This podcast is distributed by Transistor.fm. This past year, Acquired, the business podcast, had a breakout season. Everybody was talking about them. The hosts, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, were profiled in Fast Company Magazine, where they described the podcast as the number one tech podcast sensation.
Their clips started showing up everywhere on my social media feed. They had chart-topping episodes on Nintendo, Nike, and Costco. They interviewed the CEOs of NVIDIA, Uber, and Charlie Munger. And this was the year that Ben and David both went full-time on the podcast. This is now their full-time job. This past year is also the year that they switched their podcast hosting to Transistor.
And I thought it'd be interesting here at the end of the season to sit down with David Rosenthal, one of the hosts, and just talk about their entire story, how they got started, how they built momentum over time, how they were able to double their audience every single year since 2015 when they started the show, and how that momentum ended up attracting an incredibly valuable audience to
that they've now monetized through advertising. David also had a unique countercultural perspective on podcast advertising that I think you're going to find fascinating. There is so much in this interview that podcasters, creators, and indie entrepreneurs are going to find super helpful and inspirational. I'm excited to share it with you. Here is my conversation with David Rosenthal of The Acquired Podcast.
So David, to get started, maybe just describe in your own words, what is the Acquired podcast about? Oh, well, we actually just changed our tagline by unanimous vote of the board of directors, which has just better me. Yeah.
Live on our holiday special episode. We used to be the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. Yeah. And now we are the podcast about just great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. And this is actually the interesting part of your story. So you and your co-host, Ben, you do the Acquired Podcast together. Yeah.
How did the podcast get started? Like, bring me back to that point. Yeah. What year? What was going on in your lives? Like, how, what was the beginning of all that? Everything was totally different. And to say that we didn't imagine where it would go is like the understatement of the century. So Ben and I were venture capitalists. We
we i guess you could say we sort of still are although acquired is our full-time thing now uh we were junior vcs at a firm in seattle called madrona madrona is the biggest venture firm in seattle they were the first investors in amazon big investors in snowflake many other great companies great great firm very you know top top firm um and
And we were kids there. There's probably 20, 30 people at the firm. And we were junior, mid-level folks. But we were young and we didn't have kids. And Ben, one day, he had gotten really into podcasts. And we had become friends. We were getting drinks one night after work. And he was like...
I kind of want to start a podcast. I've got a couple ideas. Do you want to riff on them? So we did. And I don't remember exactly how it happened. His version of the story, which I will assume is correct because it's my my memory is too hazy, was the second idea was.
And the idea at that moment in time was to do a podcast about technology acquisitions that went well because we were venture capitalists. And so we thought that was the idea of like, oh, let's learn how to have an acquisition go well. And so we could be good at our jobs. And when he told it to me, according to him, I said, that's such a great idea. I like it so much. I'll do it with you. And that's how it all started. And that was...
Very soon to be nine years ago. So almost a decade ago. And you two met at work? Like you were work buddies? Yes. We actually met before I was already part of Madrona. And we were sort of trying to softly recruit Ben. Ben was a superstar PM at Microsoft. And we met at one of the partner's houses, Greg Gottesman, who's been a great friend and
mentor to us both. And Ben and Greg went on to start Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle together. We met at his house for a Passover Seder. Okay. That was the first time we met. You two are junior venture capitalists at this firm. And Ben has all these podcast ideas. He says, what do you think about these podcast ideas? He was thinking about doing them himself.
Uh, this is where it's, I don't know if Ben even remembers. Okay. But, uh, I, the way, again, Ben sort of tells the story, and I'll accept this as, as close to fact as we have. Yeah. Was,
He had been thinking about podcast ideas, had been wanting to do it. And as he tells the story, he's a little younger than me. And yeah, he had kind of just joined Madrona. He also, you know, in his words, he liked me. He wanted to be friends with me. And I think also wanted to like learn from me. And so he was kind of looking for an excuse to do something together. So he wasn't necessarily like,
asking me to do it together, but I think he was maybe hoping I would become interested. Did you have any idea that the dynamic you two have would be the dynamic? This is my understanding of it. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that you do most of the research and scripting and he handles most of the business stuff and then some of the business analysis at the end of each episode. Is that roughly correct? So my role in research is to research
the kind of history of the company. And these days we're covering like hundred year old companies. Um, yeah, his role in research is much more like what is happening now. Um, so he, I spend a lot of time reading books. He spends a lot of time talking to people in the company, talking to people around the company, talking to analysts, talking to, you know, all sorts of folks. Um, and he'll bring that to the episodes on the business front. Um,
Uh, which, you know, for, for many years, there was no business front to the podcast. Now it's, uh, um, also takes up quite a bit of our time and energy. Yeah. I, I don't know what he would say. I would say we kind of share things equally, but we have very, um, complimentary natural tendencies. Yeah. Uh, so we can get into it if you like, but, um, we tend to focus on different things. Although we, we, uh,
make every decision together. Did you have an understanding early on that that would be, that that complementary skill set was there? Or were you just two kids that were excited about an idea? Yeah, we were two kids excited about an idea. Certainly one of the
that has made the partnership work and be kind of magical over the years is that we have this great complementaryness to our skill sets, our personalities. And so I think even back in the day, that was part of the attraction to one another. Ben and I are...
We're deeply, deeply aligned on like what we want for acquired, what is important, what is, you know, it feels sort of hokey to say like our core values, especially since the company is me and Ben. Like, it's not like we have a, you know, mission statement plastered on our walls here. We don't have an office. It's just our homes. But whatever the equivalent of that is, we are like,
rock solid aligned. Yeah. And then everything else around it, we have this complimentary skill set. So I can trust that, you know, Ben can just go off like he loves designing our website and tweaking an update. Like it's, he's on paternity leave right now. And I logged onto our website the other, you know, this morning and he changed the color scheme on our about page. Like he just, he's such a nerd about that stuff. He can go do that stuff. And I completely trust him that like,
Whatever he's going to do is going to be awesome. So starting the podcast, it sounds like you both had this curiosity that was similar. And then would you say the other motivation was just professionally? Like if we can dig into this and understand what makes a great tech acquisition, we'll be better at...
