The Random Episode: Twitter Commentary and 2019 Survey Feedback 47:57

You know what? I feel like screw it. Let's just try to read our Twitter feeds and give commentary on it. I mean, it could be terrible. We'll listen to it. If it's really terrible, we won't release it. But I don't know. It could be fun. Totally. Totally. Let's do it. And listeners, if you do it live, if you are hearing this, then it means we decided to to ship it. Yeah. LPs. We had a.

Really, really good idea for episode today. And that really, really good idea is what David just said. We are going to not read our tweets exactly, but scroll through Twitter and discuss things that jump out at us, whether they are tech startup related or not.

maybe it's just some memes that we really like. And then toward the end of this episode, we are going to dive into listener feedback from the survey. We had a, a good number of folks say that they wanted to know what some of the results were, not only of sort of who listens to the show, but, uh,

If people feel the same way that you do about subjects such as, is it better to have guests? Is it better for us to be alone? Do we like our long episodes? Do we like short episodes? I wouldn't say any of the results were surprising because we keep a pretty good finger on the pulse from having Slack. But I think there's some interesting data in there that's probably, if you like Acquired as much as we do, if you're interested in Acquired, you might like hearing some of that. So we'll dive into that at the end of the episode. Let's do it.

All right, David, what's the first tweet in your feed right now? So the first tweet in my feed is that Dan Lee liked acquired podcast tweet

about the Google Maps episode. Oh, that is sterile. I know. That is boring. I love Dan Lee. I know. Dan is great. Dan's a good friend. Where's Madrona? Our former colleague at Madrona. I have Marques Brownlee, MKBHD, says uploading dot dot dot. So he must be uploading a new YouTube video 13 minutes ago. He's got close to 1,000 likes.

I'm pumped. I love MKBHD. And as Ben and I have been chatting about, we need to do a revisit of YouTube. We were kicking around for fun the idea of like, maybe we should reach out to MKBHD and see if he wants to join us as a guest on the give the creator perspective when we redo YouTube on Acquired. It'd be Acquired's first influencer.

Yeah, seriously. He is great. And I'm sure he would be actually really smart. Gadget reviewer, amazing Frisbee player. He'd be great. All right, here's Brian Beauches. Why do people say let's talk offline during an in-person meeting?

Oh, tech isms. There's like a whole laundry list of, uh, of like just horrific, cringeworthy things that people say in meetings that you're like, I look, I know that it was cool to say, let's double click on this in Microsoft in the late nineties. But the fact that we're still talking about it today and still using that lingo is just awful.

Oh, man. Oh, man. Yeah, that's funny. As I was scrolling through looking for my next tweet to talk about, I saw the same tweet that you had liked. Clearly, I haven't logged into Twitter in a while.

I think I may only follow you, the acquired account in our portfolio companies. But no, here we go. This is from, I think a like from my friend Connor Miervold at Uber. Sahil Lavindia says, first time founders care most about product. Second time founders care most about distribution. I think that's a Justin Kahn quote.

Maybe. And Sahil, is that SHL? Is that his Twitter handle? Yes, that is him. I could be wrong and that could actually be a Sahil quote. But yeah, Sahil founded Gumroad. He wrote that insane blog post about... His next tweet in the thread is Justin Kahn beat me to it. Ah, got it. He had that unbelievable, like really...

emotional post about his journey from Gumroad being the hot it company to being the godforsaken lifestyle business. Obviously, that's great and fine, but it requires a very different capital structure and sort of the painful process of going through what it is to transform from one type of business into another there. And it's been interesting. Actually, he's been super insightful and has been really back on the social media map

I guess it sounds gross saying it, but like I've seen a lot more of his stuff recently and it's, you know, really, really insightful. Yeah.

I would disagree slightly with his and or Justin's tweet here, though. I think one thing we've seen on Acquired is like both matter. The obvious answer is both matter. But like Google Maps, right? Like it took both an incredible product innovation of the map being front and center as the UI for interacting with it and all the things you can do with that.

and like Where To and Keyhole and ZipDash wouldn't have been able to make it on their own. They needed to be part of Google and have Google's distribution to really become mainstream. Yeah, and if I had to like...

for the quote here, I would say, of course you need to have both. I don't think that's what the quote is saying. It's that the sort of naive obvious thing is that you need to have a great product and the thing that is... If you build it, they will come. Yeah, like if you're the average consumer, all you see is a great product showed up at my doorstep and then what do you do when you go to start a company? You try and make a great product because that was the thing that showed up at your doorstep. But the hard thing is like figuring out how did they manage to find me and put it on my doorstep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Also, my buddy Jake Eiding, who runs Revenue Cat, just tweeted, just bought an indoor phone booth AMA. Oh, man. We just bought some of those, too. The question is, how long is the thread after that? Not very... Well, he's responding to himself, but it doesn't look like many other people have responded to him. Oh, sad. Yeah.

