ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with expert founders and investors. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we ca...
How ARM Became The World’s Default Chip Architecture (with ARM CEO Rene Haas)
ARM is an incredibly unlikely story. They were founded in Cambridge, England in 1990 to design a new chip architecture just for low-power devices (like the Apple Newton!), leaving the “serious computing” on desktop and servers to Intel’s x86. Now, nearly three decades later, ARM is the dominant architecture in all of computing today.ARM is in your phone, your car, data centers, the most advanced AI chips… there are hundreds (or thousands!) of ARM chips you encounter in your everyday life. In this episode, ARM Holdings CEO Rene Haas joins us to tell the story of how ARM become so dominant, weaving through the through the iPod, smartphone, and AI eras. Plus, their wild corporate story of going public, getting bought by SoftBank, going public again, and nearly being acquired by NVIDIA!Sponsors:Vanta
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1:14:09
Why Duolingo Worked (with Luis von Ahn, CEO)
Duolingo has fundamentally changed the landscape of self-guided education, starting with language learning. It is now a $9B publicly traded company in a space where everyone thought you could never build a large and exciting company. We’re joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Luis dives into how learning English was transformative in his personal trajectory and opportunities in his life, inspiring him to create the most successful EdTech product of all time. A few topics in this episode:How Duolingo became a leader in the gamification and mobile-first movements in the early 2010sHow the company balances rigorous experimentation with gut instinct to build an app with customer experience at its coreThe backstory of Duolingo’s “unhinged, yet wholesome” green owl mascot trending on your TikTok feedSponsors:Vanta
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1:03:22
Building the Open Source AI Revolution (with Hugging Face CEO, Clem Delangue)
We sit down with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue to understand the current state of the open source AI ecosystem. Hugging Face is the leading platform to host and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications. They also have a compute offering for AI builders to train their models directly on the platform. Clem has a contrarian take on the future: there will not be just a few major foundation model companies with everyone using their APIs. But rather, that thousands of companies will have their own specialized AI models built in-house for their particular use case. It's obviously a very dynamic landscape and we'll have to see how it shakes out, but Clem has a pretty great viewpoint to see it all, working with their 5 million registered Hugging Face users!Links:Hugging FaceHugging Face's Series D valuing the company at $4.5 billionSponsors:Vanta
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1:08:41
Joe Montana Interview Live from Modern Treasury Transfer
We sit down with legendary quarterback Joe Montana to discuss his transition from one of the greatest athletes of all time to… one of the great venture investors today. Joe shares some of the lessons that he learned winning Super Bowls with the 49ers that he applies to his investing career at Liquid 2 Ventures. Joe also goes into their firm’s strategy and performance, finding and investing in dozens of unicorn startups at the seed and pre-seed stage.This interview was recorded live at Modern Treasury’s Transfer conference in May 2024.Acquired’s arena show at Chase Center in San Francisco is just a few weeks away! We hope you can join us. acquired.fm/sfSponsors:Vanta
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47:01
Building a Disruptive Payments Company (with Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski)
The tenacity required to build Klarna over the last 19 years is astonishing. Despite several headwinds and changes in the payments landscape since founding, Klarna is used today by 150 million consumers globally, processing two million payments a day. Founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski joins us for one of the most honest and thoughtful discussions we’ve ever had on the show. If you’re a business strategy nerd, it’s a great case study in how to leverage the strengths you have as a startup vs. incumbents, and how to compete against other startups in your space. In Klarna's case: the rapid rise of buy-now-pay-later. Sebastian also takes us into the logic of his aggressive AI strategy for cost reduction, product experience, and payments innovation.Sponsors:Vanta
ACQ2 is Ben and David's conversations with expert founders and investors. Acquired the stories of great companies — and ACQ2 dives deeper into the lessons we can learn from them, often with the protagonists themselves.
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