Adapting Episode 1: Canlis

**Mark Canlis** (0:00)
It's kind of like the word pick six. I don't, that just like happened a few years ago, and now everybody says it. Watch, now they're like ESPN, it's like pick six, pick six.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:08)
And when it doesn't happen, they're like, we could really use a pick six right now.

**Mark Canlis** (0:11)
Totally, totally, no one said that 10 years ago.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:26)
Welcome to Season 6, Episode 4 of Acquired, the podcast of...

**David Rosenthal** (0:31)
Ben, hey, I think you're on autopilot.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:35)
Yeah, sorry, muscle memory. All right, listeners, we are coming to you in a time of enormous change and upheaval. The coronavirus has spread around the world, challenging global health systems, bringing economies to their knees, and changing daily life for everyone, seemingly overnight. Given this, it just seems irresponsible to stay business as usual over here and put on our normal Acquired episodes for you all.

**David Rosenthal** (1:01)
We're changing Acquired. For the first time ever, we're taking a pause from normal episodes. The world doesn't need Acquired right now. People normally tune in to hear us talk about the stories behind great technology companies and what goes into building them, but these aren't normal times. What the world does need right now is stories of great leaders and how they and their organizations are responding to what might be the biggest moment of change we've ever seen. We're going to take everything that we've put into Acquired over the years, our format, our infrastructure, and the way we can reach all of you, and we're going to put our full weight behind this. Starting today, we're pausing Acquired and we are launching Adapting. Adapting is a series all about doing just that, showing leadership and changing to fit what the world needs right now, not what it needed last week.
So with Adapting, we're going to take a shallow dive, a more shallow dive at the beginning of each episode into the history of an organization. But our focus is really going to be on the present and on the future, not the past. We also won't be grading. Adapting requires taking risks and putting yourself out there. And anyone who's doing that right now is forever an A plus in our book.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:11)
Yep. Yeah, David, I think we were just talking about this, but I'm excited about this. It just feels right in this moment to do this. Totally. Listeners, we are making some important changes to the Acquired community. If you haven't joined our Slack, you can sign up on the Acquired website and find all the announcements there. And we're doing some sort of new and pretty cool things in there. If you're not yet a Limited Partner, now is the time to join. In addition to LP episodes, we are adding a community component to the LP program. So last week, we had our first group Zoom call with everyone who's shut in at home.
And it was really fun and therapeutic to get to talk with everyone. So we've decided to make it a regular monthly thing as part of the Limited Partner program. So we'll be announcing more details on that in the LP show. And in the meantime, you can sign up at glow.fm slash Acquired by clicking the link in the show notes below. And lastly, David and I feel very strongly that money should never be a reason that a single person can't become an Acquired LP. So we were talking about this beforehand, especially when introducing this new sort of community hangout component. If you can't afford a subscription, especially as we all respond to this pandemic together, even if you already are an LP, just shoot us an email, introduce yourself and we'll take care of you.

**David Rosenthal** (3:30)
Yeah, we feel super strongly about this. We want everyone who wants to be part of this community to be able to. So shoot us a note.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:37)
Yep. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Acquired, and that is Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:43)
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** (4:09)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (4:14)
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. Yep.