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David Rosenthal

Co-founder & Co-host, Acquired

Search every verified David Rosenthal interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. David Rosenthal, co-founder and co-host of the podcast Acquired, has recently released episodes covering the business histories of Seinfeld and The Home Depot, as well as appearing on the TBPN live show. In the Seinfeld episode, Rosenthal discussed the show's enduring popularity, noting that Nielsen data showed 72 million Americans watched it in 2026, and detailed the syndication profit structure, attributing roughly 50% to Castle Rock and its successors, with 15% each to Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. In the Home Depot episode, he highlighted that the company's stock has outperformed Apple's since its 1981 IPO, compounding at nearly 25% per year with dividends reinvested, and reflected on how the company's early practices, such as loading merchandise in the front of parking lots, changed as it scaled. On the September 14, 2026 episode of TBPN, Rosenthal discussed recent tech news, including a phone call between Donald Trump and Jensen Huang during an All-In podcast interview, and shared that he had been hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis, an illness he attributed to overexertion and dehydration from working out. He also participated in a segment reviewing the design of a Scout vehicle, including its range extender and interior fabric.

Recent appearances

  • Seinfeld - Full Episode (Audio)

    October 18, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    As you know, most of the time, Acquired episodes are audio-only. But this episode, there's a full video version! And it was only fitting to release it on Netflix, the streaming home of 'Seinfeld'. Seinfeld, which ended three decades ago, has been watched by 72 million Americans so far THIS YEAR. Behind that incredible stat is an equally incredible business story: obsessive creators, perfect market timing, an ownership structure that aligned incentives for the long term…all of which created a sitcom that became number one by breaking all the rules. Sponsors: Many thanks to our fantastic Fall…

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  • Pacing the Frontier, Perfect Little Angels, Nico Wittenborn IRL, Home Depot with Acquired

    September 14, 2026 · 📺 TBPN

    TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN:  https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...    / @tbpnlive  

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  • The Home Depot: The best-performing stock in the S&P 500 since IPO (Audio)

    September 13, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After being unceremoniously fired from their previous hardware chain at ages 48 and 35, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank took the words of their New York banker Ken Langone (who had also just accidentally caused their firings) to heart: they'd just been "kicked in the ass with a golden horseshoe.” They proceeded to author the greatest compounding story in American retail history, helped by some legendary cameos along the way from Sol Pri…

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  • Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire (Audio)

    August 10, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corporate raiders circled, salivating over offers to sell off the film library to MGM and offload the parks to hotel operators. But what followed instead was the greatest turnaround in media history under Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. Beauty and the Beast. The Lion King. Broadway. Bringing the Disney Vault home on VHS and DVD. And the greatest media acquisition of all time — ESPN. And then... it all almost fell apart. A…

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  • #108 with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal - Brainstorming with the Acquired Podcast

    July 10, 2026 · 📺 BlackNova Productions

    Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) hosts the pod today with guests Ben Gilbert (@gilbert) and David Rosenthal (djrosent) from the Aquired podcast (@acquiredfm). In today’s episode you’ll hear: Shaan asks Ben and David to give some background on themselves and the Acquired podcast (0:30), Shaan gives four personalities that every company needs to succeed (11:00), the Acquired guys pitch an idea for an Airbnb that says whether or not the location has wifi (18:00), the Acquired guys talk about making your own stock index (29:10), Shaan talks about putting solar panels into space and beaming energy back down t…

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  • Behind Google's strategic bets in AI: A conversation with the hosts of Acquired

    June 25, 2026 · 📺 Google Cloud

    Join Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, hosts of the Acquired podcast, for a deep dive into the inflection points that defined Google’s AI infrastructure. In this story-driven spotlight, Google Chief Technologist Amin Vahdat and Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, reveal the high-stakes history of the TPU and the secret ""build vs. buy"" silicon battles that shaped the modern cloud. Discover how a decade of custom hardware, cutting edge software, liquid cooling, and supply chain innovation is now architecting the future of computing for the agentic era. Watch more: 100+ sessions from Google Cloud…

