean 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 stratecory 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

and

growth 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

Our 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 audience are reading anything on stratecory

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. 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

We and kind of through kindergarten and you too invested almost 10 million dollars in the company this year

so like that's a very mostly kindergarten very small yes, very small

and

most of that capital came from

The acquired audience community like the lp capital that yeah back that spv

Came in very large part from the acquired audience. And so that's not like

Growing the audience of 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 right the business model and like that was a transformational moment for us

And I was advantage is an amazing company, but that's a whole new

It 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 our sponsors before because we get inside into their business

From getting to work directly with ceos on those and we're like that's a really what our audience resonates with with products, right?

That's 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. Yeah, there is no strategic plan for kindergarten ventures period

It is very much like y'all may be shocked that there's no

Strategic period but it's not like we uh did uh, you know an off-site like uh, we didn't do a um

End of year uh special for kindergarten

Like we're doing now for acquired and discuss our strategy and say, you know

I think we should find an opportunity to do a 10 million dollar spv this year

But no it came naturally from everything we're talking about here in acquired. Yep, and just to put a finer point on the

Business 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 before there were several years where revenue was zero. Yeah, this was not a business. That's true

But it you know who's to say that we necessarily have the business model optimized do I think that there should be more?

Sponsorships in episodes. No, 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 we 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

We want to thank our long-time friend of the show vanta the leading trust management platform

Vanta, of course automates your security reviews and compliance efforts

So frameworks like sock 2 iso 2701 gdpr and HIPAA compliance and monitoring

Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple

Yep

Vanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time here on acquired

Jeff Bezos his idea that a company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste better

ie spend your time and resources

Only on what's actually going to move the needle for your product and your customers and outsource everything else that doesn't

Every company needs compliance and trust with their vendors and customers

It plays a major role in enabling revenue because customers and partners demand it but yet it adds zero flavor to your actual product

Vanta takes care of all of it for you

No more spreadsheets. No fragmented tools. No manual reviews to cobble together your security and compliance requirements

It is one single software pane of glass that connects to all of your services via apis and eliminates countless hours of work

For your organization. There are now ai capabilities to make this even more powerful and they even integrate with over 300 external tools

Plus they let customers build private integrations with their internal systems

And perhaps most importantly your security reviews are now real time instead of static

So you can monitor and share with your customers and partners to give them added confidence

So whether you're a startup or a large enterprise and your company is ready to automate compliance and streamline security reviews like vanta's

7 000 customers around the globe and go back to making your beer taste better

Head on over to vanta.com acquired and just tell him that ben and david sent you and thanks to friend of the show

Christina vanta ceo all acquired listeners get a thousand dollars of free credit vanta.com slash acquired

All right, david. What's next on the year in review agenda next we gotta talk about next year

2023 yes looking ahead. Okay first question for us

What episodes topics?

Guess are we thinking about? Oh, what should we um, what's on the docket? Hang 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 um, it's funny how it feels like we gotta 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 and

I 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 elan company that we'll cover after our old space x episode is open ai. We didn't didn't do anything on twitter

We haven't done any revisiting of tesla

It is crazy. God. He's got his fingers and everything the 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 acquired. That is true

I think part of the reason why we

Haven't done a twitter episode since we interviewed dick costolo 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

I 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 interesting actually is tmz

Discussed 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 uh, so for

Acquired ideas or just that's what you do with your preset, you know

Lots of the names are very familiar to us and acquired listeners the 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

Yes 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 and do that on acquired

Yeah

The point the reason to do it is what you said the under like brand, right?

How did these amazing?

Durable brands get built. Yep. I continue to want to do epic health care. I think they're like a huge

Force in the american economy and I don't know if that episode will be a hero's journey or a villain

Is it an n-ron or a nvidia?

I suspect

Without having done any research. I suspect more of an n-ron. Yeah, they're probably not a fraud

But just a open question whether it's good for the world

Yes creates a 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 evolve is sessions. So we did the

Session with jason calicanus. 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

What we do with protagonists of stories after we've done an episode just us on them. Yep, 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 it that statement can kind of take two directions

And I think either would make for an interesting sessions

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 all sorts of scc stuff involved

But there's other conversations we have with them

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 shay's passing and how that really impacted him and like

