The Acquired Podcast Hosts: How They Started and Grew a Multimillion Dollar Podcast

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
What could you get for it, you think?

**David Rosenthal** (0:01)
I would not be interested in having any conversations for less than, on the order of the hustle or morning brew or stuff like that.

**Sam Parr** (0:13)
Tens of millions.

**David Rosenthal** (0:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I just think the value of what we've built, both as a business and revenue, and our audience and our durability is in that category.

**Shaan Puri** (0:35)
All right, what's up, we got a crossover episode. Call me Tim Hardaway, we got the guys from Acquired. Yeah, you like that, you like that, on the fly.
Yeah, that's for the 5% of listeners who know about basketball. So we got, the guys from Acquired are here. We're doing kind of a joint episode, a, the old Alabama wedding, as I like to call it. You know, just, we're just getting, we're getting cousins together here, because you guys got a podcast that is pretty awesome. I remember when I was working at a, at our previous startup, a guy came to me, he was like, there's a podcast you're gonna love, it's called Acquired. And I go, what is it? He goes, it's like the backstories of these, like of all great tech acquisitions, like how it all went down, they go into like all the nerdy details. And then I binged you guys for like six days straight.
And so that was, that's how I kind of first got into it a couple of years ago. So welcome to the show, David and Ben.

**David Rosenthal** (1:30)
Thank you. We did a super fun crossover with you a couple of years ago now, but it was just with Sean, Sam, you were off traveling the world doing amazing things.

**Sam Parr** (1:40)
Well, that's what he said. He was like, you're probably doing something amazing. I was like, probably just like a doctor's appointment or something.

**David Rosenthal** (1:48)
You guys have totally come up since then.
I mean, you were big back then, but that was like within the first couple months, I think of you starting this. And it's just been awesome to watch how far you've come.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:59)
That was kind of in our, even though it was year four or five for us, that was kind of our early days too. Cause Sean, you're right that we were mostly about acquisitions at that point. And we talked about the Bebo acquisition as part of the episode. And now we do these like three, four hour entire, history and strategy of a company, regardless of whether there was a transaction. But yeah, that feels like, I don't know. The funny thing about exponential growth is it feels like a lifetime ago all the time.

**Shaan Puri** (2:25)
I always think about that, like when you pick a niche and then you kind of are going to run out, but the niche can get you somewhere. So for example, I was thinking about this with Coffeezilla, the YouTube guy who exposes people's scams.
And I'm like, and then he did one the other day that was like, he DM'd a celebrity to promote some NFT thing. Like, hey, we'll pay you to promote this NFT thing. And like the white paper said like this shit's a scam or whatever, but he didn't read it obviously, just like promoted it. And he's like, ha, scammer. And I'm like, but you kind of, that's kind of entrapment. Like you, you're running out of people to like to cover here. You had to now create scammers? Like, I don't think that.

**David Rosenthal** (2:59)
Like Ali G back in the day.

**Shaan Puri** (3:01)
Exactly. But like that wasn't his original stake, but I was like, yeah, you're not gonna, like you're trying to be on this YouTube once a week treadmill.
And there's not once a week gonna be a giant Logan Paul, like celebrity name did this bad thing and I'm gonna be the exposure. It's like, what are you gonna do next Tuesday? Cause there's not like, this isn't that current. But you guys did a good job of switching it out.

**Sam Parr** (3:24)
People said that to us, Sean, they go, you're gonna run out of ideas. And I was like, yeah, we might.
But then it just kind of like morphed into like us saying a lot of like, it's like people, when I, someone yesterday was like, what's your podcast about? I was like, well, the name's pretty bad. And it's definitely a lot about business, but we also make a lot of horrible jokes too. So people kind of like it for that reason.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:43)