Building Web Apps with Just English and AI (with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch)

More from ACQ2 by Acquired

1. 

   16 Jun 2025 · 1 hr 14 min

   Building the Savannah Bananas (with Jesse Cole, Founder and Owner)

   The Savannah Bananas have created a whole new sport. It’s baseball, but it’s not. It’s fast-paced, exciting, and incredibly entertaining. For example, if you're batting, and you step out of the batter’s box... it’s a strike. If you bunt, you’re out. If a fan catches a foul ball… you’re also out. Games are capped at two hours with no exceptions. It’s sacrilegious to traditional baseball fans everywhere. But it’s hard to argue with their numbers: they have 3.2 million fans on a waiting list to see them and have been selling out 80,000-seat football stadiums over the past few months! Today, we…

2. 

   27 May 2025 · 59 min

   Undoing a $5 Billion Acquisition and Building a Durable Standalone Plaid (with Plaid CEO Zach Perret)

   We sit down with Zach Perret, CEO of Plaid, to discuss the remarkable journey of Plaid and the broader fintech landscape over the past several years. Zach takes us blow-by-blow through journey of almost getting acquired by Visa, the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic… which quickly reversed with ZIRP tailwinds, and how Plaid navigated the volatile market conditions to build a diversified business. We explore the company’s strategic pivots, including their expansion into analytics for fraud detection, alternative credit systems, and bank payments. If you’ve ever wondered “how do…

3. 

   10 Mar 2025 · 55 min

   The Art of Selling Enterprise Software (with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott)

   We sit down with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott for a masterclass in the art of enterprise sales — a topic where Bill ranks as one of the all-time greats by any measure. Bill started his career as a bag-carrying salesman at Xerox in New York City (alongside Howard Schultz!) back in 1983, and rose to become the company’s youngest corporate officer at age 36 before going on to become CEO of global software giant SAP. Since joining ServiceNow in 2020 Bill has grown the company from $3.5 billion in revenue over $10 billion today, and a nearly $200B market cap — which makes it one of the largest…

4. 

   2 Dec 2024 · 1 hr 12 min

   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,…

5. 

   11 Nov 2024 · 1 hr 1 min

   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…

6. 

   14 Oct 2024 · 1 hr 7 min

   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…

7. 

   8 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 14 min

   The Insane Productivity of Andrew Ross Sorkin

   Andrew Ross Sorkin does the work of about five people. He founded and writes the DealBook newsletter for the New York Times. He hosts Squawk Box on CNBC every morning at 6am. He runs the DealBook Summit, which has become the premier annual interview event across business, policy, and technology. He co-created the TV show Billions. He wrote the definitive account of the 2008 financial crisis, "Too Big to Fail", and now he's written "1929," a 600-page epic about the greatest crash in Wall Street history. So how does he actually do all of this? Today we sit down with Andrew to answer exactly…

8. 

   18 Sep 2025 · 1 hr 47 min

   How to Live in Everyone Else's Future (with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke)

   Tobi is one of the most thoughtful people in the technology industry. He's also one of the very few people who started as a programmer -- just trying to solve his own problem -- and still runs his company as CEO today even as it approaches a $200B market cap. Tobi has done this in two big ways: first, a willingness throw away his past beliefs in the face of new data, growing into the leader the company needed. And second, by remaining a close observer (and participant!) in how new technology emerges that changes what is possible. Today we talk with him about both. The first half of the…

9. 

   18 Aug 2025 · 1 hr 13 min

   How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor)

   Is AI just better software? Or something completely different that requires a new paradigm to understand? Today we sit down with Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, two of the best product builders in the world to tackle that question. Bret and Clay are the co-founders of the AI company Sierra. Brett's resume reads like a greatest hits of Silicon Valley: co-creator of Google Maps, founder of FriendFeed (acquired by Facebook where he became CTO), founder of Quip (acquired by Salesforce where he became co-CEO), former Chairman of the Board at Twitter, and current Chairman of the Board at OpenAI. Clay…

10. 

    20 Aug 2024 · 45 min

    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…

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