Acquired

“This is Google's first office right here. They gave it to us for the day.”

“You created the environment with the podcast that I tried to create with the book. You grab the listener. Like I try to grab a reader and get them to the state of mind where they'll let you take them anywhere, ah, and teach them about stuff that they don't eve…”

“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.”

“Maybe if we just admit that we are heavily constrained, and then try to just lean into that constraint in the way that Hermes leans into every single Birkin bag must be handmade by one artisan, and we're going to build a business model around that. And it turn…”

“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.”

“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…”

“So end of 22 FTX happens interest rates go up, you know, all the podcast advertising market, you know, falls off a cliff. Our revenue dropped 40%.”

“At some point you're gonna wake up and say, you know, we should be doing more biography. We should be doing more people, and if that person is not, you know, is not naturally a huge corporation, you may still, I have a feeling there's more, there's an evolutio…”

“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…”

“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.”

“Not our public company sponsors, but almost all of our private company sponsors, we invested them.”

“We're probably three or four X oversubscribed on, like, people who really could convert on becoming sponsors if we said, sure, we'll take you.”

“If one of us feels passionate about something, even if the episode is a relative dud, it's still worth doing, because invariably, somebody latches onto that passion.”

“We did not announce the guests.”

“If you're only going to sell very few things, you're only going to make very few episodes, it puts a lot of onus on making Exceptional choices on the things that you do choose to carry. So it's like a very high leveraged strategy.”

“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…”

“Most podcasts sell their ads on a CPM basis, and they are incentivized to make as many episodes as possible. With as many ad slots as possible. Our business is entirely structurally different.”

“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…”

“So I write a script. I write 10 to 20,000 words. In sentence form, word for word.”

“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…”

“And I think by the end of year one, we had about 400 listeners.”

“Like for our Google series that we just wrapped up, we probably talked to 30 plus people. You know, those are all hour long research calls where, you know, sometimes people are like, oh, is this going to be recorded? And we're like, no, no, no, this isn't for …”

“We were professional venture capitalists in various flavors for eight years after starting the podcast, and never once were tempted by, should Acquired be the XYZ Firm podcast. Sure, sure. Like, that'll kill the whole thing.”

“The three things are one, you need a hero protagonist that has a great story where we can really hang all the lessons on this amazing hero's journey... Two is you need a secret hiding in plain sight... And then three is... An important company.”

“And like this year we're collaborating with the Super Bowl, which was a wild phone call.”

“The night before, he emailed us a PowerPoint tag. I think he said like, sorry, we're getting this to you so late”

“He goes, I created this program that looks at every single letter I've ever typed on my keyboard. And then every 10 minutes it automatically takes a picture Of my screen, and there's a screenshot, and I have an archive now of roughly 15 years of every single l…”

“So, this is officially one of the best acquisitions of all time, and I am raising my grade from a C to an A+.”

“Right now doing a biographies focused one when there's Senra and acquired. It's just not going to work. You're not going to get better at them.”

“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”

“On Spotify alone, you guys have now done over five million hours, and it tripled in the last year.”

“And I think it's interesting that the Chase Center was not even remotely full. Like, we had 6000 people or so that showed up. That's a place that can hold, what, 30, 40,000? And the, you know, the boxes were largely empty.”

“Wrong venue choice, but that was a partnership. That was a sponsorship. That was, they had to host it there.”

“And what happened is when that article came out, Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.”

“317,000 new subscribers or followers, depending on whether you're using Apple or Spotify's parlance, have followed the show since the Wall Street Journal piece went live.”

“The audience has grown slowly, and it doubled organically every year for the first nine years.”

“Mark Zuckerberg and other special guests will be there.”

“Four of the 14 episodes we did this year were technology companies.”

“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…”

“Yes, so the big news, we hit half a million listeners this year, which is pretty wild.”

“People ask, what's gonna be different for Acquired when you go full-time? Are you doing way more episodes? No, absolutely not. We're gonna make the same number or fewer of even better episodes.”

“I think Visa was our best episode.”

“I think LVMH, that episode alone, I think, completely changed, acquired.”

“Every single time we did a special, it had less downloads than the most recent season episode we did, which is crazy. Never once was a special our biggest episode ever.”

“ACQ-DOO is awesome, but it has one 10th the distribution of Acquired.”

“Charlie and Margaret was by far our biggest episode ever. Jensen was bigger than any previous season episode. Dara and Daniel were right around the ballpark of what our season episodes were doing at that point in time when we had interviewed them.”

“The way we're thinking about it for next year and some early conversations, seems like this is gonna work, is you get the next three interviews We promise you they're going to be world-class, and we have no idea when they will come out. And they're probably go…”

“One stat that's interesting is from Spotify wrapped for podcasters, they make a wrapped to give to you in addition to the ones to distribute to your audience, is that 76% of the people who listen to Spotify acquired on Spotify found us this year.”

“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 …”

“We totally regret doing it.”

“We put up this episode with Doug, and it's gotten 400,000 views, and is adding another 6000 a day, which in big YouTuber land doesn't sound like much, but for us, It's multiple orders of magnitude over anything else we've ever done on the platform.”

“So we have monetization turned off for our YouTube channel for us because it's not our primary business model.”

“If you look at January first, 2019, we had less than a thousand listeners on Spotify.”

“And LVMH, we got. 40,000 new subscribers.”

“We haven't acquired TikTok, we're on YouTube Shorts, we post on Twitter, and like, None of that drives the needle for us. Like, we've had videos on TikTok get a couple million views, and we don't know if it translated to a single new subscriber.”

“Two and a half NFL stadiums show up for every acquired episode.”

“It's our number one episode by a huge margin. 40,000 more people have listened to that episode than the next highest, which was amazon.com.”

“So the way that we edit is our editor takes the first pass and he's unbelievably good. And that's, we're so lucky to have him. And then he sends us a rough cut, I upload it to Descript, and then we listen, like, and read while we're listening, word for word, s…”

“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 …”

“Most podcasts should generate about 50% of their revenue from direct monetization, some kind of membership program, or paywalling their feed and about half from advertising.”