Podcast Power: Five Key Lessons from Ben Gilbert of Acquired – SmartCompany

Ben Gilbert, co-host of the mega-popular podcast acquired gave a rare interview to the Australian podcast this week The Contrariansoutlining his thoughts on business strategy, where entrepreneurs should take lessons and the power of trust.

Acquiredwhich delves into the backstory of major corporate acquisitions, has one million listeners per episode and features commentary from founders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang.

Here are five of the key takeaways from the hour-long appearance, highlight of SmartCompany own.

Look for the origin stories…

For entrepreneurs hoping to emulate the biggest names in business — think Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang or Mark Zuckerberg — there’s a lot to gain from today’s headlines. Instead, Gilbert says founders can get more out of their early days:

I will say that I think the most important thing to study about them is how they reacted in the early days of their companies. Because now mostly what each of them does is run a big company. And sometimes they manage it in a remarkable way when it doesn’t feel like a big company. But especially for any entrepreneurs trying to apply any lessons to their business, there is almost nothing to learn from How Jeff Runs Amazon in 2019 for your business. What’s interesting is how Jeff ran Amazon in 2001 or 1997. And they’re strangely lost to history. Like it’s very hard to find a news article from 1997 about Amazon unless you do it professionally, like David and I, when you search for news about a company, you’ll get the last two weeks of news about the company. So I think the thing to study about each of these people is not who they are today, but what they were like at the inflection points.

… But recognize that huge success is hugely idiosyncratic

When asked why Acquired not just condensing all of his key insights into one business strategy book, Gilbert said the lessons are in the differences, not necessarily the similarities:

I think it actually is the key insight of Acquired each of these huge, huge successes are such extreme outliers that their success is idiosyncratic. The bigger takeaway is that there’s really nothing to learn from them [as opposed to] the bottom line is “Here’s what you can learn from them and apply to their own business.” And that’s not very gratifying. If you’re listening to the show and you’re kind of like, “I want to absorb this wisdom and use it for my business”… And maybe I’m too bold. Maybe there are many, but I think it is important to remember each one the more extreme the success, the more idiosyncratic the conditions.

How businesses should look for their “second act”

Schiffman, Schwab and Gilbert are admirers of business strategist Hamilton Helmer, who formulated a simple chart for businesses looking for their “second act.” It is divided into two axes: one extends from your business’s current skill set to the skills it needs to build, and the other spans your customer’s current needs to your customer’s new needs. The number, Gilbert said, lands in the “current business skills, new customer needs” quadrant:

You don’t have to hire a bunch of new different things, but you serve a new set of customer needs. And AWS is a great example of that. They had the engineering talent, they had the internal culture to build APIs. They don’t want teams talking to each other. They are known to treat other teams within the company as outside companies. And they’re building an API so that team can use the technology they’ve built. What they needed to do was understand enterprise sales and figure out how to sell their wares to startups instead of consumers. But they did. And that’s kind of the perfect encapsulation of that. You’re using your current skills, but you’re serving a new client. And that’s it [Helmer’s] advice at least on where organizations should look for their second act.

The power of trust

Not every podcast can get Mark Zuckerberg a live interview in front of 6,000 fans. Acquired is able to do this because of the tremendous trust it has built among listeners, Gilbert said, reflecting the importance of building a strong reputation in any type of business:

The way a brand really shows itself to be earned is trust. There are sponsors who will work with us. That’s our main revenue stream where they wouldn’t work with other people. And the reason is that they are listeners themselves and are aware of the incredible trust we have built with the audience. And David and I take it, I mean it all starts and ends with the listener’s trust. And so I think any time we get too wrapped up in a conversation, “Should we do this, should we do that?” A strategic decision that we go back to the important thing is to make the next great episode for listeners as amazing as possible. And everything else is after that.

Why selling out shouldn’t be the only goal

Based on fees Acquired can charge for ad slots, Shiffman estimated that the podcast commands a $10 million revenue rate. Using the rough formula applied to SaaS valuations, this would give Acquired a potential valuation of $150 million. In a world where Joe Rogan and Call her dadAlex Cooper of Alex Cooper can broker huge exclusive deals, why not sell out?

Gilbert said a mega-dollar deal might not work Acquired duo, none more so than their current partnership:

… We’ve talked to, we regularly get contacts from the kind of people who do the big podcast deals, and we really like being independent. And I think there are so many wonderful things about being a partnership of two people who own a business 50/50 and are all principal and all agent, where you can just make better things and present them to the world than people, where there is little conflict of interest between the principal and the agent. And we just feel like it’s a sustainable competitive advantage that we own it together. We have all the advantages and all the disadvantages. We, the business itself, as you mentioned, is a great current business. Our lives do not require capital for which we could sell this business. And if we sell it, what will we do? We’d probably like to do a podcast like this together. So in the end it all comes down to “what is the optimization function of the business?” If you are a publicly traded company, the optimization function is the gross share price. But if you are a 50/50 private partnership, the optimization feature is what best allows both of us to enjoy our time here on Earth. It’s kind of a different goal than if we were something that had shareholders.

Speaking of SmartCompanySchiffman described Gilbert’s emergence as a watershed moment for the local business media landscape, with vital lessons for founders.

“He’s right about Joe Rogan,” Schiffman said SmartCompany.

Selling out “isn’t going to help him. He’s just going to get richer than he should and start doing things that I think will be demeaning to his happiness compared to happiness.”

“Wealth versus happiness follows a normal distribution curve, and you don’t want to exceed it,” he added.

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