Season 2, Episode 7: PowerPoint

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Now, my video is taking up half the screen, and your video is taking up half the screen.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
Good. How do you even, can you snap it? Oh, there we go. That's kind of cool. Can I make your video small? That's kind of, like, what is the use case for this? I'm looking at an enormous version of myself, and you're small on the corner now. It's Skype for Narcissists.
Welcome to season two, episode seven of acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions, and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:40)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:41)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are digging into the historical archives to cover the acquisition of a company you've probably never heard of, but a product that you absolutely have used. Probably hundreds or maybe thousands, or maybe you've even gotten your 10,000 hours on this piece of software.

**David Rosenthal** (1:01)
I feel sorry for you if you have.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:03)
I think I may have. I think I may have.

**David Rosenthal** (1:05)
I definitely have. Investment banking.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:08)
All right. Listeners, today we are covering Microsoft's 1987 acquisition of Forethought Inc., the makers of PowerPoint.

**David Rosenthal** (1:17)
This has the honor. I was going to say dubious honor, but this really is an honor. This was Microsoft's first acquisition and Apple's first investment in another company, for strategic investment.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:31)
Not only that, they were within like three months of each other.

**David Rosenthal** (1:35)
I know.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:36)
Most people don't even know that PowerPoint wasn't homegrown. I mean Word and Excel were homegrown applications, but PowerPoint was an acquisition.

**David Rosenthal** (1:45)
Yep, an acquisition. Not just an acquisition, a completely separate business line, as we will get into, which is not to say that that is necessarily how we will categorize it, on acquisition category, but Microsoft kept it as a business line, separately, based in Silicon Valley, actually on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. That's where PowerPoint was developed.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:06)
It all comes full circle. All right, we will dive in more, but before we do that, listeners, if you like the show, if you've been listening for a while, if you're new and you happen to like this episode, either way, we would love a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps us grow the show and it helps us create more great content. So please take a moment. You can, in fact, you could even pause right now and do it. We don't mind, seriously.
If you are new to the show, you can check out our Slack at acquired.fm. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:37)
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** (3:02)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:08)
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** (3:26)
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** (3:42)
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** (3:59)
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 C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired. Or click the link in the show notes.
So David, we had much teasing of the plot ahead in the intro. Do you want to take us in? How did Forethought get started? How did Microsoft buy it? How was PowerPoint the essential part of Microsoft Office today? Or actually, Office 365, a part of the Microsoft Cloud strategy. How did it all get started?