Episode 29: Special—2016 Review and 2017 Predictions

**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)
Yep. 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 crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes.

**David Rosenthal** (1:43)
The idea is to fix Twitter.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:16)
29 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:22)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:23)
And we are your hosts. This is a very different episode for us than usual. We decided to do a year in review. And probably more importantly than that, talk about what lies ahead in 2017 So David and I were thinking, you know, we've talked a lot about a lot of tech themes in a very sort of rambling and unstructured way over the course of the show. And we went back and actually pulled out what were the tech themes that we identified from from each episode.
And we kind of basically have a little tally going of which ones were we thought were the most important. And we're going to kind of talk about those and then get into the themes that we think are going to be pretty dominant in 2017 Or at least make some freewheeling predictions on that.

**David Rosenthal** (3:16)
Yeah, no, you get what you pay for here. So no guarantee we'll be right. But yeah, a couple notes. So Ben and I are recording this on December 30th, right at the tail end of 2016 It will, barring some editing heroics, it will probably be up for you guys already into 2017
But as we came to the end of the year, we thought, especially this being our first full year of doing Acquired, we wanted to look back and run some data on our own content and see what the biggest themes of our show have been. So Ben and I were chatting just before we started. We recorded 23 regular episodes. Well, I guess that includes specials, but 23 full episodes in 2016 This is our 24th, and it was really fun to go through and pull out the themes.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:12)
A lot of repeats.

**David Rosenthal** (4:14)
So with that, should we announce the Acquired 2016 theme of the year?

**Ben Gilbert** (4:20)
We should. And frequent listeners to the show, I'm sure, can guess what this one's going to be, or at least who the originator of this theme was.

**David Rosenthal** (4:29)
Shocked!

**Ben Gilbert** (4:31)
Yeah, so discussed in six different episodes is Aggregation Theory by Ben Thompson Ostrotechary.
This of course talks about building superior user experiences as the winning strategy in an infinitely accessible, zero-cost distribution world, aka the Internet. And this was discussed on Accompli, Snapchat, Jet, Android, Skype, and Marvel. And so I think for us, it's such a... It says a lot about the power of the theory that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you realize that, oh, this is a predominant factor in making these companies successful, you know, every company we analyze, we're like, oh, I see what they're doing here.