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ARM is an incredibly unlikely story. They were founded in Cambridge, England in 1990 to design a new chip architecture just for low-power devices (like the Apple Newton!), leaving the âserious computingâ on desktop and servers to Intelâs x86. Now, nearly three decades later, ARM is the dominant architecture in all of computing today.
ARM is in your phone, your car, data centers, the most advanced AI chips⊠there are hundreds (or thousands!) of ARM chips you encounter in your everyday life. In this episode, ARM Holdings CEO Rene Haas joins us to tell the story of how ARM become so dominant, weaving through the through the iPod, smartphone, and AI eras. Plus, their wild corporate story of going public, getting bought by SoftBank, going public again, and nearly being acquired by NVIDIA!
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Duolingo has fundamentally changed the landscape of self-guided education, starting with language learning. It is now a $9B publicly traded company in a space where everyone thought you could never build a large and exciting company. Weâre joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Luis dives into how learning English was transformative in his personal trajectory and opportunities in his life, inspiring him to create the most successful EdTech product of all time. A few topics in this episode:
How Duolingo became a leader in the gamification and mobile-first movements in the early 2010sHow the company balances rigorous experimentation with gut instinct to build an app with customer experience at its coreThe backstory of Duolingoâs âunhinged, yet wholesomeâ green owl mascot trending on your TikTok feedSponsors:
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Puuttuva jakso?
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We sit down with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue to understand the current state of the open source AI ecosystem. Hugging Face is the leading platform to host and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications. They also have a compute offering for AI builders to train their models directly on the platform. Clem has a contrarian take on the future: there will not be just a few major foundation model companies with everyone using their APIs. But rather, that thousands of companies will have their own specialized AI models built in-house for their particular use case. It's obviously a very dynamic landscape and we'll have to see how it shakes out, but Clem has a pretty great viewpoint to see it all, working with their 5 million registered Hugging Face users!
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Hugging FaceHugging Face's Series D valuing the company at $4.5 billionSponsors:
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We sit down with legendary quarterback Joe Montana to discuss his transition from one of the greatest athletes of all time to⊠one of the great venture investors today. Joe shares some of the lessons that he learned winning Super Bowls with the 49ers that he applies to his investing career at Liquid 2 Ventures. Joe also goes into their firmâs strategy and performance, finding and investing in dozens of unicorn startups at the seed and pre-seed stage.
This interview was recorded live at Modern Treasuryâs Transfer conference in May 2024.
Acquiredâs arena show at Chase Center in San Francisco is just a few weeks away! We hope you can join us. acquired.fm/sf
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The tenacity required to build Klarna over the last 19 years is astonishing. Despite several headwinds and changes in the payments landscape since founding, Klarna is used today by 150 million consumers globally, processing two million payments a day. Founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski joins us for one of the most honest and thoughtful discussions weâve ever had on the show. If youâre a business strategy nerd, itâs a great case study in how to leverage the strengths you have as a startup vs. incumbents, and how to compete against other startups in your space. In Klarna's case: the rapid rise of buy-now-pay-later. Sebastian also takes us into the logic of his aggressive AI strategy for cost reduction, product experience, and payments innovation.
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The space industry is one of the most fascinating areas of technology in 2024. The reduction in launch costs and proliferation of satellites make all kinds of new businesses possible. Today we are joined by Austin Link, the co-founder and CEO of Starfish Space (where Ben and PSL Ventures are investors!). Austin lays out the state of the space industry today, particularly as it pertains to startups. He and Ben explore what it takes to build a space company, then gets into the specifics of what Starfish Space is building.
Starfish Space has created a spacecraft to dock with and reposition satellites. This "space servicing" technology enables their customers to extend the usable lifetime of satellites (unlocking tens of millions of dollars in revenue), or safely dispose of aging satellites to avoid space debris. Starfish's product, the "Otter", uses autonomous navigation software and electric propulsion to move through space and dock with customers' satellites.
If you're into physics, outer space, or any sort of "hard tech", tune in!
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If youâve been waiting for us to venture back to the land of semiconductors, youâre in luck! On our NVIDIA and TSMC episodes, we explored two components of the silicon value chain: the fabless chip companies that design chips and the foundries that manufacture them. Today, we dive into the software that powers it all, the field electronic design automation (EDA). This is essentially the software that enables chip designers to do their jobs, which has changed dramatically with the rise of AI.
This interview is with two people who understand that world better than anyone: Aart de Geus, the co-founder and Executive Chair of Synopsys, and Sassine Ghazi, Synopsysâs CEO and President. Aart founded the company in 1986, and was CEO until January 2024 when he handed the reins to Sassine. Synopsys is now worth $80 billion, with virtually every chip company as a customer or partner for everything from AI to 5G to automotive. Aart and Sassine talked with us about the future Mooreâs Law, where chip makers are finding efficiencies today, how we got here, plus a bonus section on simulation and their $35 billion acquisition of Ansys. Enjoy!
