Episode 47: The Atlassian IPO

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
The other thing I was thinking about is do we want to do any follow-up on Alaska Virgin?

**David Rosenthal** (0:06)
Yeah, people hate follow-ups.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:07)
Yeah. People definitely hate hot takes. I mean, they also hate follow-ups.

**David Rosenthal** (0:11)
Yeah, I don't think we need to. All right.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:14)
Actually, maybe I'll just use this for the teaser quote. It didn't go well. welcome back to episode 47 of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:34)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:36)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering the Atlassian IPO. And normally, we're hesitant to do episodes on such recent news unless we're like actually on the scene, weak of, can like be the, you know, one of the first takes you hear on it. And otherwise, ultimately, we don't have enough to reflect on to make a kind of a recent IPO or a recent acquisition, something that we should cover on the show. However, there's so much interesting story behind Atlassian and there's already been so much data to go off of in the last, what, two years?

**David Rosenthal** (1:10)
Two years.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:10)
Two years since the IPO.

**David Rosenthal** (1:11)
Hard to believe it's been two years.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:12)
Yeah, yeah. In fact, when I was writing this little intro, I was like in the last couple of quarters since the IPO, but really, it really been two years that we want to talk about it and we think we have a good story to tell. Before we move on with the show, David, it's great to see you in person.

**David Rosenthal** (1:28)
Yeah, it's great to be here, Ben. Great to be on the show. So as I think most people know at this point, we've been doing most shows remotely because I actually earlier this year moved to San Francisco and I've been living there and working on something new, more to come on that later this year or early next year. But yeah, this is actually our first in-person episode of 2017

**Ben Gilbert** (1:55)
Yeah.

**David Rosenthal** (1:55)
It's good to be back.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:57)
You look very similar to how you looked in 2016, having aged a day.

**David Rosenthal** (2:02)
I appreciate it. Well, it's good to be back in person and good to be back in Seattle. Look forward to being back often and doing more in-person acquired episodes.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:13)
Sweet. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:19)
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** (2:44)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:50)
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** (3:08)
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** (3:24)
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** (3:41)
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. And listeners, if you are not in the Slack, we're about to cross a thousand members. You can go to acquired.fm and in the little sidebar, or on mobile down at the bottom, you can join the Slack. David, you ready to take us in?

**David Rosenthal** (4:13)
Let's do it. So Atlassian, this has been a much requested episode, pretty much for the whole life of Acquired. We're excited, as Ben said in the preamble, to dive in. And I think this is, actually I was going through all of our episodes in preparation for today, and I think this is the first company that we're going to cover on Acquired that's been bootstrapped and gone, quote-unquote, all the way. We've certainly covered other bootstrapped companies in the past, but none of them that have gone on to be kind of lasting, independent, large public companies without taking any venture capital along the way.