Podcasts · Technology · Business

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

218 episodes

Every company has a story.

More about the show

Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them.

Episodes page 1 of 5

  1. Seinfeld

    · 3 h 50 min · S20 E3

    Seinfeld, which ended three decades ago, has been watched by 72 million Americans so far THIS YEAR. Behind that incredible stat is an equally incredible business story: obsessive creators, perfect market timing, an…

  2. The Home Depot

    · 3 h 35 min · S20 E2

    The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After being unceremoniously fired from their previous…

  3. Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire

    · 4 h 33 min · S20 E1

    In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corporate raiders circled, salivating over…

  4. The Walt Disney Company

    · 4 h 31 min · S19 E4

    The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it’s the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual property rights to the childhood memories of…

  5. Vanguard

    · 3 h 48 min · S19 E3

    Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, on behalf of 50…

  6. Rolex

    · 4 h 51 min · S16 E2

    Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history! Their products…

  7. Costco

    · 2 h 53 min · S13 E2

    Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create incredible company…

  8. Ferrari

    · 3 h 52 min · S19 E2

    Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermès sells that many Birkins and Kellys…

  9. Formula 1

    · 4 h 19 min · S19 E1

    Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as…

  10. The NFL

    · 4 h 08 min

    The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays and holidays too) to…

  11. 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

    · 2 h 38 min · S18 E4

    Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or video. Hardly the standard-issue…

  12. Coca-Cola

    · 3 h 54 min · S18 E3

    Coca-Cola is… sugar water. And somehow it’s also America, Christmas, summertime, friendship and happiness. Today we tell the story of how The Coca-Cola Company amazingly transmogrified a beverage into emotion in all of…

  13. Trader Joe’s

    · 3 h 18 min · S18 E2

    Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000+ at normal supermarkets. Their parking…

  14. Google Part III: The AI Company

    · 3 h 56 min · S18 E1

    Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). They employed…

  15. Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)

    · 1:18

    It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film” — the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit…

  16. Google Part II: Alphabet

    · 4 h 02 min · S17 E4

    In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its next six years from 2005 to 2011, Google built…

  17. The Jamie Dimon Interview

    · 1 h 00 min · S17 E3

    We sit down with Jamie Dimon for a live conversation at Radio City Music Hall, covering the incredible journey from his 1998 firing at Citgroup (where he was widely expected to become CEO) to building the most powerful…

  18. Google Part I: Origins of Search

    · 3 h 29 min · S17 E2

    We tell the story of the single greatest business ever created: Google search. From its origins as a Stanford research project called BackRub, Google became the front door to the internet. Today it’s an essential…

  19. The Steve Ballmer Interview

    · 2 h 49 min · S17 E1

    We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listened to our Microsoft episodes and had some…

  20. Epic Systems (MyChart)

    · 3 h 47 min · S16 E4

    What if we told you that the most important company in US healthcare was run from a farm in rural Wisconsin? And that farm contained the world’s largest subterranean auditorium, as well as Disneyland—style replicas of…

  21. Indian Premier League Cricket

    · 4 h 18 min · S16 E3

    When you saw this episode pop up in your feed, you either jumped for joy and hit play immediately (in which case you’re not reading this), or you said “Huh. That’s a surprising episode.” Well, if you’re in group two,…

  22. TSMC Founder Morris Chang

    · 2 h 48 min · S16 E1

    We flew to Taiwan to interview TSMC Founder Morris Chang in a rare English interview. In fact, the last long-form video interview we could find was 17 years ago at the Computer History Museum… conducted by the…

  23. Mars Inc. (the chocolate story)

    · 3 h 44 min · S15 E4

    M&M’s, Snickers, Milky Way, Double Mint, Ben’s 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…

  24. IKEA

    · 3 h 13 min · S15 E3

    IKEA may be the most singular company we’ve ever studied on Acquired. They’re a globally scaled, $50B annual revenue company with no direct competitors — yet have only ~5% market share. They’re one of the largest…

