David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…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? The answer is, you and I talk for hours a day. We wander around our house and our neighborhoods, putting on AirPods, calling each other and talking about what's currently in our email inbox, what we're researching, what we need to do to ship an episode, prep for guests, that sort of thing. One of the conversations that's always 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? I think the growth is 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, how it was funded, or what technologies were used in creating it. I think that's been what's so cool for me. My big lessons and takeaways from everything we've done this year is that those stories and studying the LVMHs, the Costcos, the Nikes of the world, if anything, that's even more important than studying the great technology companies for building a great technology company. We found this just incredible response, especially to the LVMH episode, of like wow, here are these lessons that are not well talked about and known in our world. It is strange becoming canon. I never thought Acquired would get to the point where when we do an episode on something, it has the possibility to become an undertone of themes that people are discussing. Certainly years one through six or seven, that was never the case, but with LVMH, with Costco, maybe with Porsche, certainly with Nike, I think there was an element of, we released the episode and suddenly we noticed the discussion, especially amongst the tech sphere, about that topic massively picked up. People would go on CNBC, make a point that we made, and I'd call you David and go like, oh, I wonder how that comparison got made.…

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