Greater than 6,000 techies streamed on Tuesday night into San Francisco’s Chase Middle, a cavernous occasion house that’s house to the Golden State Warriors and hosts pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo. Engineers, enterprise capitalists and different Silicon Valley digerati chatted as they discovered their seats, with Modelos and slices of pizza in hand. The anticipation was excessive.
They weren’t there to affix a rager of a live performance. As a substitute, they’d paid $50 or extra a ticket to see Mark Zuckerberg, the chief govt of Meta, tape a podcast about synthetic intelligence, the metaverse and the way he outmaneuvered the remainder of Silicon Valley to maintain his firm successful.
“You underestimate how painful issues are going to be, so you possibly can go and do good issues,” Mr. Zuckerberg instructed the group concerning the 20-year historical past of constructing his empire, which incorporates Fb, Instagram and WhatsApp. He talked about Aeschylus, the traditional Greek dramatist who is usually described as the daddy of tragedy, in a nod to the prolonged time horizons he thinks in for his firm.
The viewers, a sea of Patagonia sweater vests and techno-optimism, roared in approval.
Different scions of capitalism piped up too. Jamie Dimon, the chief govt of JPMorgan Chase, appeared on the jumbotron. Daniel Ek, the founding father of Spotify, flew in from Sweden for the chat. Even Jensen Huang, the very busy chief govt of Nvidia, made a cameo look. A full band performed musical interludes in between segments.
It was the most well liked ticket in San Francisco as Mr. Zuckerberg spoke for practically an hour and a half with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, the creators of the podcast “Acquired.” The hit present, which has change into a must-listen for businesspeople the world over, has an viewers of greater than 800,000 and has taped episodes with the highest executives of Uber, Sequoia Capital, Berkshire Hathaway and others.
However Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, was the most important get but. “This can be a celebration of know-how,” Mr. Rosenthal declared onstage.
If it sounds unusual {that a} podcast managed to land a few of the world’s highest-profile enterprise leaders, chances are you’ll not have been paying consideration. Lately, billionaires and high executives in Silicon Valley, Wall Avenue and past have began to decide out of the staid observe of sitting just for conventional media interviews.
As a substitute, they more and more want to inform their very own tales within the pleasant areas of podcasts and YouTube streams, the place they typically have extra leeway to wax — often at nice size — about their pursuits and passions. Lots of the interviews are like fireplace chats over beers with the boys. And the “Acquired” occasion confirmed how these codecs have amassed important gathering energy, as podcasters like Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Gilbert, Lex Fridman and Dwarkesh Patel have risen to fame from relative obscurity.
“The democratization of media has allowed everybody to have a private speak present and now, these in highly effective positions have a big selection of choices to select from after they wish to get the phrase out to the general public,” mentioned Jules Terpak, a digital tradition analyst who additionally often interviews tech executives for her personal podcast.
Not way back, the tech elite performed by the e-book when it got here to coping with the press. Mr. Zuckerberg and his friends had been regulars on the dwell journalism circuit, showing at occasions just like the D: All Issues Digital tech convention and South by Southwest. They usually sat for interviews with established information organizations like The Washington Submit, The Wall Avenue Journal and, sure, The New York Instances.
Because the web business emerged within the late Nineteen Nineties and past, media consideration was centered on Silicon Valley’s gold rush and wunderkinds like Mr. Zuckerberg, who constructed Fb in his Harvard College dorm room after which turned it right into a multibillion-dollar firm after he dropped out of faculty.
However as tech corporations like Google, Amazon, Apple and Fb, which Mr. Zuckerberg later renamed Meta, grew exponentially in scope and profile, media protection developed to concentrate on the companies’ energy and accountability — typically to the chagrin of the executives in cost. On the similar time, the rise of YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Twitch produced a era of particular person broadcasters, a lot of whom eschewed conventional reportage for a webcam and a podcast mic.
“There’s a bent to ‘go direct’ to your viewers in tech nowadays, particularly as press protection has tended towards being extra vital through the years,” mentioned Sheel Mohnot, a basic companion on the enterprise capital agency Higher Tomorrow Ventures in San Francisco. “Loads of these guys want to go to people who do their homework and current an important story.”
“It’s not that they don’t present any stability,” Mr. Mohnot added. “They do push again. However they’ll additionally publish the complete interview, and to C.E.O.s, that basically issues.”
In a press release, a Meta spokeswoman mentioned that Mr. Zuckerberg “speaks usually with conventional journalists, podcasters and creators and finds worth in talking to a spread of individuals with totally different views and audiences.” (Over the summer time, he sat for an interview with Bloomberg.)
Mr. Gilbert, 35, and Mr. Rosenthal, 39, who labored in enterprise capital, started “Acquired” after assembly by probability at a buddy’s Passover dinner in Seattle in 2014. They hit it off and stayed in contact, speaking about tech business tendencies. Additionally they got here up with an concept for a enterprise podcast that will concentrate on one case examine in every episode of an organization shopping for one other firm.
They began the podcast with that format in 2015, whereas maintaining their day jobs. Mr. Gilbert lives in Seattle and Mr. Rosenthal in San Francisco.
“Acquired” finally developed away from acquisition tales to going deep on one main firm per episode. Topics included Microsoft and LVMH, with episodes spanning two to 4 hours. Every podcast took from dozens to a whole bunch of hours of analysis, with Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Rosenthal sifting by way of books, movies, articles and monetary transcripts to assemble a story of how an organization succeeded over a time frame.
After years of the podcast being a ardour venture, “Acquired” blew up throughout the early pandemic lockdowns as extra individuals found it whereas caught at house. In Silicon Valley, the podcast’s followers embody Eddy Cue, Apple’s head of providers, who listens to the present throughout his commute, and Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, who instructed the podcasters how a lot he loved the present and linked them to Mr. Zuckerberg for the Chase Middle occasion.
“We’re obsessive about why corporations work, and so are they,” Mr. Gilbert mentioned in an interview over breakfast in Oakland final week.
Mr. Rosenthal added, “I imagine they recognize the tales we inform, and the way they may apply to their very own corporations.”
The podcast has proved profitable. Sponsors of “Acquired,” which embody JPMorgan Chase, pays upward of $500,000 for a partnership deal. Mr. Rosenthal left enterprise capital in 2020 to work full time on the podcast. Mr. Gilbert did the identical earlier this yr.
(Different unbiased podcasters have completed even higher. Joe Rogan, the iconoclastic actor-turned-podcast host who has interviewed Mr. Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the enterprise capitalist Peter Thiel in recent times, renegotiated a multiyear take care of Spotify this yr for a reported $250 million.)
The occasion Tuesday was a capstone to the success of “Acquired.” Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Rosenthal’s podcast has been listened to for roughly 5.2 million hours on Spotify, based on Mr. Ek — or greater than 400 years of audio, in fast back-of-the-envelope math completed by Mr. Rosenthal.
For Mr. Zuckerberg, the taping performed out like a victory lap. Carrying his hair curly and a graphic black-and-white T-shirt he had customized made, he sat in an armchair onstage, together with his picture projected behind him on a large display screen.
Mr. Zuckerberg riffed at size concerning the challenges Meta has confronted over time, together with a troublesome interval within the early 2010s when Fb needed to shift from being a social community that was accessed totally on desktop computer systems to 1 used on smartphones. He mentioned he deliberate to stay round for a lot of extra years to come back.
“It’s rather a lot like that Michael Jordan advert,” Mr. Zuckerberg mentioned, referencing a industrial the place the basketball celebrity as soon as talked about his many losses to different groups through the years. “Even after failing over and over, he succeeded.”
