The Top 10 Acquisitions of All-Time

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Hey Acquired Listeners, we recorded this episode a few weeks ago in what already feels like a very different era. Obviously, we live in a whole new world now with the spread of the novel coronavirus and the global health, economic, and frankly, emotional fallout as a result.

**David Rosenthal** (0:17)
Yeah, in that vein, we have a few announcements to make. First and most importantly, we're thinking about all of you right now and in the weeks and months ahead. Many of us know people who've lost their jobs or businesses already, or even worse, whose families have been affected, and that's likely just gonna grow significantly in the coming weeks. We want you all to know that Ben, myself, and the whole Acquired community are here to support each other.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:42)
It's true, and related to that, we are going to make some changes for now to both the community and the Acquired show itself. As for the show, we'll share more in the days ahead.

**David Rosenthal** (0:53)
On the community side, we're changing a few aspects of our Slack to help us all do everything that we can to support each other right now. You'll find all the details in the announcement that we've pinned to the general channel. And if you haven't joined our Slack yet, now is a great time to do so. You can find a link on our website. We think it's especially important to find ways to try to be together right now virtually, even when physically we have to be apart.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:19)
Yep. One other thing, I'm a believer that when you have a voice, you should use it. And David and I are fortunate to be able to talk to all of you.
So in this time, we are here to tell you to stay home. Most of you who listen to the show are already doing this, but we figure if we can touch just one person, we can make a difference. Social distancing really works and has saved countless lives in countries across the globe. If it's not bad in your city yet, be the reason that it won't be. We promise you will look like a hero later for reacting early and reacting quickly. And of course, go pick up some takeout food from local restaurants you love.

**David Rosenthal** (1:56)
Amen on both of those. Finally, one last thing. Some of you might be wondering why, despite everything we're saying here, we still decided to release this episode right now. We thought about it a lot, and we decided to go ahead, one, because even with everything going on, we think the world does still need some entertainment, and most importantly, to laugh. And some of the things that we say in here are pretty funny now in retrospect. Two, though, we also thought it was a good reminder that even as tough as things are and are likely to get right now, at some point, things will return to normal again, and it will seem completely normal to debate the top 10 acquisitions of all time. So hopefully, this will be a little reminder of that.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:40)
Yep. Well, thank you to everyone for being on this journey with us. Stay safe and healthy. We will get through this together. And now, on to the show.
Welcome to season six, episode three of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (3:07)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:08)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are tackling an episode to cover the question we get asked most, what are the best acquisitions of all time and what can we learn from them? So today, here it is, the Acquired Top 10

**David Rosenthal** (3:23)
Acquired Top 10 We figure we're over 100 episodes in now. It's time for Greatest Hits album.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:29)
Yeah, listeners, the idea originally started as a blog post, which you can find linked at the top of the show notes. But we wanted to do an episode with really more of a director's cut of the list and how we thought about each one, since even though there's lots of numbers involved, it's not quite an objective exercise.

**David Rosenthal** (3:47)
We reserve the right to grade as we see fit.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:50)
As always. All right, a few announcements before we dive in. First, we had a great limited partner episode this week with Hamilton Helmer. And you can listen to a segment of it attached at the end of this episode. For those who don't know Hamilton's name, he is the author of Seven Powers, which David recently described to me as the best business strategy book out there. Now David is in good company here, getting high praise from strategy master Reed Hastings at Netflix, Daniel Eck at Spotify, Peter Thiel and many, many more. So we had to of course have the author on the LP show. Now if you want to go deeper on company building topics, you can become an Acquired limited partner and get access to all the things that come with that by clicking the link in the show notes, or going to glow.fm slash acquired, and all subscriptions come with a seven day free trial.