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
23 published records
01 / recommendation
“” And he was right. And then it’s later kind of in the tail end of Steve’s tenure and then after Steve with stuff like podcasts, you know, talking about Marco and the Apple default native podcast app, but I use Overcast now that Marco makes and so many other people, and it’s the indie software that’s so much better or like with Maps.”
02 / recommendation
“Today, we are covering Apple’s 2000 acquisition of SoundJam which would go on to become iTunes. So speaking of iTunes, we love iTunes.”
03 / uncertainty
“Maybe they’ll ship free AR/VR spectacles to everyone, get everyone on their platform and then... I don’t know.”
04 / belief
“Then I think either Phil or Steve at that point is like, “We’re building that. It’s going to be called iPhoto.”
05 / belief
“I mean, I think a lot of while it opens up communication and the possibility to be seen and heard to so many people to so much wider of an audience, it also at the same time has a homogenizing effect.”
06 / belief
“I think when you hear comments like that and you sort of take a step back and look at what was going on here, yes, they forked the SoundJam codebase to ship iTunes, it’s based on a lot of SoundJam code.”
07 / belief
“I mean, maybe not in music today as we’ll get into later in the show but certainly we think about Facebook, we think about Instagram, we think about Snapchat, just how much that’s changed over, you know, what is a long time in technology but not that long relative to other businesses.”
08 / belief
“Last quarter, across other product lines. And we talked about this that like the numbers are almost silly when you look at the next acquisition and it’s like well, I think Apple had done like a trillion dollars of revenue since buying NeXT, almost all of it in some way attributable to the next.”
09 / belief
“Totally. And I think that's only going to continue to happen and I think honestly, at Pioneer Square Labs, we think a lot about like new businesses as a start, it's like where is there additional white space and things that people buy now that they could subscribe to.”
10 / uncertainty
“Jobs had reached out to them and Apple – well, I don’t know if it was Jobs but Apple had reached out to them.”
11 / belief
“All right, listeners. I think that will do it for today. We appreciate you listening, as usual.”
12 / belief
“I wonder if, you know, I think a lot of big tech companies are buying companies that are started by people from their rivals.”
13 / belief
“I mean, there are no APIs for this stuff. It’s not handled natively in the Mac OS, nor I think in Windows which I think is why WinAmp took off.”
14 / prediction
“I think that’s the one that finally had enough megabytes of storage where it could really blow up.”
15 / recommendation
“Everybody, like we’ve been saying, who wants to participate in the digital music revolution on a Mac, this is by far the best software when it comes out to do it. And Macworld (the magazine) writes a review of it and says, “Of all the MP3 software available for the Mac, Casady & Greene’s new SoundJam MP,” which I think MP stands for music player.”
16 / evaluation
“Yup. It’s funny how we take MP3 for granted today but it was not a widely known thing people were distributing MP3s.”
17 / prediction
“Like one, we’re talking about Mac only and that was just a tiny, tiny portion of the market at that point, at least from a VC perspective. And two, I think we’re also just really early in consumerization of the internet.”
18 / prediction
“As you point that to people, do you think that we’re getting less and less opportunities to be different and define our own core competencies because there’s an ease of availability to the table stakes and everything else because there is everything as a service or you sort of can outsource everything.”
19 / preference
“Because like there’s so many freaking use cases when I'm yelling at Alexa that I’m like, “Boy do I wish I could see the product that she’s trying to describe to me before I commit to paying money for it.”
20 / recommendation
“But one of our last stops before we came home was Israel and neither of us had never been before and was just such an amazing, eye-opening experience in so many ways. And so glad we went and just really would recommend to everybody if you have a chance, if you live in America, if you live in Europe or elsewhere in Asia or Africa and you haven’t been to Israel or if you don’t live in the Middle East.”
21 / commitment
“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.”
22 / evaluation
“But Eric shot me an email a couple of weeks ago and he said, “Hey, I don’t know if you explored the company SoundJam as a topic. But it stands out to me as an interesting one because this is the app that not only became iTunes but I may have also influenced ‘the metal finish’ of Apple software design over the several years.”
23 / preference
“One thing, I love doing these episodes on old software because they’re such a reminder of like how far the world has come and how much in software.”