TikTok, every mention

61 scenes · ← back to TikTok

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every year anyone Ben Gilbert 28David Rosenthal 25Doug DeMuro 3Ben Thompson 2David Senra 1

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where TikTok comes up

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10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired Dec 15, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 2:18:25 Ben Gilbert I don't think come from like platform disruption, like, oh, TikTok's going to make it so people want short form instead of acquired.

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 46:22 David Rosenthal It's just in the YouTube feed, and then Facebook borrows it, and they hire Jan LeCun, and they start Facebook AI research, and then they bring it into Instagram, and then TikTok and ByteDance take it, and then it goes back to Facebook and…
  • ▶ 2:14:47 David Rosenthal Obviously your own site, that's always been true, but now with Shopify you can easily sell on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Roblox, Roku, ChatGPT, Perplexity, anywhere.

Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired Aug 26, 2025 · 4 mentions

  • ▶ 58:43 David Rosenthal And Facebook and Meta and TikTok and et cetera.
  • ▶ 1:17:08 Ben Gilbert It's a beautiful thing on mobile that you can sort of say, I've got something to recommend to you, and obviously short form vertical video like TikTok and YouTube shorts and all that these days is bad on steroids.
  • ▶ 1:27:52 David Rosenthal Now that, you know, Meta and TikTok exist.
  • ▶ 1:28:13 Ben Gilbert With Instagram, and you look at Instagram's most used thing Reels, or you look at TikTok, and what do you see?

Meta (Audio) · Acquired Oct 28, 2024 · 28 mentions

  • ▶ 4:20:58 Ben Gilbert I do want to jump forward to TikTok.
  • ▶ 4:21:04 Ben Gilbert In the mid-twenty teens here, there's a bunch of other stuff that we gotta get to, but TikTok is particularly interesting because it kind of blindsided Facebook.
  • ▶ 4:21:48 Ben Gilbert The magic of TikTok was AI suddenly, in the late-twenty teens, became sufficiently advanced that it could show you the optimal thing created by anyone in the world.
  • ▶ 4:22:21 Ben Gilbert And so if someone is a great competitor like TikTok who is incredibly well-funded, very good at strategically buying ads, has created their own growth function that is, they're just a very different animal, and they're a very…
  • ▶ 4:23:20 David Rosenthal But interestingly, TikTok and ByteDance, its parent company, as you point out, Ben, was so completely orthogonal to everything that Facebook had learned over the past 15 years.
  • ▶ 4:23:52 David Rosenthal Doesn't matter who your friends are on TikTok.
  • ▶ 4:24:44 Ben Gilbert So the job to be done by TikTok is now done by a thing that you already have habit around.
  • ▶ 4:26:05 David Rosenthal Okay, so that I think is dimension one that TikTok is completely orthogonal to Facebook.
  • ▶ 4:26:16 David Rosenthal So TikTok, as we chronicled on our episode about it a couple years ago,
  • ▶ 4:26:22 David Rosenthal Well, it was an acquisition of Musical.ly by ByteDance, and then ByteDance turned it into TikTok.
  • ▶ 4:26:26 David Rosenthal ByteDance had Totiao before having TikTok.
  • ▶ 4:26:43 David Rosenthal TikTok is like the product vector, one of many, and the biggest.
  • ▶ 4:28:38 Ben Gilbert Alright, so all this talk of TikTok, them being an AI-first company, clearly Meta today is an AI-obsessed company.
  • ▶ 4:39:59 David Rosenthal And then three, they had no way of seeing this at the time, but FAIR and AI actually becomes the way that they can catch up and re-architect to compete with TikTok via Reels.
  • ▶ 4:40:14 Ben Gilbert If not for FAIR, TikTok could have disrupted Facebook.
  • ▶ 4:40:40 Ben Gilbert I mean, it is magic how the Reels and TikTok algorithms work, and now YouTube was short, that
  • ▶ 5:07:36 Ben Gilbert TikTok is also really, really peaking.
  • ▶ 5:07:39 Ben Gilbert So it has some marginal users kind of using the app less because they're moving to TikTok, and Facebook is reacting to TikTok and trying to put reels in.
  • ▶ 5:08:00 Ben Gilbert There's ATT, there's TikTok competition, and they're, they're making
  • ▶ 5:08:50 Ben Gilbert The biggest of those three threats was TikTok stealing users.
  • ▶ 5:09:09 Ben Gilbert So the actual real existential threat is TikTok.
  • ▶ 5:09:22 Ben Gilbert This decision to make these product changes to respond to the TikTok threat in the face of ATT to do these at the same time is a founder-led decision.
  • ▶ 5:09:32 Ben Gilbert If you had a professional CEO, the correct thing to do to preserve your job and shareholder value is to wait six, 12 months before you start reacting to TikTok to let the whole ATT thing blow over.
  • ▶ 5:09:46 Ben Gilbert I think the right thing to do is react to TikTok now because
  • ▶ 5:39:21 David Rosenthal So, while probably, you know, YouTube, to a certain extent, TikTok, perhaps, also have similar strengths here, I doubt there is any other company in the world capable of actually operating privacy, integrity, and security, and within that…
  • ▶ 5:40:06 Ben Gilbert Because what we've seen is TikTok showed us there's a way without initial strong network effects to go capture people's attention and thus eventually the ad dollars.
  • ▶ 5:57:49 unnamed speaker Snapchat and TikTok.
  • ▶ 6:15:38 Ben Gilbert It is the company that has connected the world that will always gear up for the next battle and be whatever they need to be in the next era, and whether it's them defining the next generation of computing or creating all these AI…

Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) · Acquired Sep 30, 2024 · 1 mention

The Mark Zuckerberg Interview · Acquired Sep 18, 2024 · 1 mention

Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired Mar 18, 2024 · 4 mentions

Hermès (Audio) · Acquired Feb 20, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:35:33 David Rosenthal I don't think we want to go down this rabbit hole, but there is a whole TikTok and Instagram culture of Hermes sales associate appointments and Birkin appointments and reveals and all that, and like, you know, it's huge.

Doug Demuro on Analyzing the Car Industry, Creator-Led Businesses, and Porsche Follow Up (Raw Video) · Acquired Sep 20, 2023 · 3 mentions

Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired Sep 6, 2023 · 1 mention

Costco (Audio) · Acquired Aug 21, 2023 · 2 mentions

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired May 18, 2023 · 3 mentions

Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast) · Acquired Mar 29, 2023 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 2:15:49 David Senra And then Blake says, you could have, ah, like a TikTok, that has, a TikToker that has, like, ten million followers, yet they can't even get 3000 people to show up somewhere.
  • ▶ 2:16:01 Ben Gilbert TikTok, it is almost a zero signal if somebody follows you.

Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired Dec 19, 2022 · 3 mentions

Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired Dec 6, 2022 · 2 mentions

The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired Jun 20, 2022 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:02:55 David Rosenthal That's the last, you know, cool thing about this, which is that thanks to Substack, podcasting, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, it's never been easier.

Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi) · Acquired Apr 6, 2022 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 15:41 David Rosenthal I mean, TikTok using AI, that getting cheap enough and good enough to have that drive the algorithm.

Taylor Swift (Acquired’s Version) · Acquired Jan 24, 2022 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 2:17:41 unnamed speaker You have the opportunity by going viral to get an insane amount of free marketing on places like TikTok, where she's always commenting back and forth with fans, or Spotify playlists, or Tumblr, Twitter, yeah.
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