Acquired Episode 17: Waze

Topics covered include:

• Community Showcase: the Nexcast podcasting platform from listener Brian Sanders, along with their podcast chronicling the team’s journey building the company
• Waze’s origin in cofounder & CTO Ehud Shabtai’s desire to hack his portable GPS navigation unit
• Waze CEO Noam Bardin’s retrospective blog post on the Waze journey
• Waze’s Palo Alto office and the bizarre Silicon Valley phenomenon of tech companies being located in retail storefronts
• Apple’s ill-fated launch of Apple Maps as part of iOS 6 at WWDC 2012, Apple’s subsequent apology letter, and Scott Forstall’s ultimate ouster from the company
• The climax of the mobile platform wars… which it turns out Apple and Google both won
• Apple, Facebook, and Google all vying to acquire Waze throughout 2013
• Google’s renewed design ethos under Larry Page
• Ben and David spontaneously agree (surprise) to create on a new category of acquisition for the show
• The increasing strategic value of data and data assets as technology enters the age of machine learning
• The coming mega trend of autonomous vehicles, and the role Israeli startups are playing in it (including the globalization of startups & innovation)
• The disruptive power of network and data-based business models
• Emergence of native as *the* definitive advertising medium on mobile, including ability to close the advertising loop via location-based products and services

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
• Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry
• Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25
• Vanta: https://vanta.com/acquired

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The Carve Out:

• Ben: Weezer’s “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori” on Song Exploder
• David: Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” TED Talk

Followups:

• None this week… coverage of Instagram Stories to come next time!