Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal
Hosts, Acquired Podcast
Acquired today is the outcome of two guys who really want to understand why the world is shaped the way it is, and we're studying it through the lens of all these companies that shaped it along the way.
Summary
In this episode of Leadership Matters, Alan Fleischmann sits down with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, co-founders of the top-ranked business podcast, Acquired, to discuss what they’ve learned from years of studying the world’s most iconic businesses—from Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway to Nintendo, Epic Games, and Activision Blizzard. Ben and David reflect on their journey building Acquired into a globally respected business podcast, known for its extraordinary depth of research and storytelling. They share how their work has shaped their own views on leadership, risk-taking, and long-term thinking—and why diving into the full, unfiltered history of a company often reveals the most important lessons.
Mentions & Resources
Guest Bios
Ben Gilbert
Ben is the co-host and co-founder of the Acquired podcast. Acquired tells the stories and strategies of great companies in long-form, three-hour episodes.
Previously, Ben was a co-founder and a managing director at Pioneer Square Labs, a Seattle-based venture fund and startup studio, where he currently serves as a venture partner. Ben began his career as an entrepreneur and independent iPhone developer, with the productivity app "SeizeTheDay" being used by over a million people. He also has a background in product management from Microsoft where he shipped the first version of Office for iPad and ran The Garage, the company’s grassroots innovation program.
Ben was named the 2017 Young Entrepreneur of the Year by GeekWire and 40 Under 40 by Puget Sound Business Journal. He is an Eagle Scout and holds a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University.
David Rosenthal
David Rosenthal is the co-host of the Acquired podcast, which tells long-form stories of great companies ranging from Standard Oil to Nvidia to The NFL. The show has over a million listeners and has been ranked the #1 Technology show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. In addition to Acquired, David angel invests in companies of all stages via his AngelList fund Kindergarten Ventures. Before going full-time on Acquired, David was a professional venture capitalist for 10+ years, and holds an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, daughter and goldendoodle.
Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
Welcome to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann.
I'm joined today by two extraordinary storytellers who have redefined how we understand the business world. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, the co-hosts of the widely successful podcast Acquired, through deep dives into iconic companies like Nike, Amazon, and Rolex, have earned a global audience with their distinctive conversational audiobook-style. Beyond the stories they tell, they are builders, investors, and thought leaders in their own right.
I'm thrilled to welcome them to the show to discuss what this new podcast phenomenon that they're leading is about, to get into meaningful narratives, how they build lasting ventures, and the many lessons in leadership that they've learned along the way.
Ben and David, welcome to Leadership Matters. It's such a pleasure to have you on. I wanted to have you guys on — we talked about this a few years ago, but we had a few interruptions. You've got bigger families now than you had then. But I'm really thrilled that you're both on the show.
Ben Gilbert
I'm so pumped for finally making it happen.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah. So why don't we start with a little bit about both of you — we’ll throw to you, Ben, and then David, you jump in as well. I wanted to get into Acquired and the phenomenal things that you're doing, the things you're observing, and some lessons that you'd want to share.
But tell us a little bit, each of you, about your backgrounds and where you're from. Anything you want us to know about your family? Anything you want us to know about your roots? And honestly, one of the things that people are really excited about when they listen to the show — any mentors, whether family or otherwise, that have been part of your life? Then let's get into how you two met, and then we'll dive into talking about Acquired.
Ben Gilbert
Lightweight little agenda.
Alan Fleischmann
Exactly.
Ben Gilbert
Great. Well, this is Ben Gilbert. On my side, I was born and grew up in Delaware until I was six, and then moved to Ohio, where I lived from age six until after college. Went to a public high school in Hudson, Ohio. Went to the Ohio State University in Columbus, studying computer science and engineering with a minor in entrepreneurship.
My life story is being really into computers basically the whole time. For a long time, that wasn't cool, and then at some point it completely changed my life and was a very good thing that I had been into computers for so long.
David Rosenthal
But you weren't just into computers. You did theater. You were always doing side projects. I mean, that's how Acquired started. You always had all these side projects.
Alan Fleischmann
You were multifaceted. You weren't just the geeky guy.
Ben Gilbert
Yes, yes. I think I was always fascinated by the idea of a person having an idea and being able to, without relying on too much from the outside world, make that idea a reality. I think that sort of encapsulates all the great historical figures we study on Acquired now. How do these people will these concepts into existence?
It’s also my story of building iPhone apps with another developer for a few years and realizing, "Whoa, we don't need anyone else. We can just make apps on our own." Or, David and I can just make a podcast on our own. I probably made 10 or 15 websites when I was in high school. It was just the coolest thing that you could just make something and put it out there, and people could use it. I feel like I was born in the exact right era where you could build web applications and mobile applications for the first time in history. It empowered someone like me who… I mean, I've got lots of other skills now, but truly, in high school and college, I knew how to write programs and I could make things because of that.
Alan Fleischmann
That's so cool. And you loved it.
Ben Gilbert
Oh yeah. The logical thinking of computers has always just really appealed to me. I think my favorite Acquired episodes are the ones that fit together, almost as if you could write it as a piece of software. I'm thinking of, why did Costco work? You can give a definitive, descriptive, logical answer to why does that company work so well. I've always been allergic to hand-waviness, and I think that's the software engineer in me that comes out.
Alan Fleischmann
A little bit of left brain, right brain, as David pointed out too. Any mentors along the way?
Ben Gilbert
Oh, tons. But one that comes to mind — there's a person that completely changed my life, a guy named Greg Gottesman, who I met when I first moved out to Seattle. My first job out of college was at Microsoft, working on the then-secret Office for iPad. And I had been facilitating and organizing these startup weekends. I'd probably done 30 or so over the course of the years, where I was a participant first, building apps, building these little companies. It's a very fun concept. You try to start a company in just Friday through Sunday with a group of people you just met and basically speed-run entrepreneurship.
When I moved out to Seattle having done a bunch of these, a good friend, Nick Seguin, introduced me to Greg Gottesman. Greg was on the board of Startup Weekend and was a venture capitalist in Seattle, and said, "Hey, Greg, you should keep tabs on this guy. Hey, Ben, you should learn from this guy, Greg." Greg was kind enough to meet with me, I don't know, four times a year or so while I was still at Microsoft, and just kind of check in and ask me what I thought was interesting and how he could help.