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  • The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio)

    June 23, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it's the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual property rights to the childhood memories of billions of people (including, likely, all of you) and is a reliable, predictable profitable business. But it didn't start that way. During Walt's era, Disney operated like an unhinged moonshot factory, blowing its finances on one seemingly crazy project after another, like the very first feature-length animated film or a theme park inspired by Walt's fascination with model trai…

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  • Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio)

    May 18, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, on behalf of 50 million clients (including, likely, many of you). And yet Vanguard itself is essentially a communist organization — it has no shareholders, makes no profits, and operates more like REI than Fidelity. If you own a Vanguard fund, you own a piece of the firm itself. Any excess margin instead gets returned to clients in the form of lower fees, which since 1975 have added up to roughly f…

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  • Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio)

    April 13, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermes sells that many Birkins and Kellys roughly every 2 years, and Rolex moves that many watches every 3 months. And yet this ultimate luxury product also lives under the same roof with a widely-beloved professional sports team… one with 400 million rabid fans from all walks of life who live and die by the Scuderia’s performance every F1 race weekend! How is it possible that these two seemingly contradictory customer base…

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  • Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio)

    March 05, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of the Garage”, a soap opera of billionaire egos, team politics, and paddock drama that makes for incredible reality television. It's also the world's most popular annual sporting series with over 827 million fans globally — a fact that would shock most Americans, who until a recent viral Netflix series had barely heard o…

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  • The NFL: How small-town teams became America's most valuable sports empire (Audio)

    January 27, 2026 · 📺 Acquired

    The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays and holidays too) to watch the world’s most beautiful ballet of violence. It generates the most revenue of any sports league globally and sets new records for team valuations each year. But it wasn’t always this way. The history of the NFL mirrors America’s own development: scrappy small-town teams rode the successive growth waves of the automobile, TV, the Internet and social media to grow larger…

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  • 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

    December 14, 2025 · 📺 Acquired

    Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or video. Hardly the standard-issue playbook for podcasting success! And yet well over a million smart, curious and exceedingly busy humans share their (your!) valuable time with us every month. Why? This is the exact paradox that has been rolling around in the head of Michael Lewis (yes, that Michael Lewis) since he found the show earlier this year. So we asked Michael to be our guest "interlocutor" and share what he…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“So simplifying this a little bit, you can essentially think of the water flow of Seinfeld's billions of dollars of syndication profits as 15% to Sony, 15%ish, a little less because of the Sony dilution, each to Jerry and Larry, 5%ish to West Shapiro, and then 50%ish to Castle Rock and its successors, shall we say, as we go along here.”

“So I reached out to Nielsen to verify this. Not only is it true, they said that if you update it through the end of August, that number is up from 60 million to 72 million Americans. This is a show that finished making new episodes nearly three decades ago, and yet we are all still watching it. So why Netflix's 2019 deal for Seinfeld, which was reported at well more than $500 million over 5 years, was the largest sum”

“So, the way to think about it is that up until now our data center business has been almost entirely GPUs. Vera is our CPU, and you know what's really exciting is that Vera opens a brand new 200 billion TAM for NVIDIA, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscaler is partnering with us to get it deployed, and that's huge for the company because for the first time we have a second engine of that”

“Home Depot went public in 1981, one year after Apple Computer. And astonishingly, if you put $1,000 into Home Depot and Apple at their IPOs and you held them all today, your investment in Home Depot would beat your investment in Apple. And if you reinvested the dividends that it paid out, it has compounded at nearly 25% per year for 45 years. I mean, imagine if your stock portfolio did that.”

“The only case I can possibly make that we live in a worse environment is the overexploitation of IP franchises and sequelitis.”

“The real story of the last couple years though has been the parks. Man, coming out of COVID the parks have just been crushing it. And there's all sorts of criticisms that you could levy at them and people do like they're charging too much. They're nickel and diming. But especially as ESPN has been declining and as Disney Plus streaming has had a rocky go at best over the last couple years, the parks have totally fill”

Other executives at Acquired

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