Yeah, indoor phone booths. Who would have thought that would be a thing in 2019? But it is like the thing. A thing showed up in my Instagram feed the other day that was an indoor tent. Has this been advertised to you at all? It's basically like a way to put a tent in your living room. I have seen a...

essentially an indoor tent as like a sauna that you can create a, create a sauna in a room that you have. That sounds cool to me, but this is the, you're talking about like this is, this is like, we have a density problem and certain cities are not building enough housing and, Oh, for people to live in. I'm pretty sure. Like, I think the, the like, uh,

more docile use case of that would be like oh you have a friend staying with you and all you have is a living room and you sort of want them to have some privacy but like no it's like a it's like a tent you can't quite stand in it but you can kind of I mean it's like how to go camping in your friend's living room okay that seems crazy to me yeah yeah

Okay, my next tweet related to this. The first rule of Burning Man must be tell everyone you're going to Burning Man. Ah, tis that time of year again. Have you ever been to Burning Man, Ben? I have not. Me neither. I have not been to Burning Man. I don't think I'm ever going to go. But friend of the show, Jake Saper, is a big burner. That's right. That's right. I doubt he's there right now because he just became a dad. Ah, congratulations, Jake. Yeah, big shout out to Jake. Big congrats.

No, I met with him last year, though, like the week afterward, and he seemed very at peace with the world. I would go. I would totally go. I just like, it's never quite worked out in my life schedule to do it. But like, I would not hang up the hat the way that you have and say, I doubt I'll ever go. Ha ha.

I do think because you and I are talking about it on this show. I want you to go so I can hear about it from you. That's what I want. It's probably jump the shark. Like if I am considering going, like there's a Burning Man that we don't know about somewhere happening right now that is where you, where it really is. Where you really want to be. And the fact that we don't know it and we're not talking about it on the show is the reason where it's where it's at. Yeah.

So listeners, if you know where the next Burning Man is going to be, write to Ben, tell him, and then he can tell me about it. Yeah. Yeah. But I promise I won't say it on the show if that's holding you back from letting me know about it. Okay. Here's a ridiculous one. Man, this is like the Dan Lee episode. Dan tweeted, huh, is the first link on the Forbes menu really billionaires or have I been reading too many articles about rich people? And he tweeted a screenshot and like, sure enough, in the Forbes top menu, he

The topics are billionaires, innovation, leadership, money. Like, what? That sounds... I'm going to Forbes right now to confirm. Why is billionaires its own... Is it like this is... Well, they have the richest people in the world list. Oh my God, it actually is. Yeah, billionaires, innovation, leadership, money, consumer, industry, lifestyle. It's like all the normal sections they've pushed to the right and the first navigation thing is billionaires.

Maybe that's because Burning Man is coming out. Yeah, something like that. I think there are a lot of billionaires that go. Obviously, they're not billionaires there because you give up all your money to...

Yeah.

The amount of research that we do for the show, plus day-to-day reading that we do, plus, you know, carve-outs that we have. Anyway, it's concerning. I'm going to take an aside from your aside. Are you still a completionist on Twitter? No. If you don't know, Ben was, for many years, you read every single tweet in your timeline. Ten years. Yeah. Wow. I think maybe nine years, something like that, but basically until the 2016 election. Yeah.

And that was actually, I used third-party Twitter clients that would maintain your place because I hated that like the Twitter client would snap you to the top. It became impossible to stay caught up and have a job. And so I switched to the Twitter app to use their sort of like machine learning based summarization of in case you missed it. I have succumbed to the platform and changed my behavior to what they wanted rather than what the platform let you do by being extensible six, seven years before. Yeah.

This might be why the stock is up this year. Could be. Could be. Yeah, Twitter's had a nice comeback. So has Snapchat. Okay, but this billionaire's tangent I want to go on. So Brian Koppelman made this really interesting point that one of the reasons he made billions is that in the last decade, maybe two, Western culture has become fascinated with billionaires. He was like, I really want to explore that concept because I can't

I don't myself understand these people, how they got created, what motivates them. And he has this really great line that's, that was a billionaires are the closest thing that we have to nation states, that they're really more like kings than they are people. Their feet don't have to touch the ground if they don't want to.

he goes on this really descriptive, interesting tangent of it's, it's largely informed by his sort of dramatized understanding of Bobby Axelrod and billions, but is fascinating to sort of explore the concept or hear him explore the concept. What has shifted in Western culture and such that we have this sort of like near religious fascination where we look up to billionaires. Does he have any conclusions about like what I feel like that didn't used to be the case? Yeah.

