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
24 published records
01 / belief
“Here is my thesis on it. When you say Larry and Sergey don't strike me as M&A geniuses, obviously, Eric Schmidt was very active in the company at this point.”
02 / belief
“Very seasoned technology executive. But the way I think about Google is at their founding, they were tech geniuses.”
03 / belief
“Let's talk about that. What I think you're going to say is also my number one theme here.”
04 / belief
“When Google says, “We generated $15 billion in revenue in our YouTube segment last year,” there's an argument about if that's even revenue. They chose to report it as revenue and have higher revenue, lower gross margin percentage business line there rather than I think what you could have done and said, "We have $7–$8 billion revenue here.”
05 / observation
“Listeners, the way to think about this is of the two big Google Ad segments, we're excluding YouTube here, there's the stuff they own.”
06 / belief
“I mean, maybe Waymo will become… Anyway, that's two. I think three, related to both of these, was the leadership change at Google.”
07 / belief
“I think 30% is their housing and then 10% to 20% is their car and 10% to 20% is food.”
08 / belief
“There are a few different ways to attack this. One is a defensibility perspective, which I think is interesting.”
09 / commitment
“Of course, this went through Braintree, so it’s $26 million that Braintree bought it for and then less than a year later that was picked up for $800 million but rolled that $26 million forward since that is the isolated number for Venmo alone. Now, David, I will say still not profitable.”
10 / evaluation
“If you're making a Google salary and you're building a company, that doesn't work the same way.”
11 / uncertainty
“I don't know as much lore around the founding of Google X, but it does strike me as trying to recreate the conditions upon which Larry and Sergey invented Google Search.”
12 / belief
“Number three, Google's 2006 acquisition of YouTube, which I think the Acquired podcast called this a C when they did that episode.”
13 / belief
“Again, we're not ad tech experts, but I believe that's the standard rails that all third-party ad tech runs on these days.”
14 / belief
“There's a defensibility amazingness to it that I think gets harped on over and over and over again.”
15 / prediction
“Because of our Disney episode, we know that you make about twice as much from perks and merch as you make from the film itself, or at least the division as a whole does, so we felt it was reasonable to say triple the amount of money that any given film gets from the box office to its total revenue contribution to Disney, and you get about $3 billion.”
16 / evaluation
“We totally recognize that a lot of these companies don't trade on revenue multiples. They trade on a free cash flow basis, but we can't get the cost structures of the acquired companies anymore, so this is the best we could do.”
17 / commitment
“We got to write it so who knows exactly what it will be. But the hope is to create the first enduring piece of Acquired artifact outside of just these 100 plus episodes that we've done that is a little bit more referenceable and I think discoverable for folks who aren't already big fans of the show.”
18 / evaluation
“This episode may not be the exact order that we would rank it five years from now, even one year from now, even six months from now. It definitely represents a moment in time, though I think directionally correct for a while.”
19 / evaluation
“I think Android is definitely a product because Android got integrated into so much.”
20 / prediction
“I do think both of those will continue as independent enduring juggernauts because they serve very different purposes for the types of advertising that they serve people and the moment in which they catch them.”
21 / preference
“We're not talking about what's good for the world, what's not good for the world, having a lot of arguments on Instagram is bad for the world and how it is right now. But purely as a shareholder from an investor economic perspective, if I could hold shares on Instagram versus YouTube, I would put all 100% of my dollars between those two into Instagram and zero into YouTube, even though I love YouTube.”
22 / recommendation
“My other sub-bullet is, if you're big-game hunting, if you're big elephant hunting, price doesn't matter, bring a big gun.”
23 / belief
“I believe, still to this day, the only publicly available Sequoia investment memo out there because, of course, it was part of discovery in the YouTube-Viacom lawsuit.”
24 / recommendation
“You could argue, as we said at the top of the show, we're not going to include recent acquisitions in this because it's too early to tell.”