Acquired - Episode 51: 2017 Holiday Special

Episode Date: December 18, 2017

Acquired cozies up to the fire and looks back on the year in tech. How wildly off were we on last year’s predictions? What does the next year have in store? Most importantly, what price wil...l Bitcoin be trading at in December 2018??? Pour yourself a glass of your favorite holiday beverage and kick back with us.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!LinksJosh Elman on shared experiencesPatrick McKenzie on distribution2017 Carve Outs of the Year:Books  His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman Shoe Dog by Phil Knight Wooden on Leadership by John Wooden and Steve JamisonArticles  “The Great AI Awakening” New York Times Magazine“Founder Friendly” AVC blogPodcasts “The Ezra Klein Show” featuring Yuval Noah Harari “The Bill Simmons Show” featuring Jimmy IovineMusic Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band live at the  Hammersmith Odeon London in 1975A Moment Apart by OdeszaMovies CreedBlade Runner 2049The Last JediApps  YouTube HQ

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 That is definitely the best news in a long time. Yeah. Dick Kosala has a good tweet. Roll Tide. Roll Tide. Welcome to episode 51 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. We are coming to you from mid-December in a second annual Acquired holiday tradition,
Starting point is 00:00:41 the holiday special. David, are you excited? I'm so excited. I'm jealous because Ben has a glass of rosé and I am in the office and we don't yet have any wine or beer here. So I'm toasting you in spirit. We'll have to do that in person at our meetup. And we'll talk about that in a moment. Okay, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. Yes, as you know, ServiceNow is the AI platform for business transformation. And they have some new news to share. ServiceNow is introducing AI agents. So only the ServiceNow platform puts AI agents to work across every corner of your business.
Starting point is 00:01:29 Yep. And as you know from listening to us all year, ServiceNow is pretty remarkable about embracing the latest AI developments and building them into products for their customers. AI agents are the next phase of this. So what are AI agents? AI agents can think, learn, solve problems, and make decisions autonomously. They work on behalf of your teams, elevating their productivity
Starting point is 00:01:51 and potential. And while you get incredible productivity enhancements, you also get to stay in full control. Yep. With ServiceNow, AI agents proactively solve challenges from IT to HR, customer service, software development, you name it. These agents collaborate, they learn from each other, and they continuously improve, handling the busy work across your business so that your teams can actually focus on what truly matters. Ultimately, ServiceNow and Agentic AI is the way to deploy AI across every corner of your enterprise. They boost productivity for employees, enrich customer experiences, and make work better for everyone. Yep. So learn how you can put AI agents to work for your people by clicking the link in the show
Starting point is 00:02:34 notes or going to servicenow.com slash AI dash agents. If you're new to the show, we've got a Slack that you can join at acquired.fm. We're over a thousand strong and, uh, you know, good place to, uh, talk about tech M and a recent news that happened. And more importantly, we actually have more DM activity than there is, uh, um, chatter in the, the main feed. So, um, cool to see the connectivity among you listeners, uh, who are getting to know each other better by being listened to as a show. Yeah. We to the show. Yeah, we're almost at we're almost at 1100. Now, our growth is accelerating. It's going exponential. That's cool. My data is old. I gotta look. Well, speaking of listeners getting to know each other better. We mentioned it on the last show. And we got to we got to drive the point home. We're gonna be in San Francisco. David's already down there. I'll be flying down Thursday, January 18th. Mark your calendars. It'll be in the evening. We are still
Starting point is 00:03:29 figuring out out venue, but we're super excited to hang with our listeners for a few hours and our densest concentration of listeners is in the Bay Area. New York and Seattle are up there too, but the Bay Area has certainly been growing the fastest and, uh, and excited to always good to spend time down there. So, uh, yeah. And special shout out and thank you to Preet, a longtime listener who has been helping organize, uh, and pull this together. So thank you. And, uh, this is, we can't wait to see y'all. Not only to organize, but to really, uh, um, spark the whole thing. I think this is the thing David and I keep talking about haven't done and pre thanks for, um, inspiring us to do it. And that is PR three, three T, uh, if you're looking in the acquired
Starting point is 00:04:14 slack. Um, all right, David, what else we've got, we've got an announcement for, uh announcement for next year. We do. We do. We are going to be evolving the format a little bit in 2018. Big things happening in Acquired. We're going to have to put the old format back in the Acquired Museum that we talked about. That's right. That's right. Yeah. It's scheduled for construction sometime in... I haven't gotten a date yet from the crew.
Starting point is 00:04:48 Sometime in the next decade. Don't worry though. We're not, we're not making a major changes to the show, but we are going to move to a season format. Uh, we thought after 50 now 51 episodes, uh, it would be better to, uh, to block this into a traditional podcast season format. And that's going to let us do a few things which we're excited about. Yeah, we're most excited because it basically gives us a framework to try new things. So if we want to do something kind of radical, at the very longest, it can last one season.
Starting point is 00:05:16 Of course, we still can change things on the fly, but can add or remove sections or change the format for seasons at a time. And those seasons will be six months, approximately 10 episodes. And one of the things we're most excited about is to do miniseries. So we've been doing it kind of informally with things like the Disney saga and talking a lot about basically different episodes that string together and tell a single narrative. David and I have been thinking a lot about, well, what, what are trends that we really want to cover and what are things
Starting point is 00:05:47 that we really want to be thoughtful about and learn more on our own and have an impetus to do kind of a wider body of research before doing the episodes. And so I think you can probably expect one mini series, um, as a part of, uh, of the season early next year of this season. And, uh, and if it works well, hopefully each season going forward. So we're thinking this will be probably, probably around three episodes out of the 10. Uh, so seven, you know, normal standard acquired episodes and, uh, and three for, uh, for a mini series that we're going to change up in each season, if it works well. That's right. And the most important thing is the name which we are
Starting point is 00:06:25 hyper creatively calling season x no it's it's gonna be season two season 10 we're skipping seasons we're actually releasing season two and season 10 simultaneously 10 is actually marked by a y um but you'll get it it makes sense we put a lot of time into this ben this is your cheesy joke for the episode this is what happens when ben drinks for his day that's right that's right or should i yeah i thought about earlier making the joke that our uh meetup was going to be down in um acquired hq2 in san francisco perfect perfect i guess that will definitely be a uh a prediction for 2018 later in the show where is hq2 oh i've actually this isn't in my notes but like i do have strong conviction around a prediction for that oh all right well save it for 2018 i'm adding it i'm
Starting point is 00:07:21 adding it to the doc now all right david. Anything else before we dive into the 2017 year in review? No. Let's do it. All right, so listeners, in 2017, we recorded 21 episodes, this being our 22nd. And David and I have gone through and handpicked each of our favorite. So, David, why don't you go first? What was your favorite episode? So, well, I'm going to start with my runners up for, I've got two runners up.
