ACQ2 by Acquired

Despite many advances in industry transparency over the past ~10 years, much about the actual "jobs of a VC" remains locked inside firm/institutional knowledge and venture's apprenticeship model. With this series, we aim to change that. Our goal is to draw back the curtain on what the actual tasks are that VCs do day-to-day, how you can learn them, and ultimately what's required to succeed. We hop...

We’re joined by Tock CEO Nick Kokonas to discuss how they’re “arming the restaurateur rebels” versus DoorDash / Uber Eats, in much the same way Shopify has done so for e-commerce merchants versus Amazon. This episode is full of lessons on how to execute a counter-positioning playbook to disrupt entrenched incumbents, including the influence of Nick’s friend / Tock investor and Nobel prize-winning...

Benchmark General Partner Sarah Tavel joins us for a master class on consumer investing. We start with why invest in consumer at all (given the inherent risks of its "hit-driven nature"), then deep dive on marketplace investing and wrap up with social, gaming and consumer transactional businesses. Big thank you to Sarah for sharing her immense knowledge on this topic, and to her partner (and fello...

Despite many advances in industry transparency over the past ~10 years, much about the actual "jobs of a VC" remains locked inside firm/institutional knowledge and venture's apprenticeship model. With this new series, we aim to change that. Our goal is to draw back the curtain on what the actual tasks are that VCs do day-to-day, how you can learn them, and ultimately what's required to succeed. We...

We're joined by Patrick Campbell, founder & CEO of the world's leading SaaS profit-optimization service ProfitWell, to dive deep on all things pricing and monetization. Patrick began bootstrapping ProfitWell 8 years ago, and has since grown the business into a massive success with customers like Notion, Lyft, Masterclass, Atlassian, Help Scout, HubSpot, Cisco, Autodesk and many more. Patrick g...

We're joined by former Amazon, Microsoft and Bulletproof executive Anna Collins to discuss how high-performance organizations structure their hiring and interview processes. Whether you're a small startup or a big public company, as Anna puts it, there is no more important question than who you put "on your bus". Anna distills what she's learned across 20+ years and making thousands of hires into...

In Part 2 of our conversation, Jason reveals his "secret master plan" behind the Calacanis empire, as well as how he and his team manage all their various activities and their own productivity. And of course, we couldn’t resist diving into some behind-the-scenes stories and hot takes, including a long bet on a future TWiSt - Acquired live show crossover collab.  You can find Part 1 of our conversa...

We're joined for an Adapeting episode by the cofounders of Mystery, a Seattle seed-stage startup that we've mentioned before on Acquired and was started by early Convoy employees. In ordinary times, Mystery sends customers on magical date nights and group outings throughout the city with no planning or decision-making required -- an "easy button" for date night. Of course, we no longer live in ord...

Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures joins us to illuminate everything Pre-Seed -- not just what it is and how founders/companies should navigate it, but also and more deeply:  How he came into this corner of the venture world  How he started Precursor as a solo GP and raised his first/subsequent funds, and what that journey was like  How he manages the firm, its overall strategy, and especially p...

We're joined by Wade Foster, co-founder & CEO of Zapier, a company that basically hasn’t raised capital, doesn’t have an office, doesn’t have salespeople, and whose product consists of connecting other people’s products. And yet today they are doing well over $50M in profitable ARR, have hundreds of employees and thousands of hyper-passionate customers, and are one of the most interesting priv...

“There’s no real secret to making the stuff we make. It’s not something where you have to be crazy talented. The thing is, you just spend a little bit longer on it than is reasonable. Most people would give up, and then you just keep going on it for three more hours making it better, doing more research, whatever the thing is that makes it better. Wherever most people would say, yea, that’s good e...

Let's face it, Acquired borders on Star Wars fan podcast anyway. So we dipped our toe in the water of making it official, with our review of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. We are joined by fellow Star Wars nerd and repeat special guest, Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner at Benchmark. In this episode, we *nearly* avoid any business analysis or speculation on the technology, media, or enterprise...

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: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra   Be sure to...

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 perspe...

We are joined by Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner on Benchmark, talking his investment philosophies, enterprise technology trends, and the uniqueness of Benchmark. How is this firm with only five partners and no associates so repeatably successful? Chetan shares the story of his very first investment, MongoDB, and lessons learned from his other investments and board positions in Elastic, Sketch,...

"You can call it paranoia, or you can call it innovation. The language doesn’t matter if the feeling is the same. This is all an experiment I’m running eight years in: How do I update my mindset to want to approach things by activating the pleasure center more than the pain center?  I’m more likely to move away from pain and towards pleasure. So why don’t I make innovation a game and bring play to...

We're joined by Stanford professor and senior advisor to Airbnb, Uber, Stitch Fix, and Wave Capital, Ramesh Johari, who is one of the world's leading experts in marketplaces. Ramesh has been advising David and his partners at Wave since day one, and we're super excited to bring his incredible experience and insights to all of our ACQ2 listeners. In this conversation we dive deep into nearly every...

Ben and David discuss the newest development in the venture ecosystem, startup studios, through the lens of Pioneer Square Labs (which Ben cofounded in 2015). David manages to trick Ben into sitting on the other side of the table and being interviewed about how PSL works, how he and his partners started it, and what lies ahead! For more information, check out http://psl.com . Sponsors: Sierra: htt...

Ben and David couldn’t agree on a topic for this LP episode with the clock winding down to our recording going live... so we decided to “do it live” and commentate on our Twitter feeds haha (and discuss your survey feedback). We hope you enjoy this fun slice of randomness, and we’ll be back with more actionable interviews and company-building topics very soon! Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acqu...

We dive into one of the most critical components of company building, recruiting product leaders (and executives in general), with Andrew Abramson of Riviera Partners -- one of the most elite search firms in Silicon Valley. We cover first how companies and founders should think about recruiting senior leaders, from knowing when you're ready to work with search firms. Then we dive into the other si...

“If you look at the firms that were traditionally the early-stage ventures firms, the Series-A firms, and you look at their fund sizes and their firm sizes and compositions, it’s changed significantly in the last ten years. Your typical early-stage venture fund was a $250M Series A fund. Now your typical early stage fund is anywhere from $500M to 1B.”   In this episode, Ben and David dive into the...

Could I see myself or my wife working for/with this CEO? Would I quit my job and go work for this person? That’s the crux of it. If you’re a CEO out raising money, that is the lens with which you should view every interaction with a VC. You should come across in such a personally compelling way that they’re drawn to you. That’s the bar they are holding you to.   The right amount of diligence is a...

“There’s often a desire to keep adding features because ‘Oh wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this or that?’ The reality is if a customer is only spending five minutes with your product, they’re only going to interact with a very tiny subset of your feature set. And so, you’re better off usually improving something that 80% of [customers] interact with that is really core than things around the e...

“Uber, pre-IPO, had raised more money than Lyft’s current market cap. And now, because they raised 9B in an IPO, they’re close to total money ever raised to being 2x of Lyft’s current market cap. It’s an outlier in every way.” Ben & David reflect on what they’ve learned from the APLUSS IPOs so far, what’s ahead for Uber and Lyft, and tackle some longstanding listener questions. Sponsors: Sierr...

[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...