Acquired Season 3 Episode 7: Venmo (live with Andrew Kortina)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Hey, Acquired listeners, we have a big announcement today. We're launching a bonus show. For $5 a month, you can become what we're calling a limited partner and get access to it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:11)
And for those of you who know or are Googling the term limited partner, we hope you like our creativity on the name.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:19)
We're excited to use this new format to cover all sorts of things that don't fit into our normal episode format and dive deeper into a lot of company building topics. Our first LP bonus show is on the jargon of what venture capitalists say and when words don't just mean what the dictionary says they mean. We've covered some great ones including Sideways, Credible, and I know this is David's favorite, Not Raising Right Now.

**David Rosenthal** (0:43)
Always a fan favorite. So we are super excited about this. Not only because it'll give us an avenue for creating more types of episodes, which we've been wanting to do for a long time, but because it'll give you guys a way to support the show and help make it even better. So to date on Acquired, we've plowed every dollar we've ever made right back into the show. Better equipment, software, ads, travel, et cetera. And we're gonna continue to do the same here, which we think will really take things to the next level.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:13)
If you'd like to become an Acquired limited partner, you can click the link in the show notes of your podcast player of choice, or go to kimberlite.fm slash acquired. That's k-i-m-b-e-r-l-i-t-e dot f-m slash acquired. And with that, on to the main show.
Welcome to Season 3, Episode 7 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (1:50)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:51)
And we are your hosts. Today we are doing another oft-requested episode, the Venmo acquisition, first by Braintree, and then shortly thereafter by PayPal. We've been waiting until just the right circumstances, which we finally had. The show you'll hear on this episode was recorded at our very first live show in San Francisco this week, with special guest Andrew Kortina, the co-founder of Venmo. Now, we had some AV issues at the live show, and very long story short, the only recording that we have of the show is from an iPhone that was placed on the table in front of us. We sincerely apologize for the audio quality. We know it's not quite acquired standards of the episode, but we decided that the content in the interview with Kortina was just way too good not to release to everyone. So, who is Andrew Kortina?
Kortina is a consummate entrepreneur. As you'll hear on this episode, his constant stream of startup ideas and passion for nailing the experience led him to start countless projects from Philafunk to Venmo, both of which we will get into today. To give you a sense of his varied talents, he started his college experience as a CS major at Penn, but after feeling that he could learn more programming outside the classroom than in, he switched majors and ended up graduating with majors in philosophy and creative writing and minors in computer science and logic. He has since gone on, after Venmo, to found Finn with Sam Lessin, which we will talk about later on this show. So get excited to hear Andrew Kortina. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:23)
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** (3:48)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:54)
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, et cetera, and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:12)
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** (4:28)