Eventually he plucked me out of Microsoft, and I got to start a thing with him at his venture firm, Madrona. And that's where my story starts to intersect with David's.
David Rosenthal
Greg, by the way, also an incredible mentor of mine. He was my boss during all this time. So when Ben would say mentoring, maybe, from our perspective at the firm, Madrona, Greg was courting Ben.
Greg's a great mentor to both of us. Wonderful.
Alan Fleischmann
Do you know where Greg's parents are from? He wrote a book about it, I forgot.
Ben Gilbert
I know his parents, but yeah, he's from Seattle. It’s a different family from the East Coast Gottesman family.
Alan Fleischmann
Okay, got it. The East Coast Gottesman family is actually related to me, so I was trying to figure out where he fit.
Ben Gilbert
No way! Funny.
David Rosenthal
I think Greg and his parents might be a branch of that family, way back.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, way, way back. Interesting. So it's also how you guys got to know each other too.
David, tell us a little bit about where you're from.
David Rosenthal
Well my early story ends in the same place — in Seattle at Madrona, meeting Ben at a fateful Passover Seder dinner at Greg Gottesman's house. That was the life-changing event, certainly for me. I think for you too, Ben.
Ben Gilbert
Both of us. And we had no idea in the moment. That's the funny thing — you never know which moments are going to change your life looking back at them.
David Rosenthal
I'm trying to think… I was 31 years old when we met. I don't know about most people, but I'm sure lots of people have life-changing moments in their 30s. But you can absolutely demarcate the first 31 years of my life — plus, because we didn't start Acquired right away — as completely different than when Ben and I met and then formed this partnership.
Ben and I actually — for Ben's first few years — grew up in the same place. I'm from West Chester, Pennsylvania, which is right across the border from Delaware. I actually went to high school in Wilmington, Delaware, because it was closer than many of the schools in Pennsylvania.
Ben Gilbert
By the way, this is a complete coincidence. David and I were within miles of each other, and we think at one point, even like hundreds of feet of each other in our childhoods, but had no idea.
David Rosenthal
I don't even think we discovered this until we'd been friends for years, probably been doing Acquired for years. It's fate.
But yeah, I grew up in a very different background. Ben's father was and is a software engineer. My parents are lawyers, so I grew up in a very… I never know which is right brain, which is left brain, but the opposite of software engineering. I was into history, English, French languages and literature. Arts and humanities were my thing growing up. It was my parents' thing, and I was steeped in it. I went to Princeton for undergrad. I majored in French literature there.
But similar to Ben, I had this other side of my brain. I loved computers. I think it started with video games, that’s how I got into it. But I loved computers. I loved building computers. When I got to college, I took a whole bunch of computer science courses. I didn't even know computer science existed until I got to college and was fascinated by it. But it was this sort of minor part of my brain. Once I got to the mid-level courses, I was like, "Okay, I can't hack it anymore here."
So that's the side I came from. Then after college, I did investment banking on Wall Street, and that led me — because of my interest in computers and tech and wanting to get into this world — into venture capital in Seattle, where we intersected.
Alan Fleischmann
Amazing how that decision of where you went to live, for both of you, changed your lives.
David Rosenthal
Absolutely.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. Did you think when you went out to Seattle, “this is my new home, I'm living here for a long time?” It obviously turned out that way. But was that a thought?
David Rosenthal
I'm curious, Ben, what you would say.
For me, when I moved to Seattle, it was purely for the opportunity to join Madrona and work in venture capital. I didn't know a soul. I knew very little about Seattle, except…
Ben Gilbert
Did you apply to like 50 venture firms? And that was the one you got a job at?
David Rosenthal
Oh, yeah. I was desperately, I was very focused on a goal of working in venture capital. I wanted to be a venture capitalist. And Madrona — I hope they would say it was rightly — luckily, I got a chance to join Madrona.
So I just came to Seattle. No intention of it being anything more than, this is my opportunity to do what I want to do.
Ben Gilbert
For me, I was hooked on startups. I mean, I really, really wanted to be in Silicon Valley, where all the action was. But there was a conservatism to me graduating college where I wanted the practical training. It was down between Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Microsoft was the one that gave me a job offer, and it had a short timeframe, so I sort of had to decide if I was going to go work at Microsoft or keep rolling the dice.
I really like the outdoors. I'm an Eagle Scout. I liked the nature component of the Northwest. Microsoft probably wasn't my first choice, but it was a pretty good choice. And I liked the idea of Seattle. I think I knew I'd be on the West Coast forever.
Alan Fleischmann
You did?
Ben Gilbert
Yeah. And here I am in Seattle, 13 years later.
Alan Fleischmann
The truth is it worked, yeah.
Any brothers or sisters?
Ben Gilbert
Younger sister for me. David's an only child.
David Rosenthal
Only child, yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
That's why you guys are like brothers, you’re family.
David Rosenthal
That’s a good point, actually.
Ben Gilbert
Yeah, I hadn’t made that connection before. we don't have brothers, but we always think we sort of refer to ourselves as like spouses. In fact, David and I shared a bank account for a long time before my wife and I did.
David Rosenthal
That's right. We had no operating agreement for Acquired for a long time, it was just…
Alan Fleischmann
That's an interesting story too. I remember you telling me, so much of this was built on this organic desire to do something together. A feeling — this is where probably the intuitive sides of your brains dominated. But there was something about trust and opportunity that led you guys to say, "Let's try something." You weren't giving up your whole life to do it at that point, but it was more like, there's something there.
I'm curious, did you know what you were about to build when you did it? I don't think so, right?
Ben Gilbert
No, we had no idea. I mean, David alluded to this — I've always had side projects. I've always maintained, whether it was a spreadsheet or an Apple note or a text document, like 50 ideas that could be apps or blog posts or podcasts. I was just rolling through them over drinks with David. And David, you just latched on to this thing like lightning. You were like, "That concept, that podcast, I will 100% do that with you if you are serious about it."
For me, I just really wanted to spend more time with David. It felt like a structured way for us to make sure we got drinks more often. And so I similarly was like, "Yeah, sure."
But truly, when the podcast started — it took an hour to record, we did an hour of research beforehand, and then that was it. It's changed quite a bit since then.
