Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal have turned Acquired into something that honestly shouldn't work as well as it does: three-to-four-hour deep dives into single companies, released every few weeks. And yet it's become one of the most beloved business podcasts around, sitting at a 4.7 rating from over 4,000 reviewers. Their approach is closer to a well-researched audiobook than a typical podcast episode. They'll spend weeks preparing, then walk through the entire arc of how a company was built -- the founding story, the key strategic decisions, the financing rounds, the near-death moments. Their catalog reads like a business school curriculum: Coca-Cola, the NFL, Google, Trader Joe's, NVIDIA. Each episode dissects not just what happened but why specific decisions mattered and what other founders and investors can learn from them. Gilbert is a managing partner at Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle, and Rosenthal runs Crusoe Capital, so they bring genuine operational and investing experience to their analysis. The venture capital angle shows up constantly because so many of these company stories involve early-stage funding decisions that shaped everything that followed. When they covered NVIDIA, for instance, they traced how the company's early VC backing influenced its strategic patience through years of GPU development before AI made it all pay off. They've also hosted guests like Jamie Dimon, Steve Ballmer, and Michael Lewis. The main caveat: these are long episodes. You need to commit the time. But if you treat them like what they really are -- serialized business case studies -- there's nothing else quite like Acquired in the podcast world right now.