Episode 19: Jet

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
90 plus percent, I don't think we rode together 90 plus percent of that ride. Welcome to episode 19 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:29)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
And we are your hosts. Today's episode is the big news of the last few weeks, Walmart acquiring jet.com.

**David Rosenthal** (0:38)
I think this set a new record in terms of episode requests that I got Ben.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:43)
Yeah, if you can buy an email, Slack, in person, Twitter, I think I personally saw north of 10

**David Rosenthal** (0:49)
We gotta give the people what they want.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:51)
That's true. Before we dive into it, I wanna do a community spotlight.
We have a listener, his name is Chris LaRonte, and he has an app called Nowdue, invoicing like it's the future. So Nowdue is to do super fast invoicing for teams. It's actually a Slack app powered by Stripe, and if you're interested in doing some invoicing for your team, you should go check them out. They're at nowdue.ai, which I love those AITLDs. Absolutely. So listeners out there, let us know. Get at us at acquiredfm at gmail.com, on the website, on Twitter, if you would like to be on the next Community Showcase, and we'd love to tell everyone what you're up to.

**David Rosenthal** (1:36)
Yep, or on Slack, and if you're not in the Slack community, go to our website to join. Lots of good discussion from lots of people, not just Ben and me.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:45)
Acquired.fm, a breath of fresh air from David and I. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:54)
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** (2:19)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:25)
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** (2:44)
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** (2:59)
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** (3:16)
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 on to this week's topic. David, you want to do the acquisition history and facts?

**David Rosenthal** (3:37)
As always. So jet.com blockbuster acquisition this month by Walmart. Over $3 billion for a company that was two years old, but it had only been public for a year. But the story actually starts-

**Ben Gilbert** (3:55)
And not gone public, but-

**David Rosenthal** (3:56)
Or it had been launched publicly for a year. But the story starts way before then, actually. Back in 2005, when Marc Lore, who is one of the co-founders and CEO of Jet, founded another company called Quidsi, which you may or may not have heard of, but you may know its main operating business, which was diapers.com.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:20)
Killer Domain.

**David Rosenthal** (4:21)
Killer Domain name.
And the Quidsi story actually starts even earlier than that when Marc started his first company, which got sold to TOPS, the trading card company, and he moved out here to Seattle to run this new division of TOPS. And when he was here in Seattle, he was thinking about going into e-commerce and starting diapers.com. And his daughter went to a private school here in Seattle that Jeff Bezos' children just happened to go to as well.