Sam and Shaan do a crossover episode with David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert of the Acquired podcast. They cover how both shows grew, audience quality vs. quantity, the four types of podcast guests, lessons from the companies Acquired has profiled (Nintendo, Nvidia, Alibaba, LVMH, Airbnb), the corporate podcast agency opportunity, AI investing skepticism, and how MFM’s HubSpot arrangement works. Sam also announces Hampton’s launch.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), David Rosenthal (guest, Acquired), Ben Gilbert (guest, Acquired)
Crossover Introduction and How Both Shows Started [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, what’s up. We got a crossover episode — call me Tim Hardaway. We got the guys from Acquired. You like that? That’s for the five percent of listeners who know basketball.
We’ve got David and Ben from Acquired. They have a podcast that is awesome. I remember when I was working at our previous startup, a guy came to me and said there’s a podcast you’re gonna love called Acquired. I said what is it. He goes it’s like the backstories of all great tech acquisitions — how it all went down, they go into all the nerdy details. I binged them for six days straight. Welcome to the show, David and Ben.
David: Thank you. We did a crossover with you a couple years ago — but it was just with Shaan. Sam, you were off traveling the world.
Sam: I was probably at a doctor’s appointment.
Shaan: The funny thing about exponential growth is it feels like a lifetime ago. I always think about this with niches. When you pick a niche, it can get you somewhere — but then you have to expand. Like CoffeeZilla on YouTube exposes scams. He did one where he DMed a celebrity to promote an NFT thing. But that’s kind of entrapment — he ran out of organic content and started manufacturing it. He was trying to be on the YouTube once-a-week treadmill without enough raw material.
David: People said the same to us. You’re gonna run out of ideas. But it kind of just morphed. Someone asked me yesterday what my podcast is about. I said well the name’s pretty bad, it’s definitely a lot about business, but we also make horrible jokes.
Shaan: Your niche earns you the right to exist in media. It’s your demeanor and your way of looking at the world that gives you license to expand. If you’d started with “we’re a podcast that talks about businesses” — cool, next. But if you pitch people on the specific job-to-be-done of your show in their life, then you can expand from there.
I was talking to the guys from Wait But Why. Tim told me: you need a flagship franchise. Build trust on that, then you’ve earned the right to say “by the way, here’s my mindset stuff.” Keep launching new franchises after that.
Ben: We started in 2015. Even in 2019, when you guys started, podcasting’s mainstream portion was still early enough that people were looking for new stuff. That’s changed pretty significantly now.
Shaan: The way MFM started — I was in Austin and texted Sam: hey I have an idea for a podcast, want the Hustle to be the publisher? To seal the deal I needed to send a file, but I hadn’t recorded yet. So I said I already did the first episode, want to listen? Then I ghosted him for 24 hours so I could go record it. I knew if the first 35 seconds were good, this was done.
Sam: He did that. And we were in. The first episode he did solo got 65,000 downloads and we thought podcasting was easy. Then over the next 12 months it went down to 10 or 15,000, and since then it’s been a slow grind. Now we’re at 100 to 200,000 per episode including YouTube.
Audience Quality, Download Numbers, and What Actually Matters [00:12:00]
David: Where are you guys at, because nobody talks about this publicly?
Shaan: Pretty much the exact same scale with a very different journey. YouTube is maybe 20 to 100,000, RSS feed maybe 100,000.
David: We’re about the same. 200,000 per episode. Unlike you guys we do one or two episodes a month, they’re very long, and we’ve almost never had a true viral breakout moment. Eight years from zero to that.
Shaan: One thing that’s interesting about content media: everybody measures the number, nobody measures the quality, because quality is way harder to understand. There’s clearly a difference between 200,000 people listening to Acquired versus 200,000 views on a TikTok. And even podcast vs. podcast — the type of people listening to yours are just inherently more valuable.
