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
73 published records
01 / belief
“Then Ben, as you teed up in the intro, the question is why did they do all this? And I think the way to answer it is to start and just tell the stories of all the individual products.”
02 / recommendation
“Yes, Keyhole and Google Earth (I think) is my favorite part of our first Google episode earlier this year.”
03 / recommendation
“I watched the Google IO keynote with Glass and I watched a bunch of Glass content.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don’t know about that. I don’t know that Google would’ve become the dominant player in display ads.”
05 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if Larry said, hey, I really think you should do this on our behalf.”
06 / belief
“Then my quintessence is, it is wild that this one company has eight products with over a billion users and started this era with just one Search that didn’t even have a billion users yet, but Search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail maps, drive photos, and then if you count the Playstore as separate from Android, which Google does, I think that’s a bit of a stretch.”
07 / belief
“I was about to say their infrastructure, but I think that’s actually a scale economy that they’ve built out the infrastructure they have so they can run all their products as cheaply as they can.”
08 / belief
“Less of an elegant, satisfying core insight I think and not the reason that it worked.”
09 / commitment
“The thing is though—we will correct the Acquired record at the end of this section—either way, even if Google paid 20 times $1.”
10 / commitment
“I will buy a switch too at some point, probably in the next year or so. But for now, steam Deck.”
11 / belief
“Google Chrome frame was a plugin for Internet Explorer that replaced IE’s JavaScript engine and pulled in the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine and I think also WebKit.”
12 / commitment
“The one thing I will say here, David, is unlike all those other Google products, maps, Gmail, YouTube, the organizing the world’s information, this is not organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible.”
13 / uncertainty
“The only icons and apps on the phone are the ones that Apple puts there. Two of the, I don’t know how many there were, 10, 12, 13 apps are Google apps.”
14 / belief
“I have one analogy for all of this that is a little far afield but I think is actually the right way to think about this.”
15 / belief
“I think we’re still in the era of, you can’t even change your wallpaper on the iPhone.”
16 / belief
“I think Lucasfilm was mentioned at the bottom in the credits of every commercial.”
17 / belief
“We heard in the research that after this deal, Patrick Pichette (I think) was the CFO of Google at the time.”
18 / observation
“The only way it could have gone better is if instead of launching Android, they launched the iPhone and they also got the iPhone profits rather than just some small dollars that protected their core business.”
19 / belief
“I think that happened very quickly. YouTube traffic scaled so fast and so big. You can see how YouTube here, not only are they the correct video platform for the web and just doing it much better than Google’s doing it with Google video.”
20 / uncertainty
“YouTube as a small startup has the advantage of, oh, copyright, rules, laws. I don’t know.”
21 / commitment
“We don’t currently have a buyer in our ad network forum, throw them up on this exchange and see if programmatically some people will bid on it. We will get more dollars this month for the same number of page views.”
22 / belief
“I think all of these things are true. However, having your own browser when Microsoft does launch Bing, hugely, hugely, hugely important.”
23 / belief
“Less than free business model. This is the clearest example of counter positioning I think that has ever existed.”
24 / prediction
“From an engineering and scientific standpoint, building things that make use of this is a really interesting intellectual exercise. I expect we’ll be working on that for a while, incredible.”
25 / belief
“Still does by the way. Which I think held them back in AI for a while. They know the Google name means something, so they are reticent to throw their name on it until they got shoved off the cliff.”
26 / belief
“Sundar’s personality I think was a way to reunify the company, bring everybody back together.”
27 / commitment
“Imagine that generating a whole bunch more page views on search results pages and a whole bunch more opportunities for our advertisers to reach your eyeballs. But I will say they were also correct from a user experience perspective, the fact that URLS ever leaked to the public is a mistake that is letting an implementation detail of the technology.”
28 / commitment
“For users all across the board. I won’t leave YouTube at this point. The algorithm’s dialed to my interests.”
29 / belief
“Meta has four. Apple I think only has three, maybe four. The three Apple has for sure are iPhone, iMessage and Safari, iPad maybe I don’t think so.”
30 / belief
“Anyway, I think that has made it extremely clear to me when Google products succeed and when they fail.”
31 / uncertainty
“Then the question becomes how profitable is the 50 billion in revenue? And officially we don’t know, but there are these great things called research firms out there that make our jobs that Acquired here much easier.”
32 / evaluation
“You know, what’s a coronary resource? They have built internal software and systems that is better than what is available outside of Google.”
33 / belief
“I think some things for Android users, think about Google now that predated Google Assistant, maybe Google Home.”
34 / belief
“Google doesn’t release usage data for YouTube, but I’m pretty sure that YouTube is the biggest single property on the Internet in terms of minutes spent by humans on it. It’s not, I believe that the biggest number of users on the Internet, both Facebook Blue App and WhatsApp are bigger in terms of total number of users.”
35 / belief
“There are billions and billions of dollars at stake here. But the other part of it too, I think the reason that the smartphone market had stagnated for so long was this.”
36 / belief
“A lot of them were also just at the right time in history. I think Android arrived at a lot of similar conclusions at the same time.”
37 / commitment
“Go start a startup, leave Google. We will then reacquire you back into Google in a couple of years.”
38 / evaluation
“Just like we talked about on the Microsoft episodes, it really doesn’t matter when you fail and how many times you fail, even the size of your failures, if your hits are these giant world changing platform type tech businesses that endure for decades and that’s what they had on their hands.”
