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Shows worth your time, picked up where you left off.

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Technology

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them.

217 episodes

The Home Depot 14 Sept 2026 · 3 hr 35 min The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After being uncere…

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire 10 Aug 2026 · 4 hr 33 min In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corpo…

The Walt Disney Company 22 Jun 2026 · 4 hr 31 min The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it’s the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual proper…

Vanguard 18 May 2026 · 3 hr 48 min Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporati…

Ferrari 13 Apr 2026 · 3 hr 59 min Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermès s…

Rolex 5 Mar 2026 · 4 hr 51 min Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger…

Costco 4 Mar 2026 · 2 hr 53 min Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics ca…

Formula 1 2 Mar 2026 · 4 hr 19 min Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions d…

The NFL 27 Jan 2026 · 4 hr 8 min The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and s…

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) 15 Dec 2025 · 2 hr 38 min Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or…

Coca-Cola 24 Nov 2025 · 3 hr 54 min Coca-Cola is… sugar water. And somehow it’s also America, Christmas, summertime, friendship and happiness. Today we tell the story of how The Coca-Cola Company amazingly transmogr…

Trader Joe’s 27 Oct 2025 · 3 hr 18 min Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000…

Google Part III: The AI Company 6 Oct 2025 · 3 hr 56 min Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and,…

Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan) 1 Oct 2025 · 1 min It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film” — the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew Ross Sor…

Google Part II: Alphabet 26 Aug 2025 · 4 hr 2 min In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its next six…

The Jamie Dimon Interview 16 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 0 min We sit down with Jamie Dimon for a live conversation at Radio City Music Hall, covering the incredible journey from his 1998 firing at Citgroup (where he was widely expected to be…

Google Part I: Origins of Search 30 Jun 2025 · 3 hr 29 min We tell the story of the single greatest business ever created: Google search. From its origins as a Stanford research project called BackRub, Google became the front door to the…

The Steve Ballmer Interview 2 Jun 2025 · 2 hr 49 min We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listened to our…

Epic Systems (MyChart) 21 Apr 2025 · 3 hr 47 min What if we told you that the most important company in US healthcare was run from a farm in rural Wisconsin? And that farm contained the world’s largest subterranean auditorium, a…

Indian Premier League Cricket 24 Mar 2025 · 4 hr 18 min When you saw this episode pop up in your feed, you either jumped for joy and hit play immediately (in which case you’re not reading this), or you said “Huh. That’s a surprising ep…

TSMC Founder Morris Chang 27 Jan 2025 · 2 hr 48 min We flew to Taiwan to interview TSMC Founder Morris Chang in a rare English interview. In fact, the last long-form video interview we could find was 17 years ago at the Computer Hi…

Mars Inc. (the chocolate story) 16 Dec 2024 · 3 hr 44 min M&M’s, Snickers, Milky Way, Double Mint, Ben’s Rice, Pedigree, Whiskas, VCA, Banfield… all the brands you know, owned by the company you know nothing about: Mars, Incorporated. An…

IKEA 18 Nov 2024 · 3 hr 13 min IKEA may be the most singular company we’ve ever studied on Acquired. They’re a globally scaled, $50B annual revenue company with no direct competitors — yet have only ~5% market…

Meta 28 Oct 2024 · 6 hr 11 min Meta is a company everyone knows (literally, everyone). But, somehow, it’s also a company that few people feel they actually understand. Their products are used by more humans tha…

Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) 30 Sept 2024 · 2 hr 17 min Here it is: the complete video of the most unbelievable night of Acquired’s nine-year life… our sold out live show at the Chase Center in San Francisco. We joked during the months…

The Mark Zuckerberg Interview 18 Sept 2024 · 1 hr 21 min Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time. At Chase Center on September 10, 2024, he did an unprecedented thing: a live conversation in front of 6,000 people on Meta’s company st…

Chase Center + Summer Update 8 Aug 2024 · 22 min Summer greetings from Acquired! Two items for this “mini-episode”: Tickets are now available for our live show at Chase Center in San Francisco, with special guests including Mark…

Microsoft Volume II 22 Jul 2024 · 4 hr 42 min In 1999, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world. And in 2019, Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world, again. But… what happened in the twenty yea…

Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) 4 Jun 2024 · 3 hr 7 min Starbucks. You’d be hard pressed to name any brand that’s more ubiquitous in the world today. With nearly half a billion global customer purchases per week across its stores and 3…

Microsoft Volume I 22 Apr 2024 · 4 hr 16 min Microsoft. After nearly a decade of Acquired episodes, we are finally ready to tackle the most valuable company ever created. The company that put a computer on every desk and in…