David Rosenthal
The idea — I think it was the text document version of yours at that point in time — for what Acquired was the reason it's called Acquired. Every episode, we would examine as a case study an acquisition that a technology company made that went well. So think YouTube, PayPal, or the like. It was a pretty narrow and small-scoped ambition for the show.
We've become something much different, but that was the seed of it.
Alan Fleischmann
That's so cool. Was there this moment where you said, "I want to do a podcast"? Or did you think about other things you wanted to collaborate on earlier, more closely? Like, "I'm going to write a book together," or really, was it the podcast?
Ben Gilbert
This was the first time we'd even been rolling through the ideas. For me, I wanted to do a podcast because the people I admired did podcasts. I really liked listening to the Apple nerd podcasts — so The Talk Show with John Gruber, Marco Arment's podcast, John Siracusa's podcasts. Some of these early podcasting pioneers, before the medium was really a medium. We were past the era of, you load it onto your iPod over FireWire cables, but we weren't yet into the era of Serial. Actually, the Startup podcast, I think, had just come out from Gimlet.
David Rosenthal
It had just recently become an app on your phone.
Ben Gilbert
Yes, yes. Just outside the bounds of iTunes, where it used to just be a little thing in the sidebar.
I felt like I could tell, this is a thing that I know how to make that has a lot of potential. I can sort of see how to make this the same way that I could see how to make a mobile app. We can do it all with cheap microphones, we don't need a lot of infrastructure. But this concept of podcasting seems to be catching, and a lot of people seem to, at least in our circles, know about it.
Alan Fleischmann
When you started, though, it was as it was just rising.
Ben Gilbert
Yeah, The timing was perfect. When we started, the total addressable market of podcasting ads was $40 million.
David Rosenthal
And today it's several billion.
Alan Fleischmann
The other question I have for you as we get into some of the highlights of the shows is this idea of this long-form concept. I think that's so bold.
David Rosenthal
It wasn't the original concept. We evolved into it over time.
Alan Fleischmann
It gives me such incredible… I don't know what the feeling is, relief almost. Because we're living in the TikTok world, where people's attention spans have just started to be so immediate, quick. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there's this hunger. The same people that love TikTok are looking for… We're not talking about a podcast that's 20 minutes. We're talking about long-form in a way where they might listen to you over a series of days, or honestly, they may take you on a trip. A massive hike.
David Rosenthal
Plane rides, marathon training. These are a lot of common…
Alan Fleischmann
I really love to hear the demographics too. Because I love the show, but I also feel like I can talk to people who are much older than I am and they love it. I can talk to people who are teenagers, honestly, and they're listening to it and going for it. And I'm like, "Wow, okay, how is that possible?"
David Rosenthal
It's not intentional, but one of the most amazing things to us is that we hear this all the time. We’re talking to people like, "I listen with my kids. I listen with my parents." I don't think I've ever heard "I listened with my grandparents" yet, but it'll happen.
Ben Gilbert
My grandma listens. I know that much. I don't listen with her, but… We have a core tenet, which is: treat the audience like they're smart. And when we're recording, when we're researching, when we're editing, everything is in service of, "Would someone who's smarter than me and who has less time than I do be interested in this?" And if so, then it's worth us really, really understanding it and then coming up with the best way we know to make that concept digestible. And if not, skip it.
I think there's a lot of cheap attention grabs that we could do. We opt out of them because we want to treat the audience with an incredible amount of respect. We are talking to the smartest people we've ever talked to, and I think we've believed that for a decade.
David Rosenthal
Everybody wants to be treated like they're smart. And everybody is smart. You might be a 12-year-old who listens, and we have lots of 12-year-olds who listen, and they don't have the set of life experiences that a 70-year-old does. But they still want to be treated with respect and like they're smart.
Ben Gilbert
You mentioned a bold choice with these long-form episodes. It wasn't bold; that's the funny thing about Acquired. All these things, if we were to pitch it to you as if we were starting the show today, a lot of it sounds bold or crazy or a risk. And it all just happened so slowly and so organically.
We started doing 35-minute shows. That wasn't bold. We started doing almost no research. We kept our day jobs. We were two friends hanging out with a low-stakes podcast, and we just took it a little bit more seriously, got a little bit better at it, went a little bit deeper in the research, got a little bit better sources, had a little bit longer episodes, over and over and over again. And then today, it looks like this contrasting figure in our world, but it is, like everything else great, sort of an organic evolution.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. But you didn't know the phenomenon that you were about to become. What made you decide that there was a following, an audience, for the type of things you were about to focus on? Because nobody had done that before, I don't think. Have they?
Ben Gilbert
No. For the concept of studying acquisitions? I think it was very self-serving at first. David was a venture capitalist, and I was starting companies, and we really wanted to understand what made great acquisitions work, because 90% of exits are acquisitions, not IPOs.
David Rosenthal
Especially at that time.
Ben Gilbert
Yeah. So we thought, "Well, we should understand what makes an acquisition successful, so we can tailor-make companies to be very valuable acquisitions and kind of work backwards from there," using the Amazonian parlance. That had a low addressable audience and a low number of episodes that we could make.
David Rosenthal
But it was valuable to us in that — well, most importantly, that we were learning what we thought was helpful for our day jobs. But also, to the extent we were concerned about the audience in the early days, it was other startup founders. And we thought, "Well, gosh, if this appeals to us, it probably appeals to other startup founders." And that was the audience we wanted to reach, VCs and founders.
Ben Gilbert
Over time, I think we've shaken off a lot of those constraints. Like, David and I no longer believe that most businesses should take capital, and especially not venture capital. We believe that the best businesses are the ones that don't get acquired. We believe that the best thing to do is serve customers rather than try to figure out any sort of financial engineering. The constraints sort of fall away the more you study the great businesses throughout history.
And I think probably the best decision we made, David, was to allow ourselves to chase our own curiosity versus wanting to serve that initial goal of why we started the show — to help us in day jobs we no longer have.
Alan Fleischmann
Go a little deeper on that. That's amazing, actually, what you just said.
Ben Gilbert
I think Acquired today is the outcome of two guys who really want to understand why the world is shaped the way it is, and we're studying it through the lens of all these companies that shaped it along the way. If I had told myself that in 2015 or told David that in 2015, we would have shaken it off and said, "That's too ambitious, that's too abstract. I'd rather spend my time on something that has a measurable outcome for my life, like generating deal flow for me to invest in or raising my brand notoriety among other venture capitalists.”
