Not Boring (with Packy McCormick)

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Okay, we gotta get you over 100k. This episode is a failure if we don't get you over 100k subscribers.

**Packy McCormick** (0:05)
All right, so let me timestamp where we are right now, just so we know what we need to do. So we are at 88,460.

**David Rosenthal** (0:13)
Oh, we can so do that.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:15)
Oh, we'll juice this.
Welcome to season 9 episode 6 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 Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:50)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco, and I am back, sort of, from paternity leave.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:00)
An abbreviated partial ongoing paternity leave.

**David Rosenthal** (1:02)
Yeah, we're making it work.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:04)
And we are your hosts. Well, today we have a first for acquired. We are covering a business that is only one person. Not Boring, the newsletter gone Media and Investment empire run by Packy McCormick. I did some research last night. Not Boring is the number one sub stack newsletter on business. If Packy decided to switch to the technology category, from everything I can tell, he would be number one there too. In fact, even in the crypto category, there are only two newsletters with more reach, and they've existed much longer. Not Boring is only a year and a half old.
The Not Boring story isn't just impressive because of its explosive growth. Packy is reinventing the media business model and simultaneously the startup investing business model. He's done all this with a very distinct personal flair, writing in a unique whimsical voice that makes us all just want to have fun and play the great online game. And we're very lucky that he is a part of our Liquid super team here at acquired, so he could join us today live to help tell the story. Welcome, Packy.

**Packy McCormick** (2:11)
That was amazing. Thank you, Ben and David. Great to be here.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:15)
I was doing my best Packy impression, trying to write whimsically in the unique style you've cultivated.

**Packy McCormick** (2:21)
It was beautiful.

**David Rosenthal** (2:22)
You had some good buzzword bingo in there with not boring piece titles over the... I want to say years, but it hasn't been... It feels like years. It feels like you've always been here.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:30)
I had two more. I cut them. It turned into just like a long series of not boring titles. Anyway, Packy, we do it to let you know, this is not going to be all softballs. We're going to actually do the full acquired deep dive here, if that's okay with you.

**Packy McCormick** (2:43)
I mean, acquired is, I think, particularly for the first year when I wrote about Softbank, when I wrote about Tencent, when I wrote about all these companies. Getting deep, the work that you did to go deep on those companies was hugely instrumental in being able to write those pieces. I would expect nothing less than the full acquired treatment.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:02)
All right, let's do this. Well, listeners, we have a huge announcement, a gigantic, exciting piece of news to share with all of you today. For the 98% of you out there who have not joined the acquired LP community, we are opening up every single episode of the LP show back catalog to you today. We have created a new public podcast feed in Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts called the acquired LP Show, very creative. That is right, that includes our series on VC fundamentals and our startup deep dives on pricing, marketplaces, SaaS investing with top investors and founders. And in fact, we are about to drop an episode right there in that feed where I interview 15 year president of Blue Origin, Rob Meyerson on how he sees the space landscape today. Now, of course, members of the paid LP community still get great benefits like exclusive access to new episode for two weeks before we drop it in the public feed, the ability to join LP calls, Zoom, Book Club, all this stuff. But if you aren't an LP and you really want to start getting these episodes, you can click the link in the show notes or go search acquired LP Show wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe.

**David Rosenthal** (4:12)
Thank you to all of our LPs for being on this journey with us. We are very excited to now share all this content more broadly. There's some good stuff. Ben, you interviewed Joseph Gordon-Levitt the other day on the LP show.