Ed note: Are you curious about how COSTCO, Google, Ferrari, Trader Joe’s and other great companies succeeded? This audio deep dive is available for free on the web at https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/. Given that we all use My Chart for aspects of our healthcare, I recently listed to the history of the now 81 year old multibillionaire woman who started EPIC (My Chart) in rural Wisconsin. Fascinating! https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/epic-systems-mychart
Each episode is a four-hour deep dive into a single company’s history from its founding until today.
Ben and David personally handcraft each episode over 200 hours of research and production – diving into primary sources, financial documents, and countless interviews with the people who lived each company’s journey to piece together a complete story. The format is best described as a “conversational audiobook.”
The question at the center of every episode is always the same: why did this company work spectacularly, while so many others failed?
Occasionally the protagonists who built those companies join us to help us answer that question, such as Jensen Huang, Charlie Munger, Howard Schultz, Mark Zuckerberg, Daniel Ek, Morris Chang, and Jamie Dimon.
This approach has created something unique: an obsessively produced strategy deep-dive embedded within a gripping radio drama that CEOs recommend to their teams, institutional investors rely on for diligence, and talented individuals turn to when evaluating career moves.
Acquired episodes are always evergreen — focused on the history and fundamental strategies that created these companies and not on the news of the day. Our goal is to make each episode just as valuable five, ten, or even twenty years from now as it is today.
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal