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
20 published records
01 / uncertainty
“I don’t know that you could sell great employees on that, right? If you’re the best VR developer, screw that, I’m going to Valve.”
02 / belief
“I think the question is, and actually Ben Thompson wrote a great piece last week, I believe, the Smiling Curves about this.”
03 / belief
“Totally agree. I think you’ve nailed it on this one. I’m tempted to quote Tom Alberg from our Amazon IPO episode himself quoting Jeff which is such a great line in tech that Jeff Bezos is saying that it’s okay to fail at things; it’s not okay not to try.”
04 / belief
“Like we’ll make Office for Mac too. But I think there are plenty of examples whether it's Microsoft and Windows or Google and Android of that type of approach working.”
05 / belief
“Even three years later after the acquisition, best guesses are it’s growing and growing quickly but I bet there’s certainly still well less than a million daily active VR users out there in the whole world, compare that to like 6 billion daily active users, 6 billion in mobile. So I think Facebook is still totally fine.”
06 / belief
“I think what Oculus is, is them trying to get out ahead and making sure that with this technology that clearly evolves to be the future of computing, that they aren’t going to be upended by someone else who decides that “Eh, we’re not going to prioritize Facebook on the platform where all the users are.”
07 / belief
“I think we might have unexpectedly on the episode touched on a really, really deep theme in technology which is this vertical versus horizontal idea.”
08 / belief
“I think so too. Which is interesting to think about in grading the acquisition as they’ve so far paid $2.”
09 / belief
“Go listen to that one if you haven’t already. I think that is some of our best work here on Acquired.”
10 / belief
“I think there was a thing, I think Google might have even made it but it was that thing where you could paint and you use the controllers to paint.”
11 / recommendation
“This is the third time I’ve dangerously danced into tech themes ahead of schedule. But let me throw something out there that I think Facebook would be much better off keeping them separate and keeping it like its own little division with kind of a firewall between Oculus and Facebook.”
12 / preference
“You know, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re trying to just put together around to 250k, like you don’t want to raise 2.4 million because you give up your whole company.”
13 / evaluation
“They just have to figure out a way, and Google took years to do this to be clear that Android exists to power the search advertising business. It has to be first class and a great OS on its own to have people use it because it’s in a competitive landscape, but like it doesn’t exist on its own to be Google’s main revenue stream.”
14 / prediction
“Because they’d raised a lot of money really quickly but it was going to take a lot more money to get to where we are now and clearly, I think if Facebook doesn’t acquire Oculus, there’s a chance that maybe Valve continues to partner with Oculus and doesn’t go off on its own.”
15 / evaluation
“I mean, that's changing a little bit. But like the whole strategy was get the software out there, get the operating system, let other people, let other ecosystem partners build a great hardware and get it in the hands of people, and that use Android as a way to make sure that we are going to be able to continue to deliver these great Google services to everybody across all platforms.”
16 / preference
“There’s this my favorite, favorite app in VR these days is by our friends over at Rec Room which is a really amazing company in Seattle.”
17 / evaluation
“I think if you look at the vision that Snap is putting forward of a camera company, which is the closest that I have seen to anything resembling normalcy and a true wave in what we’re talking about because like I said, the wave is not “VR or AR or MR”, it’s glasses or a camera.”
18 / preference
“It’s really good. But one of my favorite elements of the piece of which there’s several, is sort of asking this question like what does the course of history have to say about what the themes are behind it, which reminds me of course of our podcast and what we do on Acquired.”
19 / evaluation
“I think one of his greatest contributions was the algorithms to do the shading of shadows so that things look appropriately far away and appropriately lit as you approach them or turn corners.”
20 / evaluation
“One, that Carmack had stolen critical IP from his work at id and taken it to Oculus. And two, actually, in 2012, Palmer Luckey met, I don’t know if it was when he was meeting with Carmack or with other folks at id, had signed an NDA with the company and as a result of everything that happened, ZeniMax is alleging that he had violated that NDA.”