We dive into the unbelievable and unlikely history behind the quietest technology giant of them all: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Founded in 1987 by the then-56 year old Morris Chang, already a legend in the semiconductor industry by virtue of his meteoric rise and fall at Texas Instruments, TSMC today manufactures nearly all the leading-edge chips for Nvidia, Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, and yes even Intel. Tune in for an incredible story of innovation, perseverance and la...
Jan 21, 2025•2 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast M&Ms, Snickers, Milky Way, Double Mint, Bens Rice, Pedigree, Whiskas, VCA, Banfield all the brands you know, owned by the company you know nothing about: Mars, Incorporated. And Mars itself is 100% owned and deeply intertwined with the Mars family, who are currently the second wealthiest (and perhaps first most secretive!) family in the United States. Tune in for one of the 20th centurys most incredible entrepreneurial stories across candy and pet care, and one thats all the more incredible ...
Dec 16, 2024•4 hr 53 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast IKEA may be the most singular company weve ever studied on Acquired. Theyre a globally scaled, $50B annual revenue company with no direct competitors yet have only ~5% market share. Theyre one of the largest retailers in the world yet sell only their own products. They generate a few billion in free cash flow every year yet have no shareholders. And oh yeah, they also sell hot dogs cheaper than Costco! (Sort of.) Tune in for an episode flat-packed with counterintuitive lessons about how this fol...
Nov 18, 2024•3 hr 22 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Meta is a company everyone knows (literally, everyone). But, somehow, its also a company that few people feel they actually understand. Their products are used by more humans than any others in history almost half of the entire worlds population daily. But what is Meta? Why do they do what they do? How do they do what they do? Ask ten people and youll likely get ten very different sets of answers. Today, we dive deeper than weve ever gone trying to find Acquireds answers to those questions. And ...
Oct 28, 2024•6 hr 23 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Here it is: the complete video of the most unbelievable night of Acquireds nine-year life our sold out live show at the Chase Center in San Francisco. We joked during the months (months!) of preparation leading up to this event that it was like planning a wedding for 6,000 Acquired fans, and the guest list included Jamie Dimon, Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg no pressure! But thanks to our amazing partnership with J.P. Morgan Payments, together we were able to make somet...
Sep 30, 2024•2 hr 26 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time. At Chase Center on September 10, 2024, he did an unprecedented thing: a live conversation in front of 6,000 people on Metas company strategy, sharing stories from early Facebook history, and his thoughts on the future of AI, VR, and AR. Mark was remarkably candid in our discussion, and gave us a window into his real and intense daily demeanor leading Meta. (And his other life endeavors!) We can't wait to release the complete video of the whole night, i...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 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 do...
Aug 08, 2024•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1999, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world. And in 2019, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world, again . But what happened in the twenty years in between? The answer, as we discovered in our research, is probably not what you think. In this episode we explore and analyze the browser wars and the DOJ case, Windows XP through 8, Surface, Xbox, search, Yahoo!, Bing, the iPhone, Nokia, mobile, social, Facebook and oh yeah, a little thing called Azure and the en...
Jul 22, 2024•5 hr 52 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Starbucks. Youd be hard pressed to name any brand thats more ubiquitous in the world today. With nearly half a billion global customer purchases per week across its stores and 3rd party retail channels, a significant portion of the human population gets their daily fix in the green and white paper cup. (Including our own Ben Gilbert who famously enjoys his daily spinach feta wrap. :) But it wasnt always this way. Long before the frappuccinos and the PSLs and the cake pops, Starbucks was just a s...
Jun 04, 2024•3 hr 13 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Microsoft. After nearly a decade of Acquired episodes, we are finally ready to tackle the most valuable company ever created. The company that put a computer on every desk and in every home. The company that invented the software business model. The company that so thoroughly and completely dominated every conceivable competitor that the United States government intervened and kneecapped it yet its STILL the most valuable company in the world today. This episode tells the story of Microsoft in i...
Apr 22, 2024•4 hr 23 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Renaissance Technologies is the best performing investment firm of all time. And yet no one at RenTec would consider themselves an investor, at least in any traditional sense of the word. Itd rather be more accurate to call them scientists scientists whove discovered a system of math, computers and artificial intelligence that has evolved into the greatest money making machine the world has ever seen. And boy does it work: RenTecs alchemic colossus has posted annual returns in the firms flagship...
