David Perell
Appearances
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
All right. Great to know. All right, my adults carve out... I don't know. My carve out that anyone can appreciate is a sunglasses brand called Meller, M-E-L-L-E-R. When I was at my buddy's wedding in Crete earlier this summer, I was out walking around the shops and I forgot my sunglasses because I left super early in the morning.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
And I just grabbed these because they were at the store and I was like, oh, those look pretty cool. They are the highest quality lenses that I have ever had in a pair of sunglasses. And maybe it's because I just always buy cheap throwaway sunglasses because I lose them all the time. But $59, polarized.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
It's the type of lens where you put them on and you can see things that are further away clearer. Normally, when you put some form of glass in front of your eye, it distorts a little bit.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Right. It's not going to get any better than your own clear eyesight. But I noticed that I put these on and I can suddenly see better than I can with my own plain eyes. So I'm like now a loyalist. Meller, M-E-L-L-E-R, sunglasses.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
That's a great question. I mean, my general answer when anyone asks is that SLR Luxottica would be yes, of course it is, just because it's the default answer for all the brands you know.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
You know, Ray-Bans and Oakleys and everything. But I don't think so.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Our goal is really just to feel like the biggest celebration and community of like-minded listeners possible, almost like the Omaha for tech or Omaha on the West Coast.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yeah, they look great. But no, I don't think, unless my quick Google was wrong, that I think Mellor is not SLR Luxottica.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
All right, on my list. Well, with that, listeners, thank you for tuning in to our Ben and David randomly hop on a call and you get to listen summer mini episode here. We really hope to see you September 10th in San Francisco. We're going to have a blast. Mark Zuckerberg and other special guests will be there. And...
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yeah, feel free to organize any meetups, lunches, dinners, anything you'd like in the Acquired Slack, acquired.fm slash slack. And tickets are available now at acquired.fm slash sf. A huge thank you to our friends at JPMorgan Payments for just pulling out all the stops. Their team is so awesome.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
It's like the Acquired team has tripled or quadrupled in size for a few months here while we all do this together. It really does feel like we are one.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yep. All right. With that, listeners, thank you. And we'll see you next time.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yep. And feel free to plan your own too. At the end of the day, even before announcing this on the podcast here, there are several thousand of you who have bought tickets and are coming. And so no one venue except for the Chase Center is going to hold us all anyway.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
So if you're coming and you want to plan dinners or happy hours or company meetups or anything, please just feel free to take the initiative, do that, post in Slack. We'd love for it to happen.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yeah, I bet. We'll get to that in Carvouts, I'm sure. Yeah. Listeners, we, after 10 years straight of never taking any time off of Acquired, we were doing like six weeks off over the summer. And it turns out that doesn't actually mean six weeks off of work for you and I, David. It means six weeks of not making an episode.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yep. Well, David, now that we have a few minutes here and we're not mid-episode, should we reflect on the last few months in acquired land? We thought listeners would be interested in a little bit of a peek behind the scenes.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yeah, it's funny. It's been one of these things. People have asked, what is the impact on the Wall Street Journal profile? And it's hard to disambiguate the two things that happen concurrently. That piece, which is the best encapsulation of what Acquired is that has ever been published, There's sort of been two canonical pieces.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
David Lidsky's wonderful piece in Fast Company last year following the production of the Nike episode really dives into the making of an episode and what that is all about. And this one is kind of like, what is acquired today and how did this thing come to be? And what happened is when that article came out, Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
No. And what that led to is number one has staying power, because if anybody opens up Apple Podcasts right now and hit the browse tab, you can very clearly see the number one podcast is the one centered on your screen that you're curious about checking out. So all of the goodness that came from the WSJ piece was then massively amplified over the course of weeks and months.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
because we just stayed the number one podcast in this self-fulfilling prophecy way across both giant podcasting platforms. So to just add some numbers to that, because we've gotten the question so many times, we were thinking we should just talk about it on air.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
317,000 new subscribers or followers, depending on whether you're using Apple or Spotify's parlance, have followed the show since the Wall Street Journal piece went live. And for context, in January coming into the year, we estimated our listener base was about 500,000 people. It was a major event. Yes.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
And so, David, I had always sort of been of this belief, especially when I'm working with startups, like don't count on a single press article being trajectory changing for you. That's generally true, except when it isn't.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yeah. So part of this is a welcome to all of you who are new listeners to the show. You know, David and I have been doing this for close to 10 years now. The audience has grown slowly and it doubled organically every year for the first nine years. And one way to think about that, because we don't really do paid marketing, what that means is
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Because we are putting all of our energy and focus into September 10th at the Chase Center. David, what are we doing? Yeah.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
the whole audience base, on average, told one friend who stuck around and listened to the show every year. So in some sense, that's almost nothing to write home about. But on the other hand, it actually just kept happening.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
And the cool thing is, it meant that it built the audience base that we really wanted, because everyone personally recommended it to a friend rather than having an explosive growth moment. And so that's why the Slack is such a wonderful and civil place. You know, it's not like this community that sort of showed up out of nowhere.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
It's this community that's been slowly building organically by inviting other people who they know in from the real world over time. And then if I could say, what would be the single best growth event if we were going to have a outsized external force that brought a bunch of audience? The Wall Street Journal is the exact right audience to join the rest of you.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
