Season 2, Episode 4: SoftBank, Fortress and the Vision Fund

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
I don't know, I don't know if it's two and 20 or lower. But even if it's lower, it's just such a huge amount of money. That like, well, we'll get into it. I have a lot of thoughts here.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:23)
Welcome to season two, episode four of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:32)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:34)
And we are your hosts. Today we are covering an acquisition that has forever changed the world of venture capital, private equity and emerging technology companies forever. I think I said forever twice there. SoftBank buying fortress.

**David Rosenthal** (0:48)
It's so forever, it's doubly forever.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:50)
It's double forever. And of course, the subsequent creation of the SoftBank Vision Fund. And we will tie up the connection between those two things. But before we dig in too far, David, I just need to say congratulations on the big news this week with the formal announcement of Wave Capital.

**David Rosenthal** (1:08)
Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Ben. It's nice to, as one of our listeners pointed out in the Slack, not have to be totally coy about what I'm doing anymore.
We're excited and it'll be fun to build Wave over the next couple of years. Who knows, maybe in a couple of years we'll be bigger than SoftBank. That is not the vision here. Did you see what I did? See what I did? Not the vision?

**Ben Gilbert** (1:30)
It's not the vision for your fund. No. Awesome to have that news be out and I'm sure we'll have lots of good opportunities to use that perspective to pepper in good thoughts for future episodes of Acquired.

**David Rosenthal** (1:42)
Indeed.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:43)
A little bit of business before we move into the show. If you're new to the show, you can check out our Slack at Acquired.fm. I just checked and we're over 1,200 people, so come join us and talk about any big tech news that's going on, suggest episodes for us and chat with other people who listen to the show. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:04)
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** (2:29)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:35)
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** (2:53)
Yep. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost, 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** (3:09)
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** (3:25)
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 crusoecloud.com/acquired, that's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. So David, the SoftBank Vision Fund.

**David Rosenthal** (3:46)
Well, first off, what is SoftBank?

**Ben Gilbert** (3:49)
So SoftBank, if there's one big takeaway from the episode, SoftBank not a bank. It is a conglomerate, a Japanese conglomerate founded in 1981, mostly focused on telecommunications businesses, and actually originally a PC software distributor in Japan.

**David Rosenthal** (4:07)
Indeed. We might just get into that.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:09)
We might. We might. So they're gonna buy Fortress, and we're gonna talk all about that. They just started this Vision Fund. Presumably you've heard people talking about the Vision Fund. I'm sure down in Silicon Valley that occasionally comes up.

**David Rosenthal** (4:21)
You know, it's not really a big, no, actually this is like the only topic here. You can go like, you literally cannot walk into a coffee shop in San Francisco or Silicon Valley without hearing somebody talking about the Vision Fund and SoftBank and its iconic founder, Masayoshi Son.