Our jobs. Yes. Yes. When we, again, not on day one, but pretty quickly, I think we had another, you know, went out and got drinks and came up with sort of three goals and three reasons that we were doing Acquired in the early days. And this is...
That's what I want to see. I want to see that early Google Doc that you two shared. Yeah, I think we actually made a Google Doc. I think it exists. Yeah, I want to see that because usually that stuff is so interesting. Like here's the doc where we brainstorm. Oh, man. Like wouldn't it be great if we could accomplish this? So yeah, what were those three goals?
in priority order goal number one most important was we want to learn uh to point of like hey that's kind of why we started it of like in theory this should be
What we're trying to do is VCs. This was back, you know, IPOs happened, but this was back in the day of like M&A was the primary outcome for venture backed companies. Yeah. You know, I think if we were starting it today, it would be a slightly different frame. But learn, number one. I think two was grow our network in the sort of.
venture startup community. We never were, even in the early days, we were never a guest-driven show, but we always occasionally had guests. And that really continues through to today. Most of what we do is just Ben and me, but we have guests. And we were super lucky when we started by virtue of being at Madrona. Madrona's
influence in the ecosystem, particularly in Seattle, we could get some pretty great guests even in our first couple episodes. So that was kind of stated goal number two. And then stated goal number three was increase our influence and our awareness of Ben and me as
venture capitalists in the Seattle tech and broader US tech ecosystem. It's all changed a lot, but those were the original goals. As far as goals go, those are great. It's like, we're doing this because we want to learn. We're doing this because we want to grow our network. We're doing this to help our career. And as far as starting podcasts, those are actually...
pretty realistic, you know, in the beginning. And you can't, you can't lose if that's the goal. Totally. Especially the number one of learning. And I mean, that probably still is in many ways our number one goal today, but it never was. Although that third goal was about our influence. We never, ever, ever in the history of the show have had like, we want to get to X,
listeners, followers, subscribers, revenue. Yeah. There's never any goal associated with that. I'm looking at your first episodes, Pixar, Instagram, Twitch.
Those were the topics for those episodes. You were reviewing those acquisitions. How'd they go? What was the response to those initial episodes? Because part of what you're also learning is how to do a podcast. Yeah. So what was like the experience of, you know, making those first episodes? And then even more so, like, what was the response? Where did you start? So this was a really different time for podcasts and for us. Yeah.
a really different time. So... October 15th, 2015. I didn't really think about it as doing a show or getting better at the show or anything. I thought about it as...
Ben and I would have these conversations anyway. This is a fun way to sort of put some structure around it. And I think for at least the first year, probably two years, maybe longer, I'm embarrassed to say, but I put zero thought into, for me at least, how I was coming across as a host on the show. I was just like, let
Let her rip having conversations with my buddy. Did you, did you share it? Like, who did you share it with? Who, who, who is like, okay, I gotta, I gotta send a link to the guys at work. I gotta send a link. Who are you sharing it with in the early days? Yeah. Yeah. So then on, on that front, I shared it with some friends and family. Um,
but I didn't think too much about it. Again, especially in that first year or two, I really didn't think of it as like, oh, I'm starting a podcast. I'm like, I, it really was just hanging out with my buddy. I love this. Um,
Ben shared it with more folks. And Ben was very involved in the Startup Weekend community. Startup Weekend was this amazing organization, actually headquartered in Seattle, but it was a global organization where they would put on what was called Startup Weekend. So it's a nonprofit. And the idea was just to get more people interested in building things and encouraging entrepreneurship. And Ben was a facilitator. So he would travel around the world,
and put on these startup weekends in cities all over the world. This is while he was still at Microsoft. And so kind of through that and through his network and Microsoft, and he'd just always been kind of
public and he was not big on Twitter by any means, but had a following. So he shared it with a lot of folks in that ecosystem and that helped seed things. We were also really lucky to be at Madrona, which kind of had a platform in and of itself, especially in the Seattle tech ecosystem because
There were a few other venture firms and still are there. But, you know, it's not like Silicon Valley, San Francisco and the Bay Area where I am now, where there's literally a million venture firms. It was like there's Madrona, especially back then. They were the biggest. There are a few others. If you were in the ecosystem, you paid attention to what was going on. I just I love this picture you're painting because it's actually, I think, interesting.
It's almost the perfect reason to start a podcast. I was just... I was happy to do it. I was happy to do it if nobody was listening. And to be that passionate about the topic, to be that passionate about the co-host and your relationship with the co-host, already, that just feels perfect. It just feels like so beautiful. And then for this to kind of grow organically out of that, it just happened. I mean...
Actually, another thing I've always wondered is Acquired has this characteristic that I think a lot of people don't think about when they're making a show. So I'm wondering how strategic this was. You have scannability. If I say, hey, you have to listen to Acquired, people search Acquired on their podcast app.
They scan through the episode titles and it's like Nintendo, Charlie Munger, Nike, Taylor Swift. And I've seen this. I recommended it to my brother. And my brother's a big like oil worker dude and muscled and like tattoos and motorcycles fan.
