Acquired21 Kesä 2017

Acquired Episode 39: Whole Foods Market

Ben and David are once again live on the scene, this time covering the biggest disruption in grocery since… well, sliced bread: Amazon’s $13.7B purchase of Whole Foods Market. We place this deal in context by diving deep into the long, intertwining history of grocery, tech and Amazon, from the infamous dotcom flameout Webvan (domain name now owned by Amazon) to its much more successful progeny Kiva Systems (acquired by Amazon in 2012) to current Silicon Valley unicorn Instacart (founded by former Amazon logistics engineer Apoorva Mehta). One thing is clear: for Amazon and Jeff Bezos, realizing the longterm vision of the Everything Store truly means building the everything store.

Sponsors:

Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry
WorkOS: https://bit.ly/workos25
Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26

More Acquired!

Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodes
Join the Slack
Subscribe to ACQ2
Merch Store!

Topics covered include:

The origins of Whole Foods Market as “Saferway” in the late 70’s Austin, TX hippie scene, founded by CEO John Mackey (“the Steve Jobs of grocery stores”) and his then-girlfriend Renee Lawson Hardy
Whole Foods’ expansion through acquisition throughout the 80’s and 90’s
The company’s recent struggles with competition, leading to sales declines and attracting activist shareholder interest from Jana Partners
Amazon’s acquisition of the company on June 16, 2017 for $13.7 billion, a 27 percent premium to the stock's previous day closing price
In depth history and analysis of the four keys to understanding this deal: Webvan, Kiva Systems, AmazonFresh and Instacart

Followups:

Walmart/Jet buys Bonobos for $310M

The Carve Out:

Ben: Mark Zuckerberg’s 2005 CS50 guest lecture
David: Exponent on Podcasting and Centralization

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(214)

Google Maps

Ben and David cover the series of three 2004 Google acquisitions that formed the core of Google Maps as we know and love it today: Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash. From nearly zero adoption ...

26 Elo 20191h 42min

The Shopify IPO

Ben and David head north of the border to Ottawa, Canada to cover perhaps one of the greatest IPO success stories of the past 5 years, Shopify. From humble beginnings as a “lifestyle business” hawking...

6 Elo 20191h 31min

Huawei

For our first episode of Season 5, Acquired returns to Shenzhen to cover another Chinese technology giant, this one slightly... different from our past subjects: Huawei. From a backwater importer of P...

22 Heinä 20191h 9min

Superhuman (with CEO Rahul Vohra)

We wrap up Season 4 with a very special (and accidental!) episode, a conversation with the CEO of Superhuman, the red hot email productivity app which just announced their $33m Series B led by Andrees...

27 Kesä 20191h 22min

The Slack DPO

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an... enterprise software company? We give the full Acquired treatment to newly-public Slack, one of the most extreme and successful pivots of all-time. From a log cabi...

25 Kesä 20192h

The Zoom IPO (with Santi Subotovsky)

Zoom board member (and general partner at Emergence Capital) Santi Subotovsky joins us to tell the true underdog story behind the hottest IPO of 2019. Together we trace founder Eric Yuan’s incredible ...

19 Kesä 20191h 23min

The Electronic Arts IPO (with Trip Hawkins)

Acquired looks back at a monumental IPO from a *much* different era: Electronic Arts. We’re joined by EA’s founder Trip Hawkins to tell the incredible story of how he built the company that made video...

27 Touko 20192h 5min

The Uber IPO

Welcome to the big one. On the day of its IPO, we tell the story of Uber. It’s a story whose roots stretch back 130 years, but whose impact reverberates perhaps more powerfully on our current world th...

11 Touko 20192h 26min