Acquired Episode 38: SoundJam (iTunes)

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
And iTunes sucks.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:02)
iTunes does suck. Well, yeah.

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
It's bloated.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:07)
Or I won't take a position, I'll say people seem to hate iTunes. welcome to episode 38 of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:29)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:31)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering Apple's 2000 acquisition of SoundJam, which would go on to become iTunes. So speaking of iTunes, we love iTunes. Well, actually now Apple podcast reviews. So this is the part of the show where, before we dive into things, I ask you, our listeners, be it a brand new one or someone who's been listening to the show for a while, if you've got some extra time, we would love a review on iTunes. It is how we grow the show and make it better. We've also got a Slack. If you're new to the show, there's over 600 of us that are in the Slack channel talking about technology news, M&A, IPOs, all kinds of stuff. So if you head over to Acquired.fm and you'd like to join us, there's a little widget on the sidebar to join us there.

**David Rosenthal** (1:16)
That was very clever, Ben. I see what you did there. I like that.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:20)
Yeah. Well, most of the show is unscripted. We have notes, but we don't actually type them out. Then you try and get too clever when you are typing out the exact words that you're going to say.

**David Rosenthal** (1:33)
We're just getting more professional here at Acquired.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:35)
Yes. That is one thing. Listeners who've been listening to the show for a long time, it's funny how with these things, when you decide to up-level a little bit, that becomes the new bar and then that's just the bar that you have to hit every episode after that. So, if anybody's starting a podcast or a creative project, keep that in mind for the future.

**David Rosenthal** (1:52)
All these new listeners now are like, wait a minute, this doesn't sound very professional. What are these guys talking about?

**Ben Gilbert** (1:58)
Yeah, hopefully we made it.

**David Rosenthal** (1:59)
This podcast started as Ben and me drinking beer and recording ourselves. We've come a long way.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:03)
That's true. Since we started doing these morning recordings and we're in different time zones, we're either a lot more coherent because we're not drinking anymore or we're a lot less coherent because we're groggy. It's not clear.

**David Rosenthal** (2:15)
We will see. Yeah.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:18)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:23)
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** (2:48)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:54)
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** (3:13)
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** (3:28)
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 energy net happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:45)
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 C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. David, you ready to take us in to the acquisition history and facts of SoundJam?

**David Rosenthal** (4:07)
Let's do it. We are entering the time machine here at Acquired. Maybe it's a hot tub time machine.