And I'm like, you got to listen to this podcast. It's fascinating. And he was like, all right, brother. And then he called me a bit later and he said, oh, I listened to the show. He's like, I love it. I'm like, what episode did you listen to first? Because that's always interesting. He scrolled through some titles. Taylor Swift, brother. Amazing. You have this, you know, even your first three episodes, they're all like interesting companies. This was never a...
any strategic thought put into it. We were just kind of following our own interests, but yeah, there's something for everyone in our catalog. We've got Taylor Swift. We've got Berkshire Hathaway. We've got Standard Oil. We've got NVIDIA. We've got Visa. We've got Costco. We've got LVMH. Yeah. And it almost opens up this perfect, what would we call it, um,
this perfect cycle of curiosity, which is I might not even be that interested in Costco, but like just seeing the name, I'm like, oh, actually I am curious. Like what, there's a bunch of open threads there that I'd like to see closed. And so, and even early on, it's like, okay, oh, Halo. Oh, that's interesting. I've always wondered how that turned out, you know? And you have, you're kind of answering questions that people already have floating around in their minds and,
But this was mostly just you guys were interested and you were you're solving your own questions. 100 percent. I mean, it's almost embarrassing for me to think that. But it's fun to look back like there was no strategic thought put into it. It really was just Ben and I were nerds. We liked hanging out with each other. And I think I think if you were talking to Ben, he would.
he was a little more strategic about this, to the great benefit of the show and me in the long run. I very much in those first couple years was literally just like, oh, cool. Once or twice a month, I hang out with my buddy Ben. When did you know, like, when was the first time you noticed that people were listening? Like, when did that happen? We were lucky because of Ben's existing kind of
influence network and Madrona's platform that we got a little bit of an initial audience. I mean, a little bit, like a few hundred people listening in the first year, a few hundred, maybe a thousand people in the first year. And then
But it was such a different time. People were looking for new podcasts and the players out there, you know, Pocket Casts, Overcast, you know, even Apple. Spotify wasn't in the game at all at this point in time. Yeah.
They were looking for new shows to feature. So we got featured by all the major players and platforms fairly early on. I think some of them in the first year. By the end of year two, we've been featured by all of them. Which was interesting, right? None of them, even Apple, none of them drove huge numbers with one exception, with two exceptions. We've never had...
huge spikes in growth as you know podcasting is not like a a medium where you see like crazy viral growth viral growth happen but i think it was like enough to help us and actually particularly pocketcasts oh interesting uh got us up enough listeners that it kind of kept that momentum going um such that by by the end of year two into year three year four you know
We and I at least were aware like, oh, you know, a decent number of people are listening out there. There's many thousand people out there that are listening by year three, year four. So that was kind of the journey. And then, but again, I never really thought about it that much in the context of this was always like a hobby for me and a way to learn and get better at my job with some ancillary benefits. Yeah.
And then around 2018, I started noticing at first slowly and then a lot more quickly that when I would meet and interact with people,
they knew me in the context of the podcast much more than in the context of being a venture capitalist. And this was bizarre to me. Like I meet with, you know, tech founders and other folks that, you know, as a VC, you meet with the ecosystem, tech execs and whatnot. And I'd be like, great, let's talk about, you know, the company you're starting or the company you might start or, you know, my portfolio company you might join. And they'd be like,
Yeah, yeah, that's cool. But like your last episode, let's talk about that. And so that started to happen. And that's when I really was like, oh,
wow, okay, maybe I should like reframe how I'm thinking about this. That's such a beautiful moment when that happens. It's so fun to have people like recognize you and go, I like your show. It was, it was so beautiful. So fun. Um, all those things. It was also incredibly cognitively disorienting for me and, and lots of other people, you know, kind of in my world and work, uh,
Like I say, it was, you know, 2018 when this really started happening, maybe a little bit in 2017. Podcasts were starting to get a little more mainstream, but the idea that a podcast would be the main thing you did, if you weren't Joe Rogan, like, was kind of insane. And especially working in venture, you know, which is a corner of finance, like, you know, you work hard, like people take it very seriously. Like it started...
creating a lot of cognitive dissonance, especially people I worked with, be like, what are you doing? You know, like, you're a venture capitalist. You're supposed to be being a venture capitalist and doing whatever it is venture capitalists are supposed to do. That's right. Why are you wasting your time with this podcast? There's the time, but then also, like, this is a distraction. People want to talk about the podcast. We need to talk about what we're doing here at Being a VC. And so for me, I started being like, gosh, this is...
I don't know. I don't know about that wisdom. I think there might be something more to hear than this. But for a lot of people in my life, they were like, they took the opposite approach. So there's a moment, you know, your first three years, you're just doing it for the love of the game. Then three years in, you notice, okay, people are listening to this, but it created this cognitive dissonance, like you said, of...
Now people knew that you were doing it. Your secret was out. And now people are like, what are you doing? Like, why are you investing in this? Was your reaction...
like, no, this is gonna be my full time job one day? Or was your reaction? This is going to help my career. And this is going to help me be a better venture capitalist. This is going to bring me deals. Well, it was a few things. It was my main reaction was like, this is my hobby, and I love doing it. So like, why would I stop? You know, that's kind of how I'd always thought about it. And probably most friction was with with folks was around. I was like,
No, like I've always been doing this. It hasn't hindered my day job. And I really love it. And like the idea that I would dial back, especially as it's becoming more successful is like, well, that's just crappy. But then also is when I started to see from interacting with people in my day job as a VC, I started to see like, oh, yeah.
I really think this will help my day job. I really think there's a lot of potential here. And that's what was, you know, I think for most people, even just like crazy to fathom in 2018. But I saw it in the conversations that was happening, you know, companies, founders, executives that otherwise I as some,
random VC, you know, wouldn't take my calls. All of a sudden they're taking my calls. Oh, that's cool. That's cool. And what was it about this time you start, when did you start getting sponsors?
It was slightly before that. So we, our very first sponsor was Silicon Valley Bank. Rest in peace. I mean, it still exists, but in a different form. And they paid us $5,000 to sponsor. I believe I can go dig up the contract. I think it might've been like a whole year. Okay. Of the show.