A lot of people did continue to double down. There were lots of other podcasters doing things like we were doing — different podcasts, but with that same goal of venture capitalists with a podcast to meet that end goal. And I think at some point — hard to say exactly when, David, maybe you can put your finger on it — we decided, "Actually, let's just keep going on the things that we're curious about." Regardless, there's a leap of faith, a little bit, that even though this won't serve us in our day jobs, this is the work we want to do.
David Rosenthal
Well, I think it was because we were friends, and fairly quickly after we started the show, we both left Madrona and ended up at different day jobs. Just because we were young and we were moving on in our careers…
Ben Gilbert
And we both wanted to start our own firms.
David Rosenthal
We both wanted to start a firm, yeah. So I think, because we were no longer co-workers, it was like, "Well, we're not doing this for the benefit of our employer anymore. So if we're going to keep doing this, the reason to keep doing this is our friendship and being curious together.” That kind of drove us down this path.
Alan Fleischmann
That's cool. I mean, you both showed a real hunger for entrepreneurship yourselves. You were both wanting to start your firms. You wanted to do something, and this became your entrepreneurship.
David Rosenthal
So much so that I think we were blinded to the fact that Acquired is our entrepreneurial journey for a long time.
Ben Gilbert
I think until five years ago, if you had asked me, "What does your future hold?" I would have said, “Yeah, maybe we'll keep doing the podcast on the side. But someday, I'll spin out of my venture firm, raise capital for a company, build a big team, and take it public. I'll be the CEO of a public company, and that will mean that I am worthy in the world and that I have succeeded in starting my business in the cookie-cutter way."
And it took, I think it took us a really long time to wake up to the idea that Acquired is our business.
David Rosenthal
"Hey, dummies, this thing here that was your side project is bigger than you could ever hope anything your main project would ever end up being."
Alan Fleischmann
I love that, that’s good too. But Acquired is no longer just about being acquired.
David Rosenthal
Correct. Yeah, it's definitely not about being acquired anymore. However, it's a great name.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, it's a great name. Because you can interpret what the definition of "acquired" is, depending on where you're coming in and what you're coming for.
David Rosenthal
We also had… We do not embrace growth hacking, and podcasting is not a medium that lends itself well to growth hacking. However, having the name Acquired was extremely valuable for a long time, because even to this day, most podcast players list the shows alphabetically. When you open your podcast app and you see your list of shows that you're subscribed to, they're sorted alphabetically. We benefited from being at the top of everyone's list for a long time.
Alan Fleischmann
That's a good thing.
I love what you said a minute ago about how, old-fashioned — how do you become an iconic company? You build supply that meets demand, or you curate demand to meet supply. It sounds so simple, but it's not. So many companies for so long, as you were pointing out, really weren't there because they were in great demand. They weren't even existing for a long time, with low interest rates and the way the economy was, because they were profitable at all. They were there because they had venture money or they had other kinds of investors. A lot of them just kept being spun from one owner to another, from one major investment pool to another.
But when you really think about it, they weren't real. I mean, they really weren't representing what customers or clients were looking for. The ones that actually have taken fire, that last and are durable — all the ones that didn't need all that, they became profitable. They started to build because there was demand for them. That's the way it should be, right?
Ben Gilbert
There's a Warren Buffett adage: You can always tell who's wearing shorts when the tide goes out.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s right. And we lived through this for a while, as you guys saw. Because when you started Acquired, we were still living, I think, at a time when interest rates were at all-time lows, inflation was at all-time lows, and capital was really flush. Between private equity and VC firms, you had money flying everywhere. It was just a matter of who had the best pitch at the right time. It didn't even matter if they looked realistic.
When you think about it, the standards are changing. I'm sure you're seeing that now. There's still that industry, but the best ones are the ones who are really scrutinizing and doing great due diligence. The ones who just were reckless are not.
Ben Gilbert
I think the intersection of this Venn diagram is really interesting — companies that raised a ton of money and were a part of the go-go craziness, on the thesis that, at some point, this thing will be so big and successful that we will pay back all of our original investment in spades. You look at Amazon.com — they were break-even for their first 20 years, and then suddenly, they were a cash gusher. The thesis was correct: that if you wait long enough, in the out years of compounding, there will be a very, very real business there.
And there are lots of other ones that weren’t. To define the Venn diagram, there's companies that can raise a lot of money, and then there's the other side: there's companies that can generate a lot of free cash at the end of the day.
So you start to look at, I think, the really interesting ones, like Shopify or Tesla, who actually were these darlings of the venture go-go era, and now every quarter, actually produce a ton of cash. They were right to raise a lot of money, even though a lot of companies were kind of wrong to raise a lot of money.
Alan Fleischmann
I guess Amazon is a great example of a company that took a long time to get to a place where it was profitable.
Ben Gilbert
Yep. By design, of course.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s true.
David Rosenthal
And I think that's the rub. Even Amazon, I think, would probably fall into this category of companies that raised venture capital… Meta and Facebook is a perfect example here. They actually were incredibly profitable very, very early. Meta certainly was. I think Amazon could have been very profitable much earlier than it was. Jeff's ambition just kept expanding, so they kept plowing those profits back into expanding the categories that were sold on Amazon.com.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us the difference of where we are today and where we were at the beginning. The thesis changed — certainly, as you said, broadened. But your selection process… In general, you said, “We came in this and thought we'd do this, and then all of a sudden, we found that there was an amazing demand and interest, and that changed it.” Or is it more like your interest changed?
Ben Gilbert
I think I'd say our interest changed. And, we became friends with people because they listened to the show who opened our minds to new areas of business. I would say I was more a student of technology and less a student of business. And over time, I realized, "Actually, what I like is systems thinking." I always applied that system to what's inside the box of a computer. I think Acquired has been the labor of love of figuring out, "Oh, the system is actually this big, complex thing that's all the forces around a company, in and around a company, not just the core technology piece.”
So, whereas we started as a show about technology companies and studying what was directly in front of us in our particular industry, as we started to accumulate these business-curious listeners, we started to get suggestions of, "Hey, you should study luxury brands." I think I turned that offer down five times before our very close friend Mark Bridge was like, "No, seriously. I know you don't own a single luxury brand item, but I think given the way that I hear you talking about businesses on episodes, you'd be fascinated by why it works."
