The Idea Dinner #1 (with Mario Gabriele and Packy McCormick)

David Rosenthal (0:00)

Hello, Acquired LPs, and readers of Not Boring and The Generalist. So Ben, Mario, Packy, and I have been longtime fans of each other's work, and have the great pleasure of becoming friends through a couple great recent collaborations like our Slack Emergency episode with Packy and our Roblox DPO preview with Mario. And given all the recent buzz on new audio platforms like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, we all decided to team up and run a little experiment, The Idea Dinner. So last night on Twitter Spaces, we all got together and brought one beverage of choice, one public market investment idea, and one private market investment idea.

And honestly, despite some technical audio issues, which you will hear in the audio to come, we had a blast. It's always super fun collaborating with other creators we respect. And given that we all come at the business tech world from different angles, I think we were able to push each other's thinking in new ways.

So fortunately, we also hit the record buttons on our end before we started, and superhero Ben has stitched it all together so we can share it with all of you who couldn't make it. Please bear with the audio quality. This was done live over what is very much still a beta product, as we found out. So it does not have anywhere near the normal level of editing and polish that Acquired, Not Boring and Generalist fans are accustomed to. But it was a total blast. We had a great time making it and we hope you all enjoy it too. Stay tuned for more to come.

Ben Gilbert (1:50)

I'm drinking Costco fake champagne. How about you guys?

Packy McCormick (1:55)

I mean, we'll go in order of classiness.

So I'm not really taking the man of the people approach, straightforward ideas. And we're drinking White Claw. I'm down in Florida right now, so I think it was the appropriate level of class.

Ben Gilbert (2:08)

And for folks joining.

Packy McCormick (2:10)

I mean, it's exactly as you'd imagine. It's just, you know, deals happening left and right.

Mario Gabriele (2:18)

How many cafecitos have you had?

Packy McCormick (2:20)

I mean, it's term sheets and cafecitos are in a neck and neck race for me right now.

Mario Gabriele (2:26)

Various cafecitos and uncapped notes.

Packy McCormick (2:30)

Exactly.

Ben Gilbert (2:31)

Well, so I was asking Packy before if he was tipping his hand with the with the idea that he'll be sharing tonight by drinking a White Claw because the let me look up the name of this company.

Arda Metal Packaging, who is the manufacturer of the aluminum for the cans of White Claw, just got spacked by who did this back Gores. It was one of the Gores holdings. I think G-H-V-I-U, if I remember correctly, for G-H-I-V-U. And they couldn't get claw.

Mario Gabriele (3:07)

Oh, that's what that's what will happen when they back when they merge. Yeah, when they spack, let's see if we can get claw.

Packy McCormick (3:12)

That business does, White Claw, I think does, as a pre-pandemic was doing $4 billion in revenue a year. So White Claw is a very, in the holding company that owns White Claw is a very legitimate spack candidate. But for everybody out in the audience who doesn't know this, if you've heard the Acquired podcast, you think David and Ben are fancy and smart and talk about, you know, big, legitimate old companies, Ben is our resident spack expert. Every morning wakes up, checks the spacks. Ben, you want to tell us a little bit about what's going on in the spack world?

Ben Gilbert (3:46)

I do. And I was planning to save this caveat for later, but I guess we're going to have to throw the caveat in now. This is not investment advice. We may hold, I don't know, the securities that we may hold the things that we're talking about here. So everybody be warned.

Yeah, spacks are fascinating because they have downside protection because they're backed by the money in the trust, which actually is in, I think most of the time in the Cayman Islands.

But they can go up. And so as long as you buy them pretty cheap and close to the value of the cash and trust, so long as you believe that there's not fraud happening and that that cash pile isn't going to go away somewhere, there could be random unexpected asymmetric upside that happens like a pop when a SPAC, you know, despecs. However, so far, and we are in unprecedented times, as they say, it's been a reasonably downside protected asset. So yes, it has been very interesting to watch the SPAC pops and, you know, see how you can play that.