Starting point is 00:07:51 Uh, you know, it's like, I love to give multiple grades, you know, I just can't, I have trouble. We try and have a format. I know. Uh, okay. Well, real quick, my runners up are the snap ipo and square ipos both great shows near and dear to my heart but my winner i cannot not pick our last episode beats that was just too much fun i mean anytime you're talking about you know jimmy ivy and who's probably the coolest person alive and dr dre in the same building, starting a company on the beach, getting acquired by Apple,
Starting point is 00:08:30 largest acquisition ever. It just doesn't get any better than that. No, no. Somebody's been watching the documentary. So good. Yeah. We'll come on that later. Listeners, the Defiant Ones,
Starting point is 00:08:42 the HBO documentary was freaking awesome. If you like the episode, even if you don't, if you like, like rap or entrepreneurship or scrappy founder stories or reflections on pop culture in the last 50 years, like you gotta go watch the defiant ones. So good. Yeah. My favorite was one of your runners up, uh, the square IPO. I felt like that was one where, um, you know, sometimes on this show, we're all over the place and sometimes we've, occasionally we have really good structured thinking. And I thought in that one, not on this episode, uh, I thought in that one, we, um, I will stand by the conclusion we made on that one forever. And I felt like all of our
Starting point is 00:09:25 reasoning to get there was really well founded. I love the fact that we really got into like, why the narrative was the way that it was about the company when it IPO and basically poked all the holes in it. And that it's a really sound company with solid fundamentals today that continues to do what it was doing when it was a private company and everyone just looked at it wrong. And so, um, yeah, it pumped about the company square and pumped about, uh, uh, about that episode. I stand by my grade on that one. Unlike the YouTube episode where we gave a C and every time I see some new article about YouTube, I'm like, we really, we really have to redo that episode. We really really should maybe that would be a fun thing to do in in season two or maybe season three is revisit you know that could be a mini series at some point revisiting we should revisit instagram we should revisit youtube
Starting point is 00:10:14 yeah especially when we're wrong like where we were wrong and why yeah i'm not on the surface without doing the research yet i'm not not 100% convinced we were wrong on YouTube. Will we give it a C? Yeah, and it was largely around opportunity cost and basically spending a whole bunch of time and money on what we kind of called a distraction for the breakeven business of YouTube. But I'm way more bought in on what it does for the rest of Google and the Google ecosystem than I was before. I mean, it's an incredible product. I'm going to talk more about it on this show, but it's also still not clear that it makes money, right? I haven't actually looked at it in a while. Yeah. But I think that's about right. Yeah. You know, David, you're an early stage VC. You don't necessarily
Starting point is 00:10:59 invest in things that make money. So, you know, what do you care? That's a low blow, low blow. Speaking of which you want to move into our, our personal 2017. Yeah. Yeah. We thought we'd add a, this section of the show this year. Um, especially, you know, given we're doing our, our holiday episode here and we talk a lot about topical things on the show and companies and stories, but we don't talk that much about ourselves. Yeah. And I thought that was like the right thing to do. But we've gotten a lot of feedback from listeners, people in person and people from messaging us on the Slack saying like, you guys mentioned early what you did. You know, like you can look us up on LinkedIn
Starting point is 00:11:43 or whatever, but that we don't actually ever talk about our day to day. Yeah. And it's so funny, like as acquired, it's gotten bigger. I mean, at a certain point, I think it was maybe kind of the beginning of this year, like, or maybe end of last year, like we passed a threshold where like way, I don't know about you, Ben, but like way more people in the world now know me as like co-host of acquired than anything else I do in life, which is so great. And yet, you know, Ben and I spend, you know, a small, small portion of our, our, you know, waking hours dedicated to acquired to the acquired media empire.
Starting point is 00:12:17 Hey, museum coming. Yeah. 20, 2019. Um, but yeah, so I mean, for me, uh, 2017 was about as big a year as, as you can get. Um, so almost exactly a year ago at the end of 2016, uh, Jenny, my wife, uh, finished her PhD, which itself was an incredible accomplishment. And I am, was, and am so proud of her uh took her six and a half years um and I would woo indeed and uh I was um also uh thinking about and uh embarking on a new journey that I am on now and so those thingsided. And at the beginning of this year, I left Madrona, the VC firm where I was in Seattle, left working there full time. And Jenny and I actually spent the first couple months of the year living in Europe. We moved to Paris for a couple months to celebrate her finishing and starting a new journey for both of us.
Starting point is 00:13:24 And David, during that period, your carve outs were like way, way better than mine. Oh man. I had so much time for carve outs. It was, it was like magical. My carve out is Israel. Yeah. I just got back and it was so great. Yeah. Definitely back to the real world now. Uh, but it was great because a little, little known fact by, by actually most people in my life, but, but now to be known world now. Uh, but it was great because a little, little known fact by, by actually most people in my life, but, but now to be known by the acquired audience, I was a French literature major in college. And, uh, Jenny, uh, was natural, natural path to be natural path to being a technology VC, early stage technology VC. But I lived in France in college and, uh, uh, for a summer and, and
Starting point is 00:14:05 Jenny also studied abroad there and neither of us had been back, um, since her time in college. So it had been 10 years, uh, really amazing to have this chance to go back to a special place for both of us. And then this summer, uh, we moved, we moved back to the States and moved to San Francisco, which has been great. And I loved Seattle, still spend a lot of time there, but also love San Francisco. And Jenny's from here. And it's just such an amazing city that has so much history and is the epicenter of tech, but is also just so much more than tech in Silicon Valley. Um, so it's been great, you know, exploring this new city. And then also I've been working on, uh, working on my new thing, uh, with my partner and my business partner. Unfortunately, we can't talk just yet about what it is, uh, coming soon in 2018, but,
Starting point is 00:15:01 uh, the founder journey has been, uh, everything it's cracked up to be. It's been, uh, wonderful, crazy, scary, awesome, terrifying. You know, I think, uh, a bunch of people at the end of the year have been asking me, you know, how's it been? And both, I had no idea the direction it was going to go and like like could never have foreseen all the daily twists and turns along the way. And yet at the same time, we're like moving along exactly in the direction and pace that we thought we were in the bigger picture. And, uh, it's just been such a cool experience and, uh, really has helped me build a lot of empathy for, you know, all the other founders out there that we cover on the show that I've worked with NBC. And I'm sure, you know, as we know from our survey,
Starting point is 00:15:48 many of you out there as well. So that's been, uh, that's been my 2017, but the, one of the best things for sure has been acquired. And, uh, especially now that we don't live in the same city, I'm just so glad we keep doing this. And's turned into much more than either of us I think ever would have expected. So thanks, Ben, for being my co-host along the way. Dude. Yeah. Likewise. You know, it's, it's caused us to make a nice, nice AV investment. I never thought I'd be a person with an office with four microphones and Mike stands behind me, but here I am. One of the things I enjoyed most about the Defiant ones was all of the shots of, you know, Dre and all the other artists in the studio and, uh, you know,
Starting point is 00:16:33 pop filters. Like we have, you know, Dre quality pop filters on our microphone. It's the cheap, it's like seven bucks. It's the cheapest part of the whole setup, but it makes it look the most legit. I know. We are totally legit. Well, David, it's funny how we have very different 2017s, but parallel in a lot of ways. And one of the ways that you were just mentioning is there's all these crazy ups and downs in sort of the founder journey, but you are exactly in the direction, doing exactly the things where if you were to have drawn the line when you first started, where you thought you'd be. I'll tell this story in medias res.
Starting point is 00:17:12 So talking about a conversation I had yesterday with one of our investors, and I went through an update deck of everything that's going on with the company. And he goes, looks great. It's exactly where I would have pegged you guys. That's, haven't heard from you in a few months, but this is great. Thanks for letting me know, right on track. And in my head, I was thinking, right on track?
