Episode 8: Acompli, Sunrise, and Wunderlist (w/ Kurt DelBene)

**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 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, etc. 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)
Forscorn seven years ago.

**Kurt DelBene** (1:45)
Our forefathers brought forth in this continent. How far can you go with that?

**David Rosenthal** (1:49)
I actually forgot.

**Kurt DelBene** (1:50)
That's as far as you got? Oh, you didn't even get that far? What did you learn in civics in elementary school?

**David Rosenthal** (2:00)
Is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (2:13)
Welcome to episode number eight of Acquired. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:18)
And we are your hosts. Today we have a very special episode. We have a guest at Microsoft, Kurt DelBene.

**David Rosenthal** (2:26)
Yeah, we are very lucky to have Kurt DelBene with us today. He's been a great friend and mentor to both of us in different ways and actually both of us at Medrona too. So Kurt started his career actually at the very famous and renowned Bell Labs and spent five years there and then went to a booth and got his MBA at Chicago.
Went to do a short stint at McKinsey after that and then went to Microsoft and had an over 20 year career at Microsoft that culminated when Ben was there in Kurt being the president of Office, which he was until December 2013 And then afterwards he went to healthcare.gov and did a stint there helping launch Obamacare. And after that ended up with us for a little while. We were really lucky to have him at Medrona as a venture partner. And then last spring Kurt returned to Microsoft and is the EVP of Corporate Strategy and Planning. So thank you Kurt for gracing us.

**Kurt DelBene** (3:34)
Hey, it's good to be here and good to talk to you guys again. Just one little correction on healthcare.gov. I came in after the launch to help them repair it.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:44)
You did.
And for listeners, I had the privilege of waking up real early one morning and coming in to hear Kurt talk about that at Medrona. It is absolutely fascinating to hear how to mop up a gigantic software project like that. And getting all the right people on the bus, all the right consultants and contracting firms that are putting that whole thing together, it is, Kurt, that looked like an absolute ballet.

**Kurt DelBene** (4:09)
Well, it was super rewarding and super challenging. So maybe we can do a future podcast just on that. It's a good, it's an interesting topic.

**David Rosenthal** (4:16)
You needed to get some good R&R, so you went to a venture firm for 10 months afterwards.
So today with Kurt, we're going to talk about hopefully a very topical acquisition, and we're actually going to lump a few in here, but the main focus is going to be Acompli, which is now the mobile outlook on iOS and Android. So I'm going to run through quickly, we're going to do Acompli and then, we'll sprinkle in little bits of both Sunrise and Wunderlist, which are also office productivity apps that Microsoft all acquired in the past 18 months or so. So I'm going to run through quickly the acquisition history and facts. Accompli, founded April 2013 by Javier Soltero, JJ Zhuang and Kevin Henrickson. It's interesting, Javier was CMU engineer and then an early employee at Netscape. Javier spent three and a half years at VMware before coming back to his productivity roots and founding Accompli, which I was a user from day one when it launched in beta and thought it was on my iPhone and thought it was just a great, really the first mobile app that combined mail and calendar all in one app.