Acquired - Episode 2: Instagram

Episode Date: November 1, 2015

Ben and David discuss Facebook's acquisition of Instagram in 2012. Was it a success? If so, what are the criteria that made it work? What lessons can be learned for other acquisitions in the future?Sponsors:ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acqsnaiagentsHuntress: https://bit.ly/acqhuntressVanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaMore Acquired!:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Merch Store!

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Another story on the way Who got the truth? Welcome back to episode two of Acquired. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts yet again, at least for the second time and hopefully many, many more. Hopefully many more.

Thank you to all of our listeners, all few of you for the amazing, few but growing, small in number, strong in spirit. True. Thank you for the amazing feedback. It was incredible. We learned a lot. We learned that Ben has amazing idioms. Amazing idioms.

David has dulcet tones. Thank you for the feedback. We will try to incorporate it and uh hope that we keep getting better if uh you have more feedback after this one please send it to us you can find us on you can find the show on twitter at at acquired fm you can find ben at gilbert you can find Ben at Gilbert. You can find me, David, at DJ Rosent, D-J-R-O-S-E-N-T. And our website is live at acquired.fm. So should we introduce ourselves again? We think for the first couple, so people, so, you know, more than our original five

listeners get the lowdown. I think we can do it just this once. Then once we're viral after episode three, then we can stop introducing ourselves. Sounds great. So I'm Ben Gilbert. I am the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs here in Seattle. We come up with ideas for companies. We prototype them. We build them. We try and get customers. And if it seems to be working, then we recruit really talented people to come in and take the company from us and we go start the next thing. And I'm David. I am a principal at Madrona Venture Group. We are an early stage venture

capital firm located here in Seattle. Invest in seed series A, series B stage technology companies. Always looking for the next great thing, which might become the next great acquirer or maybe acquiree. Hence our podcast. All right. So with that, let's segue into our second episode. Our first was Disney acquiring Pixar. And here for our second as another landmark, successful,

even in the very recent last couple of years, this one's not nearly as old. Landmark successful acquisition, Instagram by Facebook. Facebook buying Instagram. So as a quick reminder, the framework that we've decided on for our show is we're going to briefly talk about the acquisition kind of facts and history. Then each of us, Ben and I, are going to categorize the acquisition into a few buckets that we've identified. And then we're going to do a fun segment called what would have happened had the acquisition not happened. Trust us, it's fun.

And then we're adding a new one for this episode, which is tech themes that we think are illustrated by this acquisition. And then finally, we're going to give the deal as a whole a grade. And we heard the feedback that Ben and I agree too much, so we're going to try and be more controversial here. I'm not, though. Yes, you are. All right. Instagram. Instagram. here i'm not though yes you are all right instagram so um i remember vividly this was one of those moments um in my technology life at least exactly where i was the day i found out that facebook bought instagram for a billion dollars and today today, sitting here in 2015, where there are like 623 unicorn startups out there that are

valued at more than a billion dollars, back in April 2012, there were very, very few. And the even idea that a company that had 13 employees and no revenue and made an app on your phone could be worth a billion dollars was pretty shocking at the time. And totally shocking because there was no discussion of it being worth a billion dollars pre-acquisition. The only indicator that that number was ever talked about was when the deal was done and announced to the public. Yep. And interestingly, Instagram raised its, I believe, Series B round of venture capital just like a week or even less than a week before the acquisition happened, um, and did value it at several, several hundred million dollars. Um, but all that only came out, uh, just right before,

even during and after the acquisition news, which was, um, pretty momentous, really ushered in Ben and I've been talking about this for this, this acquisition for months. It was part of the genesis of the idea of this show. This acquisition, I think really ushered in, you know, quote unquote, the age of the unicorn. Yeah. As much as I hate the term, it sure does see that way, seem that way. So quick facts, April, 2012, Facebook announces that they are buying Instagram company, um, with 13 employees, no revenue, uh, no obvious monetization model, um, and had 30 million users at the time. Uh, and interestingly, um, yeah, just a week before, uh, Instagram had launched their Android app and added 1 million users. At that time, with 13 employees and 30 million users,

Instagram had 2.3 million users per employee at acquisition. Pop quiz. How many users per employee do you think Instagram has today? Well, they've hired a whole bunch of people, right? They have. They have. I think what we were talking about earlier, they have like 150 employees now.

