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 / belief
“I think the only dark horse being the Nespresso, I mean that may just be a huge business and they needed a way to invigorate it.”
02 / uncertainty
“I’m going to dual wield and have my browser open and try to order online and have my Apple Store app on my phone open and see if maybe I’ll end up with two, I don't know.”
03 / uncertainty
“Like, these are real people and these companies exist in real locations. So I don’t know if it was the second but the first sort of canonical Blue Bottle store larger than the kiosk that was in Hayes was in Mint Plaza.”
04 / belief
“Like I think the days of believing that an Apple store is a far simple location is far over.”
05 / belief
“I mean, that is the question. And I think the question both for Blue Bottle and for us in terms of in this show like looking at what’s going on in the tech world, like Blue Bottle, we were joking in the beginning of the show that it is unapologetically not a tech company but this type of dynamic is rampant these days.”
06 / belief
“We’ve posed some questions here and I think James Freeman and the Blue Bottle team were very clear what side they came down on on those questions which was that Blue Bottle can’t be a public company and maintain its ideals and also that it’s not an internet company.”
07 / belief
“I want to be in my own little thing and separated from all that. So, I guess the tech theme I’m going with here or the theme I’m going with here is like some things are un-crammable into these business models that are massive and winner-take-all and looks super shiny from an investment perspective, and I think coffee may be one of them.”
08 / belief
“Arguably even maybe I would say before lots of capital, the sort of modern series A and beyond hyped startup, they raise a venture round and they raise $5 million from a firm called Kohlberg Ventures.”
09 / belief
“I think I’d give it a B right now because this certainly was a good outcome for everyone but I just wonder if it was like the right path and what would have happened if maybe Blue Bottle had made some different decisions along the way.”
10 / uncertainty
“Actually, David, I tried the other day just squeezing my Nespresso pod and they made amazing coffee on their own. I don’t know what I paid 100 bucks for this thing for.”
11 / belief
“I think were it not for these cameras and sometimes when I want two-handed use of a larger keyboard, I’ve missed the crap out of that form factor.”
12 / evaluation
“Like you can’t do the same with coffee, right, because the experience of sitting in a Starbucks is very different from the experience of sitting in a Blue Bottle.”
13 / evaluation
“But the typical life of a venture capital fund partnership/limited partnership is 10 years. And what that means is that from the time the fund was raised until whatever that data is in typically 10 years, like you're supposed to wind up the whole fund and give all the money back to investors at that point.”
14 / evaluation
“Right? And I think that’s why Amazon can be a winner-take-all business in retail because, like, you can buy the, I don't know, what’s some trivial example?”
15 / evaluation
“I mean, the way I like to think about internet companies being differentiated is the super low, if not zero marginal cost.”
16 / recommendation
“Well, I will say, you know, as I for lots and lots of reasons believe that full acquisitions are better than these sort of majority buyouts, particularly for startups like this, I mean they’re 40-store retail location, but early-ish mid-stage company.”
17 / evaluation
“There had been some secondaries along the way. So I believe some of the money from some of the later rounds was secondary sales that the founders and management team were taking money off the table.”
18 / preference
“I’m like, for the last three years every time I’ve had lunch or dinner or gone out, like I always put my phone on the table because I can’t have it on my body and so I was like, you know what, there’s such an active liquid secondary market for Apple products.”
19 / evaluation
“We don't know the exact number but it’s been pretty widely reported that they paid about $425 million and that was for 68 percent of the company.”
20 / evaluation
“I mean, on the one hand, I think we’ve been painting it for the last few minutes as bad or at least that this is a disconnect which it is. But on the other hand, if you go back to sort of what Blue Bottle is and this whole Third Wave of coffee which we’re using as an analogy for the state of the tech world right now, does it make sense for Blue Bottle to be a public company?”
21 / prediction
“I can paint a story where instead of growing 50% year over year and projected to grow 70% year over year next year, like they actually really turn it on and are able to open lots more stores very rapidly because they have all this capital.”