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
16 published records
01 / uncertainty
“At least it used to. I don't know if they still do, it's probably virtual now. We put on these physical events in Silicon Valley.”
02 / belief
“Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC. This is I think the other lesson that I've really taken from Acquired is in this vein, which is that Morris Chang was 56 years old when he founded TSMC.”
03 / evaluation
“In 2008, Bezos came. This was right after AWS had launched. He used it as a marketing opportunity to market to all of the startups and future startups about why they should build on AWS instead of rolling their own infrastructure.”
04 / belief
“I think there's really something to just always thinking, okay, I just got more valuable, and that puts me in a position to get even more valuable again, and always just be really thoughtful and super aggressive about seizing that next opportunity.”
05 / belief
“I think two thirds of our sponsors on Acquired already know that's what Vanta is, Modern Treasury, Vouch, even Mystery.”
06 / evaluation
“One is what he's arguing that as a startup, you should focus solely—not just a startup, any company—on the attributes of your product that your customers are going to care about. Everything else, your infrastructure doesn't matter.”
07 / evaluation
“I think after the war, 48% of Tokyo was homeless. Half the population's homes had been destroyed.”
08 / evaluation
“One, he decided that the only way they were going to win and survive in this brutal commodity industry was by shipping six months ahead, shipping new technology six months ahead of their competitors.”
09 / evaluation
“It leaves you in this interesting place where you're thinking, well, okay, do I always continue to hold? This is why venture capitalists tend to be totally obsessed with market size because it's this idea that you basically need to be able to run forever, or decades and decades and decades, and continue to grow, and those markets continue to be this globally addressable, absolutely massive opportunity.”
10 / evaluation
“I don't know that in recent history there has been a worse time and place to try and live your life and do any sort of business, let alone start a brand new innovative technology firm.”
11 / evaluation
“People think it's complete voodoo math how venture capitalists come up with with valuations. This is where I think that Michael's comment and his thoughts on this make a lot of sense, because once you admit that there is no DCF and you stop trying to say, in what world is that worth $20 million, or $10 million, or $70 million at an idea stage, which we've seen recently?”
12 / evaluation
“Then the utility companies came along, and the next generation of breweries, they didn't make their own power. They just rented it from the utility companies, and they ran roughshod over the first generation of breweries to use power, because guess what, whoever makes your electricity has no impact on how your beer tastes.”
13 / evaluation
“There wasn't a market either, because every other technology firm that was making radios and stuff had pivoted to make stuff for the military, which was no longer a customer.”
14 / evaluation
“I'd say that the people that we get to interact with now in the community and all the folks that we met here who mentioned, oh, I've listened to the show, we ended up with exactly the listeners that we wanted and the people that we want to spend time with, because there is a long game to play.”
15 / recommendation
“Then if you're an investor, investing in optimism is the only way that you're actually going to make outsized returns and build great companies.”
16 / prediction
“The number of transistors on a chip—we all know this—tends to double every 18–24 months and with some quick compounding math, that means you get a 10X every seven years or so.”