They have about 150 employees, as best as we can tell. I don't know. That number's got to be significantly worse now. It's better. 2.6 million users per employee. now has two and a half years later 400 million users wow huh okay so i don't know i feel like i'm already hinting at my my answer to the question later of my rendered

conclusion but you know we this is our second episode. We're still getting to the easy ones here. Pretty incredible, honestly. I think the thing that always amazed me about Instagram was it's so simple. They focus their eyes on the prize. And the question is like, you know, we'll get to this a little bit later. But what would have happened to that incredible, simple, sheltered platform if it wasn't integrated into the Facebook strategy and it was getting to the point you know everyone's parents were on facebook it became more of a utility in our lives than than sort of an escape or an enjoyable thing and um actually a quick aside it's it's crazy i was scrolling back through

my um my history of writing on a friend's wall and this is freshman year of college and our conversation back and forth on our each other's like public Facebook walls look like text messages. And they're talking about what grades we got in classes and like sort of private stuff that I wouldn't be posting today. It's really fascinating that, you know, Facebook was very much that sort of fun place at that point and not this thing that we viewed as necessary and a thing that it could be assumed that pretty much every person would have. And you see there's a lot of reports of, hey, kids aren't using Facebook. They're just using Instagram. They're just using Snapchat.

They're all using Facebook too, but it's for schoolwork. I mean, it's for the necessary, less fun things in their lives. And starting with Instagram and with other acquisitions later, I mean, Instagram is, is sort of where you want to hang out and Facebook is where you have to go. Yep. And, um, you know, Facebook, it's so easy to forget now sitting here in 2015 and maybe we'll, maybe if, if we're, we're looking for something funny in 2018 we'll go back and listen to our podcast that we're recording now but but it's even so hard to remember like this was only three and a half years ago when this acquisition happened and facebook was in such a different

place from where it is today the company had just recently gone public um i we've been and i were just talking about this right before the episode they were still in the whole html5 mobile app hell um their apps were buggy god can you remember when that was even a debate oh nightmare and right and like you know now like what is like half of facebook's revenue, if not more? We should make a note, too, that we haven't fact-checked most of our numbers, so we could be wrong here. But at least it seems like everything that people talk about with Facebook is their mobile app installs and their CPI ads. Like, we couldn't even do that with HTML5.

Remember back, you know, people talk about now, you know, and I think, you know think Mark Zuckerberg has even said that Facebook really made coming years really stepped in and took over a lot of the value that people were getting out of Facebook from back in the day, the fun. And it's amazing because Facebook really, really killed it on the desktop. There's a lot of different boxes everywhere. If you remember, there was the mini feed and then there was the wall and then there was apps that you could have installed. Superpoke. Each one. Oh, Superpoke super poke god do i miss super poke there's these boxes they're sort of floating around all over the place maximizing your screen real estate and when they try to translate that to a mobile experience you know it's it's tough

to pare down all that stuff when your app has all this incredible functionality whereas you have instagram which is born in the mobile era and i I can have a funny story about this. It's born in the mobile era and has these immersive, beautiful, damn near full screen photographs. And all of my attention is on that one thing at one time. And it was focused on making anybody able to look like a talented creative, even if we weren't. I mean, I specifically remember one of my early Instagrams was of like the torn up bottom of my jeans and my shoe. And it looks so artsy with a filter. And I couldn't, it was a place where you could show off. That's so emo.

Full screen. And really like, you know, what they did was understand what people's attention span and what people's intention looked like when they were on that platform. And I remember this is not a thing that I came close to understanding at the time because I, um, I remember I used to work at a dog patch labs, uh, at a pure 38, uh, may it rest in peace has recently been demolished when you're interning at Cote. Yeah. In San Francisco and self an acquisition. Yeah. Yeah. An acquisition. And then another acquisition. Yeah. Everything gets, tweet yeah in san francisco and itself an acquisition yeah yeah an acquisition and then another acquisition yeah everything gets everything becomes salesforce eventually in the enterprise yeah anyway so i'm at pure 38 and um uh the the guys from bourbon later instagram are upstairs working on a pivot from their kind of location-based thing to

