Episode 13: Push Pop Press (Facebook Instant Articles) with Todd Bishop

**Ben Gilbert** (0:31)
I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:32)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:33)
And we are your hosts. We have a very special guest today visiting us from GeekWire, Todd Bishop.

**Todd Bishop** (0:40)
Hey, it's great to be here.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:41)
So great to have you.

**Todd Bishop** (0:43)
I'm a fan. I'm a listener. I think yours might be the only podcast that I've listened to every episode of.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:48)
Whoa!

**Todd Bishop** (0:49)
Which speaks to the fact that you're still relatively new. But yeah, I listen on my walks on the weekend and really love what you guys do on the show.

**David Rosenthal** (0:58)
Thank you, Todd. Yeah, we're glad to have you.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:01)
Yeah, it's a privilege. For this episode, it's going to be particularly interesting. We're talking about the publishing industry. We wanted to have Todd on because we thought it would be particularly fascinating to listeners to get a little inside info from someone who's experiencing the results of the acquisition firsthand.
Before we get into what the episode is on today, a couple of administrative things. First one, please leave us a rating and a review on iTunes. It is tremendously helpful for the future of the show as we invest in better tech and we get more and more guests on and we're able to do more things with the show. I appreciate you doing that and doing any sort of sharing on social media that you feel is appropriate. Secondarily, we started a Slack community and we've seen some really great uptake in that.

**David Rosenthal** (1:48)
Yeah, it's been really fun to chat with all of you guys and please would love more people to join but for people who are already in, keep the questions and discussion coming. It's been great.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:59)
Yeah.
We've got some email asking, well, how do I join? It's on the Acquired website. If you're on desktop, it's a little widget on the right side. You just enter your email and then it emails you how to do it. If you are on mobile, it is down below the posts. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:19)
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** (2:44)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:50)
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** (3:08)
Yep. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost, 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 and video for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:24)
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** (3:40)
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. So without further ado, our episode this week is on Facebook's acquisition of Push Pop Press. Try that, let's try it, bleh.

**David Rosenthal** (4:07)
Say that five times fast.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:10)
David, do you want to dive in with the history and facts?

**David Rosenthal** (4:13)
As always. So very interesting one here. The company, as Ben mentioned, is Push Pop Press, which not many people have heard of, but it was founded in February 2010 by two guys, Mike Matas and Kimon, I'm probably going to butcher his last name, Tsinteris, I believe. And they were both alums of Apple. And they had been a designer, one a designer and one an engineer at Apple for about four or five years. And they had worked on the iPhone in the years leading up to the launch.