ACQ2 by Acquired

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:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

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:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

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:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

We sit down with Roneil Rumberg, the co-founder and CEO of Audius — the decentralized music platform which currently is likely the widest-adopted Web3 project in existence with over 6m active users. This conversation was AWESOME and covers everything from Silicon Valley history, to how the music industry works, to the technical aspects and challenges of building a Web3 project today. Huge thank you to Roneil for joining us, and we're looking forward to hearing more from Audius on Acquired in the years to come!

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

Earlier this week David went on Levels' podcast, A Whole New Level, hosted by Acquired "Super LP" and Levels' head of growth, Ben Grynol. We had such a blast that we wanted to share here with the community as well! Full show notes from Levels below:

When most companies start, they are single-threaded companies. More specifically, companies start with one product or revenue stream and evolve. Amazon is a great example of a company that has built an ecosystem. The company started as an e-commerce site for selling books, and now has a number of inter-related businesses that make up the entire Amazon ecosystem.

Netflix is an example of a company that started as a single-threaded company – (a platform for viewing video content) – and has, for the most part, remained that way since its inception.

As we build Levels, we often think about the way that our company will evolve – will it be an ecosystem for health, or will we remain focused on monitoring glucose? In this episode, David Rosenthal, (VC and Host of Acquired Podcast), dives deep into what it takes to build an ecosystem around a company.

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

Confused about everything going on with The Fed, inflation and how it affects tech and startup valuations? Or why it seems like every Jerome Powell comment brings out an army of finance's equivalent of fortune tellers and tarot card readers? So were we, so we called up the best person we know to explain everything -- Matt McBrady. Matt may be the only person who's been an academic economist, worked at the US Treasury, run a massive hedge fund AND helped start and sit on the board of two very successful startups, aQuantive and Axon/TASER. Tune in for a crash course in everything you need to know!

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

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Links

• J.P.'s Never Gonna Give you Up
• Follow Matt on LinkedIn to see his posts or connect with him for consulting, board opportunities, etc
• For more on Matt’s academic work, check out his UVA faculty webpage

We sit down with Initialized Capital's Kim-Mai Cutler to talk about her opposite journey from us at Acquired, going from journalist to VC. We riff on how the landscape has evolved from Kim-Mai's parents' "Hewlett Packard generation" in the Valley through the TechCrunch era that se was a big part of, to today and how the nature of reporting, investing and influence -- the intersection of the two -- has changed.

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

How on earth do you professionally manage a crypto investment firm? That was the question we wanted to find out, so we dialed up one of the best in the business: Multicoin Capital co-founder and managing partner Kyle Samani. Appropriately fresh on the heels of our Solana special episode (Multicoin was one of Solana's earliest investors), we dive into how in a few short years Kyle, Tushar and the team have built one of the largest and most well-known dedicated crypto funds on the market. We cover Multicoin's three crypto "mega-theses", how they've structured the firm across both a venture and hedge fund, and the dynamics of managing capital and running a firm in the new and fast-moving world of crypto investing.

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

Links:

• Multicoin's crypto mega-theses: https://multicoin.capital/thesis/
• The Block: https://www.theblockcrypto.com
• Kyle on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KyleSamani

Ben interviewed Initialized Capital founder and friend of the show, Garry Tan at Collision Conf last month. Garry is of course also a YouTuber, Clubhouse'r, and master of content creation. The good people at Collision Conf gave us the thumbs up to share this interview on the value of owning your own media stream with all of you.

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

We're joined by Oliver Sharp of Highspot, Seattle's most recent unicorn company (at least at the time of recording!), to talk about how and why to architect everything a software company does around its customers — what today is often called "customer-led growth" — but really represents a company building philosophy that runs much deeper. Oliver has serious software cred: he first joined Microsoft in 1984, and then later became part of Bill Gates' famous "TA" staff after Microsoft acquired his first startup. The conversation was *fantastic* and we owe a huge thank you to Oliver for sharing his decades of learning by doing with us. Make sure you don't miss this one!

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra