YouSaid · the spoken record

David Perell

lines on the record: 311
first: 2023-03-29
most recent: 2023-03-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I just thought it was funny. I was like, you also have to think independently. If they're nine years old, they don't want to sit through. I don't even want to sit through a PowerPoint. Nobody wants to sit”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was like Bizarro David going after you. It'd be interesting what you would, yeah, but then again, I was living in Florida and the law there is not a lot like you'd have to move to like DC like the law there is like”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so I'll tell you the funny thing. So then 28 minutes, and then they're telling me about books they love. They're like, oh, I like Harry Potter and I like this and I like travel. And we had like the greatest time, right? So I come back, I see there's like nine in the morning. I leave. And my daughter gets out later on in the day. And she goes, Daddy, thank you very much. My friends thought your talk was the best. I was like, oh, that's like interesting. I'm glad they liked it. I go, well, let me ask you a question. Who came after me? And they're like, oh, was it, you know, John's mom or something? I was like, oh, what does John's mom do? She's like, I go, well, first I just should do a PowerPoint. She goes, yes, everybody did a PowerPoint. And I go, what does John's mom do? She goes, oh, she's a corporate attorney. I'm like, so you like, they're nine years old. And also, that's like”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't listen to your parents. Don't listen to your teachers. I go, follow whatever you're intensely. I just gave Charlie Munger advice. I go, what are you interested in? Keep following that even if it doesn't, there's not an obvious career path. And I use the word, I go, it's highly likely that the job that you're going to have has not yet been invented. I was like, there was no such thing as a podcaster. Like, I couldn't go to school. Yeah, they're all going to be prompt engineers. Or whatever. So that was like the two-minute summary. And I said a little bit more on that. I go, okay. Now what questions do you have for me? And so I spent the next 28 minutes. I told him the importance of reading. I was like, listen, your friends are all going to be these stupid apps. I was like, you're going to have no attention span. Learn how to read and read whatever you're interested in.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I go, no, but I go, they're nine. Why would I make a part of our presentation? And so I go there and I was like, listen, I'm fine. Like, I got this. Like, they're like, you're going to wing it. They didn't use the word wing it, but I forgot what it was. So you're like,”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea from venture capitalists and podcasters, right? I went and my daughter asked me to go speak at Career Day. Oh, hell yeah. And this is last year, so she would have been the greatest thing. She would have been in fourth grade, right? I can't wait. And so she's like, well, daddy, like you have a weird job. Yeah, she's like, will you come in and like give a talk? And so you mentioned earlier, like entrepreneurs are like odd ducks and like crazy people. They see rules. It's like, oh, that's just words written down on paper. I'll just do my own thing. So I show up. I was like, yeah, I'll do anything for you. Like whatever you want. And so I show up and there's two each class at the school she has two teachers, right? And so they're like, oh, we didn't hi Mr. Senner. We didn't get your email. Did you get like, did you bring like a thumb drive? I'm like, what was I supposed to email? Why would I have a thumb drive? And then like, you're a PowerPoint presentation.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do what chillos. That is the world of chill. Oh my god. And then, oh man, afterwards, talking about missed opportunities. He's older than me, but he's not that much older. So he's only been out for a couple years. Class ends and he was like. Hey guys, anybody want to hang out? I'm gonna go hang a terrace if you want to come to Princeton has eating clubs instead of they do a fraternities, but one of them is terrace. And Jenny was actually in terrace. Basically, I'm going to go hang out and have a good time with anybody who wants to come along. And I was like, nah. Now I'll see you on the podcast circuit later.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He totally hustled this. He like traded on that name for years before he made it as Tim Ferris. Because he just went in for one class. It was one class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was one day of one course, and that was like this case study class. And I think he had taken the class when he was at Princeton. And Ed, the professor, like, liked him and kind of took a shine to him. So you and I then are guest lecturers at Columbia. Oh, yeah, totally. Yay, oh, yeah. We're guest lectures everywhere. So he came in, and so he was working on the book, but it was done but was about to get published. And so he came in and the whole class was basically telling his story and then showing the book. I remember in my notes for the class I titled them, I have them still somewhere on an old computer. The title was Supplement Guy.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's funny, it's more thematic than an actual impact, but I can remember if I've talked about this before. Princeton had then just one entrepreneurship class. It was like one class in the Department of Electrical Engineering. I was not an electrical engineer, but people knew about this because I was like, oh, this is cool. And so senior year, I had already, the recruiting happened in the fall, so I was already had my job, investment banking job that I was going to go do. A whole other can of worms. But I was like, oh, you know, I'll take this class. It's supposed to be good. I'm going to go work on Wall Street. I should learn about high-tech entrepreneurship was the name of the class. And it was all, you know, guest lecture. It was case method and Ed Chao, the professor, would have guests come in.