Acquired
About this creator
Acquired is a long-form business podcast that breaks down the companies, acquisitions, and strategic decisions behind iconic businesses.
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Included for clear, credible perspective as long-form business podcast that breaks down the companies, acquisitions, and strategic decisions behind iconic businesses.
Showing 168 digests for Acquired.
Benchmark Part II: Inside the Dinner and the Partnership Model
Acquired
October 17, 2022
Case studies
9
Fundraising & VC
7
Business models
6
Why Benchmark refuses a growth fund even with millions on the table
Commitment over bet: flying to Europe to save a founder relationship
Equal partners all pay LP fees on their own Benchmark capital
Founder interviews
Podcast
Jason Calacanis on Startup Ecosystems and Founder Wisdom
Acquired
October 4, 2022
Founder interviews
9
Fundraising & VC
6
Resilience & grit
5
Angel investing evolved from Silicon Alley networks into a accessible asset class
Founders must balance product excellence with strategic timing and market dynamics
Money is infrastructure, not the destination—focus on building durable value
How Benchmark built the top venture franchise without scaling
Acquired
September 28, 2022
Case studies
8
Business models
7
Fundraising & VC
6
Why the best venture firm rejected scaling and empire building strategies
How staying small and focused produced outsized returns across generations
Benchmark's legendary early bets: eBay, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, and beyond
How Amazon built its dominance from a Seattle garage to a trillion-dollar empire
Acquired
August 16, 2022
Origin stories
10
Business models
8
Cash flow management
6
Amazon's negative cash conversion cycle financed its entire logistics empire without investors
Why Barnes & Noble and eBay were both right — just on different time horizons
Prime's Costco-inspired psychology: paying to shop makes customers fanatically loyal
Founder interviews
Podcast
From NFL to Congress: One Lawmaker's Approach to Regulating Crypto
Acquired
August 2, 2022
Founder interviews
9
Compliance & regulation
5
A congressman who actually used DeFi before writing crypto law
Why stablecoins are the only safe first bite of crypto regulation
Low primary turnout — not polarization — is why Congress stays extreme
How Sam Walton built Walmart into the world's largest retailer
Acquired
July 19, 2022
Origin stories
9
Competitive analysis
7
Scaling infrastructure
6
Sam Walton's frugality and obsession with stealing competitors' best ideas
Why building their own distribution network let Walmart crush Kmart
Grocery dominance through Supercenters: 0% to largest US grocer in a decade
Long-term planning
Podcast
Twelve lessons from 200+ company stories: the Acquired playbook
Acquired
June 20, 2022
Long-term planning
8
Case studies
8
Resilience & grit
6
Sequoia's Apple exit at 40x was the single biggest investing mistake ever
Nvidia survived by shipping broken chips and telling developers to deal with it
Scale up or niche down — the internet crushes everything caught in the middle
Founder interviews
Podcast
American dynamism: Building critical tech beyond Silicon Valley
Acquired
June 6, 2022
Founder interviews
8
Niche selection
7
Vision & mission
6
Venture capital should invest in defense, manufacturing, and civic infrastructure—not just consumer software.
Founders nationwide can now build from anywhere; remote work kills the Silicon Valley migration myth.
Ukraine validates defense tech; modern builders solve old-economy problems with fresh technical approaches.
How Zoom and Veeva built billion-dollar businesses on almost no capital
Acquired
May 19, 2022
Case studies
9
Bootstrapping
7
Business models
6
Zoom raised $130M from VCs and never spent a dollar of it.
Capital efficiency is a mindset first — business model is secondary.
Veeva's second product was deliberately chosen to be nothing like the first.
Arena Show Part II: Brooks Running and the Power of Focus
Acquired
May 16, 2022
Niche selection
9
Case studies
8
Business models
7
CEO bet entire company on runners only, cut all other products, tripled revenue in decade
Building moat through relentless execution: premium margins, supply chain control, brand focus
Warren Buffett recognized the model and gave Brooks complete independence to scale globally
Nvidia: How CUDA and deep learning built a trillion-dollar platform
Acquired
April 20, 2022
Case studies
9
Business models
9
AI strategy & adoption
7
CUDA was free but proprietary — the lock-in that created Nvidia's moat
AlexNet in 2012 was the big bang that finally justified 15 years of bets
Nvidia survived four near-death drawdowns by refusing to pivot away
Competitive analysis
Podcast
Applying Seven Powers to Platform Businesses
Acquired
April 6, 2022
Competitive analysis
9
Business models
8
Product-market fit
6
A flywheel proves product-market fit but says nothing about power.
Multi-homing silently arbitrages away a platform's scale advantage.
High preference heterogeneity is what makes a platform's lead compound.
Nvidia's rise from 90 competitors to GPU dominance, 1993–2006
Acquired
March 28, 2022
Origin stories
10
Business models
7
Nvidia survived near-bankruptcy by shipping new chips every six months, not eighteen.
Programmable shaders transformed GPUs from commodity hardware into a platform Intel couldn't absorb.
Early GPU-powered science hinted at machine learning dominance two decades away.
Sony: From Postwar Tokyo to Global Electronics and Entertainment Giant
Acquired
March 7, 2022
Origin stories
10
Business models
7
Branding
5
Morita refused a 100,000-unit order to protect the Sony brand name.
PlayStation exists only because Nintendo publicly betrayed Sony at CES 1991.
Sony's hardware genius became its blind spot as the world moved to software.
Making Super Pumped: storytelling, disruption, and the cost of winning
Acquired
February 22, 2022
Making audiences love Travis Kalanick before watching him self-destruct
Bill Gurley's dilemma: protecting your reputation versus removing a damaging CEO
"Grow or die" on a finite planet is the root of every other crisis