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Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with expert founders and investors. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.

ACQ2 by Acquired

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 a $200B market cap. Tobi has done this in two big ways: first, a willingness throw away his past beliefs in the face of new data, growing into the leader the company needed. And second, by remaining a close observer (and participant!) in how new technology emerges that changes what is possible.

Today we talk with him about both. The first half of the episode is about what has changed for him in the AI era. How he spends his time with AI throughout the day, how he thinks about what AI unlocks philosophically, and what he thinks the impact will be on all of us and what we build. The second half is more about Shopify. How he dealt mentally with the explosion in stock price in 2021 from a 20x revenue multiple to a 70x revenue multiple. And then, what he subsequently did when it all came crashing down. We also talk with him about the leadership and product principles that he's employed to steadily grow the company's revenues to an all-time high today.

Links:

John Collison's Tweet: "Museum of Passion Projects"

Sponsors:

Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin

How to Live in Everyone Else's Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke)

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 Clay are the co-founders of the AI company Sierra.

Brett's resume reads like a greatest hits of Silicon Valley: co-creator of Google Maps, founder of FriendFeed (acquired by Facebook where he became CTO), founder of Quip (acquired by Salesforce where he became co-CEO), former Chairman of the Board at Twitter, and current Chairman of the Board at OpenAI. Clay spent 18+ years at Google, starting as an APM alongside Brett and eventually running product for Gmail, Drive, Docs (all of Google Workspace), Google Labs, and the company's AR/VR efforts.

In addition to AI, today’s conversation has some great tech industry history discussion and old Google stories, perfect to tide us all over between Google Part I and Part II!

Additional Topics:

 • The accelerating adoption curves of technology waves, and if we’ll ever see an app that gets a billion users in one day
 • Second- and third-order effects of agents on the internet economy and customer experience
 • Making predictions on which AI terminology will stick and what won’t
 • New pricing models in the era of AI, like “outcome-based pricing”
 • What it’s like to build teams in this new AI era

Links:

Sierra

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor)

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, you’re out. If a fan catches a foul ball… you’re also out. Games are capped at two hours with no exceptions. It’s sacrilegious to traditional baseball fans everywhere. But it’s hard to argue with their numbers: they have 3.2 million fans on a waiting list to see them and have been selling out 80,000-seat football stadiums over the past few months!

Today, we sit down with Jesse Cole, founder of the Savannah Bananas and creator of Banana Ball. We unpack the whole story, staring with a failing college summer league team, an air mattress, and a $30 weekly grocery budget. But these days... it's safe to say that Jesse and his wife don’t have to sleep on an air mattress anymore! And they have built the business in their own way, fully under their control, and uniquely “fans first”. They have a unique all-in ticketing model, where your game ticket gets you full access to food along with your seat. There are no ads or sponsorships. There are no ticket fees or middlemen. And in fact, Jesse and crew will even pay the sales tax on your ticket for you! Jesse is just totally obsessed with delighting fans, controlling the end-to-end experience, and thinking long term… even if it means leaving (a lot) of money on the table today.

This may be our most fun ACQ2 (or Acquired!) episode ever. Enjoy!

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

Building the Savannah Bananas (with Jesse Cole, Founder and Owner)

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 challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic… which quickly reversed with ZIRP tailwinds, and how Plaid navigated the volatile market conditions to build a diversified business. We explore the company’s strategic pivots, including their expansion into analytics for fraud detection, alternative credit systems, and bank payments. If you’ve ever wondered “how do you turn from one simple product into a more durable business?” this episode is for you.

Links:

Come see Acquired LIVE at Radio City Music Hall • !

Sponsors:

Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin

Undoing a $5 Billion Acquisition and Building a Durable Standalone Plaid (with Plaid CEO Zach Perret)

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:

ServiceNowThe SPIN selling methodBill’s fantastic interview with Ben Thompson on Stratechery

Sponsors:

Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin

The Art of Selling Enterprise Software (with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott)

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:

VercelV0.devNext.js

Sponsors:

Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin

Building Web Apps with Just English and AI (with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch)

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 x86. Now, nearly three decades later, ARM is the dominant architecture in all of computing today.

ARM is in your phone, your car, data centers, the most advanced AI chips… there are hundreds (or thousands!) of ARM chips you encounter in your everyday life. In this episode, ARM Holdings CEO Rene Haas joins us to tell the story of how ARM become so dominant, weaving through the through the iPod, smartphone, and AI eras. Plus, their wild corporate story of going public, getting bought by SoftBank, going public again, and nearly being acquired by NVIDIA!

Sponsors:

Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin

How ARM Became The World’s Default Chip Architecture (with ARM CEO Rene Haas)

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 joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Luis dives into how learning English was transformative in his personal trajectory and opportunities in his life, inspiring him to create the most successful EdTech product of all time. A few topics in this episode:

 • How Duolingo became a leader in the gamification and mobile-first movements in the early 2010s
 • How the company balances rigorous experimentation with gut instinct to build an app with customer experience at its core
 • The backstory of Duolingo’s “unhinged, yet wholesome” green owl mascot trending on your TikTok feed

Sponsors:

Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin

Why Duolingo Worked (with Luis von Ahn, CEO)

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 offering for AI builders to train their models directly on the platform. Clem has a contrarian take on the future: there will not be just a few major foundation model companies with everyone using their APIs. But rather, that thousands of companies will have their own specialized AI models built in-house for their particular use case. It's obviously a very dynamic landscape and we'll have to see how it shakes out, but Clem has a pretty great viewpoint to see it all, working with their 5 million registered Hugging Face users!

Links:

Hugging FaceHugging Face's Series D valuing the company at $4.5 billion

Sponsors:

Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin

Building the Open Source AI Revolution (with Hugging Face CEO, Clem Delangue)

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 the 49ers that he applies to his investing career at Liquid 2 Ventures. Joe also goes into their firm’s strategy and performance, finding and investing in dozens of unicorn startups at the seed and pre-seed stage.

This interview was recorded live at Modern Treasury’s Transfer conference in May 2024.

Acquired’s arena show at Chase Center in San Francisco is just a few weeks away! We hope you can join us. acquired.fm/sf

Sponsors:

Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin

Joe Montana Interview Live from Modern Treasury Transfer

We continue our VC Fundamentals series with Company Building — everything that happens after you write the check. We catalog the different categories, strategies and tactics for VCs to "add value" to their portfolio companies, from direct involvement to portfolio services to simply doing nothing (often better than many alternatives!). For both of us, this is the best and most fun part of being an investor, and we hope that shines through in this episode. Here's to building great companies!

Sponsors:

Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin

 

Topics Covered:

 • The goals of Company Building: 
 1. (Obviously) add value to your investments
 2. (Less obviously) increase your odds of finding/winning your next investments
 • The four categories of company building: 
 1. "Direct" work by the GPs
 2. "Active" platform and portfolio services teams
 3. "Passive" brand halo effect
 4. Simply "doing nothing"
 • Activities you actually do: 
 • Board work (both governance and strategic/operational planning)
 • Planning and orchestrating future financings and exits
 • Recruiting, closing deals and "selling"
 • Cofounder/executive disputes and departures
 • Pivots and company shutdowns
 • And perhaps the most important company-building advice of all: Don't Freak Out.

 

Links:

 • Our interview on the main show with Doug Leone: 
 https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/sequoia-capital-part-ii-with-doug-leone • Fred Wilson's great post on pivots vs. shutdowns: 
https://avc.com/2018/11/pivot-or-fail/

VC Fundamentals Part 3: Company Building

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