Season 2, Episode 1: Zappos (with Alfred Lin)

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2018

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Former Zappos Chairman & COO (and current Partner at Sequoia Capital) Alfred Lin joins our heroes to kick off Season 2 with a classic: Amazon’s 2009 acquisition of the internet’s quirkiest online retailer for $1.2B in stock. How did three Harvard undergrads go from delivering pizza to their dorm to delivering happiness to the world — and become in the process one of the few companies ever to compete successfully head-to-head against Amazon in commerce? Tune in to find out!

Note: Unfortunately the quality of David and Alfred’s audio tracks in this episode were significantly impacted by a processor issue on David’s computer, which we didn’t discover until after recording. We’ve worked hard to fix in post-production, but it’s still far from perfect. Still, the content from Alfred is so good, we felt we had to put this episode out there even though the audio quality isn’t up to par. We hope you’ll give it a listen regardless, and we’re working on getting a transcript made ASAP as well.

-Ben & David

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Carve Outs:

Ben: Andrew Mason on Recode Decode
David: Justin O’Beirne on Google Maps’ Moat
Alfred: Walter Isaacson’s biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey Acquired Listeners, before this episode starts, David and I wanted to give you a heads up that the audio quality is pretty rough in the second half.
0:07.0	We had a problem that we didn't catch until afterwards that makes it sound like a conference call with a poor connection.
0:12.0	This stuff is important to us and we even talked
0:14.4	about not even releasing the episode. However, the interview content is just awesome, so we thought
0:19.2	it'd be a shame not to share it with all of you. We apologize and we hope you enjoy the interview.
0:24.7	Okay, and is video good for you?
0:26.7	Yeah, it's a good angle.
0:28.9	You look great.
0:29.6	This is a good angle.
0:30.7	Are you getting my good set?
0:51.7	Always, David. Welcome to Season 2, episode 1 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'mfeld and we are your hosts and I'm Alford Lenn.
0:57.0	Hey welcome Alford. We're very excited.
1:00.0	I know I know to bet our titles really really do those in.
1:07.3	Thank you for having me on the show. Yeah, we're super pumped to have you
1:10.8	Listeners, this episode is going to be about
1:13.0	Zappos and Alfred is one of the few people in the world
1:17.0	who can actually do this episode justice
1:20.0	and come on to do the show with us.
1:22.0	We, in December, I mentioned that we're switching to season
1:25.5	so we can do themes and mini series across several episodes.
1:30.2	And for our first episode, we wanted to do a really classic acquired format,
1:34.6	reviewing an M&A transaction.
	...

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