Mar 18, 2024•3 hr 7 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast In luxury, theres Herms and theres everyone else. Stewarded by one French family over six generations, Herms sells the absolute pinnacle of the French luxury dream. Loyal clients will wait years simply for the opportunity to buy one of the companys flagship Birkin or Kelly bags. Unlike every other luxury brand, Herms: Doesnt increase supply to meet demand (hence the waitlists) Doesnt loudly brand their products (IYKYK) Doesnt do celebrity endorsements (stars buy their bags just like everyone els...
Feb 20, 2024•4 hr 8 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Last year Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, overtook LVMH to become Europes most valuable company. And the pull for Acquired to finally tackle healthcare (18% of US GDP!) became too strong for us to resist. While we didnt know much about Novo Nordisk before diving in, our first thought was, wow, seems like these new diabetes and obesity drugs mean serious trouble for big insulin companies. And then we realized that Novo Nordisk IS the big insulin company....
Jan 22, 2024•4 hr 42 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Ben has some big news. Actually, double big news! On what has become a holiday tradition here at Acquired, we cozy up to the fire to do our annual review of the show in public. We reflect on what can only be described as an absolutely mind-blowing 2023 (LVMH! Jensen! Costco! Charlie! Half a million plus listeners!) and look ahead to some big things cooking for 2024. Plus as always, we wrap with extended carve outs (joined this year by some surprise guests) for anyone still shopping for those hol...
Dec 18, 2023•2 hr 17 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast To paraphrase Visa founder Dee Hock, how many of you know Visa? Great, all of you. Now, how many of you know how it started? Or, for that matter, who started it? Who runs and governs it? Where is it headquartered? Whats its business model? For the 11th largest market cap company in the world, Visas history and strategy is almost shockingly unknown. A huge portion of the worlds population uses their products on a daily basis (you might say Visa is everywhere people want to be), but very few know ...
Nov 27, 2023•4 hr 43 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast We sit down with the legendary Charlie Munger in the only dedicated longform podcast interview that he has done in his 99 years on Earth. Weve gotten to have some special conversations on Acquired over the years, but this one truly takes the cake. Over dinner at his Los Angeles home, Charlie reflected with us on his own career and his nearly 50-year partnership at Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffett. He offered lessons and advice for investors today, and of course he shared his speech on the ...
Oct 30, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast We finally sit down with the man himself: Nvidia Cofounder & CEO Jensen Huang. After three parts and seven+ hours of covering the company, we thought we knew everything but unsurprisingly Jensen knows more. A couple teasers: we learned that the companys initial motivation to enter the datacenter business came from perhaps not where youd think, and the roots of Nvidias platform strategy stretch back beyond CUDA all the way to the origin of the company. We also got a peek into Jensens mindset ...
Oct 16, 2023•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Its a(nother) new era for Nvidia. We thought wed closed the Acquired book on Nvidia back in April 2022. The story was all wrapped up: Jensen & crew had set out on an amazing journey to accelerate the worlds computing workloads. Along the way theyd discovered a wondrous opportunity (machine learning powered social media feed recommendations). They forged incredible Power in the CUDA platform, and used it to triumph over seemingly insurmountable adversity the stock market penalty-box. But, it ...
Sep 06, 2023•3 hr 54 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Costco is not only Charlie Mungers favorite company of all time (plus hes on the board, natch), its an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create incredible company value. For instance: Costco has the cheapest prices of any major retailer in America and also the wealthiest customer base. They pay their hourly workers 30% above the industry norm (and give them excellent healthcare + 401k benefits) and are almost 3x more profitable on labor than Wa...
Aug 21, 2023•3 hr•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Nike its perhaps the most iconic and most prolific brand of the modern era. On any given day, swooshes adorn the feet of more people on earth than any other footwear company by a long shot. If you read Shoe Dog or watched Air, you may think you know its history. But Shoe Dog ends in 1980, and Air well lets just say its an enjoyable piece of fiction. And it turns out (as always) that the real story is filled with far more drama, twists and business lessons than either of those works. Weve been wa...
