Andreessen Horowitz Part I

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
What do you think about playing the full Who Got the Truth song at the end?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
At the end, I like that.

**David Rosenthal** (0:06)
Yeah, it's so good.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:07)
Who got the truth?

**David Rosenthal** (0:14)
Is it you, is it you, is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:28)
Welcome to Season 9, Episode 1 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** (0:44)
I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:50)
We are your hosts. Well, listeners, David and I decided to open this season with the complete story of the firm that totally upended the entire venture capital ecosystem a decade ago, Andreessen Horowitz. But as we started researching, of course, that meant telling the journeys of Andreessen and Horowitz themselves before founding the firm, which of course means telling the history of the web browser, the creation of Mosaic, the founding and eventual IPO of Netscape, which was the first real internet tech startup, and of course, the tumultuous story of Loudcloud and Opsware.

**David Rosenthal** (1:26)
And so much more than that that you don't even know, Ben.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:30)
Well, this is great. This is the first time I've literally not opened your notes at all. Like normally, we don't trade notes, but I have no idea what you've prepared. And listeners, the impetus for that is that this was going to be a one-part episode until last night when David texted me and said, how about we do a two-parter? So there are early things about Marc and Ben that I did zero research on, and I am excited to learn from David along with you all today.

**David Rosenthal** (1:55)
I'm like the old, the legendary Chicago Cubs shortstop, Bernie Banks. Let's play two.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:01)
Well, I'm really pumped to do this one as a two-parter. I think the history of Marc and Ben is really important to understand the worldviews of both of them and how they were shaped by it. And I think for all of us working in a startup ecosystem, that was so shaped by the 2009 creation of the firm, Andreessen Horowitz, I think it's paramount to understand the things that shaped them because they have shaped us all. And I don't know, I'm really excited because I feel like my investor psychology has already changed since starting the research into Marc and Ben.

**David Rosenthal** (2:36)
Totally. Can't wait to dive in.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:38)
Well, listeners, two things to be aware of if you like the show. One is our Slack.
There is awesome discussion that takes place on not just our episodes, but also the tech news of the day going on there. There are now 8,000 strong, so you can come and join us at acquired.fm slash Slack. And two is the Limited Partner Program. And this is where we drop subscriber only content, like our library of over 50 interviews and deep dives on company building topics like venture capital fundamentals. And you'll also get access to our LP Zoom calls with David and I. So you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquired.fm slash LP. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:21)
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** (3:46)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:52)
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** (4:11)
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** (4:26)
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.