Episode 2: Instagram

**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, et cetera, and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:55)
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** (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 internet 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 back to episode two of Acquired. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:04)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:05)
And we are your hosts yet again, at least for the second time, and hopefully many, many more.

**David Rosenthal** (2:10)
Hopefully many more. Thank you to all of our listeners, all, few of you for the, a few bit growing, small in number, strong in spirit. True. Thank you for the amazing feedback. It was incredible. We learned a lot. We learned that Ben has amazing idioms.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:30)
Amazing idioms. David has dulcet tones.

**David Rosenthal** (2:35)
Thank you for the feedback. We will try to incorporate it, and hope that we keep getting better. If you have more feedback after this one, please send it to us. You can find us on, you can find the show on Twitter at atacquiredfm. You can find Ben at...

**Ben Gilbert** (2:53)
Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:54)
You can find me, David, at DJRosent, DJR-O-S-E-N-T. And our website is live at acquired.fm.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:04)
So, should we introduce ourselves again? We think for the first couple, so people, so you know, more than our original five listeners get the lowdown.

**David Rosenthal** (3:13)
I think we can do it just this once.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:15)
Then once we're viral after episode three, then we can stop introducing ourselves.

**David Rosenthal** (3:20)
Sounds right.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:20)
So, I'm Ben Gilbert. I am the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs here in Seattle. We come up with ideas for companies. We prototype them, we build them, we try and get customers, and if it seems to be working, then we recruit really talented people to come in and take the company from us, and we go start the next thing.

**David Rosenthal** (3:42)
And I'm David. I am a principal at Madrona Venture Group. We are an early-stage venture capital firm located here in Seattle. Invest in Seed Series A, Series B, stage technology companies. Always looking for the next great thing, which might become the next great acquirer or maybe acquiry, hence our podcast.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:05)
All right. So with that, let's segue into our second episode. Our first was Disney acquiring Pixar, and here for our second is another landmark, successful, even in the very recent last couple of years, this one's not nearly as old. Landmark successful acquisition, Instagram by Facebook.

**David Rosenthal** (4:26)
Facebook buying Instagram. So as a quick reminder, the framework that we've decided on for our show is we're going to briefly talk about the acquisition kind of facts and history. Then each of us, Ben and I are going to categorize the acquisition into a few buckets that we've identified. And then we're going to do a fun segment called what would have happened had the acquisition not happened.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:51)
Trust us, it's fun.