Google Maps

**Ben Gilbert** (0:01)
I don't want to spoil. I have some stuff that I could tell you, but I don't want to spoil it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:06)
Awesome. Well, Google Maps.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:09)
Google Maps. Welcome to season five, episode three of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and early stage venture fund in Seattle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:36)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am a general partner at Wave Capital, a early stage venture firm focused on marketplaces based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:44)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are talking about Google Maps and the acquisition of three companies, starting with WhereTo Technologies in 2004, that set the whole thing in motion. And David, I would not have guessed it when starting the research, but there's a chance this is as big of a success, but far less discussed than our shining example of an A-plus, Instagram. And listeners, over the next hour or so, we, or at least I, am going to try and build that case.

**David Rosenthal** (1:14)
Oh, I can't wait to hear it. Well, that's actually a good question. Which, probably Instagram is used more, like in terms of more individual, like usage sessions per day than Google Maps. But I don't know. If you count all the APIs of Google Maps, like it might be close.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:33)
Yeah, the dual revenue model as one, being a different front door to Google than search, and two, actually now selling that API access. But we will get into all of that and more. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:50)
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. 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** (2:15)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:21)
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** (2:39)
Yep. 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** (2:55)
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** (3:12)
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 crusoecloud.com/acquired.
That's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. If you like the show, you should come join the other 2500 plus acquired fans that are hanging out in there. If you want more of the show, you should become an acquired limited partner. David and I released one LP show for every main show, and we used these episodes to go deeper on company building topics. The last of which was on a not very well-known topic with Andrew Abramson from Riviera Partners on how the best companies in tech search and recruit for product executives. You can get started with a seven-day free trial and listen right now here in the podcast player of your choice, by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired. All right, David, I'm pretty excited to do a classic acquired episode.

**David Rosenthal** (4:12)
No, this is going to be classic. I noticed in our LP show review, you no longer say how buttery smooth it is to subscribe because it is very buttery smooth, but we got a bunch of feedback in the survey that people didn't like that description.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:26)
Yeah, we got a lot of funny feedback. I think actually we should do an LP show on stuff we learned from the survey because there's a lot of good... Of course, there's interesting demographic stuff. For example, the top two types of people that listen to the show are product managers and engineers, but there's a lot of other really interesting data that I think we should tease out on LP show.