Starting point is 00:17:35 Like all the, you know. Every day has been an adventure. I know, I know. So my year, I think I've talked about this a couple of times on the show, but my normal job is I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, which is a startup studio that's based in Seattle. It's sort of a new model for entrepreneurship that sits somewhere in between being the actual operating founder of a company and being an investor. Our model is that we start companies partnering with a great entrepreneur at various stages. Either we work with them from the moment that we come up with the idea together or in that first early week or month, or we have an idea internally in the studio. It's about 20 people, heavily biased toward engineers. We prototype things, we talk to customers about it,
Starting point is 00:18:24 we try and bring it to market. And if that's going well, then we start finding people who are really domain deep, who are amazing founders and work with us, and constantly trying to find different ways to plug in with great founders that are along various parts of their entrepreneurial journey. So branching out the model a little bit. One thing that I did this year that's very different is since July, I've been the interim CEO of our most recent spin out called Taunt. And Taunt is an esports company for folks who haven't been tracking. Esports is this insane phenomenon where people watch other people play video games competitively to the tune of 300 million people per year. It's growing very quickly every year. It's huge in Asia and growing quickly in the West. And what Taunt does is it's a way for people to have more fun being fans of esports
Starting point is 00:19:17 and to compete with their friends while they're watching in sort of a live fantasy type experience. So you and your friends compete against each other and it's a social competitive app. Boy, the number one thing switching from my, my job as a, um, you know, basically serially starting these ideas and then, um, working to transition off them to start the next one to sort of running with one, at least in this interim capacity has been a remarkable, I way underestimated how much focus I would need to have. I've basically stopped doing not only everything at PSL, but so many other things in my life because running a company just requires ridiculous, ridiculous focus. And every single day, it's a battle of all the really important things that need to happen important, super high priority things, but like
Starting point is 00:20:26 not, you know, it's either not as urgent, it's not a hair on fire problem as other things, or it's just not as high priority as some other high priority things. I would describe the rest of my life as I worked a lot, but I didn't, you know, like if I ever needed to leave work at three or something and not check in for the rest of the day, that was kind of fine. And it's being in the founder mindset really means it's really not the case. Like there are things, there are sometimes things that just absolutely must, must be done today, this hour. Maybe the number one skill is constantly being able to be on all the time, be ready for anything,
Starting point is 00:21:07 and play schedule Tetris and understand that whatever you looked at and thought your day was going to be at the beginning of the day may actually not be the correct prioritization, given new information and having to juggle that on the fly. And a lot of you out there are probably laughing and know this well and have been in this situation a lot. I've started other things before, but never a, a venture backed thing where we were sort of quickly building a team quickly in market. Um, and, uh, yeah, that the biggest thing is, is really, um, being able to quickly adapt and reprioritize on the fly. You have multiple, you know, handful of people that like depend on you, you know, I mean, that's one thing that's not our structure here. And so I'm lucky that I don't have that particular challenge of being a founder. I still have a little bit more kind of autonomy, but I got to imagine like, you know, in some ways, you know, as founder and CEO of something like you have the least amount of freedom.
Starting point is 00:22:07 Yeah. And at least in the pre-product market fit stage where you're actually not sure what the North Star is, like you have an idea, you have a value or a mission that's North Star, but there's not a defined implementation yet. There's a lot of thrashing. And, you know, you try and reduce cpu thrash but ultimately you you are switching back and forth a lot of things and there is high switching cost to that yeah is there ever is there ever despite all the things that we have going on in
Starting point is 00:22:37 our lives um like i said i'm just so glad we keep yeah 22 episodes you kidding me i'm proud of us oh my god like yeah i mean i'm with you other than other than my time when when uh jenny and i were you know hanging out gallivanting around europe we were not exactly gallivanting but uh um you know when my carve outs were much better back then like i basically have done nothing else except work and acquired this year there yeah that's the other thing is i think my carve-outs probably suffered because there's weeks where i'm like i'm supposed to have read something that was not an email since the last time we recorded yeah i am in that boat too well should we uh review our 2017 predictions that we made last year sounds Sounds great. See how we did. How wrong were we?
Starting point is 00:23:28 Well, let's see. Okay. So my first one, should we trade off each of ours? Yeah. Okay. So my first one was that aggregation theory was going to become even more important. Ben Thompson's seminal aggregation theory was going to become even more important. Ben Thompson's seminal aggregation theory, uh, was going to become even more important in 2017 than 2016. I think I kind of nailed that one. I mean, it wasn't a very controversial prediction. I think in 2017 it has become super clear that the big, biggest tech companies, you know, the, the Facebook's, uh, the Amazon's, the Google's, the Apple's, um, have just consolidated so much power in the space, continue to consolidate even more power. And that is, you know, kind of, I think, a direct result of,
Starting point is 00:24:13 you know, everything that's implied by aggregation theory. And Ben is actually, Thompson has actually shifted a lot of his writing, I think, to this, you know, what is the consequence of this? Yeah, mean it changed it changed our economy it changed our political structure it changed it changed it literally changed like the way that people interact with other humans like if you look at a society as a collection of political social and economic changes like it is the driving force behind the biggest change of all three of those i mean if you want to talk about income inequality, if you want, there's a variety of things. I mean, I think aggregation theory is, is the thing driving
Starting point is 00:24:49 most of those. Yeah. And, and, and super specifically, I mean, in the startup tech ecosystem, you know, we're kind of at a moment now where like for pretty much any kind of product, uh, and company that you have, if you want to do user acquisition, like you have two choices, you have two destinations, like Google or Facebook, you know? It's striking and everything else is a growth hack. Yeah. And everything else is like you're rolling the dice. Yeah. Super interesting. I saw a great tweet earlier by Patio11, the frequent commenter on Hacker News, and I think he now works on stripe atlas it was a great tweet storm we'll include this in the show notes of great advice that you
Starting point is 00:25:32 can't hear too many times and that you should just people should continue to talk about even though they feel it's old hat because there's always new people that can benefit from hearing it and one of the observations was that the hardest thing to do in a B2B company is sales. And the hardest thing to do in a B2C company is distribution. And if you're starting a consumer company, you basically have Facebook or Google to go to, and you're effectively just paying a tax to get to their customers, and they get bigger and they get better. And every single company that bootstraps their business or not bootstraps i mean coca-cola pays those companies huge amounts of money per year everybody
Starting point is 00:26:11 does in order to reach their customers because they have all the customers and that just fuels the flywheel even more so it is um you know the hardest thing to do in consumer is distribution and they have the lock on distribution. I just noticed one of my predictions from last year is the big aggregators get bigger. I think we have the same prediction. Basically the same thing. All right. Check on that one.
Starting point is 00:26:34 Yeah. Another one that I had, I think the rest of mine are kind of hard to check in on. I said people get more serious about universal basic income. I think the people who were already proponents of universal basic income got further entrenched in that view based on our political and economic structure. Now, um, I don't think that it picked up any traction in any way. I think the experiments continued. I think, um, a lot of great books were written on it. I don't think it's really picked up steam. Uh, my next one, I said, i said we would see more tech ipos in uh 2017 and 2016 and we did uh but we didn't see that many more so there were 26 in 2016 and 33 in 2017 i'll call it that's that's cool i qualify that that's more but nowhere near you know the the heyday of uh of uh the earlier 2000s
Starting point is 00:27:27 there's so many companies that uh have raised so much money in the private markets and need to exit one way or another um and they still have not exited and uh this is a trend that i think will continue into 2018 but some of the big ones big ipOs we did see in 2017, some of which we covered here, Snap, Blue Apron, Stitch Fix, Cloudera, Okta, MuleSoft, Roku, MongoDB, and Seattle native Redfin. That's right. All went public in 2017. Good companies in there, just not a ton of them. Yeah. Yeah. Another one that that was one of mine last year was the commoditization of machine learning. And that the value is value is in the data itself and not in the actual machine learning algorithms or
Starting point is 00:28:16 infrastructure to do that. That's absolutely played out. Looking at reinvent this year, looking at a lot of Google Cloud's announcements, there really are more and more machine learning off-the-shelf tools. And it really is all about not only having the data, but having the data in a great format, your processing pipeline, and correctly sort of labeling and cleaning data to be used by machine learning. I'll disclaim here that I'm not an expert on this, but we haven't really seen new math in any way that has radically changed what people are doing with machine learning. It's much more about the availability of tools,
Starting point is 00:28:55 more people having access to those tools, and a big thing is just sort of the compute being more and more available. There's some newer models that people are using, but it's largely about making it more available. There's some newer models that people are using, but it's largely about making it more available and less expensive for companies to hire the large teams that was previously required to do data science. Yeah. Well, so in contrast to a new, exciting technology becoming easier to use and more widely available my prediction or i guess question more for 2017 is we will see if vr becomes a big thing or not and uh well unfortunately for
Starting point is 00:29:35 the vr industry at least for the moment it's still not a big thing so we'll see i i wouldn't you know call vr and ar and AR out per se. I don't think this is the, yet at least the 3D TV of technologies. But AR is more in. Like AR did great. Or AR at least has a path to becoming mainstream. A path. But it's still not here.