Ben: That is literally the whole business. 40 percent of Acquired listeners are C-level or VP-level executives. 23 percent are currently founders. 12 percent were previously founders. 17 percent are engineers. 15 percent are actively CEOs today. 12 percent are product managers.
I don’t actually want millions of listeners. I want Acquired to saturate the niche it’s in because I think it’s the most valuable audience in the world.
Shaan: So what does it lead to?
Ben: We have merch, we have a fund. I manage about $30 million of capital on AngelList between two funds and four or five SPVs. All of that is because of Acquired. Everything Acquired unlocks comes from who’s listening.
David: Interesting thing we’ve noticed about guests and analytics: 100 percent of the time without fail, every time we set a new episode record it’s an episode that’s just David and me doing Nintendo, LVMH, Berkshire — our canonical 3-hour format. And every single time we have a guest on, it is less listened to than our previous episode.
The Four Types of Podcast Guests [00:22:00]
Shaan: I’ve been thinking about this because I messaged Sam about being stricter with guests. We’ve had huge names come on and I’m like — wait, I don’t care about this person. If they invited me to dinner I wouldn’t be excited.
There are four types of guests for MFM:
One: People like us with different flavor. They get the show, know what we do, and bring their own ideas. When you guys first came on, you came with business ideas — I remember you pitched this Airbnb Wi-Fi network thing. You got the stick. Those guests work because the audience loves ideas from credible people.
Two: Legit famous. Someone big enough that a bunch of new people will click to listen — Paris Hilton tier. They don’t have a podcast or newsletter, they’re just famous-famous.
Three: Internet famous. The nice thing here is at least they can help distribute the content.
Four: Personal interest. We just want to nerd out with them. We had Ariel Helwani on — I don’t know how much of the audience cared, but I cared. I wanted that conversation.
The one type you get tripped up on most is legit-famous: expectations are high, they don’t know the show, and unless they’re getting put in People magazine, they actually have no way to reach an audience directly.
Sam: Who always does it right is Dharmesh from HubSpot. His episodes get really popular every time. And he’s the sponsor, the guest, and he drives the growth. That’s the best kind of guest.
The Alibaba Story: No Money, No Plans, No Technology [00:32:00]
Shaan: Do you guys find any strange commonalities among the companies you’ve studied?
David: We talk more about companies than people. But the biggest pattern is: it’s usually the founder doing something that literally everybody else had left for dead.
Bernard Arnault buying Christian Dior from the French government out of bankruptcy in the ’80s — nobody else was even bidding. TSMC: zero other people thought you should start a chip foundry when you have no chip IP. Nintendo: the U.S. video game market went from $3 billion to $100 million in two years. Everybody ran screaming. Nintendo comes in, launches the NES, and within five years has 95 percent market share and has grown the industry back to $3 billion. These are Nut Job bets that looked dead to everyone else.
Shaan: That reminds me of something. I went to China when I was 21 — Alibaba flew out a bunch of entrepreneurs to meet with them. It was supposed to be Jack Ma, but we ended up meeting his right-hand man David Wei, who was running the company at the time.
Someone asked him: what are the most important things for the success of a company? He said: models for success are misleading — they can’t be copied due to luck, timing, all those other things. But what you can ask me is: what are the common keys to failure? Those are always the same.
He said there are three keys to failure: money, plans, and technology. So our plan was no money, no plans, no technology.
I was like — what? This is a company worth $40 billion.
He explained: Money makes people stupid. When problems come up, their first instinct becomes throw money at it rather than attacking with creativity. When Jack Ma needed to build their version of AdWords, he cut a check for $250,000 to the team. They laughed — “you’re missing three zeros.” He said: that’s how much I started Alibaba with. If you need more than that for a feature, we’re doing it wrong.
He moved 19 people into his apartment. That was the office. Need servers? Go buy junk servers and refurbish them. If you’re building in a way where you need redundancy, you’ve already done this wrong.
No technology. Everybody wants to call us a tech company. No — we’re a service company. If you don’t think you’re in the service industry, you’re in the wrong industry.
