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
21 published records
01 / recommendation
“I love Instacart. I’ve been a user for a really long time and since it launched in Seattle, it’s awesome but, you know, you sort of have to wonder at this point they knew Amazon was going to be their competitor at the very outset.”
02 / uncertainty
“I mean, well, what you’re talking about is no longer a big 5 in tech, but a big 1. I don’t know.”
03 / belief
“On the other hand though, you know, I don’t think all is lost for them by any means. They have I think the only model that makes sense too that is capable of scaling quickly in anything less than a decade-long time frame in this space which is let the stores and the companies that are good at logistics do logistics and will do the last mile.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don’t know that there’s too much more insight to add but I don’t think we’ve talked about it yet and we can’t have an episode on Amazon without talking about the flywheel.”
05 / belief
“I think I had heard in the past that Whole Foods is this Texas owned company and it’s just shocking.”
06 / belief
“Yup. So the stock has been under a lot of pressure for the last couple of years and actually there was an activist hedge fund, Jana Partners that I believe ended up getting board seats and has been kind of really pushing the company to take a corporate action, meaning sell itself.”
07 / belief
“Probably why Amazon started to realize after they acquired those companies, the power of Kiva Systems in fulfillment centers, Amazon buys the company and then completely shuts down all other third-party customers and brings all the tech in-house and has since kind of remade, I believe at this point probably the majority, if not all of their US fulfillment centers into Kiva-run fulfillment centers.”
08 / uncertainty
“Over the course of 2 hours, he says like, “Yeah, I don’t know if this is interesting to you guys at all.”
09 / commitment
“David and I do not purport to have any of the answers but we do have hot takes of our own. So, in true Acquired fashion we will probably be wildly speculative.”
10 / belief
“Let’s spend a little bit of time and cover some basically hot takes on what this could represent and then once we kind of cover all that, then I think acquisition category will start to come together and make sense.”
11 / observation
“I’ll write your review then. But no, seriously, Acquired is growing a lot and we have some amazing guests coming on this summer and that’s possible because of the growth and the way to keep the growth going is through Apple Podcast reviews.”
12 / evaluation
“They just go in and they buy this huge asset and they get this incredible data asset out of it and they learn how to optimize every single experience for every single customer based on exactly their wants and needs. And I think that also with the availability of cloud computing, like you start your two-pizza team inside Amazon and it’s small and you work on a thing and then suddenly if it’s working and you find product for market fit, you get the power of Amazon’s cloud behind it.”
13 / evaluation
“Oh wait, throw in one more tech theme that actually I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and I think is a very powerful one – is that Amazon is playing offense, Walmart is playing defense.”
14 / prediction
“No, but I think what the deal is, is I think that that Walmart through Jet is really just trying to buy a bunch of these sort of smaller e-commerce companies that people love and figure out, you know, can they just own a portfolio of these things.”
15 / evaluation
“Which is on the one hand and Go has been delayed, the public launch supposedly because of trouble getting it to work in public effacingly. But at this point, I think the point that I was trying to make, that we were trying to make in telling the full story and all these other companies – Webvan, Kiva, Instacart – Amazon didn’t just wake up yesterday or today and decided to do that.”
16 / evaluation
“Since Instacart uses an on-demand system, you really can’t actually order from multiple grocery stores because the logistics of that, sending the shopper in the next 2 hours to both grocery stores is prohibitively expensive and time consuming.”
17 / evaluation
“I mean, Amazon I believe trades at a much lower revenue multiple than other tech companies because it is a retail business and has lower margins, and grocery is like razor, razor thin margins.”
18 / preference
“At the end of the day, I think Whole Foods was the best one to buy because it is the best selection and the most premium customer segment and the most premium real estate.”
19 / prediction
“I believe the goal is to convert every FC into a Kiva center but they may not be fully done yet.”
20 / prediction
“I think probably starting with Trader Joe’s, like if Instacart can land Trader Joe’s, to my mind they’re sort of the last bastion of differentiation in this space, and they’re sure as heck not going anywhere near Amazon after the Whole Foods acquisition.”
21 / preference
“Because maybe the move is not to double down and strive for world domination but to try and figure out how to play in Amazon’s world.”