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Episode: Chase Center + Summer Update

Author: Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Duration: 00:21:53

Episode Shownotes

Summer greetings from Acquired! Two items for this “mini-episode”:Tickets are now available for our live show at Chase Center in San Francisco, with special guests including Mark Zuckerberg (!). The show is Tuesday, September 10th, with doors opening at 5 PM for an hour of mingling with other listeners before

the show starts at 6 PM. Huge thank you to the J.P. Morgan Payments team for being our incredible partner in making this happen. Tickets are almost gone so make sure you grab one ASAP — you don’t want to miss this night! https://acquired.fm/sfWe also figured this is a good excuse to update you all on the state of Acquired — after an incredible first half of the year (including WSJ’s profile of the show) we are taking the rest of the summer off to recharge, parent our young children, and prepare for the big night in September. We hope you’re having a great summer, and we’ll see you live in the fall!Carve Outs:Thule Urban Glide 3Disney’s Aulani ResortMeller sunglassesQuarterback and Receiver on NetflixMore Acquired:Subscribe to ACQ2Join the Slack: https://acquired.fm/slack‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Summary

In this mini-episode, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal announce their upcoming live show at the Chase Center on September 10th, featuring Mark Zuckerberg. They reflect on the remarkable growth of their podcast after a Wall Street Journal profile, noting a surge of 317,000 new subscribers and reaching the number one spot on Spotify and Apple charts. The hosts introduce their unique podcast format and share personal anecdotes, including summer vacation plans and recommendations for families, while emphasizing community engagement and excitement for their live event.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Chase Center + Summer Update) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
Hello, acquired listeners, and happy summer, David.

00:00:04 Speaker_00
Happy summer, indeed. I feel like a kid let out of school.

00:00:08 Speaker_01
I know. You just got back from Hawaii. Are you feeling refreshed?

00:00:12 Speaker_00
I am feeling as refreshed and relaxed as the father of a three-month-old and three-year-old can possibly be.

00:00:20 Speaker_01
Yeah, I bet. We'll get to that in Carveouts, I'm sure.

00:00:23 Speaker_00
Yep.

00:00:24 Speaker_01
Listeners, we, after 10 years straight of never taking any time off of Acquired, we're doing like six weeks off over the summer. And it turns out that doesn't actually mean six weeks off of work for you and I, David.

00:00:37 Speaker_01
It means six weeks of not making an episode because we are putting all of our energy and focus into September 10th at the Chase Center. David, what are we doing?

00:00:47 Speaker_00
hell yeah chase center live show in partnership with our good friends at jp morgan payments this is going to be as many of you have already heard the biggest thing that we have ever done this is where the warriors play it's the brand new arena in the middle of downtown san francisco

00:01:06 Speaker_00
And Mark Zuckerberg is going to be there with us on stage. He's only one of the acts that we are planning. We've been very, very busy. We're pulling out all the stops. It's going to be an amazing event.

00:01:20 Speaker_01
We'll have some fun surprises for everyone that we're not planning to share in advance. So if you're free September 10th, or if you can make yourselves free, be in San Francisco.

00:01:29 Speaker_01
It's funny, we announced many months ago on the show, save the date, but then we actually haven't had an episode since tickets have been on sale.

00:01:37 Speaker_01
And so despite the fact that we emailed a lot of you and we tweeted and we put it in the Slack, David and I were on the phone yesterday and we were like, huh, we should probably let

00:01:44 Speaker_01
people who just listen to the podcast and don't follow Acquired anywhere else know about it too. So Acquired.fm slash SF, we really hope to see you there.

00:01:54 Speaker_01
Our goal is really just to feel like the biggest celebration and community of like-minded listeners possible, almost like the Omaha for tech or Omaha on the West Coast.

00:02:04 Speaker_00
It's going to be great. Listeners are organizing a bunch of events around the show itself in the days before and after. It's going to be really kind of like the Omaha weekend.

00:02:16 Speaker_00
So if you want to stay up to date on all of that, look for announcements in the slack in the coming weeks.

00:02:21 Speaker_01
Yep. And feel free to plan your own too. At the end of the day, even before announcing this on the podcast here, there are several thousand of you who have bought tickets and are coming.

00:02:31 Speaker_01
And so no one venue except for the Chase Center is going to hold us all anyway. So if you're coming and you want to plan dinners or happy hours or company meetups or anything, please just feel free to take the initiative. Do that. Post in Slack.

00:02:43 Speaker_01
We'd love for it to happen.

