The Savannah Bananas have created a whole new sport. It’s baseball, but it’s not. It’s fast-paced, exciting, and incredibly entertaining. For example, if you're batting, and you step out of the batter’s box... it’s a strike. If you bunt, you’re out. If a fan catches a foul ball… you’re also out. Games are capped at two hours with no exceptions. It’…

 Our teacher today is Will Thorndike, co-founder of Compounding Labs and author of the acclaimed book, “The Outsiders.” In our opinion, Will has emerged as one of the most influential and innovative investor minds of the past few decades. And if you care about long-term value creation and the art of capital allocation, chances are you've also benef…

We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listened to our Microsoft episodes and had some thoughts to share — and boy, did he deliver. Steve takes us point-by-point through the original IBM DOS deal that started everything, how …

Our teacher today is Katie Koch. Katie is the President and CEO of the TCW Group, a storied firm with over 200 billion in assets under management and a fascinating 50-year legacy as a pioneer in the investment industry. Katie just took the TCW reins in 2023 after more than 20 years at Goldman Sachs. She joined Goldman right after college as the sel…

We sit down with Zach Perret, CEO of Plaid, to discuss the remarkable journey of Plaid and the broader fintech landscape over the past several years. Zach takes us blow-by-blow through journey of almost getting acquired by Visa, the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic… which quickly reversed with ZIRP tailwinds, and how Plaid navigated th…

A few weeks ago, we told you that Acquired is doing something in New York City on July 15 with our good friends at J.P. Morgan Payments. Well, the big announcement is finally here: We are doing our 2025 Live Show… at Radio City Music Hall! Radio City is of course the iconic New York City theater that hosts the Rockettes and the Tony Awards, and has…

 Our teacher today is Sebastian Mejia. He combines intellectual range with emotional depth and is the co-founder of Rappi, the on-demand delivery platform that has become one of Latin America's most influential tech companies. In this episode, we discuss resilience, identity, intuition, and building companies with a sense of urgency and wonder. We …

What if we told you that the most important company in US healthcare was run from a farm in rural Wisconsin? And that farm contained the world’s largest subterranean auditorium, as well as Disneyland—style replicas of Hogwarts and the Emerald City? What if we told you that the person who started, runs and owns this establishment has legally ensured…

 Our teacher today is Chad Cascarilla, co founder and CEO of Paxos, the leading regulated blockchain infrastructure company that is reimagining a complete technological replatforming of our global financial markets. Paxos aims to democratize finance by enabling instant global asset movement, partnering with industry leaders like PayPal, Stripe, Mas…

When you saw this episode pop up in your feed, you either jumped for joy and hit play immediately (in which case you’re not reading this), or you said “Huh. That’s a surprising episode.” Well, if you’re in group two, boy do we have a treat for you! IPL is the fastest-growing, most dynamic and most disruptive force in the sports industry today… and …

We sit down with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott for a masterclass in the art of enterprise sales — a topic where Bill ranks as one of the all-time greats by any measure. Bill started his career as a bag-carrying salesman at Xerox in New York City (alongside Howard Schultz!) back in 1983, and rose to become the company’s youngest corporate officer at…

Today’s teacher is Jacqueline Morby. She may well be the greatest investor you've probably never heard of. For anyone who invests in software or participates in the now nearly trillion dollar global growth equity industry, chances are Jackie helped to shape and give rise to the professional world you inhabit. In 1978 at the age of 40, and with her …

Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history! Their products are comparable to a Hermès Birkin bag in price, luxury status and waitlist times… yet they produce over 1m units / year (roughly 10x a…

Vercel has become the infrastructure platform powering modern web development over the past several years, with companies from Stripe to Adobe to Runway all building their front ends on them. Today we’re joined by founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch, who shares why Vercel has been uniquely successful in the fragmented (to say the least!) world of web d…

This is Rick. Today's teacher is Rich Wells, managing director of Insight Partners, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this month. I've known Rich for 20 years since our time as section mates in business school, where he was consistently recognized as the smartest person in the room. Rich is universally regarded as one of the preeminent private …

We flew to Taiwan to interview TSMC Founder Morris Chang in a rare English interview. In fact, the last long-form video interview we could find was 17 years ago at the Computer History Museum… conducted by the one-and-only Jensen Huang! This episode came about after asking ourselves a version of the Jeff Bezos “regret minimization” question: what c…

We dive into the unbelievable and unlikely history behind the quietest technology giant of them all: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Founded in 1987 by the then-56 year old Morris Chang, already a legend in the semiconductor industry by virtue of his meteoric rise and fall at Texas Instruments, TSMC today manufactures nearly all the…

Before we turn the page on 2024, we wanted to shine one more light on the man behind our most popular class of the last year. And that's Mitch Rales, co-founder of Danaher, one of the most impressive businesses to have been built anywhere in the world this past century. Having co-founded Danaher 40 years ago alongside his brother and best friend St…

