Acquired

Acquired Episode 17: Waze


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Topics covered include: 

  • Community Showcase: the Nexcast podcasting platform from listener Brian Sanders, along with their podcast chronicling the team’s journey building the company 
  • Waze’s origin in cofounder & CTO Ehud Shabtai’s desire to hack his portable GPS navigation unit
  • Waze CEO Noam Bardin’s  retrospective blog post on the Waze journey 
  •  Waze’s Palo Alto office and the bizarre Silicon Valley phenomenon of tech companies being located in retail storefronts 
  • Apple’s  ill-fated launch of Apple Maps as part of iOS 6 at WWDC 2012, Apple’s subsequent apology letter, and  Scott Forstall’s ultimate ouster from the company 
  • The climax of the mobile platform wars… which it turns out Apple and Google  both won
  •  Apple, Facebook, and Google all vying to acquire Waze throughout 2013
  •  Google’s renewed design ethos under Larry Page
  • Ben and David spontaneously agree (surprise) to create on a new category of acquisition for the show 
  • The increasing strategic value of data and data assets as technology enters the age of machine learning 
  • The coming mega trend of autonomous vehicles, and  the role Israeli startups are playing in it (including the globalization of startups & innovation)
  • The disruptive power of network and data-based business models
  • Emergence of native as *the* definitive advertising medium on mobile, including ability to close the advertising loop via location-based products and services 

Sponsors:

Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredsn
Vanta: http://vanta.com/acquired
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig25


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© Copyright 2015-2025 ACQ, LLC


The Carve Out:

  • Ben: Weezer’s “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori” on Song Exploder 
  • David:  Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” TED Talk

  Followups: 

  • None this week… coverage of Instagram Stories to come next time!
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AcquiredBy Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

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