Episode 31: The Uber - Didi Chuxing Merger with Brad Stone, author of The Upstarts & The Everything Store

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Any other way that we could phrase that would be great.

**Brad Stone** (0:03)
You guys want attention for this podcast, but no.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:17)
Welcome to episode 31 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:25)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:26)
And we are your hosts. We have another guest episode today, and we are very, very, very excited to welcome Brad Stone. David will tell you about Brad before we dive in, but I wanted to do a little bit of administrative stuff before. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (0:48)
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** (1:13)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (1:19)
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** (1:37)
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** (1:53)
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** (2:09)
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. For those of you who are long time listeners of Acquired, you know about the Slack, but if you're new to the show, join over 400 other listeners of Acquired for real time discussion and analysis and news as it's happening, whether it's the Snap IPO, Trello a few weeks ago, App Dynamics, a lot of interesting conversation going on there about the M&A world. Lastly, before we dive in, a big thank you to KUOW, a radio station here in Seattle, who has generously let us record in their studio this morning. Now, David, over to you to introduce Brad.

**David Rosenthal** (2:58)
Yeah, we are super honored and excited to have Brad on the show today. He is actually our second guest from Bloomberg after our great show with Alex Sherman a couple of months back. But Brad is the Senior Executive Editor of Global Technology at Bloomberg. Before that, he covered tech in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years as a reporter at Bloomberg, Newsweek and the New York Times. Most relevantly and fun for us, Brad is the author a few years back of the canonical history of Amazon, The Everything Store, which as listeners know, we have discussed a lot on this show. It's had a big impact on Ben and My Thinking. It's just a great book that we can't recommend enough. Brad actually has now a new book out called The Upstarts, which covers the histories thus far of the new generation of defining Internet companies Airbnb and Uber. I've heard of those.
Ben and I both read it. It's great. We highly recommend it. We're going to be talking about a lot of the content within it on this show. But definitely go out and pick up a copy. If you like this show and history and analysis of waves of technology companies, you're going to love this book. So thank you, Brad. We're super excited to have you here.

**Brad Stone** (4:21)
Thanks, guys.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:22)
Yeah. And for listeners, in my kind of typical style, knowing we were interviewing Brad this morning, just finished the Upstarts last night, and I loved it. I mean, it's truly...
I talked a lot about the Everything Store on the episode with Tom Alberg, but really the spiritual successor to that Amazon book. And it's interesting how it really is the next generation of a lot of the sort of same mentality and tactics in Uber, and to a lesser extent in Airbnb, but in Uber that we saw on Amazon.