Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
All right, well, hopefully, AirPods don't screw things up too bad. Can look like humans on air. And if we ever end up in a situation with microphones that are out of frame, it'll be game changing. It'll be just like we're talking to each other. Welcome to season 10 episode 4 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 and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:43)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:49)
And we are your hosts. We've done Sequoia, we've done Andreessen Horowitz, but we have not gone deep on one of the biggest stories in venture right now, crossover investing. We are watching hedge funds like Tiger Global and Co2 come all the way down to seed investing. And we're simultaneously seeing classically early stage venture capital firms like Sequoia completely reinvent their structure to hold on to their winners longer, even as they become public companies. And today we wanted to analyze one of the firms that pioneered this dual approach of operating a hedge fund and a venture capital firm simultaneously, Altimeter Capital.

**David Rosenthal** (1:32)
There has been so much change in venture in the last few years. More change, I think, in the last few years than in the decade that I was doing venture than watching it before.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:43)
And listeners, to tell the story right, we are joined today by Brad Gerstner, the founder of the firm. And actually, to tell you the truth, he is joined by us. We actually recorded this episode in person, even with video stands, microphones, everything at the Altimeter office on Sand Hill Road. And for those of you who don't know, Brad has had an unbelievable career starting five companies. So he's got a very different mentality than your sort of classic hedge fund guy. On the investing side, he led the Series C in Snowflake and still owns a massive stake of the company. He's led large investments and sat on the board of companies you know, like MongoDB and Roblox and Zillow and plaid. He led the SPAC that took Grab public in Southeast Asia. And he is widely known as one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the business of online travel after his involvement in Expedia, Orbitz, Uber, and many others.

**David Rosenthal** (2:43)
And you forgot maybe the most important part. I think he's the number one bestie guestie on our friends over the All In pod.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:52)
I think that's probably right.

**David Rosenthal** (2:54)
It's probably right.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:55)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:00)
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** (3:26)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:31)
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** (3:49)
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** (4:06)
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.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:22)
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. Well, we will cut over to our interview with Brad now, but please do know ahead of time that you can discuss this episode and everything else in the tech world afterwards with us at acquired.fm slash slack. Join 11,000 smart, thoughtful people like yourself. We have some awesome new LP show content out there. You can search Acquired LP Show in the podcast player of your choice. Lastly, this is not investment advice, do your own research. Now, over to Brad Gerstner from Altimeter Capital.