Founders · new episode 19 Oct 2026
Acquired
Hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
The full history of great companies, including who funded them and on what terms.
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Investors named as guests in the most episode titles on Acquired.
Every episode 218 · page 1 of 8
- 218Seinfeld19 Oct 2026 · 3h 50m▶Show page
About this episode
Seinfeld, which ended three decades ago, has been watched by 72 million Americans so far THIS YEAR. Behind that incredible stat is an equally incredible business story: obsessive creators, perfect market timing, an ownership structure that aligned incentives for the long term…all of which created a sitcom that became…
- 217The Home Depot14 Sept 2026 · 3h 35mBernie MarcusRoss Perot▶Show page
About this episode
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. After being unceremoniously fired from their previous hardware chain at ages 48 and 35, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank took the words of their New York banker…
- 216Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire10 Aug 2026 · 4h 33mMichael Eisner▶Show page
About this episode
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. But what followed…
- 215The Walt Disney Company22 Jun 2026 · 4h 31mThe Walt Disney Company▶Show page
About this episode
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…
- 214Vanguard18 May 2026 · 3h 48mFidelity▶Show page
About this episode
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). And yet Vanguard itself is essentially a communist…
- 213Ferrari13 Apr 2026 · 3h 52m▶Show page
About this episode
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. And yet this ultimate luxury…
- 212Rolex5 Mar 2026 · 4h 51m▶Show page
About this episode
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! Their products are comparable to a Hermès Birkin bag in price, luxury status and waitlist times… yet they produce over…
- 211Costco4 Mar 2026 · 2h 53m▶Show page
About this episode
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. For instance: Costco has the cheapest prices of any major retailer in America, and also the…
- 210Formula 12 Mar 2026 · 4h 19m▶Show page
About this episode
Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and, as one of our listeners perfectly put it, the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of…
- 209The NFL27 Jan 2026 · 4h 8m▶Show page
About this episode
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. It generates the most revenue of any sports…
- 20810 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)15 Dec 2025 · 2h 38mGoogle▶Show page
About this episode
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! And yet well over a million smart, curious and exceedingly busy humans…
- 207Coca-Cola24 Nov 2025 · 3h 54mBill GatesMichael OvitzThe Coca-Cola Company▶Show page
About this episode
Coca-Cola is… sugar water. And somehow it’s also America, Christmas, summertime, friendship and happiness. Today we tell the story of how The Coca-Cola Company amazingly transmogrified a beverage into emotion in all of our collective psyches, and ALSO built one of the most incredible scale economy businesses of…
- 206Trader Joe’s27 Oct 2025 · 3h 18mLos Angeles▶Show page
About this episode
Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000+ at normal supermarkets. Their parking lots are famously terrible and they're constantly out of your favorite items. Shoppers brave long…
- 205Google Part III: The AI Company6 Oct 2025 · 3h 56mGoogleDemis HassabisElon Musk▶Show page
About this episode
Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer, the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). They employed nearly all the top AI talent: Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, more or less…
- 204Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)1 Oct 2025 · 1 minBarry DillerChristina CacioppoHoward Schultz▶Show page
About this episode
It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film”, the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, Barry Diller, and cameos from around the Acquired Cinematic Universe including Christina…
- 203Google Part II: Alphabet26 Aug 2025 · 4h 2mGoogle▶Show page
About this episode
In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its next six years from 2005 to 2011, Google built seven (!) more billion+ user products: Gmail, Maps, Drive and Docs, YouTube, Chrome, Android, and…
- 202The Jamie Dimon Interview16 Jul 2025 · 1h 0mBear StearnsRepublic▶Show page
About this episode
We sit down with Jamie Dimon for a live conversation at Radio City Music Hall, covering the incredible journey from his 1998 firing at Citgroup (where he was widely expected to become CEO) to building the most powerful bank in the world. Today JPMorgan Chase is a juggernaut, the most systemically important…
- 201Google Part I: Origins of Search30 Jun 2025 · 3h 29mGoogle▶Show page
About this episode
We tell the story of the single greatest business ever created: Google search. From its origins as a Stanford research project called BackRub, Google became the front door to the internet. Today it’s an essential service for over half the world, and one that generates more profit than ANY other US company, more than…