And you had about, what, a thousand downloads per episode at this time? Or what was the numbers? That was, I think that was two years into the show. So no, we're probably at, call it five, ten thousand downloads an episode at this point in time. But the reason we did it, and we had to like call in major favors with SVB to get them to do it.
We were like, it's not about the money. I should have said also when we were talking about our goals in the early days, Ben and I had as an explicit non-goal, like line item number four in the Google Doc, it is not a goal to make money or monetize the podcast. Yes, yes. Which is so key again. And we kept that for a long time. And I think it can add so much pressure on a creative endeavor to say, we've got to figure out how this makes money, to just remove that off the table and again, to just do it for the love of the game and
That, I think, is such a healthy approach. But then, so what changed? What made you feel like you wanted to do that deal? So the reason we did it, and we literally went to our good friend who was running SVB in Seattle at the time, who we knew through Moderna, and we said...
Can we please, can you please sponsor the podcast? You pick a number, whatever it is. It's not about the money. We don't care if it's $1. We think having Silicon Valley Bank as our sponsor will add to the brand of the show and make this, like it will make it more, um,
you know, perhaps make the content a little better, but it was just like established this thing more as like a, hey, this is for real in the tech ecosystem, you know, to our sort of points number two and three of increase our network and influence. It was through the lens of that that we decided to approach SVB of like, oh, yeah,
Because back then, SVB, they were Silicon Valley Bank. They were the bank of startups of the technology ecosystem. Like, oh, this will really be a great brand halo for us. Yeah, add some social proof, add some legitimacy. So we did a lot of things for that sponsorship that ended up becoming hallmarks of...
the show and how we work with sponsors and partners now, we did things like we put the SVB logo on our album. We put it on our website. We, the sponsor slots that we did with them weren't reads. We had folks from the bank, uh,
on at the top of the episodes to give perspectives. The reason we did all these things was we were borrowing their brand. That's so fascinating because it's a great attribute of the show right now is that like when you do an ad, you often talk to the advertiser and it becomes an interesting part of the show. It feels organic, feels like it fits the
We do it in lots of different ways now, but that spirit we've had all the way through and I think is one of the things that hopefully makes us a great partner to our sponsors. And I think makes us different from almost really any other podcast out there. We approach the sponsored content with the lens of like, how do we make this?
How do we use this as an opportunity rather than a tax on the show? How do we make it interesting content? How do we make this like, Ben and I talk about it now, like an 11 star experience for our sponsors and our listeners, which is an Airbnb term. Brian Teske talks about how they do or used to do a thought exercise of what is an 11 star experience?
Airbnb stay look like? You know, it's like, oh, the host picks you up at the airport, you know, you know, limo and cooks you dinner and all. And so it was like, okay, what is an 11 star podcast ad? And it looks as little like a traditional podcast ad as possible. That's such an interesting parallel is that in Airbnb, you have this idea of the host. But in podcasting, we also have this idea of the host as
And parallel parallel parallel paralleling those two is like, yeah, the host says, Hey, come on in. I'm going to give you a great experience during the show. You can trust me. This is going to be a really wonderful use of your time and,
I really like that. There's something about, you know, making it, comparing it to the hospitality industry. That's so great. You just... That's exactly how we think about it. So fast forward to today, it was changing. Now we, for the first time next season, we're going to have Fortune 500s as our sponsors, which is a whole nother ballgame. But even before that, like for the last couple of years, a typical sponsorship for us is a...
growth stage market leading private B2B technology company, Vanta, Voucher, Modern Treasury, Statsig, Crusoe, always selling to other enterprises as a venture backed startup itself, typically having raised, you know, call it $100 million or more. And so we go to these companies and we say,
okay, you're not buying a podcast ad from us. Like you're going to get a podcast ad, like sure. But like, we're going to become partners to your company. What does that mean? When you do your annual customer partner conference, which oftentimes these companies are getting to the stage where they're doing this for the first time.
We're gonna be there with you. We'll MC the conference. We'll help drive traffic to the conference. We will do dinners with your top sales prospects the night before, the night of. Oh, wow. We will do an ACQ2 episode with you, the CEO of the company. Mm-hmm.
Because A, you're a market leading interesting company of yourself. So that's great. But also now here's this 90 minute, two hour, you know, exploration and discussion of what the company is that we can now mention, link to in the core sponsorship on the main show. So it drives people down the funnel because these are all, you know, all of our sponsors, their products are multi tens of thousands, if not multi hundreds of thousands of dollar ACV products. Yeah.
Then we've taken it even a step further over the past couple of years. We'll invest in your company. Vanta, we've invested almost $10 million in Vanta. So it's like, it's all of this 11 star experience mindset. It's like, okay, you could pay money for a podcast ad or it could look like this. I love that picture that you're painting. The experience of that is, I think a lot of folks want advertisers, but...
They don't really think about what the advertiser is getting in return. And that list you just gave us is such a good example of there's a lot of value there. There's like, they get this content asset, like, hey, let me serve you by having you on the podcast. I'm going to produce a piece of media that you can now use with...
Here, here, and here. You can have your own content team take off with it. You can post it on your own website, do all sorts of stuff. It's just, that's such a gift. And I think your approach to this is something that more podcasters should emulate, which is...
You know, everyone wants to just be, well, they think they want to be the podcast that just does HelloFresh ads. And first of all, I don't think they realize there's nothing wrong with that. But I don't think they realize how, if you want it to stand out, there's,
millions of podcasts that want to do HelloFresh ads. But if you want to stand out, you can carve out your own world where you say, we're not in that category. What we're doing is we're giving people an 11-star experience and this is how we do it. And it ends up being a huge gift to them. They're giving us money, but we are giving them this big, big gift, gifts in return that they can leverage.
