The Ledger
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Acquired invests in almost all of its private company podcast sponsors
“Not our public company sponsors, but almost all of our private company sponsors, we invested them.”
Acquired hosts have invested in five of their podcast sponsors
“Most of them now, a very large percentage of our sponsors, we've invested in. What, five of them? I think five, yeah. Vanta, we should talk about Vanta in a big way. Modern Treasury, Vouch, Mystery, Standard Metrics, we've invested in.”
Rosenthal: Acquired regrets lending its podcast platform to Sam Bankman-Fried
“We lent our platform to Sam and to FTX, and yeah, I do feel bad about that. I don't think there's any way we could have known at the time, and I don't want to stop having interesting people and companies on the show, you know, up and coming companies, so.”
Acquired hosts invested nearly $10 million in Vanta via an SPV
“One of our couple biggest sponsors and partners on the show this year, we, and kind of through kindergarten and you too, invested almost ten million dollars in the company this year.”
Rosenthal: Acquired will reduce output to eight episodes next year
“We release, for the last three years, we've released 12 episodes. The next year, we're gonna do eight. Eight episodes for the whole year.”
Rosenthal: Acquired episodes must retain 80% relevance after five years
“It must be that, like, if you listen to this, an episode that we make five years after we made it, it's, 80% is relevant. It's still, it will still be an important institution in the world.”
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.”
Rosenthal: I write 10,000 to 20,000-word scripts for Acquired episodes
“So I write a script. I write 10 to 20,000 words. In sentence form, word for word.”
Rosenthal: Kindergarten Ventures led a $10M SPV in Vanta's Series B
“Last year, Kindergarten Ventures, the early stage AngelList fund that I run with my friend Nap, we did a ten million dollar SPV in Fanta's Series B.”
Rosenthal: Acquired Keeps YouTube Monetization Turned Off
“So we have monetization turned off for our YouTube channel for us because it's not our primary business model.”
Acquired explicitly chooses to operate without a large team or staff
“One thing we've been very explicit about in a trade off for the show and acquired as an entity in a business is we don't want to have a lot of employees. We don't want to have a team.”
Kindergarten Ventures limited partners make their capital calls in stablecoins
“We have LPs in kindergarten ventures that, you know, make their capital contributions in stable coins.”
Rosenthal: Acquired records nine hours of audio for every finished episode
“Well amazingly, shockingly, we tell you all all the time that we make, when we make an episode, we sit in our houses, in our studios, we record all day for nine hours, we turn that nine hours into three or four or five hours that you all hear”