Visa Follow-Up and Today’s Payments Ecosystem (with Gaurav Ahuja)

More from ACQ2 by Acquired All episodes →

1. 

   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…

2. 

   24 Jun 2024 · 1 hr 18 min

   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…

3. 

   24 May 2024 · 1 hr 17 min

   The Space Industry in 2024, and How to Build a Satellite Company

   The space industry is one of the most fascinating areas of technology in 2024. The reduction in launch costs and proliferation of satellites make all kinds of new businesses possible. Today we are joined by Austin Link, the co-founder and CEO of Starfish Space (where Ben and PSL Ventures are investors!). Austin lays out the state of the space industry today, particularly as it pertains to startups. He and Ben explore what it takes to build a space company, then gets into the specifics of what Starfish Space is building. Starfish Space has created a spacecraft to dock with and reposition…

4. 

   6 May 2024 · 1 hr 14 min

   The Software Behind Silicon (with Synopsys Founder Aart de Geus and CEO Sassine Ghazi)

   If you’ve been waiting for us to venture back to the land of semiconductors, you’re in luck! On our NVIDIA and TSMC episodes, we explored two components of the silicon value chain: the fabless chip companies that design chips and the foundries that manufacture them. Today, we dive into the software that powers it all, the field electronic design automation (EDA). This is essentially the software that enables chip designers to do their jobs, which has changed dramatically with the rise of AI. This interview is with two people who understand that world better than anyone: Aart de Geus, the…

5. 

   6 Mar 2024 · 58 min

   The Scientific Journey Behind Ozempic (with Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, Novo Nordisk's Chief Scientific Advisor)

   On our Novo Nordisk episode , we covered the business of Ozempic, the GLP-1 taking the world by storm. On this episode, we dive into the science of the molecule semaglutide (and its predecessor liraglutide) with the world expert on the topic, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen. Lotte is Novo Nordisk’s Chief Scientific Advisor, and led the research group back in the early 1990s that first invented the molecule. A few topics from our conversation: The science behind what is happening in the body that causes weight loss while on Ozempic What it was like in the 1990s and 2000s believing in a drug for a…

6. 

   6 Nov 2023 · 1 hr 36 min

   Morgan Housel

   We sit down with Morgan Housel, who is one of our very favorite authors and has also become a good friend of the show over the past few years. Morgan’s last book The Psychology of Money had a huge impact on both of our personal financial philosophies (and by extension Acquired’s!), and Morgan was kind enough to give us an advance copy of his new book launching tomorrow, Same as Ever . It’s equally as good, and maybe even more relevant in the current environment for thinking about what’s not going to change as we cycle through vastly different macro financial environments. Tune in and enjoy!…

7. 

   18 Sep 2023 · 1 hr 26 min

   Doug Demuro on Analyzing the Car Industry, Creator-Led Businesses, and Porsche Episode Follow Up

   While preparing for our Porsche episode with Doug DeMuro , we had a lot more than Porsche to discuss… but the episode was already over 3 hours! We decided to save the rest for its own episode, released here on ACQ2. Doug helped us understand what’s going on with the car industry supply chain in 2023, the transition to electric vehicles, the car dealership business model, and how most consumer car purchase decisions really get made. We also got to talk with Doug about his business empire. In addition to his YouTube channel with ~5 million subscribers, Doug started a car marketplace called…

8. 

   30 Aug 2023 · 55 min

   Generative AI in Video and the Future of Storytelling (with Runway CEO Cristobal Valenzuela)

   We sit down with RunwayML’s CEO Cristobal Valenzuela to discuss the incredible tools they’re bringing to film and video creators (including last year’s Best Picture “Everything Everywhere All at Once” from A24), and the history + current state of the “visual” branch of generative AI. We cover how they’ve gone to market with both creators and enterprises, the potential for much more radical future use cases, and the company’s recent $141m strategic raise from Google, Nvidia + Salesforce and the context of the current AI fundraising landscape. Tune in! Links: Runway Follow Cris on Twitter…

9. 

   14 Aug 2023 · 1 hr 25 min

   Saving the Planet with Better AI Data Centers (with Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller)

   We sit down with Crusoe Energy CEO Chase Lochmiller to talk about the two “hard to imagine” tasks they’ve undertaken: 1) building a new AI cloud infrastructure provider from scratch, and 2) colocating and powering it with stranded energy from some of the harshest and most remote locations on earth. Crusoe’s cloud of course has to compete with (and in many cases exceed) the price/performance curves of cloud incumbents like AWS, Azure and Google in processing AI workloads. And the way it does so is by building data centers literally on top of oil flares (and other wasted energy sources) that…

10. 

    20 Jun 2023 · 1 hr 11 min

    Comparing the Dotcom Crash to Today (with Tom Cowan from TDM)

    Every now and then, we come across super interesting and under-the-radar (at least to us!) public markets folks like NZS Capital who make us think differently about the art of investing. TDM is another one of those groups — founded 18 years ago in Australia, they’ve compounded a single, private pool of capital at 26% per annum over nearly two decades. That’s Warren & Charlie territory! TDM recently published a memo comparing the current “post ZIRP bubble” market with what happened in the years following both the dot-com crash and the GFC in 2008. As always, past performance isn’t necessarily…