Season 2, Episode 10: The Rover-DogVacay Merger (with Rover CEO Aaron Easterly)

**Aaron Easterly** (0:00)
You know, and I've experienced dogs eating stuff that they shouldn't eat, dogs jumping over fences, you didn't think it would be possible for them to jump over.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:18)
Welcome to season two, episode nine of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:25)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:27)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are talking about a very important company. Without this company existing, there would be no Acquired, and it's likely that David and I never would have met. Today's episode is about rover.com and their merger with DogVacay to consolidate the grand rivals of the dog-sitting wars. And we're super fortunate to have with us today the founder and CEO of rover.com, Aaron Easterly.

**Aaron Easterly** (0:50)
Well, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:52)
Yeah, we're super pumped. So Aaron, this is the part where we introduce the guest, and I was going to do it from memory, but I wanted to make sure that I nailed the details. So I tried to find a bio for you online, which is harder than most folks. You're not exactly a bio person.

**Aaron Easterly** (1:08)
I spent exactly zero minutes managing my reputation.

**David Rosenthal** (1:12)
As will become clear throughout the show.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:15)
The one I did manage to find is from Crunchbase in Lisieux as Rover's top dog. So Rover's big on puns, and we'll revisit that many times throughout the episode. But listeners, to give you a sense of Aaron's background, he was an entrepreneur in residence at Madrona Venture Group sort of during the genesis and formation of Rover, and as a key part of that. And Aaron was before that the general manager of network strategy and monetization within Microsoft's advertiser publisher solutions group. Now, Aaron, there are many rumors circulating that you were the youngest GM ever in the history of Microsoft at age 29 Can you confirm?

**Aaron Easterly** (1:50)
Actually, I can't. I don't know if that's true or not. I was a very young GM for Microsoft at the time, and there's no one that's younger than I'm aware of, but I don't know if that's true.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:01)
And Aaron, of course, came into Microsoft through the acquisition of a Quantive Avenue UA, Atlas, and it was a huge ad tech acquisition of that era. So to start the show...

**David Rosenthal** (2:12)
We forgot the most important thing though.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:13)
Oh, that is true.

**David Rosenthal** (2:14)
Which is that, through your whole life, Aaron has been a lover of dogs.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:20)
Pomeranians.

**David Rosenthal** (2:21)
One dog in particular, more than anything else.

**Aaron Easterly** (2:24)
Yeah, I love all animals, but I'm very partial to dogs, and I was owned for 14 years by a four pound fluffball named Caramel.

**David Rosenthal** (2:33)
And we are sitting here in the Rover office in Caramel's den, named for Caramel with a portrait of Caramel up above Aaron on the wall here.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:41)
Very sweet. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:48)
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** (3:13)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:19)
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** (3:37)
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** (3:53)
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.