From NFL to Startup COO to Congressman Regulating Crypto (with Rep. Anthony Gonzalez)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I wonder if I can make it so you can't see her if I just hold her. She's all wound up right now.

**David Rosenthal** (0:06)
I love it. We've got all the creatures here. I got the baby on the monitor. I got my fluffy dog. You've got your fluffy dog.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:12)
Keep her off camera. I think it never happened.

**David Rosenthal** (0:19)
Is it you? Is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:32)
Welcome to this special episode 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** (0:46)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:51)
And we are your hosts. Today we have a first ever for Acquired. Our guest is a United States congressman serving from my home state of Ohio, Representative Anthony Gonzalez. David, Anthony has an incredible story.

**David Rosenthal** (1:08)
An incredible story. The original motivation was Anthony is on the House Financial Services Committee and is probably one of, if not the foremost member of Congress working on understanding and regulating Web 3, crypto, everything that's happening. And beyond that too, the broader economy, the Fed, GameStop, Robinhood, we get into all of it.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:31)
Yes, the House Financial Services Committee had a broad mandate well before crypto came around.

**David Rosenthal** (1:35)
And Anthony is one of the handful of folks, as we talk about, that really actually use and understand this stuff in Congress.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:42)
Yeah, and not just because he's actually played around with it himself, but he ran a venture-backed startup before serving in Congress. He went to Stanford GSB for grad school with David.

**David Rosenthal** (1:54)
That's where Anthony and I first intersected. And, you know, that's the who we talk about it all through this episode. His story is just incredible. His family immigrated from Cuba after the Revolution. His dad was a steel entrepreneur in Cleveland, and Anthony ended up playing football at Ohio State.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:13)
I remember in high school watching him on TV.

**David Rosenthal** (2:15)
He went to the NFL. He played for the Colts. He caught touchdowns from Peyton Manning. And he went to business school and now is a US congressman. It's just incredible.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:24)
Yep. All right. Excited to get into it. Listeners, if you want to discuss this episode after we wrap up here, join us in the Acquired Slack at acquired.fm slash Slack. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:40)
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** (3:06)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:11)
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** (3:29)
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. These lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:46)
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** (4:03)
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 on to our interview with Congressman Anthony Gonzalez. And remember, this show is not investment advice. David, myself, and any guests may have investments in the companies we discuss. And this show is for informational and entertainment purposes.

**David Rosenthal** (4:32)