Season 2, Episode 3: Nest

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
The color really does have an impact on your brain.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:02)
Yeah, it's like with these billions of dollars, the technology companies actually hire psychologists to intentionally do this stuff. Welcome to season two, episode three of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions, and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:29)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
And we are your hosts. It's finally time to cover a no-brainer story here on Acquired, Google's 2014 acquisition of Nest. David, are you pumped?

**David Rosenthal** (0:40)
I am so pumped.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:44)
There's no shortage of research for this one. There's no shortage of requests for this one. And actually, that's pretty timely with the announcement coming out last week that Google is rolling Nest back into, or I guess for the first time into its main hardware business instead of running as an independent subsidiary.

**David Rosenthal** (1:02)
Yeah. I mean, the question is, like, which Nest acquisition or divestiture is this officially going to be about? Because there was the original acquisition, the rolling out into a standalone unit of Alphabet, and now the re-acquisition back into Google.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:18)
Yeah. Well, and not to mention a half a billion dollar pickup of Dropcam along the way.

**David Rosenthal** (1:23)
Not along the way. We just might cover that.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:26)
It's true. It's true. So to make sure we're on the same page for the full episode, David, this is the original acquisition of Nest, where they Google actually wired cash to the bank accounts of people who owned shares in Nest.

**David Rosenthal** (1:43)
That's so prosaic, Ben.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:48)
A couple of announcements for listeners before we dive in. David and I have been playing around with a lot of new podcast apps recently, and one of them that's pretty cool is Breaker. So, if you're using the Breaker app and listening to us right now, or if you want to try it out, please comment on this episode. We're experimenting with how the rise of social podcast apps sort of affects discoverability, and would love your comment on this episode to see how it compares to the effect of people leaving reviews on iTunes accounts. So, maybe if we mobilize the Acquired base, we can help discoverability the show.
If you are new to the show, you can check out our Slack at Acquired.fm over 1100 Strong. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:38)
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** (3:03)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:09)
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** (3:27)
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** (3:43)
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** (4:00)
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. So David, I think we've got one piece of follow up before diving in.

**David Rosenthal** (4:20)
Yeah. So we wanted to do a follow up on the Apple Beats episode, which actually kind of hard to believe was the last episode, just you and me that we did together.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:31)
That's right.

**David Rosenthal** (4:31)
We had so many guests and specials since then, which have been great. But in the interim, listener Devin wrote into us about something that we didn't talk about in the Apple Beats story, and that's that Dr. Dre has a history of assault back in his earlier days with NWA, and in particular, assault and violence towards women, which is obviously a pretty important thing, and we should have mentioned it as part of the episode.