Episode 9: Writely (Google Docs)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:26)
welcome back to episode nine of Acquired, the show where we talk about technology acquisitions that actually went well. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:35)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:36)
And we are your hosts. This week, we're going to be covering an older acquisition, but following a theme from our last episode in productivity software. We're going to be covering what became the eventual suite known as Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Presentations, Google Slides.

**David Rosenthal** (0:57)
I think it started as Presentations.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:58)
Yeah, and then it was Presentation Spreadsheets and Docs.

**David Rosenthal** (1:02)
The product of many names.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:03)
Yes. We'll go through, there were a whole ton of companies that actually contributed to this. David will go through the acquisition history and facts, but largely focused around Writely, which eventually became Google Docs. Yes. A reminder that if you enjoy the show, leave us a review on iTunes. We would love any feedback.

**David Rosenthal** (1:23)
Or you can hit us up on Twitter, at Acquired FM.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:26)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Cruiso.

**David Rosenthal** (1:31)
So Cruiso, 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 Cruiso's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Cruiso'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** (1:57)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Cruiso's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:02)
The other element that makes Cruiso special is the environmental angle. Cruiso, 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** (2:20)
Yep. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost, since Cruiso 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** (2:36)
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** (2:53)
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. Now, let's dive in the show. David, you want to do acquisition history and facts?

**David Rosenthal** (3:13)
As always, Ben. So, dear listeners, let's transport back in time to the mid-2000s, Web 2 era is in full swing, Ajax, the browser technology that enabled live dynamic updating of websites, had just come out, and a group of technologists from Intuit had decided to start a little crew to dabble in what they could do with Ajax. And so they founded a company that they called Upstartle. I love that name.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:54)
SoBubble.

**David Rosenthal** (3:57)
So Web 2.0. And they ran through a couple projects and landed on a product that they called Writely. And it was collaborative document editing in the cloud. I don't know what they called it that at the time.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:14)
Yeah, which now seems so table stakes.

**David Rosenthal** (4:17)
Absolutely. Founded by Sam Schillace, Claudia Carpenter, and Steve Newman. And they worked on it for a couple of years. It was in beta. They had a few thousand users. And then in March 2006, Google announces that they had acquired the company for an undisclosed amount rumored in the $10 million range. What's interesting, they had only hired one person over those two years. So it was the three founders and one other former Intuit employee, Jennifer Mazon.
And they all joined Google and became PMs in Google Docs. And what's interesting is that this was actually the second acquisition that Google had made in their online office productivity suite. The first was another company, a smaller company in New York called TwoWeb, TwoWeb Technologies, that they had actually acquired in 2005, that was working on Excel TwoWeb.

**Ben Gilbert** (5:17)
That was something that they brought into Google Labs, right? And I think Google Labs created the first Google spreadsheets before Google Docs even launched.