WSJ subscribers are among the most well-educated, thoughtful business people in the world who love nerding out on this stuff. We're delighted to have anybody here who just found out because you read the WSJ.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
The dirty secret behind Acquired is every episode is about the exception. Every company we talk about is the most extreme outlier. I often find myself wondering, even though we have this playbook and this lessons learned, is the real playbook that you can't learn any lessons because they're such extreme outliers? You know, these big tech companies, they're all monopolies or near monopolies.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
in the largest and most profitable markets in the world. Well, like no one else's business is that.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
And so the lesson you can draw from a cash gusher that is extremely difficult to disrupt, some of the things you can apply to building your business, but it's much more interesting, which is of course why we do the history and facts, to go look at them in their first few years of life to understand how they catapulted to the position rather than trying to learn something about the companies as you perceive them today.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yeah, part of this takeaway for me is it's sort of unclear if and what would ever be a large outsized growth event. Like when you look at our chart, it's perfectly smooth for almost a decade until there's this one point where you can see, whoa, something clearly happened and numbers jumped up from May to now. And I don't know that you can ever really plan for those.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
So a PR person emailed me, how did you pitch that piece to the journal? And I was just laughing like... We didn't, yeah. There's no way you could possibly anticipate something like this happening and then execute a PR strategy to try to make it happen. Maybe other people know differently, but I've never once seen that be the way that things like this happen. Well, let's see.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Things we wanted to do today, chat about the arena show. Oh, one other note on that. A few people have emailed us and said, my whole company is coming. We even had a parent email us and say, my 13-year-old wants to have his birthday party by bringing all of his friends to the live show, which is the coolest thing ever. Coolest thing ever. Crazy, that's real.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
If you're interested in something like that too, email us hello at acquired.fm for big group ticket buys. And there's a special office that we can hook you up with that helps deal with that.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
The other thing that we wanted to do, we've got one more sort of announcement on show structure and then carve-outs. So the show structure thing is, as you may have guessed or observed, the thing that makes Acquired episodes unique is the format of David and I...
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
sitting down, doing the hundreds of hours of research, coming together with separate prepared minds, with separate understandings of the history and with separate beliefs about what made this business work, and then doing our four-hour format to tell the story and unpack why the business worked. And...
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
That's very different than an interview show where you have a great guest on where everybody knows their name and you interview them and then you say, so long, folks, and you sign off. There are many of those shows and there are many excellent, excellent of those shows. Occasionally, we do have the opportunity to interview someone like Jensen, like Charlie.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
like Dara from Uber, where we have covered the business in the past, or perhaps someone like Howard Schultz is willing to spend the five, six hours with us that it takes to do our standard format with them present. But what we've basically done is we've decided that the main show, with few exceptions, is for doing our core four-hour format of David and I together.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Occasionally, we will follow that up with an interview with the protagonist after we've had a chance to really do our thing. But that kind of leaves us with a whole bunch of opportunity to do great interviews, but just that are not quite acquired. And so ACQ2 has really become the place where we're doing all of that now.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
And so if you like interviews like the one we did with the Synopsys founder and the Synopsys CEO to kind of do a deep dive on the state of semis today, or the next one we have coming out as an interview with Joe Montana, who managed to shift from being one of the best football players of all time. many-time Super Bowl MVP. To a really excellent venture capitalist. To an exceptional investor, yes.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
And we've got several other public company CEOs lined up that we're going to be doing on ACQ2 soon. So while Dave and I are taking some time to breathe, prep for the arena show, if you're feeling like you want to experience some more acquired and you've already gone through the back catalog, ACQ2 is the place to tune in for those as they come out.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
I know. You just got back from Hawaii. Are you feeling refreshed?
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yeah, we'll have some fun surprises for everyone that we're not planning to share in advance. So if you're free September 10th, or if you can make yourselves free, be in San Francisco. It's funny, we announced many months ago on the show, save the date, but then we actually haven't had an episode since tickets have been on sale.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
All right. So we may have to start doing this on the show, or we may hear a revolt if we start doing this. I don't know. Now that you and I both have small children, there's like a whole second category of goods that are parent-related. Baby carve-outs.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Parent carve-outs. So I'll do my parent carve-out first. On the holiday special, I gave two stroller recommendations. So in keeping with tradition, I'm doing a third stroller recommendation. My Father's Day gift.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
It was. It was a running stroller. Yes. Because it kind of perfectly aligned with my son turning six months old, which is when it's reasonably safe for them to be in a running stroller. And I will tell you, he loves it. Running through the park near our house, the trees whizzing by, whether it's wake time or nap time, it's great. I get the miles in.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
I've been ramping up my running again, which is, you know, now that I have a nine-month-old, a thing you can kind of start doing again. Yeah. But the Thule, or Thule? I don't exactly know how to pronounce it. I never know how to pronounce it, yeah. Thule? I'm going to mess it up with my American, but I think it's colloquially referred to in America as Thule.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
Yes. The Urban Glide 3 is excellent, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking about running with a small child.
Acquired
Chase Center + Summer Update
And so despite the fact that we emailed a lot of you and we tweeted and we put it in the Slack, David and I were on the phone yesterday and we were like, huh, we should probably let People who just listen to the podcast and don't follow Acquired anywhere else know about it, too. So Acquired.fm slash SF. We really hope to see you there.