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Acquired Podcast

Acquired Podcast

Podcast | United States | Centre
www.acquired.fm/

Deep dives into the playbooks of the greatest companies and investors. Hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal.

Engagement Insights

0.76 score
65
Discussions
1
Participants
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Total Votes
65
Articles

Discussions from Acquired Podcast

Business

Submarines and the Future of Defense Manufacturing

David Ulevitch speaks with Chris Power, founder and CEO at Hadrian, and Vice Admiral Robert Gaucher, the Pentagon's first direct reporting portfolio manager for submarines, at the opening of Hadrian's Factory Four in Cherokee, Alabama. They discuss the state of America's submarine industrial base, why the Navy now needs more than five times the manufacturing capacity it had a decade ago, and how software-driven factories and a new workforce can close the gap

United States
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Technology

The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare

Erin Price-Wright speaks with Adam Warmoth, founder and CEO of Chariot Defense, and Alex Miller, CTO of the U.S. Army, about the power crisis at the heart of modern military operations. As the battlefield becomes more distributed and electronics-heavy, the Army's legacy power infrastructure, built around diesel generators and lead-acid batteries, is struggling to keep up. They examine how commercial breakthroughs in EV and aviation technology are being adapted for the front line, why fuel con...

United States
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Technology

Why Every Satellite Needs Earth | Northwood CEO on a16z

Bridgit Mendler, Co-founder and CEO of Northwood, joins a16z’s Erik Torenberg to discuss the critical but overlooked bottleneck in space: ground infrastructure. Northwood is building the systems that connect satellites back to Earth, enabling faster, more scalable space missions. They cover Bridgit’s unconventional path to founding a space company, why vertical integration matters in hard tech, and how modern ground networks could unlock the next wave of innovation in the space economy, from ...

Global
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Technology

Inside Palantir: Building Software That Matters with Shyam Sankar

In this conversation, Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer at Palantir Technologies, discusses his new book Mobilize, his commission in the U.S. Army, and why he believes the most important thing America can do right now is inspire its latent heretics to step forward. He also breaks down how he thinks about the SaaS market under AI pressure, what the "alpha versus beta software" distinction means for which companies survive, and why he started a film production company

United States
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Technology

AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What?

A new paper, “Some Simple Economics of AGI,” is making the rounds—Web3 with a16z we sat down with author Christian Catalini (MIT Crypto Economics Lab) and Eddy Lazzarin (CTO of a16z crypto), in conversation with Robert Hackett, to unpack what AGI could mean for work and markets

Global
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Geopolitics

AI, Supply Chains, and the Future of Economic Power

Erik Torenberg sits down with Jacob Helberg to discuss AI, manufacturing, supply chains, and the new geopolitics of technology. Drawing on themes from Helberg’s book The Wires of War, they explore why hardware, industrial capacity, and secure supply chains have become central to both economic strength and national security. They also unpack what it means to “win the AI race” — from model leadership and global adoption to energy, compute, tariffs, and reindustrialization in the U.S

Global
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Technology

What's Missing Between LLMs and AGI - Vishal Misra & Martin Casado

Vishal Misra returns to explain his latest research on how LLMs actually work under the hood. He walks through experiments showing that transformers update their predictions in a precise, mathematically predictable way as they process new information, explains why this still doesn't mean they're conscious, and describes what's actually required for AGI: the ability to keep learning after training and the move from pattern matching to understanding cause and effect

United States
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Technology

AI Startups vs. Big Chatbots — With Olivia Moore

In this episode, originally aired on Big Technology Podcast, Olivia Moore discusses whether AI startups can compete with the big chatbots, why American sentiment toward AI is so negative, and what she learned from giving LLMs personality tests. She also breaks down where ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are diverging, why Open Claw signals a new wave of agentic products, and what makes memory the most underrated feature in consumer AI

United States
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Business

Marc Andreessen on the Mindset of Great Founders — with David Senra

Marc Andreessen joins David Senra for a conversation about entrepreneurship, history, and what drives some of the world’s most ambitious builders. In this conversation with David, Marc reflects on patterns he’s seen across great founders, why many of them focus relentlessly on building rather than introspection, and how technology and entrepreneurship continue to shape the future

United States
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Technology

Atlassian CEO on the SaaS Apocalypse, AI Agents & What Comes Next

Alex Rampell and Erik Torenberg speak with Mike Cannon-Brookes, cofounder and CEO of Atlassian, about how to make sense of the SaaS selloff, why not all software companies face the same AI-driven risks, and how Atlassian is thinking about the shift from records to processes. They also examine the real design challenge of getting everyday users to trust and benefit from AI agents in enterprise workflows

Global
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Healthcare

Andrew Huberman: Peptides, Sleep Tech, and the End of Obesity

Daisy Wolf speaks with Dr. Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University and host of the Huberman Lab podcast. They discuss how the pandemic sparked a consumer health revolution, the emerging peptide and GLP landscape, what the science actually says about focus drugs, and the neurotechnologies Huberman believes will let us write to our own biology within the next five years

United States
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Technology

Emil Michael: Iran, Anthropic and the Future of AI at the Pentagon

This conversation with Emil Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and acting director of the Defense Innovation Unit, was recorded at the a16z American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. Michael walks through how he inherited a department running 14 undefined technology priorities, cut them to six, and made applied AI number one. He also gives the first detailed account of why commercial AI contracts written under the previous administration created a vendor-lock cr...

United States
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