If and How to Scale the Acquired Podcast

February 03, 2026

Founded in 2015 by co-hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal as a hobby, the business podcast Acquired had become their full-time jobs by 2023, and they managed all aspects of the company. By telling in-depth stories of companies, the podcast had doubled its audience year over year, reaching one million listeners per episode. And they’d grown without a strict release schedule or relentless optimization.

Still, they felt pressure to scale. They took 2025 to evaluate the podcast’s success to date while determining if, and how, it should change its well-established and revenue-generating processes. Because maintaining the balance of work, life, and family they’d achieved was an important priority too.

How did they determine a way forward? They join Harvard Business School Professor Shane Greenstein and host Brian Kenny to discuss the case “The Acquired Podcast: Scaling the Mic.”

BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the stories behind groundbreaking Harvard Business School case studies.

If you followed the rules for building a successful podcast, you’d probably keep episodes short, release them on a strict schedule, and optimize relentlessly for platforms and algorithms. Now imagine doing the opposite. Imagine releasing three to four-hour episodes whenever, with just two people doing nearly all the work, no rush to cover the news, no effort to game discovery systems. By every rule of modern media, that podcast shouldn’t work, but it does spectacularly, and it’s called Acquired.

The Acquired Podcast has more than a million listeners per episode. It sells out Radio City Music Hall for live sessions and has built one of the most influential audiences in business. Today’s case asks the hard question behind that success: when breaking the rules is what got you here, how do you grow without breaking what works? To explore that, we’re joined by Professor Shane Greenstein, along with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, to discuss the case “The Acquired Podcast: Scaling the Mic.”

I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.

Shane Greenstein’s research addresses the wide array of research questions about computing, communication, and internet markets. He writes about these and other topics on the Digitopoly blog. Shane, thanks for joining us.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: Oh, my pleasure to be here.

BRIAN KENNY: It’s great to have you here. I thought I was going to trip over Digitopoly, but that came out pretty smoothly, so we’re off to a good start. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal are the founders and hosts of the Acquired Podcast, and they are the protagonists in this case. Great to have both of you here with me.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Our pleasure.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I’m a little intimidated. I’m not going to lie. You guys have a very successful podcast, so with huge audience. I’m a little jealous and a little intimidated at the same time. So, just bear with me. I feel like —

BEN GILBERT: There are things we can learn from every other podcast, and we’re excited to just see how you do it.

BRIAN KENNY: And I was saying, we made a big deal when we had our 10th anniversary this year. You guys did the same with your 10th anniversary. As far as podcast goes, that makes us ancient, actually, being around this long in the podcast space.

BEN GILBERT: Yeah. I mean, 99% of podcasts are newer than both of these shows.

BRIAN KENNY: So, let’s have some fun with this. Shane, I’m going to ask you to start for us. Just if you can tell us when you decided to write a case about Acquired, what made this business interesting to you as a strategy problem and not just a media success story? And I’m always curious about what your cold call is when you start the discussion in class.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: Oh, as a strategy problem, this business is easy to outline, difficult to codify. So, let’s outline it a bit. Their mission is to tell the stories behind a major business and analyze their playbooks. And the flagship service is a semi-monthly in-depth analysis of a company’s business. Ben and David present the narrative. They make observations. They engage the reader. They uncover broader truths that weren’t evident. They have a eye for the fact that illustrates the broader trend. They like to generate durable lessons that endure the news cycle. And they draw on their experience as venture capitalists and investors. Before they record, they talk to many sources of information, and then they synthesize all that into chapters, analysis, and editing.

So how do we describe that business? So it has a number of different pieces. First, it attracts a fairly educated, high income audience that are interested in business and technology. They curate a set of advertisers who want access to that set of listeners. And I often say also about this, we have pretty good discussion in the classroom. Are these the right advertisers for those listeners? The listeners want to listen to those advertisers. So it’s a very good match.

That’s not all they do, though. They also have a set of activities like conversations with executives on a quasi-weekly timeline. Once a year, they’ve been doing online activities. They have a very active online community of like-minded super fans, we might call them. And all of that is oriented towards bringing them back to the flagship. So now that I’ve outlined that, could you open a podcast that achieved the same thing? And the answer is no. There’s still something behind the scenes that they do because they have built this audience over time. The audience trusts them. They think about a thousand different aspects of every single one of their cases, and they think about them thoughtfully. They’re not arbitrary choices and it’s not easy to codify. So it’s a very rich discussion about how they differentiate from everyone else, but at the same time, they’re a successful business. And to use the MBA language, they have a moat.