00:02:44 Speaker_00
The other thing we should say here, there's two ticket prices all in price. It's $100 for floor seats, which are almost gone at this point in time, and $50 for everywhere else in the arena. That's it. That's all in. That includes ticket master fees.

00:03:00 Speaker_00
We're pretty sure this is the cheapest event that has ever been put on ticket price wise at the Chase Center. Definitely not the cheapest event production budget wise, but we're really proud of that.

00:03:11 Speaker_00
We want this to be open and available and accessible to everybody. We want as many of you there as can make it. This is like a party that we want to throw for everyone.

00:03:21 Speaker_01
Yep. Well, David, now that we have a few minutes here and we're not mid-episode, should we reflect on the last few months in Acquired Land? We thought listeners would be interested in a little bit of a peek behind the scenes.

00:03:35 Speaker_00
It's been a hell of a ride the last couple months, Ben. I don't think I've even really till leaving for Hawaii, whatever it was 10 days ago, I had a chance to stop and reflect on this. My second daughter was born at the end of April.

00:03:49 Speaker_00
And then the Wall Street Journal article about us came out, I think like two weeks later. So it's just been a whirlwind.

00:03:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's funny. It's been one of these things people have asked, what is the impact on the Wall Street Journal profile? And it's hard to disambiguate the two things that happen concurrently.

00:04:07 Speaker_01
That piece, which is the best encapsulation of what Acquired is that has ever been published, There's sort of been two canonical pieces.

00:04:16 Speaker_01
David Lidsky's wonderful piece in Fast Company last year, following the production of the Nike episode, really dives into the making of an episode and what that is all about.

00:04:25 Speaker_01
And this one is kind of like, what is acquired today and how did this thing come to be? And what happened is, when that article came out, Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.

00:04:43 Speaker_00
That is a mind blowing sentence. That is not something that we ever, ever thought would even be remotely within the realm of possibility.

00:04:52 Speaker_01
No.

00:04:53 Speaker_01
And what that led to is number one has staying power, because if anybody opens up Apple Podcasts right now and hit the browse tab, you can very clearly see the number one podcast is the one centered on your screen that you're curious about checking out.

00:05:06 Speaker_01
So all of the goodness that came from the WSJ piece was then massively amplified over the course of weeks and months because we just stayed the number one podcast in this self-fulfilling prophecy way across both giant podcasting platforms.

00:05:22 Speaker_01
So to just add some numbers to that, because we've gotten the question so many times, we were thinking, we should just talk about it on air.

00:05:29 Speaker_01
317,000 new subscribers or followers, depending on whether you're using Apple or Spotify's parlance, have followed the show since the Wall Street Journal piece went live.

00:05:43 Speaker_01
And for context, in January coming into the year, we estimated our listener base was about 500,000 people. It was a major event. Yes.

00:05:54 Speaker_01
And so David, I had always sort of been of this belief, especially when I'm working with startups, like don't count on a single press article being trajectory changing for you. That's generally true, except when it isn't.

00:06:07 Speaker_00
Yeah, like all the companies we cover on the show, it's the exceptions that prove the rule here. It was a wonderful piece. Ben Cohen, who wrote it at the journal, is an excellent journalist. I have the utmost respect for him.

00:06:19 Speaker_00
He writes the science of success column at the journal that this was part of. It was just one of those lightning in a bottle moments. I don't know how to describe it otherwise.

00:06:29 Speaker_01
Yeah. So part of this is a welcome to all of you who are new listeners to the show. You know, David and I have been doing this for close to 10 years now. The audience has grown slowly and it doubled organically every year for the first nine years.

00:06:44 Speaker_01
And one way to think about that, because we don't really do paid marketing, what that means is. the whole audience base, on average, told one friend who stuck around and listened to the show every year.

00:06:58 Speaker_01
So in some sense, that's almost nothing to write home about. But on the other hand, it actually just kept happening.

00:07:03 Speaker_01
And the cool thing is, it meant that it built the audience base that we really wanted, because everyone personally recommended it to a friend rather than having an explosive growth moment.

00:07:14 Speaker_01
And so that's why the slack is such a wonderful and civil place. You know, it's not like this community that sort of showed up out of nowhere.

00:07:21 Speaker_01
It's this community that's been slowly building organically by inviting other people who they know in from the real world over time.

00:07:28 Speaker_01
And then if I could say, what would be the single best growth event if we were going to have a outsized external force that brought a bunch of audience? The Wall Street Journal is the exact right audience to join the rest of you.

00:07:41 Speaker_00
I was going to say the same thing. Yeah.