this very simple filter focused upload your photos to a social network app. And I remember seeing a demo of it when I walked by one time and telling Kevin, I'm pretty sure Facebook already lets you upload photos from your phone and everybody's already on that. And that Ben is why you're not a venture capitalist. We'll leave that to David. But no, I think, you know, Ben, is why you're not a venture capitalist. We'll leave that to David. But no, I think, you know, Ben, what you're saying, I think, really illustrates, you know, we're going to talk about themes, you know, as part of our programming in a minute. But I think this really illustrates something critical about why Facebook needed Instagram. And that was engagement. You know, Facebook before mobile, remember, you know,

back when it first launched when I was in college, and you were probably in high school when it first launched, right? Yep. You know, how much engagement did you have with Facebook? It was, you know, it's related to this concept of fun, right? And now Facebook has become this utility, and I barely engage with it at all. Um, but Instagram and messaging, WhatsApp, uh, and, and other services like that have become on mobile, these atomized services where your engagement lies. And that's the core of driving advertising revenue. And Facebook has always been, um, really good at this strategy where social networking is a cool kids game. I mean, the cool kids go to a thing and then the late adopters come on and then parents come on and then it's boring and then it's built for the old world platform and then it atrophies and it dies. And what Facebook did in acquiring Instagram is set their hubris aside and say,

we're not the most important platform. The most important thing is our business staying alive. And what we have to do is bet on whatever the thing where the people are on the new platform is. And after that critical first step, then they can start learning about what makes that so successful and kind of integrate all of those really talented folks to kind of like teach Facebook how to do that too.

So that brings us to section number two of our show. What category would you put this acquisition in? People, technology, product, business line, other? It's fine. I was just talking about people, but that's totally second order here i'm gonna say this is product um the facebook left it alone i mean facebook did the thing that every other acquirer can't seem to resist in any scenario and that is saying oh you know what this could do this could make our our main product better and the reason that that product was was

dangerous to you and potentially kicking your ass was because they figured something out you didn't. And it's been really incredible to watch Instagram have its own evolution. And I'll be out with some little boosts from the Facebook news feed and things like that, doing some algorithmic priority. But it's really remained separate, a separate team, and stayed very true to the core of what they set out to do. I think everything you said is right and totally the natural category to put this in as products. But I'm going to be a little bit controversial. I'm actually going to say technology here. Um, and the reason I'm going to say technology is not because of any, um, specific, uh, great computer science based innovation that Instagram team had. Um, but I'm going to say that this became, as I was talking about really the first, um, the first piece of, of Facebook's entire strategy for the mobile technology wave,

um, that they missed, that they missed, uh, from, from the beginning. And, um, Wait, David, you think that they, sorry, this is, you think that they wouldn't have gotten their act together in making their app what it is today without, I mean, let's, let's look at what their app is today. It's a collection of the most talented iOS developers in the world and a lot of the best mobile designers in the world packed into one office, developing maybe arguably the best suite of apps in the world. You just said the critical thing. Suite.

Suite of apps. What is Facebook today? Facebook is a suite of apps company i'm not going to disagree with you there i think without instagram without um and it's impossible to know how much of this is uh zuckerberg and cheryl sandberg and the rest of the facebook team core facebook team strategy versus what's come from from kevin and mike uh and the rest of the instagram team, core Facebook team strategy versus what's come from Kevin and Mike and the rest of the Instagram team. But I think without that acquisition happening, I think Facebook probably doesn't or make an offer for Snapchat somewhat a few months or a short time

after to buy Snapchat for $3 billion that Snapchat rejected. I think Facebook doesn't buy WhatsApp for the incredible amount of money that it did. And maybe, you know, maybe even Oculus to a certain extent. But even more than that, you know, again, think back to April 2012 when Facebook on mobile is this HTML5 mess. And think about Messenger now. To go from that HTML5 mess to the core Facebook app today, which drives a huge amount of revenue through their paid install program, ad program, and then to develop Messenger on the side and then have the guts to rip it out and make it part of this suite of app strategy. You know, Messenger, I believe, the latest numbers has 700 million active users, which is pretty incredible for something that is now a fully standalone app. Yeah, so I'll go with you on the technology of Instagram

being a kick in the pants. But I don't think, you know, we talk about like a technology acquisition that is truly about, you know, they understood how to do this computationally difficult thing better than we did and we needed it to enhance our core product. you know apple acquiring the touch id company because they could make a differentiated product based on integrating that technology i think that's a far second order thing here to acquiring the product of instagram you might be right you'll get me later You'll get me later. I'll get you later. All right, listeners.

