Mar 10, 2022 · 52 min
AB
Business
ACQ2 by Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with experts on topics related to Acquired. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.
- 112 episodes
- Updated Dec 8, 2025
- 1 subscribers
Episodes112
- ABFeb 18, 2022 · 1 hr 4 min
Ben and David on "Capital Allocators"
In late 2021, Ben and David were guests on Ted Seides' podcast, "Capital Allocators". The episode kicked off Ted's "Venture is Eating the Investment World" mini-series. From Ted: David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert are venture capitalists and hosts of the Acquired podcast. Acquired is one of my favorite shows. In it, David and Ben tell stories of great companies in technology with thorough research and a fun, engaging style. Our conversation kicks off the mini-series with their respective backgrounds in venture, the creation of Acquired, and their research process for show. We then dive into the origins of the cottage venture capital industry, inflection point after the tech bubble, rise of an abundance of capital, firms investing across stages, the competitive response of others, the mass introduction of angel investors, businesses staying private for longer, and the potential for crypto to change the game once more. You can see more about the show here: https://capitalallocators.com/podcast/acquiring-an-industry/ Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra Note: 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.
- AB
Feb 17, 2022 · 1 hr 6 min10-K Diver: Building a Top Fintwit Account and Teaching Finance Principles to Everyone (Pseudonymously!)
Get a cup of coffee. We sit down with the voice of one of our favorite Twitter accounts, 10-K Diver, to talk about his journey building one of the most widely followed (and respected!) fintwit accounts out there. We had a blast and — of course — learned a ton from one of the greats!! You can get this episode in your favorite podcast player here! Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABFeb 4, 2022 · 1 hr 11 min
NZS Capital Part II: What’s Going on in Today’s Markets? (Plus more Semiconductors!)
Back by popular “Acquired demand” (plus we really wanted to have this conversation for our own edification!!), friends of the pod NZS Capital return to talk about what’s going with the current market gyrations, and for a much-needed refresher on how to invest when — surprise — knowing the future is still an impossible task. As always we left this conversation with renewed appreciation for the NZS approach and the utility of their resiliency + optionality mental model. This is not one to miss! Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra \
- ABJan 27, 2022 · 1 hr 31 min
Race Capital, Crypto Investing, and FTX + Solana’s Early Days
It has been dubbed "one of the best venture investments of all time" by Packy McCormick, generating over a 4000X return in 3-and-a-half years. Today, we are talking with Chris McCann and Edith Yeung, the earliest investors in Solana, and partners at Race Capital. They also unbelievably were the earliest investors in FTX and started Race Capital in the midst of crypto winter! On this episode, we talk with Edith and Chris about the stories behind both of those investments and their views on what's next in crypto from their vantage point in the center of the ecosystem. Links: - The Generalist's FTX piece with Race Capital's Public Investment Memo - Picture: Chris and Edith with Jihan Wu, Founder of Bitmain - Picture: Edith with Anatoly (Solana founder) and Min Kim (ICON co-founder) Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABJan 6, 2022 · 1 hr 9 min
Italic & a New Era of Online Retail
We sit down with Jeremy Cai, the CEO of new retail pioneer Italic, for a fascinating discussion of how they're upending the traditional manufacturer-brand-retailer model by taking the opposite approach of earlier DTC startups. Rather than elevating brand and cutting out retail, Italic cuts out the brand and lets the actual manufacturers (who you've never heard of but who make most of the actual products that J. Crew, Everlane, etc sell) market and sell direct to customers. Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABJan 2, 2022 · 1 hr 43 min
2021 Recap: Acquired x Not Boring x The Generalist
Originally broadcast live on New Years Eve: we raise a glass (of coffee haha) and recap 2021 with our besties Mario Gabriele from the Generalist and Packy McCormick from Not Boring. Thank you for making 2021 an incredible year for all of us at ACQ, NB + TG, and may 2022 be filled with great things and grand adventures for us all! Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABDec 30, 2021 · 18 min
Mission-Driven Founders, Global Investing, and Canva (with Wesley Chan)
