Ben Thompson, every mention
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every year anyone Ben Gilbert 39David Rosenthal 32Packy McCormick 6Daniel Ek 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Ben Thompson comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 1:37:47 Ben Gilbert Friend of the show, Ben Thompson, has a great reflection on all this.
- ▶ 4:31:19 Ben Gilbert To Ben Thompson for his exceptional analysis of Disney over the last decade.
Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:21:50 David Rosenthal There's a Stratechery interview that Ben Thompson did with Mike Cannon Brooks, the Atlassian CEO last year.
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 10:32 David Rosenthal We bonded over Ben Thompson originally.
- ▶ 1:08:33 Ben Gilbert This we learned, I feel like I learned from Ben Thompson, which is- Tell the audience who Ben Thompson is.
- ▶ 1:08:38 Ben Gilbert Ben Thompson is the author of Stratechery.
- ▶ 1:08:44 David Rosenthal We did an episode on him and with him a few years ago.
- ▶ 1:08:50 Ben Gilbert He's a great strategy technology writer.
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:13:26 David Rosenthal I feel like Ben Thompson used to write about this, that it was the American holy trinity of General Motors and the NFL and Procter & Gamble.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:27:27 David Rosenthal Ben Thompson loves to call OpenAI the accidental consumer tech company, right?
- ▶ 3:35:10 David Rosenthal Yeah, Ben Thompson had a big article about this yesterday at the time of recording.
- ▶ 3:35:14 Ben Gilbert Yeah, that was like a mega bull case that Ben Thompson published this week that it was an interesting point.
- ▶ 3:36:12 Ben Gilbert That was a mind expanding piece that Ben published yesterday, or I guess if you're listening to this a few weeks ago about that.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 29:06 Ben Gilbert To use sort of Ben Thompson speak, Google realizes the web can become the point of integration.
Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:23:47 David Rosenthal Actually, I think as much as anything, it was our original inspiration for doing the show, and that is Stratechery and Ben Thompson.
- ▶ 4:23:54 Ben Gilbert Yeah, he's been killing it recently.
- ▶ 4:23:56 David Rosenthal Obviously, I've been a fan for a decade, but like, he is just killing it.
- ▶ 4:24:00 David Rosenthal Both Stratechery itself, but I'm also loving Sharp Tech, the show that he does with Andrew Sharp, bi-weekly show as part of the Stratechery Plus bundle.
- ▶ 4:24:08 David Rosenthal I just think he's doing some of, if not his best work of his career right now, which is saying a lot.
- ▶ 4:24:24 David Rosenthal I would say he was an inspiration to us when we started Acquired, and he continues to be an inspiration to us as we get ready to enter our second decade here.
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:14:29 Ben Gilbert Either through buying or through copying a mechanic, we need to protect our network by bringing these interactions into our family of apps either by, as Ben Thompson would put it, the audacity of copying well or, of course, by buying them.
- ▶ 4:59:19 Ben Gilbert They also, to use Ben Thompson's parlance, use it as a strategy credit.
- ▶ 5:09:13 Ben Gilbert And Ben Thompson makes this really great point.
- ▶ 5:09:16 Ben Gilbert And I know I've quoted Ben over and over this episode, but I think he's just been so astute on Facebook at many points throughout history.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 14:10 Ben Gilbert Ben Thompson has a fantastic quote on this.
- ▶ 14:13 Ben Gilbert He has an article called, What is a Tech Company?
- ▶ 14:15 Ben Gilbert And here's his comment.
- ▶ 1:59:38 Ben Gilbert They basically figured out how to exactly clone the IBM PC and buy the very same operating system, and to go back to quoting Ben Thompson, because this is from his great piece again, the result was a company that came to dominate the…
Hermès (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:03:10 David Rosenthal Joanna Stern had a great quote about this, the wall street journal, but she was interviewed by Ben Thompson recently and
Visa (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:41:25 Ben Gilbert Lisa did an amazing interview with Ben Thompson a few weeks back.
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:45:24 Ben Gilbert And Jensen did a great interview with Ben Thompson last year where he talks about the idea that they build their systems full stack.
- ▶ 1:46:18 David Rosenthal And I think if I remember right in that interview, Ben picked up on this and was like,
- ▶ 2:27:15 Ben Gilbert It is a absolute false equivalence to be like PyTorch versus Nvidia, but in real Ben Thompson aggregation theory parlance, if you aggregate the customers, you have the opportunity then to take more margin, to disintermediate, to direct…
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:59:14 Ben Gilbert I think you should go listen to Marc Andreessen on Lex Friedman, and then you should listen to him again on Ben Thompson in that order.
- ▶ 4:00:14 David Rosenthal I've listened to the Ben Thompson interview, but not the Lex one yet,
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 6:30 David Rosenthal You know, kind of like we were talking about on our most recent episode with Ben Thompson and Stratechery, and he's like, the obvious thing that I should do is raise prices to maximize revenue, but then that's pretty quickly going to lead…
- ▶ 17:25 Ben Gilbert You have then Ben Thompson the following day writing a reaction piece that's like, here's my even more thoughtful take on what happened.
- ▶ 19:28 David Rosenthal I thought Ben Thompson just said it perfectly on our most recent episode with him where he was like, you know, when I was young, I used to think when I got old that I would like still be cool
- ▶ 36:43 David Rosenthal 80, 90% of other interviewers out there, but there are other really great interviewers like Ben Thompson.
- ▶ 59:31 David Rosenthal It was so fun talking to Ben Thompson about this and his growth trajectory and curve.
- ▶ 1:02:35 Ben Gilbert And I thought Ben brought up this really interesting point where he sort of asserted podcasts are great because they're really sticky, but they're terrible to grow.
