- unregelmäßigErscheinungsrhythmus
- 1 h 12typische Länge
- 8. Dez. 2025letzte Folge
ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with experts on topics related to Acquired. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.
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The Insane Productivity of Andrew Ross Sorkin
Andrew Ross Sorkin does the work of about five people. He founded and writes the DealBook newsletter for the New York Times. He hosts Squawk Box on CNBC every morning at 6am. He runs the DealBook Summit, which has become the premier annual
How to Live in Everyone Else's Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke)
Tobi is one of the most thoughtful people in the technology industry. He's also one of the very few people who started as a programmer -- just trying to solve his own problem -- and still runs his company as CEO today even as it approaches
How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor)
Is AI just better software? Or something completely different that requires a new paradigm to understand? Today we sit down with Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, two of the best product builders in the world to tackle that question. Bret and Cla
Building the Savannah Bananas (with Jesse Cole, Founder and Owner)
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, yo
Undoing a $5 Billion Acquisition and Building a Durable Standalone Plaid (with Plaid CEO Zach Perret)
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 challen
The Art of Selling Enterprise Software (with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott)
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
Building Web Apps with Just English and AI (with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch)
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
How ARM Became The World’s Default Chip Architecture (with ARM CEO Rene Haas)
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 x8
Why Duolingo Worked (with Luis von Ahn, CEO)
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
Building the Open Source AI Revolution (with Hugging Face CEO, Clem Delangue)
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
Joe Montana Interview Live from Modern Treasury Transfer
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
Building a Disruptive Payments Company (with Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski)
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 paym
The Space Industry in 2024, and How to Build a Satellite Company
The space industry is one of the most fascinating areas of technology in 2024. The reduction in launch costs and proliferation of satellites make all kinds of new businesses possible. Today we are joined by Austin Link, the co-founder and C
The Software Behind Silicon (with Synopsys Founder Aart de Geus and CEO Sassine Ghazi)
If you’ve been waiting for us to venture back to the land of semiconductors, you’re in luck! On our NVIDIA and TSMC episodes, we explored two components of the silicon value chain: the fabless chip companies that design chips and the foundr
The Scientific Journey Behind Ozempic (with Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, Novo Nordisk's Chief Scientific Advisor)
On our Novo Nordisk episode (https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/novo-nordisk-ozempic), we covered the business of Ozempic, the GLP-1 taking the world by storm. On this episode, we dive into the science of the molecule semaglutide (and its pre
Visa Follow-Up and Today’s Payments Ecosystem (with Gaurav Ahuja)
We’re joined by Imprint cofounder and Thrive General Partner Gaurav Ahuja to dive deeper into the modern payments ecosystem and Visa’s current place within it. Gaurav was one of our research sources for the Visa episode, and we wanted to br
Morgan Housel
We sit down with Morgan Housel, who is one of our very favorite authors and has also become a good friend of the show over the past few years. Morgan’s last book The Psychology of Money had a huge impact on both of our personal financial ph
Doug Demuro on Analyzing the Car Industry, Creator-Led Businesses, and Porsche Episode Follow Up
While preparing for our Porsche episode with Doug DeMuro (https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/porsche-with-doug-demuro), we had a lot more than Porsche to discuss… but the episode was already over 3 hours! We decided to save the rest for its o
Generative AI in Video and the Future of Storytelling (with Runway CEO Cristobal Valenzuela)
We sit down with RunwayML’s CEO Cristobal Valenzuela to discuss the incredible tools they’re bringing to film and video creators (including last year’s Best Picture “Everything Everywhere All at Once” from A24), and the history + current st
Saving the Planet with Better AI Data Centers (with Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller)
We sit down with Crusoe Energy CEO Chase Lochmiller to talk about the two “hard to imagine” tasks they’ve undertaken: 1) building a new AI cloud infrastructure provider from scratch, and 2) colocating and powering it with stranded energy fr
Comparing the Dotcom Crash to Today (with Tom Cowan from TDM)
Every now and then, we come across super interesting and under-the-radar (at least to us!) public markets folks like NZS Capital who make us think differently about the art of investing. TDM is another one of those groups — founded 18 years
Generative AI Moats in B2B with Emergence Capital’s Jake Saper
How do you build defensible business value in an era when, as AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli said on our last ACQ2 episode, the “cost of intelligence is going to zero”? Longtime friend of the show Jake Saper and his partners at Emergence Capital
AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli on the Transforming the Company — and Venture Itself
Since joining AngelList as CEO in 2019, Avlok Kohli has presided over perhaps the most unexpected and astounding transformation in the venture ecosystem: taking AngelList from an SPV provider to a company that is quickly becoming the softwa
Retool CEO David Hsu on Finding Product-Market Fit via Sales
David Hsu has one of the most interesting founders journeys in tech today. After growing up in Silicon Valley, he left to study both philosophy and computer science at Oxford in the UK, then returned immediately afterward to found an intern
Ben and David on My First Million
Ben and David joined Sam and Shaan of "My First Million" to talk about scaling to a large podcast, the company they would like to own, the CEO's you don't want to compete against, and the 100+ year history of Nintendo. If you liked this and
The Future of Cloud Data Collaboration (with Samooha Co-Founder Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan)
On our AWS episode, we talked briefly about the next chapter of cloud: data warehouses. But what makes them so powerful? Why do enterprises rely on them? And how will cloud customers collaborate on data stored in multiple clouds? We sit dow
Democratizing the Tools of Big Tech with Statsig CEO Vijaye Raji
Statsig CEO and former Facebook VP Vijaye Raji joins us to discuss democratizing the tools of big tech. Before starting Statsig, Vijaye spent 10 years at Facebook where he led the development of their mobile ad product (yes — THAT mobile ad
Capital Formation and the LP / GP Relationship (with Altimeter’s Meghan Reynolds)
We sit down with Altimeter Capital’s head of Capital Formation Meghan Reynolds (who previously was TPG’s global co-head of Capital Formation for 10 years) to talk about everything that goes into the LP - GP relationship at venture funds. We
Crypto Self-Custody 101 (with Austin Federa)
The Acquired community's own Austin Federa joins us for a 101 primer on how to self-custody your crypto assets, and why it’s the only truly safe way to hold them. Given all the current turmoil (and fraud) in crypto-land, we were thinking “h
Netflix's Journey, Building TCV, and Investing Through Downturns (with TCV co-founder Jay Hoag)
We had the rare opportunity to interview Jay Hoag, cofounder of the first tech crossover investing firm, TCV, at TCV’s Engage Summit in Half Moon Bay earlier this fall. Jay and Rick Kimball started TCV back in 1995 and have been part of the
