How Ben and David bootstrapped the Acquired podcast

This podcast is hosted by transistor dot f m. This past year, Acquired, the business podcast, had a breakout season. Everybody was talking about them. The hosts, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, were profiled in Fast Company magazine, where they described the podcast as the number one tech podcast sensation. Their clips started showing up everywhere on my social media feed. They had chart topping episodes on Nintendo, Nike, and Costco. They interviewed the CEOs of Nvidia, Uber, and Charlie Munger, and this was the year that Ben and David both went full time on the podcast. This is now their full time job. This past year is also the year that they switched their podcast hosting to Transistor, and I thought it'd be interesting here at the end of the season to sit down with David Rosenthal, one of the hosts, and just talk about their entire story. How they got started, how they built momentum over time, how they were able to double their audience every single year since 2015 when they started the show, and how that momentum ended up attracting an incredibly valuable audience that they've now monetized through advertising. David also had a unique countercultural perspective on podcast advertising that I think you're gonna find fascinating. There is so much in this interview that podcasters, creators, and indie entrepreneurs are going to find super helpful and inspirational. I'm excited to share it with you. Here is my conversation with David Rosenthal of The Acquired Podcast. So David, to get started, maybe just describe in your own words, what is the acquired podcast about. Oh, boy. Well, we actually just changed our tagline by unanimous vote of the board of directors, which is just Ben and me. Yeah. Live on our holiday special episode, We used to be the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. Yeah. And now we are the podcast about just great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. And this is actually the interesting part of your story. So you and your cohost, Ben, you do the acquired podcast together. How did the podcast get started? Like, bring me back to that point. Yeah. What year what was going on in your lives? Like, how what was the beginning of all that? Everything was totally different. And, to say that we didn't imagine where it would go is, like, the understatement of this century. So Ben and I were venture capitalists. We I guess you could say we sort of still are, although acquired is our full time thing now. Yeah. We were junior VCs at a firm in Seattle called Madrona. Madrona is the biggest venture firm in Seattle. They were the first investors in Amazon, big investors in Snowflake, many other great companies. Great great firm. Very, you know, top top firm. And, we were we were kids there. Like, you know, there's probably, I don't know, twenty, thirty people, you know, at …