Episode 41: Booking.com with Jetsetter & Room 77 CEO Drew Patterson

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Drew, I think you might be our most prepared guest ever. This is great. Drew has printed out notes and pen and paper here. This is awesome. Yeah.

**Drew Patterson** (0:10)
I mean, I'm a big fan. I just want to blow my shot here.

**David Rosenthal** (0:15)
Your shot had started.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:29)
Welcome back to episode 41 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:36)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:38)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering the 2005 booking.com acquisition by the Priceline group. Now, this acquisition is legendary, and there are tons and tons of sort of interesting nuances to understanding the industry. So we wanted to wait until we had a guest with deep travel experience and really industry domain knowledge to make sure that we did it right. So today, our guest and listener of the show is Drew Patterson, the CEO of Jetsetter & Room 77

**David Rosenthal** (1:08)
So, yeah, we are lucky to have Drew, who is a, quote, grizzled travel industry veteran, to help us impact this one. So Drew started his career at Starwood Hotels, where he managed distribution and pricing, and then jumped into the world of online travel at Kayak, where he was VP of Marketing from 2004 to 2009 He left to found Jetsetter, and thank you for doing that, by the way, because you guys booked Jenny and my honeymoon, so very much appreciated.
And he was CEO there at Jetsetter until 2012, when he moved to the West Coast and founded another travel company that was quickly acquired by Room 77, and he served as CEO there at Room 77 until the beginning of this year. So thanks again, Drew, for coming on and sharing your travel industry knowledge.

**Drew Patterson** (1:56)
Guys, great to be here. Longtime listener, first time talker, can't wait for the show.

**David Rosenthal** (2:01)
We can't either. Well, we are ready to dive in.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:05)
We are. We are. And listeners, if you listened to last week's episode, you may know this, but if not, we are skipping the bit about asking for reviews and letting you know about our Slack this time with an extremely important message. We are launching the annual Acquired survey and we'll have it open for about a month. So whether you're a first time listener or a long time fan, we would love to hear your thoughts. And in fact, this is so important to us that it's actually more important than any reviews, any begging you to share with your friends, any of the normal stuff that we do. Because as you guys know, we often lament the lack of data available to podcasters. And it's really important to us to learn more about who you are. Some of those reasons include, number one, we need your honest feedback about how to make the show better. And based on some of the early responses we've already read, you guys have been fantastic at doing that. So please help us out, tell us more information. We'd like to understand who you are so we can better tailor the content and the guests to our audience. And then third, we'd like to learn more about who you are to share completely anonymously without any identifiable information with our sponsors to really help them paint a picture of who's listening out there. So that's about all I have to say about that.

**David Rosenthal** (4:16)
We're a company that uses standard 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** (4:28)
Yep. Obviously it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost 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** (4:44)
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** (5:01)
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 crusoecloud.com/acquired or click the link in the show notes. So David, are you ready to take us into the history and facts?