Episode 27: Special—A Conversation with Microsoft's Head of Strategic Investments Brian Schultz

**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** (0:54)
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.

**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. It was a classic reload the page problem.

**Brian Schultz** (1:48)
Turn it off, turn it on, hit it a few times. Eventually it works.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:08)
Welcome to episode 27 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

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

**Ben Gilbert** (2:17)
And we are your hosts. Today's episode is a discussion about M&A at Microsoft with Brian Schultz.

**David Rosenthal** (2:23)
Brian is the managing director and head of strategic investments at Microsoft. And Brian actually started at Microsoft in 1999 in CorpDev, and then left for a little detour into the startup world in the mid 2000s. He left and co-founded Antela here in Seattle, which was ultimately acquired by Photobucket. And he did that with Dan Shapiro, who's now the co-founder and CEO of Glowforge here in town. Shout out to Dan. After that, he came back to Big Tech and to M&A, to Microsoft, and has been back in CorpDev and now running strategic investments ever since, but remains very active in the Seattle startup scene and has been a friend to us and many others here. So welcome, Brian, and thanks for joining us.

**Brian Schultz** (3:12)
Thanks for having me.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:14)
Yeah, yeah.

**David Rosenthal** (3:15)
We are super excited to, we've had Taylor Bereta from Adobe on who runs Adobe's CorpDev, but super excited to talk to you about the bridging this world between the big technology companies and running CorpDev there and strategic investments, but actually having gone and founded a startup yourself.
What's your perspective? What kind of brought you back into Microsoft after tasting the startup world?

**Brian Schultz** (3:48)
Right. Well, there's I think a whole bunch of different ways to look at it, and I think the one thing that I certainly believe is that it actually has made me a better CorpDev person by far having been on the other side, if you will. Talk about empathy. Empathy for your customer. Yeah. Having had to raise money and deal with these discussions that happened between strategic investors and acquirers.

**David Rosenthal** (4:12)
Money and selling your company.

**Brian Schultz** (4:14)
All these things. And so just having, and as a CFO, CEO of a startup having been on the other side, both on the investing and acquiring side, I also, I think, I hope, avoided a lot of pitfalls and kept my cap table clean. I knew a lot of things that I should be doing, that I think a lot of folks can get trapped in. And so I think having the diverse set of experiences is a great thing and I wish more folks in Microsoft and other big companies, as well as in startups, had that empathy to be able to reach across the aisle. And of course, now we're getting to politics and didn't mean to do that. But going back.