ACQ2 by Acquired – Details, episodes & analysis

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 firm’s 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 Treasury’s Transfer conference in May 2024.

Acquired’s arena show at Chase Center in San Francisco is just a few weeks away! We hope you can join us. acquired.fm/sf

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

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 we’ve ever had on the show. If you’re a business strategy nerd, it’s 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.

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

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 — founded 18 years ago in Australia, they’ve compounded a single, private pool of capital at 26% per annum over nearly two decades. That’s Warren & Charlie territory!

TDM recently published a memo comparing the current “post ZIRP bubble” market with what happened in the years following both the dot-com crash and the GFC in 2008. As always, past performance isn’t 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:

• TDM’s 2023 Market Memo
• The current BVP Cloud Index
• Follow TDM on Twitter or LinkedIn

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Ben and David are back for episode #2, diving into the most elusive early-stage investing and company-building topics: product-market fit. 

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Kicking off ACQ2 (formerly known as the LP Show) and diving into some jargon-y VC vocab. 

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

How do you build defensible business value in an era when, as AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli said on our last ACQ2 episode, the “cost of intelligence is going to zero”? 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 you’re building or investing in existing businesses from the “pre-AI” era or brand new startups that are native to GPT, this episode has plenty of takeaways you should consider. Tune in!

Links:

• Jake’s recent blog post on Generative AI and B2B
• Follow Jake on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

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 David’s 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!

Links:

• Visit AngelList to get started
• Follow Avlok on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

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 — almost uniquely for this era — 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!

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Links:

• 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.

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Links:

* 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

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!

Sponsors:

• Plaid: https://plaid.com

Links:

• Kamakshi on Twitter
• Samooha
•  Samooha Product Demo Video