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Business
How companies come to be
Each piece takes a company apart: how it started, how it grew, where the moat is, what the founder was thinking.
Episodes
2025 · acquiredTrader Joe's: The Contrarian Grocery Empire
In one sentence: A company that breaks every rule of grocery retail — inconvenient, incomple…
Google: The Origin of Search
In one sentence: when Google was founded in 1998, a dozen search engines and portals already…
TSMC Founder Morris Chang: The Interview
In one sentence: This is a rare personal interview, not a company-history narrative — 93-yea…
Microsoft Volume I: The Greatest Business Negotiation Ever
In one sentence: Two geeks in their early twenties used a contract that looked like a conces…
Hermès: A Century of Craftsmanship and Scarcity
In one sentence: A handbag company that won't sell you a handbag, a traditional saddle maker…
Novo Nordisk: From Insulin to Ozempic
In one sentence: A pharma giant that bet a full century on a single therapeutic direction —…
Visa: The Democratic Toll Booth
In one sentence: A system that lets you show up anywhere on Earth with a piece of plastic an…
NVIDIA Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023)
In one sentence: Part three of Acquired's NVIDIA trilogy (Season 13, Episode 3, recorded and…
Costco: The Trust Machine You Pay to Enter
In one sentence: A company that looks boringly simple — "sell big packages cheap" — is actua…
Lockheed Martin: The Archetype of the Military-Industrial Complex
In one sentence: The single largest contractor to the US federal government — not just the l…
Nintendo: The Console Wars (1989-2023)
In one sentence: In part one, Nintendo single-handedly revived the video game industry with…
Nintendo: From Hanafuda to the NES Empire (1889-1992)
In one sentence: This is part one of Acquired's two-part Nintendo story, covering only the f…
LVMH: Bernard Arnault's Luxury Empire
In one sentence: Acquired set out to answer a question that stays maddeningly "squishy" acro…
Amazon.com: From Online Bookstore to The Everything Store
In one sentence: Season 11, Episode 2 of Acquired (Walmart before it, AWS after it) spends n…
Walmart: How a Small-Town Discounter Became the World's Largest Company
In one sentence: A business that began in 1945 as a franchised variety store in small-town A…
NVIDIA Part II: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022)
In one sentence: Part two of Acquired's NVIDIA trilogy — from the 2006 CUDA bet to the eve o…
NVIDIA Part I: The GPU Company (1993-2006)
In one sentence: Part one of Acquired's NVIDIA trilogy (parts two and three cover 2007-2022…
Standard Oil Part II: Monopoly, Breakup, and Legacy
In one sentence: The back half of the two-parter, running from the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Ac…
Standard Oil Part I: The Rise of Rockefeller (1839-1890)
In one sentence: Part one of a two-parter — the story of how John D.
TSMC: The Inventor of the Pure-Play Foundry
In one sentence: A "contract manufacturer" that runs a 40% operating margin — TSMC invented…
Berkshire Hathaway Part III: The Modern Empire and Succession
In one sentence: The trilogy's finale — the most admired investor on earth runs headlong int…
Berkshire Hathaway Part II: Munger and the Wonderful-Business Years
In one sentence: Part II of the Berkshire trilogy, which Acquired itself christens "The Empi…
Berkshire Hathaway Part I: The Buffett Partnership Years
In one sentence: The first installment of Acquired's three-part series (recorded April 2021)…
Epic Games: From ZZT to Fortnite, 22 Years Bootstrapped, Then a War With Apple
In one sentence: An 11-year-old kid from Maryland gets his hands on an IBM PC in San Diego a…
Google Maps: The Platform Built from Three Acquisitions
In one sentence: Three acquisitions that probably added up to less than $90M combined — Wher…
Whole Foods: Dissecting the Amazon Acquisition, Day One
In one sentence: On the morning of Friday, June 16, 2017, Amazon announced it was buying Who…
Themes
themeDefenses Against the Leveraged Raid
Facing the threat of a leveraged raid or a stealth-accumulation ambush, three otherwise unre…
Family and Foundation Control
In one sentence: Novo Nordisk locks control inside a foundation whose charter never mentions…
Founder Succession
In one sentence: Every great company eventually has to hand the keys over, and there's no si…
Returning Savings to the Customer
Walmart, Costco, Trader Joe's, and Amazon are all running the same trick — squeeze cost out…
The Semiconductor Power Chain
In one sentence: TSMC turned Taiwan's lack of design talent, brand, and IP into an almost un…
Two Models of Luxury
Hermès and LVMH sell the same broad category of goods and run in opposite directions.
Concepts
concept7 Powers: The Moat Framework
Hamilton Helmer's strategy framework (7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy, 2016)…
Counter-Positioning
One of Hamilton Helmer's seven-powers — a challenger adopts a new business model so attracti…
Jobs to Be Done
Customers don't buy a bundle of product attributes — they "hire" a product to get a specific…
Learning Curve
every time cumulative production doubles, unit cost falls by a predictable, fixed percentage…
Veblen Goods
In one sentence: A category of goods where higher prices drive more desire, not less — the t…
People
personBen Rich
In one sentence: Kelly Johnson's longtime deputy and second-ever head of Skunk Works — shown…
Bernard Arnault
In one sentence: A man who never founded a single one of the brands he owns — he started in…
Charlie Munger
Charlie Munger is the man who dragged Berkshire away from cigar-butt liquidation investing a…
Dee Hock
In one sentence: A self-taught kid from Depression-era rural Utah who never finished a four-…
Jeff Bezos
In one sentence: The grandson of the man who ran America's nuclear weapons program, the sole…
Jensen Huang
In one sentence: From a nine-year-old immigrant bunking with a 17-year-old fresh out of pris…
Jim Sinegal
In one sentence: A San Diego City College student who started bagging groceries part-time at…
Joe Coulombe
In one sentence: An amateur macroeconomist who read demographics, regulation, and airfare ec…
John D. Rockefeller
In one sentence: A bookkeeper's son carrying two irreconcilable bloodlines — a con-man fathe…
John Mackey
In one sentence: A University of Texas dropout who couldn't stand the structure of picking a…
Kelly Johnson
In one sentence: One of only two aircraft designers ever to win the Collier Trophy twice, ni…
Morris Chang
In one sentence: A man who spent 25 years in American semiconductors, got "put out to pastur…
Sam Walton
In one sentence: A paper-route kid from a foreclosed-farm family in Oklahoma who spent thirt…
Sol Price
In one sentence: The son of penniless Belarusian Jewish immigrants, raised in a Bronx garmen…
Warren Buffett
In one sentence: from an Omaha grocer's grandson to the Oracle of Omaha, Buffett is the thro…