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head on over to huntress.com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. Our huge thanks to Huntress. All right. What would have happened if Kevin Systrom had said no? Yeah. Instagram had just raised $50 million. They had plenty of runway, bright future ahead of them. Where would we be today? Yeah. You know, I think Instagram as a product to users wouldn't be significantly different.

I think that it would have continued to grow more slowly because they didn't have the resources. They wouldn't have had the prioritization from, and you know, this is, this is theoretical. This is something we talked about before. Did, you know, Facebook really prioritize Instagram posts in the newsfeed algorithm? Probably. I mean, it sure looked like it. It looked like we had a huge spike in that, and there was probably a lot more Instagram traffic. On the other hand, one of the things I'm still bummed about today is a loyal Twitter user. Oh, man. How great was it when Instagram was natively integrated into the Twitter stream? Yeah, that was pretty cool. And that was a sad, sad day when that integration broke.

Totally sad. And actually it changed my behavior. Like I don't tweet photos on like, I don't put a photo on Instagram and then tweet it because I know it's not going to show up. I natively upload it to Twitter now. Yep. And how often do you do that? Every third, fourth tweet. Maybe.

Yeah. Maybe. But, but, but I'll say, I was going to say, oh, these things negate each other. Twitter's at 300 million users and churning out everyone they can bring in, churned out a billion plus so far. And Facebook's sitting pretty with a decent chunk of the world's internet enabled population. So I think anything Facebook does is a three, four X, maybe five X force multiplier on top of anything Twitter could do.

No doubt. However, I do think, um, you know, Instagram has become itself, uh, a huge driver of audience and 400 million active, 400 million active users added a hundred million this year. Um, it's crazy. Yeah. Um, but I think they, you know, I think you can make an argument that they could have continued bootstrapping their way up into that user base through other platforms like Twitter, um, and using Facebook as well. Yeah. I mean, here's, here's how I think it would be different. I think, you know, in the last six months, especially Twitter has a, or I'm sorry,

Instagram has a very real ad platform. And they took their time in developing it. First, a very full-serve one where you'd work directly with the Instagram team, now a self-serve dashboard. But you get these really immersive brand ads that are platform appropriate. They don't feel like something that I want to scroll past. I want to look at it almost as much as I want to look at the gorgeous nature of photography that I see. They just didn't have the funnel of advertisers to point the ad platform at. So it would have been very slow to try and get advertiser attention and people to come over and use the Instagram platform and not only to spend their dollars there, but to spend their attention there learning a new platform. Whereas in the

Facebook acquisition, they have this kind of dual, um, dual deployment where you can buy ads on either from a single ad dashboard, much like Google did very early on with YouTube. Yep. Um, so I'm going to go a little bit kind of out there, crazy direction with this. And this is pure speculation, but I think if this acquisition hadn't happened you know i mean like we were like i was talking about earlier this kicked off the era of the constellation of apps you know with facebook and with you know twitter buying vine um and gosh even instagram itself now between um boomerang that they just launched and Hyperlapse. And Layout. Yep.

Which kudos to the Instagram design team. The cohesiveness of those is really nice. So let's imagine, though, for a second, that this constellation of apps thing hasn't become a theme in the technology landscape over the past couple of years. What's really interesting interesting because it has, you now have all of these major social platforms that have been created over the past five years, with the exception of Snapchat, um, all of the U S new, um, domestic, uh, U U.S.-based social platforms are owned by other companies with other business models and other goals.

And if you think about the level of business model innovation that's happened at this mobile app layer in the U.S. and compare it to Asia and WhatsApp. Now, it's a pretty bold claim to say the acquisition of Instagram prevented the rise of WhatsApp-like business models in the U.S. But let's just play this out for a minute. Sorry, not WhatsApp, WeChat. Apologies. I meant WeChat. Yeah, as a quick aside for listeners,

if you haven't been reading up on WeChat, it is insane. I mean, it's on the surface, a messaging app, but it's effectively like an operating system where it's much easier for especially non-technical folks to build a plugin for their business to WeChat that enables all sorts of things from booking doctor's appointments to picking your kids up at school, all within this theoretical messaging platform. In my opinion, WeChat is nothing short of literally the creation of an entirely new major, major business model for technology companies.