BRIAN KENNY: Ben, let me turn to you for a second. I would love if you could give a little bit of the history of how the two of you came together, what the early days were like at Acquired when it was just a hobby for you. And what you guys were thinking about, what problem were you hoping to solve, what were you trying to optimize for?

BEN GILBERT: Thanks, Brian. The early days are so different than what the podcast is today. It’s almost a Ship of Theseus where it’s unrecognizable from the journey where it started because every piece has been replaced along the way. I mean, now we tell these four-hour journeys of Costco or LVMH or Hermes or Nvidia just as an entire company story with all this research that goes into it and planning and real storytelling. And when we started, the first episode was 40 minutes long. The pitch to listeners was: we’re going to analyze an acquisition like Pixar going to Disney or Instagram going to Facebook and we’re going to grade it. And that’s the whole hook of the show. And over time, it broadened from just acquisitions to IPOs to really leaning into the storytelling aspect and realizing that what the listener wants is to understand how these outlier-ish successes happened, who the forces were behind them, what the industry landscapes and technologies that enabled them to happen were. How path dependent were these things? How idiosyncratic were these things? Are these replicatable successes, or are they each unique and special in their own way?

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I get this question a lot too about Cold Call, but I’ll ask you, is there an episode that stands out to you as, I won’t say your favorite, but something that you look back on and say, “Wow, we really nailed it on that episode.”

BEN GILBERT: Oh, we have so many favorite children. Mine is Costco. David has a different one.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Yeah. Mine is Hermes, but those have been our favorites for a while. We might have to think of… Those have been our go-to favorites. You might have to update.

BEN GILBERT: The most recent audience favorite appears to be Trader Joe’s.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Trader Joe’s, I was going to say, yeah, Trader Joe’s was super fun. Our Google series. Yeah, that’s like picking your children. It’s funny, Ben, you love to use the Ship of Theseus analogy, about Acquired, which I think is totally true, except there are two things that have never changed. One, the name. And two, like you said, the reason we do it is still to spend time together.

BRIAN KENNY: David, let me ask you, was there a point at which you realized that the reason the show was growing was maybe because you were breaking some rules? You probably didn’t set out to be unconventional, but was there a point at which you realized being unconventional was actually working in your favor?

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Well, it’s funny. I think the unconventional thing we were doing in the beginning was doing a podcast at all. It wasn’t really a thing yet. I’m sure you probably felt the same way when you started Cold Call. Certainly, podcasts existed. Serial had started the year before, and people were just starting to listen to podcasts in a mainstream way. But we got so many puzzled looks from friends and acquaintances when we mentioned we were starting a podcast or doing a podcast or over the years, continuing to do a podcast and be like, “Well, that seems like a waste of time.”

But in a lot of ways, I think that helped us because we if we had started once podcasts were already what they are today and there were this codified set of rules, we might have been tempted to follow them, but it was just much more of a open wild west. And I think what we did intentionally do over time was just listen to feedback and we’ve got a bunch of great feedback loops from our audience and we heard loud and clear through analytics and direct feedback that people loved our storytelling, people loved the depth, people didn’t really care how often shows came out. It was appointment listening when they did. And so, we slowly evolved towards this.

BEN GILBERT: And in particular, David, you had that insight around the Tesla episode. I was really nervous to do it. And I have the old text thread where you said, “I think we’ve got enough feedback that people actually care about the history and less about any sort of transaction. What if we just do the whole history of Tesla?” And this was in 2018 or ‘19, so it was a whole different Tesla back then, but what if we just cover that whole company rather than a transaction?

BRIAN KENNY: What does that look like for you? What is the process like, Ben, when you decide, “Okay, we’re going to do such and such company.” How do you go about doing it?

BEN GILBERT: So the first thing that we do is David and I both do about two hours of high-level research to figure out, are we excited? Based on just what we can scratch on the surface, are we going, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” Because if we as people in the tech and business sphere can find that in the first two hours, there’s a lot more interesting stuff there. But if we just are finding, “Hey, I can’t find a story here. I can’t find anything surprising or interesting or cool,” even if it’s a brand that’ll get clicks, that episode won’t be durable because we won’t be able to deliver a big key insight or a secret hiding in plain sight to people. So that’s always the first step. Then David and I come together and we say, “Here’s the interesting research sources I found. There’s these books, there’s these videos, there’s these documentaries, there’s these old articles, 10, 20 pages.”