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Tale of Charlie Munger, though, Charlie was talking about this, where he's just like, I learned about business at the Buffet grocery store, right? From the cash register. I think the quote in the book is like, money's the lifeblood of all businesses, and that's where the money was at this point. And it's like you just learn. And he says, like, you learn the importance of showing up on time. How to work with people you don't like, like how to service, like take care of your customers. Like these are things that are all universally applicable that it's another form of education. Like, that's the biggest, the key of experience and why it's so important. It's the most valuable form of education, because it's education of life.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think listening to the audiobook before reading the book is very helpful. It gives you a basic overview. It's almost like reading a Wikipedia page before you read the biography. It's not enough detail, but like you have, okay, you have watching a movie for the second or third time, you know how it ends and you pick up on things you miss the first time.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all the time. I actually hate that they sink and they because my common workflow in doing acquired research is I listen to the book. And then I'll take some notes and Apple notes of half quotes where I'm like, oh, I got to look this up later.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They weren't useful to me then, but I went and took a Coursera class last year, two years ago, on accounting because I was just like, okay, like, I want to actually understand accounting in part because we talk about it on Acquired all the time. And David understands the stuff more than I do and I hate it. But like.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relationships are everything. But the relationship that's what, and it's not the stuff you're learning is actually super important, but you don't have the context for why yet. It's like you're working on a DCF model and you're like, This is useless to me. Or you're like learning about depreciation and amortization. You're like, This is awful because I have nothing. Whereas my face classes were awesome, there's labs. I can touch and feel the things and understand mechanical advantage and how the free body diagram works. But in these business concepts, they're like super abstract.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I like when in thinking, like, I want to have some kind of like, I want to do business and tech, but I didn't know what that meant. And so I found my way to a club called the Business Builders Club, and they were like, oh, there's like a real, like an actual miner that you can take. And so sort of like through student organizations, found my way to actually doing something in the College of Business, which like. I go back and forth on whether undergraduate business stuff is useful, because on the one hand,”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, from Ohio State. Similarly, only ever went to public school. I was a little different. I was really into computers when I was 10, my dad and I found a PC on the side of the road, and he was like, do you want to install Linux? And I was like, what's Linux? And like, Tommy used a terminal. Like, I was really lucky if a dad is an engineer. And so I went to college for computer science. But wait, wait, wait.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we would know how many car owners there were in this specific radius. And we'd have to hit like, let's say we need 40,000 car owners in a three-mile radius. Are there any other stores? Put a store right there. And they did that over and over and over and over again.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he's like, this guy made a ton of money in a really hard business, which is like tires and like oil changes and stuff like that. And so the guy was coming into the class. He was going to donate like three or five million dollars to have a building name after him. And he had one prerequisite. He goes, I want to talk to your entrepreneurship students before I give you this money. And I learned more in one hour from that dude than I did in two years in entrepreneurship because he would talk for like 20 minutes and then he's like, open up your questions. And I lit him up with question after question after question. And I remember to this day just like the simple way, this is like, you know.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but there's all these other classes, but entrepreneurship 101 is run the teacher, right? What is her credentials? Her dad started an AC company in Florida. You're going to make a lot of money. And he... Died on the job because he got electrocuted to death. And she inherited the company, and then she ran it. And so she's the teacher. And so the curriculum was terrible. It was terrible. The best thing, and this relates to what all we do for a living now. Which I could have never predicted is there was a guy that, this is kind of like Charlie Munger says you should read if you want to learn about incentives in a really difficult business, read Les Schwab's autobiography, which I did because Charlie told me to. I did it like episode a long time ago.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so essentially, they never went to college, so I just kept this routine. I was like, people are like, oh, like, what do you want to do for a living? And I remember watching TV when I was younger. I was like, well, I want to be rich. And you think when you're younger, you don't know anything. Like, who's rich on TV? I liked fresh fruits of Bel Air. I was like, you could judge or a doctor. And I was like, oh, I can't see blood. Like that freaks me out. So I could be an attorney. So I went to school and I worked full-time and I was trying to do hustle anything I could do. And so the idea was like, okay, I'm just going to go undergrad for business because I'm interested in business anyways, but I'm only doing that till I get till I go to law school, right? And this point of the story was not to go on this deviation, but I was in the entrepreneurship program, the pilot one, right? Because I was already interested in trying to make money in any way possible. And this is how bad the entrepreneurship was. And this is why I'm kind of jealous of these young kids where now you actually have an entrepreneurship industry.