Ben Gilbert
53 statements across 23 episodes · 18 bullish · 8 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Dec 3, 2021 by Packy McCormick · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Ben Gilbert's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Ben Gilbert, oldest first
Dec 3, 2021
Dec 3, 2021 neutral
Gilbert: Creator businesses transition through financial break-even remarkably fast
“The period of time where Hey, this isn't going to cover our lifestyle is long. And then, Hey, the period of time where, Whoa, this is going to more than cover our lifestyle is long. But the period of like, Hey, this is great. We're like right at break even sus…”
Jan 24, 2022
Media Consumption Is Driven by Identity Signaling Over the Content Itself
“It was less about the music itself and more about, do I identify with the type of person who I perceive to listen to that thing? And it's the same with any other sort of music. It's often the same with movies too. It's a form of like self-identification and co…”
Mar 7, 2022
Company culture and values mean nothing until they are tested
“Company culture and company values don't mean anything until they're tested. And when I don't think he used the phrase direct to consumer, but when they sort of decided they wanted to be a direct consumer company, that's cute and all until someone offers you a…”
Apr 6, 2022 negative
Uber Killed Ben Gilbert's Ride-Sharing Meta-Search Startup by Cutting API Access
“At one point I started a startup that actually got killed by Uber, not willing to play ball with us and cutting off our API, but it's effectively a meta search for ride sharing to be able to find the fastest, closest ride to you independent of who's actually p…”
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Jun 20, 2022
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Jul 19, 2022 positive
Aug 16, 2022 positive
Sep 28, 2022 positive
Benchmark partners retire past their forties because 100% effort is strictly required
“And I also think that's why they have to retire once they sort of age too far out of their forties, because it is an implicit thing among the group of you gotta be bringing it all day, every day. And at some point, if you want to notch down to 90%, it's time f…”
Oct 4, 2022 neutral
Dec 19, 2022
Strategy requires rejecting lucrative low-hanging fruit that violates core trade-offs
“Sure, you could make more money doing that, but it goes in the too hard pile. I think you and I have a really big too hard pile. In some ways, that's strategy. It's like, if you actually believe in the set of trade-offs that you have, Then you have to be willi…”
Dec 19, 2022
Acquired sells six-month season sponsorships to an audience of 250,000
“So we only do Six month, season long sponsorships, and we are ridiculously choosy about the people that we do that with, and because it's a six month long thing to an audience of 250,000 people that happen to be probably the most valuable audience in the world…”
Dec 19, 2022 bearish
Live podcast episodes require 10 to 20 times more production effort
“Some of the live shows we've done are the most special experiences of the year. They have hidden value for Acquired in a bunch of ways, like getting to actually talk with real people, like getting to hang out with the thousand people that came to the arena sho…”
Mar 29, 2023
Mar 29, 2023 neutral
Mar 29, 2023 neutral
Mar 29, 2023 neutral
Mar 29, 2023 negative
High-Value Business Podcasts Forfeit Massive Revenue by Paywalling Feeds
“For the type of podcast that we are, where you have lots of founders and CEOs and hedge fund managers and these sorts of people listening, You could never ask someone to pay you in membership what they are worth to the most valuable advertiser for that slot. A…”
Mar 29, 2023 negative
Gilbert: Acquired's COVID adaptation episodes were their least-listened to
“It was like our three least listened to episodes covering a pretty amazing stories, but we just branded it wrong. Like Canlis is like the most interesting restaurant story you could ever hear about. And like, we did Intel. That's the only time we've ever done …”
May 18, 2023 bullish
Gilbert: AI deepfakes will increase the value of content platforms
“Platforms probably have a role to play in verifying authenticity. Like that, that actually raises the value of platforms, because platforms like Spotify, YouTube, you actually can point to, we know for a fact that this was created by the creator, and we can st…”
Dec 18, 2023 negative
Dec 18, 2023 negative
Gilbert: Covering the breaking news cycle creates commodity content
“We very much have moved away from current events, and I think that is in part because of what we talked about earlier, that we want to create n of one content, and the way to create the most possible commodity content is to try to cover the current news cycle …”
Dec 18, 2023
Gilbert: Young professionals should learn end-to-end individual economic production
“When you're a young person, you should try to become singularly productive. And I mean productive in the economic sense. That you are able to soup to nuts within your control, make something of economic value, and put it in the world in a way that you own the …”
Dec 18, 2023 neutral
Dec 18, 2023 positive
Dec 18, 2023 bullish
Dec 18, 2023
Gilbert transitions to venture partner at PSL to focus full-time on Acquired
“And the way it's going to work, I'm transitioning to a venture partner at PSL, at Pioneer Square Labs here in Seattle, so still get to keep my board seats, which I think keeps me sharp for the show, and stay a friend of the family there, so I'm excited to sort…”
Mar 18, 2024
Mar 18, 2024
Jim Simons personally paid $670 million in Renaissance's IRS tax settlement
“Over time, eventually in 2021, the IRS said, no, you made all those trades. That was not a completely separate entity. And so you guys owed 6.8 billion dollars in taxes that you didn't pay. You're going to need to pay that with interest, with penalties. And by…”
Mar 18, 2024
Gilbert: Medallion Achieved 12.5x Leverage via Basket Options
“Competitors generally had about seven dollars of financial instruments for every dollar of cash. By contrast, Medallion's option strategy allowed it to have 12 dollars and 50 cents worth of financial instruments for every dollar of cash.”
