Kevin Rose from Web 2.0 to Web3

**David Rosenthal** (0:01)
Welcome to Acquired. Today, we're sitting down with Kevin Rose. Kevin was one of the pioneers of Web 2 as the founder of Digg, and then became one of the Valley's first Super Angels, investing early in companies like Twitter, Facebook and Square. Today, he's a partner at True Ventures and host to the modern Finance podcast. Let's chat with him.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:23)
All right, did you like that? Should we put that in?

**David Rosenthal** (0:25)
I've always wanted to do that.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:44)
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** (0:58)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:03)
And we are your hosts. This was so effing cool.

**David Rosenthal** (1:09)
Oh, man. Kevin is so great. We had such a blast. Of course, we went deep. Covered the screensavers, the real origin story of Digg, the Digg Nation parties at South By that Ben, you were at back in the day.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:21)
Totally. I wasn't expecting him to... He like corrected the record. All the previous Digg founding stories are wrong.

**David Rosenthal** (1:27)
I know. Wikipedia is wrong, apparently.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:29)
Well, listeners, this episode basically has two chapters. We start in Web 2 and we end in Web 3 And obviously, Kevin is super deep on all things, crypto, blockchain, NFTs, and he's doing a really cool thing on the modern Finance podcast. And he even ends the show with announcing a new thing that he's doing. So stay tuned for that. But I had so much fun this episode, pattern matching everything Kevin learned from Web 2 to the Web 3 world. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:00)
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** (2:26)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:32)
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** (2:50)
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 in video for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:06)
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** (3:22)
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. All right, two last things. One, as usual, this is not investment advice from either us or Kevin. Do your own research, come to your own conclusions on making your own investments. This is for entertainment and informational purposes only. As usual, two, join us in the Acquired Slack. Acquired.fm slash Slack. We are nearing the 10,000 person mark. It is a great group and we'd love to have you. Now, on to our conversation with the one and only Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose, so great to be talking with you.

**Kevin Rose** (4:11)
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. This is going to be fun.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:14)
I think many, many episodes of my teenage years watching Digg Nation later, I feel probably the same way a lot of our listeners do when they run into David and I, and they're like, oh my God, you're like a real human. I feel very, very similarly talking to you today. So thank you for all the just massive indulgence of nerdery over the years.