Led to him deciding to make some changes in how he approached

Life and his work for the next few years like she was like

That was an opportunity that you just let fall on the floor. Like 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 like 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 vishria 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 an amazing and a great privilege. You know who would be

truly

the most

Interesting person to have as playing that role would be peter fenton. Oh, yeah

Oh my gosh, that was the whole benchmarker is amazing that dinner was amazing

There were a few things that peter said that when we were talking about the principal program and blake

One of us I can't remember if it was me or you asked, you know

So why do you guys have a principal, you know in like a like a junior investment person when clearly like your whole

Ethos says you don't do that

And peter's response. Well, it was like, uh, 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

It just like it like leapt out of it just like that was the immediate response that leapt out of him and it's like

Wow, I never thought that

That would show up on a podcast

Yeah

Yeah, that was great. Peter is 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 seers

Nike's one that I really want to do. I know he said we don't do lives

I actually don't think this should be a live show. I want to go on site

I want to go to oregon. Mm-hmm

Go 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 facilities there and like because it's such a

Athletic like a physical thing. I want to go see right what it's like

That's a good point. Yeah, that 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

the little bit I

Know I think mostly from the last dance

But like the 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. It used to be a

big thing

All right. So before we get to our extended carve outs

In sort of reviewing 2022 you and I both had big 2022s. So that's probably worth uh, worth chatting about a little bit

I love this is uh, we didn't intend it this way

This is becoming much like the benchmark dinner that we recorded everything obviously before dinner because we didn't want to eat dinner before

You know

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 gonna eat aren't they gonna eat real food and like we did afterwards

Yeah, yeah, but like that would not make for good video content. Clink clink clink clink. Yep, uh audio or video content

We are going to after we finish recording here

We're going to go out to uh celebrate celebrate a holiday dinner for acquired for the two of us

But I feel like this is like the pre-recorded

This is the recording version. So at which we would definitely talk about our personal lives

Well, you had

I had probably the biggest life 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 generation sort of like date for a long time and live together and feel like life partners

But there's something totally different about being married

You know having the ring on every day as a reminder and the sense of like longevity

Associated with it is really cool in a really totally different psychological

Place than I thought well and you go through this process and project together

Yes, the wedding like from the moment you get engaged

until the wedding

Is this like uh, you know, you're like a butterfly going into like a caterpillar going into cocoon. It's like a transformational period

Yes, um, 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 was my

David was my groomsman. You and I have some great pictures together. Thank you for coming up and being a part of it. You did a

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 deejaying onto the dance floor out there

It's so fun going to weddings after having been married because you're like, oh good

I just get to enjoy all of the the fruits of the couple's labor

Yeah

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. Um, it was super cool. That was I think the biggest

Personal life event what else for you this year?

Let's see on 2022. We took a vacation to italy. I'd never been to italy before that was like a

absolutely spectacular

time rome

chinquatera

Florence coppery god the island of coppery is incredible. I've never been it's just

Beautiful 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 it 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 in tried and to kill him

And so he like fled to coppery 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 he was he was a pre-digital nomad. Yes

That's the cool thing about italy and um every european country compared to here

But I feel like especially italy the sense of history especially for you know us to your history buffs like yep

You know you walk around rome or florence and a roma special with florence and its own

Rite 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 we're thinking about where to go on a honeymoon

Probably early to mid next year and I like 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 the world, right?

Like 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

That as much as possible or should I say?

You know, there's this one spot in hawaii that I really like and so every single year i'm going back there

Clearly the answer is both

Yeah

Maybe you had someone that planned for carve-outs

But like I feel like i'm like decently up on like the latest like tech and gadgets and stuff, but like you're like

You made some interesting decisions about your personal technology. Oh, we're gonna review my apple apple urine review. Yeah

Yeah, can we do an apple urine review for ben? Yeah, let's do it. So got the ipad mini

For acquired we both are rocking the the mini because it's very very good for on stage as we did more 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 and i've basically no use for it

Like this is actually the device that suits my use case

I think a little over a year ago. I got the macbook pro 16 inch which is which has the level here

This is our fire. Yep, which is it the finest computer i've ever owned. It's a

Display is amazing. Yes, the display is unbelievable. I mean everything about this thing is nuts

I do have nv the m2 macbook error. I think it's sexy

Like 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 having like 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

I want the screen space because i'm also a venture capitalist and i'm doing spread sheet 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. So you still bring yeah. Yeah purely personal travel

What are you talking about? I don't there's not a single day where i'm on

personal vacation where

I'm not also doing something. That's true. Let's see even for yours truly. That's I mean, we're small business owners