And that is the value-added services and integrations business model. Before WeChat, I mean, it's amazing. This product is given away for free, not monetized through advertising. And still in China, which is a brutally competitive market where it is very hard to monetize users, this product has, I believe, the latest estimates are like a $7 ARPU, uh, annual revenue per user in China. Just more, I think more than Twitter and rivaling Facebook. And those are ad platforms. Exactly. Um, and that is pretty incredible. And what, and so what, so what I think is amazing is, um, because in the U S you've had these new innovative mobile products be acquired by larger companies with older established

business models. You haven't seen that happen in the U.S. as much. Now, there are lots of other factors. You know, like in China, there was no, you know, mobile was really the first computing platform to be widely adopted across the whole population. There was no legacy desktop product and technology layer like there was no legacy desktop um uh product and technology layer like there was in the u.s that certainly had a lot to do with it too um but imagine you know what type of business model innovation we might have seen had instagram remained independent i don't know and certainly snapchat is playing with it too in terms of uh constellation of apps in terms of business models yeah yeah yeah their their channels thing will be really interesting to watch play out all right uh new new uh we'll

we'll move quickly here but um uh new uh segment for the show for episode two. Um, we've already talked about a little theme music for new segment, new segment. Um, what, uh, we've talked about this a bunch already, but, you know,

for, for you, Ben, um, what kind of broad themes and technology does the Facebook Instagram acquisition kind of represent for you? Yeah. So I was thinking about this when, um, when when you sent me earlier your idea to do the new segment and i was trying to think you know i think you did a really nice job in the last segment kind

of bringing in the app the app constellation theme i think the other theme that this sort of opens up is that you really have to own the audience. And that sounds trivial and obvious at first, but I think what I mean by that is in any distribution channel, you have suppliers, you have a distribution, and then you have the audience. And with the rise of these services, it's becoming increasingly more important to own the default channel that the users go to for leisure, for distraction, for whatever it is, because in the near infinite nature of the internet, you can push whatever you want through that channel to reach that audience. And I think Facebook's core asset was, and still sort of is, being that core place where people want to go and want to, you know, the first thing you want to do when you open your phone,

when you have some downtime or whatever it is, you go there to be distracted. You go there for fun. You go there to see your friends, to see whatever you aspire to. And that, owning the channel, makes you the most powerful advertising platform in the world. And on top of that, makes you the most powerful a lot of other things in the world. I mean, we're seeing it now with Facebook Instant articles and other experiments that we're playing with, but you are a very, very powerful force in your business model and to other people's business models if you are the first step in dishing out who gets the attention after you. And I think Facebook saw that as an incredible dangerous threat of people want to look at Instagram instead of us, and then they can start shoving whatever they want in that feed, even though that's kind of Instagram's model is to not clutter it up. They've managed to do a

really nice job of taking that attention that they're getting as the front door of what you want to go look at and putting that where advertisers are appropriately putting their ads. I think this is one of the reasons why technology companies with advertising business models have become so much larger in terms of size and reach and revenue and value than old world advertising models. I started my career steeped in old world media and advertising. You know, I worked in media technology and media investment banking. And then I worked at a newspaper at the Wall Street Journal. But when I was in banking, I worked on television and cable networks a lot. And their content and distribution were separate.

You know, the distribution companies were the cable companies and the satellite companies and they owned the distribution pipe and the content companies were the cable networks the amcs the scripts you know the all the channels that you see on cable tv and those were two separate things um and they both uh had their own advertising um it kind of they shared the advertising pie those advertising pie, those two stages of the value chain. And although television advertising was and perhaps still might be larger than web digital-based advertising as a whole, no one company could become as big as a Google or as a Facebook has. Because Google and Facebook have, or at least Facebook has integrated, and through Instagram, integrated content and distribution within one single company, within one single app

or constellation of apps. Yeah, they are the channel. I mean, Facebook is the channel for where you go when you want social or downtime or the variety of other services that Facebook offers, events, messaging, all that. Google is where you go when you have intent. So for me, I think we've talked about a few things throughout the episode. We mentioned briefly technology waves, which is something that Ben and I talk a lot about. We should just do a whole episode. We should do a special episode on waves.

But the concept that in the tech world, there are these waves of technology that come every few years. And I think this is a perfect illustration of the wave of mobile coming in and washing over the desktop wave, but bringing with it a whole new set of companies, of content and product models, of business models that may or may not have been implemented, at least domestically. But that's one. And then the other one that I think is something I've been thinking about a lot lately in terms of technology themes, I think is the scalability and the leverage that technology gives you. And I'm thinking in particular about the number of employees at Instagram. I mean, this is just incredible. 13 employees with 30 million users. Oh, and on those 13 employees, we were looking on LinkedIn too. I think 11 are still at Instagram. Yeah, something crazy like that, which is not typical for technology acquisitions. Yet another example of Facebook doing an acquisition.

