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Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with expert founders and investors. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.

ACQ2 by Acquired

The Savannah Bananas have created a whole new sport. It’s baseball, but it’s not. It’s fast-paced, exciting, and incredibly entertaining. For example, if you're batting, and you step out of the batter’s box... it’s a strike. If you bunt, you’re out. If a fan catches a foul ball… you’re also out. Games are capped at two hours with no exceptions. It’s sacrilegious to traditional baseball fans everywhere. But it’s hard to argue with their numbers: they have 3.2 million fans on a waiting list to see them and have been selling out 80,000-seat football stadiums over the past few months!

Today, we sit down with Jesse Cole, founder of the Savannah Bananas and creator of Banana Ball. We unpack the whole story, staring with a failing college summer league team, an air mattress, and a $30 weekly grocery budget. But these days... it's safe to say that Jesse and his wife don’t have to sleep on an air mattress anymore! And they have built the business in their own way, fully under their control, and uniquely “fans first”. They have a unique all-in ticketing model, where your game ticket gets you full access to food along with your seat. There are no ads or sponsorships. There are no ticket fees or middlemen. And in fact, Jesse and crew will even pay the sales tax on your ticket for you! Jesse is just totally obsessed with delighting fans, controlling the end-to-end experience, and thinking long term… even if it means leaving (a lot) of money on the table today.

This may be our most fun ACQ2 (or Acquired!) episode ever. Enjoy!

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

Building the Savannah Bananas (with Jesse Cole, Founder and Owner)

We sit down with Zach Perret, CEO of Plaid, to discuss the remarkable journey of Plaid and the broader fintech landscape over the past several years. Zach takes us blow-by-blow through journey of almost getting acquired by Visa, the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic… which quickly reversed with ZIRP tailwinds, and how Plaid navigated the volatile market conditions to build a diversified business. We explore the company’s strategic pivots, including their expansion into analytics for fraud detection, alternative credit systems, and bank payments. If you’ve ever wondered “how do you turn from one simple product into a more durable business?” this episode is for you.

Links:

Come see Acquired LIVE at Radio City Music Hall • !

Undoing a $5 Billion Acquisition and Building a Durable Standalone Plaid (with Plaid CEO Zach Perret)

We sit down with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott for a masterclass in the art of enterprise sales — a topic where Bill ranks as one of the all-time greats by any measure. Bill started his career as a bag-carrying salesman at Xerox in New York City (alongside Howard Schultz!) back in 1983, and rose to become the company’s youngest corporate officer at age 36 before going on to become CEO of global software giant SAP. Since joining ServiceNow in 2020 Bill has grown the company from $3.5 billion in revenue over $10 billion today, and a nearly $200B market cap — which makes it one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. Whether your job directly involves selling or not (and if you’re a founder, make no mistake — selling is the MOST important part of your job) there’s something here to be learned for everyone. Break out your notebooks and enjoy!

Links:

ServiceNowThe SPIN selling methodBill’s fantastic interview with Ben Thompson on Stratechery

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

The Art of Selling Enterprise Software (with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott)

Vercel has become the infrastructure platform powering modern web development over the past several years, with companies from Stripe to Adobe to Runway all building their front ends on them. Today we’re joined by founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch, who shares why Vercel has been uniquely successful in the fragmented (to say the least!) world of web development platforms. There are now more than 6 million Vercel users, 80,000 active teams, and users have grown 200% year-over-year. The company also crossed $100m in annualized revenue last May, and Guillermo shared with us that they’ve been growing at 80% since, and were recently valued at $3.25 billion.

This is also a particularly interesting moment for Vercel. Last year they launched a new product, “v0”, which lets anyone create and deploy a working website simply by describing it in English and letting AI take care of the rest. Guillermo shares its origin story within the company (and insanely that it reached $2m ARR in the first 14 days!), and how it’s changed their entire thinking about what’s possible now with AI products.

We also cover:

 • How to build a business around an open source project (Next.js)
 • How they balance both being a fast and nimble platform for startups with being a reliable platform for enterprises
 • Guillermo's unconventional approach to staying deeply technical as CEO at scale

Links:

VercelV0.devNext.js

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

Building Web Apps with Just English and AI (with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch)

ARM is an incredibly unlikely story. They were founded in Cambridge, England in 1990 to design a new chip architecture just for low-power devices (like the Apple Newton!), leaving the “serious computing” on desktop and servers to Intel’s x86. Now, nearly three decades later, ARM is the dominant architecture in all of computing today.