DAVID ROSENTHAL: These HBS case studies…

BEN GILBERT: We divide up the available material and our goal is to not do the same research so that then we can come together, each of us doing 100 hours of research along the way on recording day and bring separate insights to the table.

BRIAN KENNY: David, let me ask you, you’ve just said in the case that your principal job is understanding. I wonder if you could break that down a little bit and talk about how that shapes the kinds of editorial choices that you make as a podcast team.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Yeah. Well, there’s really two things behind that statement. One is purely what it says on its surface, but that’s what Ben and I are trying to do is understand why did this thing work so well? The line we like to use is: how did this company go from obscurity to ubiquity? And any company that goes on that journey, there’s something that they do or some things that they do that are just incredible and are usually not well understood. Even for companies like Google or like Meta out there that people think they know, most people don’t really know how they got to work so well. So that’s one side. And then the other part of that statement is our goal when we cover a company is that no matter what you think about the company, what your emotional valence is about the company, whether you think it’s fantastic and wonderful and great for society in the world, or whether you think the direct opposite of that, you will still enjoy listening to our episode and still understand how it got to this point.

BRIAN KENNY: One of the unique things that Harvard Business School has is a business historian group that looks at the history of businesses. And I think we actually have a very large historical collection in the library here on campus where firms and individuals leave their papers to the school to keep them in good standing and to explain them to the world. And so, when I listened to your podcast, I was struck by how much time and care and attention you spend on the historical aspects because to me, that’s some of the most interesting things that you can learn about a firm is what happened historically and how does that impact what they’re doing today.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Totally. I mean, even Ben already brought up the Tesla episode. Even all these years later, I think about that and I think about Elon Musk. The thing that you need to understand about Elon Musk is he got ousted from his first company by the board. Once you know that, that that happened so long ago in his past and was a scarring incident for him, the behavior and the set of decisions start to make a little more sense in that context.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Shane, let me come back to you for a minute. And just talking more about this in the context of the broader industry perspective, they’re in a space that’s fairly competitive and growing more competitive I think all the time. Just last night, the Golden Globes gave an award out for podcasting, which is a new category for them. You guys did not get it. I’m sorry that didn’t break your way.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Our audience is a little different.

BEN GILBERT: But I listened to a lot of Amy Poehler show and it’s great. I’m happy she won.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I’m happy for her too. But I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about what this reveals about the way media platforms are starting to morph these days.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: Well, it’s interesting if you do listen to them closely. They both mirror principles that you hear in other podcasts and they depart from them also very deliberately. So let’s talk about the mirror part. So they are heavily researched, they’re synthetic, they’re designed to address a topic that Ben and David have decided or they believe their audience is interested in. They’re very, very careful not to waste your time. They’ve earned the trust of their listener over time by repeatedly finding insights that their audience wants to hear and they grapple with challenging questions and they try to put themselves in the shoes of those that they’re covering and try to understand where they’re coming from. Now that is the kind of principles a lot of podcasts follow.

So where are they different? First in their focus, they’re focused on business and technology. They’re bringing their own background into it. They’re very different in the depth and the lengths to which they’ll go to realize a very, very deep story and really provide a combination of narrative and synthesis that is almost unmatched by any other podcast. Now that they’ve demonstrated how it works, an interesting question is whether imitations will show up, whether there are other, if you will, topics with enough enthusiasts who would put in time for a monthly podcast that went deep on a topic. And I think they would say, and I would say it too, that there are some topics that would lend themselves. Certainly there are more sports topics than I can list on my hand that would lend itself to that. But actually, if I think more carefully say about talk radio and some of the things that attract attention there, food, automobiles, movies, gardening, I’m a gardening nut. I could listen to somebody for hours.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Well, I think that raises a great point, Shane. There are probably a somewhat limited set of topics that you can make a large, commercially successful podcast in this format, but I think you could do this format in any topic. Just a question of how big the audience would be, but I think it works for anything.

BRIAN KENNY: But I also think it’s a question of how much of a commitment the owners of the show would have. You have both poured yourselves into this thing in a way that most people wouldn’t have the, I don’t know, the desire to do.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: There wouldn’t be the incentives to do so, yeah.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Can you find somebody who cares enough about the topic to go as deep and as broad as you go on Acquired? I don’t know. I think that’s a tough one, right?

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Well, the great thing about the internet, I think people would have said the same thing about our topic and Acquired when we started. The great thing about the internet is you can aggregate audiences of niches and there’s all sorts of monetization models.

BEN GILBERT: It’s a globally addressable audience.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: So I bet if somebody poured their heart and soul into a gardening podcast, I bet they would aggregate enough audience to make a living out of it.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, it’s entirely possible. I also, I think in some ways this to me is a parallel to the long form article where we produce Harvard Business Review, but we know that not a lot of people, even though they have it on their shelf, are really spending the time to dive into those long form articles and focus on them. Whereas with the podcast, I feel like people are more… They almost feel like they’re connected to you, to the hosts, and they’re willing to spend that time and they want to hear what you have to say. So it’s a new take on that old medium.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: It’s also a very young industry, really a decade old, as it were. The first podcast maybe or two decades ago, I don’t think they called themselves podcasts at the time.

BRIAN KENNY: I don’t think the pod, the iPod was out.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: And so, it shouldn’t be surprising we’re seeing a lot of experimentation. It’s still young.

BEN GILBERT: The single biggest tailwind that podcasts have, that audiobooks also have, and the rise of audiobooks over the last 20 years has been incredible too if you look at any stats on that, it’s a passive way of absorbing information, whereas reading is active. If I want to go read Harvard Business Review, I have to take it off the shelf, open it, and really do work, pour my energy into consuming that information. And unless I hit pause, my podcast player is going to keep going with the story.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, that’s a great point. None of this happens for free, however. And so, I do want to talk a little bit about your sponsorship model. David, maybe you can tell us a little bit. The case talks about how highly selective it is and how you want to make sure that it’s integrated into the content, and you want to make sure that it’s something your listeners won’t reject. So how do you think about your relationships with partners and sponsors?

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Yeah. It has been the best unintentional business decision we ever made in that when we brought on our first sponsor, our first partner, a couple years into the show, first few years we didn’t have any ads, no partners. It was with the motivation, not of making money, but of increasing the luster of our own brand. How do we associate with a partner that would make our listeners and prospective listeners take Acquired more seriously? And at the time, Ben and I were venture capitalists and there was a no-brainer, obvious brand company partner that could do that for us. And that was Silicon Valley Bank. Rest in peace. But clearly for our industry and our corner of the world, it was the universally admired, known, accepted partner to probably 70 plus percent of the companies in our space. And so, we went to SVB and we said, “Hey, we’re doing this thing, this podcast. Would you please partner with us? We don’t care about the money. We just want-”

BRIAN KENNY: You might want to take a negotiations class here at Harvard Business School at some point.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: So famously, they did the first “season” that we did, we instituted seasons so that we would have a set unit of inventory for partners for sponsors. They paid us $5,000, right Ben? Is that right?

BEN GILBERT: Something like that. I remember sending it to Shane, so it was in the case, but it was a few thousand dollars for either 6 or 12 months of episodes.

BRIAN KENNY: Wow.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: So I could go on with the story and I’ll finish it. The net of it is we delivered many, many, many millions of ROI to SVB on that in the form of new customers. And then we realized, oh, we should probably charge more for this. But that’s always been the spirit that we’ve viewed things of like for partners that we have on the show, is our association with them in the minds of our listeners, going to increase their respect for Acquired and the partner as well. And that’s our lens. Everything we do is through that lens.

BEN GILBERT: That was probably true for seven, eight years of building Acquired’s brand that way. It has flipped the other direction now where we can raise the stature of a company by choosing them since listeners know how selective we are about the sponsors, declining 95% of inbound. There’s meaning to us deciding, “Hey, this is one of the four partners that you’re going to hear about on this season over the next six months.” One of our greatest pitches to companies is you’re at your inflection point of growth, you’re a series B or C or D company. You can arrive on the scene by being a partner.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: We think about our partners in two different categories. We have our public company partners and our private company partners, and most of our sponsors are private companies. And we love the public companies too, JPMorgan, Shopify, ServiceNow, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a slightly different calculus for them, but for the private companies, really our pitch, so to speak, is to the CEO of, “Hey, doing this will increase your enterprise value by a large amount, much more than you will invest in this sponsorship. And it’s going to increase your enterprise value through increased sales and customer relationships, revenue most obviously, but also hiring, fundraising, general awareness of your brand. A lot of our partners are preparing for IPOs that’s not far off in the future. We are a great way to raise awareness in the institutional investor community.”

