Qualcomm

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
I walked in and the first thing I saw was the bottom of the big crane boom arm with the weights. And I was like, why are there Olympic weights here? And then I was like, oh, because we've got a professional boom arm camera. This is amazing.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:14)
All right, let's do it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:18)
Is it you? Is it you? Is it you?
Is it you? Is it you? Is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:32)
welcome to Season 11, Episode 6 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. There is an incredible property of the universe where electromagnetic signals can be broadcast and travel through space at the speed of light to be received at a different point in the universe. Now, a tiny fraction of these frequencies are detectable by humans as visible light. Some other frequencies can be dangerous like X-rays or gamma rays. But there is a part of the spectrum that is not detectable to humans and it's not harmful at modest doses that can be used to transmit invisible messages all around us all the time without any of us having any idea.

**David Rosenthal** (1:29)
It's like magic.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:31)
Yeah. These frequencies have been used for over a century to broadcast TV and radio shows, presidential messages and important news updates. In the last 50 years, humans have gotten tremendously clever at purposing some parts of the RF spectrum to be used for cell phones. But the story of how we got from transmitting small messages on a single frequency to having billions of humans concurrently sending megabytes or gigabytes of data every minute has been an incredible journey of invention and entrepreneurship. The company most responsible for the mind-bending system of how it all works today is qualcomm. And today we will dive into their entire history and strategy unpacking their products, which to the outside observer is really best described as a layered series of magic tricks.

**David Rosenthal** (2:21)
And spoiler alert for listeners, this is an incredible story. I had no idea before we dove into the research. Like this one is up there with like Nvidia, TSMC. There is so much stuff you can't make up in this story. It's incredible.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:34)
Largest fabless chip company in the world.

**David Rosenthal** (2:37)
Indeed.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:38)
The other thing we should say, listeners, this was super fun to do this episode live in person in Lisbon. Our huge thank you to the Solana Foundation for hosting us at Solana Breakpoint. Many longtime listeners will know Austin Federa from the Slack. He was kind enough to invite us and really fun to do it there, especially given Solana's tie to qualcomm with Anatoly having worked there for over ten years.

**David Rosenthal** (3:02)
Indeed.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:03)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:08)
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** (3:34)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:39)
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, et cetera, and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:58)
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** (4:14)
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 energy net happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.