No plans. He turned to the room — 50 young entrepreneurs — and said: how many of you are doing what you initially planned to do? Nobody’s hand went up. Exactly. Plans are fine, but they always change. That’s the only thing we know about plans. The mission never wavers. Don’t follow the plan you wrote when you started — follow your mission, follow your vision.
Sam: That’s amazing. Are there any founders you would least want to compete against?
David: Jensen Huang. He’s Elon, except not like Elon — leads with kindness. But he was contrarian and right at every single phase of Nvidia. GPU originally for gaming. Then he saw researchers buying gaming GPUs from Best Buy to do AI research, and he spent billions and thousands of headcount over five years to build Cuda — the software stack that became the platform to develop AI on. By the time AI became a thing, Nvidia had an enormous moat. Without Jensen and Cuda, we are not living in the world we’re living in today.
The other answer for the most savage person to compete against is Bernard Arnault. He got there not by being a founder with natural product-market fit — but by deal prowess. He figured out how to Hoover up 70 percent of history’s most important luxury brands into one umbrella.
Shaan: What about Airbnb? I had a job there when I was 22, dropped out of school, then got denied. My wife ended up working there. I’d listen to Brian Chesky give 30-minute Thursday talks during COVID. That guy is bad to the bone. There’s a difference between a missionary and a mercenary — he’s a missionary who’s also a killer. People think of him as just a nice guy. He’s way more of a killer than people give him credit for.
David: The funny thing about the “even an idiot could run it” quote — I don’t think there’s anything any manager could do to change the trajectory of Airbnb. It’s the most amazing global network effect of all time.
The Contrarian Test [00:45:00]
Shaan: I’ve picked up a poker tell on real contrarians versus fake ones. In the tech world, because of Peter Thiel, there’s a fetishization of being contrarian. If it’s in your Twitter bio, you probably aren’t one. Same with “polymath” and “Visionary.”
Here’s the tell: how excited are you that you have this contrarian idea? People who are contrarian for the sake of it get really excited to tell you how everyone thinks A but it’s actually B. Real contrarians — they just see A, and they’re almost confused why people don’t think A. They don’t spend time trying to convince the world. When someone reacts strongly, they say: I can’t believe you don’t think this. It just seems like the truth to them.
David: We know how to be contrarian. I’m not sure we know how to be right yet. We do basically everything that’s the opposite of every podcasting best practice — short episodes, weekly cadence, guests for audience building — and everything that has worked for us is doing the exact opposite. Does that mean keep doing the opposite of every piece of advice? I don’t think so. But pay more attention to the iterative feedback loop with your listeners than to general advice.
Business Idea: Corporate Podcast Agency [00:52:00]
David: I have a half-baked idea I was kicking around with Ben. You could start a corporate podcast agency — an agency for companies to make their own internal or external podcast.
My thesis: there is tremendous value to a company having a podcast even if nobody listens. If people do listen, great upside — but assume no one will. It’s really an excuse for relationship-building conversations with customers. Sales enablement. Once you have the conversation recorded and published publicly, even without organic audience, you can link to it as a lead nurturing tool: here’s someone in your position talking about why this made their life better.
What do you charge for that?
Ben: Yes, it works. Customers are extremely price-insensitive. Margins are super high. We actually made Snowflake’s podcast and Frank Slootman was about it all the time. The one bad thing: when recessions hit, it’s the first thing to go. You get the email asking for last 30-day downloads numbers and it’s like — delete the whole thing.
AI Investing and the Moat Question [00:58:00]
Ben: The category I’m most interested in right now: I believe saying “we invest in AI” is a little bit silly — same thing as 20 years ago saying “we invest in software.” It’s going to be so quickly ubiquitous. I haven’t invested in any net new AI company, in part because I don’t think AI is going to be the differentiation or defensible for the vast majority of companies.
