Episode 7: YouTube

**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** (0:55)
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 crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. Welcome to episode seven of Acquired. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:05)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:07)
And we're your hosts. Today we sit here on the eve of the announcement that Google is the most valuable company in the world to tell you about Google's acquisition.

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
Google announced that they were the most valuable company in the world?

**Ben Gilbert** (2:20)
What?

**David Rosenthal** (2:22)
Google announced earnings and people are speculating that it might...

**Ben Gilbert** (2:27)
Oh, when it opens tomorrow.

**David Rosenthal** (2:28)
I haven't checked the stock price, but Google's market cap might pass Apple's tomorrow.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:33)
Ah, gotcha.

**David Rosenthal** (2:36)
Mr. Market will tell.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:37)
Yeah, in steep contrast to what we normally do on this show, that is just conjecture and hypothesizing.

**David Rosenthal** (2:45)
We never conjecture on this show.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:49)
We're going to talk about kind of an older acquisition when you look at the companies that we've looked at so far. Google acquiring YouTube. David, why don't you take it away with acquisition history and facts?

**David Rosenthal** (3:05)
Will do. So YouTube, this is a big one.
YouTube was founded early 2005 by two former engineers and one former designer from Paypal. Part of the much-belly-hooed Paypal Mafia. And interestingly, we'll get more into this later, YouTube was one of the very first investments at Sequoia by another member of the Paypal Mafia, Roloff Bautha. Just keep it in the family. So it was founded in early 2005, and then in November of 2005, Sequoia and Roloff come in, they lead a $3.5 million Series A. And then a few months later, it was very early growth days, having just released the product when Sequoia leads the Series A. A few months later in December of 2005, SNL, remember the Lonely Island days on SNL, the skit Lazy Sunday comes out and...

**Ben Gilbert** (4:21)
Wait, so it only took us seven episodes to talk about Andy Sandberg here on Acquired.

**David Rosenthal** (4:27)
Ironic, I know.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:29)
Editors note, David looks like Andy Sandberg. There should be no inside jokes in podcasting.

**David Rosenthal** (4:37)
Lazy Sunday comes out, and a whole bunch of people video their TVs and post it to YouTube. And I don't know if this was an aggregate or just one of the versions of this clip of Lazy Sunday generates seven million views on YouTube, which was huge. I mean, there were only 100,000 people on the site before then.

**Ben Gilbert** (5:02)
Yeah, I think even at Acquisition, they had an audience of 72.1 million, but they were reporting 19.1 monthly active users. So I mean, to get that kind of view count that early, and that was even a year before.

**David Rosenthal** (5:13)
I'm sure it was a lot of college kids like me watching it over and over and over again.