- 200The Steve Ballmer Interview2 Jun 2025 · 2h 49mSteve BallmerBill Gates▶Show page
About this episode
We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listened to our Microsoft episodes and had some thoughts to share, and boy, did he deliver. Steve takes us point-by-point through the original IBM DOS…
- 199Epic Systems (MyChart)21 Apr 2025 · 3h 47m▶Show page
About this episode
What if we told you that the most important company in US healthcare was run from a farm in rural Wisconsin? And that farm contained the world’s largest subterranean auditorium, as well as Disneyland, style replicas of Hogwarts and the Emerald City? What if we told you that the person who started, runs and owns this…
- 198Indian Premier League Cricket24 Mar 2025 · 4h 18mEd CowanRupert Murdoch▶Show page
About this episode
When you saw this episode pop up in your feed, you either jumped for joy and hit play immediately (in which case you’re not reading this), or you said “Huh. That’s a surprising episode.” Well, if you’re in group two, boy do we have a treat for you! IPL is the fastest-growing, most dynamic and most disruptive force in…
- 197TSMC Founder Morris Chang27 Jan 2025 · 2h 48mJeff Bezos▶Show page
About this episode
We flew to Taiwan to interview TSMC Founder Morris Chang in a rare English interview. In fact, the last long-form video interview we could find was 17 years ago at the Computer History Museum… conducted by the one-and-only Jensen Huang! This episode came about after asking ourselves a version of the Jeff Bezos “regret…
- 196Mars Inc. (the chocolate story)16 Dec 2024 · 3h 44mMintNovo Nordisk▶Show page
About this episode
M&M’s, Snickers, Milky Way, Double Mint, Ben’s Rice, Pedigree, Whiskas, VCA, Banfield… all the brands you know, owned by the company you know nothing about: Mars, Incorporated. And Mars itself is 100% owned and deeply intertwined with the Mars family, who are currently the second wealthiest (and perhaps first most…
- 195IKEA18 Nov 2024 · 3h 13m▶Show page
About this episode
IKEA may be the most singular company we’ve ever studied on Acquired. They’re a globally scaled, $50B annual revenue company with no direct competitors, yet have only ~5% market share. They’re one of the largest retailers in the world, yet sell only their own products. They generate a few billion in free cash flow…
- 194Meta28 Oct 2024 · 6h 11mMark Zuckerberg▶Show page
About this episode
Meta is a company everyone knows (literally, everyone). But, somehow, it’s also a company that few people feel they actually understand. Their products are used by more humans than any other’s in history, almost half of the entire world’s population daily. But… what is Meta? Why do they do what they do? How do they…
- 193Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)30 Sept 2024 · 2h 17mDaniel EkEmily ChangMark Zuckerberg▶Show page
About this episode
Here it is: the complete video of the most unbelievable night of Acquired’s nine-year life… our sold out live show at the Chase Center in San Francisco. We joked during the months (months!) of preparation leading up to this event that it was like planning a wedding for 6,000 Acquired fans, and the guest list included…
- 192The Mark Zuckerberg Interview18 Sept 2024 · 1h 21mMark ZuckerbergDaniel EkEmily Chang▶Show page
About this episode
Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time. At Chase Center on September 10, 2024, he did an unprecedented thing: a live conversation in front of 6,000 people on Meta’s company strategy, sharing stories from early Facebook history, and his thoughts on the future of AI, VR, and AR. Mark was remarkably candid in our…
- 191Chase Center + Summer Update8 Aug 2024 · 22 minMark Zuckerberg▶Show page
About this episode
Summer greetings from Acquired! Two items for this “mini-episode”: Tickets are now available for our live show at Chase Center in San Francisco, with special guests including Mark Zuckerberg (!). The show is Tuesday, September 10th, with doors opening at 5 PM for an hour of mingling with other listeners before the…
- 190Microsoft Volume II22 Jul 2024 · 4h 42mBill Gurley▶Show page
About this episode
In 1999, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world. And in 2019, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world, again . But… what happened in the twenty years in between? The answer, as we discovered in our research, is probably not what you think. In this episode we explore and analyze the…
- 189Starbucks (with Howard Schultz)4 Jun 2024 · 3h 7mHoward SchultzBen Gilbert▶Show page
About this episode
Starbucks. You’d be hard pressed to name any brand that’s more ubiquitous in the world today. With nearly half a billion global customer purchases per week across its stores and 3rd party retail channels, a significant portion of the human population gets their daily fix in the green and white paper cup. (Including…
Who the show talks about
Firms named in its episodes, and people named in descriptions: talked about, rather than on the show.
