Season 2, Episode 5: The Dropbox IPO

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
It's roughly the same, and then they raised $350 at a $10 billion post-money, so they sold 3% of the company. God, it's crazy.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:20)
Welcome to episode two, season five of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:28)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:29)
And we are your hosts. We are coming at you 24 hours after the trading began for the initial public offering of Dropbox. David, what do you think?

**David Rosenthal** (0:39)
Ha ha, it was a big day here in San Francisco yesterday.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:43)
Is the window open? Are we about to see a whole bunch of these? Are we about to see the stampede of unicorns?

**David Rosenthal** (0:51)
I wish. I think we're, well, I think the window is open. I don't think it's going to be a stampede, but maybe it'll be a slow procession, which would be a good thing for everybody.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:01)
Listeners, as you know, on the show, we generally like to do most of our episodes taking a good amount of time since either the acquisition or the IPO happened so we can analyze, was it a good decision for an IPO? Was it a good idea to hit the public markets and raise that money? And what did they end up doing with it? Or with an acquisition, what did the acquirer end up doing with the acquirer? But sometimes the current narratives and the story is so juicy and there's such a good backstory to the company and a narrative to talk about how they got where they got, where we just got to do it. And so we're here in real time after Dropbox IPOed and did one day of very successful trading to talk about Dropbox the company.

**David Rosenthal** (1:44)
Yeah.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:44)
So if you're new to the show, you can check out our Slack at Acquired.fm. It's easy to either join the Slack there or get email updates about when we have new episodes. And if you have listened to the show and you're thinking, hey, I like this, how can I help these guys out? We'd love to contribute to the show in some way. We've got a great, great answer for you. You can review us on Apple podcasts. So if you open up the podcast app, you can review us from there and we appreciate any time you could take to leave a nice note that'll help other people find the show. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:20)
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** (2:46)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:51)
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. Yep.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:10)
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** (3:25)
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** (3:42)
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. Well, David, there's no shortage of fun history on the founding of Dropbox and how the whole thing came together. Are you ready to dig in?

**David Rosenthal** (4:09)
I am for sure ready to dig in. It's funny, you know, I was thinking leading up to this, we recorded our last episode on SoftBank and Fortress and the Vision Fund exactly a week ago, right? Or maybe or was it Sunday? Was it less than a week ago? A little less than a week, a little less than a week ago. And I thought, you know, Dropbox, like it's a pretty straightforward story. So, you know, of course, we do lots of research here and, you know, it's the hallmark of the show. We love doing it. This is a little bit of like, okay, this is great, because we don't have a lot of time for this episode. You know, I'll be able to knock this out pretty quickly. Well, per usual, proved wrong. Once again, there is a lot to this story.