Acquired Episode 16: Midroll + Stitcher (acquired by Scripps)

**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** (0:55)
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 nvidia 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 and 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 crusoecloud.com/acquired. That's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. We'd like to thank our one listener that we see in our analytics on Zoom.

**David Rosenthal** (1:49)
And the one listener on Stitcher who happens to be my wife.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:56)
It's a great way to lead into this episode.
Welcome back to episode 16 of Acquired. The podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:22)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:23)
And we are your hosts. Today, we have a few notes before we dive into it. I wanted to take a minute and say a huge thank you to one of our listeners, David Resnick. He's known as The Resonator in Slack. David is an entrepreneur with a company called Bester, but in a former career, he was a recording engineer and music producer. David's been helping us tremendously with audio quality, so I wanted to give a shout out to his company. Bester is a platform to share the best things. Curate your bests into topics with automated images and links. You can use their widget with your branding embedded on your website. Find out more at bester.co. That's www.bestr.co. Which brings me to my next point. David and I were grabbing-

**David Rosenthal** (3:10)
Big announcement alert.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:11)
Yeah. Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo. If this were a really high production podcast, we would have some- We would have sound effects. That's right. We wanted to do something a little bit different with this podcast. We're at about the size where we could start doing some advertising. Actually, we'll get into our analytics a little bit later this episode as part of the topic of the show. Instead, we wanted to do something called community showcase.
Since so many of our listeners are entrepreneurs that are building things, product people at companies or venture capitalists or finance people, really people that are involved in creating products themselves, we thought it would be really cool to try and just do a community focus every episode.

**David Rosenthal** (3:55)
Rather than advertising, at least for now, we're going to experiment with this. We're not charging anything or making any money on this, but we really just wanted to do it as a thank you to our community and listeners and especially those that are really engaged on the Slack channel and emailing us. So if you have something you're working on and you want us to talk about it on the show, either hit us up in the Slack community or send us an email.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:20)
That's acquiredfm at gmail.com.

**David Rosenthal** (4:23)
Also on our website. And we will aim to start with one and maybe do more of these every show. Let us know what you think.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:31)
Yeah, that's true. You can hit us up on Twitter to at acquiredfm. And we may do a more kind of traditional advertising thing later. But if you're working on something, we'd love to give you a shout out on the show. So, David, you ready to dive in?