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Past daily clips from Acquired

Every ExpertsFM daily clip so far, newest first.

34 clips · 1 hr 18 min · from Acquired
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Past daily clips from Acquired
34 clips · 1 hr 18 min — plays in order
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Tap play — the clips run in order and advance on their own.
  1. 1
    Amazon poached Walmart's logistics brain, then outgrew Walmart's model
    Acquired — Amazon.com @ 2:02:21 · 3 min
    How a dozen Walmart defectors, a lawsuit, and the shift from distribution centers to fulfillment centers built the moat that beat eBay and Walmart.
  2. 2
    Why Trader Joe's founder chose not to go national
    Acquired — Trader Joe’s @ 2:04:19 · 2 min
    Joe Coulombe invented Trader Joe's but wanted every store within a day's drive of home, a vivid counterpoint to empire-builder founders.
  3. 3
    How Starbucks built a national brand without marketing spend
    Acquired — Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) @ 1:08:04 · 2 min
    Hear how Costco, United Airlines and grocery shelves became Starbucks' free billboards, letting it build a national brand without spending on marketing.
  4. 4
    How a $100 price cap gave the NES a proto-GPU
    Acquired — Nintendo's Origins @ 1:54:45 · 3 min
    Hear how Yamauchi's strict price limit pushed Nintendo to split out graphics processing, years before NVIDIA, and birthed its 'withered technology' philosophy.
  5. 5
    Hershey kept its bar at a nickel for seventy years
    Acquired — Mars Inc. (the chocolate story) @ 2:37:56 · 3 min
    Hear how a sacred nickel price led Hershey to halve its bar, then botch the fix in 1969.
  6. 6
    How Riot bought its first players by buying DotA fan sites
    Acquired — Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming @ 1:01:48 · 2 min
    Mitch Lasky explains why he backed Riot: they bought DotA fan websites and redirected a frustrated audience to League of Legends.
  7. 7
    The junior engineer who wrote Microsoft's internet playbook
    Acquired — Microsoft Volume II @ 13:25 · 2 min
    How a young Microsoft engineer's 1994 memo coined 'embrace and extend' and mapped the browser-war strategy before Netscape even existed.
  8. 8
    How PlayStation quietly killed Sega's arcade empire
    Acquired — Short: The Death of Sega @ 38:25 · 2 min
    A fresh read on Sega's collapse: owning a console locked it out of Sony's platform while PlayStation gutted its $7 billion arcade market.
  9. 9
    Why Uber's scale edge disappears when riders open two apps
    Acquired — Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi) @ 20:58 · 2 min
    Chenyi Shi explains how multi-homing erases a platform's scale advantage, and Ben reveals that Uber killed his ride-sharing metasearch startup over exactly this.
  10. 10
    Steve Ballmer counts how many real tricks a company has
    Acquired — The Steve Ballmer Interview @ 1:28:16 · 2 min
    Ballmer's framework for judging companies by independent revenue engines, applied live to Google, TSMC, Nvidia, IBM, and Microsoft itself.
  11. 11
    Why nobody can copy the full Hermès bundle
    Acquired — Hermès @ 3:40:32 · 3 min
    A sharp breakdown of why Louis Vuitton, Supreme, and Paris artisans each offer only part of what Hermès sells, and why that matters.
  12. 12
    Ferrari casts its own engines while rivals share platforms
    Acquired — Ferrari @ 2:06:34 · 2 min
    Hear how Ferrari pours raw aluminum into its own Maranello foundry while a Lamborghini Urus is essentially a Volkswagen Touareg underneath.
  13. 13
    Why Ben Thompson thinks micropayments for articles are terrible
    Acquired — Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) @ 9:06 · 2 min
    Ben Thompson explains the timing mismatch that breaks per-article pricing, and why subscriptions let the money fund the work instead.
  14. 14
    Why Converse couldn't copy Nike's Jordan royalty deal
    Acquired — Nike @ 2:14:03 · 2 min
    Hear how Nike turned being small and cash-strapped into a deal structure that Converse, with its many stars, couldn't match.
  15. 15
    Bernie Ecclestone gives away F1 TV rights to own them
    Acquired — Formula 1 @ 52:37 · 2 min
    How Bernie sold F1 rights to 92 European broadcasters for almost nothing, required every race on air, then took over the feed himself.
  16. 16
    Why Renaissance runs one model while rivals run silos
    Acquired — Renaissance Technologies @ 1:22:27 · 3 min
    Learn how Renaissance's single shared model turned every researcher's work into a firm-wide asset, unlike Citadel's competing pods.
