Season 2, Episode 9: GitHub

**David Rosenthal** (0:03)
Definitely my brain is not working right. It has been a long day.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:20)
Welcome to season two, episode nine 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. Today, we are coming at you on Tuesday, June 5th, the day following the big announcement that Microsoft is buying GitHub.

**David Rosenthal** (0:38)
Ooh, I thought you were gonna say the day after Monday, June 4th.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:42)
It is also after Monday, June 4th. And you know, this show is clearly patterning after Acquired. It is a San Francisco company and a Seattle company that are joining forces. And I don't know where I'm going with that. But we sit here in Wave Capital in San Francisco, near the headquarters of GitHub to celebrate this momentum occasion.

**David Rosenthal** (1:09)
Indeed, indeed. And this is our second in-person episode in a row. We actually recorded what we thought was episode nine last week together in Seattle.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:20)
We did.

**David Rosenthal** (1:20)
And turns out now that that's episode 10 So listeners, you'll have to wait and find out what that could be.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:27)
What Seattle company might we have covered? Tune in next time to find out. All right. Getting into this show. If you're new to the show, you can check out our Slack at Acquired.fm. You can also check us out on Apple Podcasts. And we appreciate any love or reviews that you could show there. Love coming in the form of reviews. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:53)
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** (2:18)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:24)
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** (2:42)
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** (2:58)
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** (3:16)
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 C R U S O E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. All right. David, are we ready?

**David Rosenthal** (3:35)
Let's get into it. So we didn't have a lot of time to research this one, given that it's hot off the press. But fortunately, I actually had a little bit of a shortcut, which was back when I was a first year, a young whippersnapper, first year in business school. In one of my classes, I believe it was like high tech business strategy or something like that. Sounds official. It sounds very official.
Me and myself and two of my classmates did a final project for a class. On GitHub. So I just so happened to have a 17 page document that we had all put together, all about the history and strategy of GitHub.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:19)
If only every episode's prop was that easy.

**David Rosenthal** (4:22)
Unfortunately, it's from back in 2013, but as we will see, not that much has changed with GitHub since 2013 Okay, so with that, oh, and other fun story. One of my professors at the time, not actually in this class, but one of my professors at GSB was Peter Levine, the general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who led GitHub's Series A and was on the board.