Acquired
04:23:20 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[04:23:20] S0: Trader Joe's original milk supplier before they got bought by Trader Joe's competitor seven Eleven. [04:23:25] S1: Yep. That's right. And, of course, Trader Joe's itself was in part inspired by the enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland. [04:23:33] S0: That's right, which we didn't talk about, but Walt also owned that personally. It opened in '63. He put up the capital for it. I think WED owned it, and it was ticketed separately. I think it was, like, an extra 75¢ or something to go to Walt Disney's personal tiki room, which is why it's named [04:23:49] S1: Tiki Room. That's right. Alright. Carve outs. What you got? [04:23:52] S0: Alright. Follow-up to yours from the Vanguard episode. The shoes Brooks vanguards are indeed great. I ordered a pair. They're excellent. I'm not wearing them today because they're not squishy enough to stand for whatever we're at, nine hours. [04:24:07] S1: Yes. But they are great shoes. I got two pairs. [04:24:10] S0: I wear them around the neighborhood. They're awesome. I have two YouTube channels. Oh, nice. One is Defunctland. Oh, yeah. Watch this channel all the time. I forgot about it for a while, and then I rediscovered it while we were doing research. It is the stories of either Defunct or Never Built theme parks. And it walks you through the insanity of Action Park in where is that? New Jersey? [04:24:33] S1: Yep. I think that's right.
04:24:33 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[04:24:33] S1: Yep. I think that's right. [04:24:34] S0: Tons of great Disney ones, Disney parks that were never built. There's a great one on the the Florida project, so I highly recommend Defunctland. My second one is Animagraphs. There's not a lot of videos on this channel, but they're all so cool. It is three d models explained by a narrator of how really interesting pieces of machinery work. I've used it for at least two episodes that I can think of off the top of my head. One, how a mechanical watch works, and two, how a Formula one car works. I highly recommend the channel, Animagraphs. Nice. It is awesome.
04:25:09 · David Rosenthal
[04:25:09] S1: I also have two carve outs. My first one is we got a new car, a Volvo e x 30. The little guy? The little guy. A, it is awesome. It's like the perfect car for San Francisco. It fits in tight parking spaces, but it can hold my whole family. It can hold a bunch of gear. B, oh my god. Chinese EVs are incredible. So Volvo is owned by Geely, which is a Chinese company. And the e x 30 is a Geely platform EV with Volvo branding unlike the other Volvo cars. I mean, this thing is crazy. It only costs, like, $35,000, and it's awesome. Unfortunately, that leads to c, which is Volvo just canceled it in The US right after No way. Got it. Yeah. I think because of tariffs. Yeah. Oh. It is an amazing car. You can no longer buy it in The US, but you can internationally. It was a short window. And, like, man, I get Chinese EVs now. This is a really, really good car for not a lot of money. Okay. My second carve out is the San Francisco Symphony. Jenny and I went the other night. They have a new music director coming in, Ellum Chan, and this was her first performance since being named music director. She's awesome. She's 39 years old. She's so much fun and so much energy. And going to the symphony, which I hadn't been in forever, made me realize that actually through classical animation, I got a ton of exposure to classical music growing up. I think more than anything else, like through Disney films and Looney Tunes and Warner Brothers, I was just sitting there like, man, I feel like I should be watching some animation right now.
04:26:54 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[04:26:54] S0: Awesome. Alright. Well, we have got some thank yous to people who helped us with our research. But first, to our partners this season. JPMorgan, trusted, reliable payments infrastructure for your business no matter the scale. Jpmorgan.com/acquired, to Vercel, the developer tools and cloud infrastructure, to build and scale fast, secure applications on the web, vercel.com/acquired, to ServiceNow, the platform that puts AI to work for people, servicenow.com/acquired, and Statsig, bringing experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system for product teams, statsig.com/acquired. Thanks to all four of these companies for being awesome partners with us this season as we Yes. Wrap here with this finale and leave you with a cliffhanger here over the summer when we'll be back for our fall season in August. [04:27:41] S1: Disney part two. Yes. The Renaissance.
04:27:45 · Ben Gilbert
[04:27:45] S0: Ben and David will return. Yes. As always, thank you to all of our sources. The books that we read for this episode, they're all linked in the show notes. And a special thank you to Arvind Navaratnam at Worldly Partners for his great write up on Disney linked in the show notes. Arvin, for folks that don't know, is at Worldly Partners, which is a long term investment firm focused on multi decade compounding businesses. Very simpatico here with acquired. Learn more at worldlypartners.com. He provided us with the data on the rise of televisions, actually some annual reports that we were missing even from our time in the Disney archives for the original offering document for Disney selling shares to the public, all sorts of awesome stuff. Personally, thank you to Jeffrey Katzenberg. We had a great breakfast when I was down in Burbank and helped us out a lot with research, and you'll hear a lot more about him on part two. To Josh D'Amaro, the new CEO of the Walt Disney Company, for his time chatting through some stuff that we were wrestling with and helping us with research. Also to Nancy Lee and all the Disney folks in the archives, animation research library, and all the other great folks in Burbank we met with on our research trip. That really was incredible. Thank you to all of you. To Mike Miller, former Wall Street Journal editor and now frequently helping us with acquired episodes. Mike, you are awesome. To Graydon Hoare, who emailed us last year with the observation that the entire business community misuses the phrase flywheel. Yes. Appreciate your your help, Creedon.
04:29:17 · David Rosenthal
[04:29:17] S1: Glad we finally found the perfect episode to bring this up. Well, speaking of The Wall Street Journal, thank you to Ben Cohen and Emily Nelson over there who helped us track down the original flywheel article. We will link to that in the show notes. Can't wait to share it with all of you. To Mitch Lasky, our friend Mitch Lasky, former partner at Benchmark, who helped me think through a whole bunch of the flywheel dynamics. To Ryan Shear, who is Walt's great grandson and is on the board of the Walt Disney Family Museum here in San Francisco, which really is a excellent museum. It's done by the family. It's about Walt, the person. Highly recommend going to see it next time you are in San Francisco.