The value is going to come from the same thing that always creates value and moats: network effects with your customers, or a data moat where someone’s already fully locked into your thing and doesn’t want to migrate. An enormous amount of AI value will accrue to the foundational models, but you have to be using them in order to be table stakes in the next few years — because everybody’s going to expect all software to behave magically.
Shaan: James Currier told me he’d been pitched by 200 AI companies in the last quarter and invested in none. I haven’t invested in any new AI companies either. The companies I’ve already invested in have added AI to their products, but I haven’t bet on a net new AI company for the same reason.
How MFM’s HubSpot Deal Works [01:05:00]
Sam: The podcast is owned by HubSpot and we get paid strictly a performance fee. When it kicks ass, which it has, we get paid well. Not one time have they ever censored us or said you made a bad joke, don’t say that. It’s been a great relationship.
The honest complication: if Shaan and I bounce, they don’t have a show. So both sides are trying to figure out what we can do and how far we can push things. We leave money on the table — we turned off YouTube ads, we don’t do spot ads. But any revenue outside the Pod is 100 percent ours — events, merch, whatever.
Shaan: It also gives credibility. You see people on YouTube giving business advice and you click their bio: so what have you done? Oh, your career is giving advice. Where’d you get that firsthand knowledge? Do you have any battle scars?
During the pod I built Milk Road and sold it — that adds credibility. Sam launches Hampton, it’s clearly going to be successful — that gives the pod credibility. That’s why all-in works: billionaires talking about being billionaires. My First Million is millionaires talking about making millions.
Hampton Launch and Sam’s Philosophy on Focus [01:12:00]
Sam: In 2021 and 2022 I tried investing and I was like — I hate it. I totally dislike it. I don’t like taking a minority interest in things. I think of myself a little bit like an artist sometimes with companies. I like to be creative and express myself through them. I prefer owning all of something.
So that’s why I launched Hampton. It fits my interests, I have a competitive advantage. When I announced it on the Pod, we now have 5,000 people who applied. It’s $8,500 a year to join and we’re being very meticulous and slow about who we add. But that’s going to be a very large company.
Shaan likes to do lots of things — cash-flowing businesses, minority stakes, investing in startups. That’s actually the easier way to make wealth. I just don’t find enjoyment in it. I’m a dopamine fiend. Seeing sales come in, making decisions — that’s my alcohol. I get drunk off that.
I prefer spending five to ten years on something rather than jumping between things like an investor needs to. Focus is my thing.
Why Podcasting Gets Closer to the Truth [01:20:00]
Ben: Podcasting has more people from the field doing it because it’s easier. You’re talking, not writing. No barrier — you don’t have to edit, make a TikTok, layer in filters. You sit down and talk.
That’s why you see Reed Hoffman doing straight audio, athletes doing it. The podcast format gets credible industry participants in a way other media can’t.
David: The journalists covering tech — even the best ones have had to immerse themselves in the operator-founder communities to understand what’s going on. But a junior journalist coming out of journalism school picking up this beat — it’s structurally impossible for that to be a better way to learn what’s going on than listening to industry participants.
Sam: Podcasting is a good AI use case, actually. You run the transcript of people who are industry participants through a model and say: write this as if it was a New York Times article with a strong lead. It is amazing how I’ve transformed my use of GPT — not using it to answer questions, but to feed it lots of stuff and ask it to make it better.
I wrote a LinkedIn post about our most recent Acquired episode and pasted the whole thing in. I said: can you act as my editor and modify this to make it more likely to go viral as a LinkedIn post? It indexed way in the other direction — full of emojis, “discover the secrets.” I had to tone it down. But it helped me rephrase a lot of awkward phrasing that didn’t flow well. It’s a very good rewriter.
Ben: Yeah. I totally agree. Go check out Acquired. This is the gentleman’s agreement and the ladies’ understanding — you got to subscribe. It benefits you. You’ll get smarter, you’ll get more ideas. That’s the whole deal.