Last month, Ben sat down with Wesley Chan at Web Summit for a quick, 18-minute interview. The conversation was supposed to be about global investing in 2021 as an early-stage VC, but the conversation turned mostly into the origin story of Wesley's (unbelievably good) seed investment in Canva. Wesley's firm Felicis Ventures invested pre-revenue, leading the seed round, and Canva is valued at $40 billion today. Wesley dives into the details (and why he invested in the first place!) in this interview. Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABDec 6, 2021 · 40 min
Blue Origin and the 2021 Space Landscape (with Rob Meyerson)
Today we're excited to have a longtime friend of the Acquired family on ACQ2, Rob Meyerson. Rob was the President of Blue Origin for 15 years, and today is an investor and advisor to space industry startups. Ben recorded this interview live at the fantastic aerospace industry conference, ASCEND, where Rob is the Executive Producer. In this interview, we cover: How Blue Origin started, and what it was like in the early days (spoiler: they weren't yet building rockets!) Rob’s experience working directly for Jeff Bezos What’s changed about SpaceX since May of 2020, when we did our Acquired episode on the company Rob’s theses about what sectors of commercial space are poised for growth in the next few years Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABDec 2, 2021 · 1 hr 30 min
Ben and David on "This Week in Startups" Holiday Special
Ben and David go on "This Week in Startups" with Jason Calacanis for a holiday special! Discussion includes: - Talking TWIST and All-In this year with everything from politics to weight loss to private jets - Acquired's year and some of Ben and David's biggest insights from episodes - VC, valuations, and crypto investing mechanics - Use cases for crypto, and trying to get Jason (a skeptic) excited - Carveouts: our favorite books, podcasts, and TV shows from this year Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABNov 15, 2021 · 41 min
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: A Fireside Chat
We are very excited to bring you a special ACQ2 interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Aside from Joe's well-known work as a Golden Globe-nominated, Emmy-award-winning actor in films like 500 Days of Summer, Inception, and Looper, Joe is also the founder of HITRECORD, a startup which brings creative collaborators together across film, music, books, and more. Ben sat down with Joe to discuss: The creator economy’s focus on the finished product vs. the creative process, and how he thinks about this at HITRECORD The state of the film and TV industry today, amidst the shift to streaming platforms and tech companies as primary distribution channels What it has been like on set playing Travis Kalanick in Showtime’s upcoming “Super Pumped” Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra Thanks to our good friends at Fika Ventures for setting this conversation up!
- ABNov 9, 2021 · 57 min
Update on Dad Life, MacBook Pros, and Acquired Video
The title says it all. This feels weird to release by Acquired standards -- an hour of audio with zero research! -- but we wanted to check in with y'all and say hi from parental leave. Topics covered: - Update on Dad Life - Ben's new MacBook Pro - Discussion of Acquired's approach to doing video / YouTube Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABOct 26, 2021 · 59 min
Web3 Marketplaces (with Braintrust CEO Adam Jackson)
We sit down with Adam Jackson, the cofounder and CEO of Freelance Labs, which builds the incredible Web3 project Braintrust. (Disclosure David is an investor via Kindergarten Ventures.) We talk all about what a marketplace looks like in Web3, and why it's a completely different animal than traditional Web2 marketplaces like Uber, eBay, DoorDash, etc. Prior to starting Braintrust, Adam was the CEO of Doctor on Demand, so has literally lived both sides of the table. Tune in for a FASCINATING discussion of everything that crypto/tokenization enables, and why it's such an exciting shift that unlocks massive, $000B+ opportunities like Braintrust. Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABOct 11, 2021 · 1 hr 18 min
Audius (with CEO Roneil Rumberg)
We sit down with Roneil Rumberg, the co-founder and CEO of Audius — the decentralized music platform which currently is likely the widest-adopted Web3 project in existence with over 6m active users. This conversation was AWESOME and covers everything from Silicon Valley history, to how the music industry works, to the technical aspects and challenges of building a Web3 project today. Huge thank you to Roneil for joining us, and we're looking forward to hearing more from Audius on Acquired in the years to come! Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABOct 7, 2021 · 1 hr 11 min
Special drop: David on Levels' Podcast!