  25. Meta

    · 6 h 11 min · S15 E2

    Meta is a company everyone knows (literally, everyone). But, somehow, it’s also a company that few people feel they actually understand. Their products are used by more humans than any other’s in history — almost half…

  26. Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)

    · 2 h 17 min · S15 E1

    Here it is: the complete video of the most unbelievable night of Acquired’s 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…

  27. The Mark Zuckerberg Interview

    · 1 h 21 min · Bonus

    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 Meta’s company strategy, sharing stories from early…

  28. Chase Center + Summer Update

    · 22 min

    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…

  29. Microsoft Volume II

    · 4 h 42 min · S14 E6

    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…

  30. Starbucks (with Howard Schultz)

    · 3 h 07 min · S14 E5

    Starbucks. You’d be hard pressed to name any brand that’s 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…

  31. Microsoft Volume I

    · 4 h 16 min · S14 E4

    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…

  32. Renaissance Technologies

    · 3 h 00 min · S14 E3

    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. It’d rather be more accurate…

  33. Hermès

    · 4 h 01 min · S14 E2

    In luxury, there’s Hermès… and there’s everyone else. Stewarded by one French family over six generations, Hermès sells the absolute pinnacle of the French luxury dream. Loyal clients will wait years simply for the…

  34. Novo Nordisk (Ozempic)

    · 3 h 36 min · S14 E1

    Last year Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, overtook LVMH to become Europe’s most valuable company. And the pull for Acquired to finally tackle healthcare (18% of US GDP!)…

  35. Holiday Special 2023

    · 2 h 10 min · S13 E5

    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…

  36. Visa

    · 3 h 36 min · S13 E4

    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?…

  37. Charlie Munger

    · 1 h 07 min

    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. We’ve gotten to have some special conversations on Acquired over the years, but…

  38. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

    · 1 h 23 min

    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…

  39. Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023)

    · 2 h 47 min · S13 E3

    It’s a(nother) new era for Nvidia. We thought we’d 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 world’s…

  40. Nike

    · 3 h 54 min · S13 E1

    Nike — it’s 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…

  41. Porsche (with Doug DeMuro)

    · 3 h 15 min · S12 E6

    Nobody’s 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!).…

  42. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi

    · 1 h 30 min

    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…

  43. Lockheed Martin

    · 3 h 31 min · S12 E5

    Today we bring you two absolutely incredible stories. The first is Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works division — the elite team of aviation geniuses who produced some of the greatest airplanes in history: the U-2, the…

  44. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

    · 1 h 31 min

    We sit down with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek live in Stockholm at Spotify’s amazing HQ studio (check out the video version of this episode — which plays natively on Spotify!). This was an incredibly special and timely…

  45. Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming

    · 2 h 09 min

    We sit down Benchmark’s 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…

  46. Short: The Death of Sega

    · 1 h 01 min

    Sega and the Genesis was THE underdog story of the early 90’s. In a single console generation, Sega went from ~zero to 50% US market share and dethroned Nintendo’s seemingly invincible global monopoly. But — somehow —…

  47. Nintendo: The Console Wars

    · 3 h 11 min · S12 E4

    In the 1980’s 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…

  48. Hamilton Helmer & Chenyi Shi on How to Build an AWS-Like Second Business

    · 1 h 23 min

    7 Powers author Hamilton Helmer and his Strategy Capital colleague Chenyi Shi join us again to discuss their latest research on a topic that’s highly relevant to the recent Acquired canon: how to build a second…

  49. Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast)

    · 3 h 12 min

    ACQ Sessions returns with David Senra of the Founders Podcast. David is one of our very favorite people in the world — it’s impossible to spend an hour (or 3!) with him and not come away inspired to go take over the…

  50. Nintendo's Origins

    · 3 h 19 min · S12 E3

    You may think you know the Nintendo story: a plumber named Mario, a princess named Zelda… and didn’t they buy the Seattle Mariners at some point? We thought we knew it too. And then we started researching and were…

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