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why it's also driven too, but she, because you have to understand being smart in this family is not like being like the bar is low in the sense that they're both coming from multiple generations of people that did not prioritize education or self-improvement. So that's why I'm so ferocious in this, because I didn't see that, you know. And so this demonstrated when my mom was dying of cancer. So like, you know, HIPAA has this thing where they're not going to share paperwork or information unless it gets permission from the person. And like my mom could choose whoever she wanted to. She could have chose her husband, right? They had a bad relationship. They should have got, they got divorced and then remarried. They should have stayed divorced, but whatever. And you see that with actions. We said actions express priority. She's like, we're in there. And she's like, who do you want the paperwork? Who do you want us to communicate? She's like, David, not her other kids, not her husband, not her sister. And she trusted me implicitly.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“20 bucks. I do it at his house. I make $150. And so I've always just had that, and again, there was just not like, this is the story you guys read in the books and the stories. It's like, there's no master plan here. It's like, hey, I need to make money. All of my other friends were working at McDonald's Chick-fil-A, where you just said something like they cap. I never had a capped upside. And then, so I did all these other businesses. I started in college because I thought I was going to be a lawyer. And this is so silly because all my friends are lawyers hate it. I dodged a bullet there.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My house, or would you do it on my boat that you don't do, or like whatever? And so my first business was just detailing cars and boats and taking all this other stuff where it's like, okay, I spent an hour waxing this guy's car. I might make.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make enough money where I could like buy, I bought like a new car with my own money, like all that other stuff. And so then I realized like, oh, like, I think I was making like $400 or $500 a week in high school, which is freaking really good. This is like late 90s, early 2000s. And then I got promoted to being a detailer. And that's like you have client list. And then you start developing relationships. And it's like every other business. And they're like, hey, I love what you do. Would you do this at”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like mini mesters. So I always, even when I was in college, I did this, I would go to school year round, right? And so in high school, I went to school so much that by the time I got to my last two years of high school, I was in this program called OJT, which is on the job training. So instead of having six periods, you would leave after the fourth period and you would have to have a job and you would get your other credits to your employer. So your employer would have to like fill out paperwork. Is David, you know, cleaning cars and like, oh, there's a baby that came in and threw up. He did a good job with that. It was disgusting. But the benefit of that was being able to work full time.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I made $40,000 a month, and I'm making so much money. My parents let me drop out of high school so I can do this business. I'm like, I worked at a car wash, dude. I made $4.65 an hour. You know. So, anyways, long story short, I would go to school year round, right? Because I had figured this out where it's like, oh, most people went to summer school, they were forced to, I went to public school my whole life, right? And so people would go to public school, they would be forced to because you failed something else. But if you elected to do that, in six weeks, you get a full semester's credit. And there's two six week.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I worked at, back then, this is something that Paul Graham made the point of, right? He's like, dude, when I was a kid, the only jobs available were like, you know, scoop ice cream or something. And like, you've probably met them. I met some 17-year-old founders and a bunch of founders. You talked to them, they're second company. I'm like, what? They're like, oh yeah, when I was like ninth grade, I did this Gmail plugin or like I made $4,000.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For uneducated, they don't have the internet. It's an unbelievable. And so in his case, I know they had ORs. I think they had a sale. They get close enough to the Bahamas. They haven't drink water for like three or four days or something. A pigeon lands on the oar. They wind up killing the pigeon, opening it apart drinking the blood. That's the only thing that saved. And so now he gets to America. Eventually, go from the Bahamas to America. Now his son is like, you know, makes millions and millions of dollars as a professional fighter and a celebrity and all this other stuff. So anyways, long story short, the one thing my dad's still alive. I told you my mom passed away. But I really think my dad were just like he did not baby me at all. He's just like, you got to figure out how to get a job.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have like some have ores and some have see that blanket over there? Like you try to make a... A sale out of like a blanket or you know there are some of these are unbelievably in like the level of ingenuity is like”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they estimate that like half, at least I think something like half a million people perished never got there. There's a conversation with this UFC fighter named Jorge Mazvidal, who lives in Miami. He's Cuban guy. And his dad was one of the ones that escaped. He went on, their raff was made out of a truck tire, like, you know, like think of like a size of like a bulldozer tire, right? It's his uncle and two 14 year old boys. They get off path, right? They run out of, their water wind up being like contaminated. So you can't drink.