Episode 20: Android

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
The podcast about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

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

**Ben Gilbert** (0:34)
And we are your hosts. Today's episode is one that's been coming for a long, long time. It's a cornerstone of all of computing today, Google's 2005 acquisition of Android.

**David Rosenthal** (0:47)
I'm speechless.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:49)
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, 2005, when you think about the numbers, it doesn't feel that long ago, but when you think about the first time you saw an Android phone and heard about what Google was working on, it seems like the iPhone hadn't come out yet, right?

**David Rosenthal** (1:04)
Yeah. This was pre-iPhone. Before, iPhone was just a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:09)
Yeah. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:16)
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** (1:41)
Yes. We talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (1:47)
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** (2:05)
Yeah. 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** (2:21)
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** (2:37)
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.

**David Rosenthal** (2:52)
Or, click the link in the show notes.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:55)
So to all of our new listeners, welcome. We were featured on New and Noteworthy and iTunes over the past, looks like a week or two. And about doubled our subscriber base. So thanks so much for everyone trying us out and giving us a shot. I think what I want to do is go over the format of the show since a lot of you are new and talk about what we'll cover today in kind of reviewing and grading Google's Android acquisition. So the first thing is something sort of newish that we're trying called Community Showcase. And we felt it was important since we have so many listeners who are working on projects and building things, a lot of entrepreneurs, and we like to, on each episode, talk about something that one of those people is working on.
So that will do our Community Showcase. Then we go into acquisition History and Facts, where David takes us through...

**David Rosenthal** (3:48)
What actually happened?

**Ben Gilbert** (3:49)
Yeah.

**David Rosenthal** (3:49)
What happened and when?

**Ben Gilbert** (3:51)
Yeah. And then we get into the acquisition Category, where we decide if it's a people acquisition, technology, product, business line. We recently added Asset to our categories or the ever so famous...

**David Rosenthal** (4:02)
All-encompassing Other.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:04)
Yes. Then we talk about what would have happened otherwise, what tech themes this illustrates for us. We then formally give the grade of our acquisition from the episode. Then we have some follow-ups and a section called the Carve Out. This is where David and I grab something from our lives that we've seen with a book or a piece of software or anything in the media that we think is either related or completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

**David Rosenthal** (4:31)
Just something fun that strikes our fancy. The other thing that we sometimes do now is hot takes.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:37)
Hot takes.

**David Rosenthal** (4:37)
If something big in the M&A world or otherwise happened in the past week or two, we'll do a quick discussion. We will. So that's the show.