BRIAN KENNY: Ben, I think the point that you made about you now being in a position to elevate and validate to some extent other brands is a really key one. I’m wondering, that probably makes you think maybe differently and harder about who you choose to move forward with in a partnership. Is that fair to say?

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Well, I will say, to jump in, when Shane emailed us asking if we would be up for doing HBS doing a case on us, that was a no-brainer. Yes.

BRIAN KENNY: I’m glad.

BEN GILBERT: Even though David went to that other business school.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: We won’t talk about that.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: But thank you guys for answering the email.

BRIAN KENNY: Yes. We’re all happy that you did.

BEN GILBERT: I mean, I think what this really comes down to, Dave and I sort of had this aha moment a few years ago that you can run a media business a different way than media businesses are currently run. Media is notorious for low margins and raising at high valuations, getting ahead of their skis and then needing to do big newsroom layoffs or low salaries for journalists or often being nonprofit organizations. And David and I looked at each other and we were like, “But other than software, media is the best business model of all time.” I mean, the operating leverage you can get in a media business is insane that takes the same amount of work for us to make an Acquired episode for 10,000 people as it does for 10 million.

So, if your inputs don’t need to scale with your outputs, why wouldn’t you make at the least amount of content possible and put all your energy behind just finding all the people in the world who would be obsessed with that content, and then your revenue can scale commensurately with that versus what most media companies do is, “Hey, we just raised some more money or we just had a good year. Let’s increase our overhead again and let’s try and start from zero in a new vertical or a new beat or something and try to build up a listener base.” I’m confident for 99% of media organizations out there, you have not saturated all of the upside and all of the audience you can find with your current content. So everyone’s marginal dollar and marginal hour would be better served doing that than launching new categories.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Yeah, I’m laughing here. Ben, I agree with everything you said through a new media startup lens. Really, it’s different in some ways, but what we do has a lot of parallels to a bygone era of media companies. In the old world, media companies were the best businesses with the highest margins and the most operating leverage. Exactly everything you’re saying, Ben. And I came from that world. My first career, my first job straight out of college were, I did media investment banking on Wall Street and then I worked at the Wall Street Journal and we share a lot in common with the ethos of the journal. Obviously, what we do is different. They’re at the newspaper, they’re publishing every day, they’re covering news, but that same dedication to we are producing the highest possible quality pieces and we are not producing the highest possible quantity of pieces and ultimately focusing on the former is going to be a much better business decision than the latter. It trickles through to us.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Scarcity and quality really do matter so you can differentiate yourself on those two things. Shane, I want to come back to you for a minute. They’re playing in a very volatile space. We’ve seen how things can shift very quickly with these platforms like Apple and Spotify and YouTube. I’m wondering, as you talk about this in class, how do you get into the economics in the context of platform dependence that they rely on?

SHANE GREENSTEIN: So one of the interesting things is that Ben and David have a direct relationship with their listener. They do it through email. They do it through their online community. They’ve earned the trust of many of their listeners over time, and listeners can directly subscribe to their feed, and that gives them a degree of independence. And they use that in certain ways that’s earned the trust again of their listeners, so their listeners return. So if you think about it, they have a lot of relationships with sources of information who they are very upfront about and transparent about that they come back to them for interviews about how analysts view companies that they’re looking at and they’ll return to some of the same analysts. And they have a relationship with their customers and they have a repeat relationship with their advertisers.

So what they’ve done is they’ve minimized use of their own time and grown an audience independent of dependence on many of the other standard platforms. And in that way, they’ve not ceded decision making to somebody else, if you will. And they’ve been able to craft an experience for the user that is actually quite different because it’s not standardized.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I’m still astounded by the fact that it’s really just the two of you and your engineer, is that right, that produced the shows?

BEN GILBERT: That’s correct.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. What happens if you add to that model? Does something break? I mean, the case talks about that.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: That’s the question of the moment.

