Acquired Episode 17: Waze

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
The theme of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:34)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:35)
And we are your hosts. Today, we're gonna be talking about Google's acquisition of Waze. But first, we talked about in our last episode, we are going to be doing a community showcase. And this week, it's one of our listeners, Brian Sanders. He and his team are building something called Nexcast. Nexcast is a next generation podcasting client that has a lot of interactivity baked into it. So they look at the existing kind of flat one-way medium of podcasting as it is today. And Brian and his team are looking at ways to make it kind of more of a two-way street, so you can have a relationship with a podcaster and click links and watch videos and things like that. The app's not totally built yet, but their customer development process and kind of their pitching for funding and things like that is being covered in a podcast called Building Nexcast.
So check them out at buildingnexcast.com if you're interested.

**David Rosenthal** (1:34)
It's really cool that we launched Community Spotlight and we did an episode about podcasts and it's like they were listening to the episode. This is perfect.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:44)
Yeah, it's awesome.

**David Rosenthal** (1:45)
So if anybody out there is building a social navigation app, please ping us.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:53)
Yeah, if you would like to be on our next listener showcase and you're working on something that you want to tell people about, shoot us an email at acquiredfm at gmail.com or tweet at us at acquiredfm.

**David Rosenthal** (2:04)
Or hit us up in the Slack group, as always.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:08)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:13)
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** (2:38)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:44)
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, et cetera, and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:03)
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** (3:18)
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** (3:35)
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.

**David Rosenthal** (3:52)
All right, Ben, should we get into it?

**Ben Gilbert** (3:54)
Let's do it.

**David Rosenthal** (3:55)
Let's do it. Waze. I would presume most of our listener base is familiar with Waze, but for those who aren't, it is a social navigation app, much like Google Maps or MapQuest going way back or Apple Maps. We'll get into that in a minute. But you drive with friends.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:16)
Yeah. Waze's magical insight is that there's a whole bunch of data being collected on the road by other drivers all the time that can indicate things passively, like, oh, there's a traffic, there's high traffic there because people are going really slow. Now, Google's been doing that for a long time. They introduced that in 2009 based on data being fed back from Android. But what Waze does is it both plugs you in with a social network based on Facebook or importing your contacts, and you can while you're driving, report things like red light cameras, like police officers, like traffic accidents, and you get a real-time map when you're driving of the incidents on the road.