Episode 12: Snapchat

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
I've noticed our episodes have been getting a little longer.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
Yeah, they have.

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
Do you think that's a problem?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:07)
Maybe a little. Welcome to episode 12 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions that actually went well. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:33)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:34)
And we are your hosts. This episode, we're going to try and do something a little bit different.

**David Rosenthal** (0:39)
Today, we're going to talk about one that didn't happen at all.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:42)
Dun, dun, dun. This week, we're going to cover Facebook's attempted acquisition of Snapchat for $3 billion a while back.

**David Rosenthal** (0:54)
In November of 2013

**Ben Gilbert** (0:57)
Yes, and it will be cool because we have, not only the deal didn't go through, but we have the benefit of history to help us grade what would have happened if that offer actually went through.

**David Rosenthal** (1:09)
We know for a fact what would have happened otherwise if Facebook didn't acquire Snapchat.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:15)
That's actually easy. All right, a few things before we get into it. One, please rate us on iTunes. It's how we grow the show, and it's how we gain more listeners like you.
We also really appreciate any social sharing. If you like the show, please shout it out on Twitter or Facebook. David has an update with a new thing we're trying.

**David Rosenthal** (1:35)
Yeah, we have a new innovation here at Acquired. We just launched a Slack community that we're experimenting with. So if you'd like to join us on Slack, go to our website, acquired.fm, and from there, you can sign up and join our community on Slack. And we're going to have some fun with it, and have some fun with it, and see where it goes.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:00)
Yeah, we plan on doing kind of like episode discussion in the week following. We get a lot of email from people directly to us, and we figure that actually could be pretty beneficial to just have that in a group context. And Slack seems like a nice way to do it, because a lot of us are already on it for our work day in and day out. We can just kind of passively subscribe and kind of watch the conversation.

**David Rosenthal** (2:23)
Yeah, and we'd love to see where it goes with the community. So you can DM us with feedback or questions, or just post it in the community.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:32)
Yeah, yeah. And also a good place for if you have ideas for future shows that you want us to do. If you think you'd like to be a guest on the show, we've got a few great guests coming up that we're super excited about, so more great stuff to come. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:53)
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** (3:19)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:24)
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** (3:42)
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** (3:59)
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** (4:15)
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. All right. Time to get into it.