Season 2, Episode 3: Nest

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

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

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2018

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Acquired brings it all back home—to the smart home that is—with Google’s 2014 acquisition of Nest for $3.2B. From Nest cofounder Tony Fadell’s first job at General Magic (alongside future Android founder Andy Rubin) to his days as “father of the iPod” under Steve Jobs at Apple, the Silicon Valley history runs deep with this one. But did that make the acquisition a good move for Google in the coming battle with Amazon’s “Lady A” for control over consumers’ homes? We dive in!

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

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

Links:

Carve Outs:

Ben: Do by Friday podcast
David: A Kingdom from Dust By Mark Arax in The California Sunday Magazine

Transcript

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0:00.0	The color really does have an impact on your brain.
0:02.8	Yeah, it's like with these billions of dollars the technology companies actually hire
0:06.6	a psychologist to intentionally do this stuff. Welcome to Season 2 episode 3 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and
0:26.7	IPOs.
0:27.7	I'm Ben Gilbert.
0:28.7	I'm David Rosenthal.
0:30.6	And we are your hosts.
0:32.2	It's finally time to cover a no-brainer story here on
0:35.1	acquired Google's 2014 acquisition of Nest. David are you pumped? I am so pumped.
0:42.0	Yeah, um, There's no shortage of research for this one.
0:46.0	There's no shortage of requests for this one.
0:48.0	And actually, it's pretty timely with the announcement coming out last week that Google is rolling Nest back into, or I guess for the first time into its main hardware business instead of running as an independent subsidiary.
1:02.0	Yeah, I mean the question is like which nest acquisition or divestiture is this officially
1:08.2	going to be about because there was the original acquisition, the rolling out into a standalone unit of alphabet, and now the reacquisition
1:16.8	back into Google.
1:17.8	Yeah, well, and not to mention a half a billion dollar pickup of drop cam along the way.
1:24.1	We just might cover that. It's true it's true. So to make sure we're on the same page for
1:30.1	the full episode this is the original acquisition of Nest where they Google
1:37.0	actually wired cash to the bank accounts of people who own shares in Nest.
1:45.0	That's so prosaic, then. A couple of announcement for listeners before we dive in.
1:51.0	David and I have been playing around with a lot of new podcast apps recently, and one of them that's pretty cool is Breaker.
1:57.0	So if you're using the Breaker app and listening to us right now, or if you want to try it out, please comment on this episode.
	...

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