ACQ2: The Acquired Interviews Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

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

My First Million: https://www.mfmpod.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

My First Million: https://www.mfmpod.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!
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.
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!
Links:
Kamakshi on Twitter Samooha Samooha Product Demo Video

Statsig CEO and former Facebook VP Vijaye Raji joins us to discuss democratizing the tools of big tech. Before starting Statsig, Vijaye spent 10 years at Facebook where he led the development of their mobile ad product (yes — THAT mobile ad product that’s the core of FB today).
We talk all about about Facebook’s early days in mobile, and the internal building and shipping process that let them continuously experiment and roll out features out to billions of users, which Statsig is now bringing to engineering and product teams everywhere. This episode is a must-listen for product builders at all stages!
Listen in any podcast player.
Links:
Statsig’s generous free feature flags offering Statsig experimentation community on Slack, LinkedIn and Twitter