Ben Gilbert

Why?

And does that why have something to do with the fact that we study the world's best companies?

Like is there some osmosis that happens from the subject matter bleeding into the property itself?

And?

So that's our frame.

Most of these things are actually, I think, are confirmation bias.

We get some inkling that we should continue to go in this direction.

In calling out Hermes, it's because I think quality and scarcity have become an important part of Acquired.

And in some ways, we learned that from Hermes, but we covered Hermes last year.

I think we found our way to that probably four-ish years ago, maybe five years ago, where we used to feel like...

we were bad at podcasting because we couldn't make very many and because we didn't have a whole production team and we didn't have professional ad sales people and we didn't have... We weren't full-time for a long time.

Yeah, and at some point we kind of looked at each other and we were like, maybe if we just admit that we are heavily constrained and then try to just lean into that constraint...

in the way that Hermes leans into every single Birkenbag must be handmade by one artisan, and we're going to build a business model around that.

And it turns out to be a great business.

We sort of thought every episode is going to be entirely handcrafted by us, all the research, all the recording.

We work with this amazing audio engineer, Steven, who does the literal waveform editing, but we go in and in a transcript highlight a thousand cuts per episode.

It's this made-with-love product

And it turned out we could actually build a big platform and a good business out of something heavily constrained.

No.

No, no, no.