Episode 35: Oculus

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Hey Acquired listeners, Ben here. You'll notice for the first eight minutes or so of the episode, my audio quality isn't the greatest. But bear with us, it'll be crystal clear for most of the episode. Thanks. Is ocular and occluded from the same root?

**David Rosenthal** (0:15)
I don't know.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:17)
I don't know either. Anyway. That feels right, because I think that's our logo, right?

**David Rosenthal** (0:22)
It's an eye, yeah.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:23)
Yeah, all right. I concede. Welcome back to episode 35 of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:44)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:45)
And we are your hosts. Today's episode, we are covering the Facebook acquisition of Oculus, a much requested episode by a lot of our listeners in the Slack and one we've gotten a lot of email about. So we've now got enough distance from the acquisition that there's a lot more to come, but we feel comfortable covering it.

**David Rosenthal** (1:06)
No doubt about that. And we thought now would be a good time to do it, given some of the themes we talked about on the Snap IPO episode, that this would be a good counterpoint, a sort of different approach to a camera company.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:21)
indeed. So before we dive in, we have some incredible listeners that leave some great iTunes reviews. And sometimes they're even a little host deprecating, but we love them all the same as long as they are five stars, and they help us grow the show. So as we mentioned a couple of episodes ago, if you leave one that we think is worth reading on the air, we're going to go ahead and do just that. So one we've got from Daniel X is an emoji review, which is trophy, bag of money, unicorn, which I think is quite appropriate. And this one, this one's a little, I had trouble parsing it at first, and then I was like, oh, I see what they're doing. The subject is, yep, yep. And the description is, that's one of my favorite phrases Ben uses. Oh man, yeah. And super interesting are up there too. So now I'm going to be incredibly self-conscious every time I use those phrases. Thank you so much.

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
We love you just the same, Ben.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:19)
The username on that one is ActiveUsers. So thank you to all the ActiveUsers out there that really appreciate my catchphrases.

**David Rosenthal** (2:26)
That's great.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:27)
All right. Moving on. I'm happy to leave that behind. But what the point we're trying to make is leave us iTunes reviews. Helps us grow the show. We love it. And hopefully, if you're creative, then we get to share it with the rest of our audience. Speaking of the rest of our audience, we've got a Slack. So join us at acquired.fm. You can join the over 500 of us that are in talking about tech, M&A, and any news that comes up between episodes. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:57)
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. 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** (3:22)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:28)
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** (3:46)
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** (4:02)
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** (4:18)
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.