Acquired
01:46:14 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:46:14] S0: It's just on your behalf instead of on shareholders' behalf. [01:46:17] S1: They're working for you. And so by the mid to late nineties, the two sister funds together are approaching, like, a $100,000,000,000. Like, the Vanguard Colossus is rolling. Yep. Things are going great. And then in 1999, you're not gonna believe this, Jack manages to get himself fired again. Unbelievably. Unbelievably. [01:46:46] S0: Yes. But listeners, before we tell you that story, now is a great time to thank one of our favorite partners, Vercel. So for twenty years, cloud infrastructure was built around a pretty simple mental model. Humans send requests, servers respond, and then they scale according to the traffic. But what happens in the era of AI agents when the software itself is sending the requests and making decisions, not just responding to them? [01:47:15] S1: That's the shift is building for. The cloud wasn't designed for agents, but Vercel is. They've purpose built agentic infrastructure where agents are first class users alongside human developers. It's not just an old deployment platform with AI features bolted on. It's a ground up rethink. Tools, frameworks, infrastructure, all engineered to work together.
01:47:15 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:47:15] S1: That's the shift is building for. The cloud wasn't designed for agents, but Vercel is. They've purpose built agentic infrastructure where agents are first class users alongside human developers. It's not just an old deployment platform with AI features bolted on. It's a ground up rethink. Tools, frameworks, infrastructure, all engineered to work together. [01:47:36] S0: So one particularly noteworthy element of this is their AI gateway. Just like content delivery networks accelerated and secured the web, Vercel is doing that for agents. It's a single endpoint that routes across every major AI model with automatic failovers. So when a provider goes down, and as you know, they do Oh, yes. Your product keeps humming. So since launch, it serves 60,000,000,000,000 tokens across a 180,000 unique teams. Vercel is a new type of delivery network for tokens. [01:48:07] S1: A good example of what this unlocks is Poke, who are building personal superintelligence that hundreds of thousands of people use. Before switching to Vercel, they were maintaining their own AI infrastructure, infrastructure, everything from routing and retries to cost tracking by users. After switching, their retry rate dropped 20 x. So virtually every message now succeeds on the first try.
01:48:07 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:48:07] S1: A good example of what this unlocks is Poke, who are building personal superintelligence that hundreds of thousands of people use. Before switching to Vercel, they were maintaining their own AI infrastructure, infrastructure, everything from routing and retries to cost tracking by users. After switching, their retry rate dropped 20 x. So virtually every message now succeeds on the first try. [01:48:29] S0: AI gateway is just one tool in a complete AI stack built with, for, and optimized by agents. And that's what Vercel is really about, making sure that the most ambitious teams like OpenAI, Stripe, and Polymarket have the infrastructure to match. Because when code is increasingly autonomous, the question is no longer can you ship, it's what you choose to ship. Learn more at vercel.com/acquired. That's vercel.com/acquired, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Alright. So, David, there is something that you have not been telling us about Jack's life over the years. [01:49:06] S1: Yes. Jack, unfortunately, has a bad heart. He was born with a rare genetic heart disease called arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia or ARVD. And that means that Jack suffers his first heart attack in 1960 at age 31. So before he even becomes CEO of Wellington management, that was his first heart attack. He had, like, ten, twelve over his life. It was like a ticking time bomb. At any moment in time, he knew he could just drop dead.
01:49:06 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:49:06] S1: Yes. Jack, unfortunately, has a bad heart. He was born with a rare genetic heart disease called arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia or ARVD. And that means that Jack suffers his first heart attack in 1960 at age 31. So before he even becomes CEO of Wellington management, that was his first heart attack. He had, like, ten, twelve over his life. It was like a ticking time bomb. At any moment in time, he knew he could just drop dead. [01:49:42] S0: And what Jack decided to do with this was work. At the age of 36, he got a pacemaker, and he consulted a doctor. And that doctor said, you really shouldn't count on living past 40. Then he went and talked to a second doctor, and that doctor said, why don't you get a place out in Cape Cod and stop working and enjoy the last few years you have left? Don't work anymore. He wrote at one point, if I had taken the second doctor's advice, the first doctor would have been right. [01:50:15] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Man, this is totally Jack's unique personality. The way he approaches this part of his life is not gonna change a thing. I'm just gonna live every day the same way I would have lived it if I didn't have this disease. Yep. And the stories around this are amazing. I think one time he collapsed and had a heart attack waiting for the commuter train out of Philadelphia, and it was lying there on the ground. And the ambulance and the paramedics come, and he makes a bet with them that they won't get him to the hospital in time to save his life. He just had that kind of attitude and approach to it.
01:50:15 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:50:15] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Man, this is totally Jack's unique personality. The way he approaches this part of his life is not gonna change a thing. I'm just gonna live every day the same way I would have lived it if I didn't have this disease. Yep. And the stories around this are amazing. I think one time he collapsed and had a heart attack waiting for the commuter train out of Philadelphia, and it was lying there on the ground. And the ambulance and the paramedics come, and he makes a bet with them that they won't get him to the hospital in time to save his life. He just had that kind of attitude and approach to it. [01:50:53] S0: He would bring defibrillators to squash matches. [01:50:56] S1: Oh, this is the best. Yeah. [01:50:58] S0: And it it happened at one point where he had a heart attack while playing and had to count on his opponent running over and reviving him. [01:51:06] S1: Yeah. Yeah. And he would use this to, like, intimidate his opponents while playing. He'd be like, make sure I got my defibrillator here. I could drop dead at any moment. Alright. Let's go. You know? [01:51:16] S0: It's amazing.
01:51:18 · David Rosenthal
[01:51:18] S1: So as Vanguard's really taking off and indexing is taking off, Jack's heart is just getting weaker and weaker and more and more worn down from all this. In 1994, his twin brother David dies also from heart complications. And by 1995, over half of Jack's heart has stopped working. Ugh. And so in early nineteen ninety five, his doctors say, hey. We know your approach to life, but we can't put this off any longer. Despite your relatively advanced age for this, he's 66 at the time, you need to have a heart transplant if you wanna have any hope of actually, you know, surviving for a meaningful period of time going forward. Jack and the family are brought around. They agree to this. So this, of course, impacts Vanguard. So in May 1995, the company holds a press conference where Jack announces that he's stepping down as CEO to prepare for his heart transplant. And the company announces that John Brennan, Jack's former assistant who had joined the company in 1982, will be taking over as the next CEO. Brendan had been Vanguard's CFO for many years leading up to this. And in late nineteen ninety five, Jack Bogle enters the hospital on a waiting list for a heart transplant. His heart has continued to degenerate. He needs to be hooked up to an IV, feeding him drugs to keep his heart beating constantly. He waits a hundred and twenty eight days in the hospital waiting for a heart transplant, and he keeps working the whole time. He hasn't officially transitioned out of the CEO role and given it to Brennan yet. Maybe a little bit of foreshadowing here. On 01/31/1996, Jack officially steps down as CEO, and Brennan takes over after more than three months of operating as CEO out of his hospital room. Unreal. Really, Jack is one of a kind here. And then in February, finally, they get the call. There's a heart available for Jack, and he has the heart transplant at the February. So the day of the surgery arrives.