Yeah, we 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

Yep, 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 we need to um, you need real computer. We need to make edits to an episode or something like I need to

Yeah, yeah

And I could do that on a smaller computer and 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 a nonprofit that i'm working with

and

None of those things required a computer

but

I brought

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 and where I thought you were going to start. So I really like to take pictures

I'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 tendinosis something's 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 and like constantly it's having that computer

Yeah, so 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 if there's a test one in 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 battery is going to die on this one

And if they never make another mini again, like you want to have one like in cold storage

It's just like my uh nike's upstairs that i've got stacked in the closet

It is the perfect size phone

so I have um

I have a 12 mini right now. I didn't upgrade to the third probably should have dude you totally should

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 when I haven't gotten it yet

It's because it's on back when I went to the 14 pro. Wow, which I have never had any of the pro

iPhones like I care about technology a lot, but I was just never compelled by I don't care that didn't used to not care that much about

Photography. Yep, and so it's just 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 what 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 now just like some of the best advice

I love talking to people who have older kids

I'd be like because you just realize time just slips away like when you have a kid and um,

Almost universally. I wish I'd taken more photos. I especially wish I'd taken more videos

Uh throughout the end. So like like oh, all right, so the pro I have on order, but I i'm

Conflicted about it. Like i'm really gonna miss the form factor. You are you're really gonna miss it. Yeah

It's like not gonna fit in your pocket. Yeah, it's gonna be

It's gonna 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 has been okay with in the name of getting the very best

Photos that they can out of this thing which as a parent now i'm like I see the business reason for doing that, right?

Okay, so keep going on the lineup because you've got another important large device. Yeah, so I bought the apple watch

It's really heavy. Uh

I was about to say the apple watch 14 the apple watch ultra

Which i'm sure next year this is going to be the apple watch ultra two or the apple watch two ultra

I'm curious how they'll name apple watch ultra second generation. I imagine that's what they'll do. Anyway, this thing is

Actually super light relative to how large it is and you 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

For sure. It's big. It's beautiful though. The screen is yeah, the super clear like you can look at pictures on it

It's really bright. It's 2000 nits

So like it has a flashlight button because it functions as a fairly effective flashlight the battery lasts like almost three days

Which is totally game changing if you I think i've tracked every single night of sleep for

four or five years now

And so that's like a thing that I that's a use case. I really care about

I haven't done anything extreme in it yet. Like i've climbed mount saint helens

Got this great photo 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 um, I totally expect to use it for the 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 that could be there's a good number of times where i'm like, okay, cool

I 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. Yep. 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 like, you know raised bezel around it bezel around it

Yeah

It 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 cassio 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 had added that to me would be a

Maybe not 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 uh ultra

I wouldn't have to take it off to charge it as much but when I put my watch back on after I'm charging it

Then I gotta enter my pin code every time which you know, like first one

I don't understand why they can't put a touch id

Sensor. I mean, I know they're trying to save as much space as possible in there, 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 found that to be kind of janky. I have found that to be kind of janky too. I can't like

Reliably trust that it's going to 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 uh

A lot larger than it used to be shall we say

All 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. Oh, okay

So i'm

Still rocking the 2020

Original og m1 macbook air. Yep, which there's so much more performance machines out there like this now

But like I still have tons of head right i'm not sure you notice the performance

Yes, and like the leap forward that that m1 chip was was just

Incredible, I mean

Performance battery 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

Whatever they're going for like I bet

500 ish 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 dollars. 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 guy

Okay, so there's that we talked about my phone. I'm currently rocking the 12 mini

Very mixed emotions about transitioning to the 14 pro. Yep

And i'm rocking the uh, 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 highly recommend it

my

decision for going with the

Se originally was it didn't have the always on screen and I actively did not want the always on screen

Hmm

How do you find you does it 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 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. Yeah, it felt like my phone didn't it's like really on. Yeah, but on the on the watch it

Yeah, it's it's subtle. It's not like noticeable

I will say too. 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 uh checking your watch checking your watch but having 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 like jerking my wrist or like 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 like tap it

Seropitiously. Yeah

And then on the ipad side the ipad mini I had the one

Really only negative experience besides the just amount of work that we end pitch book put into the arena show was my old ipad

Got stolen after the arena show criminal

Literally criminal. I could still see it on like the map on the find my devices

It was somewhere up like north gate or somewhere like north of seattle and like but it's like these things

You're like just because I know where that is. It does not mean I should go there and get it. No

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?