Starting point is 00:29:58 No. Here's a speculative question is, how do you call that rollier? I mean, there were plenty vr naysayers but looking back on it i mean what are the signals that people just weren't going to buy the devices at the volume that that we were all hoping earlier so you don't make those investments or you don't spend years of your time working on those companies some people are going to weather the storm and do great and when it finally does become a thing, if it becomes a thing, but you know, how, how do you spot that? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the Kickstarter, you know, numbers for Oculus were really good along the way. And then, you know,
Starting point is 00:30:36 their, their, uh, dev kit shipments. Um, but, uh, and, and the, uh, you know, the vibe is an incredible piece of hardware. I don't know. I mean, I guess the thing is, it's just like still not easy to access for, you know, most people for your mainstream consumer. Like you still need to do a lot of work to get the payoff of the incredible experience and spend a lot of money. It's not as easy as just like downloading the number one app in the app store like coinbase you know yeah yeah that was something we did not predict no no we're in here
Starting point is 00:31:12 just to say anything about crypto no well we missed that but we did um in fact i would say i may miss it again yeah i don't have uh I don't have anything in my 2018 predictions about crypto. Probably should. All right. My last one was I said the mega trend of urbanization would continue. I think it probably did. I don't have a great way to measure, but more people in the world, all around the world,
Starting point is 00:31:40 moving to cities doesn't seem to be abating anytime soon. Nope. And mine was, does it become more expensive to produce physical stuff? David, I honestly can't remember my rationale behind this. Well, I think you were saying that, like, as, you know, like, take China, for instance, you know, as the middle class rises,
Starting point is 00:32:00 is it going to become more expensive, actually, to produce stuff physically in China, like physical goods? Right-ram went up component cost of smartphones went up but i think that probably has to do with more like more business like structural business dynamics than it does rising labor costs yeah i'm i'm not sure that that actually happened if anything i think more and more returns are going to capital as opposed to labor around the world all right final section to round out our review of 2017 before we look forward bravely and boldly into 2018 our top acquired theme of 2017 so unlike last year when we did this we reviewed themes that we talked about most on the show that's actually way way too long way too long and
Starting point is 00:32:53 not that interesting um so we're taking a more qualitative approach this year uh and what we think you know looking back on our body of work for this year, like what stands out to each of us as like the, um, uh, the kind of most impactful or interesting theme, um, that we've discussed on the show. So for me, it's actually a pretty recent one that, um, I think I first brought up on the Stitch Fix episode, um, but then also talked about on the Beats episode. And that's this concept of the way to really, you know, as an investor make outsized returns, but as a company and as a founder to really have a large, large impact as opposed to a smaller impact is to do something, you know, make a, have a thesis with a company or an investment that is,
Starting point is 00:33:46 obviously you want it to be correct, but being correct is not enough. You have to also be correct and non consensus, not obvious. Uh, and this was something that, uh, Andy Ratcliffe, one of the founders of benchmark and one of my professors in business school talks a lot about, and he took this idea from, from Howard Marks at Oak tree, but it's really, really powerful when you internalize it. And if you look at, you know, Stitch Fix, as I mentioned in beats, you know, but I think also square Starbucks snap, all of these are companies and products that, um, you know, they were both like the correct product for the time, but before they were started, like nobody thought like, you know, who's going to go to a store to
Starting point is 00:34:23 drink coffee, like people buy coffee beans to drink at home, you know, or, um, you you know who's gonna go to a store to drink coffee like people buy coffee beans to drink at home you know or um you know who's gonna pay a lot of money for headphones that aren't reference headphones like the two dollar ones that you get with your you know ipod or you know an iphone are good enough or you know a snap like facebook dominates social media like why do you need another like you, method of sharing photos with one another? And I think it's a really powerful idea. Um, again, both for, both for investing, obviously, but, um, but also as, as a founder and product design as well. Yeah, I totally agree. It's a good theme. Mine. I don't think we explicitly called this out on a show, but we talked about it in many of these episodes in 2008 2008, call it, we started, maybe 2007, we started first hearing about social media. And it was a term that I don't think I had quite understood and dissected
Starting point is 00:35:19 for a few years of really like, what does it actually mean? I get that we're calling Twitter social media. Like I understand that. What does it imply as you dig into it and, and really understand like, okay, it means basically everyone is a citizen journalist and it won't just be for this in this short form capacity. Of course you have the rise of medium. Um, you have YouTube, you have basically the, the, the rise of the internet allowing anybody to become a creator, where instead of a future of media, much more about do you have a compelling message rather than are you able to fit in with a body of content that has existed today. And in the ability to be non-conforming, which David actually fits in pretty well with your tech theme, to be able to be differentiated by be non conforming and still get distribution on that, that was a new piece of value that was unlocked. And the biggest thing to come of all
Starting point is 00:36:31 that is that the internet and social media really removed gatekeepers, it removed a lot of the power that was held by people that controlled the very few that could actually publish that you had to fit in with, that you had to be conforming. And you see this in so many different, there's so many different manifestations of which one amazing thing for the world is the fact that Time's Person of the Year was the silence breakers. I mean, for the first time, there were people, there were women primarily that were able to stand up and talk about their stories and know that they weren't going to be silenced for that by the people that controlled all the distribution because you don't have to be afraid in this world and there are ways to get your message out even if you don't go through those gatekeepers trying to silence you. Yeah, totally. And like, you can tell your story on your terms
Starting point is 00:37:25 too. I mean, uh, Ben Thompson's person of the year was Susan Fowler, the Uber whistleblower on her own blog. Yeah. On her own blog. Like, you know, she didn't have to go to, you know, the New York times to, to get them to break the story and have them tell it on their terms. And like, who knows what happens? Like, yeah, on on her own blog like she wrote it she hit publish on her terms it's pretty incredible and of course there's negative repercussions to this too of course you start to get into you know you only start reading things from um that are that are lower quality because they don't have editorial process that are only confirmation bias thing i mean there's of course many problems with it, but the removal of gatekeepers by social media broadly is, is finally coming to fruition. But I would, what's super interesting though, is like, I would say like, yes,
Starting point is 00:38:17 social media has definitely removed people, individual people and organizations of people who were gatekeepers. But like we were talking about with the just uh growth and consequences of aggregation theory earlier like there are now technologies that are gatekeepers uh so if you want to market to people you know in any sense like you need to pay the toll to google and facebook yeah there's there's different um there's different taxes along the delivery now than there were before. And they're more obvious and they're more monetary. Like it's less about paying your dues and more about paying money. And, you know, even outside of marketing, like in terms of getting your voice heard,
Starting point is 00:38:59 yes, you can do it via social media and on these platforms, but you also have to pay the toll. You have to pay the toll with your attention and your contribution of that content to that platform, which is going to monetize the attention that it generates. Yep. And everybody is either paying the toll to do acquisition or paying the toll by giving'm sorry, paying the toll to do acquisition or paying the toll by giving their content
Starting point is 00:39:25 to Facebook and Google with accelerated mobile pages, with the subscription platforms are both launching, with Facebook, Instagram articles, in all forms, some of the best content in the world is being contributed as part of the bargain that the publishers are striking with the platforms. Indeed, indeed. All right, listeners, our next sponsor is a new friend of the show, Huntress.