It's just, it's fascinating. It's gifts, but it's also like, it really is a partnership when we think about it. Like we get things out of this too. When we go MC, you know, Modern Treasuries customer conference or whatever, their partners that are there are the largest banks in the world. So now we're on stage MCing, hosting this conference and then doing a fireside chat. We did a fireside chat at the end of the day with Brad Kirsner from Altimeter, uh,
We are being held up on stage as like, you know, on a pedestal to the 30 largest banks in the world. Yeah. And like, and JP Morgan is our presenting sponsor next season. Wow. We didn't meet them at the Modern Treasury Conference. We knew them before. But like all of this helps like it's a true partnership. It's the same way that you think about producing compelling content for the audience. It's like what would be a compelling offer for a sponsor? That is just amazing.
It's just right there. You know, like this is compelling. We're not like pushing something on somebody. They're being drawn to us because this offer has just a lot of value in it. They can see it. We don't even have to tell them. They can see it, the evidence of it right there. Two other things I would say. One, this approach works so well for us because...
It's what our audience is. Like, I think, you know, we're talking about the HelloFresh. That's like, or any kind of, you know, programmatic stuff. Programmatic stuff is great. Like, you know, like there's a world for all that. That is mostly a world in mass market consumer podcasts.
We are not a mass market consumer podcast. You know, our biggest segment of our biggest audience segment is founders of companies. So like, you know, understanding our audience and then what the right, you know, segment of sponsors and partners and advertisers is for that. Yeah.
It's great. We happen to be an extremely high value, high LTV segment, which is awesome. But I think the lesson applied, you know, whatever it is that you're doing, like you can be very thoughtful about who the natural. And for us, this was just like, oh, back to the SBB conversation of that as our first sponsor. Like, oh, great. That is like that brand helps us with the brand that we want to create of Acquired for the audience that we want to reach.
Like, how can we get alignment between... Did you always want to reach those people from the beginning? Yes, because we were venture capitalists. And so we were like, to the extent we cared about who was listening, it was, oh, we want founders of companies that we could potentially invest in or people who might in the future start companies we could invest in. Or we want folks at Microsoft and Google and Apple who might buy these companies to listen. Oh, we want, you know, investment bankers at Goldman Sachs who might take them public to listen. I think you also have...
People like us listen to podcasts like this. You really have that dynamic. I've often seen people in the tech industry recommend your show because it's like, if you're in the tech industry, people like us, what kinds of shows should I be listening to? And inevitably, Acquire is on that list. And I think...
even that's a great thing for podcasters to think about. Like when people are recommending shows, like what kind of people like this should listen to a show like this and figure out how you can cultivate that in kind of everything that you do. Because honestly, like... Which podcasts are so good for. It's the best medium for this kind of thing. Like tribes get created around podcasts. Yeah, totally. And like your topic could actually be...
There's another audience that could have found it interesting. You know, there is a consumer like, oh, this is just interesting. How I built this exists. That is the alternate version. And it's a great show, but that's the consumer version, mass market version. Yeah, I love that. So did the show just keep growing organically or was there ever like just a big surge? Yeah, let's talk about, well, one other thing I want to say on Spotify
because I think it's relevant for anybody who has a podcast too. And then we can talk about growth. But the other thing that we've really embraced from the get-go and unintentionally and are now very intentional about, you're talking about HelloFresh ads and podcasts. Yeah.
I don't know, 90, 95% of podcast advertising out there right now is direct response. You know, enter this code at checkout. Direct response, driving a transaction to happen. Usually consumer transaction, usually a low dollar value transaction. We've embraced, we are not direct response. Like hopefully some direct response happens. Like that's great. You know, we have landing pages that, you know, for all of our sponsors, but like,
These are extremely considered purchase decisions that are very high value. And they're not going to be made because somebody heard a podcast ad. They are going to be influenced and considered over a set of months, if not years. What we are really, really great at is raising the esteem for a
a product and a company in the eyes of their customers, investors, partners, et cetera. And so that's what we focus on. We don't focus on like, hey, buy now. Hey, use this code. And I think this
I've been surprised that how slow the whole podcast industry has been to move to this type of brand advertising. And brand advertising is by far the bigger part of advertising. Like you walk through any airport and you realize this, you read any magazine or any newspaper, like Cartier isn't trying to get you to buy
buy their jewelry right now when you see their ads, they're trying to build their brand. Exactly. If you see an ad for like, I'm trying to think of an ad that people would like IBM often advertises, you know, like you should use our mainframes or whatever. And it's like, why are they doing that? Like, they don't want, you know, the average consumer to go, Oh, yeah, I should go. They're just trying to raise their awareness of the awareness, like, and
awareness, interest, esteem that the audience has for the company, for the brand. You've almost done the reverse because at the beginning you were using SVB's Halo, brand Halo, but now you're doing the reverse. Now you are offering your Halo to a brand to say, we are going to
really emphasize who you are. We're going to raise your profile and we're going to do it organically. We're going to do it over time and it's going to compound. And eventually people will have heard it so many times that it's going to be like the next time
Folks are like, we need, you know, we need this kind of thing in the boardroom. We need a compliance solution. You know, we need we need our business insurance, you know, et cetera, which is not going to be the next time they listen to a podcast episode. Yeah. Yeah. But it very much still is bidirectional. Yes. Now the Acquire brand is a part to the point where it has a ton of value and we can do that for our partners. But we still think about it of our partners doing it for us.
too. Whether that's large companies like JP Morgan's going to be our presenting sponsor next season. We absolutely like that is adding to our brand. But even the startups too, we want to work with the very best startups and we want to be known as like, oh, the very best startups that are going to create the most value that are going to be the best investments out there. They're the ones that are part of the acquired universe that adds to us too. If I think about your last six months,
your last six months are just incredible. Well, you see the data. But even in terms of awareness, it's like we did Charlie Munger's first and last podcast interview ever. We did, you know, we interviewed the CEO of NVIDIA. Like there is, and then these big episodes that just seem to resonate across the, at least my perspective,
you know, my sphere of the world, it's like everybody's talking about the Nintendo episodes and, you know, Daniel Ek wants to sit down with you in the same way that Daniel Ek wants to sit down with Charlie Rose, you know, like it had that feel to it. Was there a point where it just all culminated and then you passed a line and you were like, wow, like we are really on a different level now. Like this, this has taken off because now it's like everything that you've built has
and experienced and done, it's all just feeding you new opportunities. Like it really is a compounding machine that's just like... It has become a compounding machine. Yes, yes. Thank you for that. And like, yes, it's totally wild and surreal. On the growth question though, so I would, there's two answers.
mostly 90% of the growth is that it's always been constant and steady.
