Episode 3: Twitch

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
All right, David, you ready?

**David Rosenthal** (0:02)
I'm ready, Ben.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:03)
All right.
Welcome to episode three of Acquired. This is the one where we talk about Twitch. Today, we're gonna try something a little bit different. We've been listening to our listeners and getting a lot of feedback that not only do David and I agree too much, but we're doing softballs. And you know-

**David Rosenthal** (0:38)
Feedback is a gift, Ben.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:40)
Yeah, thank you. We really like hearing from everyone. And you know, well, originally, our goal was to set out and only review the super stellar, spectacular ones that only went super well and what we can learn from those. It's a little boring.

**David Rosenthal** (0:57)
People are telling us they want some spice.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:59)
Yeah, so we're going to do... Obviously, Twitch has been a little bit more recent. It's a 2014 acquisition and I hear a recording in November of 2015 And there's still a lot of open questions. And I think, you know, people are generally positive and optimistic and there's an exploding market there, but a lot more to talk about.

**David Rosenthal** (1:22)
A whole lot to talk about. As always, thank you everyone for the reviews, for the feedback. You can check out our website at Acquired.fm. We're on Twitter at Acquired.fm. And please keep the feedback coming.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:36)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:42)
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** (2:07)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:13)
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** (2:31)
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** (2:47)
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** (3:03)
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. So we're changing locations a little bit tonight. We are in the wonderful den of David's home, here on the creative and secure SSID of default two.

**David Rosenthal** (3:33)
We're really creative in the Sholik-Rosenthal household.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:37)
Yes, so thank you so much for your generous hospitality, David and Jenny.

**David Rosenthal** (3:42)
Always happy to, Ben. And you listeners as well.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:46)
All right, let's get on with it.

**David Rosenthal** (3:47)
Let's jump into it. So, right about, what was this? 14 months ago, there had been acquisition rumors swirling about a young, three-year-old, live streaming network, primarily used for streaming games called twitch.tv.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:12)
Which itself has a crazy history.

**David Rosenthal** (4:15)
Crazy history.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:17)
If you were watching either of the previous incarnations of this company, you wouldn't have seen this end coming.

**David Rosenthal** (4:23)
And the incarnations being first, justin.tv, which I believe was one of the first white-combinator companies. Am I right there?

**Ben Gilbert** (4:31)
Yeah, I don't know what batch. One of the early ones, for sure.

**David Rosenthal** (4:33)
It was like 2007, I think.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:35)
justin.tv is this incredible, before smartphones, before a lot of the, or before smartphones got big anyway, kind of before GoPro and all that. Justin Kan strapped a camera to himself and broadcast what he was doing all the time 24-7. Ended up going through white-combinator with the kind of the crazy concept.