Earlier this week David went on Levels' podcast, A Whole New Level, hosted by Acquired "Super LP" and Levels' head of growth, Ben Grynol. We had such a blast that we wanted to share here with the community as well! Full show notes from Levels below: When most companies start, they are single-threaded companies. More specifically, companies start with one product or revenue stream and evolve. Amazon is a great example of a company that has built an ecosystem. The company started as an e-commerce site for selling books, and now has a number of inter-related businesses that make up the entire Amazon ecosystem. Netflix is an example of a company that started as a single-threaded company – (a platform for viewing video content) – and has, for the most part, remained that way since its inception. As we build Levels, we often think about the way that our company will evolve – will it be an ecosystem for health, or will we remain focused on monitoring glucose? In this episode, David Rosenthal, (VC and Host of Acquired Podcast), dives deep into what it takes to build an ecosystem around a company. Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABAug 16, 2021 · 1 hr 31 min
Explaining Macroeconomics, The Fed, Interest Rates and Valuations (with Matt McBrady)
Confused about everything going on with The Fed, inflation and how it affects tech and startup valuations? Or why it seems like every Jerome Powell comment brings out an army of finance's equivalent of fortune tellers and tarot card readers? So were we, so we called up the best person we know to explain everything -- Matt McBrady. Matt may be the only person who's been an academic economist, worked at the US Treasury, run a massive hedge fund AND helped start and sit on the board of two very successful startups, aQuantive and Axon/TASER. Tune in for a crash course in everything you need to know! Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra Links J.P.'s Never Gonna Give you Up Follow Matt on LinkedIn to see his posts or connect with him for consulting, board opportunities, etc For more on Matt’s academic work, check out his UVA faculty webpage
- ABAug 4, 2021 · 43 min
Kim-Mai Cutler -- From Journalist to VC
We sit down with Initialized Capital's Kim-Mai Cutler to talk about her opposite journey from us at Acquired, going from journalist to VC. We riff on how the landscape has evolved from Kim-Mai's parents' "Hewlett Packard generation" in the Valley through the TechCrunch era that se was a big part of, to today and how the nature of reporting, investing and influence -- the intersection of the two -- has changed. Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABJul 22, 2021 · 1 hr 14 min
Managing a Crypto Fund (with Kyle Samani from Multicoin Capital)
How on earth do you professionally manage a crypto investment firm? That was the question we wanted to find out, so we dialed up one of the best in the business: Multicoin Capital co-founder and managing partner Kyle Samani. Appropriately fresh on the heels of our Solana special episode (Multicoin was one of Solana's earliest investors), we dive into how in a few short years Kyle, Tushar and the team have built one of the largest and most well-known dedicated crypto funds on the market. We cover Multicoin's three crypto "mega-theses", how they've structured the firm across both a venture and hedge fund, and the dynamics of managing capital and running a firm in the new and fast-moving world of crypto investing. Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra Links: Multicoin's crypto mega-theses: https://multicoin.capital/thesis/ The Block: https://www.theblockcrypto.com Kyle on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KyleSamani
- ABJun 3, 2021 · 20 min
Owning Your Own Media Stream (from Collison Conf with Garry Tan)
Ben interviewed Initialized Capital founder and friend of the show, Garry Tan at Collision Conf last month. Garry is of course also a YouTuber, Clubhouse'r, and master of content creation. The good people at Collision Conf gave us the thumbs up to share this interview on the value of owning your own media stream with all of you. Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
- ABApr 29, 2021 · 1 hr 32 min
Making your customers your secret weapon (with Highspot's Oliver Sharp)
We're joined by Oliver Sharp of Highspot, Seattle's most recent unicorn company (at least at the time of recording!), to talk about how and why to architect everything a software company does around its customers — what today is often called "customer-led growth" — but really represents a company building philosophy that runs much deeper. Oliver has serious software cred: he first joined Microsoft in 1984, and then later became part of Bill Gates' famous "TA" staff after Microsoft acquired his first startup. The conversation was *fantastic* and we owe a huge thank you to Oliver for sharing his decades of learning by doing with us. Make sure you don't miss this one! Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra