Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal tell the full stories of great companies and the decisions that made them. 30 Acquired episodes on product and growth, each as notes you can zoom: the bottom line, key takeaways and every chapter, linked to the moment in the video.

Ask all of them a question · The course

September 20261

Acquired · Sep 13

The Home Depot: How America's aging houses built the best stock of the last 45 years

Fired from Handy Dan, Marcus and Blank built a warehouse home improvement chain on a bundle of knowledgeable staff, supplier credit and employee equity, and it became the best-returning stock since 1981. It also shows how a bad successor nearly broke the culture and how a leader who returned to the founding values brought it back.

Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank built Home Depot on a specialty retailer's service, not just low prices
Home Depot hired tradespeople as retail staff, because a stable job beat the hardships of contracting
Home Depot gave floor associates equity so the stock price tied directly to their service

August 20261

Acquired · Aug 10

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire

Disney was rescued twice by managers who extended its character flywheel into new businesses and bought great storytellers and cash engines instead of building them. The ABC and ESPN deal and the Pixar purchase made the empire, while the later Fox deal and the pivot to streaming show how hard it is to change a business model.

Michael Eisner's 1995 ABC deal brought ESPN, a cable pricing power machine
Bob Iger decided Pixar's leaders should take over Disney Animation, then bought Pixar for $7.4 billion
Michael Eisner put Disney classics on VHS in 1985 despite family opposition

June 20261

Acquired · Jun 23

The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia

Walt Disney's era shows how an artist-led company can turn timeless animated IP into a business that earns from films, merchandise, television and parks, and why that took repeated all-in bets that nearly sank it. The decisions that make it worth hearing are Snow White, the Kay Kamen merchandise deal and the ABC-financed Disneyland.

Walt Disney lost Oswald because he owned no IP and no employment contracts
Disney found the IP flywheel: great characters, wide distribution, then ancillary products that reinforce the core
Walt Disney built the flywheel on animated characters because they never age or demand a cut

April 20261

Acquired · Apr 13

Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team?

Ferrari shows how a luxury brand and a racing team can sit under one roof and strengthen each other, built on scarcity, myth and a vertically integrated factory. The decisions that make it worth hearing are Enzo's myth-making and his selective sale to Fiat, and Luca di Montezemolo's 1991 turnaround that cut production almost in half and put the luxury strategy in place.

Luca di Montezemolo cut Ferrari output from 4,500 cars to 2,300 to rescue the brand
Fiat tried to fix Ferrari by making more cars, the cardinal sin of luxury
Luca di Montezemolo saw Ferrari as a luxury company, not just a racing company

November 20251

Acquired · Nov 23

Coca-Cola: The Complete History & Strategy

Coca-Cola turned cheap syrup into a global brand by letting independent bottlers carry the capital and work while the company controlled the formula, trademark and marketing. The accidental $1 bottling contract, Woodruff's standardization and lifestyle advertising, and the New Coke blunder show how a brand and a system can outlast a product.

Asa Candler gave away bottling rights for $1 and accidentally built a global system
Coca-Cola kept the high-margin syrup and pushed bottling's capital and labor onto local owners
Robert Woodruff's motto was that everyone who touches Coca-Cola should make money

October 20252

Acquired · Oct 26

Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning

Joe Coulombe was a young executive trying to clone 7-Eleven. He built a counter-positioned grocery store around liquor, wine, health food and private label that has no direct competitor. The sharp choices to skip the supermarket and brand playbook, and to sell to Theo Albrecht on a one-page deal, are why it now earns over $2,000 per square foot, about double Whole Foods.

Joe Coulombe chose hard liquor as a moat 7-Eleven could not follow
Joe Coulombe refused to race Walmart-style rivals on size and chose to be an active retailer
Joe Coulombe bet on the college-educated, well-traveled customer before the trend arrived

Acquired · Oct 5

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI?

Google invented or funded almost every key piece of modern AI (neural nets, TPUs, the transformer, DeepMind) and still got caught flat-footed by ChatGPT because its search profits made AI a threat to itself. The story is worth hearing for how Sundar Pichai's code red, the Brain and DeepMind merger and the single Gemini model turned a rocky start into a credible comeback.

Google published the transformer and failed to treat it as a platform shift
Google built a chatbot before ChatGPT and shelved it because it threatened search
Sundar Pichai's code red treated AI as a disruptive threat, not a sustaining upgrade

August 20251

Acquired · Aug 26

Google Part II: Alphabet

From 2004 to 2015 Google turned a pure search company into a maker of seven more billion-user products, each one chosen to grow the web, protect search ads from Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, or both. The decision that stands out is giving away or buying platforms like Chrome, Android and YouTube, so that Google never again had to depend on someone else's platform.

Larry, Sergey and Eric built web apps to escape Microsoft's control of search
Google paid carriers and phone makers to take Android, a less than free model Microsoft could not match
Google attacked Microsoft Office with free real-time collaboration, not by matching features

June 20251

Acquired · Jun 29

Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened

Google won search because it paired a better ranking algorithm with cheap infrastructure and a pay-per-click ad auction that rewarded relevance, then spent aggressively on distribution. The decisions that made it worth hearing are betting the company on the AOL deal and seeing that scale raised revenue per search, not just cut cost.

Google found that scale raised revenue per search, not only lowered cost
Google's founders turned down a deal that would have kept users on someone else's site
Larry and Sergey bet Google's survival on the 2002 AOL search deal

January 20252

Acquired · Jan 26

TSMC founder Morris Chang

Morris Chang built TSMC by taking decisions other executives avoid: fixing R&D as a share of revenue, betting the balance sheet on one node, and settling a customer fight with a firm, fair offer. The 2009 to 2011 stretch, covering the Nvidia settlement, the 28nm bet and the Apple 20nm deal, shows how a pure play foundry earned the trust that made it the leader.

Morris Chang fixed TSMC's R&D budget at 8% of revenue to end yearly fights
Morris Chang tripled capital spending in 2010 to go all in on 28nm
Morris Chang overruled his independent directors on a threefold capex increase

Acquired · Jan 20

TSMC

After being passed over for CEO at Texas Instruments, Morris Chang founded TSMC in 1987 at age 56 as the first pure play chip foundry, betting that a market of fabless chip designers would appear. Reinvesting profits into ever larger fabs turned a commodity manufacturing business into one with 40% operating margins and roughly 90% of the leading edge.

Morris Chang built TSMC as a pure play foundry to fit Taiwan's one real strength
Chang bet on chip designers who did not yet exist because fabs blocked them
TSMC's flywheel turned fabless customers into funding for better process technology

November 20241

Acquired · Nov 17

IKEA

Ingvar Kamprad built the world's largest furniture retailer by reinvesting only its own cash flow, designing everything backward from a breathtakingly low price for the many, and putting the company beyond the reach of shareholders and heirs. The result is a roughly $50B revenue business with no direct global competitor and only about 5% market share in a fragmented market.

Ingvar Kamprad funded IKEA only from its own cash flow, never outside capital
Kamprad designed IKEA products backward from a breathtaking price and engineered the whole chain to hit it
Kamprad set up IKEA as self-owned foundations so no heirs, shareholders or governments could break it

October 20241

Acquired · Oct 27

July 20241

Acquired · Jul 21

Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years

Microsoft's supposed lost years were really the years it built an Enterprise and cloud engine that later made it the most valuable company in the world again, even as it failed in consumer markets. The decision to back Azure outside the existing server business, despite heavy internal pressure, is what makes the story worth hearing.

Steve Ballmer backed Azure outside the server division, against his own go-to-market machine
Microsoft let the Enterprise Agreement turn software sales into a bundled annual annuity
Microsoft built an interlocking Enterprise stack so customers never had to pick best of breed

June 20241

Acquired · Jun 4

Starbucks (with Howard Schultz)

Howard Schultz turned a six-store Seattle bean roaster into a 39,000-store global brand by treating coffee as an experience, his people as partners, and growth as something that could erode the soul of the company. The story is worth hearing because it shows both the choices that built Starbucks and the 2008 near-insolvency and later mobile app drift that followed when the experience was allowed to slip.

Howard Schultz saw that Starbucks sold romance and community, with coffee only the conduit
Schultz gave stock options to every employee, including part-timers, a year before the IPO
Schultz refused to franchise because he believed culture could not survive franchisee subcultures

April 20241

Acquired · Apr 21

Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95

Microsoft's first 20 years show how a tiny, capital-light software company became the point of integration for the whole PC industry by licensing instead of selling, hedging its bets and betting on the next platform. The decision that makes it worth hearing is Bill Gates taking a fixed fee from IBM while keeping the right to license DOS to every other maker.

Bill Gates took a flat fee from IBM but kept the right to license DOS to everyone
Bill Gates priced BASIC cheaply so no one had a reason to use a rival
Bill Gates and Paul Allen learned from MITS that software must be paid for with the hardware

February 20241

Acquired · Feb 19

Hermès

Hermès shows how a family firm can stay independent for six generations by reinventing its products while never giving up craftsmanship, scarcity and control of its brand. The decision that makes it worth hearing is the family's 2011 lock-up of 50.2% of the company in H51 to beat Bernard Arnault's stealth takeover, followed by a push to scale handcrafted production to 7,000 artisans.

Axel Dumas's Hermès scaled handcrafting by training artisans itself instead of outsourcing or building factories
The Hermès family locked up 50.2% of the company for 20 years to defeat Bernard Arnault
Hermès never lets demand set its output: craft constraints cap supply and scarcity is the result

November 20231

Acquired · Nov 26

Visa

Dee Hock turned Bank of America's failing franchise program into a global payments network owned by the banks that use it, and then built the technology to make it run everywhere at near zero marginal cost. The story shows how aligning rival banks around a shared network can produce one of the most profitable businesses in the world, with 50%+ net income margins on about $30B of revenue.

Dee Hock convinced Bank of America to give away its crown jewel by showing the pie would grow
Dee Hock made Visa a for-profit non-stock membership company owned by the banks that use it
Dee Hock built a democratic constitution that rival banks could not leave but could change by 80% vote

October 20231

Acquired · Oct 15

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang explains how Nvidia survived near-death in 1997, then repeatedly positioned itself years ahead of new markets, from CUDA to the data center to AI. The Riva 128 bet, made with one tape-out and an emulator, and the Mellanox deal show how he bets the company only after pulling the risk forward.

Jensen Huang bet Nvidia's last cash on one tape-out, simulated first to make it perfect
Jensen Huang pushes chips in only after simulating the risk, not on faith
Jensen Huang rebuilt Nvidia around DirectX after its first architecture proved the wrong road

September 20231

Acquired · Sep 6

Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023)

Nvidia spent five years rebuilding the data center around GPUs, networking, its own CPU and the CUDA software platform, so it was ready when generative AI arrived in late 2022. The result was a roughly $800 billion company that crossed a trillion dollars, and a quarter with $10.3 billion of data center revenue that more than doubled in three months.

Nvidia spent five years rebuilding the data center before generative AI gave it a customer
Jensen Huang bought Mellanox for $7 billion because the data center had to behave as one computer
Jensen Huang builds Nvidia's products full stack but sells them in pieces

August 20231

Acquired · Aug 21

Costco

Costco shows how trade-offs that look costly, like thin margins, high pay and few products, lock together into a durable business that members and suppliers trust. The decision that makes it worth hearing is capping markup at 14% and sharing scale savings with customers, which produced 230 billion dollars of revenue and a loyal, wealthy customer base.

Costco under Jim Sinegal caps markup at 14% so members trust every price
Costco uses its scale to lower prices instead of widening its own margin
Costco pays hourly workers well because turnover and theft cost more than wages

July 20231

Acquired · Jul 24

Nike

Nike grew from a shoe importer starved for capital into the world's biggest apparel brand by turning athletes into its marketing, borrowing heavily to grow, and breaking the rules of its industry. The Michael Jordan royalty deal, which Adidas and Converse could not match, shows how a cash-poor challenger can build a structural edge.

Nike gave Michael Jordan a royalty and a signature shoe because rivals could not copy it
Phil Knight ran Blue Ribbon at a near 100% debt to assets ratio and had to grow
Knight escaped the Oregon banks by taking financing from Japanese trading company Nisho Iwai

November 20221

Acquired · Nov 15

Qualcomm

Qualcomm shows how a team of top information theorists bootstrapped with contract work, patented a technology everyone thought impossible, and then built the whole ecosystem around it until it owned the most valuable layers. The decision that makes it worth hearing is betting on CDMA and Moore's Law against the industry standard, then shedding everything except chips and licensing.