I'm trying to remember if there are any conclusions. This is basically the Ultra Carvouts episode. The one thing that he did point out that I thought was interesting is that more attention is paid to wealthy people than sports stars or musicians. Being rich makes you as famous as entertaining, which I think is sort of...

I don't know. Like, was that true in the era of Carnegie and Leland Stanford and those guys? I don't, I mean, I don't know, but I don't think so. There were always like the society columns and whatnot in newspapers. I feel like a lot of this has to do with the rise of startups and like entrepreneurship and like the cult of the entrepreneur over the last few years. Oh yeah. Like when the, when the social network came out and sort of like made a,

made startups sexy. I was thinking about this a lot as long as we're on this rabbit hole. When the Bezos divorce happened, I don't know if we talked about this on the LP show. We didn't talk about this, but you and I talked about it. We were on a run. Yeah. That like really rocked my world. Like I totally idolized Jeff Bezos. Like he's a, he and his ex-wife Mackenzie are Princeton alums. Jenny and my wife are Princeton alums. We met at Princeton. Like, you know, and I thought like he had achieved like all of this stuff and he did, you know,

many, many great things. And then I was like,

Who knows what the true details were, but it appears like he was cheating on his wife of 25 years and mother of his four children with someone else. And it's just like, that's gross. I mean, on the one hand, it's a reminder like, hey, he's a human too, like everybody else is a human. But on the other hand, it's like, that's really gross, you know? Yeah. I mean, it makes you acutely aware of your own hero worship where I think we all think like, I'm sane and level-headed and I don't overly have...

hero worship or I don't turn people into gods in my head and put them on a pedestal. But like we, we all do. I mean, I think like I used to wear shirts with Steve jobs quotes around and I think, you know, uh, we're as guilty as anyone else is of, of, uh,

And actually, like, we should talk about this a little bit. Like, on this show, the amount of reverence that we have for some of these founders that built these incredible companies that we talk about, we build a monument to them, an hour and a half long audio monument to the incredible things that these... We don't necessarily always say they can do no wrong. I mean, we did the Uber episode, but, like, it is worth acknowledging that on this show...

We build people into temples and we're contributing to this phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah. And society is obsessed with doing that. It's the turning people into brands. I don't know if it's happening more than it used to or if the Internet has accelerated that or social media has accelerated that. But it sure feels like business leaders are brands in a much larger way than they used to.

We want to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading trust management platform. Vanta, of course, automates your security reviews and compliance efforts. So frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance and monitoring, Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple.

Yep, Vanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time here on Acquired. Jeff Bezos, his idea that a company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste better, i.e. spend your time and resources only on what's actually going to move the needle for your product and your customers and outsource everything else that doesn't. Every company needs compliance and trust with their vendors and customers.

It plays a major role in enabling revenue because customers and partners demand it, but yet it adds zero flavor to your actual product. Vanta takes care of all of it for you. No more spreadsheets, no fragmented tools, no manual reviews to cobble together your security and compliance requirements. It is one single software pane of glass.

that connects to all of your services via APIs and eliminates countless hours of work for your organization. There are now AI capabilities to make this even more powerful, and they even integrate with over 300 external tools. Plus, they let customers build private integrations with their internal systems.

And perhaps most importantly, your security reviews are now real-time instead of static, so you can monitor and share with your customers and partners to give them added confidence. So whether you're a startup or a large enterprise, and your company is ready to automate compliance and streamline security reviews like

Like Vanta's 7,000 customers around the globe. And go back to making your beer taste better. Head on over to vanta.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. And thanks to friend of the show, Christina, Vanta's CEO, all acquired listeners get $1,000 of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired.

Oh, I have a tweet, not in my timeline, but this is great and super relevant to Acquired that Jenny sent to me this weekend and was like, this is interesting. It was a tweet storm, I don't remember from exactly when, about the issue of plagiarism on podcasts or attribution. And I was like, oh, wow.

