ACQUIREDHOSTED BYBEN GILBERT AND DAVID ROSENTHAL
Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
Popular Clips
Acquired
Microsoft
Mon Apr 22 2024
This is a very early place to make the point. Microsoft is the result of tremendous intelligence, brilliant strategy, fierce competition, and an unbelievable amount of luck. Bill Gates was born in 1955, the same year as Steve Jobs to come into adulthood just as the personal computer wave is starting. And the fact that he was at a middle school and had this much privilege where he could get access to a PDP 10 at this point in his life to help him understand how important computers would become. I mean, there are dozens of people in America who are as well situated as Bill is, and that might be overly generous. He and Paul got a sneak peek into the future there at Lakeside. Now it's funny you said the personal computer era. We are so far away from the personal computer here. I mean, we got us at the stage. What is computing? I mentioned ENIAC and these room sized things. Computers did not have screens. You didn't have cursors. You didn't have lights. You didn't have pixels. Everything was done on a teletype. They kinda looked like typewriters, and they were wired up remotely either in the same facility or, like, what Lakeside is doing. You could be remote. I mean, it's almost like the cloud today. And it called over a phone line? That was the teletype? Yeah. Exactly. Got wired over the phone line hooked up to these mainframes. And so you typed commands into this teletype, and then the response came back over the phone line or over whatever cable from the mainframe, and it got printed out on a spool of tape on the teletype. But this is power that normal 13 year olds don't come anywhere near accessing. Yep. What is the computing market at this time? It is pretty much we'll come back to the pretty much in a minute. A 100% dominated by IBM. Oh, yes. IBM, big
Acquired
Renaissance Technologies
Mon Mar 18 2024
Or Uber Rich, but very, very solidly upper middle class, and especially, he's an only child. He has all the resources of his parents, his family, his grandfather's this sort of well-to-do entrepreneur. And Jim, you know, he gets to rub shoulders in the Boston area with people who are really rich. And he says later, I observed that it's very nice to be rich. I had no interest in business, which is not to say I had no interest in money. Yes. Important to tease out the difference between those 2 things. Yes. Very, very important. And what he means when he says he has no interest in business, It's because from a pretty young age, he gets really into math. So the legend has it when Jim is four years old, he stumbles into one of Zeno's famous paradoxes from ancient Greek times. Yep. This is great. The basic gist of Zenos paradoxes, if you are always taking a quantity and dividing it by 2, you will never hit 0. You will asymptotically approach 0, but you will never actually touch 0. You need to do addition or subtraction to do that division won't cut it. And so, Jim, as a four year old, when he observes, they need to go to the gas station to fill up the tank, He throws out the idea. Well, let's just use only half the gas in the tank because then we'll still be able to after that only use half the gas in the tank. And, you know, the funny thing that doesn't occur to a four year old is, well, then we're just not gonna get very far. So Jim's dream is to go to MIT down the street in Cambridge and study math. He graduates high school in 3 years. And during the 2nd semester of Jim's freshman year there, He enrolls in a graduate math seminar on abstract algebra. So pretty, you know, heady stuff. Yeah. And Jim would go on to finish his undergrad at MIT in 3 years and get a masters in 1 year. Yeah. Pretty pretty smart. But it turns out that that freshman year grad seminar, he took actually has a big impact on him because he doesn't do well in the class.
Acquired
Hermès
Tue Feb 20 2024
Medieval city with super tight streets. Like, if you go up to Montmartre, those streets around there, that is old Paris. But when you think of the Eiffel Tower, the museums, the grand boulevards, the Champs Elysees, that's happening right at this time. And the Baron Osman, he's kinda like Robert Moses was in New York in the mid 20th century remaking New York. He is given full latitude and direction by Napoleon the 3rd to burn Paris to the ground and remake this city as a modern city. Fascinating. And this is super important for Thierry and Hermes for two reasons. 1, in the old medieval streets in Paris, not that many people were going up and down them. Not that many people were gonna see the nobility in their carriages, in all their finery. Now you've got the Champs Elysees, the Grand Boulevards, everything about the sort of gallantry of Paris that we know today. It's all on display now. So this becomes really important for showing off, for signifying your wealth, your status. The other kind of related thing here that happens with Napoleon and Napoleon the third is that status is no longer just about what you were born into. In the old system, the nobility, the royalty, it was like, look, you're born noble or you're not. And it's kinda independent of how much money you have or what you do or what influence you have. Under Napoleon, he brought in this modern idea that you could shift your class. I mean, he was essentially a nobody, and he became the emperor of Europe. That'll completely upset the mindset of people. Yep. So all this is happening. This is the best thing that could ever happen to Thierry. He's the best artisan, most exclusive crafter of carriageware, of aikibaj. The city is being transformed so that this can all be displayed prominent.
Acquired
Novo Nordisk (Ozempic)
Mon Jan 22 2024
Leads to the disease diabetes. So this group, if you could call it that, at the University of Toronto, is comprised of the physician Frederick Banting and the medical student, his assistant, Charles Best, along with a chemist and the head of the laboratory there, and assistant medical school dean John MacLeod. Now there's a whole bunch of controversy around who actually deserves credit for the discovery of insulin. The historical consensus at this point now being that it really was Banting and Best who did all the work. But, nonetheless, 2 years later, when the Nobel committee awards them the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of insulin, it is Banting and McLeod who get the award, not best. This will come back up in a minute. Yeah. And to set some context for the time period here, 1921, the public is not aware of what insulin is. The public is, however, aware of what type 1 diabetes is. This is the juvenile form of diabetes. Only 5% of diabetes sufferers have type 1 today. But back then, this was the dominant form of diabetes, and it was families whose kids had a death sentence. And there was basically nothing that could be done. And there were lots of rumors of people trying to figure out what substances, you know, you could inject or eat or anything to cure this sort of mysterious, horrible way to die. And people were so convinced in the late teens and early twenties that scientists were on the verge of a breakthrough that the common wisdom was to go on a diet of, like, 2 to 500 calories a day and starve yourself so that you could live long enough, even though you had a terrible quality of life, you could live the months or couple of years long enough when the treatment did arrive.
Acquired
Holiday Special 2023
Mon Dec 18 2023
Is and the stories and playbooks behind them to a podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. And, yes, we have continued to grow in the tech world and sort of our core niche, and I think that audience and audience potential is way bigger than we ever realized, but we've also added everybody else in the world now who is interested in business and runs a brand and thinks about brand management or runs a retailer or runs a large hardware business like Home Depot or something like that, you know, and also all around the world too. I mean, some of our biggest episodes this year were, a, not American companies, b, even if they were American companies, they were truly global brands and global companies. A lot of what we do, if we just wanted to optimize for growth, we would do differently. We would not make 4 hour episodes. We would release more frequently, etcetera, etcetera. It's interesting. Growing from a podcast about great technology companies to a podcast about great companies is certainly a growth strategy or a byproduct of doing that is growth because the addressable market is larger. But I think it would fail if that wasn't just you and I following what our natural interests were. People ask us all the time, how do you pick episodes? And the answer is you and I talk for hours a day. We wander around our house in our neighborhoods, putting on AirPods and calling each other and talking about, you know, what's currently in our email inbox while we're researching what we need to do to ship an episode, prep for guests, that sort of thing. And one of the conversations that always is happening is what are you interested in right now? How have your views shifted over x period of time? What is fascinating to you now? And I think the growth is sort of a byproduct of our obsessions shifting and becoming these durable businesses and trying to understand what makes a company worthy of being a century long company regardless of where it came from or how it was funded or what technologies were used in creating.