Back by popular “Acquired demand” (plus we really wanted to have this conversation for our own edification!!), friends of the pod NZS Capital return to talk about what’s going with the current market gyrations, and for a much-needed refresher on how to invest when — surprise — knowing the future is still an impossible task. As always we left this conversation with renewed appreciation for the NZS approach and the utility of their resiliency + optionality mental model. This is not one to miss! 

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

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It has been dubbed "one of the best venture investments of all time" by Packy McCormick, generating over a 4000X return in 3-and-a-half years. Today, we are talking with Chris McCann and Edith Yeung, the earliest investors in Solana, and partners at Race Capital. They also unbelievably were the earliest investors in FTX and started Race Capital in the midst of crypto winter!

On this episode, we talk with Edith and Chris about the stories behind both of those investments and their views on what's next in crypto from their vantage point in the center of the ecosystem.

Links:

- The Generalist's FTX piece with Race Capital's Public Investment Memo

-  Picture: Chris and Edith with Jihan Wu, Founder of Bitmain

-  Picture: Edith with Anatoly (Solana founder) and Min Kim (ICON co-founder)

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

We sit down with Jeremy Cai, the CEO of new retail pioneer Italic, for a fascinating discussion of how they're upending the traditional manufacturer-brand-retailer model by taking the opposite approach of earlier DTC startups. Rather than elevating brand and cutting out retail, Italic cuts out the brand and lets the actual manufacturers (who you've never heard of but who make most of the actual products that J. Crew, Everlane, etc sell) market and sell direct to customers. 

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Originally broadcast live on New Years Eve: we raise a glass (of coffee haha) and recap 2021 with our besties Mario Gabriele from the Generalist and Packy McCormick from Not Boring. Thank you for making 2021 an incredible year for all of us at ACQ, NB + TG, and may 2022 be filled with great things and grand adventures for us all!

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Last month, Ben sat down with Wesley Chan at Web Summit for a quick, 18-minute interview. The conversation was supposed to be about global investing in 2021 as an early-stage VC, but the conversation turned mostly into the origin story of Wesley's (unbelievably good) seed investment in Canva.

Wesley's firm Felicis Ventures invested pre-revenue, leading the seed round, and Canva is valued at $40 billion today. Wesley dives into the details (and why he invested in the first place!) in this interview.

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Today we're excited to have a longtime friend of the Acquired family on ACQ2, Rob Meyerson. Rob was the President of Blue Origin for 15 years, and today is an investor and advisor to space industry startups. Ben recorded this interview live at the fantastic aerospace industry conference, ASCEND, where Rob is the Executive Producer. In this interview, we cover:

• How Blue Origin started, and what it was like in the early days (spoiler: they weren't yet building rockets!)
• Rob’s experience working directly for Jeff Bezos
• What’s changed about SpaceX since May of 2020, when we did our Acquired episode on the company
• Rob’s theses about what sectors of commercial space are poised for growth in the next few years

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Ben and David go on "This Week in Startups" with Jason Calacanis for a holiday special! 

Discussion includes:

- Talking TWIST and All-In this year with everything from politics to weight loss to private jets

- Acquired's year and some of Ben and David's biggest insights from episodes

- VC, valuations, and crypto investing mechanics

- Use cases for crypto, and trying to get Jason (a skeptic) excited

- Carveouts: our favorite books, podcasts, and TV shows from this year

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

We are very excited to bring you a special ACQ2 interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Aside from Joe's well-known work as a Golden Globe-nominated, Emmy-award-winning actor in films like 500 Days of Summer, Inception, and Looper, Joe is also the founder of  HITRECORD, a startup which brings creative collaborators together across film, music, books, and more.

Ben sat down with Joe to discuss:

• The creator economy’s focus on the finished product vs. the creative process, and how he thinks about this at HITRECORD
• The state of the film and TV industry today, amidst the shift to streaming platforms and tech companies as primary distribution channels
• What it has been like on set playing Travis Kalanick in Showtime’s upcoming “Super Pumped”

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Thanks to our good friends at Fika Ventures for setting this conversation up!

The title says it all. This feels weird to release by Acquired standards -- an hour of audio with zero research! -- but we wanted to check in with y'all and say hi from parental leave.

Topics covered:

- Update on Dad Life

- Ben's new MacBook Pro

- Discussion of Acquired's approach to doing video / YouTube

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

We sit down with Adam Jackson, the cofounder and CEO of Freelance Labs, which builds the incredible Web3 project Braintrust. (Disclosure David is an investor via Kindergarten Ventures.) We talk all about what a marketplace looks like in Web3, and why it's a completely different animal than traditional Web2 marketplaces like Uber, eBay, DoorDash, etc. Prior to starting Braintrust, Adam was the CEO of Doctor on Demand, so has literally lived both sides of the table. Tune in for a FASCINATING discussion of everything that crypto/tokenization enables, and why it's such an exciting shift that unlocks massive, $000B+ opportunities like Braintrust.

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com