8 Podcasts Like Acquired (Ranked by a Bootstrapped Founder)
Acquired ruined most business podcasts for me.
Once you've heard Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal spend 4 hours dissecting how Nvidia or Costco actually works, the average "5 tips for entrepreneurs" show feels like eating cardboard.
The problem: Acquired ships roughly one episode a month. About 220 episodes in ten years. Over a million people now listen to each one, and then we all sit there waiting four weeks for the next hit.
So here's my list of podcasts like Acquired: shows with the same depth and the same respect for real numbers. I run a podcast myself and listen to founder shows for a living, so I ranked them by one thing: how much you can steal for your own business.
One honest note before we start. Acquired covers Nvidia, LVMH, Berkshire. Incredible stories, but you can't copy Jensen Huang from your desk at $8K MRR. Some picks below fix exactly that.
What makes Acquired so hard to replace
Quick baseline, because "like Acquired" means something specific.
Ben and David met at Madrona, a Seattle VC firm, and started the show in 2015 as a hobby. It stayed a side project for years. By 2023 it was their full-time job, and today a single episode reaches more people than most business books sell in a lifetime.
Three things make the show what it is:
- They do the reading. Books, S-1s, shareholder letters. An episode is hundreds of hours of prep, not two guys reacting to headlines.
- You get the full company arc. The founding, the near-death moment, the decades of compounding after.
- Every episode lands on what actually drove the outcome, usually a moat or a distribution advantage nobody saw early.
That's the bar. Nothing below hits all three the same way (nothing does), but each show keeps at least one of those pillars and adds something Acquired doesn't have: frequency, interviews, or companies at your stage.
1. Profitable Founder Podcast
Full disclosure: this one's mine. But hear out the logic.
Acquired tells you how a company became worth $3 trillion. I ask founders how they got from $0 to $25K/month, this year, with no funding.
Every week I interview a bootstrapped SaaS founder making between $100K and $10M a year, and I make them share the numbers everyone else hides: MRR, churn, exact acquisition channels, what they paid themselves.
42 episodes and counting. Recent ones: a founder at $25K/month with a bootstrapped CRM, one making $3.5M/year with a LinkedIn AI agent, another who sold his $800K/year agency to go all-in on SaaS.
It's the same "how does this business actually work" obsession as Acquired, applied to companies one or two stages ahead of you instead of fifty.
→ Best for: founders who want Acquired-style depth on businesses they can actually replicate.
Listen to Profitable Founder →
2. Founders
David Senra reads a founder biography, highlights half the book, then talks about it for 90 minutes like his life depends on it.
That's the whole show. 450+ episodes. Rockefeller, Estée Lauder, Enzo Ferrari, Steve Jobs (multiple times).
Senra is Acquired's research obsession compressed into one person. A Fortune profile this July reported that the CEOs of Coinbase and Ramp listen religiously. Makes sense: he keeps finding the same five or six principles across a century of builders.
Warning: you will finish an episode at 1am convinced you need to work harder. Every time.
→ Best for: history-of-greatness energy, one founder at a time.
3. Business Breakdowns
If you want the Acquired format on a weekly schedule, this is it.
One company per episode. Matt Reustle and Zack Fuss bring on an investor or operator who knows the business cold, and they take it apart: how it makes money, its moat, its unit economics, what could kill it.
It's part of Colossus, the same network as Founders, and the catalog is deep: hundreds of breakdowns from Costco to HEICO to Ferrari.
Episodes run about an hour instead of four. Less storytelling than Acquired, more raw mechanics. I treat it like a business school case library I can binge while doing dishes.
→ Best for: understanding how specific business models actually make money.
4. Invest Like the Best
Patrick O'Shaughnessy has been running this since 2016. Nearly 600 episodes of interviews with investors and operators, and it's the show Business Breakdowns spun out of.
Why it belongs on an Acquired-likes list: same intellectual bar, different lens. Acquired studies the company. Patrick studies the people allocating capital into companies, and their mental models transfer surprisingly well to running a small SaaS.
