Episode 5: Siri

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
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** (0:30)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (0:36)
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** (0:54)
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** (1:10)
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** (1:27)
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 C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes.

**David Rosenthal** (1:44)
Hey Siri, were you a good acquisition by Apple? Interesting question.
Is it you? Is it you? Is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (2:06)
Welcome to Episode 5 of Acquired. This episode is about Siri and Apple's acquisition.

**David Rosenthal** (2:15)
Are we starting? Yeah. We're starting.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:20)
So, welcome back to all of our listeners. As usual, you can catch... Give us any feedback or anything at AcquiredFM on Twitter.
It's been a fun last few episodes. I think this is our last one before the new year.

**David Rosenthal** (2:33)
Yeah. Happy holidays, everybody.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:35)
Yeah.

**David Rosenthal** (2:36)
In the meantime, though, we've got a special one for you here. We're doing, hey Siri.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:45)
We are. We are. David, do you want to start us off with the acquisition history and facts?

**David Rosenthal** (2:50)
As always. So Siri, a super interesting history, a spin out from SRI International, which itself is a fascinating organization, many people are probably familiar with, based in Menlo Park. It itself was actually started in 1946 by the trustees of Stanford and was originally called the Stanford Research Institute. The purpose of it was to research and then potentially spin out and commercialize basic technology, and has been funded by the government, Stanford itself and many other sources over the years. Done a lot of great work. And in the sort of mid 2000s, started working on this project called Calo, which was funded by DARPA, and that SRI was a major participant of. And the goal of that was to develop an artificial intelligence based personal assistant for the government and the military. And SRI thought that the potential was there to spin this out and commercialize it and put it on smartphones. So, in 2008, they spun out what would become Siri. And there's a really cool story about how they decided to name it. Actually, on Cora, Adam Cheyer, one of the co-founders and the VP of Engineering at Siri, talks about how they came up with the name. And obviously, it echoes SRI that the company spun out of.
But Dag Kittlau, who was the CEO of Siri, had apparently once considered it as the name for his daughter when his daughter was born.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:54)
just think of that every time you say, hey Siri.

**David Rosenthal** (4:56)
Every time you say, hey Siri. And in Norse, Dag is Norwegian American, in Norse it means beautiful woman who leads you to victory.
And then apparently in Swahili, it means secret, which this is my favorite part. As Adam writes on Quora, a tip of the hat to their pre-named days of the project when they began as stealthcompany.com, which still exists if you go to stealthcompany.com, there is this really old school looking website saying, Stealth, get in early. We are forming Silicon Valley's next great company. We aim to fundamentally redesign the face of consumer internet. And then in news and events, they have office location finalized on February 1st and January 18th. Money raised from top VCs in parentheses, lots.