David Rosenthal
Co-Host, Acquired. On 3 shows, 81 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
hostinvestorfounder@djrosent ↗LinkedIn ↗acquired.fm ↗
David Rosenthal is the co-founder and co-host of Acquired, an in-depth business podcast detailing company histories and strategies. Previously a Principal at Madrona Venture Group, he also manages the early-stage investment fund Kindergarten Ventures.
3shows
81appearances
1,508statements
1,111resolved
812supported
91contradicted
73%fully supported
23said about them ↓ Everything David Rosenthal said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
The NFL blackballed Colin Kaepernick following his 2016 national anthem protests
“The NFL blackballed Colin Kaepernick after this.”
Rosenthal: The IPL is structurally superior to the NFL
“To me, this is not a controversial statement. The IPL is better set up structurally than the NFL. It is the Most perfect sports league that exists.”
Rosenthal: Taylor Swift Enterprise Value Is $11B Using Disney's 20x Multiple
“Disney trades at 20 X free cash flow. Taylor is five hundred and fifty million in free cash flow. That's a eleven billion dollar enterprise value for Taylor.”
Rosenthal: Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie deserve all credit for Azure's vision
“I kind of think all of the credit for the vision for it and the championing it for the initial seven years within Microsoft goes to Steve and to Ray.”
Ilya Sutskever argued next-token prediction inherently requires true world understanding
“The more accurately an LLM predicts that next word, i.e. The name of the criminal. Ipso facto, the greater its understanding, not only of the novel, but of all general human-level knowledge and intelligence, because you need all of your experience in the world…”
The SR-71 Blackbird Was Effectively a Decoy for Space Satellites
“This is heretical to say, because it's so beloved, but I think the Blackbird was a decoy. We were getting everything we needed from space. We just didn't want anybody to know about it.”
Streaming's high-volume content firehose fundamentally breaks Disney's historical IP flywheel
“That whole strategy of a fire hose of content is completely orthogonal to the flywheel strategy of only the best content very infrequently.”
Nintendo's intellectual property rivals Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm combined
“Nintendo is like Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm combined. I mean, they have some of the very best IP in the entire world. They've got three franchises that can stand toe to toe with anything at Disney in Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon.”
Animated IP outperforms live action in flywheel entertainment business models
“The IP that works best for Flywheel Dynamics almost has to be animated, i.e. Not live action, because with live action characters, the characters are too bound up in the actors that play them, and that creates all sorts of problems.”
Ancillary products do not cannibalize core entertainment IP
“The beauty here and the discovery that Disney makes is that when you put the IP into these other ancillary nodes, it doesn't cannibalize the core IP.”
Vanguard's mutual structure starves its technology and customer service of reinvestment capital
“Vanguard, the downside of its structure is that there are no excess profits that can be invested for the long term in things like technology and things like customer service.”
Ferrari Is Arguably the Only Legitimate Luxury Brand Founded Post-1950
“I think you could maybe even argue they are the only legitimate luxury brand established in the second half of the 20th century.”
The NFL is the largest single-property media business in the world
“I'm pretty sure the NFL is the largest single media business in the world. Not an aggregate diversified media business, but like, if you consider the league as a single property, then I think it is the largest individual single property in the world.”
Major broadcast TV networks would not exist today without NFL football
“For those networks for the last decade, run the counterfactual of the networks no longer had football. They don't exist anymore. This has been life support for them for a decade.”
Sequoia refused to raise a mulligan fund after the dot-com crash
“We interviewed Doug Leone who was, you know, one of the, I guess, two stewards ago of Sequoia, and he told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund, every other venture firm out there, after the bubble popped, were …”
Warren Buffett's legendary Coca-Cola investment has actually underperformed the S&P 500
“He would have been better off buying the S&P Over that same time period. Including dividends over that same time period. The S and P 500 is up about 11% annually. So the famous Berkshire Hathaway Coca-Cola investment today is actually underperforming the marke…”
Rosenthal: Yann LeCun is the only major AI leader not from Google
“You know, every single major leader in AI that you know of, no matter what company they are at, with the one exception of Jan LeCun at Facebook. He's the only one. Who, like, didn't come from Google.”
Rosenthal: Hidden systemic leverage in tech ecosystem exceeds corporate balance sheets
“I think there's more leverage in the system than the balance sheets would show.”
Google Is Only Company with Both Frontier Model and AI Silicon
“Somebody put it to me in research that if you don't have a foundational frontier model, Or you don't have an AI chip, you might just be a commodity in the AI market, and Google is the only company that has both.”
The 2011 Google Brain 'Cat Paper' Drove Hundreds of Billions in Revenue
“I think it's not that much of a leap to say that the cat paper led to probably hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue generated by Google and Facebook and ByteDance over the next decade.”
Google's DeepMind Buy Directly Spawned Modern AI Labs
“This company and this purchase of it by Google was the butterfly flapping its wings equivalent moment that directly leads to OpenAI, ChatGPT, Anthropic, and basically everything.”
Noam Shazeer Urged Google Leadership to Replace Search with Transformer Models
“Gnome, though, immediately starts advocating to Google leadership. Hey, I think this is going to be so big, the transformer, that we should actually consider just throwing out the search index And the 10 blue links model and go all in on transforming all of Go…”
OpenAI Rushed ChatGPT Launch After Learning of Anthropic's Chatbot Plans
“So, Anthropic was working on what would become Claude, and rumors were out there, and people at OpenAI Got wind of like, oh, hey, Anthropic and Dario are working on a chat interface. We should probably do one too. And if we're gonna do one, we should probably …”
The other half of the tape: David Rosenthal's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 18 times in 2 episodes across the shows. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Jeffrey Solomon 17
Statements about David Rosenthal, by other people (5)
Gilbert and Rosenthal deeply regret interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried on Acquired
“We totally regret doing it.”
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…”
Gilbert and Rosenthal to pool investments for growth-stage tech companies
“For companies that we already know well, David and I are going to join our investing forces and invest more in those growth stage market leading tech companies.”
Gilbert: Acquired began to investigate why large acquisitions succeed
“When I pitched him on the concept for Acquired of, like, hey, you're investing in companies, I'm starting companies, like, it'd be nice to understand When they get acquired for like a lot of money, and those go really well, why?”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 17
TBPN 1
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 17 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens David's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 ACQUIREDLEDGER | Co-Host, Acquiredhost | 79 | 1,486 | 73% 809/1106 | full record on Acquired → |
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Co-Host, Acquired | 1 | 16 | 75% 3/4 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
| TBPNLEDGER | Co-Host, Acquired | 1 | 6 | 0% 0/1 | full record on TBPN → |