  17. 17
    Why Google's $50M Android buy came just in time
    Acquired — Google Part II: Alphabet @ 2:34:06 · 2 min
    How 350 versions of mobile Google Maps signaled the threat, and why skipping Android would have handed smartphones to Microsoft, not Apple.
  18. 18
    Jamie Dimon says JPMorgan is really a giant community bank
    Acquired — The Jamie Dimon Interview @ 54:53 · 2 min
    Dimon explains how JPMorgan works like a small-town bank at global scale, and why he cut the businesses that made Citi a sprawl.
  19. 19
    Why Uber Eats is secretly a driver recruiting machine
    Acquired — Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi @ 21:32 · 1 min
    Dara explains how food delivery's lighter onboarding gets new earners working faster, which feeds Uber's ride supply and marketplace liquidity.
  20. 20
    Coke's brand power shows up in volume, not price
    Acquired — Coca-Cola @ 3:41:10 · 3 min
    Why Coke never charges a premium, how every can doubles as a billboard, and the one experiment that proved its brand's strength.
  21. 21
    How being first nearly killed Nvidia
    Acquired — Nvidia Part I: The GPU Company (1993-2006) @ 36:04 · 4 min
    Hear how Microsoft's DirectX triangle standard, Sega's exit and falling memory prices left early Nvidia building for a world that vanished.
  22. 22
    Why aggregating creators isn't the margin dream it looks like
    Acquired — Spotify CEO Daniel Ek @ 19:03 · 2 min
    Daniel Ek explains why open creator platforms hide costs, like moderation, that keep growing at scale and undercut the high-margin story.
  23. 23
    Jensen's one non-negotiable rule behind CUDA's moat
    Acquired — NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang @ 52:54 · 1 min
    Jensen explains why every NVIDIA chip in 30 years, about 300 million GPUs, stays architecturally compatible, and calls it the company's only non-negotiable rule.
  24. 24
    Why CAA almost never lost a client in 25 years
    Acquired — CAA (with Michael Ovitz) @ 1:02:59 · 2 min
    Michael Ovitz explains how team coverage, literary agents on actors, and firm-wide pay made CAA nearly impossible to leave.
  25. 25
    How IKEA designs a ten dollar table backwards from price
    Acquired — IKEA @ 1:10:16 · 2 min
    Hear how IKEA's breathtaking-price rule, with no loss leaders allowed, forced it to rebuild manufacturing around scrap wood and sell 20 million LACK tables yearly.
  26. 26
    Is Rolex really luxury, or just brilliant industrial engineering
    Acquired — Rolex @ 3:24:40 · 2 min
    Ben and David spar over whether a million-watch-a-year maker counts as luxury, landing on a sharper definition: managing the market rather than participating in it.
  27. 27
    How New Jersey law let Standard Oil dodge Ohio
    Acquired — Standard Oil Part II @ 8:54 · 2 min
    Hear how a quirk in New Jersey corporate law let Rockefeller restructure Standard Oil on paper while running everything exactly as before.
  28. 28
    Why Peloton raised its bike price by a thousand dollars
    Acquired — Peloton @ 43:28 · 3 min
    Hear how charging more made Peloton's bike seem better and quietly picked customers who churn about 9% a year, against roughly 50% for typical consumer businesses.
  29. 29
    How Costco gets suppliers to fund its inventory
    Acquired — Costco @ 56:57 · 3 min
    Costco sells inventory before paying for it, and a deliberately tiny SKU count is the hidden lever that makes this possible.
  30. 30
    Why Google could outspend every rival for search distribution
    Acquired — Google Part I: Origins of Search @ 2:33:13 · 3 min
    How Google's ad auction earned more per search as it grew, letting it pay partners up to 100% revenue share.
  31. 31
    Why the IPL auction beats a salary cap
    Acquired — Indian Premier League Cricket @ 2:06:27 · 3 min
    A clever mechanism-design lesson: NFL quarterbacks game the cap with side deals, while the IPL auction makes collusion pointless.
  32. 32
    Spotify found audiobooks hiding in Germany's music charts
    Acquired — Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) @ 37:18 · 1 min
    Daniel Ek explains how audiobooks topping German music charts, despite a terrible experience, revealed Spotify's next big product before anyone planned it.
  33. 33
    How a bug report helped Altimeter win Snowflake
    Acquired — Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner) @ 1:00:44 · 3 min
    Brad Gerstner explains how Altimeter won a contested Snowflake round at $175 million by testing the product and sending founders a bug report.
  34. 34
    Lion King on Broadway out-grossed every movie ever made
    Acquired — Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire @ 45:06 · 3 min
    A dismissed brand extension turns out to be an $11 billion asset, worth an extra hit movie every year for thirty years.
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