Episode 23: NeXT (Live show at the GeekWire Summit)

**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** (0:55)
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 crusoecloud.com/acquired. That's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes.
I feel very antiquated in my use of TextEdit now that...

**David Rosenthal** (1:48)
TextEdit, hey, next product.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:50)
It is. It's unbelievable. There's so much still there.

**David Rosenthal** (1:53)
Chess from next.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:55)
Totally. The screenshot icon finally changed. It was that like big camera until Yosemite, and it finally changed that little thing. That was like the last asset remaining. The podcast about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:40)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:41)
And we are your hosts. On today's episode, we will be covering a cornerstone of technology today. Apple's 1997 acquisition of Next. So, yeah, I think this is one that we've been talking about doing for a very long time. The original tagline of our show was technology acquisitions that actually went well. And we've deviated from that a little bit, and we've gotten into talking about all sorts of acquisitions, recent ones, ones we think didn't go well. But this one is super, super true to our roots. So excited to be here and talk about it today.

**David Rosenthal** (3:14)
Yeah, this is going to be a blast. And big, big thank you to GeekWire and John and Todd and everybody for posting us here. This is our first live show, so we're streaming on Facebook. You guys will get to see how the sausage is made. Thanks for sticking with us. And we will post it on iTunes and our website acquired.fm once we edit it. With that, we'll dive in. So next, like Ben was saying, I've been looking forward to doing this one for a long time as both devoted Apple users, both of us.
This is really the story of how, you know, what I love about it is it's kind of like this is the hero story of Steve Jobs, you know. He had initial success, the initial arc, and then he was off in the wilderness at Next for 10 years, then he comes back to Apple, and here we are today where Apple is the most valuable company in the world. How did this happen?

**Ben Gilbert** (4:13)
And truly like a drama, right? I mean, you can't script this stuff. They've literally made three movies about it because of how kind of crazy this journey is. So we want to focus just today on kind of the part picking up at when Steve started Next and how that went integrating that into Apple.

**David Rosenthal** (4:28)
Yeah. So we start our journey in 1984, a very good year. That was the year I was born.
And Steve Jobs is still at Apple for the first time. The company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak. And what's going on at this time is the personal computer has happened, driven by Apple and the Macintosh. Apple's a public company, very valuable. But computing has entered a new wave. And we're in the era of the workstation at this point. And I had to do a bunch of Googling and Wikipedia because I really had no clue what a workstation was. I think there were a bunch of these in college, in the computer lab somewhere. And they were made by Sun. And I didn't really know what they did.