2017 Holiday Special

The holiday special begins as a gathering for listeners as much as a year-end recap. Ben and David discuss an upcoming San Francisco meetup, credit a longtime listener for helping organize it, and note that the Slack community has grown to more than 1,000 members. They also announce that the show will move to a season format in 2018: roughly ten episodes over six months, with room to experiment and potentially devote about three episodes to a connected miniseries. The hosts frame the change as a way to test ideas without making any single experiment permanent.

Their review of favorite episodes shows how differently the hosts evaluate the year. David names Snap and Square as runners-up, then chooses the Beats episode because it brought together Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre, the company's origin and its sale to Apple. Ben instead chooses the Square IPO episode and says its analysis of the IPO narrative and the company's fundamentals was especially well structured. Their praise also exposes a disagreement they have not resolved: Ben still questions the grade they gave YouTube, which reflected concerns about opportunity cost and whether the business made money, while he has become more convinced of YouTube's value to Google's broader ecosystem.

The hosts explain why they want a personal section in the annual episode. Listeners have asked about their day-to-day lives, and the scale of Acquired has changed how others recognize them even though the show takes only a small share of their waking hours. David describes 2017 as unusually consequential: his wife Jenny finished a six-and-a-half-year PhD, he left his full-time role at Seattle venture firm Madrona, and the two spent several months in Paris before moving to San Francisco. He says he is also building a new venture with a partner, but cannot yet share details. The account presents these developments as personal reflection, not as a business update about the unnamed company.