Earlier this week, I joined about 6,000 other people at the Chase Center in San Francisco. We weren’t there to see the Golden State Warriors play, but to watch a three-hour live podcast about tech and business.
Acquired has become a phenomenon in the podcasting world over the last couple of years. If you work in the tech industry, it’s probably your CEO’s favorite podcast. Cohosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal have found success by eschewing the traditional podcast formula. Instead of a weekly talk or interview show, they publish one, multi-hour episode a month that dives deep into the story of a company.
This week’s live show — the largest of its kind — featured a noticeably unbridled Mark Zuckerberg. There were also surprise cameos from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Given that the audience was full of superfans, part of the evening focused on the state of Acquired itself, which is now averaging about 800,000 downloads per episode and rapidly growing.
The next morning, I sat down with Gilbert and Rosenthal in the lobby of my hotel nearby to discuss their unusual approach to building a media empire, how they think about their growing influence, and what’s next.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
Have you thought about broadening what the show is? Because you could have a version where it's you two talking about the news. Have you thought about being a counter to the All-In podcast?
David Rosenthal: I think that’s probably the least likely thing we would do.
Ben Gilbert: It's just not who we are. I would prefer to stay quiet for a very long time and then say something that I'm really sure is going to age well and is right. And we miss at that sometimes. But if I woke up in the morning and thought, "I have to have a take today," and I'm really not sure if it's right or not but people want a take, and I have a business model where I need to have a take, I think I would burn out and quit.
DR: There's a huge market for all that, and All-In has been incredibly successful. We're friendly with them, and Jason [Calacanis] has been super kind to us over the years. I don't want takes. I just don't want that in my life. That's just not what we do. That's not our space.
All-In had their live event this week at UCLA. I think you guys beat them on audience size, but their ticket prices were much higher.
BG: But that's the ethos of Acquired. We want the content to be Hermès-quality content, but we want the accessibility. If we could have given tickets away for free, we would have. It was not a profit-generating event.
Is that how you're going to approach future events? Because you could probably make a lot of money doing shows at this scale.
DR: We don't need to. Acquired is just us. There are no shareholders. We would rather have it be a celebration.
BG: It's effectively the “too hard” pile. Acquired is a very good business. David and I own it 50/50. We have no contractual relationships with any entity other than the sponsors that season, and it makes our life pretty easy. I could see some world where we turn live [events] into a business at some point, but right now, it feels really good for there to be just an incredible consumer surplus there.
Was that the biggest audience for a live podcast?
BG: Certainly a business or tech podcast. I know the Kelce brothers did a larger show but not in an arena.
You guys are independent, right? You're not tied to anyone else?
BG: Not for distribution. We don’t even work with agencies on ad deals.
DR: Our business model is really different. Every time we have one of those conversations [with potential partners], it's all predicated on the podcast business model of, “We've got an ad sales force; we'll, like, plug you in, and then we'll cross-promote with our shows, and maybe you'll add more shows.” We don't actually sell on an inventory model. We're B2B. It's a partnership.
BG: Sometimes we do hand-to-hand combat sales for these companies. We will show up at a prospect dinner and work with them. Our goal is for them to be more like partnerships.
I've been thinking a lot about the barriers that are breaking down between outlets like us at The Verge, what you guys are doing, and what creators and influencers are doing. I'm curious how you guys think about that.
BG: We are not reporters. We're maybe journalists. We're definitely historians. I don't think anybody looks to Acquired and says...
