Benchmark Part II: The Dinner

**Peter Fenton** (0:00)
I've spent a lot of time in Europe, and the dinners are about three hours, maybe three and a half hours long.

**David Rosenthal** (0:07)
That's an Acquired episode.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:08)
Yeah, that's right.

**Peter Fenton** (0:10)
And that's the whole point, is that social connection is not something that's transaction, it's fluid, it's fun, it's playful. And so the idea is people are coming out beaming, smiling after a dinner, as opposed to, you know, this sort of rigid structure of a typical dinner with an agenda.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:56)
And so, we're going to talk a little bit about Ben Gilbert, who is the founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (1:01)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco, where we were for this very episode.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:10)
Indeed, and we are your hosts. Last episode, we told the four-hour story of Benchmark, the legendary venture capital firm that stayed small while all their competitors ballooned in size. At the end of the episode, we mentioned that their partner meeting had this dinner at the end of it, where the five equal partners of Benchmark sit down for an open-ended discussion, sometimes with a special guest. Well, we were talking with the Benchmark partners about that last episode, and they invited us to be their guest for one of these dinners, and for the first time ever, record it, even on video. So, we are so pumped to share this with all of you. We got to ask them about a lot of the open questions we had about the future of balancing those out-there consumer investments with their B2B portfolio, how they think about making sure that they see that next world-changing company, the pressure of inheriting a top venture firm and trying desperately not to mess it up. And of course, there's some good war stories from the portfolio companies in there too, David.

**David Rosenthal** (2:11)
Indeed, indeed. This was such a special episode on so many fronts. This by far is a record on an Acquired episode for a number of guests that we have concurrently.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:23)
Oh, we had seven microphones running.

**David Rosenthal** (2:25)
We had to buy like $5,000 worth of gear just for this episode. I think it was worth it though.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:30)
Next time, I need to account for the fact that there will be violent laughter when I'm setting the audio levels because we each had a blast and you'll definitely hear it when you listen. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:44)
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. 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** (3:09)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:15)
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** (3:33)
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** (3:49)
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** (4:06)
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 crusoecloud.com/acquired or click the link in the show notes. Well, we have an update to the Merch Store. We got many requests about this. Gosh, why isn't there a dad hat? Well, we called up the good folks at Cotton Bureau and we did some horse trading because I wanted a really good one. I wanted one that was embroidered, that felt nice. So for the next couple of weeks, there'll be a limited edition dad hat embroidered with ACQ right there on the front. So get them before they're gone at acquired.fm slash store. Join the Slack acquired.fm slash Slack. The LP show has been on fire recently. For those of you who are paying LPs out there, we just dropped an interview on the profitable growth playbook for B2B companies with Jaleh rezaie, the CEO and co-founder of Mutiny. That is live just for LPs right now for another week or so, and then it will hit the public feed. So you can become a LP at acquired.fm slash LP, or get those episodes after they're made public by searching for the LP show in your favorite podcast player. Now without further ado, on to the dinner and listeners. As always, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the company we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.