DoorDash

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Well, first of all, is there some rule that the graphics that you put in your S1 have to be just painfully low resolution? welcome to Season 7, Episode 7 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 advisor to startups based in San francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:41)
And we are your hosts. The year was 2013 Everyone had just finished cracking their jokes about how every startup is just another photo sharing app. But the wave of yet another food delivery app was just getting started. Tony Hsu and his co-founders were launching paloaltodelivery.com, which we all know today as DoorDash. On this episode, we'll dive into how these Stanford students became one of the very few winners in the cutthroat food delivery category, how they raised $2.5 billion from VCs, the SoftBank Vision Fund, and even sovereign wealth funds around the world, how they went up against incumbents like GrubHub and Seamless, and the even more well-funded start-up on a warpath for world domination, Uber. This is the story of insanely fast growth, a company currently tripling year over year, and that's the December 2019 number before the global pandemic created the ultimate tailwind at their back to IPO at the greatest possible time in the business's history.

**David Rosenthal** (1:45)
Yeah, they kind of nailed the timing on this one, didn't they?

**Ben Gilbert** (1:48)
They did, David. Today, we will dive into the question that we're all wondering, is it even possible to build a sustainable business with positive unit economics in this category? And if so, will DoorDash actually be the one to do it? All of this and more coming up on Acquired.

**David Rosenthal** (2:05)
Ben, your little, your hooks and intros are getting so good. Do we even need to do history and facts? I feel like you covered everything there.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:12)
Oh, you know we didn't.

**David Rosenthal** (2:16)
You mean we should go through these like 15 pages of notes that I have here?

**Ben Gilbert** (2:21)
All right, well, lots to do. Let's get to it. As always, if you love Acquired and want to hone your own craft of company building, you should join us as an Acquired limited partner. You'll get access to the LP show where we dive deeper into the fundamentals of company building and investing, in addition to our monthly LP calls where we talk with all of you directly, and of course our book club and the Zoom calls with the authors. This is really where we have gotten to know so many of you personally, and frankly this is like the set of people who have most influenced the direction of the show and kind of the set of topics that we want to tackle. So thanks to all of you who are a part of that community and welcome if you're thinking about joining. If you do want to join, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquired.fm slash LP and all 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** (3:14)
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** (3:39)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:45)
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** (4:03)
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. These lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (4:19)
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.