39 / uncertainty
“The company started by Andy Rubin and Andy of course had been an engineer at Apple and then left Apple with a group of rebels. I don’t know, were they rebels that went to go start General Magic.”
40 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, it’s a little bit loose, but that’s what I’ve been kicking around.”
41 / belief
“Here's why I want to pause David, and I’m going to take it in a little bit different direction than I think you’re probably expecting, which is so therefore they went after Facebook.”
42 / belief
“Gmail and Google Drive advantage each other. I think you can subtract one of those out.”
43 / observation
“There is one way that Chrome is a business and that is getting paid by Google to drive traffic to Google as a search engine. It’s the only way to operate a business of a browser.”
44 / belief
“Actually what happened is it destroyed Firefox’s market share and I think the launch of Chrome and the peak of Firefox are right around the same time.”
45 / belief
“By the way, also since I think the theme of this whole episode is like the dual bottom line to Google of everything they’re doing of both revenue and profits and strategic installation versus other large tech companies.”
46 / commitment
“For searches that originate on your phone, we will give a little rev share to both the carrier and the OEM, the handset maker.”
47 / belief
“What if we think simpler and we just make a wireless version of this to scan barcodes.”
48 / belief
“Then it was in beta for 10 years. But I think the reason it took so long was this was all new.”
49 / observation
“Fast forward to today, it’s hard to get real actual apples-to-apples data on Google Workspace versus Microsoft Office users. But basically, the way to think about the market is that Google has the vast majority of users and usage of productivity software, and Microsoft still has the vast majority of dollars.”
50 / belief
“Then I realized the other as bigger or bigger thing is cloud Google should have been massively investing in cloud.”
51 / belief
“Pretty wild. But to my point about the dollars, so Microsoft’s productivity and business process segment, which is mostly Office—I think LinkedIn is now part of this too—last year generated over $120 billion in revenue.”
52 / belief
“I think if you lumped them all together into Workspace and add Drive, it is over a billion users.”
53 / belief
“Branding, I think in the heyday of Google that we’re talking about in this episode when they’re launching all these incredible products, yes these products won because they’re incredible and because they were free.”
54 / belief
“The ultimate fun coda though is Sam Schillace, founder of Writely, he would go on to manage all of Docs and Sheets. I think he actually managed Maps at some point too.”
55 / commitment
“We are going to buy a device and make this our flagship smartphone, position it against the iPhone and we are going to invest hugely behind this thing.”
56 / belief
“I think that the strategy was pretty tight at the top level and they just didn’t actually need to communicate it down very far.”
57 / belief
“Microsoft can keep all the dollars. All we care about is people use the web. In this instance, particularly with Office and productivity, really this is about putting the screws to Microsoft a little bit and distracting them.”
58 / belief
“I think so. That’s how they take care of the cost side of the equation, is not running out of control is the invite strategy.”
59 / belief
“I think if you look at users of Docs, Sheets, or Slides, it’s in the billion-ish, 500 million billion range for each of those.”
60 / commitment
“You grow the web, you grow time that people spend in web browsers, they will search more, we will make more money.”
61 / commitment
“Now I will say I believe Apple reputation launderers a little bit. They get a lot of the value of being in the search business without having to do all the stuff that they demonize from a privacy and data sharing and all that ickiness perspective.”
62 / belief
“Friendster was a thing at the time, January, 2004, before Gmail, before the Google IPO, before Facebook launches on the Harvard campus, in his 20% time, he launches a social network within Google called Orkut. It didn’t become that big in America, but it got at its peak, I think 300 million users.”
63 / commitment
“I will say, David, doing the research took me way back to early Acquired grading acquisitions.”
64 / evaluation
“Plus all this has turn by turn navigation is, but even to put aside whether it was better or not, it just was a real smartphone on Verizon, Time Magazine named the Droid its product of the year for 2009.”
65 / commitment
“Now I believe Eric had disclosed to Steve about the Sooner project because obviously it was public that Google had acquired Android and I believe that Steve Jobs knew that Google was working on like a Blackberry style phone, but he did not know about the Dream prototype.”
66 / evaluation
“We had that awkward teenage years where browsers had the URL bar on the left and then the search on the right and it’s clean to think about it on its own because now that we understand that that is sponsored, that I think for the longest time that was not in the public psyche, that whatever search engine appeared in that box in the right hand corner was paying for that placement.”
67 / evaluation
“Actually traffic acquisition costs originated before Mozilla because it’s effectively the same thing that they were doing with software vendors to include Google toolbar.”
68 / preference
“Camp one is, hey, the way to make people most engaged is by getting them to follow creators and they curate the information sources they want.”
69 / preference
“I don’t know, I just love it. It’s a 2019 camera and they really need to come out with one that has USB-C because it’s annoying to charge.”
70 / prediction
“I believe, just to foreshadow our next chapter, that was in the form of programmatic advertising that was on the Doubleclick ad exchange that they were using to make money.”
71 / prediction
“Whereas YouTube can say, eh, whatever, but then they’re going to go out of business because they’re going to get sued out of business. It’s this really interesting catch-22 of this is the way to start and get all the users because this is the best user experience.”
72 / evaluation
“They were a systemic disadvantage because they were going to carriers and saying, why don’t you pay us $5, $10?”
73 / prediction
“Ben, to your point, because they have to make it look and feel and function exactly like the installed desktop apps, this is going to take them a long time and be a big investment.”