VC Vocab

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

Welcome to the very first limited partner bonus show of Acquired.

The show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. And now in the LP show, much, much more.

David Rosenthal (0:13)

Much more.

Thank you, everyone, for being here, joining us on this little adventure. We can't wait to see where it goes.

Ben Gilbert (0:25)

Yeah, I think we started a journey three years ago, and we feel like we're starting a whole new journey today. And I think it's fun that it's been like three years, almost to the day, since actually starting the show. And I think a lot of you that have become limited partners have been with us for a really long time. And just fun to see how much the show has grown, but how many of you have been like communicating with us from the very beginning on helping make the show better.

David Rosenthal (0:55)

Yeah, it's been a wild ride.

Ben Gilbert (1:00)

So we should say a few things before diving into episode one here. You know, what are we doing? Like, what is the point of, you know, having this LP bonus show? And I suppose even before that, there are probably a decent chunk of you that are saying, why do you keep calling us Limited Partners?

So I'm going to turn that one over to David and say, David, why did we name this the LP bonus show and why a Limited Partner program?

David Rosenthal (1:28)

Well, as probably many of you know, but maybe not all, the investors in venture capital funds are called Limited Partners. And Ben and I, of course, both being VCs, we thought now you guys are investing in Acquired, so you are by nature Acquired LPs.

Ben Gilbert (1:50)

It's not totally true.

There's another half of the equation there that's not actually an equity transaction. But in the same way that a venture firm looks at their LPs as the group that makes it all possible to do what we do, we look at that in the same way that we look at you, our limited partner base. So what are we doing here in these episodes? We want to take a deeper dive into company building. Our shows normally are obviously about the exit. And while that is a really nice structure to tell a story, and we were fortunate enough to come up with a framework that really scaled well across acquisitions and IPOs, and we think will continue to do well for the far future, there's a lot of sausage that goes into company making.

And there's a lot of people that we want to bring on to talk about that with us that don't really fit into the normal structure of a company exiting and being able to tell their story as an investor, early employee or CEO of that company. And so either just through David and I exploring topics or by guests that we have on, we really want to be able to just kind of expand the scope of what we do and be able to share that with a group of you.

David Rosenthal (3:08)

Yeah, it's like, Ben and I have talked a lot about this over the last couple of years of Acquired. Like it's been awesome. And our number one goal when we first started thinking about starting the show and then all the way through has been us learning from researching and telling these stories. And we do, but we kind of joke that like, both of us being involved intimately and kind of early stage company building, like what we end up serving up on Acquired is like a fully grilled kielbasa for everyone that looks beautiful and tastes great.

But like the reality is that there is so much that goes into stuffing that sausage. And we really wanted to try and find ways to explore that.

Ben Gilbert (3:49)

Yeah, as Scott Belsky calls it, the messy middle.

David Rosenthal (3:52)

Indeed, the messy middle of the sausage. Hopefully it gets cooked before you bite into it.

Ben Gilbert (3:57)

That's right. Well, speaking of less cooked, we, another big tenet for us was that the real shows can't change. And David and I were like, well, how on earth are we gonna have time to do our day jobs and do this extra content and make sure that we preserve the integrity of the main acquired product?

And basically where we've landed is this is gonna be pretty unproduced. So we may sometimes have worse quality if we're maybe recording it over the phone or doing something remotely or occasionally David and I talk over each other and you'll hear way too many ums and ands and things that we normally would spend a bunch of time trying to make better. So we hope that's okay. Let us know how you feel about it.