Podcast profile
Acquired
By Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them.
Latest episode
The Home Depot
3 hr 35 min
- Cadence
- Monthly
- Typical length
- 3 hr 47 min
- Latest release
- Sep 14
- Language
- EN
- Activity
- Current — released within 30 days
Podcast Classification
Topics
Technology Business
Technology-company strategy, business models, operations, competition, and market structure.
Big Tech
Major technology platforms, companies, ecosystems, leadership, and competitive behavior.
Technology History
Historical development of technologies, companies, industries, and computing culture.
Formats
Case-Study Analysis
Detailed examination of a company, product, system, incident, or technical decision.
Narrative Storytelling
Structured stories using chronology, scenes, characters, and production.
Audience level
Intermediate
Assumes basic technology literacy and familiarity with common products, roles, and terminology.
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Latest episodes
Episodes shown — 10 of 25
The Home Depot
The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate.
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire
In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corporate raiders circled, salivating over offers to sell off the film library to MGM and offload the parks to hotel operators.
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it’s the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual property rights to the childhood memories of billions of people (including, likely, all of you) and is a reliable, predictable profitable business.
Vanguard
Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, on behalf of 50 million clients (including, likely, many of you).
Ferrari
Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermès sells that many Birkins and Kellys roughly every 2 years, and Rolex moves that many watches every 3 months.
Rolex
Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history!
Costco
Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create incredible company value.
Formula 1
It's also the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million fans globally — a fact that would shock most Americans, who until a recent viral Netflix series had barely heard of it.
The NFL
The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays and holidays too) to watch the world’s most beautiful ballet of violence.
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)
Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or video. Hardly the standard-issue playbook for podcasting success!