Meituan

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
You've been a VC in my heart for a long time.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
I take offense to that and also thank you. Welcome to Season 8, Episode 3 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** (0:34)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:39)
And we are your hosts.

**David Rosenthal** (0:41)
Ben, you're a bio there. It's a little different this time. Congratulations, my man.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:47)
Thank you. Very long, Seattle. Excited for the future of the Pacific Northwest.

**David Rosenthal** (0:50)
It's very exciting. Well, well deserved promotion to managing director.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:55)
Well, thank you. And I mean, frankly, it's most exciting just to have a new 100 million dollar early stage fund to invest in Pacific Northwest entrepreneurs who also might be acquired listeners. Well, today we were talking about a company that, frankly, couldn't be further from the Pacific Northwest. Well, maybe it could. I suppose if you're on the East Coast of the United States, you might be literally halfway around the world. But today, we dive into a Chinese app that started as a Groupon clone by a founder who had previously started a Facebook clone and a Twitter clone. But this bike-sharing Yelp-esque door-dash of China is much more than a clone. This AI-powered delivery company is also a ride-sharing company. It's a real-world supermarket, a merchant analytics platform, a fintech platform for those merchants who need loans, a travel booking app for consumers, and a way to buy cheap movie tickets. So what on earth is going on?

**David Rosenthal** (1:54)
So you're saying it's like door-dash and Airbnb and Square and booking.com and Expedia and Uber and Instacart and more?

**Ben Gilbert** (2:04)
Yelp, Fandango, Safeway. The list goes on and on.
So Meituan is what people have dubbed a super app. And if you're confused, well, so were we before we started the research. So over the course of this episode, we will dive in to unpack this curious company, how it became China's third largest tech company behind only Tencent and Alibaba. And it was founded over a decade after each of those two companies. It's pretty crazy. It's like frankly amazing that it's in the same category as those or are quickly rising into that same category. And of course, wildly displacing Baidu, the classic third in the big three Chinese tech companies.

**David Rosenthal** (2:45)
Yeah. Alongside Pinduoduo as well, which we covered last summer. This story is honestly amazing. I mean, we'd heard we'd reference Meituan on the show, how it's the super app, it's this really interesting Chinese thing that is unlike anything in the West. This story is incredible. Frankly, it's a shame we haven't told it before now.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:07)
Indeed. Well, that's why we have eight seasons of Acquired. Well, are you an Acquired Slack member? If not, what have you been waiting for? It is a spectacular community discussing, of course, all things acquired and recent episodes. But more importantly, it is just a genuine and smart group of people having thoughtful, nuanced, and respectful discussion about the tech and investing news of the day. You can join at Acquired.fm slash Slack if that sounds like your cup of tea. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:40)
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** (4:05)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (4:11)
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** (4:29)
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.