Arena Show Part I: Idea Dinner + YC Continuity

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Oh, holy crap! Hello, Acquired listeners.

**David Rosenthal** (0:13)
You didn't tell me you were going to say that.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:14)
That's good. I'm ad-libbing. I got up here and I was overcome with emotion, and none of this is scripted. Thank you so much for coming tonight. I, um, I, like, prepared things, and I should read them off my iPad here. But the only thought that can occur to me right now is how different this is than what you and I normally do. David and I are very used to being on Zoom, talking to each other through the Internet. There are zero people watching live, and if we say something wrong, we delete it. And that's not happening tonight.
But more important than that is we get evidence that people listen in the form of analytics or tweets or anecdotes here and there of someone saying, oh, I listen to the show. But there's no human visceral way to feel that. Like we literally just refresh an analytics dashboard and a number goes up. And this is so cool to see you.

**Packy McCormick** (1:20)
It's real.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:25)
Well, as fun as it is going to be to like watch the show and we've got some great stuff planned, I think it will be much cooler to meet each other for as many, they call it parasocial relationships where you hear us talk but we don't get to meet you. We're going to try and meet as many of you as possible. We want a lot of you to meet as many other people as possible because you have an easy opener like what's your favorite episode or how did you hear about Acquired? Like my buddy dragged me here tonight and I never heard of it before this. But everyone's got some answer to that question. So meet each other, take selfies, enjoy the time together. We have freaking climate pledge arena and enjoy the time in it. Thank you to PitchBook. Holy crap! John's not kidding.
PitchBook is Seattle's like monster amazing business hiding in plain sight. And it's been really cool to get to know their team more and more and more and understand the business and just learn how on $4 million they've been able to build this multi hundred million dollar business and it's inspiring to us. So thank you to John, thank you to kai, thank you to Lauren and Val, thank you to Nas. Everyone we work with at PitchBook is just awesome. So thank you to them.

**David Rosenthal** (2:51)
Happy Star Wars Day, Ben.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:52)
Happy Star Wars Day. May the 4th be with you all.

**David Rosenthal** (2:59)
I hear Paul McCartney is here.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:01)
Yes, Paul McCartney is here tonight. We have a great show for you.
That was last night?

**David Rosenthal** (3:06)
That was last night.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:07)
We do have a great show though. Tonight we have Jim Webber, the CEO of Brooks Running, another Seattle monster business that we're very excited to talk to you about. We have Anu Hariharan tonight from Y Combinator, the infamous Packy McCormick from Not Boring, Mario Gabriele from The Generalist, two of the Internet's finest publications. So very excited to chop it up with them.
And we learned from Arena Show's past, live shows, very small live shows past, that our normal format of telling a three plus hour story of a business doesn't work very well in this sort of time where you're sitting down and you could feel the audience getting antsy in those long stories. So we got three just like fast-paced, great stories, great segments for you tonight. Be in and out in a couple hours. We'll enjoy it along the way, but it's going to feel fast relative to your normal Acquired episode.

**David Rosenthal** (4:08)
Speaking of, should we start our normal Acquired episode?

**Ben Gilbert** (4:13)
We got to do it the way that, I don't know, it feels like we have a way that we start Acquired episodes, so we should do that.

**David Rosenthal** (4:20)
We should do that.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:51)
Episode seven, the Arena Show, presented by PitchBook of Acquired, the podcast. About great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based...

**David Rosenthal** (5:12)
Woo!

**Ben Gilbert** (5:15)
Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (5:19)
And I'm David Rosenthal. And most days, I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco, but today I'm an angel investor based in Seattle.

**Ben Gilbert** (5:31)
And we are your hosts. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.