BRIAN KENNY: Have you thought about that in the context of, do you want to scale this business in any way? Do you want offshoots from Acquired? I mean, have you looked at adjacencies and things like that?

BEN GILBERT: The short answer is we’ve looked and this appears to be the highest leverage use of our time. We could build the business bigger, 2, 3, 4X what it currently is with additional verticals, TV, books, movies, newsletters, explored all sorts of angles. The cool thing about this business is it has two shareholders. And so, the question is, what are we optimizing for? If we were a public company or if we were a private company with even one other shareholder, we would want to drive growth because we would want to drive shareholder returns and make it worth putting their marginal dollar in our business versus other things they could have put it in, but we don’t have that. And so, you end up with this blended quotient of dollars and life happiness. And the business is already a far better business than David and I ever dreamed or frankly dreamed that we would do financially in any career that we picked.

So now it’s every decision is run through this filter of will it make our life worse? And it’s a weirdly privileged thing, but we often turn down opportunities because we say, “Oh yeah, that would be a good business. That would be a good leverage of the Acquired brand, that would produce not only revenue, but meaningful profit and we’re going to say no to it because we don’t really want to do it.”

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. David, did you have something you wanted to add to that?

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Yes, everything Ben said. The only thing I’d add is part of your question was I think expanding to other things and part of your question was hiring. They’re related, but there are cases where they’re slightly different. I think we’re very open to, and candidly, one of the outcomes of doing the case with Shane was making us consider more and we asked Shane for his thoughts. Would hiring or adding some more resources to what we’re doing just let us continue to make what we’re doing better or like do Ben and I ourselves need to be doing absolutely everything except the audio engineering that our wonderful engineer, Steven does? And the answer to that is probably no, that we don’t need to be doing absolutely everything ourselves. But in terms of staffing up to go pursue other verticals, I don’t think we’re going to do that anytime soon.

BRIAN KENNY: We have a lot of cases. We’ve had a lot on Cold Call. We have a lot on the MBA curriculum that deal with this question about whether or not to scale. It seems like many of them come back to that question, Shane. And so, what I’d like to ask you is, as you think about this, as you think about Acquired, do you think of it more as like a lifestyle business or a media company or a platform from which other things can grow? And why does that matter as they think about whether or not to scale?

SHANE GREENSTEIN: Well, I actually think of them as an, if you will, an asset light, entrepreneurial online business. And we’re seeing an increasing number of these. I’m seeing an increasing number of these. Our MBAs after graduation end up being in many of these and that’s actually how I think about them. And it’s this hybrid and just as exactly as Ben and David were just saying, it requires them to face a very different set of trade-offs than you typically see in a business that has an asset, a machine, where you’ve got to utilize it as much as possible to get a return on that. That’s not the kind of decision making they’re facing. They still have to work hard, but they don’t face this tradeoff of working hard versus their personal life. I think that’s a wonderful lesson to throw in front of our students and have them see a very intelligent, really thoughtful… They’re very thoughtful about this and how they think about that.

And another aspect of what they’re doing here is they’re in a very crowded business, at least on the surface it looks very crowded, but then they’ve taken to heart the lesson we try to teach, which is differentiate from your near rivals and differentiate in a way that’s attractive to someone who wants to, in this case, someone who wants to listen and someone who’s willing to pay to show advertising to those listeners. And then lastly, they’ve been very, very thoughtful about scaling. Again, as we’ve heard from them, it’s the things we teach. They have wonderful lessons to have emerge in the classroom. Pay attention to what your listeners tell you, pay attention to what your customers tell you, have conversations with them, react to it, have the courage of your convictions to follow what you’re hearing and be very clear-eyed about the experiment you’re trying to undertake. They did that. And that makes them a wonderful example in the classroom to show, look, this is one of the things we’re starting to see today and it’s still the same frameworks we’ve always used. It manifests in a new way. That’s pretty interesting.

BEN GILBERT: It’s the old adage in order to make money, you have to be contrarian and right. Acquired’s definitely contrarian. It’s not clear when we started that the market was going to be there for this. We got lucky that a product that we wanted to make in a topic we were obsessed with happened to have a large total addressable market and we happened to become the leader in that. But the prior to all of this is you must do something that is differentiated and unique in the market.