00:07:43 Speaker_01
WSJ subscribers are among the most well-educated, thoughtful business people in the world who love nerding out on this stuff. We're delighted to have anybody here who just found out because you read the WSJ.

00:07:55 Speaker_00
Totally. The other thing that was so surprising about this, hell, I used to work at the Wall Street Journal a long, long time ago, briefly, early in my career.

00:08:04 Speaker_00
So I identify with it deeply and love the publication and was so glad they were going to cover us. But I at least have always believed that people aren't going to discover podcasts by reading about a podcast or in another medium.

00:08:17 Speaker_00
If you read about something, you're probably not going to go open up your phone and your podcast player and hit subscribe or you're in some other modality. Right. This proved us wrong.

00:08:29 Speaker_01
The dirty secret behind Acquired is every episode is about the exception. Every company we talk about is the most extreme outlier.

00:08:36 Speaker_01
I often find myself wondering, even though we have this playbook and this lessons learned, is the real playbook that you can't learn any lessons because they're such extreme outliers?

00:08:48 Speaker_01
You know, these big tech companies, they're all monopolies or near monopolies. in the largest and most profitable markets in the world. Well, like, no one else's business is that.

00:08:57 Speaker_01
And so the lesson you can draw from a cash gusher that is extremely difficult to disrupt, some of the things you can apply to building your business, but it's much more interesting, which is of course why we do the history and facts, to go look at them in their first few years of life to understand how they catapulted to the position rather than trying to learn something about the companies as you perceive them today.

00:09:20 Speaker_00
It feels like a visceral manifestation to you and me of this takeaway from all of our episodes. Every great success story is idiosyncratic.

00:09:29 Speaker_01
Yes.

00:09:29 Speaker_00
You can't plan this and they all are their own journeys. It's why we can make a four or five hour episode about all these different companies. And it's not just, well, they did the same thing that the other companies did.

00:09:42 Speaker_01
Yeah, part of this takeaway for me is it's sort of unclear if and what would ever be a large outsized growth event.

00:09:49 Speaker_01
Like when you look at our chart, it's perfectly smooth for almost a decade until there's this one point where you can see, whoa, something clearly happened and numbers jumped up from May to now.

00:09:59 Speaker_01
And I don't know that you can ever really plan for those. So a PR person emailed me, how did you pitch that piece to the journal? And I was just laughing like we didn't.

00:10:08 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:10:08 Speaker_01
There's no way you could possibly anticipate something like this happening and then execute a PR strategy to try to make it happen. Maybe other people know differently, but I've never once seen that be the way that things like this happen.

00:10:24 Speaker_01
Well, let's see. Things we wanted to do today. Chat about the arena show. Oh, one other note on that. A few people have emailed us and said, my whole company's coming.

00:10:33 Speaker_01
We even had a parent email us and say, my 13-year-old wants to have his birthday party by bringing all of his friends to the live show, which is the coolest thing ever. Coolest thing ever. Crazy, that's real.

00:10:45 Speaker_01
If you're interested in something like that, to email us hello at acquired.fm for big group ticket buys. And there's a special office that we can hook you up with that helps deal with that.

00:10:54 Speaker_00
Yeah, we've had a few companies get in touch with us and say either they're remote first companies or they're located somewhere else like, oh, we're going to do our fall off site as a company in San Francisco for the live show, which is super cool.

00:11:07 Speaker_00
So, yes, if you want to do anything like that, hello at acquired.fm, we'll make it happen. We'd love to have you here.

00:11:13 Speaker_01
Yep. The other thing that we wanted to do, we've got one more sort of announcement on show structure and then carve outs.

00:11:20 Speaker_01
So the show structure thing is, as you may have guessed or observed, the thing that makes acquired episodes unique is the format of David and I

00:11:34 Speaker_01
sitting down, doing the hundreds of hours of research, coming together with separate prepared minds, with separate understandings of the history, and with separate beliefs about what made this business work, and then doing our four-hour format to tell the story and unpack why the business worked.

00:11:53 Speaker_01
That's very different than an interview show where you have a great guest on where everybody knows their name, and you interview them, and then you say, so long, folks, and you sign off.

00:12:02 Speaker_01
There are many of those shows, and there are many excellent, excellent of those shows. Occasionally, we do have the opportunity to interview someone like Jensen, like Charlie,

00:12:14 Speaker_01
like Dara from Uber, where we have covered the business in the past, or perhaps someone like Howard Schultz is willing to spend the five, six hours with us that it takes to do our standard format with them present.

00:12:26 Speaker_01
But what we've basically done is we've decided that the main show, with few exceptions, is for doing our core four-hour format of David and I together.

