Success has come slowly and yet recently enough to David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert that you get the sense neither can quite believe their good fortune. In fact, the hosts of Acquired, one of the most popular—and unusual—podcasts about business, are at a point in their journey that closely resembles the early days of the business titans whose stories they obsessively and meticulously tell: They are breakout stars but still more or less operating by the seat of their pants.
In 2015, the pair were coworkers and new friends at the venture-capital firm Madrona Venture Group in Seattle when they decided, just for the fun of it, to make a podcast about tech-industry mergers and acquisitions. “That was it,” recalls Rosenthal, who is 39. “We were buddies. Podcasting wasn’t a thing. It was barely an industry. We didn’t think any more of it.”
Nearly a decade later, everything has changed for the duo. They have quit their VC jobs and are each earning seven figures creating a podcast whose episodes are downloaded more than 900,000 times within six months, with a listener base that has been doubling yearly. They have moved on from solely focusing on technology or M&A to include creation-to-present-day coverage of companies like Hermès, Visa, and Novo Nordisk, as well as moneymaking institutions like the NFL and Taylor Swift.
They also have become such a big deal that they’re rubbing shoulders with the richest and most powerful executives on the planet. Gilbert, who is 35, says they brought up the similarities of Facebook’s start with Acquired’s during a recent chat with Mark Zuckerberg. “We said, you know, we started this as a side project. We never intended for it to even become a business, let alone our life’s work. And he goes, ‘I’m familiar.’ ”
Jensen Huang, cofounder and CEO of AI tech giant Nvidia, was so impressed with the episodes about his company that Nvidia features them on its employee intranet. “I’m really proud of Ben and David,” Huang says in an email. “I still remember them telling me about the beginning of Acquired and their thinking process in addressing audiences that wanted to go a lot deeper into a particular topic. Their success shows their instincts were right.”
“A lot deeper” is an understatement. Compared with the standard interview podcast, which might run an hour at most and come out weekly, Acquired episodes often stretch past four hours and appear every six weeks or so. A typical episode consists of Gilbert and Rosenthal excitedly chatting from their respective homes (Gilbert in Seattle and Rosenthal in San Francisco), revealing and piecing together their exhaustive research in what feels like two enthusiasts kibitzing rather than experts lecturing.
I was skeptical at first. Who would want to listen to four hours about one company? Yet after powering through the epic retelling of the Nike story the two released last year, I bought into their description of the product as like an audiobook. An Acquired episode is so deep, patient, and analytical that it’s much more like listening to a book than consuming an ephemeral piece of journalism.
The secret sauce is the combination of that depth with the fresh-eyed enthusiasm Gilbert and Rosenthal bring to the material. They share their discoveries with a charming earnestness—even when the insights are not exactly groundbreaking. In the Nike episode, for example, Rosenthal informs Gilbert that a onetime journalist named Donald Katz wrote a book about Nike called Just Do It and went on to found audiobook pioneer Audible. Those nuggets, highly relevant to the Acquired team, would be old hat to a generation familiar with Katz’s career but are exciting revelations to its youthful hosts—and their audience. “I view it as continuing education for a whole cohort of businesspeople,” says startup guru Eric Ries, the author of the entrepreneurship bible The Lean Startup.
Acquired is in the enviable position of being relevant both for its backlist—33 percent of monthly downloads are of episodes older than six months—and for the news it occasionally breaks. On the former, the hosts have learned the importance of shelf life. “We have to not mention news cycles,” says Gilbert. “It’s actually delightful to have a business incentive to not participate in hype.”
At the same time, Acquired occasionally strays from its format by including interviews that generate buzz. They spoke at length with longtime Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz for an episode that aired in June. His comment to them that “the company has not executed the way that I think it should have” was widely cited as Schultz’s public dissatisfaction with CEO Laxman Narasimhan, whom the Starbucks board pushed out in August.
Like the start-ups it chronicles, Acquired is in robust expansion mode. It has added a separate interview series called ACQ2 that focuses on conversations with entrepreneurs. It sells several sponsorships for a season and also for its older episodes. And though Gilbert and Rosenthal say they turn down 95 percent of inbound requests for sponsorships, they are commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars a season from advertisers who love the old-timey-radio way the hosts integrate their pitches into episodes.
“We definitely don’t view this as advertising,” says Dustin Sedgwick, chief marketing officer for J.P. Morgan’s payments unit, who says his team collaborates directly with Gilbert and Rosenthal on the copy they share with listeners. Of course, what J. P. Morgan is doing absolutely is advertising: paying money to get its product mentioned. It just feels organic because of how naturally the ad copy is embedded. J.P. Morgan Payments likes its relationship with Acquired so much that in September it sponsored a 6,000-person-capacity live event at the Chase Center in San Francisco featuring an interview with Zuckerberg, whose company, Meta, is slated to be the focus of an upcoming episode.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg (left) being interviewed by Gilbert (center) and Rosenthal at the Acquired LIVE event in San Francisco on September 10.
Rosenthal and Gilbert are thoughtful guys who clearly are enjoying the lifestyle business they’ve created. They don’t work with advertising agencies. They poll their listeners on which episodes they should do next via a public Slack channel. They don’t travel much. And they like to stress how much time they spend with their young families.
When I interviewed them in Rosenthal’s cozy studio in his backyard—with Gilbert connected via Zoom—I asked if they worry about cheerleading too much for the companies and executives they talk about. “David and I tend not to take positions, especially in the last few years,” says Gilbert. “If you think the world is being destroyed because of capitalism, then Acquired is a great corpus of material for you to understand how that happened. If you believe that innovation is the single thing that drives global human welfare, it’s also great for you. It’s a celebration of that.”
And there’s no concern whatsoever that Acquired will ever run out of material.