Like the minis don't have a promotion display the 120 hertz

Yeah, oh no i've got like an old old ipad that I don't think has promotion

I feel like you used to have one with a promotion display. You know what?

Maybe it doesn't I think it's an original the first ipad pro that they made in 2017. 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 pro right that's the goes up to 120 hertz hertz refresh rate on the screen. Yeah butter

The mini is great though for events. 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 uh

For outdoor stuff. You can't beat the kindle

Yeah, 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

I'll still bring the kindle. I wouldn't 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 uh 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. 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 right with uh, right

Jenny and I got the oasis for that very reason jenny's at night owl and i'm a morning person

And jenny is a huge reader. She has a phd in literature and um, i'm a huge reader too

But she puts me to shame she would stay up reading at night with the light on and finally 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 uh

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 you know, then like the first couple months are like

It's 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 uh, I know we released the interview

Oh, we switched it with the michael obits 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 probably less like

Such a fog

Yeah, there's first few months

But then this year is video jenny went back to work and she works in person

She works at san francisco ballet like it's an 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

Re-negotiate our relationship in a long time. So uh, 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 and you know, it's for hearing you talk about um, things 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

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, and that is so true about getting married but then having a kid, I think that's like the biggest

Well, there's so many huge things but one is like you now 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 decisions. You're like, you know, it's like a responsible adult. Hopefully

You know can keep themselves alive can like if we're going late recording an acquired episode

She'll be fine, but you know, right when you have a kid

Right that's big starves. 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

so

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 not 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 like that's a very normal thing of like, you know

Mom's too have this but like kid pops out and you're like, whoa

You know, right but there's no instant love. I had the instant love like instant

Uh, 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 like so clearly has a personality and like every day and like

Oh, 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 to just like the early days are so physically demanding

Like on everybody

Especially moms but like any any caregiver

It's 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, oh, there's no way cool words. David. Yeah, right

exactly

Highly highly recommend it but uh, you know in due time. Yeah other stuff for you this year personally

It's sort of crazy looking back on it like so much changes when you parent

but um, 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 did 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 was great like really hard very different. It seemed very hard. I gotta say from the outside. It was hard

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 we were pretty sure we're gonna stay in california and probably the bay area jenny's family's there and and we genuinely 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 the 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 you know, why would you live in san francisco period?

Especially post pandemic. Why would you raise kids in san francisco? It's actually great like for us. It's been

Amazing we can walk. We don't have to drive. We don't have to get her in the car. There's so much great stuff

She really enjoys it like she's a city kid like after breakpoint. We went out in the countryside in portugal for a couple days

The baby was so bored. She was like really get me back to lisbon. Like oh, wow

So it's actually been really great for us staying in the city. We'll see as she gets older, but um

But that's the plan

That's great

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Carvets carvets. 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 unless otherwise stated. This is a spoiler free

Yeah, uh carve outs

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 in project hail mary

there's just like all the known rules of physics that we know about

and

Yeah, it's uh, it's hard sci-fi I think is the term right? Is that what they call it?

Yeah, where it's like everything is like laws of physics explanations 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 acquired should read it

I think it expands even broader than this audience

But this audience in particular would eat it up called the psychology of money by morgan houssell

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

post

2020 and 2021 bubble when like everything was crazy. It would have been great to read it during 2020

Yeah

But it includes I think i've i've made it a carve-out before the um

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 this amazing

path of

World war ii 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?

I certainly don't account for enough of that in my own financial planning. Yeah

Morgan makes a very strong argument in the book to basically

Put as much into smp 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 beat 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? I 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 malady. Is it worth reading even if you're already steeped in the industry?

You and I have done research on 250 companies and all these venture funds and talked to the people that

Started a lot of these venture funds and sebastian knows more it just goes deeper

I mean just talks about these investments that like we think we've talked about the best investments of all time

There are more and like oh 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 gonna love it. Okay

I might find that under the tree. That's all I got for books. Oh, that's all you 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, I don't like whiffs

I know I i'm embarrassed by this like mostly for me

This is like an ultimate like david rosenthal like dad joke moment

My 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 swear I did. Did you?

