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
61 published records
01 / recommendation
“My carve out is a really great fantasy series, a book series that I read recently, Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes series.”
02 / belief
“I think there might be more and more, David, exactly of what you're talking about, you got to pick and then there is less room or at least have a large addressable market as someone who is trying to be a centrist.”
03 / belief
“Let’s try and do a ton of crazy data science and launch a bunch of games. It’s happening over the course of years instead of months and they’re not running hard into these opportunities that I think you would see for a tech company in the startup world if they were falling into the success that The New York Times is.”
04 / belief
“I think there's one more piece to that A+ case which is they have to increase ARPU for subscribers.”
05 / belief
“Yup, and could you say that that is so wrapped up in the organization that it can't be transferred out? I think maybe.”
06 / belief
“I think there's an absolute A+ case if they do keep making investments and really turn into more of like a tech company of experiment, learn, rapidly iterate.”
07 / belief
“A year-and-a-half under my hat. Well let's see, listeners I think that brings us to a close.”
08 / belief
“I think that right now they're constraining their TAM to the English speaking market, but they have a clear eye on international trade.”
09 / belief
“I was reading a Medium post by their outgoing former CTO, who said things like, I think 150 Timesians went through the reforge growth series.”
10 / belief
“If I'd been born 10–20 years or earlier, I think my default assumption would be more that your markets are geographically constrained.”
11 / belief
“Maybe it was on the site that (I think) this was part of the Dodd-Frank legislation.”
12 / commitment
“Listeners, I will say this is something that David and I both realized in the research.”
13 / belief
“Amidst all these, I think by 2013, that $3¼ billion of revenue that I previously referenced was down to $1.”
14 / uncertainty
“Here, you are suddenly thrust into this new era where you're in the worst financial shape you've ever been in as a company, you own all these things, the technology landscape is changing out from underneath you, and you have basically built an internal, I don't know the right phrase is but you got a massive chasm between what you perceive as the core competency of a business producing print journalism and everything else over on the business side, and not thinking about any distribution.”
15 / belief
“Before this time, newspapers were selling (I think) around 5–6¢ a copy, but starting in the 1850s, newspapers—in particular, new newspapers—dropped in price to 1¢ per copy.”
16 / belief
“In fact, in the very first edition that comes out that September in 1851, he writes famously, “We, being The Times, shall be conservative in all cases where we think conservatism essential to the public good, and we shall be radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform.”
17 / belief
“I think he was always—after he released that—kept it a little bit at arm's length.”
18 / belief
“Now, when we were comparing it to Netflix I think there’s one more interesting thing to say about The Times here and that’s the bull case, is they don’t have to go acquire content.”
19 / belief
“Although I would say unlike at this time when Buffett was investing in Goldman, Harley Davidson and the like, those were solid companies.”
20 / belief
“In catching us up today, we have to give a huge shoutout to a website called Mine Safety Disclosures, that put together a deck of it, provides just an amazing analysis of The Times, and frankly makes an amazing bull case that I think we’ll cover as we go into bull and bear narratives but definitely wanted to give a shout out.”
21 / belief
“Today we peer into what I think is the oldest company we've ever done on this show, founded over 170 years ago before the civil war.”
22 / uncertainty
“I guess he must have been in the plane. I don't know for sure. But pretty incredible, totally incredible.”
23 / uncertainty
“I don't know if they have intentionally done this in modern eras because they learned from this time when it went well for them, but The Times now has a pattern of buying low when others are selling, in particular, investing in high quality journalism when the industry is going through terrible financial times.”
24 / belief
“I think he waits until the expiry dates which is a few years later, but he does exercise them and he becomes the largest individual shareholder in The New York Times owning about 17%.”
25 / belief
“I was able to get a hold from the proxy statement, I think from the 1990, maybe 10-K of The New York Times; the proxy statement.”
26 / belief
“I think what was less great was from a capital allocation perspective, what you really want to do here is differentiate versus this new medium.”
27 / uncertainty
“I don't know if they were friends or something, but it was originally an Ochs quote.”
28 / belief
“I think in year 3, they chopped their free articles in half from 20 to 10 that you would get.”
29 / belief
“The family must (I think) support it because the trust had been redone a few times.”
30 / belief
“I think the origin is the Bank of England was called Good Lady or something like that, so we borrowed from that.”
31 / belief
“You can see if you're Trask or the existing bankruptcy committee, you're like, I think we'll take the merger.”
32 / belief
“The crossword app on its own is a $30-million-a-year business with zero marginal cost because they’re just running historical crosswords from years and years and years, and I think some new ones, but the apps business that they have—they call it other digital—is growing at 60% year over year and it’s crazy high-margin revenue.”
