ACQ2 by Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
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Top 10 ACQ2 by Acquired Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best ACQ2 by Acquired episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to ACQ2 by Acquired for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite ACQ2 by Acquired episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Cameo CEO Steven Galanis on building the first non-advertising driven social media company (at least in the US!)
ACQ2 by Acquired
01/06/20 • 72 min
Steven Galanis, cofounder and CEO of the red-hot Chicago startup Cameo, joins us to discuss how they've turned selling personalized celebrity shoutouts online into both a massive business and the most interesting new social media phenomenon to hit the West since TikTok. We hope you have as much fun listening as we did recording this one!
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
Be sure to follow the Acquired Podcast:
Show Links:
Building Product & Ops at Uber (with Brian Tolkin)
ACQ2 by Acquired
05/05/19 • 45 min
[on Uber’s Early Organizational Structure] “Uber always thought about it as a twin-turbine plane: maybe for a short period of time, you could operate on one engine. But if you want to operate at full efficiency, you need both engines working in tandem and working effectively together.” Brian Tolkin, (@briantolkin)
We’re super excited to be joined by Brian Tolkin, one of Uber’s first ~100 employees who built their “Product Ops” organization and then went on to lead Product Management for UberPOOL and all shared rides on the platform. We dive into the nitty gritty of how Uber built their “twin turbine” engine of decentralized real-world Ops and centralized Tech Product, and how the organization evolved as it scaled. We also cover Brian’s new role at OpenDoor and the tight ops + product coupling they’re building now in real estate.
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
Be sure to follow the Acquired Podcast:
Links from the Show:
03/10/25 • 57 min
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 age 36 before going on to become CEO of global software giant SAP. Since joining ServiceNow in 2020 Bill has grown the company from $3.5 billion in revenue over $10 billion today, and a nearly $200B market cap — which makes it one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. Whether your job directly involves selling or not (and if you’re a founder, make no mistake — selling is the MOST important part of your job) there’s something here to be learned for everyone. Break out your notebooks and enjoy!
Links:
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
02/18/25 • 58 min
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 development platforms. There are now more than 6 million Vercel users, 80,000 active teams, and users have grown 200% year-over-year. The company also crossed $100m in annualized revenue last May, and Guillermo shared with us that they’ve been growing at 80% since, and were recently valued at $3.25 billion.
This is also a particularly interesting moment for Vercel. Last year they launched a new product, “v0”, which lets anyone create and deploy a working website simply by describing it in English and letting AI take care of the rest. Guillermo shares its origin story within the company (and insanely that it reached $2m ARR in the first 14 days!), and how it’s changed their entire thinking about what’s possible now with AI products.
We also cover:
- How to build a business around an open source project (Next.js)
- How they balance both being a fast and nimble platform for startups with being a reliable platform for enterprises
- Guillermo's unconventional approach to staying deeply technical as CEO at scale
Links:
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
Kim-Mai Cutler -- From Journalist to VC
ACQ2 by Acquired
08/04/21 • 45 min
We sit down with Initialized Capital's Kim-Mai Cutler to talk about her opposite journey from us at Acquired, going from journalist to VC. We riff on how the landscape has evolved from Kim-Mai's parents' "Hewlett Packard generation" in the Valley through the TechCrunch era that se was a big part of, to today and how the nature of reporting, investing and influence -- the intersection of the two -- has changed.
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
Owning Your Own Media Stream (from Collison Conf with Garry Tan)
ACQ2 by Acquired
06/03/21 • 23 min
Ben interviewed Initialized Capital founder and friend of the show, Garry Tan at Collision Conf last month. Garry is of course also a YouTuber, Clubhouse'r, and master of content creation. The good people at Collision Conf gave us the thumbs up to share this interview on the value of owning your own media stream with all of you.
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
How YC Rewrote the Seed Playbook with Garry Tan
ACQ2 by Acquired
09/29/20 • 76 min
We're joined by Posterous co-founder, former YC partner and current Managing Partner of Initialized Capital Garry Tan to go deep on how YC changed the game for company creation and seed investing, how they thought about building the "cult" of startups, and what lies ahead as the early-stage world continues to globalize and evolve more quickly than ever.
