A Fan’s Research Compendium · Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal
Acquired
A working catalogue of what I have learned listening to Acquired — the patterns Ben and David return to, the facts I kept writing down, the people they interview, and the industries I realized I knew almost nothing about.
A · Featured deep-dives
36 companies, one framework
Each has its own deep-dive with transcript-grounded evidence, external citations, and the cross-links into patterns + concepts. A representative slice below; the full set lives in the library.
Ferrari
Build the road cars only to fund the racing programme — never the other way around.
4 strategies · 7 numbers · 8 events →Costco
Members pay an annual fee for the right to shop; merchandise margin stays near zero — the fee IS the business.
8 strategies · 9 numbers · 10 events →NVIDIA
Programmable graphics accelerators for PC gaming — and, by Jensen's stated bet at the founding, eventually a wedge into general-purpose accelerated computing.
6 strategies · 8 numbers · 13 events →Apple
Personal computing for the rest of us — Wozniak built the machine, Jobs figured out who would buy it and what they would pay for the experience of owning it.
6 strategies · 5 numbers · 13 events →Amazon
The web would grow at 2,300% per year — Bezos calculated this in 1994. He made a list of the 20 most mail-order-friendly products and picked books: 3 million titles in print versus 150,000 in the largest physical store.
6 strategies · 4 numbers · 12 events →Microsoft
Every computer in the world will run Microsoft software — a bold claim in 1975 when computers filled rooms, but Gates bet on the hobbyist PC market before it existed and structured every deal to own the software, never the hardware.
6 strategies · 5 numbers · 13 events →Google
Rank the web on its own link structure (PageRank) to organize the world's information, then monetize intent at the moment of search with a self-serve ad auction.
8 strategies · 7 numbers · 13 events →Berkshire Hathaway
Buffett's thesis was not to build a textile company — it was to use an undervalued cigar-butt asset to extract capital and redeploy it at higher rates of return than the industry could generate. The textile mills were the funding mechanism, not the business.
5 strategies · 5 numbers · 12 events →Visa
Create a member-owned cooperative that the competing banks themselves control — so that the network benefits everyone — rather than letting any single bank own the rails.
6 strategies · 4 numbers · 8 events →TSMC
Pure-play foundry — manufacture chips for other companies only, never design or compete with them. Customers, not products, are the relationship the company defends.
6 strategies · 7 numbers · 11 events →Netflix
DVDs were small enough to mail economically — unlike VHS tapes. A subscription model with no late fees would be structurally different from Blockbuster's per-rental, late-fee-dependent model.
4 strategies · 3 numbers · 9 events →Tesla
Electric vehicles would only become mainstream if they first became desirable. A high-end electric sports car (the Roadster) would prove that EVs could exceed internal-combustion performance, funding the technology development for cheaper mass-market vehicles.
4 strategies · 4 numbers · 9 events →LVMH
Treat luxury as a portfolio business — acquire crown-jewel artisan houses, scale them through the couture→accessories pyramid, and never sell.
7 strategies · 7 numbers · 10 events →The NFL
A league structure where franchises cooperate on scheduling, rules, and economic sharing so that competition on the field is balanced enough to maximize fan engagement — the opposite of a normal market, where the strongest competitor wins everything.
4 strategies · 4 numbers · 7 events →Meta
A real-identity social graph where people connect using their actual names — the inverse of every prior online community. Thefacebook.com launched at Harvard, spread to other Ivy League colleges, then to all universities, then to everyone.
5 strategies · 5 numbers · 11 events →