Alan Fleischmann
Your Hermès one was one of the best things I’ve ever heard, it was amazing.
David Rosenthal
Yeah. There's the decision to first cover LVMH, and then Hermès, and then Rolex. But the decision to start covering luxury companies was the single best decision I think we've ever made in the history of Acquired.
Ben Gilbert
That's probably true.
Alan Fleischmann
And it wasn't the one you naturally had at the beginning, as you said. So it took a lot to figure out that would be an interesting thing.
I'd love to know a little more — who are your biggest fans and their demographics? You mentioned luxury brands, but probably, a lot of people who love Acquired are not necessarily running around with Rolexes and shopping at LVMH.
David Rosenthal
The most amazing thing happened. When I say I think deciding to cover luxury brands was the best decision we ever made, it did two things. One, it expanded our audience and our market from tech nerds, basically, to the entire world, all of business. And, it really deepened the appreciation and lessons that the technology sector could have for Acquired and that they could learn from us. Because nothing was farther apart than the tech world and the LVMH or Hermès world.
So many people in tech looked down on that and thought it was frivolous, and thought marketing was frivolous, and thought brand was frivolous. Then we did those episodes and we said, like, "Oh no, we have discovered that this is not frivolous. There are really valuable, important lessons to be learned from this industry that will apply in technology that are completely counter to how you're thinking about things." I think that really re-energized us within our core segment and expanded us out to so many other segments.
Ben Gilbert
David, you have a great story about Stanford when you went to Stanford.
David Rosenthal
So, I went to Stanford Business School. A couple of years ago, after we had done LVMH — probably around the time we did Hermès — we got a really nice note from a couple undergrads actually at Stanford saying that they wanted to start an Acquired club at Stanford, I’m “like, Oh, this is so sweet. I live in San Francisco. Okay, I'll come down."
I go and I spend a day with them. It was the whole university — it's undergrads, there were some GSB folks in the group, and other master students in the group, graduate students — and all they wanted to talk about was luxury brands. We are at Stanford, at the heart of Silicon Valley, and all they wanted to talk about was our lessons from studying these luxury brands.
Ben Gilbert
I think that gave us the permission to then go do healthcare, and cars, and so on. To try to understand different industries and what strange, idiosyncratic things existed in those industries that we could apply when analyzing other industries or building Acquired itself.
For example, in sports, the most important thing is to have a competitive league. This is not something that I would have intuitively grasped coming in, but when we studied our NFL episode, the biggest takeaway was, you want parity within the league because you want any game to feel like, any given Sunday, anyone can win, and therefore, it creates the most compelling entertainment product.
Every industry has this thing that you wouldn't understand as the core pillar of why that business or industry works. Once you study a new industry and come to it with fresh eyes, you really can build this… I think about it as like the infinity stones from Marvel. You can sort of build this infinity stone collection of all these incredible mental models of what makes all these different industries tick. They actually are cross-applicable, but you just don't get that much organic cross-pollination between industries of people who study a broad set of them.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that.
How much do these ideas come to you, or are you hearing about them from others? Are people saying, "We want to see a story about this"? "We'd love to hear more about that"? I'm sure you get those too. But how much of the interactive parts of your life have to do with your fans?
Ben Gilbert
At this point, we've hit it — we've tipped. I think over a million people listen to any given episode. And so, because we've got a Slack community that's very vibrant with 40,000 members and a big email list, and we answer a lot of email, we will not make an episode that has never been suggested. There's enough volume of suggestions.
David Rosenthal
Every plausible company we could ever cover has been suggested.
Ben Gilbert
We have a big spreadsheet. Some ideas are there because they're frequently suggested. Other ideas are there because it's a pet project, a good idea.
A good example is India Premier League cricket. David, we wouldn't have done that episode unless you were like, "We should do IPL cricket." Was it suggested in the past sometime? Probably.
David Rosenthal
Probably, I'm sure somebody suggested it somewhere. But…
Ben Gilbert
We did it because you were curious. And those, I think, are the highest-variance, the high-beta episodes. Sometimes it really, really works. Sometimes it doesn't work as well. But you need those. I think that's how we sort of take risk and create podcast-defining episodes.
I never would have known that LVMH or Costco would have become so iconic, the ones that people associate with us. But you've got to chase them and try it.
Alan Fleischmann
How do you know that one is so popular? And how do you know that one is not so great? Or have you not had ones like that?
Ben Gilbert
We really haven't had ones that are truly not so great. Obviously, we can see it in the numbers. But if you close your eyes and don't look at the numbers and just go off of how many times people flag David down on the street in San Francisco and go, "Oh, my God, you're from the Hermès episode," we get it qualitatively too.
David Rosenthal
There's kind of a web of feedback. There's the numbers, the analytics on every episode and its performance relative to other ones.
Ben Gilbert
Which are all clustered within about 20% of each other. As you know, as a podcaster, the best thing about this medium is your listeners are your listeners. They're not just coming because of the title of the episode. So when we release an Acquired episode, it's going to do somewhere between 850,000 and 1.1 million. It's a pretty tight variance, which is cool.
David Rosenthal
But there is variability within that band, and so that gives us signal.
Then there's qualitative feedback from people. I think about our Nintendo episodes that we did, which surprised us — the numbers were lower than we would have thought, but we got incredible qualitative feedback from a couple really key people who are big executives in the industry, saying they loved them. So, were the Nintendo episodes a failure? They underperformed on numbers, but they outperformed with a specific audience.
Then the third dimension is just how we feel about it. Sometimes we'll make an episode and we'll be like, "We really feel good about how we did that episode." Or sometimes we'll feel like, "Yeah, we do not feel good about how we did that episode."
Ben Gilbert
Nike was a great episode despite a failure of process. We could feel the failure of process when we released it.
Alan Fleischmann
What was the failure of process?
David Rosenthal
Over-preparation.
Ben Gilbert
Yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
Share that a little bit. And also, what struck me from one of our conversations was how much time and work goes into the preparation and then execution of an episode. I don't think people have a clear idea of that.
Ben Gilbert
The prompt I always think about is: imagine you had nothing to do all month except make one podcast episode. How good could you make it?