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“90 miles right. I'm going to go over to the study of the University of Miami just to do on this. 90 miles, you're You're a parent. Hopefully you might be a parent one day. Like you love your kids way more than you love yourself. There's people that came hundreds of thousands of people went to the edge of the island and put their kids on a raft just in hopes that they get to America. And so the problem is, it's like, you don't make the announcement to everybody, it's like, hey, tomorrow we're leaving on a raft. Could you get caught? Right, right, right. Imprisoned or killed or whatever the case is. And so the University of Miami did this study. It was like, well, how many... People did this. We know hundreds of thousands survived.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, in that book, Sam's dad's always telling him, You don't understand how lucky you are to be born here. And I was like, I understand that mentality because I grew up. Meeting. Cubans have this thing called Notroena, which is they don't celebrate my wife's Colombian, so I married into a Colombian family that is too. They don't celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day. They do it the night before. It's a Christmas Eve. And so I grew up Know for as long as I can remember, I was like eight, seven, ten, 10 years old, meeting people that came over on rafts. And you would see these things. I've seen these in person. It's just like Think about how bad it has to be.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“18 members of his family, his dad went around to saying we got to get out of here. This is not good. They're like, no, we're going to stay. They're all dead. Sam's dad and his mom have a daughter. They get to America. His mom's pregnant. Sam is born in America.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he goes to a country, picks up, loses everything. Not that you had a lot, anyways, goes to country, knows nobody, doesn't speak the language. When I sat down, the first thing me and Sam Zell talked about and I think helped bond us to the point where at the end he said he liked my energy and everything. But so hopefully he liked me. I don't know. In his story, I was like, because I had obviously read his autobiography. And one of the first things me and Sam talked about was, Sam, I understand and empathize with your story because Sam's story is his dad being Jewish, getting the last train out of Poland before the Nazis bombed. Literally the last train out.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he's like, what's the nicest thing ever did to you? Or for you, did to you. And I was like, man, something that it was a decision that happened way before I was born. And like my grandfather is in Q. 1958. And again, not an educated man. He worked as a butcher and worked in a factory that made shoes. He's married and he's got a baby. That baby is my dad. And Castro comes to power. And he doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't speak English. And yet he had some kind of insight that I need to get out of here.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a long story here would take me like 30 minutes, but my dad sat me down when I was like 15. He's like, listen, you don't have to pay rent, but like, I don't have any money for you. So if you want something, you got to go get it, right? And the good thing about my dad, he's a Cuban immigrant, not educated, but the best piece of advice that he ever gave me and my brother was a maxim. He's like, don't half ass things, right? So he does it in like a blue collar. He's a truck driver, like, you know, that kind of thing where he's like, he prides himself on the fact that he'll work 72 hours straight, right? But he never made a lot of money and never had an education. Like his mom wasn't good and whatever. And they had escaped castro's cube. But my dad was born in Cuba. Wow. So it's like, imagine, like, I talked about this on, because, you know, Patrick's at the end of the best episode, he says,”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like, I have never been on a job review. I've only had two jobs in my life. Like, I was, but I was like, there was no entrepreneurship. There was no entrepreneurship, like community. There was no entrepreneurship industry, right? So like my first business was, this is a long story, but like, um, I had been accustomed, I was talking about this yesterday, by the time I was 17, I had been accustomed to working full-time and going to school, right? So people were like, oh, you work a lot on founders. It's like, I don't have to go to school and do this all the time. You have to have to have.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steve Wozniak and Jobs. They're like, worst case scenario, if this doesn't work, we'll just go get jobs. We're broke anyways. Right. Let's just try. And he's like, he sells his van for like 50, Steve sells his van for like $1,500. Like, oh, I'm just all in on Apple. To me, that's like, again, I think a lot of this is like people are asked, it's like, it's entrepreneurship, like innate. It can be taught. Can there be a school of entrepreneurship? And I was like, well, ask Charlie Munger if he taught a business class. What did he say? He's like, I would just teach the history of what you guys do. He's like, I teach the history of 100 companies. And I would talk about what went right and what went wrong. There's no security. He's not saying, yeah, take my class. And on the other end, you get this degree that guarantees business success. That doesn't exist.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You make all this money. I think this is a super mispriced thing. I think people who crave security, which I get, like all humans crave some level of security, sort of mispriced security because no jobs are as secure as we think they are, but they definitely cap your upside. And people, it's like, is founding a company or going into business for yourself as an entrepreneur extremely risky? Yes, it is. But is it actually that much riskier than a job where you could get laid off or the sector could go through a downfall? Or there are a lot of things about having a job that are not nearly as secure as people think they are.