Ethereum

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Should we do the new theme music, even though it's not season nine yet?

**David Rosenthal** (0:03)
Ooh, I think we should. Yeah? Let's do it.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:06)
Alright, let's do it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:06)
It's a special episode.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:07)
Let's do it. Welcome to season eight, episode eight of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:41)
I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco. But today, I am here with you in Seattle, in the flesh.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:50)
In the flesh, and we are your hosts. Well, first, we want to give a huge shout out to Young Spielberg, and Mike Taylor for crafting this new intro music that we used to open this episode. We have been wanting for years to do something distinctive for the show, and it was a real treat to work with both of them on this. And we have links to both of their fine work on Spotify, and just love both of these artists.

**David Rosenthal** (1:16)
They killed it. I am so pumped.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:19)
Me too. Well, we started this season with our first blockchain episode covering Bitcoin. It seems only appropriate to bookend it with the season finale on Ethereum. So David and I are here together in person to tell this story. And as you all know from our Bitcoin episode, Bitcoin is some combination of currency, a store of value, a medium of exchange, which all frankly are up for debate if it's doing a good job at any or all of those things. And as many of you who have bought or sold cryptocurrencies over the last six years know, there has been a big second game in town with Ether, ETH, the token used as a currency in the Ethereum network. But this time, it's not just about currency. Ethereum is something completely different. You can think of it more as a gigantic distributed computer that exists all around the globe in a completely decentralized way.

**David Rosenthal** (2:19)
It's the world computer.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:21)
It is. It is one single virtual machine. That runs across millions of CPUs all at the same time, albeit one very slow virtual machine. There is a strong argument to be made that this enormous tamper-proof, censorship-proof computer is maybe the most important invention of the last decade, laying the groundwork for technology companies to come for the next several decades. And while there are kittens and rainbows everywhere you look in Ethereum land, there were some absolutely wild stories that transpired to bring us to where we are today. This thing has had a pretty wild last year, as most of you will know. Having a market cap 12 months ago at around 20 billion, earlier this year at 450 billion, sort of in the same 12-month stretch, it's been a heck of a year for Ethereum.

**David Rosenthal** (3:14)
This has been a heck of a year for a lot of things.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:17)
No kidding. Well, are you an Acquired Slack member? If not, you should. And aside from all the normal reasons that we usually point out, I'm sure this episode will have quite a vibrant digital assets channel discussion. It's a great way for beginners and the sort of crypto aware alike to have great conversations. And as always, you can join that at acquired.fm slash Slack. Another thank you to listener Austin Fedra for curating that channel and for helping with several discussions as we prepared for this episode. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:54)
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** (4:19)
yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (4:25)
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** (4:44)
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.