Apr 22, 2024 positive
Microsoft's 6,000-person Office team consistently hit three-year planned ship dates
“I did always think it was absolutely incredible when I was at Microsoft and we would ship a version of Office every three years, I worked on Office 15, that the entire 6000 person organization had a process in place where we could release to manufacturing, RTM…”
Jun 4, 2024 bullish
Gilbert: Starbucks' 1991 Employee Stock Option Grants Have Appreciated 800x
“So those initial grants, the strike price was six dollars per share. Today, as we speak, the share price is 77 dollars, but there have been six splits since then, which comes out to a 64 X. So that initial grant has 800 X'd since even the part-time employees a…”
Jun 4, 2024 positive
Jul 22, 2024
Gilbert: Company leaders must repeat core messaging 10x more than expected
“Anyone who's listening who's a leader at a company right now knows that the right amount of repeating yourself to do is about 10 times more than you think it is. You need to just keep Delivering the same message over and over and over again, and that wins.”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024
Gilbert: Startups seeking complete market dominance should extinguish their hardest competitor first
“If you're okay splitting the market, you go for the white space, and then you say, let's see how much of the low-hanging fruit we can easily get. But if you're Facebook, you're gonna say, let's go to the hardest possible competitor, Extinguish them. And then w…”
Feb 24, 2025 bullish
Apr 21, 2025 positive
Dec 15, 2025 positive
Rosenthal and Gilbert: Acquired operates with no assistants or sales agents
“No, no, no assistance. No, we do everything.
Michael Lewis: You don't sell,
Michael Lewis: You don't have an ad sales.
David Rosenthal: There's no agent.
Michael Lewis: We do all the selling.
Ben Gilbert: We love doing the ad sales ourselves.”
Dec 15, 2025
Gilbert: Scale economies prevent new competitors from matching Acquired's production depth
“The fact that there's a large number of listeners to amortize all the inputs across makes it So that we can do an unreasonable amount of things for each episode. I mean, if you were gonna try to compete with Acquired today, you couldn't do all the stuff that w…”
Dec 15, 2025
Gilbert: Three specific criteria define a great Acquired podcast episode
“There's three things that make a great acquired episode. One, there's a compelling hero protagonist that takes a hero's journey, where we're going from obscurity to ubiquity. How it starts is this thing that nobody cares about, and then it becomes the most imp…”
Dec 15, 2025
Dec 15, 2025 positive
Dec 15, 2025
Dec 15, 2025 neutral
Gilbert: Acquired's business model works due to privilege, not universal correctness
“I don't think we've figured out a better way to do it. Like, I don't think we figured out the way to do it and everybody else should just snap to our way. It's like, we have an enormous amount of Privileged that we can run a business in this way, and most peop…”
Dec 15, 2025 negative
Gilbert: Acquired operates a strict policy of never working with ad agencies
“Here's, here's a rule. We don't work with agencies. If an agency reaches out and says, we want to place ads on your podcast, we write them a very nice note. If we're able to get to the email and say, oh, we don't work with agencies, but thank you so much for y…”
Dec 15, 2025 negative
Celebrity guest interviews underperform Acquired's core narrative storytelling episodes
“We thought the interviews would be better than our core storytelling episodes because we hadn't discovered that the Ben and David storytelling is our N of one product. It is the thing that we uniquely can do that no one else can do, and we thought getting thes…”
May 18, 2026 bullish
May 18, 2026 positive
Passive indexing protects retail investors from their own destructive overactivity
“Passive index investing just lends itself better behaviorally. If you're in one of those funds to just saying, I know the market's up, I know the market's down, but whatever. I own the index. I've made my piece. Whereas if you are either the active manager try…”
Jun 23, 2026
Competing with entrenched incumbents requires orthogonal technological leapfrogging
“There's a great business model lesson in this, which is with the first two Mickeys flopping, if you just do the same thing as an existing competitor who already has distribution, brand, customers, It's not enough. You need to go do something leveraging a new p…”