M&M’s, Snickers, Milky Way, Double Mint, Ben’s Rice, Pedigree, Whiskas, VCA, Banfield… all the brands you know, owned by the company you know nothing about: Mars, Incorporated. And Mars itself is 100% owned and deeply intertwined with the Mars family, who are currently the second wealthiest (and perhaps first most secretive!) family in the United S…

In honor of Notre Dame clinching a playoff spot, we're replaying our conversation from earlier this year with head coach Marcus Freeman. We discuss the power of relationships and how he talks with his players about the concepts of hard work & love. Marcus delves into what it takes to focus on inputs rather than outputs, especially as the college sp…

ARM is an incredibly unlikely story. They were founded in Cambridge, England in 1990 to design a new chip architecture just for low-power devices (like the Apple Newton!), leaving the “serious computing” on desktop and servers to Intel’s x86. Now, nearly three decades later, ARM is the dominant architecture in all of computing today. ARM is in your…

Today’s teacher is renowned historian Patrick Griffin. Patrick is the former chair of the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. In 2021, he was named the Harold Vivian Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford, perhaps the highest honor an American historian can receive. He joined us to explore “…

IKEA may be the most singular company we’ve ever studied on Acquired. They’re a globally scaled, $50B annual revenue company with no direct competitors — yet have only ~5% market share. They’re one of the largest retailers in the world — yet sell only their own products. They generate a few billion in free cash flow every year — yet have no shareho…

Duolingo has fundamentally changed the landscape of self-guided education, starting with language learning. It is now a $9B publicly traded company in a space where everyone thought you could never build a large and exciting company. We’re joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Luis dives into how learning English was transformative in h…

Meta is a company everyone knows (literally, everyone). But, somehow, it’s also a company that few people feel they actually understand. Their products are used by more humans than any other’s in history — almost half of the entire world’s population daily. But… what is Meta? Why do they do what they do? How do they do what they do? Ask ten people …

Today's teacher is Rich Wong, general partner at renowned venture firm Accel. Rich is a very special investor and leader, and he spent many years as an operator prior to his time in VC. What was going to be a short stint as a venture operating partner nearly 20 years ago turned into a defining pivot for Rich. He not only quickly reached the top of …

We sit down with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue to understand the current state of the open source AI ecosystem. Hugging Face is the leading platform to host and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications. They also have a compute offering for AI builders to train their models directly on the platform. Clem has a contrarian take on the fu…

Today's teacher is Ravi Gupta, a partner at renowned venture firm Sequoia Capital. Ravi has had a fascinating and meandering career on his way to becoming a VC, from consulting at McKinsey to private equity at KKR to operations at Instacart as both CFO and COO. All along the way, Ravi was gathering and cultivating a unique set of skills that's equi…

Here it is: the complete video of the most unbelievable night of Acquired’s nine-year life… our sold out live show at the Chase Center in San Francisco. We joked during the months (months!) of preparation leading up to this event that it was like planning a wedding for 6,000 Acquired fans, and the guest list included Jamie Dimon, Daniel Ek, Emily C…

Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time. At Chase Center on September 10, 2024, he did an unprecedented thing: a live conversation in front of 6,000 people on Meta’s company strategy, sharing stories from early Facebook history, and his thoughts on the future of AI, VR, and AR. Mark was remarkably candid in our discussion, and gave us a window i…

We sit down with legendary quarterback Joe Montana to discuss his transition from one of the greatest athletes of all time to… one of the great venture investors today. Joe shares some of the lessons that he learned winning Super Bowls with the 49ers that he applies to his investing career at Liquid 2 Ventures. Joe also goes into their firm’s strat…

Summer greetings from Acquired! Two items for this “mini-episode”: Tickets are now available for our live show at Chase Center in San Francisco, with special guests including Mark Zuckerberg (!). The show is Tuesday, September 10th, with doors opening at 5 PM for an hour of mingling with other listeners before the show starts at 6 PM. Huge thank yo…

We are back with a summer special and to celebrate, we have a cast of teachers joining us. In this episode, you’ll hear from the Mount Rushmore of business podcasters–Patrick O’Shaughnessy, David Senra, and Acquired’s David and Ben–as well as two of our favorite entrepreneurs. We’ll also reflect on what we’ve learned from our guests, from hosting t…

In 1999, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world. And in 2019, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world, again. But… what happened in the twenty years in between? The answer, as we discovered in our research, is probably not what you think. In this episode we explore and analyze the browser wars and the DOJ case, Wind…

Today we are replaying our classroom session with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, founders of Acquired, the podcasting sensation telling the stories and strategies of the world's great companies. In this episode, we turn the tables on Ben and David in order to discover their own stories and the fairy dust behind acquired success. We'll cover the h…

The tenacity required to build Klarna over the last 19 years is astonishing. Despite several headwinds and changes in the payments landscape since founding, Klarna is used today by 150 million consumers globally, processing two million payments a day. Founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski joins us for one of the most honest and thoughtful discuss…