BRIAN KENNY: I think the whole podcast space also benefited from changes in technology that allowed people to access content when they were in the car or at the gym or the expansion of-

DAVID ROSENTHAL: AirPods are the biggest wind at our backs, our collective backs.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So that’s helped all of these ships to-

DAVID ROSENTHAL: One other thing I wanted to say, Shane, it was interesting. I hadn’t heard you say before how you considered us as an asset light, internet based entrepreneurial business. When I was at that other business school on the other coast, about 10, 15 years ago, or whatever it was, the idea that this was a viable career path for ambitious people from top MBA programs to pursue, it didn’t exist. You could either go work at a prestigious company, you could start a company and have it be venture backed, have investors and obligations around that. Or you could go into a service industry like investing or consulting or like that. But the idea that you could own your own business, but also control your own destiny wasn’t something that was impressed upon us. And I’m so glad we have stumbled into this path because I’m certainly much happier on it.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: Yeah. The superficial thing you might have said is, “Oh look, these are commonly available to everybody. There’s no point at which you’re going to see differentiation.” That would have been the standard thing you would say. And experience in the market has proven that wrong. There’s actually quite a number of prominent businesses that have been able to use the internet in these clever ways. I have to admit, this is what attracted me as a case writer to what you were doing. How did they do that? And it is very, very interesting to find out how. And our students find it are also very, very curious. And again, thank you for giving us the window. Although as I’d say, I could outline as much as I like, but I don’t think I could codify it. There’s still that special sauce and magic you guys have.

BRIAN KENNY: Do you think at all about the implications of AI on the industry itself, but also on Acquired? Do you feel like there’s a disruption coming that where AI could do a lot of the legwork that you’re doing and people wouldn’t need you anymore?

BEN GILBERT: Absolutely. If you listen to Acquired purely because you wanted to come up to speed on Costco and you were searching the internet and you were trying to just find some audio based resource to tell you why Costco works. NotebookLM is a great substitute for you. Reading the text that Claude produces or deep research is a great substitute for you, but there’s something about the fact that Acquired has… There’s like a listener network effect where there’s a water cooler element to it. You want to listen to the latest Acquired episode because your friends are talking about the latest Acquired episode, or perhaps you’ve become endeared to David and I and the banter that we have and the relationship we have with each other, or there’s a particular way that we unpack things. I actually think that’s the majority of the audience. And so, counterintuitively, I think media brands may get more valuable in an era of AI producing abundant content because it is trusted, personality based, and has a water cooler effect. And we may get completely blindsided as with all new technology waves, but the more I look at some of these AI tools and the more people use AI to produce derivative work or similar work to Acquired, I look at it and go, “I think this only makes us more like the gold standard or more the reference design of, hey, I made an AI thing that’s like Acquired.” I think for a lot of people, they’re like, “Well, oh cool. I should listen to Acquired.”

SHANE GREENSTEIN: So I have not yet to listen to one of these AI tools that has an eye for the surprise that both of you have. I’ve listened to enough of your episodes, both as homework and for entertainment. And you have an eye for the, as I say, the fact that nobody knew beforehand or the origin story that where both of you go, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” And then you’re both laughing at each other and your audience is laughing too. You guys have a pretty good sense of what your audience likes. And then, you have reference points back to your other episodes and other things it relates to and no AI can do that. No, that’s part of your secret sauce. I wish I could describe more of it, but that’s a piece of it.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: It’s funny though, thus far, AI has been absolutely fantastic for Acquired on two fronts. One, all of the production around the show, Steven, our audio engineer is a, he’s a master craftsman. He crafts my hand with engineering, not with AI, but our show notes, helping us with our partner ad reads every episode.

BEN GILBERT: Real time fact checks. While we’re recording, ask a question to AI and then look at the source and figure out why. Sometimes David and I show up to a recording day with a slight discrepancy where you’ll assert something, I’ll assert type of thing and I’m like, “Wait, how can these both be true?” And then I quickly ask Claude and I’m like, “Oh, they are both true and here’s the nuance of why we found slightly different things.”

DAVID ROSENTHAL: So all that and on the production, but then also our sponsors and if you look at our sponsor set of companies, half of them are probably AI native companies now and the other half of them were started before the AI boom, but are now all they talk about is AI. So it’s been, if you were to listen to our sponsor segments three or four years ago and then listen to the sponsor segments today, it’d be like you’re living in two different universes.

