Episode 33: Overture (with the Internet History Podcast!)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Brian, have you ever had to cancel an episode, like mid-episode because something was going wrong and it was just unrecoverable?

**Brian McCullough** (0:08)
Yes. Actually, the one that was the worst that I still released was ironically enough, the guy that invented the MP3. Right.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
Welcome back to episode 33 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:37)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:39)
And we are your hosts. Today, we've got a great guest with us, Brian McCullough from the Internet History Podcast. We are huge, huge fans of Brian's podcast here on Acquired, so super, super pumped to have him joining us today. We're doing a double episode, so you'll be able to hear a version of this episode on Brian's podcast as well. Today, we will be talking about the valley-shaping acquisition that happened in 2003 of Yahoo acquiring Overture. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:14)
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. 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** (1:39)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (1:45)
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** (2:03)
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** (2:19)
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, 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** (2:36)
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. Now, without any further adieu, over to you, Brian.

**Brian McCullough** (2:57)
Guys, thanks for doing this crossover. So yeah, today we're going to be talking about an interesting acquisition story. Interesting in the sense that it's not just one company acquiring another because there's a huge major third player that comes into this story. But we're going to talk today about Yahoo acquiring goto.com, which at the time of acquisition was known as overture.com. So to set the acquisition groundwork here, goto.com was a company that came out of an incubator in the late 1990s.
Incubators were hot during the.com era. One of the hot ones was-

**David Rosenthal** (3:42)
What's old is new again these days.

**Brian McCullough** (3:44)
Exactly. The incubator we're talking about was called Idealab, which was founded by a man probably most of you know by the name of Bill Gross.
Idealab generated a couple of different companies, carsdirect.com, Net Zero, the free ISP, if you remember that from back in the day. The infamous etoys.com came out of Idealab, but probably the most successful company to be incubated at Idealab was goto.com. I believe this was 100% Bill Gross' brainstorm. What goto was was a glorified search engine where the results of a search were generated not by an algorithm based on accuracy or what you were searching for necessarily, but was actually the results were generated by bids from advertisers. If you went to goto.com and you searched for flowers, the number one search result would be brought up, paid for by an advertiser that had bid the most for that ad.

**David Rosenthal** (4:55)
This is one of the... Doing research for this show is just so crazy to even think about today, but there were no organic search results. Everything you saw on goto.com and then later Overture, we'll talk about how they shifted their product and business models was an ad. It would be like Google, but without the organic search results.