Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…You couldn't make apps until the next year. I missed that whole first year of, you can't make apps. I don't think I was thinking about it then. The app that I made was a to-do list. It's not like I was like, oh my God, this is going to be a way that you can hail cars or order groceries, or it was let me do the smallest possible thing on this. I think that's actually just how I think about products. I'm not a Travis Kalanick–like person. I think I always think in terms of what products I can fully conceptualize and see in my head, understand all the hard stuff involved in it, draw a nice neat box around it, and just work towards shipping that thing that I can fully imagine. It's almost like I want to be able to do everything myself, which is why I think Acquired has come out the way that it has, rather than us doing a bunch of hard stuff. I very much shy away from you'd have to send a bunch of people into grocery stores and figure out all their inventory to like, load it. I just wouldn't do that. But the idea of okay, there's this really nice, neat package called an Acquired episode, and it contains these components that David and I can make it ourselves. What do you think the ‘what would've happened otherwise’ would be if we did the hard stuff? One thing we've been very explicit about and a trade-off for the show and Acquired as an entity and a business is we don't want to have a lot of employees. We don't want to have a team.…

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