Jul 25, 2023•4 hr 1 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Nobodys perfect including Porsche. Despite that phrase appearing in their famous 1983 magazine advertisement, they managed to get damn-close to the perfect luxury business (even Bernard Arnault would be jealous!). Porsche is both quality AND quantity, owning the most prestigious brand in its market, while at the same time churning out almost half a million mass-market soccer mom/dad SUVs per year. And like any good luxury brand, its packed with enough juicy family drama and creeping takeovers to...
Jun 27, 2023•3 hr 22 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi dropped by the Acquired studio for an Eats delivery, so we broke out the cameras and asked him to hang out for a wide-ranging conversation. :) We talk about his 20 years working with Barry Diller, starting his career at Allen & Company, how the Uber CEO search process ACTUALLY went down and oh yeah, the massive transformation thats happened at Uber over the past few years. When Dara took over the company it was bleeding huge sums of cash, losing share to competitor...
Jun 13, 2023•2 hr 37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we bring you two absolutely incredible stories. The first is Lockheeds legendary Skunk Works division the elite team of aviation geniuses who produced some of the greatest airplanes in history: the U-2, the Stealth Fighter, and the incomparable SR-71 Blackbird. The second story is arguably even more important, but not widely known! It's the secret and true origins of Silicon Valley and Lockheeds primary role in it. We take you from WWII to the Cold War, all the way to today to unpack and a...
May 30, 2023•4 hr 37 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast We sit down with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek live in Stockholm at Spotifys amazing HQ studio (check out the video version of this episode which plays natively on Spotify!). This was an incredibly special and timely conversation: for those who havent been paying attention over the past few years, after revolutionizing music Spotify has now ALSO completely transformed our own industry in podcasting. Starting from way behind with ~zero market share in 2018, Spotify has now aggregated the listener market ...
May 18, 2023•2 hr 38 min•Transcript available on Metacast We sit down Benchmarks legendary gaming investors Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins (now also of the excellent Gamecraft podcast fame) to discuss the history and future of gaming business models. This episode is the perfect bookend to our Nintendo/Sega gaming series this season on Acquired no one is more qualified than Mitch and Blake to breakdown how the business side of the industry has evolved so radically from the Periscope quarter-drop days to the forever games and platform based publishers of ...
Apr 26, 2023•2 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sega and the Genesis was THE underdog story of the early 90s. In a single console generation, Sega went from ~zero to 50% US market share and dethroned Nintendos seemingly invincible global monopoly. But somehow it all then died. Two console generations later Sega was out of the hardware game entirely, and the company was sold off for pieces to a pachinko manufacturer. How on earth did this happen?? Today were launching Acquired Shorts in order to tell this story and others like it: side tales f...
Apr 18, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the 1980s Nintendo was on top of the world, with the NES achieving over 90% market share of home video games globally. So how did they fall ALL the way down to ~10% in just a few short console generations? And how did they then build themselves back up (and down and up again) to the top of the world again? Spoiler: it all hinged on one very small, yet very large and durable platform the Game Boy. Fire up your favorite portable entertainment device and tune in for the epic story of Nintendos f...
Apr 11, 2023•3 hr 18 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast 7 Powers author Hamilton Helmer and his Strategy Capital colleague Chenyi Shi join us again to discuss their latest research on a topic thats highly relevant to the recent Acquired canon: how to build a second business line. This incredibly important transforming question faces every great company who has achieved initial product success (as well as their investors). Do we continue solely along the established path, or do we attempt to grow new branches on the tree? Some companies grow new busin...
Apr 04, 2023•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast ACQ Sessions returns with David Senra of the Founders Podcast. David is one of our very favorite people in the world its impossible to spend an hour (or 3!) with him and not come away inspired to go take over the world. This conversation is an extended, IRL version of monthly calls that we do together where we share stories, swap life and podcast advice, and just genuinely enjoy sharing time with someone who shares our outlook and enthusiasm for the history of entrepreneurship. Pull up a chair, ...
Mar 29, 2023•3 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast You may think you know the Nintendo story: a plumber named Mario, a princess named Zelda and didnt they buy the Seattle Mariners at some point? We thought we knew it too. And then we started researching and were blown away. The lovable Disney-like Nintendo that we know today is a 130 year-old a playing card company (i.e. gambling), forged in the shadowy world of the Yakuza and shaped by a four-generation cycle of bitter family betrayal. And its unlikely transformation into a global multi-billion...
Mar 16, 2023•3 hr 26 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast 