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On our Novo Nordisk episode, we covered the business of Ozempic, the GLP-1 taking the world by storm. On this episode, we dive into the science of the molecule semaglutide (and its predecessor liraglutide) with the world expert on the topic, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen. Lotte is Novo Nordiskâs Chief Scientific Advisor, and led the research group back in the early 1990s that first invented the molecule. A few topics from our conversation:
The science behind what is happening in the body that causes weight loss while on OzempicWhat it was like in the 1990s and 2000s believing in a drug for a problem that the rest of the industry (including her own company) had written offHow weight loss was actually a goal from the very start â not just a side effect of diabetes medication like you often read today!Sponsors:
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Weâre joined by Imprint cofounder and Thrive General Partner Gaurav Ahuja to dive deeper into the modern payments ecosystem and Visaâs current place within it. Gaurav was one of our research sources for the Visa episode, and we wanted to bring his insights to you all too. We discuss whether Visa really should be worried about eroding interchange fees, the impact of realtime payments systems, opportunities for startups and whether the Visa / Mastercard duopoly could really be overthrown. Tune in and enjoy!
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/files/Avg_IF_by_PCN.pdf
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We sit down with Morgan Housel, who is one of our very favorite authors and has also become a good friend of the show over the past few years. Morganâs last book The Psychology of Money had a huge impact on both of our personal financial philosophies (and by extension Acquiredâs!), and Morgan was kind enough to give us an advance copy of his new book launching tomorrow, Same as Ever. Itâs equally as good, and maybe even more relevant in the current environment for thinking about whatâs not going to change as we cycle through vastly different macro financial environments. Tune in and enjoy!
Morganâs new book Same as EverThe Psychology of MoneyMorganâs blog on Collaborative Fund and on TwitterMorganâs new podcast!
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While preparing for our Porsche episode with Doug DeMuro, we had a lot more than Porsche to discuss⊠but the episode was already over 3 hours! We decided to save the rest for its own episode, released here on ACQ2. Doug helped us understand whatâs going on with the car industry supply chain in 2023, the transition to electric vehicles, the car dealership business model, and how most consumer car purchase decisions really get made.
We also got to talk with Doug about his business empire. In addition to his YouTube channel with ~5 million subscribers, Doug started a car marketplace called âCars and Bidsâ. Earlier this year, Doug took a $37 million investment from The Chernin Group, and Doug walked us through that transaction and what itâs been like going from âindie creatorâ to a large and more professionalized organization. And of course, thereâs some discussion on our Porsche episode together.
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Cars and Bids!Doug on YouTube and TwitterSponsors:
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We sit down with RunwayMLâs CEO Cristobal Valenzuela to discuss the incredible tools theyâre bringing to film and video creators (including last yearâs Best Picture âEverything Everywhere All at Onceâ from A24), and the history + current state of the âvisualâ branch of generative AI. We cover how theyâve gone to market with both creators and enterprises, the potential for much more radical future use cases, and the companyâs recent $141m strategic raise from Google, Nvidia + Salesforce and the context of the current AI fundraising landscape. Tune in!
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RunwayFollow Cris on TwitterSponsors:
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We sit down with Crusoe Energy CEO Chase Lochmiller to talk about the two âhard to imagineâ tasks theyâve undertaken: 1) building a new AI cloud infrastructure provider from scratch, and 2) colocating and powering it with stranded energy from some of the harshest and most remote locations on earth.
Crusoeâs cloud of course has to compete with (and in many cases exceed) the price/performance curves of cloud incumbents like AWS, Azure and Google in processing AI workloads. And the way it does so is by building data centers literally on top of oil flares (and other wasted energy sources) that otherwise comprise multiple percentage points of annual global greenhouse gas emissions. In other words â methane that previously just got lit on fire is now powering your favorite AI startupâs training workloads!
We cover what it actually takes to build and operate a public cloud, the latest Nvidia networking and server innovations and what they mean for GPU data centers, and how to set up a company to pursue something âhardâ like this across the team, operations and capital raising fronts. Tune in!
Crusoe Energy and Crusoe CloudFollow Crusoe and Chase on Twitter
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Every now and then, we come across super interesting and under-the-radar (at least to us!) public markets folks like NZS Capital who make us think differently about the art of investing. TDM is another one of those groups â founded 18 years ago in Australia, theyâve compounded a single, private pool of capital at 26% per annum over nearly two decades. Thatâs Warren & Charlie territory!
