Acquired21 Jun 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

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(214)

The New York Times Company

For the entire 20th Century, you’d be hard pressed to find a better business than an American newspaper — Warren Buffett famously described them as “franchises” — and no American newspaper stood talle...

18 Feb 20213h 9min

Special: Sequoia Capital's Investment Playbook (with Alfred Lin)

We cover Sequoia Capital a lot on this show. Not only across our now four(!) dedicated episodes, but across a stunning nearly 50% of recent season companies where Sequoia was a primary or only investo...

1 Feb 202158min

Bitcoin

We had to do it. After 12 years and 3,000,000x appreciation, we kick off Season 8 with the best investment of all-time and our biggest episode ever: Bitcoin. From the first bitcoin transaction of 10k ...

19 Jan 20213h 14min

Special: Acquired x Indie Hackers

As regular listeners know, we typically cover some of the biggest companies who often receive the most media attention (see Airbnb and DoorDash). But today's episode is a little different. In our conv...

17 Des 20201h 51min

Airbnb

Over 13 years after its founding, one of the defining startup companies of the past decade finally makes its public debut — and boy was it a big one. But for all the hype (and all the legitimately gre...

11 Des 20202h 40min

DoorDash

Live from the scene of its blockbuster IPO, we recount the crazy, roller coaster journey of this "Palo Alto delivery company". From Sand Hill darling during their Series A and B fundraises to all but ...

10 Des 20203h

Slack + Salesforce Emergency Pod with Packy McCormick of Not Boring

Acquired is live on the scene covering Salesforce's blockbuster $27.7B acquisition of Slack, with the help of the internet's #1 Slack bull (and top internet analyst in his own right), Packy McCormick ...

2 Des 20201h 32min

Virgin Galactic

Live from the 2020 ASCEND Space Conference, Acquired covers the full story behind the most "out there" technology story of the past few years: Virgin Galactic. How did this space tourism company grow ...

23 Nov 20201h 48min