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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Specifically integrating the two companies enterprise AI assistance starting in the fall customers will be able to interact with service now's
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It's telling for the magnitude of this partnership to see Satya Nadella appearing in the keynote at service now's big annual event knowledge last month
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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behind the scenes co-pilot shares that request and
context with now assist and now assist
Accesses internal company policy with the right permissions for that user and returns the answer to co-pilot in a rich card with options
For the user to kick off a workflow via now assist in the future Microsoft co-pilot will also be integrated
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It's pretty awesome for both companies and especially awesome for enterprise users
So if you want to learn more about the service now platform and how it can work with your company's Microsoft services
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
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?
