What does a $200 million+ acquisition look like up close? How much time, focus, and communication happens between the first conversation and closing the deal? And when do the CEOs of each company just need to use the "red phone" and have a direct conversation without the 86(!) lawyers in the room? We sit down with ProfitWell founder and CEO Patrick Campbell to answer it all, centering on ProfitWell's recent acquisition by Paddle. And incredibly, Patrick built and scaled the SaaS company without ...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 23 min
David is the first guest on a new podcast, Unlimited Partners! This is a wide-ranging interview where upon listening, even Ben learned some new things about David :) Unlimited Partners is hosted by long-time friend of the Acquired community, Thomas McGannon. UP is his journey to learn - what makes great partnerships? They explore stories of people working together throughout business building, investing, community and family. While much of this is brought to you through Thomas’ work as a limited...
May 23, 2022•1 hr 13 min
We sit down with TrovaTrip co-founders Nick Poggi and Lauren Schneider to talk about travel for the creator economy. This one is very close to home since Ben is on their board! TrovaTrip is a marketplace that enables creators to easily plan trips to places around the world with their audiences. It's a whole new way for people to travel, with other like-minded people who share the same passions and communities. We talk with them about growing from a bootstrapped business to over 10,000 travelers ...
Apr 15, 2022•56 min
We dropped by Vanta 's all-hands in SF a few weeks ago for Christina to interview us for a change! We decided to turn the mics on and record it as an ACQ2 episode. We discussed lessons learned from building Acquired, the shape of the show's growth trajectory, how we think about the business, and dive into our own origin story. Sponsors: Vanta
Apr 08, 2022•34 min
We sit down with Composer CEO Benjamin Rollert to talk about bringing serious financial firepower to the people, wallstreetbets-style. Composer opens up to anyone the same level (or better) of tools that top quantitative hedge funds hire armies of PhDs and computer scientists to build internally. We have a blast discussing how he came at this space as a total outsider, and why Gamestop may prove to be the "iPhone moment" for Composer and all high-powered consumer financial tools. And oh yeah, he...
Mar 23, 2022•1 hr 2 min
We sit down with Bain Capital Ventures' newest fintech Partner Christina Melas-Kyriazi to talk about everything happening right now in fintech, and the experience of helping build Affirm and the BNPL space from crazy idea to massive consumer finance category. Anyone interested in the history and future of fintech will love this one. Tune in! Sponsors: Vanta Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for info...
Mar 10, 2022•54 min
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 background...
Feb 18, 2022•1 hr 7 min
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: Vanta...
Feb 17, 2022•1 hr 9 min
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! Sp...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 13 min
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 wha...
Jan 27, 2022•2 hr 34 min
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: Vanta...
Jan 06, 2022•1 hr 12 min
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: Vanta
Jan 02, 2022•2 hr 46 min
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 intervi...
Dec 30, 2021•20 min
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 d...
Dec 06, 2021•43 min
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: Vanta...
Dec 02, 2021•2 hr 33 min
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 t...
Nov 15, 2021•43 min
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: Vanta
Nov 09, 2021•59 min
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 discu...
Oct 26, 2021•1 hr 1 min
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...
Oct 11, 2021•1 hr 21 min
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...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 14 min
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 suc...
Aug 16, 2021•2 hr 33 min
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: Vanta...
Aug 04, 2021•45 min
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...
Jul 22, 2021•1 hr 17 min
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: Vanta
Jun 03, 2021•23 min
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 ...
Apr 29, 2021•2 hr 34 min
We got *awesome* feedback on the recent special episode we did with Levels founder Josh Clemente -- so we asked Josh if he'd join for a follow-up Q+A session on our next LP Call, and he graciously agreed! The conversation was so good we decided to release the audio recording in the ACQ2 feed. Thanks again to Josh and the Levels crew, and we hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did live! Sponsors: Vanta...
Apr 23, 2021•1 hr 11 min
When the internet’s top China tech analyst Lillian Li posted a great Twitter take (linked below) on our Meituan episode, we knew we had to try to get her on ACQ2 to tell us all more. What’s really going on with these platforms on the ground in China, what is the government’s role in all this, and why is Meituan’s outlook “rosy, but maybe not quite as rosy as we painted on the episode”? Thanks to the magic of the internet, a few Twitter DMs later and voila — not only do we have this awesome episo...
Apr 01, 2021•1 hr 15 min
The very cool (and also very hot! You can read about their recent funding rounds from Benchmark and Altimeter) fintech startup Modern Treasury recently asked if they could interview us for their internal "Coffee Break" series of fireside chats. We agreed, on one condition... that we also get to interview them! The result was a match made in Acquired Interview Heaven. Sponsors: Vanta Links: Modern Treasury: https://www.moderntreasury.com MT's Journal: https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal...
Mar 18, 2021•54 min
Emergence Capital's Jake Saper returns to the LP Show to talk 2021 "state-of-SaaS" and Emergence's Deep Collaboration thesis. We cover how Figma changed the game for embedded collaboration within work tools, and why this theme represents a deep vein that Emergence is investing behind with companies like Ironclad and Jake's latest investment in Maze. Plus we cover the impact of the Zoom investment (undeniably one of the greatest venture investments of all time) on Emergence as a firm, and why inv...
Mar 05, 2021•1 hr 9 min
We team up with Mario from the Generalist and Packy from Not Boring for something new: The Idea Dinner! We've been longtime fans of each others' work and, given all the buzz on Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, decided to team up and run a little experiment: The Idea Dinner. Last night on Twitter Spaces we all got together and brought one beverage of choice, one public market investment idea, and one private market investment idea. Despite some technical audio issues... it was a blast! We're super e...
Feb 26, 2021•1 hr 17 min