We have more or less, give or take, for the past eight years, we've doubled the audience every year. And that's pretty locked in. We've never tripled and we've never only grown 50%. Interesting. The band of growth pretty much is 100% year-on-year on the audience. And you measure that in average downloads per episode? Yeah.
So, yeah, we use kind of a custom metric for us because it ties to how we structure our sponsorships of number of downloads an episode gets in the first 180 days, so the first six months, because our sponsorships are six months long. So that's why we've had Transistor and you guys have been so great in helping us, like, you know, providing custom data feeds for us for that. Yes.
And it fits your content too, because these are episodes that have a long shelf life. And so, yeah, interesting. Okay. And so even for episodes older than six months, they continue to get a lot of downloads. And that's why we now sell the back catalog separately as a separate sponsorship product. In aggregate...
Our back catalog episodes. So our episodes, we're switching how this is done, but you can generally think of that as our corpus of episodes that are older than one year get almost always pretty much guaranteed over a quarter million downloads a month. And if, you know, if,
Sometimes some companies in the news that we covered two, three years ago, there's a big spike in downloads for that episode. Like it can get 300, you know, even more sometimes, you know, more downloads than that. A thousand downloads per month. Wow. Which is a great number of downloads. Wow. But yeah, so 90% of the growth has just been doubling every year. It's people telling their friends. It's organic. Like that's how it's worked. Yeah.
We have had a couple spikes. The first spike that we saw was as Spotify really got into the space in a big way and started getting bigger. We they also are so great, especially compared to Apple, who does nothing about having podcaster relations and, you know,
partner management and all that. So we have great folks at Spotify. We know lots of people there all the way up to Daniel Lack and have great relationships. We know zero people at Apple. Zero. So as they saw that we were, you know, had traction on the platform, they
featured us a couple times. The Taylor Swift episode was the first time that they cross-promoted that episode to people who listened to Taylor Swift and liked business podcasts. And so we got a nice little spike there. It wasn't huge, but nice little bump in the graph when that happened. And then the
But we never had any really, really huge spikes until interviewing Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA and interviewing Charlie Munger in the past couple of months. Those episodes just went like crazy. Why do you think those in particular? Yeah. I think they, you know, it's funny because both Jensen and Charlie did lots of other media, did and do or do and did lots of other media. Yeah.
I think there's, in both cases, we had done three episodes, three acquired episodes of just me and Ben on each of those companies, three on Berkshire, three on NVIDIA. So 10 hours of content representing hundreds of hours of research that we'd each done. So when we sat down with the two of them, you know, Ben and I talk about this a lot,
I don't think we don't think we're the best interviewers in the world far from it. Many other people are just much better natural interviewers or more practiced at interviewing folks and like, but nobody else had ever interviewed either the two of those people that had done so much work on the companies. So I think they were really special interviews we were able to do with people who were just in the zeitgeist. I think the other thing, the other factor is,
is you've got your fan base that has been hearing you fan out about both of those people forever. And so when it finally happens and it's like, oh my gosh, my guys are interviewing their favorite guys. It's like there's a natural... I wanted to share it just because it's like, look, they got their dream. They got their dream interviews. And I think when you have a fan base that is...
This is one of the beautiful things about podcasting is that your audience often ends up being your cheerleaders, you know? And then when you achieve something great, I mean, Mark Maron had this too with the Obama interview, anybody that had been following his story and it's just like cheering Mark on, like you can do. And, and all of a sudden it's like, he's got the president in his garage. People talked about it because he,
It's like, it's almost like at Thanksgiving, you want to just share like, Hey, I got to tell you what, what happened to my buddy. It's not really my buddy, but you know, it's, it's my guy. Like this happened for him with Jensen. You had this clip that was this moment. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Like,
Do you want to talk a bit about that? Like, was that planned or? Sure. No, no, no, not at all. So at the end of our interview with Jensen, we, as our closing question, Ben and I thought we were being...
So clever. So fun. You know, we knew all about the history of how the company was started. The company was started. Jensen and two of his good friends decided to start the company over breakfast at Denny's one day, famously in 1993. And, you know, from Denny's to trillion dollar company. And so we thought, oh, this would be really fun. Jensen and
Imagine Jensen was 30 years old when he started the company. He's 60 now. He's crazy. He doesn't look 60 years old. And we said, Jensen, if it were magically, if you were magically 30 years old again today in 2023, and you're back at Denny's with your two best friends, two smartest guys you know, and you're back at Denny's with your two best friends,
and you're talking about starting a new company, what is the company you're talking about starting today? We thought this would be so fun. Maybe he'll say biotech. Maybe he'll say AI. Who knows what he'll say? And he just looked at us and said, I wouldn't do it.
And so if you watch the clip or listen to the episode, I start laughing because I assume he's joking. Like this is the CEO of NVIDIA. But he wasn't joking. He was dead serious. And I hope we haven't created too much of a problem for him. I mean, I don't think we... These things are not problems for Jensen, but it's created a lot of... He's had to deal with talking about this clip since. Obviously...