33 / belief
“The other part is he uses seller's notes again of $600,000 in debt owed back to the creditors that they will pay off over some number of the coming years from profits he'll generate by running this paper that has 9000 subscribers and is bleeding (I think) on the order of about half-a-million dollars a year at this point in losses.”
34 / belief
“In fact, they famously talked about 400,000 (I believe) Europeans killed by the Nazis, as were 400,000 Jews that they changed.”
35 / commitment
“I can certainly say from when I worked at The Journal and I worked on the “business side,” not on the edit side, but I will tell you, there is absolutely a machine.”
36 / uncertainty
“I don't know but I suspect certainly a large portion of the five million subscribers they've added since Donald Trump was elected president have chosen to subscribe more for the niche reason than for the neutral reason.”
37 / belief
“I want to paint this spectrum as we come out of narratives because I think there's this interesting decelerating excitement on the spectrum.”
38 / belief
“When you say that no other organization the world has, The New York Times (I think) today is 7½ million new subscribers.”
39 / uncertainty
“I don't know what the strike price of those warrants were, whether they were penny warrants which is effectively free equity, stock options to employees, or whether they are at the then current stock price of the company or some discount, but they're effectively free call options at whatever the strike price is on the company for the future.”
40 / belief
“Go, go, go. This is when the company went public in 1969 on the American Stock Exchange, with the dual class share structure where the family still retains voting control than (I think) the rate to 70% of the board but exponentially larger voting control with their shares.”
41 / uncertainty
“I didn’t read the report as closely as I know you did, so I don’t know how much of this was in the report versus they do it.”
42 / belief
“I think probably he's maybe more like Pulitzer and Hearst than he lets on and he wanted to run a marketing stunt.”
43 / belief
“I think we just got to accept that we live in a world of accelerating change, which means lots of frequent disruptions of all types.”
44 / belief
“I think there are eight family members who comprise a board of right now, and that they make the decisions for the dozens, and dozens, and dozens of numbers of cousins that there are now.”
45 / evaluation
“The reality is that was the best thing (I think) that ever happens in The New York Times.”
46 / belief
“I think I found a source that said that they essentially bought 750,000 square feet of prime New York office space at $333 a foot.”
47 / commitment
“I could imagine him praying one night being, like I'm sorry God for going into real estate. I will be the greatest newspaperman ever if I can bail out my debts.”
48 / commitment
“There are really two-and-a-half pieces of any news media organization, newspapers included, cable news, television networks—we will talk about that as we go along here—and Internet media news networks as well.”
49 / belief
“I'm going to talk about branding because rarely do I think that a business actually has brand power.”
50 / belief
“Crosses 100,000 in 1901, 200,000 in 1912, and by the 1920s after World War I, he's up at over three quarters of a million circulation, and has become the dominant, not just paper in New York but probably the most prestigious, most respected, most widely-known American journalistic organization out there, that when we think of The New York Times, this was it, it was all Ochs.”
51 / belief
“There’s this interesting allegory to the yellow journalism era where what Sulzberger and the 10-12–person team asset is if we are willing to step up internally, make a big change, bring the right leaders into the newsroom—tech, product, distribution, marketing, growth leaders—and adopt them as our own, we think that we can hold our values, grow our subscription business, and grow our reach.”
52 / prediction
“I only knew about it, frankly, because when we saw all these tech CEOs starting to do this crazy dual class structure stuff, famously Zuckerberg and I think the Google founders did it, obviously Snapchat and freaking everyone since.”
53 / evaluation
“These guys were, I don't know if they were The National Enquirer, but they were fast and loose with the facts and basically trying to sell copies with any sensationalism that they could come up with.”
54 / prediction
“Ochs made a really big bet on whether we should be producing more business content and people will be willing to pay more for it because it is either actually a business expense or it inspires them that they could do more with their business.”
55 / commitment
“I probably mostly only knew that because I used to be a media investment banker and worked at the Wall Street Journal, but I didn't know anything about this history.”
56 / preference
“He put it there specifically because he was like, I don't want this to be intermixed with my business practices.”
57 / evaluation
“Another bear case to make because in my bull case, I started painting of why this is an even better business than Netflix.”
58 / evaluation
“Another bear case to make is that while subscribers are up—we’ve talked a lot about their subscriber numbers—we haven’t been talking about or nearly as much about their subscriber revenue because it is not growing as fast.”
59 / evaluation
“Rockefeller is such a fascinating human because he is both the most egregious penny-pinching capitalist of all time and also probably the biggest philanthropist in global history maybe except for Bill Gates.”
60 / preference
“The New York Times has incredible brand power They can print things that I wouldn't even believe if some blogger printed it, but it's literally the exact same story in The Times, 100% I will take that as truth.”
61 / evaluation
“The Times is very much like that where they did come out of this as number one because they didn't compromise on their values.”