Doing a great job here. But 13 employees at this landmark acquisition and today even at roughly 150 for 400 million users. And it's impossible to know how much revenue Instagram is generating today, but there was a great equity research report put out by Citigroup a year ago, almost a year ago, in which they valued Instagram at $35 billion. Uh, and this was when Instagram had not quite 300 million users. What's Facebook's market cap. Uh, I don't know offhand. I want to say it's right around 200 billion. Yeah. So, I mean, that's what a ridiculous chunk, right? Acquired for a billion dollars. It was less back then. Right. Right. Um, and, uh, and, and, and in that report, they estimate that Instagram revenues could be on the order of about $2 billion.

I mean, that's incredible. And this year, right? I think it was maybe summer 2015 to 2016 or something like that? Yep, yep. This year, they estimate. Last year, Citigroup estimated $2 billion in revenue for Instagram this year in 2015. To do that with 150 employees is incredible. And then WhatsApp, which came later,

something like 50-some-odd employees acquired for $20-plus billion. I'll raise the flag here and say it's not really fair to do the revenue calculation for the ad network since they're piggybacking off of Facebook's ad network, and I'm sure that takes a lot of engineers. True, true. But I think about the leverage that is possible with technology and technology companies versus, again, old world media where I spent time earlier in my career.

I mean, nowhere near that kind of leverage that you can get. All right, let's wrap up. Conclusion time? Conclusion time. So acquired for a billion dollars. December of last year, externally valued at $35 billion. Even ignoring the fact that that's based on, you know, there's $2 billion in revenues this year. This is like not grasping at straws. This is a very real revenue product. And in fact, when it was acquired, I don't think it had revenue. They had no ad platform. They had no... Nope. Nothing.

Pretty incredible what they've done since acquired. 35x multiple post-acquisition on that property alone. Not to mention all the ancillary benefits of potentially steering Facebook as a whole organization in the right direction on mobile. I mean, do I get a plus? It's an A+. I know we need more disagreement on this show but man a plus for me too this might this might even be the very from a from a multiple return standpoint um even just straight financial returns this might be the very best acquisition in technology history i'm curious is there ever what is how small of a scale do you have to go down to to get something that was a 35x multiple in three is it three years i mean bungee perhaps foreshadowing that'll be an interesting episode by the way listeners um if you have requests suggestions comments thoughts uh as we said but uh if you can think of companies

we haven't that we haven't please send we haven't. Please send our way. We'd also love to have some guests on this show. And by send our way, there's Twitter. There's also a little feedback form on our site where you can submit stuff. We'd also love to have guests. If you have particular insight into a great technology acquisition in history, that either you were part of it directly or you worked on it as part of a third party and you want to be on our show shoot us a note about down here i think we're about done all right thanks everyone we'll see you next time who got the truth is it you is it you

is it you who got the truth now? We want to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading trust management platform. Vanta, of course, automates your security reviews and compliance efforts. So frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance and monitoring, Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple. Yep, Vanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time here on Acquired, Jeff Bezos, his idea that a company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste better, i.e. spend your time and resources only on what's actually going to move the needle for your product and your customers and outsource

everything else that doesn't. Every company needs compliance and trust with their vendors and customers. It plays a major role in enabling revenue because customers and partners demand it, but yet it adds zero flavor to your actual product. Vanta takes care of all of it for you. No more spreadsheets, no fragmented tools, no manual reviews to cobble together your security and compliance requirements. It is one single software pane of glass that connects to all of your services via APIs

and eliminates countless hours of work for your organization. There are now AI capabilities to make this even more powerful, and they even integrate with over 300 external tools. Plus, they let customers build private integrations with their internal systems. And perhaps most importantly, your security reviews are now real-time instead of static, so you can monitor and share with your customers and partners to give them added confidence. So whether you're a startup

or a large enterprise, and your company is ready to automate compliance and streamline security reviews like Vanta's 7,000 customers around the globe, and go back to making your beer taste better, head on over to vanta.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. And thanks to friend of the show, Christina, Vanta's CEO, all acquired listeners get $1,000 of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired.