Every company has a story.
Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them.
Afleveringen
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Seinfeld
19 oktober 2026 · 3 uur 50 min
Seinfeld, which ended three decades ago, has been watched by 72 million Americans so far THIS YEAR. Behind that incredible stat is an equally incredible business story: obsessive creators, perfect market timing, an ownership structure that aligned incentives for the long term…all of which created a sitcom that became number one by breaking all the rules. Lees meer
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The Acquired Seinfeld Companion PDF
Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV by Warren Littlefield
Comedian
The Seinfeld Chronicles: An Unnecessary Data Exploration by Andy Kirk
Worldly Partners' Seinfeld Study by Arvind Navaratnam
Jerry Seinfeld's 2017 Harvard Business Review Interview
All episode sources
Carve Outs:
Seinfeld - "The Marine Biologist"
Seinfeld - "The Jacket"
Seinfeld - "The Dinner Party"
The Seinfeld Chronicles: An Unnecessary Data Exploration by Andy Kirk
Buck's of Woodside
Tin Can
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00:00:00 Start
00:00:55 Intro
00:04:52 Jerry Seinfeld's Stand-Up Origins (1954-1988)
00:16:16 NBC Pitches a Late-Night Special (1988)
00:21:35 Enter Larry David (1988)
00:35:04 Fin-Syn Rules & The Castle Rock Deal
00:52:45 Making the Pilot & Test Screening Disaster (1989)
01:04:24 Rick Ludwin Saves the Show (1989-1990)
01:10:17 Adding Elaine & "No Hugging, No Learning"
01:28:41 Season 2 & Defying Network Notes (1991)
01:35:56 The Structural Mechanics of Seinfeld
01:45:11 Season 4 & "The Contest" (1992)
01:57:09 Moving to Must See TV Thursdays (1993)
02:07:28 Anatomy of a Production Week & The Harvard Lampoon Writers
02:15:44 The Syndication Cash Cow (1995)
02:28:36 Larry Leaves, Cast Salaries & Season 9 (1996-1997)
02:42:13 Jack Welch's Brunch… -
The Home Depot
14 september 2026 · 3 uur 35 min
The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After being unceremoniously fired from their previous hardware chain at ages 48 and 35, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank took the words of their New York banker Ken Langone (who had also just accidentally caused their firings) to heart: they'd just been "kicked in the ass with a golden horseshoe.” They proceeded to author the greatest compounding story in American retail history, helped by some legendary cameos along the way from Sol Price, Jamie Dimon, and Ross Perot (to name a few). And the ending is as good as any superhero film: from its 1981 IPO to today, The Home Depot has been the single highest-returning equity in the entire US stock market — higher than Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, and everything else! Lees meer
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The Acquired Home Depot Companion PDF
Our Visual Artifacts page for Home Depot
Built from Scratch by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank
Kick Up Some Dust by Bernie Marcus
The Board Wore Chicken Suits by Joe Nocera, The New York Times
Frank Blake on Invest Like the Best
Ken Langone's interview with Arvind Navaratnam
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Home Depot Study
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Carve Outs:
Silo Season 3
Tires Season 3
Ratio 8 Coffee Maker
Trade Coffee
Quarterback
Comedian
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00:00:00 Start
00:00:43 Intro
00:05:32 Bernie Marcus's Early Career and meeting Arthur Blank (1972)
00:15:58 Ken Langone & Handy Dan (1970s)
00:33:08 Ken Buys Handy Dan, Bernie & Arth… -
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire
10 augustus 2026 · 4 uur 33 min
In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corporate raiders circled, salivating over offers to sell off the film library to MGM and offload the parks to hotel operators. But what followed instead was the greatest turnaround in media history under Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. Beauty and the Beast. The Lion King. Broadway. Bringing the Disney Vault home on VHS and DVD. And the greatest media acquisition of all time — ESPN. Lees meer
And then... it all almost fell apart. Again. Euro Disney turned into a money pit. Boardroom and executive infighting ran rampant. Animation descended into a dumpster fire. (Remember Chicken Little? Us neither.) Comcast — Comcast!! — tried to steal the company via a hostile takeover. Out of the chaos, a new generation of Disney management emerged under Bob Iger to stage yet another epic comeback with Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm, creating the defining media empire of the 21st century…until the tech companies came along. Tune in for the ultimate Acquired thrill ride: Disney, Part II.
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Links:
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The Acquired Disney Part II Companion PDF
The Acquired Disney Part II Artifacts visual hub
Our Disney Part II column in WSJ
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Disney Study
All episode sources
Carve Outs:
Warby Parker Transitions Extra Active
Michael Arndt's Toy Story 3 Story Presentation
The Golden State Valkyries
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00:00:00 Start
00:00:50 Intro
00:05:07 Disney in Chaos (1984)
00:11:33 Eisner, Wells, Katzenber… -
The Walt Disney Company
22 juni 2026 · 4 uur 31 min
The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it’s the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual property rights to the childhood memories of billions of people (including, likely, all of you) and is a reliable, predictable profitable business. But it didn’t start that way. Lees meer
During Walt’s era, Disney operated like an unhinged moonshot factory, blowing its finances on one seemingly crazy project after another, like the very first feature-length animated film or a theme park inspired by Walt's fascination with model trains (spoiler: Disneyland). Walt’s relentless ambition to bet the company over and over again not only created some of the most monumental artistic achievements of the 20th century (Snow White, Fantasia, Disney Imagineering), but also resulted in the accidental invention of the modern “flywheel” business model. In this episode, we tell the story of the ultimate marriage of art, commerce, and engineering — The Walt Disney Company: Walt's Era.
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The Acquired Disney Companion PDF
Our Disney column in WSJ
The original 1958 WSJ “Flywheel” article
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler
The Animated Man by Michael Barrier
Walt Disney: An American Original by Bob Thomas
Building a Company: Roy O. Disney and the Creation of an Entertainment Empires by Bob Thomas
The Disney Version by Richard Schickel
PBS American Experience: Walt Disney
Disneyland Handcrafted
Walt's 1966 EPCOT pitch video
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Disney Study
The Walt Disney Family Museum
All episode sources
Carve Outs:
Brooks Vanguard sneakers
Defunctland YouTube Channel
Animagraffs YouTube Channel
Volvo EX30
The San F…
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Vanguard
18 mei 2026 · 3 uur 48 min
Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, on behalf of 50 million clients (including, likely, many of you). And yet Vanguard itself is essentially a communist organization — it has no shareholders, makes no profits, and operates more like REI than Fidelity. If you own a Vanguard fund, you own a piece of the firm itself. Any excess margin instead gets returned to clients in the form of lower fees, which since 1975 have added up to roughly five hundred billion dollars transferred out of Wall Street managers’ pockets and into retail investors’ savings accounts. And oh yeah, it all started as a cockamamie revenge plot by a guy who’d just been fired by his partners. Today we tell the story of communist capitalism at its finest — Vanguard. Lees meer
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J.P. Morgan
WeAreDevelopers event
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Links:
This episode's PDF companion
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Our Vanguard "episode preview" in WSJ
Stay the Course: The Story of Vanguard and the Index Revolution by John C. Bogle
The Bogle Effect by Eric Balchunas
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Vanguard Study
Worldly Partners' Article Generational Investing: The Discipline Behind 100+x Outcomes
All episode sources
Carve Outs:
Our WSJ pieces on Ferrari and Vanguard
MacBook Pro M5 Max
Michael MacKelvie on YouTube
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
Brooks Vanguard sneakers
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00:00:00 Start
00:00:41 Intro
00:05:30 Jack Bogle's Early Life & Family Ruin (1929)
00:12:34 Princeton Thesis & Mutual Funds Emerge (1949-1951)
00:27:20 Joining Wellington Management (1951)
00:30:38 The Go-Go Y… -
Rolex
3 mei 2026 · 4 uur 51 min
Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history! Their products are comparable to a Hermès Birkin bag in price, luxury status and waitlist times… yet they produce over 1m units / year (roughly 10x annual Birkin production). They make the most universally recognized and desired Swiss watches… yet their founder wasn’t Swiss and didn’t start the company in Switzerland! If Rolex were publicly traded, they’d almost certainly be among the top 50 market cap companies in the world… yet they’re 100% owned by a charitable foundation in Geneva that (among other things) literally just gives away money to local people in the city. Lees meer
Tune in for one of the most fascinating and admirable companies we’ve ever covered on Acquired. We had an absolute blast making the episode, and hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
This episode was released on February 23, 2025.
Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26
Links:
The Renaissance of the Swiss Watch Industry - Marc Bridge
HODINKEE - Inside All Four Rolex Manufacturing Facilities
“If you were…” campaign
Worldly Partners’ Multi-Decade Rolex Study
Episode sources
Carve Outs:
Bluey
Acquired on Armchair Expert
Eleven Reader
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© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC
Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
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Costco
2 mei 2026 · 2 uur 53 min
Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create incredible company value. For instance: Costco has the cheapest prices of any major retailer in America — and also the wealthiest customer base. They pay their hourly workers 30% above the industry norm (and give them excellent healthcare + 401k benefits) — and are almost 3x more profitable on labor than Walmart. Speaking of Walmart, Costco stocks 40x fewer SKUs than their Bentonville-based rivals — yet sells an average of 15x more volume of each. And oh yeah, practically all of Costco’s C-Suite started their careers as baggers and checkout clerks! Tune in for a mind-bending exploration of one of the world’s most iconic — and iconically unique — companies. Lees meer
This episode was released on August 20, 2023.
Links:
The Science of Hitting
Warren Buffett’s Costco joke
Episode sources
Carve Outs:
Tifosi sunglasses
Dwells “take off everything”
Jeremy Giffon on Invest Like the Best
Dogpatch
David Lidsky’s great piece on Acquired in Fast Company
Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26
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© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC
Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
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Ferrari
13 april 2026 · 3 uur 52 min
Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermès sells that many Birkins and Kellys roughly every 2 years, and Rolex moves that many watches every 3 months. And yet this ultimate luxury product also lives under the same roof with a widely beloved professional sports team… one with 400 million rabid fans from all walks of life who live and die by the Scuderia’s performance every F1 race weekend! How is it possible that these two seemingly contradictory customer bases can coexist within the same company? And far from destroying each other’s value, only reinforce it? The answer, it turns out, is a beautiful, bloody, tragic and romantic opera that spans two families and three generations — and just might be one of the best tales we’ve ever told on Acquired. Buckle up for the story of Ferrari. Lees meer
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Links:
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Our Ferrari "episode preview" in WSJ
Enzo Ferrari by Luca Dal Monte
Seeing Red on IMDb
Go Like Hell by A.J. Baime
Stephen Wilmot's great WSJ piece on Ferrari
Ferrari factory tour
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Ferrari Study
All episode sources
Carve Outs:
Ford v Ferrari
Maison Wheat sweaters
Craighill scissors
Amazon grocery service
Travelpro Altitude backpack
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© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC
00:00:00 Start
00:01:07 Intro
00:05:57 Enzo Ferrari's Early Life & Tragedies (1898-1919)
00:12:25 Scuderia Ferrari: Enzo's Racing Dream (1920-1933)
00:22:58 The Prancing Horse & Ferrari's Branding
00:33:30 First Fe… -
Formula 1
2 maart 2026 · 4 uur 19 min
Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality television. It's also the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million fans globally — a fact that would shock most Americans, who until a recent viral Netflix series had barely heard of it. Lees meer
Today we tell the story of how a chaotic, deadly, and gloriously dysfunctional European racing series became one of the greatest business stories in sports. For decades, brilliant engineers and daredevil drivers dedicated their lives (and too often lost them) to a league controlled for 45 years by a single man: a former London car dealer named Bernie Ecclestone, who centralized power and extracted billions, while also undeniably single-handedly making the sport successful. Then, in a move no one saw coming, the American company Liberty Media bought the whole thing in 2017, installed a team of Fox Sports and ESPN veterans, and did what Bernie never would — professionalized it. All of a sudden famously money-losing F1 teams turned into real businesses, with the average team valuation today clocking in at an astounding $3.6 billion. Buckle up for one of our most-requested episodes: the wild story of Formula 1.
Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
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Links:
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The Formula by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg
Drive to Survive on Netflix
F1 The Movie on Apple TV
Adrian Newey, How to Build a Car
Senna documentary
Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Formula One Study
All episode source…
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The NFL
27 januari 2026 · 4 uur 8 min
The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays and holidays too) to watch the world’s most beautiful ballet of violence. It generates the most revenue of any sports league globally and sets new records for team valuations each year. But it wasn’t always this way. Lees meer
The history of the NFL mirrors America’s own development: scrappy small-town teams rode the successive growth waves of the automobile, TV, the Internet and social media to grow larger than the even the founders’ wildest dreams. Whether you watch football or not, the NFL is one incredible business story, and one that we’ve taken more lessons from over the years for Acquired itself than perhaps any other episode we’ve made.
Note: This is a remastered release of our original January 2023 episode, updated to today's Acquired production standards. It also features a full hour+ followup section at the end covering the seismic shifts in the NFL’s business since the original episode’s release. Much has happened in those three years: Taylor Swift entered the league (via merger 🙂), streaming went mainstream (and took over Thanksgiving and Christmas), sports gambling exploded from 46 million to 76 million bettors, and — in perhaps the most surprising development — private equity finally stormed the gates of the NFL. Oh, and average franchise valuations grew by 60% from $4.5 billion to over $7 billion. Communist capitalism is alive and well!
Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26
Links:
Innovation Summit details and all Super Bowl LX Week events in San Francisco (note content from the Innovation Summit will be posted publicly the week after the Super Bowl — we’ll update this page with links when available)
America’s Game
Sport…
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- Categorieën
- Zakelijk , Technologie , Beleggen
- Verschijnt
- Elke maand
- Lengte
- Meestal 3 uur 50 min
- Afleveringen
- 218
- Eerste aflevering
- 1 oktober 2015
- Taal
- Engels