David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. So it's interesting that companies acquiring former employees. When we started Acquired, as long-time listeners now, we do this to try and find common threads between successful acquisitions to really understand what makes a successful acquisition so that as we build companies in the earliest stages, how can we build with those things in mind, that you need a very successful integration or very successful IPO and you don’t want to build something that’s great early and then sucks when it’s acquired or something. So one thing that I totally thought was going to be a theme that we have only seen once besides this episode is companies acquiring people that used to work for them. And that previous one is Steve Jobs and NeXT. We talked about that it could happen in the Jet episode where like potentially Marc Lore could end up back at Amazon and there’s a bidding war with Walmart because Walmart really wanted to keep Jet out of the hands of Amazon. But like we really haven’t seen it and if you would have asked me a couple of years ago, like is that a common thread of someone leaving the company, starting a thing and it getting bought and bringing them back in. It seemed like it was a common thing but it has not been the predominant story of these very successful IPOs that we’ve been talking about or these very successful acquisitions. If anything, it’s kind of the opposite. I wonder if, you know, I think a lot of big tech companies are buying companies that are started by people from their rivals. Like I think about Facebook buying Instagram and obviously that is our benchmark here at Acquired. I mean, there is even as Instagram just continues to crush it, I mean that is going to go down as one of the best purchases of all time in any industry, technology or otherwise. But, you know, Kevin says the term came from Google and there’s so much Google DNA that has come into Facebook through acquisitions and, similarly, Apple DNA into Google or Facebook and Amazon or what-have-you. All right, I’ve got one more and that one is this rising tide lifts all the ships concept where if any of the listeners are familiar with like the indie Mac ecosystem, there’s this concept of getting Sherlocked where Apple introduced Search, sort of Sherlock the feature and that was a third-party utility before, and when it got built into the platform that “we’re very sorry, thank you for the idea, thank you for building our platform, we’ve destroyed you.” And there are times where that is terrible and there are other times where they do a bare bones implementation on the platform level and it gets better for everyone. An example of that, I mentioned Marco Arment before that he built Instapaper before doing Overcast and with Instapaper, Apple came out with Safari reading list that was baked into the operating system into the browser. And that actually raised awareness of the category of the concept that you could save things to read later and was good for Instapaper. And it’s interesting to think about how sometimes that’s the case but sometimes it kills you and in this case, Audion guys were hoping, well, maybe Apple did sort of a barebones thing here and for pro sophisticated users, they can find out about music management through Apple and then come and buy our software. And that totally didn’t happen. iTunes was too full featured, number one; it was free and it was bundled into the platform. And it’s something where it’s I’ve always thought before, well, maybe people freak out too much when a platform launches a thing and they should think more about the Instapaper strategy of how can you create something that the platform by their nature, by needing to serve a wide variety of people aren’t going to serve the narrow band, like how can you thrive in that narrow band. But you really need some serious pro features and serious narrow band differentiation in order to make your thing worth paying for when it’s competing with free and baked into the platform.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.