00:12:35 Speaker_01
Occasionally, we will follow that up with an interview with the protagonist after we've had a chance to really do our thing. But that kind of leaves us with a whole bunch of opportunity to do great interviews, but just that are not quite acquired.

00:12:49 Speaker_01
And so ACQ2 has really become the place where we're doing all of that now.

00:12:53 Speaker_01
And so if you like interviews like the one we did with the Synopsys founder and the Synopsys CEO to kind of do a deep dive on the state of semis today, or the next one we have coming out is an interview with Joe Montana, who managed to shift from being one of the best football players of all time

00:13:08 Speaker_01
you know, many times Super Bowl MVP to a really excellent venture capitalist to an exceptional investor. Yes.

00:13:15 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:13:15 Speaker_01
And we've got several other public company CEOs lined up that we're going to be doing on ACQ two soon.

00:13:22 Speaker_01
So while Dave and I are taking some time to breathe, prep for the arena show, if you're feeling like you want to experience some more required and you've already gone through the back catalog, ACQ two is the place to tune in for those as they come out.

00:13:34 Speaker_00
Indeed. All right. To bring us home here for our little summer session. Carve-outs. Carve-outs. Ben, we were about to hit record and you stopped and you said, wait a minute, I got to walk around my house.

00:13:46 Speaker_00
I am so excited to hear what you came back to us with.

00:13:49 Speaker_01
All right. So we may have to start doing this on the show or we may hear a revolt if we start doing this. I don't know. Now that you and I both have small children, there's like a whole second category of goods that are parent related. Baby carve-outs.

00:14:03 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:14:03 Speaker_01
Parent carve-outs. So I'll do my parent carve-out first. On the holiday special, I gave two stroller recommendations. So in keeping with tradition, I'm doing a third stroller recommendation. My Father's Day gift.

00:14:15 Speaker_00
This is the most Ben Gilbert thing ever. I love it. Wait, was your Father's Day gift a stroller?

00:14:21 Speaker_01
It was. It was a running stroller. Yes. Because it kind of perfectly aligned with my son turning six months old, which is when it's reasonably safe for them to be in a running stroller. And I will tell you, he loves it.

00:14:35 Speaker_01
Running through the park near our house, the trees whizzing by, whether it's wake time or nap time, it's great. I get the miles in.

00:14:43 Speaker_01
I've been ramping up my running again, which is, you know, now that I have a nine-month-old, a thing you can kind of start doing again. But the Thule, or Thule? I don't exactly know how to pronounce it. I never know how to pronounce it, yeah. Thule?

00:14:57 Speaker_01
I'm going to mess it up with my American, but I think it's colloquially referred to in America as Thule.

00:15:01 Speaker_00
T-H-U-L-E is the brand, right?

00:15:03 Speaker_01
Yes. The Urban Glide 3 is excellent, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking about running with a small child.

00:15:12 Speaker_00
It's funny, I never got into the running stroller, running with children thing. I think I would really enjoy it, but it's so hilly here in San Francisco.

00:15:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, I can't imagine pushing that thing up, you know.

00:15:24 Speaker_00
Yeah, I've been more in carrier mode and then doing hikes with the baby in the carrier, which I'm now back in that world with baby number two here. Well, okay, great. Well, trade off, you did your parent carve out.

00:15:37 Speaker_00
I'm going to do my parent carve out, then I'll kick it back to you. So mine actually is what you started the show off with was my time in Hawaii. So our second daughter just turned three months old.

00:15:48 Speaker_00
We wanted to do a family vacation while we're having this little acquired hiatus before Jenny goes back to work.

00:15:55 Speaker_00
And we were thinking, what could we possibly do with like a three-year-old and a three-month-old in tow that is going to be the least bit enjoyable or relaxing as a family vacation? And we scoured the earth.

00:16:09 Speaker_00
And the best idea that we came up with was the Disney Resort in Hawaii. And it was awesome. Let me tell you, this place, it's called Alani. It was perfect. So it is not the nicest resort. It is not a Disney park. There's no like rides or stuff.

00:16:26 Speaker_00
You know, as far as Disney goes, it's actually fairly light touch. So it's not the best Disney experience. It's not the prettiest beach. But you are really selling it. It is not spiky in any category.

00:16:39 Speaker_00
But the Venn diagram of needs of like you have a young family, you are a harried parent. You want something like a Hawaii vacation where you can have some hope of getting a little bit of relaxation in and everyone will have a good enough time.