- ▶ 1:02:47 Ben Gilbert He basically said, I don't know how you would grow a podcast if you didn't also have a writing platform that was easily forwardable because podcasts are really hard to share.
- ▶ 1:05:17 Ben Gilbert So it does sort of beg this interesting question that Ben threw out, which is how do you grow a podcast when you don't have a secondary shareable component?
- ▶ 1:07:27 David Rosenthal And I think Ben was kind of making this same point in the episode we did with him.
- ▶ 1:07:57 Ben Gilbert I was like, wow, we managed to get 200,000 more of basically the same type of person, and it was heartening talking to Ben, because it sounded like he thought that he had bumped up against the market, that he was starting to saturate, and…
- ▶ 1:08:13 Ben Gilbert and so it feels like Ben is
- ▶ 1:08:16 Ben Gilbert I think he probably has close to a million people that consume Stratechery.com for free in a given year, and so if he doesn't feel like he's bumping up against the TAM, and we have a reasonably overlapping audience, that feels like pretty…
- ▶ 1:09:01 David Rosenthal The episode with Ben was about strategy, obviously.
- ▶ 1:09:03 David Rosenthal So we didn't really talk about this, but I kept thinking about him wanting to explore more and we should do here.
- ▶ 1:09:09 David Rosenthal Our business model is very different than Ben's and growth again, like nice to have for us comes with some set of trade-offs.
- ▶ 1:09:30 David Rosenthal But because of our business model and everything we were talking about, like the deepening of the engagement with the right people and the right sponsors, that's what drives our excitement about the business and the business itself in a…
- ▶ 1:09:51 Ben Gilbert You're saying for his revenue to grow, he must grow the number of subscribers, which means
- ▶ 1:09:58 Ben Gilbert If subscribers are always a fraction, a fixed fraction of the set of people who are reading anything on Stratech, he must grow the top line.
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 1:31:32 David Rosenthal Rigging Ben Thompson smiling curve in this industry.
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 1:53:59 David Rosenthal When the quote unquote AWS IPO, which I think Ben Thompson coined that term.
- ▶ 2:03:46 Ben Gilbert The other one is Ben Thompson pointed this out in a piece that we'll link to in the show notes.
Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- ▶ 28:15 David Rosenthal Ben Thompson had this amazing interview with Jensen on strategy and, uh, Jensen in this interview, I think puts what CUDA is and how important it is.
- ▶ 28:26 David Rosenthal So this is Jensen speaking to Ben.
- ▶ 42:39 Ben Gilbert In fact, even in the Ben Thompson interview, I think he said,
- ▶ 42:42 Ben Gilbert Ben basically lays out, like, how did all these implausible things happen at exactly the right time?
- ▶ 52:56 David Rosenthal And, uh, yes, in the Ben Thompson, um, Jensen interview, Ben actually says this when he's sort of realizing this, talking to Jensen, he says, this has been talking the way value accrues on the internet in a world of zero marginal costs,…
- ▶ 1:18:04 David Rosenthal You know, and it's interesting, like, again, in the Ben Thompson interview, Jensen talks all about this, and maybe this is just justifying in retrospect, but I don't think so.
Taylor Swift (Acquired’s Version) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:54:05 Ben Gilbert Where Ben Thompson says, it's easy to see how this plays out going forward.
- ▶ 1:54:19 David Rosenthal Ben wrote that when the fearless Taylor's version came out, which again wasn't until April, 20, 21 back into December, 2020, whenever more comes out because folklore had come out just a few months before and was obviously huge.
- ▶ 2:34:54 Ben Gilbert But that's what Ben Thompson thought before red came out.
Not Boring (with Packy McCormick) - Extended Cut · Acquired
- ▶ 38:01 Packy McCormick We read like a bunch of Ben Thompson and we read good strategy,
- ▶ 39:43 Ben Gilbert To foreshadow, I think at one point early on, you described Not Boring as if, uh, Bill Simmons and Ben Thompson had a baby, and so clearly this is where the sort of Ben Thompson side comes from.
- ▶ 39:54 David Rosenthal There's a quote from your first, uh, your first newsletter post, which was not called Not Boring, uh, that says, uh, uh, it was about this course that you're taking, this writing course.
- ▶ 40:30 Packy McCormick and I wrote about Ben Thompson because they're like, you know what, instead of starting from scratch, and I think this actually just showed up in my last piece, kind of like go remix other people who you respect, go remix their ideas and…
- ▶ 40:45 Packy McCormick And so that's how this whole thing kicked off by writing about Ben Thompson.
- ▶ 55:37 Packy McCormick It needs to be different than Ben Thompson.
- ▶ 1:05:34 Packy McCormick All I need is an iPad.
- ▶ 1:13:18 Packy McCormick Even Ben Thompson on his podcast, I think it was back in February,
- ▶ 1:15:19 David Rosenthal Even when Ben Thompson did it, he had to roll his own for so much of this.
- ▶ 1:34:00 Ben Gilbert So taking us back to the story, you mentioned February is when, uh, Ben Thompson mentioned you as some guy who writes a newsletter whose name I can't remember or something like that.
- ▶ 1:34:10 Ben Gilbert The, the funny thing about compounding, you went from zero Ben Thompson mentions your whole life to like, now it feels like every, every few, uh, newsletters I read from him, I'm like, oh, there's Paki again.
Standard Oil Part II (Extended Cut) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:12:48 Ben Gilbert And it's funny, you said a few years ago, uh, the Ben Thompson article, The End of the Beginning, which lays out this hypothesis, uh, and he has a really good analysis on it.