Ben Gilbert

Sometimes we don't nail it.

Sometimes we don't come across.

It also requires you to learn something new while you're making the creative work.

If you come in with a point of view

And you come in, let's say we try to, I was so afraid when we were making Trader Joe's that we were going to remake the Costco episode.

And I was like, this episode's going to suck because we're not going to have the original enthusiasm that we had.

Or it's Costco but it's for furniture like Ikea.

And then we get it and we're like, oh, this is totally different than Costco.

You have to have new insights that delight you as you're researching it so that you can make something great.

And I think the reasons Acquired will eventually fail is,

I don't think come from platform disruption.

Like, oh, TikTok's going to make it so people want short form instead of acquired.

Maybe, but the more likely reason that we eventually fail is we stop being delighted by new things we discover, so we have nothing new to deliver to listeners.

Right.

I agree with that.

Okay, listeners, now is a great time to thank one of our very favorite partners, Shopify.

And David, we recorded this episode with Michael the week after Thanksgiving.

And while you and I were nice and festive and coming off of some relaxing time with family, the Shopify team had been cranking because Black Friday and Cyber Monday is, of course, the biggest sales weekend of the year for merchants around the world.

That is absolutely nuts.

That four-day sales volume number, that's almost twice as much as Shopify's entire annual volume when they went public in 2015, of course, as we chronicled on our acquired episode on Shopify back a few years ago.