Episode 18: Special—An Acquirer’s View into M&A with Taylor Barada, head of Corp Dev at Adobe

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
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** (0:30)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (0:36)
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** (0:54)
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 in video for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (1:10)
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 energy net happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:27)
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. Welcome to episode 18 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:07)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:08)
And we are your hosts. Today, we have a very special episode that kind of breaks the mold of the show. We had an opportunity that we absolutely couldn't pass up. And even though we're not covering a single specific deal, we think this is going to be a super, super interesting episode for listeners out there. So, David, you want to tell them about our guests?

**David Rosenthal** (2:29)
Yeah, we are lucky to be joined by a special guest today, Taylor Barada, who is the VP and head of Corp Dev, CorpStrategy, and Strategic Partnerships at Adobe. So, welcome, Taylor. Thanks for joining us.

**Taylor Barada** (2:44)
Yeah, excited to be here, guys. Thanks for having me.

**David Rosenthal** (2:46)
Of course, quick background on Taylor. He joined Adobe in 2013 Before that, he was the VP of Business at Zynga. And before that, he was also relevant to our show, head of Corp Dev at Yahoo. He is a JD MBA from Northwestern. And after Northwestern, spent a couple of years at Bain before getting into the deal-making world. And perhaps most interestingly, you are the first guest on our show who is a former professional athlete. Taylor played professional soccer or probably more accurately, football in England. Maybe we'll get into that. Lots of deal-making in that world.

**Taylor Barada** (3:24)
Yeah, exactly. No, I would say that looking back on it, I didn't have the language at the time, but there was no real US scene when I came out of college. And so effectively, I became an independent solo soccer entrepreneur, had to go kind of figure out how to insert myself into the European game. And it was an amazing life experience, but not always the easiest.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:49)
Yeah, man, that could be like a whole separate episode. Probably not of this podcast, but I'm sure it's a cool story.

**David Rosenthal** (3:54)
So what we thought we'd do for this episode is kind of stick to our typical structure. But instead, as Ben mentioned of talking about one acquisition in particular, we just thought we'd use it as a vehicle to tailor-gate your insights kind of from the inside of being in Corp Dev and how you think about deals and acquisitions as you're going through them. So we have a bunch of questions, but we thought we'd start with the acquisition history and facts section as usual. I think the best way to kick off would be something that probably most of our listeners are curious about and I'm curious about. How do conversations typically start between Corp Dev and startups? Either when you're approaching startups or when they're approaching you, what's the beginning of the story usually look like?