We'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 highly recommend non acquired books that I read this year

I think I did this as a carve out. Uh, the godfather series the books. Yep mario puzo's books

They are so good as good or better than the movies and the movies are

In my opinion some of the best of all time. Yeah

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 like huge interview with karmak. So felt less urgent for us to do it

but um

Really 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 did I send 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 you work at id she may have worked briefly at id

But then she joined remaro at his next company after remaro and karmak broke up. Oh crazy

Anyway, crazy story and then she went on she came out to silicon valley ended up working at twilio

And now it's the sierra at manta. 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, huh? Cool. Stevie's story is is amazing

So that's my that's my article carve out too, which is our next category

Mine was how all this happened. Yeah, perfect

Podcasts podcast. 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 tenera and the founder's podcast. Yep, of course

Wonderful show and we've become close with david and like when you hear david on the show

He is exactly that same way in real life too. Like it's so great. We 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 yep been to uh, the waveform podcast that they do is great

I've started like regularly listening. I really like it and um, our buddy david ml who's on the MKbhd team

He's regularly on a host a co-host on the they rotate through the team

On the waveform podcast and like it's in the same vein as kind of the verge podcast

Like 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 like end gadget gizmodo type things but like

That was wrong. It is my

This is like embarrassing to say new favorite publication

Like nee lai is so smart and I i'll basically go listen to nee lai

Talk wherever he is like 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 nee lai in any situation

and then like with the verge redesign I sort of

I don't think I realized how unbelievably thoughtful the team there is and how strategic they are

They'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 like I think the new verge redesign is genius

Like 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 right? 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 verge and I might consume some other stuff that comes to me on social media

but like I will directly go to those two properties and 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 aphorism. You don't want to be top one percent at anything

You want to be top 25 percent at the right three things and figure out how to marry them together. I feel like that's

Neatly 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

Like I did a ton of qualcomm research on the verge because they've done so much reporting on qualcomm over the years

So big verge fan. I know that's we don't have publication. It's like a category, but I think they've got podcasts

Yeah, they don't put podcasts. So back to podcasts

I already said the episode of tim ferris with jerry seinfeld from a couple 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, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean we both open tonight with cocktails, but um

Well, you gotta live

This is a celebratory event. That's right. That's right

My last podcast recommendation is smartless any episode so fun

It's just so fun to go live in their world for an episode

You've been like that one for a while right last six months or so. Yeah, I feel like you've been making on that. All right

music

I don't think I discovered any new music this year

I listened to a lot of taylor swift midnights

I did a ton of prep for our wedding curating a bunch of different playlists for like different segments of the day. Oh, that's right

you

Put together all the playlists yourself too, right? Yeah

I mean the dj did all the work that a great dj does but I sent him very highly manicured

Playlists 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 like spotify year in review and I was like

Oh, 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 podcasts 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 the only way it was available

Yeah, we're back. It's interesting. Whereas i've gone the total opposite direction. I pretty much only do physical paper

Copies for acquired research. I admire your attention span. I'm interested to try. I do have an apple pencil for our iPad minis

and

I wish I could write with the apple pencil directly on the book. I thought that'd be a useless device

Yeah, I bought that and I thought it'd be so cool and I never use 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 an e-book the same way I do on a physical book and

For whatever reason the tech gods

Just have not let 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

Less so now but when uh when she was like, I don't know between ages like

two months and six months

they'll go through

moments, right

Olivia rodrigo almost without fail turn on driver's license

like

She would just be wrapped in attention and like immediately calm down

Amazing. We're like, I guess we have a teenager like

So I listened to a lot of olivia rodrigo this year, huh? And she's very talented. Huh? Very impressive

All right, I got out to uh to my spotify

uh

TV and movies. Yes

Andor was my carve-out very you gotta carry everything here because I did none frickin

I rewatched black panther recently. It was just as good great movie. But that's all I got

So and or I saw the new top gun. That was unbelievably fun

Like so put that on a big 4k tv with some surround sound and just enjoy jenny and I watched that uh on a laptop

Uh, yeah, we we got to go. I think they're re-releasing it in theaters. Oh, really?

