Acquired
About this creator
Acquired is a long-form business podcast that breaks down the companies, acquisitions, and strategic decisions behind iconic businesses.
Why they're in the library
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.
Bob Iger's vision: Disney's evolution from parks to streaming
Acquired
November 25, 2019
Case studies
9
Business models
8
Pivoting
6
Bob Iger's 45-year journey transformed Disney into a streaming powerhouse.
Disney+ launches with unprecedented integration of content creation and distribution.
Overcoming past failures, Disney now competes directly with Netflix and others.
WeWork's collapse: from $47 billion unicorn to SoftBank bailout
Acquired
October 25, 2019
Post-mortems
9
Origin stories
7
Fundraising & VC
7
How SoftBank's $100B fund turned WeWork's founder into an unchecked liability
A profitable real estate business disguised as a technology company
Adam Newman walked away with $700M+ while 14,000 employees lost their equity
How Nolan Bushnell built Atari and invented the home video game industry
Acquired
October 15, 2019
Origin stories
10
Business models
8
Bootstrapping
7
Built Atari to $30M revenue on $500 of personal capital before raising a dollar
Secretly created a fake competitor to lock up every distributor in the country
Warner bought Atari for $28M then destroyed the culture that made it dominant
How Don Valentine built Sequoia Capital and modern venture capital
Acquired
September 26, 2019
Case studies
10
Business models
7
Fundraising & VC
6
Don Valentine backed markets, not founders — Genghis Khan welcome
Selling Apple pre-IPO for $6M cost Sequoia hundreds of billions
Handing the firm to Moritz and Leone in 1996 made Sequoia endure
How Google built its mapping monopoly through three small acquisitions
Acquired
August 26, 2019
Case studies
9
Business models
7
Four engineers in Sydney rebuilt a desktop map app for the web in three weeks to win Google's acquisition.
Google spent five years eliminating its dependency on NavTeq and TeleAtlas data entirely.
Apple Maps debacle handed Google a dominant iOS position it could never have bought.
Founder interviews
Podcast
How Shopify went from snowboard shop to $35B commerce platform
Acquired
August 6, 2019
Founder interviews
10
MVP & prototyping
7
Business models
7
Shopify began as a snowboard store, not a software company
Toby resisted venture capital for years — and admits it cost them
Shopify's take rate rises as merchants grow, not falls
How Huawei became the world's largest telecom equipment manufacturer
Acquired
July 22, 2019
Origin stories
9
Business models
7
Long-term planning
5
From $5,000 import business to $108 billion revenue in 30 years
99% owned by a trade union that rolls up to the Chinese Communist Party
US Entity List ban risks splitting the global tech stack permanently in two
Product-market fit
Podcast
Superhuman: algorithmic product-market fit and charging $30 for email
Acquired
June 27, 2019
Product-market fit
9
Pricing strategy
7
Pricing psychology
6
40% 'very disappointed' is the measurable threshold that predicts growth
Charging more than free incumbents only works with deliberate premium positioning
Only launch when you actually need users, capital, or candidates
Founder interviews
Podcast
How Slack went from a failed game to a $19.5 billion direct listing
Acquired
June 25, 2019
Founder interviews
10
Product-market fit
7
Fundraising & VC
6
Freemium gated on message history — not headcount — unlocked whole-company adoption before anyone paid
Slack emerged in a week from the wreckage of a nonviolent browser MMO called Glitch
Teams that hit 2,000 messages retained at 93% — so every onboarding step targeted that threshold
How Zoom went from ignored underdog to the most successful IPO of 2019
Acquired
June 19, 2019
Origin stories
10
Product-market fit
8
Business models
6
Why Zoom's founder rejected visa nine times before building a $26B company
End users becoming buyers made happiness the only defensible enterprise moat
Profitable at IPO with 9-month payback — while competitors burned cash
How Electronic Arts was built: founding, IPO, and the Sega bet
Acquired
May 27, 2019
Origin stories
10
Business models
7
Fundraising & VC
6
Why treating game developers as artists created a new industry
EA reverse-engineered the Sega Genesis without a license — and won
The $8M IPO that turned a $60M company into a $2B one
How Uber went from a James Bond idea to a $82 billion IPO
Acquired
May 11, 2019
Case studies
10
Pivoting
7
Fundraising & VC
6
Peer-to-peer ride sharing in 2012 destroyed Uber's exceptional unit economics overnight.
Travis Kalanick's removal in 2017 followed a cascade of harassment, fraud, and cultural failure.
Uber IPO'd at a loss of $3B/year — betting on the Amazon 'infrastructure first' playbook.
How Pinterest grew from a failed shopping app to a $16B IPO
Acquired
April 24, 2019
Origin stories
9
Fundraising & VC
6
Pivoting
5
Pinterest was built by pivoting a doomed mobile catalog app called Tote.
Women bloggers, not tech bros, delivered Pinterest's initial product-market fit.
Pinterest priced its IPO conservatively and popped 28% on day one.
How Lyft survived a decade of near-death to go public
Acquired
March 30, 2019
Case studies
10
Fundraising & VC
7
Pivoting
5
An LGBTQ community service — not Lyft or Sidecar — invented peer-to-peer ride sharing.
Uber's self-destruction doubled Lyft's market share after near-death by undercapitalisation.
Lyft loses money on every marginal ride, not just at the fixed-cost level.
How Facebook built Instagram into a $150B business
Acquired
February 26, 2019
Case studies
10
Vision & mission
7
Branding
6
Keeping Instagram separate from Facebook was the strategy, not an accident
Every early ad was hand-curated — self-serve didn't exist until 2015
Monetising bought autonomy: revenue meant writing your own rules within Facebook