Skip to main content
Acquired Podcast

Acquired Podcast

Podcast | United States | Centre

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

Engagement Insights

1.46 score
182
Discussions
2
Participants
2
Total Votes
184
Articles

Discussions from Acquired Podcast

Technology

What Happens to Design After AI?

Anish Acharya speaks with Microsoft VP of Design John Maeda and Impeccable founder and CEO Paul Bakaus about how AI is changing the practice of design. The conversation explores the relationship between design and technology, the rise of AI-powered creative tools, and whether automation raises the floor, the ceiling, or both. Maeda and Bakaus discuss software craftsmanship, taste, creative judgment, and why some aspects of design may become increasingly automated while others become more valu...

Global
Technology

What’s Next for Consumer AI? | Josh Elman Joins a16z

Anish Acharya sits down with Josh Elman to discuss the future of consumer technology and Josh's decision to join a16z. Over the past two decades, Elman has helped shape some of the most important consumer technology products and companies, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Robinhood, Discord, Musical.ly, TikTok, and Apple. Drawing on those experiences, he reflects on how technology has evolved from a niche industry into a central force in everyday life. The conversation explores consumer...

United States
Business

Jake Paul & Anti Fund: From Creator to Investor

Jake Paul and Geoff Woo join the podcast to announce Anti Fund’s new $100 million growth fund and discuss the evolution of their investment strategy. The conversation covers the fund’s portfolio, including investments in companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Cognition, Etched, and Modal, as well as the lessons they’ve learned backing founders and identifying emerging technologies. They discuss founder psychology, resilience, ambition, and why they believe attention, culture, a...

Global
Business

The New Rules of Media | Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz

Recorded live at the New Media Summit, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg, and Gaby Goldberg discuss how media, communication, and influence are changing in the internet era. The conversation explores the shift from legacy media to creator-led platforms, why authenticity has become a competitive advantage, and how founders can build audiences by communicating directly with customers, employees, and the public. They discuss podcasts, social media, storytelling, corporate communicati...

United States
Business

The Fintech Playbook for Latin America

Angela Strange and Gabriel Vásquez speak with Addi founder and CEO Santiago Suárez about building one of Latin America's largest financial platforms. What began as a buy now, pay later product has evolved into a broader ecosystem spanning payments, commerce, logistics, and now banking. Serving millions of consumers and tens of thousands of merchants, Addi sits at the intersection of financial services and commerce in Colombia. The conversation covers building in Latin America, lessons from sc...

Global
Economy

Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok on AI, Jobs, and Economic Growth

Wyatt Thomson of OpenAI speaks with economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok about AI, labor markets, and the future of economic growth. The conversation explores one of the most common fears surrounding AI: that increasingly capable systems will eliminate jobs. Cowen and Tabarrok argue instead that economic growth remains the key variable. Throughout history, productivity-enhancing technologies have transformed work, created new industries, and expanded living standards, even as they disrupt...

United States
Healthcare

AI, Growth, and the Future of Healthcare | Anish Acharya & Sachin Jain

SCAN Health Plan CEO Sachin Jain speaks with a16z General Partner Anish Acharya about AI, healthcare, and what it takes for established organizations to adapt during periods of technological change. The conversation explores how AI is reshaping work, customer experience, software development, and organizational structure. Acharya argues that artificial intelligence is not simply another productivity tool, but a fundamentally new technology capable of performing work on behalf of people and or...

United States
Business

Jack Altman on Product-Market Fit

Jack Altman joins Speedrun to discuss product-market fit, customer feedback, hiring, fundraising, and the realities of building an enduring company. Drawing on his experience building Lattice from startup to multi-billion-dollar company, Altman explains how founders should think about customer requests, when to pivot, and why some of the hardest decisions come from balancing conviction with market feedback. He shares lessons from the early days of Lattice, including finding product-market fit...

United States
Technology

Designing the Physical World with AI

Erin Price-Wright speaks with Alex Modon, cofounder and CEO at Unlimited Industries, and Davide Asnaghi, CEO at Diode Computers, about how AI is moving from software into the physical world. They discuss automating construction and electronics design, using code and simulation to model real-world systems, and how incentives and manufacturing constraints shape adoption. They also examine what it takes to scale infrastructure, reduce build times, and unlock more abundant industrial capacity in ...

United States
Economy

Samo Burja on Growth, Energy, and AI

Theo Jaffee speaks with Samo Burja, founder of Bismarck Analysis, about AI, industrial capacity, economic growth, and the institutions that shape civilization. The conversation explores how AI’s demand for compute, energy, and infrastructure could trigger a new wave of industrial expansion, benefiting sectors far beyond technology. Burja argues that AI is not just a software story but a demand shock that will ripple through energy, manufacturing, construction, and global supply chains. They a...

Global
Technology

AI, Design, and the Power of Open Models

Yoko Li and Justine Moore speak with Ideogram founder and CEO Mohammad Norouzi about image generation models, design workflows, and the evolving relationship between AI and creative work. The conversation covers Ideogram's decision to release an open-weight model, the challenges of generating text and layouts within images, and why controllability has become an increasingly important area of research. They discuss prompting, customization, editing, and the tradeoffs between general-purpose mo...

Global
Technology

Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk

Sarah Wang speaks with Exa cofounder and CEO Will Bryk about building search infrastructure for the AI era. The conversation covers Exa’s origins, why traditional search engines were not designed for AI agents, and how search changes when the user is no longer a human but an autonomous system. They discuss retrieval, agent workflows, coding agents, data access, and why search may become a foundational layer for the emerging agent economy. Along the way, Bryk shares his views on AI-native prod...

United States