Episode 36: The LA Clippers

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I have this great, great curve-out. I don't know what it's called, but you should go download it and pay money.

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
I didn't write down the title. I wanted to make sure I got it right.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:20)
Welcome back to episode 36 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:28)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:29)
And we are your hosts. Today's episode, David and I are venturing away from technology into the world of sports. We'll be talking about Steve Ballmer's 2014 purchase of the Los angeles Clippers. So for full disclosure here, David and I are not huge NBA fans. Well, maybe except for my unapologetic bandwagon fanhood of the Cavs and LeBron james.

**David Rosenthal** (0:53)
And I gotta admit, the Warriors are pretty fun to watch.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:55)
Yeah. Well, they're changing the game. So, and Steph Curry is awesome. But we do love digging into the analysis of any acquisition, and there's no shortage of writing and opinion on this one. And we're going to be doing some episodes on the overlap of sports and tech in the near future. So, we figured we would dive in just absolutely headfirst and kind of force ourselves to do all the research. And thanks to many acquired listeners and many of David and my friends who we called in to get their kind of like hardcore sports opinions on all this.

**David Rosenthal** (1:28)
Yeah. Open invitation listeners to get in touch with us by email or jump in the Slack and tell us where we went wrong. But we think this will be really fun. We've done a bunch of kind of serious, more hard-hitting episodes in a row, and we wanted to do something light. Given that the NBA playoffs start literally today, we thought this would be a fun one.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:48)
Yeah. I think this was a $2 billion purchase by Steve Ballmer, and anytime there's a $2 billion transaction going on.

**David Rosenthal** (1:57)
Involving Steve Ballmer.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:58)
Right. Involving Steve Ballmer. Whether it's sports or airlines like we did with the Virgin Alaska acquisition or any of our standard tech wheelhouse, we can definitely apply the acquired methodology to it and get some good discussion in. So a few things before we dive in. The lifeblood of the show is itunes reviews. So please help us grow the show, and if you're so inclined, leave an itunes review for us. We also have a Slack and we are close to 600 people. So if you enjoy doing analysis of any tech event, there's people in there talking about M&A events, about IPOs, about new product launches, about Star Wars trailers coming out. If you want to talk with other nerds about this sort of stuff, we are all hanging out in the Acquired Slack, which you can join at acquired.fm.
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:54)
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** (3:20)
yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:25)
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** (3:43)
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** (4:00)
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** (4:16)
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 now, without further ado, David, will you take us into the story?