Episode 21: Inside the M&A Press with Bloomberg's Alex Sherman

**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** (0:54)
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** (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.

**Alex Sherman** (1:27)
Yep.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:28)
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.

**David Rosenthal** (1:44)
Well, the nice thing is I don't think this is going to be a super long episode anyway. So.

**Alex Sherman** (1:47)
Yeah.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:49)
We said that before.

**Alex Sherman** (1:51)
Yeah, right.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:08)
Welcome to Episode 21 of acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:15)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:16)
And we are your hosts. Today is a special episode where we yet again break the mold and do a little bit of experimenting of our own here at acquired. We are covering the press perspective of mergers and acquisitions, and we have special guest with us, Alex Sherman from Bloomberg. He's based out of their New York headquarters and is the host of the great Deal of the Week Podcast. He started at Bloomberg in 2008 as an intern out of graduate school, and has worked in a variety of roles and covered a number of beats since then. Thanks so much, Alex, for joining us and welcome to the show.

**Alex Sherman** (2:48)
Thanks for having me.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:50)
Yeah, yeah.

**David Rosenthal** (2:51)
We are excited to have you here, and especially as a former employee of the media industry myself a number of years ago now. I'm really looking forward to this one. I think we're gonna have a great time talking about the press and how you guys cover deals, your business model, and how it all relates to tech and acquisitions. So thanks again for joining us.

**Alex Sherman** (3:16)
Yeah, absolutely. It's nice to be on this side of the table instead of the host of the podcast, which I'm used to. Put my answering questions.

**David Rosenthal** (3:23)
You're getting the questions posed to you.

**Alex Sherman** (3:25)
Yeah, you'll see as the course of this goes around, I may end up being like just interviewing you guys for a force of habit.

**David Rosenthal** (3:33)
Oh, that'd be... Our listeners can then see the tables turned.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:40)
Yeah, for our listeners out there, we wanted to do this episode. We were talking with Alex about what would be the right way to work together on something or have Alex be on an episode. And as we were talking, we realized there's this totally fascinating process of the news cycle of M&A and why we read about stories when we do and how that whole process works that was really not something I had thought about even after doing 20 episodes of this podcast. So we thought it'd be a cool idea to have Alex on and clue everyone in on the process.

**David Rosenthal** (4:13)
Yeah. So before we kick off, we're going to abandon our traditional structure for this show and do it as a special episode. But I want to sneak in a little bit of history and facts about Bloomberg. Because I bet a lot of our listeners may consume Bloomberg media, but don't really know much about the company other than Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, was the founder. But it's interesting. So Bloomberg actually, I think might be like the largest technology company that nobody really thinks about or talks about too much because people think about it as a media company. But it actually is at its heart and its origins a technology company. So it was founded in 1981 by Michael Bloomberg. Michael had been a partner at Salomon Brothers, which was an investment bank on Wall Street. Salomon Brothers got acquired in either 80 or 81 by an entity that was rolling up banks and it eventually became Citigroup. And as part of that acquisition, Michael, as a partner, made $10 million in the acquisition. And he used that money, turned around, he started a company called Innovative Market Systems, IMS.