David Rosenthal
That is the question we ask ourselves every month. A lot of work goes into every one.
Ben Gilbert
It's our full-time job. We make 12 episodes a year. So you apply four full weeks to research. There's some other administrative stuff we have to do. So call it 100 hours of research each. It's reading multiple books. It's watching every talk that is publicly available that the founder of the company has given. It's every podcast appearance. It's old interviews.
David Rosenthal
And then these days, really, it's a lot of primary research too. Now that we are bigger and we have access, every episode we’re at somewhere… I don't know, what would you guess, Ben? Probably between 10 to 15 conversations.
Ben Gilbert
10 to 15 conversations.
David Rosenthal
Yeah. I was going to say, percentage of research into the episode that's primary versus secondary — I would say anywhere from 25% to 80% of our research these days is primary.
Ben Gilbert
Yep. Then you write a massive script the day before recording, you take a lot of your raw notes and put it into…
David Rosenthal
Turn it into a narrative structure.
Ben Gilbert
Is that a 70-page document?
David Rosenthal
Depends on the episode, but yeah, anywhere from 40 to 70 pages of mostly written-out script. Then we'll record, and we record all day. Our recording session is, minimum, 6 or 7 hours these days, up to 9 or 10. And then we have an editing process.
Ben Gilbert
I physically hurt at the end. My back hurts. We stand the whole time.
David Rosenthal
Then we have a seven- to 10-day process where we turn that 9 hours into four-and-a-half. We cut it in half and then we ship.
Alan Fleischmann
Has the format changed along the way at all? Have you played around with it? Anyone interested in podcasts will find their way with you, find a place where they are comfortable.
Ben Gilbert
I would say the bones of the format are kind of the same. It's the story, plus some analysis, and then some way of landing the plane. But every episode is slightly different than what's before. There's sort of this — is it the Ship of Theseus? If you look at the structure of our notes from episode one and you look at the structure of the notes today, it's so different that you probably wouldn't recognize the original outlines.
The core thing that makes it work is, we tell the whole company story. And obviously, with these 200-year companies like Hermès, you can't tell the whole story, so you're trying to pick the important beats to really help someone understand how the company became what it is. Then there's some financial analysis and a little bit more qualitative analysis of why it worked.
Then we have different ways of landing the plane each time. It used to be grading acquisitions. Then it was a bear case, bull case for the company. We've been playing around with this idea the last 5 or 6 episodes of a quintessence — what's the splinter in your mind that you're left thinking about, the biggest thing that jumped out to you that's important to understand from the research.
Alan Fleischmann
That's very cool. Do you know from others who have podcasts, how much more research you put into your episodes? Because I really think you dive in in such a deep and profound way in a way — it gives me such great respect for you. The standard that you hold for your quality of work is so high.
I honestly think that's why people love it. They feel that respect. You said it earlier, David — people don't want you to talk at them or talk down. You're like, "I'm going to do the work so that I can share things with you that you wouldn't otherwise have access to, and I know you're going to meet me where I need to meet you." I think that's kind of an amazing thing.
Ben Gilbert
It's very akin to being an author. I mean, we happen to create 12 pieces of work in a year versus one or two. But that's probably the way to think about it.
David Rosenthal
Yeah, I think our process and product looks a lot more like an author writing a book.
When you asked about other shows, I don't think any other shows really have the same approach we do. We've just structured our show, lives, and business in a way that… We are a podcast, that is our medium, but we're not exactly a podcast in the definition that you would think of. We're not an interview show. We publish extremely infrequently. We do very, very long episodes. Most other shows are trying to do something different and serve a different role.
Ben Gilbert
Yeah. There are three basic types of podcasts out there. There is scripted drama, so think true-crime type, and those are highly produced. Those typically have large teams behind them. There's interview shows, where you do some prep. Like you did a great amount of prep, Alan, coming into this and wrote some great questions. But there's only so much prep you can do for an interview. Then there's a third category of a couple of hosts chopping it up, and that can be very frequent. That can be weekly or three times a week.
There really aren't many people — in fact, I can't think of any others — that are trying to take this approach which we do on Acquired, called conversational storytelling or conversational audiobooks. It's narrative, but it's not a fully scripted, drama-style narrative. It's two people having a conversation, but telling you a story through conversation.
I actually don't know why there's not more of that. I think it's a format that works very well in sports and telling a lot of non-business stories. I would like to see 10 more Acquireds in different domains out there.
Alan Fleischmann
You'd think, with your success, others would dive in and do exactly what you just described, actually.
David Rosenthal
The reason they don't is the incentives are not aligned towards it. We felt this pressure over time and, at times, pulled back. The incentive, if you're successful with a show, is to make more episodes of the show.
We did this for a while. We increased our episodes, and then we dialed it way back when we thought, "Oh, this is…”
Alan Fleischmann
What’s the business model? Is the business model with those who partner with you, the sponsors, and all that?
Ben Gilbert
Yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
So in essence, you decided that quality over quantity — you're going to do high quality and therefore have a deeper, stronger relationship with your partners, sponsors, investors, all the above. Versus, "We're going to do many, many episodes, and that's how we're going to scale."
That's also bold, I would argue, because there's a draw. There’s some kind of pull that would say, "Well, you're doing so well, more is better." And you chose to say, "Well, no, quality is more important than more."
Davis Rosenthal
Exactly, yes.
Ben Gilbert
We've watched a lot of people have the wheels fall off the machine. We want to do this for decades to come. So the question is, how do you build your machine so that it actually can last decades?
It involves saying no a lot. We have this really weird thing where every single sponsor that we talk about on air, we have a direct relationship with, often with the CEO. There's no agencies. There's no trading this standard spreadsheet.
David Rosenthal
It’s not like we have a sales team. It’s just us. We have direct relationships.
Alan Fleischmann
I was going to ask you that too. Have you built a big office infrastructure for Acquired?
Ben Gilbert
Literally zero.
Alan Fleischmann
Literally, it’s just the two of you.
Ben Gilbert
We have this fantastic editor who's a contract editor, but at this point Acquired is his only client. But no administrator.
David Rosenthal
He's the only other human involved in what we do.