We should really think about that at Acquired. And in this specific case, the author was at Sleet, I think, and had written a piece about the original welfare queen, a big research piece he did. And then somebody did a podcast. They basically just took his article that he'd written several years ago and turned it into podcast form and then didn't cite him at all. And he got really angry about that.

justifiably so but then I was like oh wow like we don't there's no good way to kind of cite your sources on podcasting at least at least not in the audio format and yeah it's like we try as much as we can to say like oh this great you know thing that I read you know when it's when it's like a comprehensive breakdown of something or something and we we link to stuff in the show notes but it's not like you can throw little parenthetical citations after every sentence yeah yeah so it got me thinking about like yeah what what should we do I mean

at the very least, I think what we should do, and I think it would be helpful to listeners too, is just keep track of all our sources as we're researching and then just link to all of them in the, in the show notes going forward. Um, but even that requires like a bunch of overhead on our, on our parts. Um, so yeah, I don't know what the right, uh, what the right answer is. It feels like we should do something, uh, just exactly what I don't know. And, and Lord, I would hate to be in a

scenario where but I could also see like somebody you know accusing us to quiet of like hey you guys like just you know grab my stuff and like we always use multiple sources that acquired and try and do as much deep research as we can and don't cut take shortcuts but I can also see that argument so I think it's it's really interesting but that's not the norm in pot like I don't know any podcast that like cite their sources so to speak and

Yeah, listeners, if you know of podcasts that do this particularly well and make that tradeoff of sort of creating overhead versus being sure to really pay homage to all the sort of creators that came before, DM David or I in Slack or email us at AcquiredFM at gmail.com. It'd be really interesting to figure out like, you know, as the podcasting industry matures, what's the right thing to do here?

I got one. This is exciting. I have this Instapapered. And yes, I still use Instapaper. Actually, maybe we should do a whole episode about our own productivity stacks. I don't know if that's interesting to people, but...

Tim Urban just published The Story of Us, which is a new Wait But Why series that just launched today. And it looks from this little goofy graphic like it's about humans and sort of starting with what this goofy graphic depicts as cavemen and torches and fire. I don't know if you've read a lot of the Wait But Why stuff, but at some point I binged all of it. And it's some of the best, I mean...

All writing is on the internet, so you can't say the best writing on the internet. But it is like, for people who like this show, I would imagine if you haven't read Wait But Why, you will lose many, many hours or days to diving into that site. And not just like the Elon Musk stuff, like the number of weeks left in your life and the 10 types of single 30-year-old dudes and all the different... So, okay, I have a question for you on this. So I went down the Wait But Why rabbit hole...

I don't know, some number of months or years ago. I don't remember now. I thought it was awesome. And then I subscribed to get new articles by email and I almost like never get one. And so I'm not, I'm not sure if either like Tim jokes about how he never-

Yeah, how he's been on a long break, how he takes forever to get stuff out. And I'm like, are my email filters capturing this? Or is Tim not writing? Or both? When was the last time you saw a new one? It's been a while, maybe a year or two. I mean, was it a SpaceX or an Elon Musk related one? Because my massive binge was probably four years ago, right around there. Yeah. And I think maybe three. Probably two or three years ago for me, maybe three years ago. Yeah. I don't know.

Maybe he's been researching for this one. Yeah, maybe. Look forward to reading it. Okay, I've got one that is interesting, but also makes me think of another diversion to talk about. Cyan Bannister at Founders Fund tweets, we need to teach younger people how to be anti-fragile. Great, seems good. But it reminds me, both the quote and Cyan reminds me of... How do you define anti-fragile? I read the book.

My recollection of the definition is with stress on the system, you get stronger, not weaker.

I think that's how I define it. And that makes me think of Cyan's new partner at Founders Fund, Keith Raboy. He's been on a couple of great podcasts on Invest Like the Best and 20 Minute VC, maybe another one recently too. He recommends this book that I haven't read yet, but I love his summary of the book, which is called The Upside of Stress. And what he's saying is that people think of stress as like

bad and they try and avoid it. But the book says, and he believes that stress is actually really good because when you're stressed, you're learning and you're growing. And like people think that when they're stressed, it'll like take years off their life and like all this, but it's actually the opposite that like when you're stressed, you're engaged in something and you're moving forward. And as long as you're like making progress, then it's actually like really good for you overall. I'm sure there's like a happy medium you want to find here, but I think that's really interesting, especially like in the last, uh,

two years building Wave here, like I've definitely both felt more stress than I've ever been in my life and like feeling like I've grown more than I have at any other point in my life, at least professionally. This reminds me of a great text that my uncle sent me

So when I sort of stepped out of my day-to-day at PSL for, it was close to a year, about 10 months, to take the interim CEO role at Taunt, which is an esports company that spun out of PSL a few years ago. It's super cool. It's a current instantiation is a Twitch extension that helps people who are watching Twitch streams be more engaged with streamers and sort of play games and contests with other people who are watching the stream at the same time. And I remember being under more stress

And feeling more pressure to do things that, frankly, were above my skill level at the time. And not only above my skill level, but were all brand new things that I'd never had to do before.

