the best Acquired podcast episodes, ranked by tactics per hour

Charlie Munger says

There aren't many times in a lifetime when you know you're right and you know you have one that's really going to work wonderfully, maybe five or six times in a lifetime you get a chance to do it. People who do it two or three times early all go broke because they think it's easy, when in fact it's very hard and rare. When you know you have an edge you should bet heavily. Most people, they don't teach that in business school, it's insane.

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Before your next major allocation decision, ask whether this is a rare, high-conviction setup or an ordinary one, and size accordingly.

Mark Zuckerberg says

I never thought about us as a social media or social app company, we are a social connection company. We started as a website, then moved to mobile apps. Building glasses to let people feel present with each other is the natural continuation of the apps we build today.

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Write one sentence defining your company by the underlying job it does, not its current product format.

Jamie Dimon says

Our stress test should be worst ever, not the stress test the Fed gives us, meaning markets down 50%, interest rates up to 8%, and credit spreads back to worst ever. I run as conservative an accountant as you can find and I don't upfront profits when I can spread them over time. If I make bad loans, they are bad revenues, they will kill you, but for a while they look pretty good. We look right through the cycle at the actual economics of what we do, not the accounting of what we do.

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Today, review one key financial assumption and check it against the actual worst historical case, not the optimistic one.

Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal says

Nvidia had designed their chip for a constraint that was no longer true by the time everyone else came out with their stuff. The company had about 9 months of runway left, and like anybody else, that meant pulling the plug was a real possibility. The only thing they could do was standardize on the same Microsoft direct 3D architecture as everyone else. They had to lay off 70% of the company, going down to about 35 people, and eventually shipped the Reva 128, which turned out to be a beast.

Try this

Identify one assumption behind your current product that no longer matches the market, and decide today whether to abandon it rather than keep iterating.

Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal says

Costco enforces a strict cap on margin, marking up a maximum of 14 percent above supplier cost. The only exception is Kirkland's signature, where they cheat a little and let themselves go up to 15, quite indulgent. You could raise the price of a bottle of ketchup to a dollar and three cents instead of one dollar and no one would know. Raising prices just three percent would add fifty percent to pre-tax income. Even Walmart marks up 25, which is almost twice as much as Costco's margin. For every dollar Costco gets a supplier to reduce the price on something, tough but fair, the customer actually sees most, about 89 percent, of the benefit.

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Pick one margin or fee number in your business and write down the ceiling you will not cross this quarter.

Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal says

Excite's CEO refused the Backrub deal because he wanted people to stay on his site and view banner ads, not leave quickly, since he made money when people stayed on his site. Google from the start focused on how quickly it could deliver someone something relevant so they could leave Google having had a good experience finding what they really wanted. This conflict of interest is basically why Google beat Yahoo.

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Review your core user flow today and remove any step that exists only to boost your own engagement metrics rather than help the user finish their task.

Howard Schultz says

The equity of the brand even back then was much larger than the size of the business. Tourists in the Pike Place store would buy a bag and fill out a card asking to have coffee mailed to them in their home city. People were talking about Starbucks way outside of Seattle as if it was already some kind of iconic big company. No money was spent on marketing, there was zero money for it, so the cup people carried became a free billboard.

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Identify one thing customers already do that spreads your brand for free, and make it slightly more visible this week.

Jensen Huang says

At the moment they decided together and reasoned through something, everybody heard the decision at exactly the same time, so nobody has more power than anybody else. The new college grad learned at exactly the same time as the executive staff. You earn the right to have your job based on your ability to reason through things and help other people succeed, not because you have some privileged information.

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When making a decision, include people from different levels in the room so everyone hears the reasoning at the same time.