What we did is we set our own business model for this. Where almost every other podcast — probably not every, but 99% of podcasts out there — sell their advertising on a CPM basis, as most media is sold. It's literally just like number of impressions, and I pay you a set price for the number of impressions. Hence the incentive of, "Well, make more episodes, get more impressions, make more money."
We do not. We sell on a season partnership basis. There is a price to be our partner for a season, and that is divorced from the number of impressions that you get. It is value brand advertising, value-based partnership.
Alan Fleischmann
And do you want them to be multi-year partners? Or you don't care?
Ben Gilbert
Absolutely. We just signed our first two-year deal. I mean, this company has been with us for two or three years in the past. When we get to know these companies really deeply and understand what makes their business work, why it works so well with our audience, we want to lean in. We want to deepen these partnerships.
David Rosenthal
These started as several-month-long deals. Our typical relationship now is a year-long deal, and now we're moving into multi-year.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that.
You're listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. I'm here with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal— co-hosts of the Acquired podcast, investors, and experienced business leaders — and we're discussing this extraordinary phenomenon which is Acquired.
What I love about everything we're talking about: it's so clear that you both created something that no one's done before. What's so stunning is it wasn't like you laid out a plan — although I think you both plan a lot. It’s different. You didn't lay out a plan and say, "We're going to do it this way." There's this organic nature about all this that, due to hard work, discovery, interest, and curiosity, you created something. Versus, it was all just inorganic and kind of laid out the other way.
It goes very much along with the philosophy of how you think businesses should be run, honestly. Where it should be a bit of "figure out the supply and the demand and make it work,” versus "let's just get a lot of funding and let it go."
Ben Gilbert
If you looked at Acquired as a business, you would see a mirror that reflected all of the favorite companies that we studied and all the lessons we've picked up along the way. It's the low-SKU count from Costco. It's the scarcity of Hermès. It's the brand — brand is very powerful — from Nike or from Visa. It’s… I don't know, David, what else do you think?
David Rosenthal
Oh, gosh. It's the merchandising from IKEA. It's the zero marginal cost of replicability of Meta and Facebook. So we borrow little elements from everything we study.
Alan Fleischmann
And then what was the decision about video versus audio? I'm curious.
Ben Gilbert
Oh a great ongoing debate.
David Rosenthal
How much of a rabbit hole do you want to go down? I'll say something first, then you jump in Ben.
I think we both believe — Acquired believes — that a secret in this industry world — and it is so puzzling why other people don't see and believe this — is that the value of an audio podcast subscriber to your show is the most valuable unit of media out there, period. We can go into what we mean by that, but the value of a listener and a subscriber on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or the Apple podcast ecosystem is immensely more valuable than a subscriber on YouTube or a reader of your Substack, et cetera.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us more.
Ben Gilbert
The busiest people in the world, the CEOs of public companies, they don't have four hours to watch video. They have a commute, and they're training for their ultra-marathon, and they're doing the dishes.
They are listening to something while they're doing the dishes. And importantly, audio is a way to reach people while they're doing something else.
David Rosenthal
It's the only medium where you can do that.
Ben Gilbert
A lot of smart, busy people don’t have an extra dedicated slot where their brain needs to be fully engaged, but they have little spaces they can fit in while they're doing something else.
I think almost no one listens to an Acquired episode straight. They fit it in while they're doing somewhat mindless things, and they're open to having the sort of audio track in their mind tuned to something while they're doing that other thing.
Alan Fleischmann
And still they're able to absorb everything, because they've trained themselves to be able to multitask in that sense.
David Rosenthal
Or they're driving!
Ben Gilbert
It's when the language center of your brain is not engaged. When you're not reading, or writing, or talking, but your body is occupied, you have the opportunity to listen and digest words.
David Rosenthal
Also, every other medium, you're being bombarded with other options. Think Substack or a newsletter, you're in your email inbox. You're like, "Oh, I could keep reading this, or I could go check the rest of my email." Or YouTube or video, there's a million other things vying for your attention.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. Again, it is a fundamental respect: "We value your time. We're going to match what we do to match your busy life, rather than expect you to match our life because we decide we like this format more.”
But how did you come to the conclusion that the most valuable listener is a listener rather than a viewer — why haven’t other people figured that out? On SiriusXM, where I am with this show, it is audio. But there's a Howard Stern that's both, I guess, right? He's video and audio, and people love to watch him talk and all that in his studio. But no one's ever articulated to me what you guys just did, which is, you want to capture the people who are, through work or through pleasure, though a busy life, so they can keep listening to you as they’re juggling all the other things they’re doing.
David Rosenthal
The Howard Sterns and the Joe Rogans are kind of a red herring. Obviously, they're incredibly successful, but people look at them and they say, "Oh, that's the model. I need to do that." What they don't realize is that they are special. Howard and Joe are special.
Ben Gilbert
This is the listener-accruing value side of it. There's also a massive Acquired-accruing value side of it that's twofold.
One, video is way harder to produce. And I don't just mean on a cost perspective — I mean time. We can turn around an episode in a week, and it's great. If we want to do a really great job editing to the quality that we edit for video — which, by the way, is 600 to 1,000 cuts per episode — and hide the fact that we're making all these cuts, which are invisible in audio, we'd have to do like two cameras. It's just much more difficult. We'd probably need B-roll. S our production costs go up, which ends up hurting listeners in the long run, because I think it makes it more likely that we burn out if it's harder to make what we make and we don't enjoy it as much. So there's the "audio is easier to produce than video" side of things.
Also, audio platforms exist where you can have a direct relationship with your audience.
David Rosenthal
They're not algorithmic.
Ben Gilbert
If you're a YouTuber, that's cool that you have a million followers or subscribers. It doesn't guarantee anything about how many people will actually see a new episode when you release it. So I think there's this real magic to being an audio creator, where, when we release a new podcast episode and you open your podcast player, you're actually going to see it and you're guaranteed to see it.
Alan Fleischmann
A couple of questions right now. We're going to hit that magic wall of an hour — I knew it should have been a two-hour episode. You guys are used to four hours and I could have convinced you to do a special two-hour episode. What was I thinking?
But your storytelling and all the work you do — it really does highlight how history informs leadership, how you really do understand leadership. The fact that you have a relationship with so many of your sponsors' CEOs, for example. If there's an example of a great leader, we'd love to hear it. Obviously, it's hard to pick one over the other. But any timeless leadership lessons, anything that you've actually witnessed around business, investing, and leadership, that has become so clear to you today that you'd want to share with this audience?