Qualcomm patented CDMA in 1986, betting Moore's Law would make it feasible
Qualcomm built joint ventures for base stations and handsets so carriers could adopt CDMA
Qualcomm sold its base station and handset businesses to keep only chips and licensing

September 20221

Acquired · Sep 5

Amazon Web Services

AWS was not built from spare servers. It grew out of an internal fix for a gridlocked codebase, which Amazon then turned into a pay-as-you-go infrastructure business that now earns as much operating income as the whole retail operation. The decision that makes it worth hearing is to launch with basic building blocks, win startups first, and sell at margins the incumbents would never accept.

Bezos forced every Amazon team to talk only through externalizable service interfaces
Jeff Bezos answered scaling pain with less communication, not more coordination
AWS began as an internal fix for Amazon's own engineering gridlock, not leftover servers

August 20221

Acquired · Aug 16

Amazon.com

Amazon.com shows how a founder can turn a book website into the dominant retailer by building logistics no rival could copy, reinvesting float instead of showing profit, and learning fast from dozens of failed bets. The decision to open its own product pages to third-party sellers, made while the company was near death in 2000, is the turn that makes the story worth hearing.

Jeff Bezos chose to build things that could only exist on the internet
Bezos left a likely D. E. Shaw succession using a regret minimization framework
Bezos bet on 2,300x internet growth and picked books as the first category

July 20221

Acquired · Jul 18

Walmart

Sam Walton built the world's largest retailer by copying the best ideas from rivals, cutting prices on everything, and building his own logistics when no one else would partner with him. The decision to go it alone after Butler Brothers refused to help, and to run lean on reinvested cash flow, let a small Arkansas chain beat Kmart, Woolco and Target.

Sam Walton had every manager look for what rivals did right and copy it
Sam Walton cut prices on everything because lower prices sold enough extra volume to earn more profit
Walmart built its own distribution network and beat Kmart, which borrowed its parent's

April 20221

Acquired · Apr 20

Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022)

Jensen Huang spent more than a decade pouring gaming profits into CUDA, a free but closed parallel computing platform with no clear market, and it became the foundation of modern machine learning. The story teaches how owning a full stack, enduring years of doubt, and being ready when a breakthrough lands can turn a graphics chip maker into a generational company.

Jensen Huang bet Nvidia on CUDA with no obvious market, starting in 2006
Jensen Huang kept investing in CUDA while the stock fell 80 percent in 2008
Nvidia gave CUDA away free but locked it to its own chips

March 20221

Acquired · Mar 28

Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006)

Nvidia began as one of about 90 graphics chip startups and survived by repeatedly admitting its strategy had failed and betting the company on a fix. The decision to drop its own standards, ship a chip in six months and then build programmable GPUs turned a commodity business into an industry leader.

Jensen Huang scrapped Nvidia's own graphics standard for Microsoft's Direct 3D with nine months of cash left
Jensen Huang laid off 70% of Nvidia and shipped a new chip in six months
Jensen Huang made intellectual honesty the base of Nvidia's culture by killing his own strategy

October 20211

Acquired · Oct 18

Standard Oil Part II (Extended Cut)

Standard Oil's late years show how a dominant company can lose the public, the politicians and its own founder, and still end up worth far more after a forced breakup. Rockefeller's second act, building organized philanthropy, shows how to give money away with the same rigor used to make it.

The breakup into 34 companies made Rockefeller and every Standard Oil shareholder far richer
The breakup freed Standard Oil's young managers, and one of them invented gasoline cracking
Rockefeller put scientists, not trustees, in charge of his medical research institute

September 20211

Acquired · Sep 21

Standard Oil Part I

Rockefeller built the first great American corporation by combining obsessive cost discipline, heavy borrowing to build scale, and control of the chokepoints between oil and its customers. The decision that makes the story worth hearing is how he turned a rescue of struggling rivals into control of 90% of US oil by 1877, and why it still carried the seeds of its own breakup.

Rockefeller bet on refining oil in cities, not prospecting for it
Rockefeller won on obsessive cost discipline while rivals chased gold-rush profits
Rockefeller borrowed heavily to build giant plants and win on scale economies