
If and How to Scale the Acquired Podcast
From Cold Call by HBR Presents / Brian Kenny
February 3, 2026 · 42 min · Episode 275
About this episode
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal discuss their experience scaling the Acquired podcast while maintaining work-life balance.
By 2025, the business podcast Acquired was getting one million listeners per episode, having doubled the audience year over since Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal started it in 2015. And they’d grown without a strict release schedule or relentless optimization. Still, they felt pressure to scale—without throwing off their work-life balance. How did they determine a way forward? They join Harvard Business School Professor Shane Greenstein and host Brian Kenny to discuss the case “The Acquired Podcast: Scaling the Mic.”
People in this episode
Host: Brian Kenny
Guests: Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
Topics covered
- scaling podcasts
- audience growth
- work-life balance
- business strategy
- podcast management
Keywords
- podcast scaling
- audience growth
- business podcast
- work-life balance
- Acquired podcast
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Harvard Business School
Books & works: The Acquired Podcast: Scaling the Mic
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