Holiday Special 2022

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
How do I open again?

**David Rosenthal** (0:01)
Welcome. What is this show?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:03)
What are we doing? Welcome to How I Built This.

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
Welcome, no. No, nothing against how I built this, but that's not us.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:11)
All right, let's start.

**David Rosenthal** (0:12)
Okay. Is it you, is it you, is it you?
Is it you, is it you, is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
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 am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:44)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco. But today, Ben, you are hosting me at your lovely home here in Seattle.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:53)
Welcome to the studio.

**David Rosenthal** (0:54)
It's great to be here.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:56)
And we are your hosts. Ho, ho, ho.

**David Rosenthal** (0:59)
Ho, ho, ho. Happy holidays.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:00)
Happy holidays.

**David Rosenthal** (1:02)
Man, I don't know about you, but I'm ready to put a bow on 2022 Well, we have much to talk about.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:10)
Yep. Well, listeners, normally I have like a script, like a thing that I'm looking at in front of me to know what to say now. But I don't really on this one other than to say, join the Slack. There are great people there, including probably you if you're listening to this episode. We don't think this is an entry point for a lot of people into Acquired. We think this is probably, if you're a fan, you're going to listen to this. But I don't think this is going to be anyone's first show. So we're going to try and go a little deeper and nerdier than normal.

**David Rosenthal** (1:37)
We've got a little agenda. We're going to recap 2022 for the show, for tech, for us, talk a little bit about what's ahead in 2023 We've got some extra, extra fun carve-outs.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:48)
Indeed. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:55)
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** (2:20)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:26)
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** (2:44)
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** (3:00)
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** (3:16)
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. With that, this is not investment advice. This is probably the episode of the year where we will come closest to things that might be interpreted as investment advice, as we talk about things that we have liked and didn't like, and predict the future and all that. So do your own research. All right, David, where are we starting with?

**David Rosenthal** (3:50)
All right. I think we got to recap 2022 despite the craziness of the year of 2022, in the broader world tech markets economy. This is a pretty great year for the show. I have down here my signature acquired episodes and favorite memories from the year. We started the year with Taylor Swift.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:12)