The episodes with founders and operators (rather than fund managers) are the ones I'd start with.
→ Best for: mental models from people who evaluate businesses all day.
5. How I Built This
Guy Raz interviews the founders of iconic brands: Airbnb, Spanx, Patagonia. Hundreds of episodes, now on Wondery.
It's the emotional version of Acquired. Less "here's the balance sheet", more "here's the night I almost lost the company". Founders on this show admit doubt and failure in a way you rarely hear elsewhere.
The catch, and it's the same catch as Acquired: these are lottery-winner companies. Inspiring, not always copyable.
I wrote a full list of podcasts like How I Built This if the storytelling side is what hooks you.
→ Best for: founder origin stories with real vulnerability.
6. My First Million
Sam Parr sold The Hustle to HubSpot for a reported $27M. Shaan Puri sold Bebo's remains to Twitch. Now they riff on business ideas twice a week.
This is the anti-Acquired in format: loose, fast, sometimes dumb on purpose. But the business instincts underneath are sharp, and it's the only show on this list that regularly hands you an idea you could start this weekend.
I broke down my favorite episodes in podcasts like My First Million if you want more in that lane.
→ Best for: idea generation and frameworks, minus the homework.
7. All-In
Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg, weekly, on markets, tech and politics.
It earns a spot here for one reason: the segments where they break down an actual company or deal are genuinely Acquired-adjacent, four investors arguing about what a business is worth in real time.
You'll have to sit through poker stories and political tangents to get there. Worth it about two weeks out of three.
→ Best for: how investors think about current events touching your market.
8. Business Wars
Netflix vs Blockbuster. Nike vs Adidas. Red Bull vs Monster.
David Brown narrates company rivalries as full documentary-style seasons, with actors, sound design, the works. It started at Wondery and now lives as an Audible Original.
It's the most produced show on this list, closer to a Netflix docuseries than a podcast. Less analysis than Acquired, way more drama. Perfect entry drug for someone who "doesn't like business podcasts".
→ Best for: business history as pure entertainment.
How I'd actually use this list
Don't subscribe to all 8. That's how podcasts become a second job.
My honest stack:
- Business Breakdowns for weekly Acquired-style analysis
- Founders for motivation with substance
- Profitable Founder for numbers from founders at your stage
- Acquired itself for the monthly main course
The other four rotate in when a specific episode hits my feed.
FAQ
What podcast is most similar to Acquired?
Business Breakdowns is the closest match in format: one company per episode, analyzed in depth with someone who knows it inside out. It ships weekly instead of monthly, episodes run about an hour, and it comes from the Colossus network. If you want the storytelling side of Acquired more than the analysis, Founders is the better pick.
Why does Acquired only release one episode a month?
Because each episode takes hundreds of hours of research. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal read books, filings and interviews to build 3 to 4 hour episodes, and they've kept that bar for about 220 episodes since 2015. It's also why over a million people listen to each one: scarcity plus depth beats volume.
Are there Acquired-style podcasts about small companies?
Yes, that gap is exactly why I started Profitable Founder. Acquired covers trillion-dollar outcomes; shows like mine and Indie Hackers cover founders between $100K and $10M a year, with real MRR, churn and channel numbers. The analysis style is similar, the companies are just close enough to your stage to copy.
What order should I listen to Acquired's back catalog in?
Skip chronological order; the early episodes are a different, rougher show. Start with the modern classics: Costco, Nvidia (the trilogy), Hermès, Standard Oil, TSMC. Those five teach more about moats and compounding than most MBA programs. Then pick whatever industry you're building in and search the catalog for it.
Is Acquired good for bootstrapped founders?
Yes, with a caveat. The strategy lessons (moats, pricing power, distribution) apply at any size, and the episodes on Costco, Standard Oil and Hermès are masterclasses in business fundamentals. Just pair it with shows about companies at your scale so you're not only studying businesses with 40 years of compounding behind them.