ARM is in your phone, your car, data centers, the most advanced AI chips… there are hundreds (or thousands!) of ARM chips you encounter in your everyday life. In this episode, ARM Holdings CEO Rene Haas joins us to tell the story of how ARM become so dominant, weaving through the through the iPod, smartphone, and AI eras. Plus, their wild corporate story of going public, getting bought by SoftBank, going public again, and nearly being acquired by NVIDIA!

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

How ARM Became The World’s Default Chip Architecture (with ARM CEO Rene Haas)

Duolingo has fundamentally changed the landscape of self-guided education, starting with language learning. It is now a $9B publicly traded company in a space where everyone thought you could never build a large and exciting company. We’re joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Luis dives into how learning English was transformative in his personal trajectory and opportunities in his life, inspiring him to create the most successful EdTech product of all time. A few topics in this episode:

 • How Duolingo became a leader in the gamification and mobile-first movements in the early 2010s
 • How the company balances rigorous experimentation with gut instinct to build an app with customer experience at its core
 • The backstory of Duolingo’s “unhinged, yet wholesome” green owl mascot trending on your TikTok feed

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

Why Duolingo Worked (with Luis von Ahn, CEO)

We sit down with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue to understand the current state of the open source AI ecosystem. Hugging Face is the leading platform to host and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications. They also have a compute offering for AI builders to train their models directly on the platform. Clem has a contrarian take on the future: there will not be just a few major foundation model companies with everyone using their APIs. But rather, that thousands of companies will have their own specialized AI models built in-house for their particular use case. It's obviously a very dynamic landscape and we'll have to see how it shakes out, but Clem has a pretty great viewpoint to see it all, working with their 5 million registered Hugging Face users!

Links:

Hugging FaceHugging Face's Series D valuing the company at $4.5 billion

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

Building the Open Source AI Revolution (with Hugging Face CEO, Clem Delangue)

We sit down with legendary quarterback Joe Montana to discuss his transition from one of the greatest athletes of all time to… one of the great venture investors today. Joe shares some of the lessons that he learned winning Super Bowls with the 49ers that he applies to his investing career at Liquid 2 Ventures. Joe also goes into their firm’s strategy and performance, finding and investing in dozens of unicorn startups at the seed and pre-seed stage.

This interview was recorded live at Modern Treasury’s Transfer conference in May 2024.

Acquired’s arena show at Chase Center in San Francisco is just a few weeks away! We hope you can join us. acquired.fm/sf

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

Joe Montana Interview Live from Modern Treasury Transfer

The tenacity required to build Klarna over the last 19 years is astonishing. Despite several headwinds and changes in the payments landscape since founding, Klarna is used today by 150 million consumers globally, processing two million payments a day. Founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski joins us for one of the most honest and thoughtful discussions we’ve ever had on the show. If you’re a business strategy nerd, it’s a great case study in how to leverage the strengths you have as a startup vs. incumbents, and how to compete against other startups in your space. In Klarna's case: the rapid rise of buy-now-pay-later. Sebastian also takes us into the logic of his aggressive AI strategy for cost reduction, product experience, and payments innovation.

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

Building a Disruptive Payments Company (with Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski)

The space industry is one of the most fascinating areas of technology in 2024. The reduction in launch costs and proliferation of satellites make all kinds of new businesses possible. Today we are joined by Austin Link, the co-founder and CEO of Starfish Space (where Ben and PSL Ventures are investors!). Austin lays out the state of the space industry today, particularly as it pertains to startups. He and Ben explore what it takes to build a space company, then gets into the specifics of what Starfish Space is building.

Starfish Space has created a spacecraft to dock with and reposition satellites. This "space servicing" technology enables their customers to extend the usable lifetime of satellites (unlocking tens of millions of dollars in revenue), or safely dispose of aging satellites to avoid space debris. Starfish's product, the "Otter", uses autonomous navigation software and electric propulsion to move through space and dock with customers' satellites.

If you're into physics, outer space, or any sort of "hard tech", tune in! 

Links:

Starfish Space

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com

The Space Industry in 2024, and How to Build a Satellite Company

We are very excited to bring you a special ACQ2 interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Aside from Joe's well-known work as a Golden Globe-nominated, Emmy-award-winning actor in films like 500 Days of Summer, Inception, and Looper, Joe is also the founder of HITRECORD, a startup which brings creative collaborators together across film, music, books, and more.

Ben sat down with Joe to discuss:

 • The creator economy’s focus on the finished product vs. the creative process, and how he thinks about this at HITRECORD
 • The state of the film and TV industry today, amidst the shift to streaming platforms and tech companies as primary distribution channels
 • What it has been like on set playing Travis Kalanick in Showtime’s upcoming “Super Pumped”

Sponsors:

 • Plaid: 
https://plaid.com
Thanks to our good friends at Fika Ventures for setting this conversation up!

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: A Fireside Chat

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