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Starting point is 00:41:02 to stop attacks that really software-only solutions could sometimes miss. Huntress is democratizing security, particularly cybersecurity, by taking security techniques that were historically only available to large enterprises and bringing them to businesses with as few as 10, 100, or 1,000 employees at price points that make sense for them. In fact, it's pretty wild. There are over 125,000 businesses now using Huntress, and they rave about it from the hilltops. They were voted by customers in the G2 rankings as the industry leader in endpoint detection and response for the eighth consecutive season and the industry leader in managed detection and response again this summer.
Starting point is 00:41:43 Yep. So if you want cutting edge cybersecurity solutions backed by a 24-7 team of experts who monitor, investigate, and respond to threats with unmatched precision, head on over to huntress.com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. Our huge thanks to Huntress. All right, 2018 predictions 2018 here we come uh well maybe i'll start off because it's it's appropriate i did i didn't plan it this way my first prediction is that the consequences of aggregation theory continue david you make the most like cop out predictions i really i need to like i need to go out on a limb more clearly my my brain uh too much in the second half of this year has just been tied up in my work i have not been able to been able to make a really you know interesting and compelling predictions
Starting point is 00:42:39 here all right i'm just gonna stop there i've got more but you you go next i'll force you to make a call here we sit on december 12 2017 what is the price of bitcoin on december 12 2018 oh okay well i'm gonna force you to make a prediction after this um and it's it's 17 000 ish today 17,000 ish today. Yeah. 17,000 ish today. Um, I mean, I don't know. It depends on so many things, but, uh, I'm going to wildly pick a number out of thin air. Uh, I am going to say the price of Bitcoin on December 12th, 2018 will be $28,000. I like it. I like it.
Starting point is 00:43:32 And 52 cents. What's your prediction? Buy your futures right there. You heard it first. $2,000. But I do think it's going to think it's gonna get up to 30 first 30 000 first up to 30 down to two yeah so you and i are an order of magnitude apart yeah i'm curious what it's gonna get to in the next two weeks alone i mean i think people are gonna get coinbase for
Starting point is 00:43:59 christmas you think people are gonna give each other bitcoin for christmas that should be our carve out yeah yeah i think people are going to get phones they're going to download the number one app in the app store it's going to be coinbase people are going to think they're being clever and and people are going to think they're doing the thing that um the dot com stock people did when it was like i'm gonna buy my grandson a tech stock for Christmas and write it up like here, have some Cisco. It's going to be that. Wow. Wow. Stocking stuffer of Christmas 2017. Yeah, we got to release this before Christmas, so I'm not wrong before this airs. Yeah, we're doing we're doing intentionally doing this show a little earlier this year
Starting point is 00:44:43 than last year so that we can get it out before Christmas so that carve outs can be used as stocking stuffers. Yeah. And for everyone doing a long drive, you have you have this to listen to. Yeah. All right. OK, so my question back to you prediction. We referenced it earlier in the show. Where is Amazon HQ to Amazon HQ2 will be in Toronto. Oh, wow. You're going with the dark horse. I am.
Starting point is 00:45:09 Canada. I am. They said it's the North American HQ2. Yeah. I think... Do you think they were... Do you think they have Canada in mind all along? I do.
Starting point is 00:45:20 I think Toronto because it gives them diversification in case tax stuff goes crazy in the US. I mean, it's not looking like it's going to hurt corporations right now. But, you know, Amazon has been extremely conscious of tax law and done insane things to their business model to make sure that they give customers the best deal possible since their very inception. So, I think they're very conscious of that. I think they want to diversify politically as well as have an economic center around tax to do that. And I also think, you know, as I used to work at Microsoft, we hired a ton of Waterloo grads, really great computer science school. I think they're going to do plop right down the same way they did next to the University of Washington.
Starting point is 00:46:03 Wow. plop right down the same way they did next to the university of washington wow well uh my prediction is somewhere in texas probably dallas slight edge over austin but austin also uh big front runner it's not a bad call if you're not going to go to canada go to a red state well texas is a very very diverse state i uh yeah i spent a lot of time in texas uh for a lot of reasons including um uh jenny's mom's family is all from texas uh outside the houston area and still lives there there is a very good chance potentially in the next presidential election um but if not by then the next one for sure that texas will be a blue state i believe it did you know the demographics are changing incredibly rapidly did you know dallas forest fort worth is the
Starting point is 00:46:51 number four metropolitan area in the united states yeah it's enormous you got new york la chicago and then dallas fort worth arlington and it's not far behind chicago it's nine and a half million and 7.2 million. Yeah. Interesting. Bigger than the Bay. Well, the Bay area is split into, um, the San Francisco area and the San Jose area. I bet if you combine the two of those, uh, it's, uh, it's up there. How's Dallas's tech community listeners, if you're in Dallas or, or have, um, um, have connections with Dallas, we'd love to kind of explore that a little bit further. So reach out on Slack or, you know, it seems like one big theme that a lot of that I hear over and
Starting point is 00:47:32 over and over again is people start companies for other people in Silicon Valley. Why don't we start companies for people in the rest of the United States? And then there's lots of arguments about, well, you know, people are harder to reach and I don't understand their pain points and blah, blah, blah. Like there's a ton of people in Dallas. Seems like that's a rich market to, if you believe that people in Dallas behave differently and used and use different services, um, than people in the, in the Bay area would like, that feels like a huge group of people that you can go start companies for. Yeah. To our earlier discussion, like, how are you going to reach people in Dallas? The same way you're going to reach people in the Bay
Starting point is 00:48:09 Area, Facebook and Google. Um, all right. My money's on Texas, but, uh, we've got Canada, we've got Texas. All right. Um, all right. What's your next one? My next one is that this current mega consolidation era that we're in will continue and accelerate in 2018. We're in the midst right now of a Disney Time Warner M&A transaction that includes sort of part of the company. We covered the Qualcomm Broadcom. Disney Fox. Disney Fox, yep. We covered the Qualcomm Broadcom. Disney Fox. Disney Fox. Yep. We covered the Qualcomm Broadcom. And what was the third major one that just, oh, the non-tech, but CVS and Aetna.