One thing that helped a lot was I was doing Calm every morning because I would see my email inbox and then get all wound up. And that was actually an amazing way to clear my head before heading into the day. But I remember talking to my uncle about this and he's a super accomplished dude and was telling me, he just kind of smiled and he was like, yeah, this is good. This is good. It's important to be pressure tested. What I thought I was going to get was like a much more like...

hey, you'll be okay. Like, do we need to, do you need to do something? Do you need to make a change? And his demeanor was just, no, like, this is good. You need to do this. I think about that a lot when there's like an opportunity to do something bigger and scarier than,

what you feel would be comfortable or not even comfortable, like a notch or two beyond comfortable where you're like, okay, this is like a normal amount of pressure. Like if you have the opportunity to go a few notches beyond that, like it's good to be pressured to happen. Like, yeah. Well, I mean, that's the only way you learn and grow is, is, you know, maybe this is what say Anne was getting out in her tweet of is by stretching yourself and it's not comfortable in the moment.

Yeah. Should we bump over to talking about feedback from our survey? Yeah, I want to do one more and then we'll do that. So there was a piece this weekend, Sunday. Yeah, it's in the Sunday Business edition of The New York Times. Massive, full page, really cool graphic of it looks like a lot of self-driving cars wrecking into each other and blowing up.

And it's by Mike Isaac. And the piece is titled How Uber Got Lost.

And I haven't read the tweet. I'm pretty sure I read this. Yeah? I think I did. You can talk about that when I'm done because I haven't read a lick of it, so I won't even be able to... If you describe it, I won't be able to tell you if it's correct or not. The newsworthy event to me is that Dara tweeted, keeping this will be fun proving much of it wrong. And that is the first time I have seen Dara...

be sort of like, I hesitate to say wartime CEO, but act a little Travis-like, like a little, I mean, his whole demeanor, we talked about this a lot on the Uber episode, his whole stance and public persona until this point has been very like,

It's okay. The fires are put out. We're a great company. We embrace everyone. You know, the market's huge. There's, we're doing great. And not like, I'm very curious if there will be a, if this sort of changes the way that he, uh,

messages himself to the world. It's not the tame executive that we all sort of have been seeing. So I did read this piece and I don't recall the specific vignettes or claims in it, but look, like we talked about in the Uber episode, we did.

Uber is a complex story and there was for sure. Yeah. That's an understatement of the episode. Uh, and there's for sure a lot of bad there, but like, there's a lot of good there too. And like at Wabano, like I'm on the board of a company started and founded by former Uber people. They are wonderful people. Like there are a lot of really, really great people who were really bought into the mission, who worked really hard there, who are still there and who have left. And like,

The narrative and I, you know, I think, you know, to call out Mike in particular at the New York Times, like, I feel like the media has just been hammering on all of these people, Travis included, you know, sometimes rightly, but a lot of times wrongly, like these people are not evil. Like they're good people, like not all of them, but a lot of them are.

Yeah. I mean, of course, of course. It's just, I was just flipping through the art of this article here. And like, there's a one, uh, uh, one quote about like the New York office had developed a toxic bro culture and it's like, well, yeah, maybe some people there, but not all of the people there. Like I know people from the New York office. They're not toxic bros. Like, yeah, it's my defense of the day. Uber is a complex company. My only point being I'd kill to be sort of in the thought process of, uh,

how do we change Dara's PR plan to this sort of, of, of about face? Or is it literally just he's eating breakfast on Sunday morning and is like, come on, this pisses me off. Like I gotta say something. And like, boy, if they pull a rabbit out of a hat, that's going to be a fun thing to quote tweet later in the future and, uh, and show the world. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about your feedback. My feedback. Oh, listeners feedback. No, listeners feedback. I'm like, I don't know.

David, this is not like a 360 review here. I would love it. We should do reviews of each other. That'd be great. That sounds terrible to me. That does sound terrible. Let's not do that. All right. Should we go through question by question here on the survey? Yeah, let's do it. Awesome. So how old are you?

So our first question, the largest category with just over a third is 29 to 35 year olds. And the second 30% is 23 to 28. So a lot of sort of post-college. And then about 10%, 36 to 40. I mean, is this a silly way to do this? Reading tabular data over the air? Yeah. I think the point is two thirds of you are between the ages of 23 and 35.

That's a nice way to put that. Interesting. Yeah, 1.2% that were over 61%.

That's great. Some of this is on acquired.fm slash audience. If you're curious to get sort of more of the breakdown. What is your highest level of education? 50.4% of you have a bachelor's degree. This is amazing. Over almost a full third have a master's degree or an MBA. And then over 6% have a PhD. Yeah.

