Here's What It Takes to Make a Great Company

Tracy Alloway (0:00)

Hey there, Odd Lots listeners, it's Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:03)

And Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:04)

We are very excited to announce that Odd Lots is going to Washington.

Joe Weisenthal (0:09)

That's right. For the first time, we're going to do a live public Odd Lots recording in our nation's capital. That's going to be March 12th in Washington, DC at the Miracle Theater. And guests will be announced in the coming days, but in the meantime, you can find a ticket link at bloomberg.com/oddlots.

SPEAKER_3 (0:31)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Tracy Alloway (0:47)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:51)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:53)

Joe, you told me you read a fiction book last year, right? Just one.

Joe Weisenthal (1:00)

I read too much non-fiction, like a lot of dudes, I think. Non-fiction is very bro-coded. My goal for 2025 was to read at least one novel, and I did it. I already satisfied my goal. It's not even the end of January yet. Back to reading random history and philosophy and all that stuff.

Tracy Alloway (1:18)

Very ambitious. You're one fiction book. Can I make a suggestion for another fiction book you should read? Please. There's a book by Margaret Atwood called Oryx and Crake, and it's a sci-fi thing. But I think about it quite a lot nowadays because she has this vision of society in the future, and in that society, companies are the most important part of it. It's not about countries anymore, it's all about what company you work for, and the companies are the ones providing all the social services like healthcare and housing. Basically, you're a citizen of a company instead of a country. I think about it a lot because I feel like we're moving in that direction where companies are becoming more powerful, they're becoming more interesting in many ways, and more important to society than ever.

Joe Weisenthal (2:12)

I'm looking it up right now. I hadn't heard of it. It came out in 2003 Maybe at that time, it was seen as futuristic, but in 2025, it does not even sound futuristic or controversial at all. We could go on about what that means, but I just basically accept the premise that that's true now in 2025

Tracy Alloway (2:32)

Okay, great. You have your second fiction book to read. But the reason I bring it up is because I think we should do more on the stories of companies in general. I am very pleased to say that we do in fact have the perfect guests to discuss this. I'm very excited about this. I'm a fan of their podcast. Lots of people are fans of their podcast. We're going to be speaking with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, the co-hosts of the Acquired podcast. Ben and David, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Ben Gilbert (3:01)

Great to be here. Thanks for having us.

David Rosenthal (3:03)

Tracy, I love that intro. What a career she's had.

Joe Weisenthal (3:08)

Tracy and I were talking about who should start this one. I was like, Tracy, you do it. I was much better than what I would have done.

Tracy Alloway (3:15)

Thank you, everyone. That's very nice. Ben and David, maybe give us the elevator pitch for the podcast just before we begin.

Ben Gilbert (3:23)

Well, Acquired is a 10-year-old podcast that started, like many company journeys, in obscurity with nobody listening and slowly doubled year over year over year.

Joe Weisenthal (3:34)

You can't really.

David Rosenthal (3:35)

Exactly.

Ben Gilbert (3:36)

I bet. I bet. Yeah, we're now fortunate to be one of the top few, off of the number one tech podcast on Apple and Spotify, which is a little funny because we study these companies that are very often not tech companies now, but we look at companies like TSMC and Mars, the company behind M&M's, Ikea, Meta, Hermès, Costco, and we really try to, through conversation, David and I tell the entire history of the company from founding to today, analyze it and really try to answer the question, why did the company that we are studying work and work at such extreme scale?

David Rosenthal (4:12)

And Tracy, the reason we do it is literally just like you said, the institutions that these companies, the biggest companies around the world have become are quasi-governmental at this point. You can make an argument they're more important than government. Somebody said to Ben a few months ago when talking about acquired, in 200 years, I don't know if people are going to know the name Joe Biden, but they're sure as hell going to know the name Mark Zuckerberg. And we're like, whoa, that's a crazy idea, but might be true.