Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
51 published records
01 / recommendation
“First book I read was Rendezvous with Rama. That's a really cool one about a dead seeming alien spacecraft entering our solar system and what happens.”
02 / belief
“There wasn't money tied up into it, I think we're past that point now, but I think that's the risk.”
03 / belief
“I think we should grade the Ethereum Foundation on their storageship of the Ethereum network over the past seven years.”
04 / belief
“I’ve got one that is a really, really big playbook theme that we've only scratched the surface here and we can't fully dig into, but I think we're going to in the future of Acquired quite often is look, Fred Wilson's arguments against Patel, against The Foundation had a lot of merit and rewinding back to the original history and the founding, Charles, and Anthony, and the desire to do a for profit company for this as the vehicle and to raise venture financing, there was merit for those things.”
05 / belief
“I think the idea of making incentive design into the core of the product and letting the community design incentives for themselves is mind bendingly fascinating.”
06 / belief
“There are a lot of people who contribute to this thing. It's a big open source project, but I don't think that gives it power, I think in large part that has held it back.”
07 / belief
“If you're starting after that, I think given the fact they have a human team, given the fact they don't want to change things too many times and change things to quickly, they've forked and made some decisions in the past that are very human decisions, but they can't do that too frequently and still be viewed as secure thing.”
08 / commitment
“There's definitely some test the water things and it's funny how it's actually more around how much I would be willing to invest, not how much I will be willing to pay.”
09 / belief
“When Mark took that summer to move out to Palo Alto and work on Facebook, I think he was intending to go back to Harvard.”
10 / uncertainty
“When he's seven years old, I don't know if this is a school project or just something Vitalik did for fun.”
11 / belief
“What I think is the opposing camp to Eth2 is the miners who've been making all this money off from proof of work. But if it does switch to proof of stake which it seems like it will, the big thing that happens there is that instead of spending a lot of electricity to solve really hard math problems and maybe hurting the environment or maybe not, depending on if you use renewables, all of that, what happens is you put up whatever amount of ETH I think, to do it directly unchained, you need to hold 32 ETH and put them up or stake them.”
12 / belief
“I think with a blockchain, its network effects and Lindy a little bit on steroids where there's also this financial fee tied to the Lindy.”
13 / uncertainty
“I don't know if they start, they instantiate—to use a developer phrase. The crowd sale starts on July 22, 2014 at midnight, Swiss time.”
14 / belief
“As part of parody, I think is his company, and was a great contributor from parody into the Ethereum ecosystem for a long time.”
15 / observation
“Interesting. It's not just a paywall, it's the only way anybody gets to read this is if enough people are pulling up.”
16 / commitment
“Whether for good and for bad, for being vulnerable, but also for galvanizing a movement, this real name tied to my real identity is how I will do that.”
17 / belief
“I think Satoshi has already disappeared at this point, but most of the other crypto projects that were happening, I think were happening on top of the Bitcoin network at this point.”
18 / belief
“November 27th, 2013, Vitalik, I think he's still in San Francisco at this point, he's done the first draft of the Ethereum white paper.”
19 / belief
“I think that covers it for high level bull and bear and I think in playbook here, we may discover some more.”
20 / belief
“I think just the fact that all these tokens are ERC-20 tokens, it has a switching cost as well.”
21 / belief
“Always a big assumption. That is a whole other thing, I think if you want 559 the least of a huge assumption, Eth2 is a very big assumption, we’re probably six months out from Eth2.”
22 / belief
“I think that's certainly a possibility depending on how slow it moves. There are already some things like Audius Project which is a distributed music player which is built on both.”
23 / belief
“I think the only seed funding that is larger than that for a single entity is probably Quibi.”
24 / belief
“Again if you talk to Solana or some other single chain, single shard protocols, I think what they might say is that because you're switching over to sharding, this beautiful thing that we haven't really discussed but is one of the reasons that people like building on top of Ethereum and building web 3.”
25 / belief
“I mean the very first one here that I think we've all been alluding to is either Eth2 switch over doesn't happen and they blow their lead in the corresponding network effect, because it's technically difficult and also difficult to get the community on board, or that it goes poorly.”
