Hello, and welcome to Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks

behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. So Ben and I are obsessed

with uncovering the history, strategy, and stories behind what built the greatest companies in the

world. Each month, we choose a company, and we spend the

entire month researching what uniquely made it work, where many others failed. The output of that

is a full-day recording session where Ben and I come together and tell the absolute deepest

business and technology stories on the internet. And when we say obsessed, we mean that we spend

100 hours each reading everything

that exists about a company and doing primary research and background interviews with the people

who lived it firsthand. These are stories like Nvidia, Costco, Hermes, Microsoft, Rolex, Amazon.

Those are some of our favorites anyway. What started 10 years ago as just the

study of tech companies has led to a curiosity about our broader world from Berkshire Hathaway to the

NFL or even Taylor Swift. Our goal in creating each episode is to uncover the secrets that are

lurking in plain sight and how these world-changing

companies went from obscurity to ubiquity. So if you've ever wondered, how did Starbucks end up

on every corner around the globe? Or what does Visa actually do? And how did they become the payment

rails of the whole globe? Or why is the NFL so much bigger than other sports

leagues than acquired is for you? Yep. We have a unique format that we do on the show. We call it a

conversational audiobook. Ben and I tell these stories of these companies through a deep conversation,

and typically it's just the two of us without an interview guest.

Occasionally, we will bring in a protagonist from the story like Howard Schultz from Starbucks or Jets and Huang

from Nvidia or Mark Zuckerberg from Meta. Usually though, that's as a follow-up interview to a deep dive

...