Airbnb

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
I took Tanny's collar off her, so that we don't have the same problem.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:06)
That'll save us some time in post. Welcome to Season 7, Episode 8, the Season Finale of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:35)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor and startup advisor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:41)
And we are your hosts. Today, we cover the hottest and most anticipated company to IPO in 2020 And oddly, in a year marred by the global pandemic and just this month, an all-time high number of stay-at-home orders, this hot IPO is a travel company. Airbnb, originally known as Airbed and Breakfast, Inc., is going public today, raising over $3.5 billion and initially valued at over $47 billion. The company is insanely impressive. They operate in 220 countries and 100,000 cities. Last year, there were $38 billion of bookings made on the platform that are over 50 million active guests who book nights to stay at over 7 million listings. And unlike other companies that we've covered recently, well, yesterday, like DoorDash, this is truly a global company with 86% of hosts outside of the United States. And yet, well, this company has changed the world. And how a meaningful fraction of the human race travels, their growth has been slowing more severely than any of the other unicorn IPOs we've covered. And that's before even looking at the effects of the global pandemic. Now, of course, David and I did our usual deep homework on the company, but this is one where we've been doing our research for years, not just as guests on the platform since 2010, but actually as hosts too, starting in 2015 for David and 2017 for me.
So, does Airbnb see its market saturation on the horizon, or is this a global community movement that's still getting started? Today, we dive in.

**David Rosenthal** (2:24)
Indeed we do.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:25)
Well, as always, if you love Acquired and you want to hone your own craft of company building, you should join the community of Acquired Limited Partners. On our LP show last week, David and I did a first for us and had our own actual limited partners, investors in our current and former funds on the show, Jacqueline Hester and Lindell Ekman from Foundry Group joined us for part four of our VC Fundamentals series where we went seriously deep on the topic of portfolio construction for a venture capitalist. Sure, this is a useful thing for aspiring VCs, current VCs, to hone their thinking on that. But if you're a founder or an employee at a startup, I think understanding the incentives and strategy of your investors, big stakeholders in your company, and your potential future investors, it's just insanely valuable. So really awesome to have them on. Fun to be diving so deep on this topic and sharing a lot of these conversations with so many of you. If you aren't already an Acquired Limited Partner, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquired.fm slash LP and all new listeners get a seven-day free trial. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:34)
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** (3:59)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (4:05)
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** (4:23)
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** (4:39)
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.