Jamie Dimon: Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)

The event opens with a joke about a missing thumb drive, then a prerecorded welcome from JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal explain that the live show will depart from Acquired’s usual format: instead of spending hours tracing a company’s history, they will celebrate current technology, the Bay Area, and the audience itself. A staged montage of the hosts’ recording-room missteps plays into that premise, showing the rough material normally edited out of a long episode.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek joins the hosts to review Acquired’s growth. Ben says the show relied on organic recommendations rather than paid marketing: each episode gives one listener a reason to tell another person. Ek cites more than five million hours of Acquired listening on Spotify, tripling over the prior year, and more than 250,000 Spotify followers, also up roughly threefold. The hosts add that the Wall Street Journal profile created an unusually visible jump in their growth chart. These are figures discussed onstage at the event, not a full accounting of the show’s audience across platforms.

Ek says the audience has also become international, pointing to reported growth in Mexico, Hong Kong, Israel, and Singapore. He connects Acquired’s success to a broader expansion of podcast listening: Spotify had grown from a few million podcast listeners in 2019 to more than 150 million by the time of the event. The episode presents the show as both a beneficiary of that larger medium and a source of new listeners, but it does not isolate how much growth came from Spotify, the Wall Street Journal article, live events, or other factors.

The discussion of Acquired’s future turns to video. Daniel Ek sees video as a way to create a stronger sense of presence and to let audiences choose between watching a full episode and dipping into selected segments. Ben is more cautious: he argues that audio’s advantage is that listeners can exercise, drive, or do chores without giving the show their full attention, and he doubts that a four-hour video version would work the same way. Their exchange frames video as an added format and interaction option, not a settled replacement for audio.

The hosts ask how far Acquired could grow without weakening the format that made it work, and compare that question with Spotify’s expansion beyond music. Ek’s answer starts with audience behavior rather than a fixed product category. He says Spotify observed users finding ways to listen to audiobooks and podcasts, including record labels uploading books in Germany before the company had built a good audiobook experience. For him, these unexpected uses were signals of adjacent demand. The principle is to notice what audiences already do, then build a better product around it, rather than assuming every new category needs a separate app.

The hosts also debate whether video should become a larger part of Acquired. Ben sees potential for visual storytelling around some companies, but values audio because listeners can exercise, drive, or do chores without giving the show their full attention. Ek says video has become a growth area on Spotify and may help audiences feel closer to creators; he favors giving listeners the choice to watch a full episode or selected segments. The exchange treats expansion as a product-design question: new formats can deepen the experience, but they should fit the way the existing audience listens.

Spotify’s early Facebook integration grew from Daniel Ek’s relationship with Mark Zuckerberg and their shared interest in social music. Spotify initially used invitations as a scarce form of social currency; after Zuckerberg posted that he liked the service, friends wanted access. The companies then built a feature that showed friends’ listening activity in Facebook’s News Feed, helping Spotify distribute its US launch. Ek says the feature still exists on Spotify desktop, but the conversation makes clear that this was not the product’s lasting center of gravity.

Ek distinguishes the underlying social value of music from one particular feature. Simply seeing what friends listen to may not be the strongest social experience; actively building a shared queue can be more engaging. He points to Jam, which lets friends add songs together, and says the feature helped people stay connected during the pandemic even when they were apart. His account suggests that a product can preserve its original insight while changing its implementation. The hosts compare this kind of social feature with the period when Facebook games such as FarmVille and Zynga were prominent, but do not try to turn that history into a full financial analysis.