Acquired Episode 15: ExactTarget (acquired by Salesforce) with Scott Dorsey

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
So, Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners, and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (0:36)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So, think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:54)
Yep. obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay in video for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (1:10)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS, Google, and Azure who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:27)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired. That's crusoecloud.com/acquired.
Or click the link in the show notes. This is going to be a great episode.

**David Rosenthal** (1:46)
This is going to be awesome. Yeah.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:47)
I think Administrivia might only be asking for reviews. Should we keep doing that? Does it sound needy? Welcome to episode 15 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:18)
And we are your hosts. We'll be talking about the 2013 Salesforce acquisition of ExactTarget. We have with us today Scott Dorsey. Scott was the founder and CEO of ExactTarget. And I actually interned at ExactTarget for a summer when I was in college. And probably worth mentioning, Scott is also my cousin. So super, super excited to have family on the show. And welcome, Scott.

**Scott Dorsey** (2:41)
Hey, thanks, Ben. Really appreciate it. And David, I'd like to be on the show and proud to watch how your careers develop, Ben. And I'm glad that you had a little stint at ExactTarget along the way. That's pretty neat.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:54)
Super, super fun. Met a lot of great people there.

**David Rosenthal** (2:57)
You wouldn't be here today without it.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:58)
No, no, that's true. I think normally we talk about the acquisition history and facts, and David sort of reviews that. But I thought a really cool way of diving into the show today would be to kind of have David do a little bit of review of facts, but kind of go into a Q&A with Scott.

**David Rosenthal** (3:15)
Yeah, that's the plan, since we're lucky enough to have the primary source here sitting with us. So for folks who don't know, ExactTarget was founded by Scott and your co-founders Chris Baggott and Peter McCormick in Indianapolis in December of 2000 So, Scott, December of 2000, how did you guys decide to start a tech company? The bubble had just burst, you weren't in Silicon Valley. What was going through your minds?

**Scott Dorsey** (3:49)
Exactly, David. It's a great question. And we're a classic, you know, kind of didn't know any better against long odds story and that we started ExactTarget in December of 2000 Under the toughest conditions, the internet bubble had burst, you know, VC funding had really dried up and we were three first-time software entrepreneurs, you know, starting a tech company in Indianapolis. And actually none of us had a technical background. So we were against long odds for sure, but we had a real clear vision around what we were trying to accomplish. And it was actually my co-founder, Chris Baggott. And while we're kind of unpacking some family stories here, Chris is actually my brother-in-law. So we both married into this great family from Indianapolis. He's from Pittsburgh and I'm from Chicago. And I had just finished my MBA at Kellogg over at Northwestern and really studied entrepreneurship and Internet business models and had just come back from our capstone course, which was studying really the Silicon Valley ecosystem and figuring out how to apply that to Chicago and how to apply that to the Midwest. And Chris had this big idea around database marketing and how to apply database marketing principles to the Internet.