He's glad he started the company. But what he was trying to say was this journey is hard, like really hard. That's what makes it such a great clip. Is it just that it's vulnerable, it's real, it's raw and it's human. I think that's the big part that resonated with folks. It's like, okay, wow, wow.
You always want like peek on the inside. And when people actually respond to that with vulnerability, it's so refreshing sometimes. It's just like, okay. And of course, all of us know, like he's proud of what he's done. Like you can, you know that, but just having the honesty of like, listen, this is super, super tough. And I gotta be, I gotta be honest about it. Yeah. Yeah.
But that clip, I saw that everywhere. It was super, super cool. Do you remember what brought you to Transistor? I'm always fascinated by people's switch. What precipitated that? We were with Libsyn for a long time. The OG, O-O-G podcast hosts. And we... I was trying to remember if it was before or after. It was before, but then ultimately, you know, the SVB, well...
SVB collapsed famously in March of this past year, which was right around... We were already talking about transitioning to you guys. Their ads were still in those old episodes when they started sponsoring. And, you know, we were like, gosh, like...
A lot has changed since then. Obviously, a lot has changed since SBB. And to what we were talking about earlier, our back catalog, our episodes tend to be evergreen. They're getting, they were now then getting, you know, 100,000, 150,000, 200,000 downloads a month. Like this is a,
we should be selling this inventory so we started a process of hey we need to switch hosts to a host that will support us to do dynamic ad insertion in our back catalog episodes but in the way that in like the acquired way to do this um and i can't even remember if libsyn they probably have some sort of dai solution but it was not what we needed um
And we evaluated every host out there in the space, including many of the big ones, one of which may or may not be owned by Spotify. But, you know, what we found was that everyone we talked to, either two categories, one, the hosts weren't sophisticated enough to on the technology side to do what we wanted. Yeah.
Or they were just way too big, complicated, enterprising, and they were oriented around networks, networks and agencies. We don't work with agencies as we work directly with companies as our sponsors and sponsors.
We have ACQ2 as our second show, but we don't have other shows in the network. We don't have other hosts. We're never going to be part of a network. And you guys are just this incredible sweet spot for us of you have great technology. You were willing to work with us and very generously build a lot of analytics and data that we needed for our business, which we're very, very appreciative of. Yeah.
Technology side was fantastic. And you weren't so like caught up in this network world that we could use you in the way that we wanted to run the acquired business. So it's been perfect. We're so, so happy with you guys. Wow. I remember, I think I looked back, I got an email from David Sherry saying, hey, you've got to meet my friend, Ben.
And I was a fan of the show. And I remember meeting with you and Ben initially and being like, you know, Transistor is a small company. I just want to make sure that you know that, you know, we're small and we're not as sophisticated. You know, some of these dynamic ad insertion products are very complex and very sophisticated. And yeah, I was...
And we were like, great. You are an elite boutique and we are an elite boutique. And like, this is a match made in heaven. It's beautiful. And it's interesting actually to hear the moment, like the actual crux was we need to remove all these old ads that are no longer relevant and we need to...
get, you know, some dynamic ad insertion going. So that was the that was kind of the crux of the decision. But then I think beyond that, too, even just for our everyday, you know, current season, current episode hosting, what you guys have, what you already had, and then what you've built for us around the analytics, immensely helpful. Ben was doing so much manual work with
with our old host to try and get to that 180 day metric that we use. I mean, he had lots of Zapier's apps and spreadsheets and Google docs and like an insane amount of stuff that you guys have not only simplified for us, but like we feel a lot better about the quality of the data too. Before we were always like, all right, this is kind of like, we know this is directionally correct.
We think it's as good as we can get, but the precision here is perhaps lacking. That's wonderful. Well, that's great. We've really enjoyed. It's been fun for us because we were fans beforehand. And so to have you come on board and for it to work out has been really great. And to just also, again, your last episode.
six months. I mean, your last year has been so fun and just fun to watch. I think, yeah. Well, it's no coincidence that it coincides with our move to Transistor is when all this great stuff has been happening. Yeah. Sorry, what do you mean by that? Just because you were able to focus on... Working with you guys really has helped us focus and get better analytics.
focus on the content. But I think also allow us to, you know, in our sort of marketing and selling process to our sponsors and our partners, you know, be a lot more crisp about that. Like before, whenever we'd get into discussion around analytics and whatnot, we'd always be like, well, Ben has all these spreadsheets and like, we're pretty sure it's right, you know, and it's the best we can do. And now we can be like, no, no, we're like very confident in our data. You got it. It's solid. That is so great. Yeah.
There's a dozen questions that I'll have to ask you another time. You've been so generous. Is there anything that...
You haven't been able to say that you're like, oh, we should say I've got something else I should say about. It could be for aspiring podcasters. It could be something about your experience that you think is relevant. Well, I actually have two thoughts. One, to continue the conversation about you guys and Transistor and our relationship.
decision process and then experience switching over to you. There's, it's related to what I was saying earlier about podcasts and podcast advertising being stuck in performance world and people not appreciating what the true potential and power of this is. Yeah.
So much of the tech and the other hosts and other platforms out there are built for networks. And networks are built for audience scale and for direct response. Yes.
But that is not like if you think about what the core elements and advantages and beautiful parts of the podcast medium is, it's not that. It's the opposite of that. It's the relationship between the hosts and the listeners. And so like as I look at like the podcasts that I admire out there, and I think the ones that are the most successful and that are the future of the industry are not the mass produced network driven shows. They're the, you know, they're the...
the Huberman labs, they're the Tim Ferriss shows. They're the, I mean, call her daddy's part of Spotify, but like it's, it's those, it's the boutique highly, highly passionate about their show and their craft. You know, it's David Center at founders. You know, it's all, all those folks. So I think for you guys, like transistor is such a great platform for that, you know, for the,
independent shows that it's like the life's work of the hosts where they aren't employees of some big network that's churning out their 57th show that a lot of the other tech in the industry is built for. Like, I hope you guys are on the precipice of, you know, having a lot of success. How do you think we could position ourselves for that? What's the...
