Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…It would have been odd for Fortune 500s to work with us before recently. Now, starting to work with their teams, how a JP Morgan thinks about their brand, their positioning, and their whole set of marketing activities is a completely different animal than how startups and earlier stage tech companies do. It's an intensely coordinated effort with a calendar that is already full by the time you're finishing 2023. 2024 is largely known. There's a whole set of events. There is a set of campaigns that are going to happen at different times, and these things are adaptable. But the level of foresight and planning that we've gotten to work with from those teams has just been a whole different animal than what we're used to. We love the nimbleness of small companies, and that enables us to do special things together. Our fun task for next year—I'm excited to unveil some of the stuff we're doing—will be to bring that custom thing that we're able to do with these small companies, create native content for the medium, and do other collaborations with them as a company. For example, the way that we invest in our sponsors, the way that we speak at their conferences and things like that, to bring that to large Fortune 500 enterprises. That's such an amazing dance. The way that these marketing organizations are able to figure out, okay, can we talk about this partner of ours? In what way can we talk about it? And how much leeway can we give Ben and David to natively work in an Acquired theme from six episodes ago and trust them that in this episode, it's going to come across right on air? It takes a very special marketing department to be able to behave the way that the Vantas, the Modern Treasuries, and the Vouches of the world do while stewarding a 2000–3000 year brand. A few other things we've got up our sleeve, I think the goal is to be able to continue to work with these recent product/market fit, Series B-ish companies that we've always worked with. Between the back catalog, between interviews, we will figure out ways that we can still work with those companies. Frankly, those are the types of companies that David and I love using for Acquired. We're customers of Vouch, and we use Modern Treasury. We like playing with it. We like following the founders on their journeys. We like having the founders on ACQ2 so we can learn about how they're building their companies. We also like getting the exposure to be able to invest. So it's awesome to be able to build these really tight relationships with those companies, especially when they're founded. I just keep going back to Dimitri, his co-founders coming up to us at our very first live show after they had come out of YC and telling us about this tiny little Modern Treasury at the time. And you just look at the behemoth amount of money that they move now. There are dozens of companies in the Acquired ecosystem that we have relationships with, that we want to be able to continue to be a partner to and just figure out the right way to structure that. And just as importantly, dozens, if not more than dozens that are going to be coming up over the next set of years.…

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