TDM recently published a memo comparing the current âpost ZIRP bubbleâ market with what happened in the years following both the dot-com crash and the GFC in 2008. As always, past performance isnât necessarily predictive of the future, but what happened back then surprised us and might surprise you too. More importantly, it gave us the perfect excuse to sit down with TDM cofounder Tom Cowan and share the conversation with you all. Tune in and learn alongside us!Links:
TDMâs 2023 Market MemoThe current BVP Cloud IndexFollow TDM on Twitter or LinkedInSponsors:
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How do you build defensible business value in an era when, as AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli said on our last ACQ2 episode, the âcost of intelligence is going to zeroâ? Longtime friend of the show Jake Saper and his partners at Emergence Capital have been refining their thesis for this brave new world of Generative AI in B2B, and we sit down with him to discuss. We cover topics including:
When do exactly correct answers matter, and when do they not?When are human-in-the-loop systems necessary?When do startups have an advantage vs. incumbents, and vice-versa?Where can companies capture value on a durable basis?When do you need proprietary data in order to be defensible?Whether youâre building or investing in existing businesses from the âpre-AIâ era or brand new startups that are native to GPT, this episode has plenty of takeaways you should consider. Tune in!
Jakeâs recent blog post on Generative AI and B2BFollow Jake on Twitter
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Since joining AngelList as CEO in 2019, Avlok Kohli has presided over perhaps the most unexpected and astounding transformation in the venture ecosystem: taking AngelList from an SPV provider to a company that is quickly becoming the software platform for the entire industry.
Today, AngelList provides investors and founders with the infrastructure they need to launch and scale a startup or fund, and supports over $15B of assets (including Davidâs own Kindergarten Ventures!). We sit down with Avlok to discuss how it all happened (and happened so fast), and - also unexpectedly and astoundingly - how generative AI is about to transform their entire business and the venture ecosystem again. Tune in!
Visit AngelList to get startedFollow Avlok on Twitter
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David Hsu has one of the most interesting founders journeys in tech today. After growing up in Silicon Valley, he left to study both philosophy and computer science at Oxford in the UK, then returned immediately afterward to found an internal enterprise tools company. Fast forward to today, and Retool is a multi-billion dollar valuation juggernaut that â almost uniquely for this era â operates at roughly cashflow breakeven while still growing rapidly. On this episode David shares his thoughts on finding product-market fit through sales, the dangers of product-led growth, how to get $1-5 million in ARR with just 5-10 people on the team. Tune in!
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Retool!Follow David H. on Twitter -
Ben and David joined Sam and Shaan of "My First Million" to talk about scaling to a large podcast, the company they would like to own, the CEO's you don't want to compete against, and the 100+ year history of Nintendo.
If you liked this and want more of Sam and Shawn, subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here.
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* Hampton
* Wait But Why
* Marques Brownlee
* Nintendo
* NVIDIA
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Show Notes:
(01:45) - Intro to Acquired
(10:00) - How to scale to a big podcast
(14:05) - How big do you have to be to be at the top of the business category?
(23:55) - What commonalities are there between weird companies?
(27:40) - How to tell a real from a fake contrarian
(34:45) - Nintendo
(37:45) - Which company would you most want to own?
(40:45) - Who would you least want to compete against?
(52:30) - Business ideas
(56:40) - Will you ever sell Acquired?
(58:20) - Best ways to make money as a podcast
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On our AWS episode, we talked briefly about the next chapter of cloud: data warehouses. But what makes them so powerful? Why do enterprises rely on them? And how will cloud customers collaborate on data stored in multiple clouds?
We sit down with Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, the co-founder and CEO of Samooha, a new company backed by Altimeter and Snowflake Ventures to tackle the problem of secure data sharing and collaboration in the cloud. Kamakshi has an impressive background to speak to this problem, having been a part of AdMob (sold to Google), and the founder/CEO of Drawbridge, which sold to LinkedIn. She then went on to work in Microsoft's Office of the CTO, where she obviously had a lot of experience understanding the needs of cloud customers.
If you want a better understanding of how enterprises use the cloud, multi-cloud architecture, and how security and privacy works with customer data at scale, this episode is for you!
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Kamakshi on TwitterSamooha Samooha Product Demo Video -
Statsig CEO and former Facebook VP Vijaye Raji joins us to discuss democratizing the tools of big tech. Before starting Statsig, Vijaye spent 10 years at Facebook where he led the development of their mobile ad product (yes â THAT mobile ad product thatâs the core of FB today).
We talk all about about Facebookâs early days in mobile, and the internal building and shipping process that let them continuously experiment and roll out features out to billions of users, which Statsig is now bringing to engineering and product teams everywhere. This episode is a must-listen for product builders at all stages!
Listen in any podcast player.
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Statsigâs generous free feature flags offeringStatsig experimentation community on Slack, LinkedIn and Twitter - Näytä enemmän
