In 2023, Ben and David joined Managing Director Matt McIlwain to reflect back on the greater Seattle innovation ecosystem and the role of Amazon, the late Tom Alberg’s enduring impact and vision for flywheels, and the growth of the Acquired podcast founders from their days at Madrona. Listen here.

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David Rosenthal of Madrona and Ben Gilbert of Pioneer Square Labs team up every two weeks or so to eat some food and talk about acquisitions. These can so easily go wrong. This podcast is about the ones that mainly went right – the “The 1+1=3 deals” as the authors say on their site. Why did these go right? What were the elements of success? And they are only 30 minutes! Perfect. The newest episode looks at YouTube (and includes a link to the original internal investment memo from funders, Sequoia)

Get the podcast from iTunes or from Acquired.

We sat down and asked a couple questions about the podcast and the response so far. Read on for fun insight and a good restaurant recommendation.

How did you get the idea for Acquired?
The idea was Ben’s— he had wanted to do a podcast for a while, and thought a theme around analyzing tech acquisitions would be a good mix of unique, focused and atomized-enough content that we could keep it going with fresh and interesting material. So far we’ve been very happy with how it’s working, and we have a few fun ideas in the works riffing on the theme— acquisitions that DIDN’T happen, “real-time” analysis when a big one gets announced, more special guests, etc.

Continue reading “David & Ben’s ‘Acquired’ Podcast Dissects What Went Right – New Episode Available”