Ben and David on "This Week in Startups" Holiday Special

Jason Calacanis (0:00)

Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of not only This Week in Startups, but I'm officially welcoming Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal's amazing audience, pretty sophisticated audience, I would say, based on the Slack that I'm in at Acquired FM. Yes, this is a collab, a collaboration. All the kids doing it on the YouTube. David and Ben, welcome back to This Week in Startups. Jason Cal, welcome back to Acquired.

Is this your first time doing a collab?

David Rosenthal (0:35)

What is this episode, like six, seven we've done together?

Jason Calacanis (0:38)

You guys are now in the rankings of most on the show. Seventh episode together, yes.

Ben Gilbert (0:43)

Who else is on that leaderboard? Who do we have to battle here?

Jason Calacanis (0:47)

Brian Alvey, who is my best friend from high school, who I did Weblogs with, has been on a lot of times. There's some people on the news roundtable, like Molly Wood's been on a couple of times. Yeah, I'd say the news roundtable.

Alex Wilhelm, has been on.

Ben Gilbert (1:00)

All right, so some formidable competition.

Jason Calacanis (1:01)

Yeah, you're up there. Zach's been on six or seven times. Yeah, Zach Kolias would be on a lot, because he does Ask Jason and Zach, because I find like there's some people I just vibe with, and obviously Ben and David, you're two of those folks.

If you don't know about Acquired FM, where the hell have you been? Go to Acquired.fm and sign up for their elite $100 subscription product in addition to their free. We have big news.

Ben Gilbert (1:30)

Yeah, we changed the model a little bit. So we started releasing all LP episodes for free after two weeks, because we had such awesome guests that we were like, you know what, if people want this information in a way that they're going to do something interesting with it, two weeks is plenty of time.

But, you know, it's incredible guests. They're saying incredible things. It's a shame to lock it up for just a couple thousand people.

Jason Calacanis (1:55)

That's always been the problem I've had with the paywall, and the market for advertising is so vibrant right now, for podcasting, at least. You can't say that about blogs or other things.

So I think it's a good decision. We started playing with the, you know, paid concept on Patreon, whatever, and I was just like, you know, this is like an antithetical to my personal brand of founders don't pay, and my audience is founders, mostly, you know, some investors and some tech enthusiasts, but mostly founders. I just, they've got a hundred bucks or no offense. You have a lot of capital allocators, so a hundred bucks is just like whatever is most about the show. I'd rather they put it towards their startup or something.

Well, congratulations on it.

David Rosenthal (2:36)

It was much more about the, well, A, it was people who were paying us, some people were paying for the content, but it was a minority. Most people were paying because they, like us, wanted to support the show.

Jason Calacanis (2:47)

They wanted to support the show.

David Rosenthal (2:48)

We're part of the community. We do monthly Zoom calls with our paid LPs and...

Jason Calacanis (2:52)

That's very cool.

Ben Gilbert (2:53)

So, we get to hear about their crazy NFT exploits in the last six months. Oh my god.

Jason Calacanis (2:59)

I mean, we, I don't know when the last time we got together was, but we have not really... When was it?

Ben Gilbert (3:08)

I think it was right before your Italy trip.

Jason Calacanis (3:09)

Oh, right before Italy. Okay. So it was August.

Oh, thanks. I've lost 20 pounds since then.

David Rosenthal (3:15)

You were looking good. You were seriously looking good.

Jason Calacanis (3:18)

You know what happened was David and I were talking and like, I don't know if you remember this all in where somebody had a picture of us on the golf course in the middle of the pandemic in Cabo, because we had done this like...

I mean, David had basically gone AWOL and it was kind of like a... I don't know if you guys ever watch Apocalypse Now, like Colonel Kurtz goes into the woods and like he goes kind of crazy. So like David Sacks is missing and so people are like, hey, David's kind of lost it in the middle of the pandemic. He just went to Cabo.

Can you go retrieve him? And I'm like, okay.

So I'm, you know, middle of the pandemic, I fly down private to Cabo. I find him in Cabo and he's like literally, yeah, he's kind of like, I don't know about this pandemic. Is this the end of the world? He's kind of, you know, on edge or whatever. He's like Colonel Kurtz. He's basically gone Colonel Kurtz.