Episode 43: The Square IPO

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I also don't think there's anything that we want to edit or cut.

**David Rosenthal** (0:03)
Oh, that was great.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
We're getting good at this. Welcome back to episode 43 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:25)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:26)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering the 2015 Square IPO to much, much demand from a lot of our listeners out there, from David, from myself, living on our Google Doc for way too long. We now have enough distance from it that we feel comfortable retrospectively covering it as an Acquired episode.

**David Rosenthal** (0:48)
Yeah, this one is going to be fun. I've been looking forward to this for a while.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:53)
Yeah, we've never said that on a podcast intro before.

**David Rosenthal** (0:56)
Basically, this whole show is just like what Ben and I want to do and what we want to learn about.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:02)
We did our survey and we had a tremendous amount of feedback that said, it seems like you guys just going to do whatever you want to do. And we hope that you guys like that because that is indeed how this works.

**David Rosenthal** (1:11)
Well, you know, that's the best product advice out there is to solve your own problem, right?

**Ben Gilbert** (1:18)
That's right. That's right. Speaking of our survey, we promised you guys that someone would win a pair of AirPods. And while they are still shipping because of Apple's excellent, excellent six-week delay, which congratulations to Apple for creating a product that has that much demand, they're still in the mail. But we've got a winner.
So a shout out to Tom, who we will leave his last name anonymous. But Tom, we have reached out to you over email. And congratulations. And thank you to everyone that took the survey. It means a bunch to us.

**David Rosenthal** (1:50)
Yeah, thank you. We got some great data, not just data, but feedback from you guys that hopefully you'll start to see incorporated in the show.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:00)
Yeah, we heard you loud and clear. We do not need to do hot takes. We get a lot of feedback about the hot takes. We're not doing it unless we really need to. We're not doing the hot takes.

**David Rosenthal** (2:08)
Like today.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:09)
Yeah. We love reviews. So listeners, if you have a minute right now, you can pause this very podcast, pop open the Apple Podcasts app, and you likely are already in it if you are reflective of our analytics, and go and write a quick review. We really appreciate it. It's how we grow the show. It's how we bring on more guests, and it's how we do even better content. So thank you for doing that. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:37)
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** (3:03)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:09)
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, et cetera, and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:27)
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** (3:43)
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 energy net happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:59)
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.