So, man, we have a highly educated audience. This is great. We do have a highly educated audience. This is kind of a silly question. Like, I don't, I think we'll take this off next time. Like, I don't, what are we going to do with this information?

feel bad about our SAT scores. Yeah, no kidding. We should just directly ask that next time. Yeah. All right. Of the 80 plus acquired episodes, how many have you listened to? 19% of you said every episode, which I mean, I'm sure like if you're willing to take on the survey, there's some selection bias there, but I got a crack out of that.

That was great. Thank you for all of those of you who have. Largest segment is 16 to 40 episodes, which is a large segment. Maybe I should break that down further next time. Some of this is an artifact of me not changing the survey in a couple years. Rather than going through every question here, let's pick out the interesting stuff here. Yeah. I have the next few questions summarized nicely on the Acquired Audience page, so I'll just read them. 61% work at a tech company.

39% work at a privately funded startup. 33% are currently or have been founders. And this is an interesting one to me. That's amazing. Totally a third of our audience. Yep. 73% of those who are not a founder aspire to be a founder someday.

So like, what does that leave? What's 73% of 66%? I'm wrong. Not 73%. Listen to Ben do math on the air. This is what you're paying for. I was like, what are you going for here? You want 27% of 66%. So 18% have never been a founder and do not want to be a founder. Everyone else either is or does. I thought that was crazy. Yeah.

Yeah, that's amazing. Good for you guys. Go for it. Do it. That's what I have to say. You're incentivized to say that. Well, I am incentivized to say that, but I also, having founded something like, if you have a dream and you want to do it, it's like the old best time to plant a tree. You know, the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago. The next best time is today. Ooh, I like that.

All right. If you work at a privately held startup, what stage is it? The biggest segment, which I thought was interesting, was unfunded or bootstrapped at 25%. After that, I put like, I think, angel funded, institutional seed, series A, B, C, or growth. Everything was basically evenly divided after that. I don't know exactly what to read into that, but I was just sort of curious, like,

Is it a whole bunch of people working at early stage stuff? Is it people that are working at quote unquote startups but are no longer startups? But it's pretty across the board.

This one, I'm going to move to the other chart because this one's a disaster. Which best describes your job? I think this is the most interesting data that we got back from the survey. 18, 19%, I can't exactly read my chart, are engineers. 19%, yeah. By far our biggest group of the audience. Yeah. The second highest is product managers at 11.5%.

Executive leadership, right around 10%. And on down from there, strategy, non-VC banking or finance, student, venture capital just above 5%. Which if you extrapolate over, our whole audience means that over 1,000 venture capitalists listen to this show, which is bananas. I think that's all of them.

It's been a growth industry over the last few years. That's true. It ain't the 90s anymore. Yeah. But I think it's a really interesting data point that close to 30%, or maybe 30%, so close to a third are engineering or product management. Yeah. Yeah.

What's actionable about this for us is that we're not going to shy away from continuing to be to sort of flirt with the line of technical on the show. I think there's always risk that we get like financing in a way that doesn't come across well on the air. Like you can't really read numbers on the air and have that be an interesting way to absorb information. Kind of like we're doing now. Yeah.

Uh, uh, yeah, maybe we should, maybe we should take another look at whether we're releasing this episode or not. The, um, uh, but I do think like one of the things that I love doing is when we get to like explore technical details of how companies got started and what the little niche was that they exploited and why that was technically interesting at the time. And I think what the, the audience numbers say to me is we should keep doing that because it's an audience that's very receptive to that.

Favorite episodes from the last two seasons. I'll pause for a minute, listeners, so you can sort of like guess in your heads what these might be. I'm looking at the bar chart myself. All right. Number one, the most favorite episode. And of course, this was right before Superhuman. So that episode was not eligible for voting. Was Netflix part one. Yeah. Closely followed by Netflix part two and the Uber IPO.

We talk often on the show about like once we're done with an episode and a couple of weeks go by, it's like it never happened in our brains. You know, like we retain like an after image of it, but none of the... Hopefully, and this is the whole...

point of the show we learned some lessons from from doing it but uh i don't remember that much about the netflix episode but yeah people everyone loves it which is great i was very surprised i blacked out for most of it but uh data looks good so i thought i thought that um uh

In my mind, the Uber and Lyft episodes were like, I thought they would be way higher than anything else. But it's probably just recency bias. Yeah, there were a bunch there sort of around, not quite at that level, but a little bit below. We should first say, if any of you were guests on these episodes and you're listening to this one, don't feel bad. I think it's more the topic of

than anything. So we, we think you were a great guest. It is amazing to me how low, uh, or how few people said that the smaller companies were some of their favorite episodes. So like, even though I deeply, deeply enjoyed doing the Sonos IPO, uh, the recode acquisition, um, the B hands acquisition, we didn't really do any small companies in the last episode, but like the, the, some of those season three, um, smaller companies, smaller relative to Uber, uh,

