Episode 51: 2017 Holiday Special

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
That is definitely the best news in a long time.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
Yeah. Dick Costolo has a good tweet. Roll tide. Welcome to episode 51 of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:29)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
And we are your hosts. We are coming to you from mid December in a second annual Acquired holiday tradition, the holiday special. David, are you excited?

**David Rosenthal** (0:43)
I'm so excited. I'm jealous because Ben has a glass of rosé, and I'm in the office and we don't yet have any wine or beer here. So I'm toasting you in spirit.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:59)
We'll have to do that in person at our meetup, and we'll talk about that in a moment. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:12)
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** (1:37)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (1:43)
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** (2:01)
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** (2:17)
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** (2:34)
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 Crusoe cloud.com/acquired. That's crusoecloud.com/acquired or click the link in the show notes. If you're new to the show, we've got a Slack that you can join at Acquired.fm. We're over a thousand strong and good place to talk about tech M&A, recent news that happened, and more importantly, we actually have more DM activity than there is chatter in the main feeds. So cool to see the connectivity among you listeners who are getting to know each other better by being listeners of the show.

**David Rosenthal** (3:15)
Yeah, we're almost at 1,100 now. Our growth is accelerating.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:20)
It's accelerating.

**David Rosenthal** (3:20)
We're going exponential.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:23)
That's cool, my data's old. I gotta look. Well, speaking of listeners getting to know each other better, we mentioned it on the last show, and we gotta drive the point home. We're gonna be in San Francisco. David's already down there. I'll be flying down Thursday, January 18th. Mark your calendars. It'll be in the evening. We're still figuring out out venue, but we're super excited to hang with our listeners for a few hours, and our densest concentration of listeners is in the Bay Area. New York and Seattle are up there, too, but the Bay Area has certainly been growing the fastest, and excited to always get to spend time down there.

**David Rosenthal** (3:59)
So, yeah, and special shout out, and thank you to Preet, a longtime listener, who has been helping organize and pull this together. So, thank you, and this is, we can't wait to see y'all.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:13)
Not only to organize, but to really spark the whole thing. I think this is the thing David and I keep talking about, haven't done, and Preet, thanks for inspiring us to do it. And that is PR33T, if you're looking in the Acquired Slack.
All right, David, what else? We've got an announcement for next year.

**David Rosenthal** (4:35)
We do, we do. We are gonna be evolving the format a little bit in 2018 Big things happening in Acquired. We're gonna have to put the old format back in the Acquired Museum that we talked about on the last show.