BRIAN KENNY: This has been a great conversation, we’re actually close to the end of our time, which probably you guys probably thought we were just getting started, but no, actually-

DAVID ROSENTHAL: We’re just getting warmed up.

BRIAN KENNY: We’re close to the end of our time. So I’ve got one question left for each of you and I’m going to give Shane the last word because he’s the faculty member. So he’s the ranking person on the call, like it or not. Ben, let me start with you. We haven’t talked at all about the live events. And live events are becoming more and more common in the podcast space. Cold Call has done a number of them. They’re fun to do, I think, but maybe not everybody agrees. But I’m wondering how the live events have worked out for you and how you’ve described them in the case as a flywheel for a lot of the other things that you’re doing. Maybe you can break that down a little bit.

BEN GILBERT: So we have not run the events as a profit center. A lot of media companies do. We work with a partner and we say, “You own the P&L. We don’t want to sign the venue contracts.” We don’t have the ability to deal with all of the overhead, but what we do want, our main goal, is to create spectacle. We learned this from the NFL with the Super Bowl. Can you create something that just for a few hours lets someone really live inside the Acquired cinematic universe and experience what Acquired could be in its full glory, whether it’s at Radio City Music Hall or at Chase Center, both of which we did with JPMorgan. And for us, the amount, even though there’s only 6,000 people in the venue relative to the 1.2 million that’ll listen to an episode, if you just look at that number, you say, “Oh, you shouldn’t do it. It’s not worth your time. It’s not worth the distraction.” Sometimes we have to not make episodes for a month or two in order to plan that big Super Bowl-like event for the year, but the amount of brand love for that 6,000 people in the room, the amount of like compressed heat and light and energy that explodes out of that building that night not only deepens the relationships for those 6,000 people, by the way, many of which are past and future guests, sponsors, people who are close to the show, but then the amount of sharing that happens on social media that I went to this, it was a spectacle, here’s some spectacular visuals, I can’t believe this surprise. There’s almost like a, you get to be a main character on the corner of the internet for a day, which is a rare spot to be able to earn in this crowded, noisy landscape.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: To me, success looks like Ben and I are still finding topics and making episodes that, to quote where our end of the year special, our 10-year anniversary special with that we have Michael Lewis-

BEN GILBERT: I know where you’re going with this.

DAVID ROSENTHAL: Yeah, make our socks go up and down is the analogy, the metaphor he used. If we can still find the spark of magic and excitement when, from topics we cover, that’s success. I don’t really care about anything else. That’s just the greatest thing in the world. When Ben and I are just in the studio, eight hours in and we’re recording, I say to Ben all the time, I’m like, “This is so fun. I can’t believe we get to do this.” We’ve been standing for eight hours straight and we’re like, “We’re out of oxygen in the studio.” But we just fall in love with these topics.

BRIAN KENNY: Shane, I’ll give you the last word here. First of all, the case was super fun and I think our listeners probably really liked getting a glimpse into Acquired, but if you can step back and tell us a little bit about what the Acquired story tells us about maybe the limits of scale in the creative industries as they grapple with whether or not they should scale and how, but also what you’re hoping people will take away from the case.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: Well, first, you’ve heard them. Their priority is on producing and protecting that magic. That’s a pretty big lesson here and actually one of the things I take away. Another thing I hope students take away is aligning their business and operating model so that they use their resources effectively. They’re very good about being able to step away from their own day-to-day and think analytically about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. You can hear it. We’ve heard it from them just now. And that’s another big thing I’d like students to take away. And maybe a third thing, it’s maybe a little less on the surface, but we’re seeing it today. David and Ben were nice enough to give Susan Pinckney and Kerry Herman and me insight into their business. They’re giving something back.

BRIAN KENNY: That’s your case writing team?

SHANE GREENSTEIN: Yeah. Giving us something back to the world and they were very thoughtful and willing to give back to the world and share that with us. And not every business is willing to do that. And I really appreciated that. And our students really appreciated that. And that tells you something about who they are as people too. They’re really, what you see is what you get there.

BRIAN KENNY: What you hear is what you get.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: What you hear.

BRIAN KENNY: That’s great. Shane, David, Ben, thank you so much for joining me on Cold Call.

SHANE GREENSTEIN: Thank you for having us. It was a joy.

BEN GILBERT: Thank you, Brian. Really appreciate it.

BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts: Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Think Big, Buy Small. Find them wherever you get your podcasts.

If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.