Less people reported those being some of their favorites. And I think... Yeah, or like Electronic Arts, which is obviously a big company, but smaller than some of these others recently. Yeah, that was probably around the middle of the pack. I thought that was so great. I love spending time with Trip. And of course, it's Trip not being a household name, but basically invented the video game publishing industry. And so it's interesting looking at this data. I think we were on a path to covering more

mostly bigger companies anyway, but it's really clear what folks sort of like six to 12 months later and sticks in their head as, oh my God, that was an amazing episode. Now, what this doesn't mean is like, we're going to stop doing those, you know, smaller acquisitions that have really great stories or really great guests. Like, I don't want to do that at all. And maybe we'll do more of those on the LP show instead of the main show. The data speaks for itself. Why do you like listening to Acquired? Acquired.

David, this one, all the credit goes to you. The biggest category is definitely the history and fact storytelling is interesting. But right after it is the analysis is insightful. And I feel like that mostly goes to you. Yeah.

Well, thank you. I think it goes to both of us. I think we have a good partnership here on Acquired. Me too. The funny thing about this question was lots of people wrote stuff in. Yeah. And the way Google Forms works, all of the write-ins get kind of cut off, so we get the first couple words. Yeah, I'd have to go over to the spreadsheet to see. But there's funny stuff. This person said the reason they like the show is the catchphrases.

This person said it was because of the high quality audio, which thank you. I've obsessed over that quite a bit. Ben has put a lot of work into that. There's one option that's I know Ben or David personally that we put in for folks that like we've recommended it to personally. This person wrote, I wish I knew Ben or David personally. Yes. Hey, just hit us up in Slack. It's true.

It's true. Let's go on to the next one. How did you find out about Acquired? By far, the biggest is a friend or a coworker told me about it. So we've been thinking about this a little bit. And by thinking about it, we mean we know we need to think about it. We haven't actually thought about it yet.

acquired has like a, I hesitate to say network effect, but a little bit of a virality, a lot of virality within companies. Like we've been trying to think about like, we hear about this all the time. It's like, yeah, if we covered a company, people in the company are sharing with each other. Even if we didn't like it, it becomes sort of like,

book club in a way. Yeah. Somebody in a company starts listening, tells their coworkers and next thing you know, a bunch of people are listening. Which there's a mixed blessing here because it's frigging awesome that you guys tell your friends. Let me take a step back. There is this thing in the creative process where you get too close to the work and then you have no idea if it's good. And that happens to me a lot with Acquired. And like, it's not like we're painting here. When I say the creative process, like

It's a business tech finance show, but there is an amount of like, especially in the storytelling and figuring out what research makes the show, what doesn't, how we want to reveal information, you know, how we structure the analysis, all this stuff is a creative act. I think there's this thing that happens to me every single time we release an episode, David, where we put it out and I go...

this could very well be garbage. Like I have no idea. I really hope it's not garbage. Like we listened to it. We sanity checked it. We edited it. Maybe we had someone else listen to it. Um, but I always, every single time have this fear. Like we just produced absolute shit and put it out in the world. This is the beginning. Yeah.

Which this episode well could be. Well, you know what? I'm glad we're doing this episode because I think we've talked about this too. Well, in the early days of Acquired, it was so much easier to just... By the way, are you wearing a Stratechery t-shirt? I am. That's amazing.

It was so easy to... You know, we could just experiment with all sorts of stuff and we did all the time. But then as it's gotten bigger, it's... You know, I feel... You feel the pressure and it gets harder to experiment. So, like, I'm sure this episode is crap, but...

But like, is there something listeners LPs tell us? Is there something interesting in here that if we refined it further, like you would like to hear more of this on a regular basis. And that's the reason to keep experimenting. It's kind of funny. Like we're doing this in this like weird one way audio medium and we're trying to like solicit feedback. It's like, oh, if only there was a better way.

I think it's like, it's kind of a kooky, uh, it's like here, we're going to, let's walk through this process. We're going to create a show and we're going to ask you questions and then we're going to stop recording. We're going to edit it and like produce it. And then we're going to release it. And we're going to ask you to open up this application that you have called Slack and then direct message us in that to be able to interact many days later. It's a ridiculous anyway.

So I was saying... Not to mention that we're talking about questions that we asked you on the show that you went to a Google form and filled out. It's too meta. I can't handle it. So I was saying it's a mixed blessing that...

32.1% of people, which is the highest category, said they found out about Acquired because a friend or coworker told them about it. So freaking awesome that folks are talking about it with friends and coworkers. As a lot of you know, as we've talked about, our goals in making this show, none of it involves generating income from it. And so we always try and pour money back into making the show better, growing, whatever it is.