00:16:56 Speaker_00
Like, man, it nails the center of that Venn diagram. It was truly like the very best trip we could have done at this stage in our lives. That is great to know. Highly, highly recommend for anybody in the same life phase.

00:17:11 Speaker_00
Although, there were people of families of all phases there. There weren't many non-families there, I will say. But there were big family reunions happening, there were parents with pre-teens, there were parents with teens.

00:17:23 Speaker_00
I was, like, a little surprised by that. But, I mean, hey, who doesn't love Disney and who doesn't love Hawaii? Yeah, I highly, highly, highly recommend it, especially with young children.

00:17:33 Speaker_01
All right. Great to know. All right, my adults carve out. I don't know.

00:17:39 Speaker_01
My, uh, carve out that anyone can appreciate is a sunglasses brand called Meller M E L L E R. When I was at my buddy's wedding in Crete earlier this summer, I was out walking around the shops and I forgot my sunglasses cause I left super early in the morning and I just grabbed these cause they were at the store and I was like, Oh, those look pretty cool.

00:17:59 Speaker_01
They are the highest quality lenses that I have ever had in a pair of sunglasses. And maybe it's because I just always buy cheap, throw away sunglasses because I lose them all the time, but 59 bucks polarized.

00:18:13 Speaker_01
It's the type of lens where you put them on and you can see things that are further away, clearer. Normally when you put some form of glass in front of your eye, it distorts a little bit.

00:18:22 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:18:23 Speaker_01
Right. It's not going to get any better than your own clear eyesight. But I noticed that I put these on and I can suddenly see better than I can with my own plain eyes. So wow. I'm like now a loyalist. Meller, M-E-L-L-E-R sunglasses.

00:18:36 Speaker_00
Is it a Essilor Luxottica brand or is it an indie?

00:18:40 Speaker_01
That's a great question. I mean, my general answer when anyone asks is that Essilor Luxottica would be yes, of course it is. Just because it's the default answer for all the brands, you know.

00:18:49 Speaker_00
It's a safe bet. Yeah.

00:18:50 Speaker_01
You know, Ray-Bans and Oakleys and everything, but I don't think so.

00:18:54 Speaker_00
Well, speaking of, I am intentionally wearing my Ray-Ban medas here to prepare.

00:18:59 Speaker_01
I see you are.

00:19:00 Speaker_00
I especially enjoyed these in Hawaii. They were great.

00:19:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, they look great. But no, I don't think, unless my quick Google was wrong, that I think Meller is not SLR Luxottica.

00:19:11 Speaker_00
Independent. Wow. Wow. The question is, for how long? Well, to bring home on our summer carve out theme, my carve outs for everyone are it's summertime, which means sadly no NFL.

00:19:27 Speaker_00
But with the little baby, I finally got around to watching the Netflix quarterback series from last year and then the new receiver series. They're so good. I love them both. The quarterback series, especially.

00:19:41 Speaker_00
There's no other position in sports or at least sports that I am familiar with that are like large team sports where so much of the game hinges on that one person just following like

00:19:55 Speaker_00
The amount of mental work that goes into being an elite NFL quarterback and then just the pressure that these guys are under is so immense. Receiver was funny too. Like I enjoyed receiver.

00:20:08 Speaker_00
almost equally as much, but it's so funny to watch the difference between the preparation and the pressure that the quarterbacks are under versus what the receivers are doing.

00:20:19 Speaker_00
Very, very different stakes, although they are obviously the receiving end of what the quarterbacks are throwing.

00:20:26 Speaker_01
All right, on my list. Well, with that listeners, thank you for tuning into our Ben and David randomly hop on a call and you get to listen. Summer mini episode here. We really hope to see you September 10th in San Francisco. We're going to have a blast.

00:20:41 Speaker_01
Mark Zuckerberg and other special guests will be there and Yeah, feel free to organize any meetups, lunches, dinners, anything you'd like in the Acquired Slack. Acquired.fm slash Slack. And tickets are available now at Acquired.fm slash SF.

00:20:57 Speaker_01
A huge thank you to our friends at JPMorgan Payments for just pulling out all the stops. Their team is so awesome. It's like the Acquired team has tripled or quadrupled in size for a few months here while we all do this together.

00:21:11 Speaker_01
It really does feel like we are one.

00:21:13 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's not just that their name is on the building, which it is, but they are performing a heroic amount of work and effort to make this, hopefully, the best live event that you've ever been to, and we cannot wait.

00:21:27 Speaker_01
Yep. All right. With that, listeners, thank you, and we'll see you next time.

00:21:31 Speaker_00
We'll see you in September. Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Huh?