26 / uncertainty
“There are at least daggers in one direction from Warren and Charlie to crypto. I don't know about the other direction.”
27 / belief
“Of course, it is a cryptocurrency but I think if we focus on grading and tying this episode up based on it's investment return, I think we're missing the point.”
28 / belief
“I think the Bitcoin maximalists are very excited to see the time of Berkshire Hathaway be in the past.”
29 / belief
“I think that was maybe the last day of the conference or something, January 26th.”
30 / belief
“I think that's the potential power of businesses built on top of Ethereum. They're incentivizing users to get more of their friends to use the thing that they're using because their token gets more valuable as they do it.”
31 / uncertainty
“Are you going to reach a certain point in the equilibrium where gas fees are too high and it’s too much of a pain for developers where they're like, fine, I'm out. I don't know.”
32 / belief
“I think in 2017, it hits maybe $13 per transaction you have to pay, then that dives down a little bit, and then at the peak it's $70.”
33 / belief
“Ian is buddies with Neal Stephenson. I think a lot of Ian's work influenced a lot of Neal Stephenson's Sci-Fi.”
34 / belief
“There's a bunch of things jumbled into one, but I think the existence of an Ethereum classic, or existence of a bunch of chains that technically are the exact same as something like Ethereum, but their coins are nowhere near as valuable.”
35 / belief
“I think looking from then to now and what's potentially going to happen in the future, the seeds of things that are being planted right now, to even just be alive to this point when there had been other Blockchains spinoffs and Bitcoin spinoffs and other things.”
36 / belief
“If you don't like what we're doing, you can take your money out, then you decide to go even one step further. They say, actually, we think the Slock.”
37 / belief
“The analogy I’ve been thinking about with Solana, they're the most interesting competing other chain with Ethereum. I think about it like lots of organizations use AWS and they use Snowflake.”
38 / belief
“I think there are still a lot of things that are happening on Ethereum because it's early, cool, and they have no impact on the real world.”
39 / belief
“I think there's another element of switching costs too, which is for participants in the crypto economy, ether is the coin trading pair and Bitcoin too, but probably ether more than Bitcoin for other coins and other objects.”
40 / belief
“I think that's right, yes. Everything is a double edged sword. Its strength is also its potential downfall.”
41 / belief
“I think there's something there where—at some point, you have to pay a bunch of taxes if you sell your ETH.”
42 / evaluation
“Once that network has been laid, you do really cool stuff on it, cool legitimate stuff that is better than what came before or at least serves a different use case because now you have this infrastructure.”
43 / recommendation
“For little ticky-tack transactions that you don't want to pay huge fees for but also if they don't matter as much, if there's a lie in it somewhere or there's an attack on it and it's not that big a deal, it's fine for that not to happen on the main Ethereum blockchain.”
44 / prediction
“I think I'm coming around to the idea that I'm not going to see the next Spotify that is just straight up better than Spotify, but decentralized and because it's decentralized, it's like no we're going to see a version of Spotify that lets me transact directly with the artist.”
45 / preference
“Because I think the Mac OS one that I threw out earlier was like Ethereum is the operating system upon which you can build platforms and applications.”
46 / commitment
“We got I think probably closer to 75+ grade LP episodes in the catalog for everything from the basics of VC fundamentals through pricing and packaging, through hiring, building great teams, all sorts of good stuff in there.”
47 / evaluation
“Let me just crystallize this even further, just because I keep thinking that it is a stretched analogy.”
48 / evaluation
“By the end of the summer, he emails Waterloo and he's like, hey, I think crypto and Bitcoin is a really big thing.”
49 / preference
“I'm going to do a little bit of a popcorn one this time because I think I've been heavier in the past.”
50 / commitment
“If I like your idea, you will get a four-day deadline to write your article and a three-day deadline to finish your final draft.”
51 / evaluation
“Then the killer app for Bitcoin, which of course, was the first killer app, which was the Silk Road, didn't launch until February 2011. It was right at that time, the very next month in fact, in March of 2011, that a new user showed up in the Bitcoin talk forums online.”