It's really hard to invest in growing the audience when the best way that the audience grows is this way. Like if the number one way was I saw an advertisement on Facebook that was well targeted and the creative was exactly what I wanted at exactly the right time. And so I, you know, I clicked and then I subscribed to my podcast player. Then I'd be like, awesome. I can go pour all the dollars into that, but I can't. And this is, this is like a, you know,

this forces us to be more creative and figuring out how do we leverage this, you know, observable thing that's happening with our audience that they're telling us this is how they found out about the show into more growth. Yeah. So we're thinking about it. Live shows at companies like, uh, we're thinking about it. Yeah. How would you solve it? I mean, that's an interesting, like if you were a podcast marketer sort of knowing this information, um,

you know, it's kind of an interesting thing to think about. Okay. What type of episodes do you like better? The vast majority of people, not vast majority, almost 60% of people said they like both episodes with just Ben and me and with guests equally. But if people who had a preference, the majority of people with a preference preferred just us and no guests. Yep. Three to one, which yeah, I understand, you know, like it's so great to have guests and,

but it is, it's harder. Like we, we, we feel more pressure. We're less relaxed when we're in front of guests. And it's also hard. Like we're not, we're not Kara Swisher. We're not journalists. We don't view our job as to like ask the hard hitting questions. We view our job as to like help a guest tell a story. And sometimes guests are really good at telling stories and sometimes they're, you know, not as good. And sometimes we develop a relationship where like,

halfway through the episode, we feel like we can ask the gotcha questions, but sometimes we don't. And yeah, it, you know, we always run that risk. So I totally get it. We're not going to stop having guests there because I think when we have a great guest, even if, even if the rapport isn't there, like sometimes you can just get stuff that you can't get otherwise. Um,

This is one. A friend asked me to add this because we've had a constant debate over, you know, can you shorten the episodes? They're getting long. You know, this Uber two-hour extravaganza. Like, I feel like I just went to the movies. So we asked, what length of episode do you prefer? So we broke it into four. Yeah, about two hours was one category. About an hour, 20. About an hour and then less than 40 minutes. So sort of like the quick take format. And

very few people wanted that. It's like 5% wanted episodes less than 40 minutes and a full 27% of people wanted the two hour episodes. And so I feel validated that, that there's some large group of people that want the large, uh, the really long ones. Another 26% want hour long episodes. And then the largest group of people is, uh, about an hour 20. So the interesting takeaway here is two thirds of people want an hour 20 or longer. So, uh,

I think that we will keep doing. We will keep letting each episode run its natural course. Yeah. There's basically no information in this. Do you find the Slack interesting or useful question? Yeah. I mean, most people are not yet in the Slack. If you're not in the Slack, you should join the Slack. There's actually really great stuff going on there.

Real quick, before we call it on this experimental episode, in kind of the narrative responses, there are a couple themes that came out. Let's see. That would be interesting to talk about that we've talked about. And before we do that, I should say we have an NPS of 78. So I feel pretty good about that. Yeah. Great. Thank you all. Maybe some bias in the people who actually respond. Totally. But isn't it always the case with NPS? Yes.

I guess, I mean, a biblical rule of NPS is like, I think there's two that we violated here. One is you're supposed to ask people, like, I think we were biased at the time that we asked people and we also were biased in that we asked people for their personal information. So of course it's going to skew higher.

One of the big takeaways from the feedback is that we totally appreciate and thank you guys for is just that like, we have license to kind of do more. Like, if you hadn't noticed, we've been slowly broadening the show over time from acquisitions that went well to acquisitions in general to acquisitions and IPOs to then, you know, occasionally telling just...

stories. And you may have noticed in our recent episodes, we've changed the description of the show in the intro to we tell the stories of great technology companies. So we're going to keep doing that, whether that's acquisitions, IPOs, public companies, private companies, wherever there's a good story, we're going to try and find it. I'm really glad that we got that, you know, that folks felt comfortable sort of telling us that because one of my big fears, and you always see this with

companies that have a killer insight originally and then get sort of muddier and muddier and muddier until they don't stand for anything anymore. My biggest fear was that we were doing that and that we sort of like ran out of standard acquired episodes to do. And so we sold out and did, you know, something different and more mass market. And it's so clear that we're not doing that. And it turns out what the majority of folks seem to like about the show is that

But the way that we tell stories and the way that we draw conclusions from it and the way that that company went through a transaction is not the relevant bit. I seriously got to go because I'm late for dinner. All right, dude. LPs, it's been great. Thanks for taking the time as always. Talk to you. Likewise.