Starting point is 00:48:57 And I think we're just going to see huge M&A continue through 2018. I think the political climate is right for these companies to combine. You know, you enter these eras of lots of new companies being created and companies not combining for a while. So you have sort of proliferation in an industry and then followed by big eras of consolidation. And I think we are charging into a consolidation era. Interesting. You think across multiple industries or particularly in the tech industry? Let's see. The regulatory argument would argue across multiple industries. And the tech argument that I would make is that, let's see, you would see consolidation after a period of sustained innovation,
Starting point is 00:49:47 new company creation, which would come from a lot of availability of early stage capital. So I guess if the cost of capital got more expensive and private company funding was less abundant, then you would start to see more consolidation. I think I don't know if that logic totally holds, but. All right. My last one is I seriously believe we have been in the midst of major disruption that has been happening in the in the venture capital ecosystem over the last few years. But it's been disruption that's been happening at the capital formation and raising parts of the ecosystem as so much money has come into the asset class. Um, both in terms of existing, you know, well-known VC firms raising
Starting point is 00:50:39 much larger funds and getting bigger as, as money has come in in and and new entrants like soft bank like bringing a hundred billion dollars in a new fund um into into the asset class uh all of that is is likely to continue but i think we're gonna start to see we we are starting to see um a second order effect of that in the vc ecosystem which is, I think there is, there is a serious, uh, retilling of the soil, I would say of, um, what true early stage investing is, um, and, uh, and company building and, and who does it and who's great at it. Um, because I, what's happened is, you know, the, the series a quote unquote firms that used to be the early stage firms, um, that invested when companies were getting started and right at those, those beginning days,
Starting point is 00:51:32 uh, they don't do that anymore because they're so much bigger now because they have so much more capital. So they, they wait until later. And so I don't know, maybe we'll see some turnover in, in who the quote unquote best firms, top tier firms are, um, at the traditional, you know, Sand Hill road, uh, set, but there's this whole really thriving ecosystem underneath it. You know, like you're part of it, Ben at PSL and, um, and, and so many other firms are, uh, and, and it's all, um, all kind of emerging, you know, underneath it's like, it's like Clay Christensen in action here. And say what you will about ICOs,
Starting point is 00:52:09 but I mean, there's no denying that that is a super transformative way to finance early stage companies if that were to continue. Yep, indeed, indeed. All right, well, I have another one and then I have one question to close with. So one prediction I have is that we're going to start seeing smaller, more intimate communication networks rise instead of broad social networks as people start to react to, you know, the lack of comfort with things being public and a shift toward a desire for more private communication
Starting point is 00:52:46 and private broadcast of themselves. And this is a prediction that has, you know, people have been making this bet for a long time. Path tried to make it in, what, 2010, 2011. Earlier than that, even, I think. Yeah, maybe. Maybe not that much earlier. Sometime around then.
Starting point is 00:53:01 Yeah. And, you know, I'm just not sure the timing was right for that. I think Facebook had so much more, there was still so much more growth available for the user experience in terms of there are so many more people rapidly coming onto this thing and it's becoming the de facto way that I communicate with anyone in the world. So it makes it sort of hard to disrupt. Um, I do think now that, and it's actually a perfect time for Facebook to be experimenting with monetizing WhatsApp, that private communication networks are going to start occupying more of people's time than public communication networks did. I've noticed, and this could be entering a different phase of life, but I do way less activity that could be
Starting point is 00:53:42 broadcast to my social network on Facebook, and I spend way more time in a variety of private slacks. I even spend less time on Twitter and more time in Slack and in messenger groups. And I really do think that people are just finally having the reaction to, I don't want to have all my stuff be public all the, and sort of culling that. And of course you're not actually going to cull it on those platforms where you already have all the connection. You're not going to shrink those social graphs. You're just going to move to new ones. And of course that's why Facebook acquires the new ones because they, you know, um, they need to stay king of that. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, path, I was just looking at blast from the past. I used to actually really enjoy path, uh, which for listeners who don't know, this was the sort of private,
Starting point is 00:54:29 um, mobile app, social network. I guess you could call it that, uh, from sometime around 20, you know, nine,
Starting point is 00:54:39 10, 11 that had a lot of buzz. Um, and really was like beautifully designed. Really? Oh my God. They invented that, that button, the path and really was like beautifully designed really oh my god they invented that that button the path button that was like a radial menu yes yes you're right that you clicked it and then it expanded out into like all the different types of media you could post
Starting point is 00:54:56 yep and they had parallax scroll down so you would pull down and different parts of the page would move at different ratios yeah oh that's right um way ahead of the time that might be a fun episode to do at some point because they get bought by a chinese conglomerate of some sort yeah i just i just looked it up daoam cacao uh i'm not sure where they are based but uh interesting yeah i also saw an interesting tweet that's going to reveal one of my carve outs early. But it was a Josh Ellman tweet. Josh is a partner at Greylock talking about we've had this extreme shift toward individualism and how everything is so tailored for us now with basically everybody has their own personalized news feed. Everybody has the, you log into any technology product now and it's so tailored for you that it's starting to put us in silos a little bit
Starting point is 00:55:51 and it's starting to make us feel extremely isolated. And we may see products, he suggested that, this is why things like HQ Trivia, where everybody is all in one room all together, all at the same time, 400 know, 400,000 people strong, we're going to start to see the rise of products that make us feel part of a collective again, and part of something greater than our individually tailored selves. And I think there is really something to that. You know, if you let yourself, you can just become more and
Starting point is 00:56:18 more isolated. And I've noticed it in my lifestyle to create, you know, craft a life that's like more and more specifically designed for me, which is awesome in many ways, but is kind of isolating. Yeah, I know a lot of folks in tech are thinking about that broadly and some founders are working on ideas in that space. You know, we're broadly on that theme. It is definitely a counter trend that uh, that maybe will come to fruition in 2018. Yeah. And then I have one more sort of question. Um, so I'll posit something first talking about being mobile first or moving to mobile today, I think is a lot about, is very similar to talking about, you know, being a PC or doing something with software
Starting point is 00:57:06 from, you know, many years ago. And it just seems like an irrelevant question, right? It's like, well, yeah, I assumed. And I'm wondering, you know, are we nearing the end of mobile? And I don't mean that in something is going to replace mobile, i don't think it's going to be the airpods and the watch and you're not going to have your phone but it's almost like are we going to enter somewhere where um between like voice assistants in your house and your phone and like it's all part of a constellation of devices where you have sort of machine learning built experiences for you there's some ar component like are we moving away from the mobile era and into this sort of like ecosystem of highly tailored devices era and will that kind of actually happen in 2018 okay i'm gonna go out on a limb here i think we're moving into the era of the end of eras.
Starting point is 00:58:05 Whoa. There's no, you know, it's just the internet now. And like, there's no difference between mobile and web or desktop or, you know, voice assistant or AR. It's just like the internet. It's like you can access it through multiple modalities. It's just a highfalutin explanation for something that all those, you know, investment research memos have said for four years. Yeah. But no, where I'm going with this is like you access the services that you want to interact with through, you know, in multiple modalities, like you access them,
Starting point is 00:58:46 you know, through a keyboard and mouse and through a touchscreen and through your voice and, uh, you know, through your wrist or through your glasses, like it's all the same and they're all everywhere. Yeah. Omnipresent technology. You want to do carve outs? Let's do it. Okay. So just like last year, we are keeping our mega extended carve out section. So we're going to do each pick one carve out from all of the categories of carve outs that we typically cover. So we have books and I'm going to do separate fiction and nonfiction article podcast, music, TV or movie or both, and app are our categories. We're thinking this is also why we wanted to get this episode out ahead of the holidays for, you know, all of the upcoming travel that lots of people have for airplanes, car rides, or maybe stocking stuffers for some of these. We wanted to get these out to you before the season.
