David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It's almost like the Batman thing. What's the line from Batman begins, where he's talking about the frailness of being a person, and then when he becomes Batman, he says, as a symbol, I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting, something elemental? It's that idea. Totally. All these people are both people and symbols. I'm just imagining, once you become a symbol, you have two options. You could bemoan it, or you could embrace it. I think Charlie would say, look, it's going to weigh on you no matter what. No matter which one you choose, there's no going back. It's going to weigh on you. So you might as well embrace it. One other behind the scenes point to make, which I think listeners might find interesting on these for Daniel, Dara, Jensen, and Charlie, they all were these massive lead time interviews. They don't just get coordinated a couple of weeks before. The story behind each of them was that Charlie was maybe a six month thing. It was once we started digging into Costco. Andrew suggested, hey, what if you interview Charlie for a follow-up? Jensen, I think we originally reached out to NVIDIA before we started our NVIDIA part one research almost two years ago. This was a very different time for Acquired. We thought the dream is to interview Jensen, not the dream is to go learn as much as we can about NVIDIA and tell the story ourselves. We reached out and said, can we interview Jensen? Even though we had a good friend of the show who was able to introduce us to someone on their executive team, we got a canned response of, he's very busy, that sort of thing. It wasn't until we did the work and then we made part one, part two, where then it caught NVIDIA's attention. The folks were like, geez, we should do something together. It still took another year to figure out exactly what the thing was to do together and when. The same thing with Dara at Uber. Actually, a friend of the show, Brad Gerstner, had his investor day for Altimeter. I met Dara there. I think it took probably nine months after that to figure out a good time on the earnings calendar, on the PR calendar, when it could actually make sense to the interview.…

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