Ben Gilbert

Yeah, what are we doing?

Like, oh, just come down.

Oh, we'll just record it here.

And clearly, we're not at your house.

It's Aviato.

Is this the Google house?

Where they had their first office in the garage?

Like we can do our holiday special in it?

Welcome to the fall 2025 season finale of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.

I'm Ben Gilbert.

I'm David Rosenthal.

And we are your hosts.

Well, listeners, today we're going to do something very different than our holiday specials of years past.

We've received a bunch of requests over the years to do an Acquired episode on Acquired itself and to unpack why Acquired worked when 99% of podcasts do not.

But it's always felt a little bit strange to me, and we've always shied away from analyzing our own company.

And so we thought, well, if we're going to do something, we should bring someone in to do it with us.

And we'd want someone who is great at dissecting the mechanics behind teams or companies, someone who distills complexity into simplicity, someone who himself knows how to tell a great story.

And there was really only one choice.

Yes.

And then, of course, there's the venue.