2018 Holiday Special

David Rosenthal (0:00)

Ben, how are you?

Ben Gilbert (0:03)

I'm at home. Well, actually, I'm at PSL, but I'm in the home city of Seattle. Where are you?

David Rosenthal (0:10)

I am coming at you from Austin, Texas, doing a little pre-holiday vacation. It's been super fun and relaxing.

Ben Gilbert (0:20)

And you're just rolling with your iPad, right? And you're podcasting from an iPad?

David Rosenthal (0:25)

Yeah, rolling with listeners, LPs. We had about half an hour of trying to get technology.

Ben Gilbert (0:33)

You are not supposed to tell anybody about that.

David Rosenthal (0:36)

So, hey, this is for LPs. We're letting everybody know how this hostage is made.

Ben Gilbert (0:45)

Yeah, we are. We talked about sort of doing our holiday spectacular as part of the main feed that we've done the last few years, but it actually fits much better into the category of stuff we do as the LP show, particularly because it lets us sort of like foreshadow a lot more stuff about sort of early thinking about next season and kind of doesn't really make sense as a main show anyway.

David Rosenthal (1:10)

Yeah, totally. And especially given my technology issues right now and it's the holidays and we're kicking back, we thought it would be perfect for all of you LPs.

Ben Gilbert (1:24)

Yeah.

David Rosenthal (1:24)

Thanks for joining us. Well, should we dive into holiday special 2018?

Ben Gilbert (1:31)

Let's do it. Ho, ho, ho.

David Rosenthal (1:34)

Ho, ho, ho, indeed.

Well, first, it's been a big, big 2018 for Acquired. We'll talk about that in a minute, but should we talk about a couple of things we're thinking about for season four and five in 2019?

Ben Gilbert (1:50)

Yeah, for sure. Oh, you've thought about season five?

David Rosenthal (1:52)

Oh, yeah, man. I'm thinking two steps ahead.

Ben Gilbert (1:57)

You haven't shared that Google Doc with me yet.

David Rosenthal (2:01)

No, I just predict that we won't be able to fit everything we wanted in season four.

Ben Gilbert (2:06)

That's probably fair.

David Rosenthal (2:09)

Particularly, I think one thing we are for sure going to do is we will be live on the scene as hopefully some big IPOs are coming our way in 2019

Ben Gilbert (2:20)

Man, the doors are about to bust open. We are going to get Uber. We are going to get Lyft.

Did you see today Pinterest is contemplating a 2019 IPO?

David Rosenthal (2:30)

I saw that. That's been in the works for a while. Potentially Slack as well.

We may even see an Airbnb IPO in 2019

Ben Gilbert (2:39)

They have a CFO now, right?

David Rosenthal (2:41)

Yeah, from Amazon.

Ben Gilbert (2:43)

Yeah. Well, I think we will get into this in tech themes later, but I think how those IPOs perform will dictate a lot of the way the rest of the tech landscape looks.

David Rosenthal (2:59)

Oh, my God. As we're sitting here at the end of 2018, the markets are getting crushed. The window, the proverbial IPO window, is definitely not open right now.

But I think all these, at least many of these companies, are going to have to go public next year.

Ben Gilbert (3:18)

Dude, the drama of Uber and Lyft filing on the same day was just too much for me.

David Rosenthal (3:24)

It was great.

It was great. I love how people were blowing up in the slack about it, too.

Ben Gilbert (3:30)

Yeah, that was cool.

David Rosenthal (3:32)

So that's one.

Other themes that were kicking around, one that we think could be super fun that we're probably going to try and do in season four is companies that were... We need a good, succinct way to put this, but companies that were high-flying companies at one point in time and super well known that ended up not living up to their potential or falling back down to earth. I hate to say fails because a bunch of these companies and companies we're thinking about aren't quite failures, per se, but something happened or I think it'll be fun to dig into were there some strategic decisions that the companies got wrong? Was there anything they could have done about it? How did these situations arise?

Ben Gilbert (4:21)

Yeah, and it's also hard to say failed when they created a bunch of value along the way that they just weren't able to sort of hold on to and capture. Because I think we've had some feedback from listeners that I think is really apt. That is, on this show we talk a lot about value capture after value creation.