Starting point is 00:59:47 I will start off with my first carve out fiction book. It's actually a trilogy. It's Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which the first book of which is The Golden Compass, which is a fantasy sort of, you know, young adult fiction, but also like, you know, can very much be read and enjoyed by adults. Kind of like Harry Potter, like very similar to Harry Potter trilogy. And, uh, I had not read it growing up. Uh, Jenny had, and he just wrote, came out with the first book of the second trilogy many, many years later. Uh, and so he's writing a new trilogy. The first book of that just came out. Um, I haven't read it yet cause I just finished the original,
Starting point is 01:00:30 but really good, super fun. It's like, it's like Harry Potter meets like sci-fi meets steampunk with a female protagonist. Uh, and just like really, really well done. and it's all a uh it's all a complete inversion and retelling of paradise lost uh really really fun uh i only have one book this year that i uh i'm gonna say makes the cut um shoe dog it was so good oh so good talked about it a bunch on on when uh whatever episode it was where it was my carve out i I think David, it was your curve out and I had forgotten that. Um, but the, the, the story of, uh, of Phil Knight and, uh, and the creation of Nike, um, just like page Turner thriller, but nonfiction and so freaking well written. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:01:20 That would be, if you have somebody on your holiday list uh that um you know enjoys business or shoes or just good you know good story autobiographies sports yeah yeah sports uh put this you know under the tree or menorah or you know whatever your object of celebration is this holiday season um my uh my non uh, my nonfiction is actually, I'm repeating my carve out from, I think the last episode, uh, just cause I finally, I finished reading it since then. It was so good. Uh, is wooden wooden on leadership, speaking in the sports and shoes arena, John wooden, legendary coach of UCLA. Uh, and wooden on leadership is his book expounding on his
Starting point is 01:02:07 philosophies of leadership and in particular his pyramid of success. And what I didn't talk about on Carbouts last time is I just think this is so cool. His definition of success. I really want to try and keep this in mind in my own life and my own, you know, new endeavors now. And, and John Wynn says, you know, people think about success as like achieving something or like setting goals and hitting them or, uh, having anything, you know, externally visible, but he said, that's not what success is at all to him. Success is, I'm quoting here, success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.
Starting point is 01:02:47 So nothing about like results, nothing about external perception. The only measurement that you can truly, you know, both measure and, and feel fulfilled by of success is whether you made the effort to become the best that you can be at whatever you're trying to do. And it's so great because it's like, yeah, you can be at whatever you're trying to do. And it's so great because it's like, yeah, you can always ask yourself, like, did I actually like put my total effort into this? If yes, it doesn't matter what the outcome is. Uh, if no, like then no, I wasn't successful, you know? And, and that's how he coached his teams. And I mean, he's, I think still
Starting point is 01:03:21 the winningest coach in college basketball history. I mean, he would go multiple seasons without losing a game and won 10 national championships, I think. But he never cared about the outcome of the game. It was always just about, like, getting his players and his teams to do the best that they were capable. It's a great mantra. Yeah. Great mantra. Especially in this day and age where there's so much that feels out of our control
Starting point is 01:03:47 in life and in tech. All you can control is whether you make yourself the best you can be. My article, so the second category is the best article we read this year, or at least the one that we feel is noteworthy of a carve-out. It actually happened
Starting point is 01:04:04 in December of 2016, but I think it was after we recorded the holiday episode. It is the New York Times Magazine cover story called The Great AI Awakening. And this was the first piece that I read that really brought not only an understanding, but a compelling narrative to why AI and machine learning is so transformative to the era that we live in. And the, um, it tells the story of the recreation of
Starting point is 01:04:33 Google translate using, I believe a neural network instead of, um, sort of like structured top-down rule-based architecture and, uh, and pitting them against each other. And it's, um, you know, it's good narrative. It's told really well. And, uh, there've been many probably better pieces written since then. And I'm sure it was a little dumbed down or sensationalist relative to more, um, industry papers or industry articles that written been written before, but really landmark to see that on the, the, the cover of the New York times magazine and really well done. Yeah, man, it's time moves so fast these days. Like that. Yeah. I totally remember that article. And I, in my head that came out like five years ago and it came out one year ago. Yeah. Okay. My article, uh article is much shorter, but is a Fred Wilson blog post
Starting point is 01:05:27 from earlier this year called Founder Friendly. And it was about the Uber situation and the benchmark lawsuit against Travis Kalanick and that whole saga. And he was, Fred was, who's a great vc at union square ventures the founder and what a co-founder of union square ventures he was responding to a tweet that dan primack put out uh saying that um primack tweeted uh let me find the exact quote here um rip quote unquote founder friendly 2010 to 2017 and the point being that like you know a vc and a great vc like benchmark suing the ceo of a portfolio company is like the end of this era of
Starting point is 01:06:13 like vcs just sucking up to founders and being founder friendly and founders should watch out for vcs and fred had this response it was like you know sometimes like what's most friendly to founders is is be doing what's best for the company or his point. His point was that as a VC and a board member, you need to do what's best for the company. And that isn't always like sucking up to founders. Like, uh, sometimes, and often in the long run, what's best for the company is also best for the founders. Um, and, uh, I don't mean necessarily here to opine one way or the other on the Uber situation, particularly, but I think it was, this was the beginning of a sea change in i think the relationship between vcs and founders and boards
Starting point is 01:06:50 and founders um i think for the better uh not in just like bringing power away from founders and back to vcs but just more of a balance of like going from an era where founders can do no wrong to like do what's best for the company and for all the stakeholders involved. My podcast is an episode of the Ezra Klein show with Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens. And I can't actually remember if this was one of my carve outs or not. I think Sapiens was and I think maybe the podcast was but awesome interview. If you haven't read Sapiens, that's also a great book. It's like a primer on many, many things that are core to the human condition, archaeological stuff, psychological stuff, evolutionary biology, a lot of sociology of why we treat people the way we do today in different groups and how that falls out of
Starting point is 01:07:40 different evolutionary things. And Yuval is just a great thinker and he talks a lot about, he actually does a 60 day meditation retreat, silent meditation retreat to start off every year, which sounds freaking nuts. But I, uh, I, I hope, I don't know. I, I think I, I'm going to make it a 2018 resolution to do a, uh, a three day. I'd love to do like a meditation retreat. But honestly, you know, I've been like just doing um headspace and playing around with some some meditation apps and like trying to get into it like dabble a little bit this notion of like 60 days oh my god yeah but the notion of of meditating alone like uh actually focusing on your breath and not letting your mind wander. It's impossible. It's very difficult to do that for like five or 10 seconds.
Starting point is 01:08:38 I totally see how this is an incredibly trained art and just very interested to see. It's almost like a CrossFit thing. Like the people that meditate, like you're very aware that they meditate, but I, I, I think it's something where like, if you can really refine the practice and get good at it, I can see how that can change you as a person. Yeah, totally. I, um, I did a bunch of exploration with meditation in, uh, in grad school. Uh, and, uh, did I, I haven't done any full day retreats, but I did a half day retreat actually as, as part of a class, uh, at Stanford in grad school. And, um, it was, uh, it was really cool and very, very difficult, even just a half a day of sitting there.
