Adapting Episode 3: Intel

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I don't think so, I mean, we said on adapting, we weren't doing any grading. I don't know what we would grade. I mean, it's like.

**David Rosenthal** (0:06)
The decision to pivot. Uh, let's see, eh?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:21)
Welcome to this Potapalooza special. We are in episode three of our Adapting mini-series, where we tell the stories of great companies and leaders who are adapting to a world that's changing in real time. For those keeping track at home, welcome to season six, episode six of Acquired. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:39)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:40)
And we are your hosts. Today, we tell a historical story of a company in crisis. A different and more industry-specific crisis than the one we are all going through right now, but a crisis nonetheless. This is the story of a business whose amazing and differentiated core product line became a pure commodity overnight and the realization, action, and bravery that followed thereafter. Today, we cover Intel and their incredible bet the company move on their newly emerging microprocessor business in 1985 This was an astounding part of the research for me, was a full 17 years after their founding.

**David Rosenthal** (1:21)
Yep, they weren't the microprocessor company when they started, but we'll get into all that. To all of you listening out there for the very first time as part of Potapalooza, welcome to Acquired and Adapting. On this podcast, we tell the stories of great companies. Mostly, we focus on technology companies, and we center our story mostly in normal times around a culminating event that we grade for the company, typically an acquisition or an IPO, hence the name Acquired. Ben and I, though, are not journalists. We are industry practitioners. And so our perspective here is telling these stories from the perspective of people inside the industry. We're entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and we've been trying over the past 100 or so episodes here on Acquired to better understand how to build great companies and learn in public how to do that ourselves and with all of you.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:15)
Well, a few announcements before we get to it. If you love Acquired and you want to go deeper on company building topics into the nitty gritty, you can become an Acquired limited partner. You will get access to the LP show, which has recent guests like venture capitalist Charles Hudson and mystery co-founders Shane Kowalski and Vince Coppola. With Charles, we discuss the inside baseball of pre-seed investing and portfolio construction. And with Shane and Vince, their insane pivot in real time where they took their seed stage experience hospitality company, which is a tough spot right now, into the world of in-home morphing their offering during the coronavirus pandemic and figuring it out in real time.

**David Rosenthal** (2:59)
And growing their business.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:00)
I know. It's crazy. just crazy. So you'll get access to that. You'll get the LP calls where we hop on Zoom and spend a couple of hours with all of you once a month or so. And you can get access by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired. And all subscriptions come with a seven day free trial. So feel free to check it out. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:25)
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** (3:51)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:57)
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** (4:15)
Yep. 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** (4:31)
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.