Episode 37: BAMTech, Disney and "the Biggest Media Company You've Never Heard Of”

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Frickin Forbes, God, I hate these quotes of the day. Most annoying website ever.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:22)
Welcome back to episode 37 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. And today, spin-outs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:32)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:34)
And we are your hosts. So today, David and I are continuing our journey along sports and technology by diving into Major League Baseball's 2015 spin-out of a company called BAMTech from their Advanced Media or Mlbam group and the 2016 minority investment into BAMTech by Disney. So David, I'm ridiculously pumped for this episode.

**David Rosenthal** (0:56)
Oh, me too. Not only, and for listeners, even if you don't care about sports, you should keep listening because not only is this one of the most interesting sports tech deals that's happened in the last decade plus, but this is actually, I think, really important to understand from just a pure technology standpoint, you know, when it comes to the future of television and things we've talked about on this show a lot with Twitch and Amazon and YouTube and even Snapchat. So stay tuned for this one.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:29)
Yeah, it's like there was a secret, like big tech company hiding inside of a sports league for like a decade and a half. And they had more foresight and more premonitions than the best streaming services out there and had better technology. And I mean, reading into all this, I really couldn't believe it. Like we give a lot of credit to a lot of these other companies, Netflix being one of them for being these sort of digital pioneers and Baseball is making bets five years earlier.

**David Rosenthal** (1:57)
Totally, totally agree. This is gonna be fun to dive into.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:00)
Yeah, well, before we get to it, a couple of administrative things as usual, we love iTunes reviews. Listeners, if you like the show, if you've been listening for a long time, or if you're brand new to the show, it's how we grow the show, it's how others find us, and it lets us do more cool things and bring on more cool guests. So if you have them in, it would love a review on iTunes, and thanks so much for that. Our Slack has been blowing up recently. So we've got a thing called Slack, and I'm sure many of you use it at work, and there's over 600 of us that are hanging out in the Acquired Slack now. You can get to it by going to Acquired.fm, and there's a little widget on the right. And there's a ton of cool conversation in there, a lot of great criticism and feedback of episodes after we release them, where we hop in and talk about it with you guys. But then also a lot of people link to Breaking News, and yesterday was a great discussion of Amazon's earnings call. And honestly, we get a lot of great color for upcoming episodes from the community. So thanks to everyone who is an active participant in the Slack.

**David Rosenthal** (3:05)
Yeah, absolutely.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:07)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:12)
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** (3:38)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:43)
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** (4:02)
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** (4:18)
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.