Starting point is 01:09:16 But, uh, that's cool. I remember listening to that show too and thinking 60 days. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Okay. My, uh, podcast carve out for the year is, uh, also, I think I did have this also as one of my carve outs at some point during the year is the episode of the bill Simmons show with Jimmy Ivy. And, uh, we've been talking about him a lot lately,
Starting point is 01:09:38 but literally the coolest human alive go listen to it. I'm queuing that up now. Literally just grab my phone. I'll jump forward. Um, my music also related to this whole Jimmy Iovine ecosystem, although everything in music is related to him. Uh, I discovered, um, Bruce Springsteen, uh, and the street band have multiple live albums. Uh, I had growing up there live in New York city album, uh, from their reunion tour, which was fantastic. But there is, I think probably their best live album is live at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, uh, in 1975. This is early, early days, right after born to run comes out. And, uh, this is just an amazing show bruce writes about it in born to run in the in the autobiography um uh whatever your streaming service of choice is go listen to this now it's just the boss at his best with the band sweet my music uh i'm i'm sure this was a carve out of mine uh odeza's new album a moment apart i know that I listened to this over and over again.
Starting point is 01:10:46 I know that it's, uh, new and anecdotally and the, the Spotify, your top tracks of 2017 reinforced it. It's my work music. It's my morning music. It's my workout music.
Starting point is 01:10:58 It's so good. And, uh, it's weird. Somebody asked me the other day, three bands you would take to your grave. And like, I have longer bands that have like staying power the other two the beatles and
Starting point is 01:11:08 radiohead and i'm like it's weird but they're newer they're trendy but odessa makes the cut and we can revisit that in like five years but that's how i feel right now radiohead yeah man um i mean radiohead's great but like you put them in the same category as the Beatles and Odessa. Well, for take to my grave, I think, I mean, they're more,
Starting point is 01:11:28 more than Odessa. Like I think, uh, Odessa is three and I'm not in my Radiohead. I'm more in an Odessa phase right now than a Radiohead phase, but like, you know, Radiohead got me through college.
Starting point is 01:11:39 Fair enough. It's, it's, I mean, that's the thing about music and back to the beats episode that Jimmy and Dre just totally identified. Like music is about, it's like bit, I mean, that's the thing about music and back to the beats episode that Jimmy and Dre just totally identified. Like music is about, it's like you identify with a certain point in your life with certain
Starting point is 01:11:50 activities. Like it's just such, it's an emotional thing. It is. Um, I totally hear you. Yeah. There's some like mid two thousands,
Starting point is 01:11:59 you know, hip hop dance tracks that like we're in, you know, just take me right back to that specific moment of time in college. Uh, anyway. Yeah. Um, okay. Uh, my movie, uh, TV and movie for me, uh, for 2017, I was going to do the defiant ones, but we can't, that's, we can't do too much. It's a recency bias already. Recency bias. Yeah. Um, I didn't watch that many movies in 2017, but, uh, I just on a, an airplane trip last week, finally watched Creed, uh, the, um, latest Rocky movie.
Starting point is 01:12:36 Uh, and, and I think probably, I think the last, uh, hard to imagine them following up on that, uh, watch watch i'll say that and they probably made creed too but really really really good uh and uh very worth watching cool uh mine is blade runner 2049 uh it's a movie the year that i thought saw in theaters and uh embarrassed to say i'd never watched blade runner the original uh all the way through so i watched uh i think the edition i watched was the the final cut or the there's a few different remastered versions but watched that the night before and then went and saw 2049 in theaters the next day and um you know it's what it's it's both visually incredible and one of those thinker movies that you're thinking about for for days after and especially in our um AI apocalypse that we were in,
Starting point is 01:13:25 definitely interesting to think about. Yeah. I'm going to add one additional movie carve-out. Hasn't come out yet, but obviously The Last Jedi. It hasn't even come out yet, but it's definitely a movie of the year. Look, if they already grid-lit a new trilogy
Starting point is 01:13:41 for Rian Johnson, then I'm pretty sure we're gonna love it yeah i'm pretty sure it's gonna be awesome yep all right app app um so my app of the year i'm joking says the guy who uh i told you i would talk about youtube later in the episode we gave it a c on acquired i I'm not sure it deserves more than a C, but my app of the year is YouTube. I have been spending a lot more time in YouTube this year. Uh, and I feel like, uh, on the episode we did on the company, I was very, uh, critical of like, YouTube is not a destination site. Like who goes to you? Do you
Starting point is 01:14:21 just follow links there? You do, you know, embed embeds that's the only youtube content you watch i've been re-engaging with like the main app and the feed and like there's great stuff that they service for you in there um and very personalized based on your you know watching history um i find myself often you know when i'm bored at home just open up youtube and see what it recommends for me wow that's That's like a behavior. I know people do that. It just hasn't materialized for me. Like I, I actually extremely rarely watch something on YouTube and I know that, I know that sounds weird, but like, you know, I never want, it's actually just not a good modality for me. I'm never, I never want to play sound on my phone. It's too much of a commitment really for me to browse through. And that's why Twitter's better or Facebook's better. Um, maybe 2018 will be the year that I start browsing the YouTube
Starting point is 01:15:10 newsfeed. So I was totally in the same mode as you didn't understand it at all. And then I don't know why, for some reason, uh, I just picked it up one day and I was like, Oh wow, this is really entertaining. And the feed is like very personalized to me yeah that's right listeners you are listening to the insightful show acquired where we realize that youtube is cool uh if if we uh didn't already you know know that we were too old and not cool anymore like now it's official or at least for me that's right right. That's right. Well here I, so I have, I've already given away my app, app of the year, which is HQ, um, which I talked about on the last episode, but my biggest observation around this, when David, you sent me the framework to go through
Starting point is 01:15:57 and figure out my, my app of the year went through my home screen. So I've got the iPhone 10. So I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven by four. There's 28 apps on my home screen, including the dock. Zero of them came out in 2017. And that's, I think, an interesting point about the end of the mobile era. Like there is very, very, very rarely a new app that becomes a part of my daily or even weekly life. The closest would maybe be, I started using Enlight and PhotoFox and some other photo, specialized photo editing apps now that you can do a lot more powerful sort of pro style tools on the iPhone. But I actually don't think those are 2017 either. I just don't actually
Starting point is 01:16:46 think there's new apps that are habit forming, um, in my daily life. And maybe I'm just like, not, not one of the cool kids anymore. And you know, there's plenty of those and I'm not involved. Uh, like musically it was 2016. I mean, there's been a, there's been a rise of, of new consumer apps. I guess I have TBH on my phone, but it's not at the beginning. Um, HQ was not, not on my home screen either. Um, but I think it's telling. Well, it's nowhere, it's nowhere near the velocity that it used to be. No, I mean, pull out your phone. Do you have anything on your home screen that came out this year? I did the same, I did the did the same exercise and uh that's how i ended up with youtube i was like okay there's nothing new on my phone this year what have i interacted with differently or more than last year and that's how i got youtube yep all
Starting point is 01:17:35 right so you heard her here first couple old men doing a podcast so welcome to 2018 david actually david actually bought an older phone. Pretty soon I'm going to be telling the kids to get off my lawn. 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. Yeah, 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
Starting point is 01:18:20 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,
Starting point is 01:18:40 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
Starting point is 01:18:58 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
Starting point is 01:19:29 to vanta.com acquired and just tell them that ben and david sent you and thanks to friend of the show christina vanta ceo all acquired listeners get a thousand dollars of free credit vanta.com slash acquired all right i think i think I think that's all we've got. Have a safe drive, a safe travel to wherever you're going. Enjoy the time off work. And if you've ever thought, hey, you know they say that thing about reviews and that's
Starting point is 01:19:55 nice and that's for other people to do. We actually mean that for you too. So we would love, love, love as soon as we sign off here. Or right now. I don't have anything else important to say. If you'd leave us a review on iTunes. That's all we've got. Happy holidays.
Starting point is 01:20:10 Happy holidays. We'll see you in 2018. We'll see you in season two. See you in season 10 or two.

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