Sequoia's burned cigarettes ethos reshaped Acquired during the 2022 crash
“We interviewed Doug Leone, who was one of the two stewards of Sequoia. He told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund, every other venture firm out there after the bubble popped were taking mulligan funds. And he said, the best line anyone's ever said on Acquired, he said, we looked at each other and you could burn cigarettes on our arms and we wouldn't flinch. And they spent the next like five years, they didn't raise another fund.”
Founder control beats enterprise value maximization
“Founder Control was a huge one. We sought some advice and we went to one of the best investors ever. He sort of sat there and he thought a minute and he said, I have seen so many founders become trapped in prisons of their own making, in their own companies. You guys have avoided that fate, don't go down that road.”
Berkshire's too hard pile freed Acquired from Hollywood
“Berkshire, we learned so many things from. We got really obsessed with the circle of confidence, that it's okay to have a giant too hard pile. There's a bunch of things that I'm not intelligently saying no to. It's basically admitting that like our opportunity cost is so high, like the things that we say yes to are so awesome, that it's okay to say too hard to just a giant amount of things.”
“Language is a lossy compression of thought. And uncompressing information, it's so funny when you and I are communicating. I had a thought, I compressed it into a very narrow bandwidth thing of speech. I told it to you, you uncompressed it into your brain. It might actually mean a pretty different thing to you than it means to me.”
Costco's low SKU count drives the entire business model
“Low skew count drives everything. If you only sell 4,000 things, it doesn't take a lot of volume before, very quickly, you are a meaningful seller to every single one of those products. On average, it takes them 27 days to sell through their entire inventory, which means that's on net 30 terms, three days of grace, where the inventory is actually financed by the vendors and then some. There's no working capital in this business other than building more Costco's.”
Improvisation and surprise are Acquired's secret weapons
“You're not taking risks if it doesn't work sometimes. Right? But it's the difference between, I mean, do you know how your heart sinks when someone gets up at a podium with a script with a speech and they're going to read their speech? The audience is waiting for you to get through this thing because they know nothing is going to happen. If you get up and you just start talking, the audience also knows, oh my God, this could be a disaster. They don't know where it's going.”
Acquired's scarcity strategy mirrors the NFL's playbook
“The NFL, because the product is scarce, and then they have very smartly cultivated that and engineered it to be more scarce, more of an event-driven sport, that's made all the difference. To me, what we do is insane for the podcasting industry. It's completely insane. We release, for the last three years, we've released 12 episodes. The next year, we're going to do eight episodes for the whole year.”
Niche internet audiences scale independently of inputs
“The Internet's niches are way bigger than you think they are. So if you think you're writing about a niche topic, the Internet being a global community of four-ish billion people means that any little niche, there might be six people in your geography that care about it in your local town, but there's millions of people online. All outputs can scale completely independently of your inputs.”
Passion projects compound even when episodes underperform
“Both Nintendo and IPL, they were the first listening experiences for some incredibly influential people who have changed the trajectory of acquired. Specifically listened to by one person on the Meta executive team who found it, thought it was amazing, sent it to the entire Meta executive team. Without the Nintendo episode, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't join us.”
Lewis bought Berkshire in 2008 — and Buffett noticed
“I bought these shares in 2008. When I was working on Going Infinite, I was talking to a publicist completely unrelated to Warren Buffett. She said, I also represent Warren. She said, and I told Warren that I had been talking to you. He said, is he the Michael Lewis who bought shares back in the Mitchellites? And he said he bought it like the book value to that thing, that ratio, he bought it as cheap as it's ever been. So can you imagine that Warren Buffett is taking the time to watch who is coming in and out of the A shares and thinking about it?”