Yeah, we can go upstairs after this and watch it's a 75 inch like

Like it's a very good. Uh, it'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 rom-com

It's like a family dynamics movie sad parts happy parts and visually stunning

So and great acting I don't really want to talk about what it's about because it's 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

Rich people that show up at this beautiful hotel the white lotus in cicely

And they're 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 very well written fiction and the first one was in hawaii

So it's and 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. I think that's what they're doing. Yeah

lastly

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

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 a 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 arrest that like all this document all this stuff became public footage. Yeah

So well, 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 ossified

And what about you? Do you have anything? 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 uh

Flighty, which is ryan jones's he's an indie developer

He previously did weather line, 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 and it's tied 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 gotta 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 mass of people are behind you it's

very that's huge

Very that is an edge. That's alpha. That's alpha right there. That's alpha

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 is just amazing indie developer

It's been really fun to like watch. Um, 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

Maybe it'd be an lp show or two, but we should have some indie developers. Yeah on 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 what? Is this a robo vacuum? Yes

It's the competitor to rumba and I think it's a xiaomi company

You know how xiaomi owns like large stakes and a whole bunch of companies that they like manufacture for I think it's that

but it's just like

I had a rumba and I actually returned it to get the robo rock instead and the s7 max is the like

I mean, it's like the worst product name of all time, but it's like the souped up self emptying

also has a lightweight mop built in it's the first time i've actually had like a

robot where you actually can say like

This thing is robust enough that it's just going to make my life easier without failing or getting stuck or needing some kind of intervention

It just does its job. What's prevented 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 robo rocks

given the

xiaomi

Involvement or potential I would imagine you could probably

Get two for less than the cost of a no, they're very expensive. They're very expensive. Oh, wow. I was expecting that too

No, they're they're um, they're premium priced. Oh, interesting, but great fantastic product. Yeah

I guess that is a solution. You just do one for each floor. Yep. Yeah, interesting or get used to carrying it

It's fine

I'm gonna guess you're gonna walk upstairs to like go to bed

So you may as well just like carry this thing under your arm and set it down and then start it in the morning or something

hmm

That's great, but I never thought about that just save you a thousand bucks right there

All right

That's all I got that's all your brother. Okay. Let's see. I uh,

I'm intentionally gonna limit a parenting product to to just one

I could really do a whole other show about this. Yeah, like this is maybe I should do a list

Yeah listeners 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 I never would have thought of but diaper bags are like big

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, like you can get like a nice like pouch or whatever like printed or like, you know

I don't even know where ours is from

And then you could just move that pouch into whatever bag or you can either carry the pouch yourself

Or put in your backpack or put it in whatever like rather than having a dedicated diaper bag

Keep the core essentials of the diaper bag in a pouch that you can then put in other things

God dude, this show is getting worse. Okay. Listen listeners if you're still listening i'm sorry

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 a parent i'm totally gonna be like yeah

I'll just do that. I'll make a list for you good

on the

Universal product appeal a couple quick ones one. I 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 like it actually it's so convenient

It is really nice. So convenient. I have the microsoft ergonomic sculpt two and I love it

But I think I type 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 standalone touch id

dongle

Yeah, totally bunch of elgato gear

Including the sound pan 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 camera the wide camera that somehow turned off again is uh mounted on the elgato

Boom arm where my mic is normally on my desk. Yep, they make 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 i've put up, uh, 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 4k the way that we pipe our cameras into our computer as webcams

Yep, huge huge elgato fans nice

All right, and then you added to the agenda a final

new carve-out

section

of places places here

Uh copry

That was my that you already yeah discussed

Yes

Any for you?

No, we didn't really go anywhere new despite all our travels. We've been to portugal and lizmon 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

Just an amazing lovely lovely play one of the loveliest places on earth and very accessible from california

We gotta find more. We did the ea episode down there

We gotta we gotta find more acquired related reasons to go. Yeah, that's right trip lives 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

If 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 davin

one very

Very important last thing a big. Thank you. Yeah to all of you

We uh, you know, we talked about it a lot on this episode if we truly have the best audience in the world

The best community in the world ben and I just pin to 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. I mean clearly we can talk for hours just about the year

And all the fun whether or not that's interesting to other people it remains to be seen but every business should know their source of power

And their source of differentiation and 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 indeed. Happy holidays. Happy holidays

Who got the truth?

Is it you is it you is it you who got the truth now?

[Acquired Podcast: 2022 Year in Review and Future Outlook]-[Holiday Special 2022]

📋 Summary

A Year of Strategic Evolution

Key Highlights and Retrospectives

Strategic Philosophy and Growth

Looking Ahead to 2023

Personal Reflections and Tech Picks

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Acquired Podcast: 2022 Year in Review and Future Outlook]-[Holiday Special 2022]

📋 Summary

A Year of Strategic Evolution

Key Highlights and Retrospectives

Strategic Philosophy and Growth

Looking Ahead to 2023

Personal Reflections and Tech Picks

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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