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, I don't know. And so, like, of course, there's no certainty. That's why if you crave certainty, you've got to get a job. But there wasn't even Facebook when I was in college because I had to work full-time. I went at night. But my college did not have Facebook. It was just coming out. So we had MySpace. And MySpace, you could put a quote, right? Like the header. That's right. And I've always thought like this for my entire life. It was like there's no security in life, only opportunity. And I think that's so investors and entrepreneurs are going for opportunity at the expense of security. And if you need security, you can get a job. But we see, like, everybody said, go into tech, going to tech, going to tech. Look, you make all this money.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he gets all the credit because Lee and me told him not to do it. And he's just like, same to your point. It's game tape. It's just like when Kobe is watching this particular play of Michael Jordan, that may never appear in his life And maybe the move he did wasn't the right move for what Kobe did, but maybe it influences his other thing. It's just like the life is complex and messy. And like you can think you're really smart. And until you have a two and a half year old and they ask you, why is that the way? And you answer the question. And then their follow-up question is going to be why. And eventually you're going to get to 11 where like, I don't know. Like, I don't know why.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but he started out like doing like knockoff cell phones in Korea or something. And then I forgot the guy's founder's name and I apologize, but like he was telling me the life story, but he was saying that the founder, that Charlie and Lilu, Lilu, gave the founder advice and he ignored it. And he was right. He's like, don't go on electric cars or whatever it was that he did. He's like, and he, you know, selling, I think he said like two billion car. Like, I forgot what, two million cars. I don't know why he sold two billion cars in a year. So like he's like sold two million cars. China is a big market. Yeah. So he's just like, and he did it.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advice is an average and reality is a distribution. And averages suck because they hide the distribution. You kind of want to know the shape of the distribution, and you kind of want to know like things that apply to your specific data point, not like the average thing. And I think advice is always an average that hides the distribution. And if you know that you're actually an outlier in some way, then you have to sort of like selectively follow advice because it may not apply to you.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most interesting thing is that like I think we've talked about this concept before on air if someone's going to advise you on starting a podcast, they would say do a 30 to 40 minute episode and do it weekly. And you release it at the same time all the time. Have a guess so that way that person promotes it too. And we're like, okay, well, we do the opposite of all of those things. And I think it's like the conclusion I've come to is.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this goes back to what you were just saying, and I want to go the crafting. Charlie, again, has these simple ideas. Like, most of the problems are that you're just not intensely interested in what you're working on. And he's like, I don't care how smart you are. And Charlie's smarter number, everybody else, he goes, I was not successful until I moved myself into a position where I worked on something I was intentionally interested in. These small rules carry most of the weight. It's like, how bad do you actually want it? And if you're not willing to do those things, then there's nothing wrong with that. entrepreneurship is for a very small percentage i'm not one of these people to think everybody can be an entrepreneur I would like to see more of them but there's no safety net it's like no one's telling you what to do no one had to tell you guys hey you should uh”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's one of the reasons why we find ourselves so attracted to episodes that highlight craft is because that's sort of like how we think about acquired. Like if LVMH benchmark, it's like people who do few things but do them exceptionally well are just so entrancing to study.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is actually something that ties into much of what we've talked about over the last couple hours. People are going to do what they want to do. If people can do what they want to do and are given unfettered freedom to run in it, they can do great things. If people are forced to do things that they don't want to do, they're not going to make great things or either forced to or choose put themselves in a situation for whatever reason where they're doing something they don't want to be doing. They're not going to be very good at it.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over and over again, that's going to cop up naturally in a conversation that you can, like, oh, I didn't know about this. Maybe there's a bunch of people probably like, I didn't know who Everland was. I didn't know Ogavy. I never thought about the NFL as the largest media company.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's zero chance that people aren't interested in entrepreneurship and investing are not finding this interesting because the prep for this is not Three guys that have a million other things to do. It's three guys that”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And because you know how hard it is to do. And when you go and listen to other business podcasts, and like I had a friend, his friend has a podcast, and he's like, hey, these three guys, they have large social media followings, but it does not translate to episodes, which people don't understand. Yeah, rarely will. Yeah. And they're like, would you listen to their episode and give it feedback, right? And we went, like, so I was like, yeah, listen to it. And I go, um... Three guys sitting around talking whatever happens pops out of their mind. What did you expect to happen?”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source