Acquired Episode 17: Waze
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
4.8 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 August 2016
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Topics covered include:
- Community Showcase: the Nexcast podcasting platform from listener Brian Sanders, along with their podcast chronicling the team’s journey building the company
- Waze’s origin in cofounder & CTO Ehud Shabtai’s desire to hack his portable GPS navigation unit
- Waze CEO Noam Bardin’s retrospective blog post on the Waze journey
- Waze’s Palo Alto office and the bizarre Silicon Valley phenomenon of tech companies being located in retail storefronts
- Apple’s ill-fated launch of Apple Maps as part of iOS 6 at WWDC 2012, Apple’s subsequent apology letter, and Scott Forstall’s ultimate ouster from the company
- The climax of the mobile platform wars… which it turns out Apple and Google both won
- Apple, Facebook, and Google all vying to acquire Waze throughout 2013
- Google’s renewed design ethos under Larry Page
- Ben and David spontaneously agree (surprise) to create on a new category of acquisition for the show
- The increasing strategic value of data and data assets as technology enters the age of machine learning
- The coming mega trend of autonomous vehicles, and the role Israeli startups are playing in it (including the globalization of startups & innovation)
- The disruptive power of network and data-based business models
- Emergence of native as *the* definitive advertising medium on mobile, including ability to close the advertising loop via location-based products and services
Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury
The Carve Out:
- Ben: Weezer’s “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori” on Song Exploder
- David: Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” TED Talk
Followups:
- None this week… coverage of Instagram Stories to come next time!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We have a model where I think money from venture investors, we give it to engineers. |
| 0:04.0 | That's how the business model works. |
| 0:07.0 | But, except for that, now that we're part of Google. |
| 0:10.0 | Yeah, what's the plan? |
| 0:11.0 | Everything's changed. |
| 0:12.0 | Who got the truth? |
| 0:14.0 | Is it you, is it you, is it you, is it you, is it you, who got the truth now? |
| 0:19.0 | Is it you, is it you, is it you, is it you? |
| 0:22.0 | Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way. |
| 0:27.0 | Who got the truth? |
| 0:28.0 | Welcome to episode 17 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm |
| 0:34.0 | Ben Gilbert, I'm David Rosenthal, and we are your hosts. Today we're going to be |
| 0:38.7 | talking about Google's acquisition of ways. But first, we talked about in our last episode we are going to be doing |
| 0:46.8 | a community showcase and this week it's one of our listeners Brian Sanders. He and his team are building something called |
| 0:55.0 | NextCast. NextCast is a Next Generation podcasting client that has a lot of interactivity |
| 1:00.8 | baked into it. So they look at the existing kind of flat one-way medium |
| 1:06.0 | of podcasting as it is today. |
| 1:07.7 | And Brian and his team are looking at ways |
| 1:10.5 | to make it kind of more of a two-way street so you can have a relationship with |
| 1:14.2 | with a podcaster and click links and watch videos and things like that. The |
| 1:18.6 | app's not totally built yet but their |
| 1:23.2 | uh... their uh... pitching for funding and things like that is being covered in a |
... |
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