Is there a positioning or a headline that comes to your mind that you think about? Ooh.
Well, it's different in many ways, but I think about like in the venture world, you know, Benchmark versus like Andreessen or something like that. Like, you know, we've done episodes on all these, you know, investment VCs and investment firms. You know, Benchmark is the elite boutique partnership. There's five partners. There's nobody else. They're all like all of their investments. They're very high touch with the founders. They're on the board. They're like, you know, you
you are, it is the, uh, they're like the Jerry Maguire of VCs. Um, and then most of the other VCs out there are big industrial conglomerates, multi-stage, many, many, many billions of capital under management. You know, they're the, they're the agencies that Jerry Maguire was leaving when he started in the movie. Um, and, uh,
I think you guys could position as, you know, sort of that, you know, the benchmark type approach of we are here to support, you know, for let's take a Huberman lab, right? Like, you know, they're a boutique team that are highly, highly dedicated to what they do. Yeah.
Maybe they'll sell the, but I don't think they'll ever sell the, to my mind, they'll never sell the pod. They're going to be a, there's like five people involved in that. They work super hard. They care so deeply about what they do and they probably want a lot of custom really stuff and they're never going to join the network. Never. So like you guys should be the perfect platform for them. That boutique independent show is,
That's what I think I'm going to be thinking about is what's the language... How do those shows describe themselves? Like you use the words independent, you use the words boutique, but...
Not a network, not an agency. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be interesting to think more. I think self-owned too is a big part of it. Self-owned, I think, is a big part of it. Like, which is related to not being part of a network, but like, you know, Andrew and his, you know, partners in the show. Yeah.
They own Huberman Lab. Huberman Lab is not like a division of, you know, the New York Times or something like that. And so thus, all of the success, all the audience growth, all the success, all the revenue, that is money in their pockets. Like they own the equity value and the revenue from that. And that's just such a powerful driving force versus of like you're an employee of a network that makes a show. Yes.
It's funny because your show is often about these big, like you have a venture capital background, but you're really passionate about building a bootstrapped business. Yes, it's quite ironic. Yeah, that's the spirit for sure. Yeah, I'm going to think about that. That's really wonderful. Cool. And I guess the other thing I'd say that is that like,
The potential for that and for you guys is so big because it's, you know, a few years ago, I think people thought in this industry of like, oh, it's going to be the Gimlets. It's going to be the New York Times. It's going to be all the NPR shows that are going to win. And like, no, no, no, no. They're losing. Like the Huberman Labs are winning. Like, you know, they're going to be the biggest part of the industry. Yeah, you're right. And in that sense, this is very timely because...
The headlines right now is that podcasting is dying or podcasting is in trouble, podcast industry is on fire. And from our perspective, we've grown every year that Transistor has been in business since 2018. And we still see lots of people that want to start shows, but they're independent folks and they have lots of different motivations. Yeah.
But you're right in terms of like, it was like the whole world was betting on big networks, big shows. And even you look at, you know, Malcolm Gladwell, Malcolm Gladwell had a great show, uh,
And then they turned it into a network. Like we're going to make this into something bigger. Yep. Yep. And, um, and you look at what's happening in YouTube and it's, I mean, Mr. Beast is the biggest example of this, but Mr. Beast is the independent one show media company. And they just put everything behind that. You know, that's the, all the wood behind the arrow is just for that.
And not a network. Disney doesn't own it. There's no investors in it. It's just an independent media brand. And the same thing is happening in podcasting, for sure. I love this idea of the independent media brand. 2024 is the year of the independent media brand. That's...
Yeah, that's cool. You know, in our industry, everybody is always... You know, there's 5 million podcasts and the average podcast gets this many downloads. And I keep saying...
The truth is the average podcast is actually not that good. Like if most podcasts are just not very good or okay, you to me are such a great example of saying we are going to produce content at this level. We are going to take the research seriously. We're going to take a whole month to produce an episode. You're not on this treadmill where you have to produce an episode every day or every week.
Oh, gosh. You're taking the time to do something that's exceptional. And in that way, you really are like hardcore history, except you actually publish every month. You know? We always joke, we love Dan and hardcore history. Like, yeah, this is our joke of like...
we stay motivated to like keep working hard. I'm Dan works hard too, but like we got to publish at least once a month because otherwise like we just, we can't, we can't fall into that. A monthly cadence is enough time to have to produce a show that is a very high quality. And the truth is, is that none of like all of the things we've discussed, any sort of,
marketing tactic or positioning tactic or advertising tactic wouldn't matter if the product wasn't excellent. And I love your focus on quality. It really shows. And I think that's what's driven just year after year. It's just like, we're going to gain more and more people because I can recommend an episode to my brother with confidence and know that he's going to have a good experience. You know what I mean? Yeah.
And so, yeah. Well, thank you so much. That's the, um, that is the best compliment you could pay us. And that's what we, we, um, we always strive for. And I, I guess that's the last thing I would leave the audience with too, for anybody who's has a podcast thinking about starting a podcast, like the, um,
don't one don't let that be a barrier and be too scared to start because it seems like oh well to have a good podcast I would need to dedicate my whole life to it like no no no no no start small we started small we did little to no research for our first episodes but
At the same time, you can make something excellent if you scope down small enough. And then you can, as you have success, you can expand that scope over time. And it is much better to make something excellent than to make something not excellent. So if that takes more time, if that takes more effort, it's always better to make something excellent. I agree.
David, thanks so much for doing this. We got to do it again. We got to catch up again. Yeah, just real big fan of what you're doing. And I can't wait to see what happens in 2024.
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