Convoy (with CEO Dan Lewis)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
All right, I just checked, and the waveform does spike and clip when I scream like that, so we'll try not to do that anymore for the sake of everyone at home.
Welcome to Season 5, Episode 9, the home stretch of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. We are coming to you live today from the University of Washington. Audience, can we hear you? I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:46)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:48)
And we are your hosts. Let's talk about trucks.
Eighteen wheelers, semis, the long haul guys. One out of every four of these that you see on the road is completely empty. Truckers finish a job and then pick up the phone to find their next load, which could be a state or more away. You might think they should be able to just have their boss or co-worker figure it out across multiple trucks and coordinate. But get this, 90% of trucking companies have six or fewer trucks, and 97% have fewer than 20 trucks. There are over a million independent trucking companies or carriers, as we'll call them tonight, in the United States alone. So enter Convoy. Today, we are going to talk about this company, which has only existed unbelievably for four and a half years, and their ambitious plans to make it easy for any truck driver to find a nearby load, transparently see what they'll get paid, and do it all, as you would expect, right on their smartphone.

**David Rosenthal** (1:51)
We've existed for four and a half years too. We're almost as big as Convoy.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:56)
Yeah, this was like a sick dose of perspective. When we were doing the research, David and I realized that Convoy was started between the time that we had lunch and talked about doing the show, and when we actually started the show. It's freaky to see close to 1,000 person company at Acquired well on its way.
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:23)
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** (2:49)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:54)
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, et cetera, and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:12)
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** (3:29)
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** (3:45)
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.com that's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com.acquired.com or click the link in the show notes.
Now, listeners, if you want to go deeper on company building topics or you just want to support the show, you should become an Acquired limited partner. We have a second show where we get into the nitty-gritty with expert operators and investors like the CEO of Webflow and partners at Benchmark, Emergence and other great venture firms. You can become an LP by going to glow.fm slash acquired or by clicking the link in the show notes and all new listeners get a seven-day free trial. Of course, there are tons of ways to be involved with the show. You can join the Slack available at acquired.fm, write us on iTunes, and we always appreciate any shout-outs anybody wants to give on Twitter or the social media platform of your choice.

**David Rosenthal** (4:41)
Or in person.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:43)
Or in person.