David Rosenthal
Well, a couple things that stand out to me about the leaders we study. One, every great company and every leader of every great company, is unique. You don't get to be great if you are not wholly different from the rest of the world on some really important dimension. So there's uniqueness.
But a common thing to all of them that we find is founder control and a focus on the long term, usually to the detriment or outrage of more short-term-oriented stakeholders. We just studied Epic Systems, the healthcare company. They've never made an acquisition in their entire 47-year history. Judy Faulkner, the founder, she's 81 years old. She founded the company. She's been running it for 47 years. When she dies, it will go into a trust. It can never be sold. It can never be taken public.
All of that is sort of ridiculous from a shareholder value perspective. However, it's key to why they have come to dominate the industry, because all of their competitors are amalgamations of different acquisitions and different systems that got glued together. They're the only ones that can go to their customers in hospital systems and say, "Our system is one database. Everything that happens in a patient encounter room gets captured in one database that then is that same database that you bill out of to the payers, to the insurers, and to Medicare and Medicaid. Thus you can ensure that you will actually get paid for what actually happens in the room, and there won't be errors that could introduce risk of you getting sued for medical fraud."
Ben Gilbert
The founder control thing is funny. We see it show up also in Rolex, IKEA, Meta, and Mars. And the thing we have to keep reminding ourselves is, despite the fact that intense founder control shows up in a lot of our stories, it is not necessarily causal.
We are a show about survivorship bias. I mean, we don't study the companies that didn't work. So there's plenty of companies that had intense founder control and didn't work, but it sure seems like the most successful ones in the world required someone who was incredibly contrarian and correct. It's important to sort of caveat everything we say with, we have only studied the ones that worked. So many things that show up in the ones that work also showed up in the ones that didn't work. We just don't know much about them.
Alan Fleischmann
Interesting.
What is the one question that no one's ever asked you that should be asked? What is the one question I didn't ask that I should have asked?
Ben Gilbert
There’s a question — and I don't know the answer to it, so it's almost dissatisfying to ask it — but it is, why do we care so much?
David and I feel like we're craftsmen here. We're obsessed with every detail. We're obsessed with releasing something bulletproof that, even the people with all the biggest and best arguments against something, we address them. No one can say that we got something wrong or that our take was bad.
I don't know about you, David, but I am obsessed with getting it right and understanding the whole story and making the best thing that's ever been made about any of these companies. What drives a person to do that? Like, why are we so obsessive? And how convenient that we found each other to be obsessed together.
David Rosenthal
Yeah. I think this is the answer to this has hopefully come out, the listeners can see it. But a question that doesn't get asked of us enough is a version of, "How did you two find each other, and why do you two work so well together?"
I think both Ben and I — I certainly believe, I won't speak for Ben — deeply, deeply believe that David Rosenthal's value to Acquired and Ben Gilbert's value to Acquired is well below 50% of the value of Acquired. It's like 10% of the value of Acquired is what each of us does individually. 80% is the magic that we make together.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. I've got to tell you, the genuine respect and affection you have for one another is so wonderful. It is so real. It comes across, by the way, in person, but also comes across on the show. You guys respect each other so much, and you guys also think of each other as the funniest person you’ve ever met, which is also funny. You're laughing at each other's comments way more than anybody else probably will. You know why the other is saying it, probably — that’s also a big part of it. But to watch you laugh at one another is amazing.
I love your comment about, "Why do we work so hard?" Which is kind of your message. You probably could do so well with less work, but somehow, you put so much into it. That's what strikes me so much. So there is this wiring in successful people, that good is not good enough. I've always said. It doesn't mean you're looking for perfection, but you're looking for the best. The best sometimes has warts and has blotches and isn't all perfect, but it is the best.
I think what you guys do is you work so hard. If anyone just thinks all you’re doing is putting your earphones on, making the mic work, and then gabbing away for a few hours together, they should think twice. Because you put so much thought into why you're doing it, where you're going, what you're doing. And, when you're doing it — I’m sure there are many things that you know you're going to do, but it's not right yet and you’ll be coming around to it when you know that it's the right time to do the work and be heard. That's a lot of prep. The fact that you have this very lean machine of the two of you is so wonderful to hear, actually. I love it.
I didn't get to ask you about AI and how AI is changing the world. I wanted to do that. And whether AI has any impact on you — I don't think it does.
Ben Gilbert
Well, Claude writes our sponsor reads now.
Alan Fleischmann
Is that true?
Ben Gilbert
I kid you not. David, this morning, got Claude to write our next sponsor read.
David Rosenthal
Prompted it because Anthropic and Claude is one of our new sponsors.
Ben Gilbert
So he fed in a bunch of our old sponsor reads, and so we now have sponsor reads that sound like Ben and David about our new sponsors.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, that actually allows you to do other things, right? It allows you to expand focus areas.
One thing that's so true when we go back in time, before there were podcasts — you're capturing the same thing on a podcast — is this idea of audio, the radio world. You go back in time to like my dad and his generation, and then the generation before that, they sat around listening to the radio. Their imagination was filled with ideas, because they could close their eyes and hear you.
You're capturing that same incredible magic and able to share with so many more. Obviously, the world of podcasts allows it to be when you want it, not just at a given time on a given day. That's actually very wonderful, that that’s something that continues.
David Rosenthal
I mean, that's another one. Like I was saying about our secret — audio is a magical platform in and of itself. There's been a bit of a rush recently to move to video, and that feels… Video is a magical platform itself too, but it's a different platform.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, This has been amazing. I wish we did do a second hour. Maybe I'll convince you guys to come back on soon enough.
But you've been listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. We just spent the last hour-plus with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, the co-hosts of Acquired. They are the best podcast, I'll say it. And they bring such great business acumen. They work hard, and they know that their listeners really want everything that they bring — the fascinating discussions, the stories about leadership, careers, experience, and building things is truly what you get when you listen to Acquired.
It is such a pleasure to have you guys on. I hope you will come back. I hope to spend more time with you, and I'm just so incredibly grateful that you're bringing this to the world, and the world is listening.
David Rosenthal
Thank you.
Ben Gilbert
Thanks so much, Alan.