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
Topics Covered (among others):
- How the recruiting challenge for early-stage startups led to outside-the-box thinking
- Peter Thiel’s “crazy” (but not actually crazy) offer to Garry to join Palantir
- Leveraging “cult” startup culture into a magnet for specific types of people
- Y Combinator’s path from fringe to mainstream
- Insight that those same cult recruiting techniques could be applied at a meta-level to recruiting company founders themselves
- Initial strong reactions to YC, and knowing they were on to something
- The beginning of “influencer investing” with Paul Graham’s essays + Hacker News
- The blooming of Seed as an asset class alongside and around YC
- The landmark deal with SV Angel and DST / Yuri Milner to “auto-fund” every YC company starting in 2011
- YC scaling from ~10-12 companies per batch to 70-80 and now 200+ per batch
- Starting Initialized Capital within YC, and then spinning it out into one of the largest independent seed funds
- Influencer investing and startup evangelism going mainstream
- The impact of The Social Network movie
- Exporting the ~”YC message” to the entire world: you can start a startup
- The power of direct, bi-directional access to people via the internet
Links:
- Paul Graham’s Essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
- Hackers and Painters: https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp/1449389554/
- Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com
- Garry's (great) YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIBgYfDjtWlbJhg--Z4sOgQ
12/12/19 • 63 min
We're joined by Webflow's Co-Founder and CEO, Vlad Magdalin, talking about how he started the company (over a decade, trying three times), how to nail the timing of your startup, and the future of the "no-code movement."
Vlad took his company through YCombinator in 2013, and raised only $3m in the following six years, before closing a $72m Series A from Accel earlier this year. He gives his perspective on why now is the only time Webflow could have worked (not in 2009, the last time he tried to start it), what's changed in browser technology, and how he was inspired by one of the original designers of the iPhone software. Vlad also shares his wisdom for other founders and opportunities he thinks will be available for entrepreneurs in the next five years when robust "no-code" infrastructure is built out.
“The differentiator between No-Code and Low-Code is that Low-Code makes this implicit admission that in order to really finish a project, I’m going to need a developer. Or I am going to need to know how to take it across that last mile. In No-Code, the aspiration is that for the vast majority of cases, you will not that. Or, if you do, that one or a few developers that can create the No-Code version that abstracts away the Low-Code version and put it into the hands of millions.” -Vlad Magdalin, @callmevlad
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
Be sure to follow the Acquired Podcast:
Show Links:
Bret Victor – The Future of Programming (YouTube)
02/11/19 • 66 min
As promised in our holiday special, we dive into the past, present and future of clean energy funding, with the absolutely perfect guest: the former Obama administration Assistant Director for Entrepreneurship at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Doug Rand. This episode was totally eye-opening for us, and we hope inspires many of you to think about energy and climate through an entrepreneurial lens.
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
Links:
- ARPA-E: https://arpa-e.energy.gov
- Steve Blank’s Secret History of Silicon Valley: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
- NSF Innovation Corps: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/
Book Club Discussion: Brotopia with Emily Chang
ACQ2 by Acquired
10/23/20 • 58 min
Hello ACQ2! Posting the audio recording of our Book Club Zoom session with Emily Chang in digestible podcast form. For those who weren't able to attend, we hope you get as much out of the recording as we did being there live!
Sponsors:
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig24
Book notes public post: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/book-club-discussion-brotopia-with-emily-chang
GDoc version of book notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1939VQja1rIK9yP1Ahe4w2frPy4-nUYEH7pxwRk-WjBk/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=110434699798216361855
Thanks as always,
Ben & David
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FAQ
How many episodes does ACQ2 by Acquired have?
ACQ2 by Acquired currently has 108 episodes available.
What topics does ACQ2 by Acquired cover?
The podcast is about Entrepreneurship, Investing, Podcasts and Business.
What is the most popular episode on ACQ2 by Acquired?
The episode title 'Race Capital, Crypto Investing, and FTX + Solana’s Early Days' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on ACQ2 by Acquired?
The average episode length on ACQ2 by Acquired is 68 minutes.
How often are episodes of ACQ2 by Acquired released?
Episodes of ACQ2 by Acquired are typically released every 18 days, 3 hours.
When was the first episode of ACQ2 by Acquired?
The first episode of ACQ2 by Acquired was released on Oct 21, 2018.
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