Season 3, Episode 2: The Xiaomi IPO

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I had something weird going on in my internet cutout, too. Did you get that? Did you see that? I mean, it's fine, because we're not using any kind of web upload thing. We're just doing a... But yeah, when I disappeared for a second, it was to go turn on a fan, because I was like, maybe it's hot, and that's affecting, I don't know.

**David Rosenthal** (0:17)
Oh, good. I was so... I was worried. I was like, oh no, Ben's super pissed that we're changing the...

**Ben Gilbert** (0:23)
No, no.

**David Rosenthal** (0:24)
He couldn't take it anymore.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:38)
Welcome to season three, episode two of Acquired, the show about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:45)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:47)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering Xiaomi. You may already know a few things about Xiaomi, that they make smartphones, they're from China, and they recently IPO'd. But today, we're here to go deeper, understand what the company really is at their core, and talk about the exploding China tech sector. And we have with us today two of the best people in the world to help us dig in on these topics, Hans Tung and Zara Zhang from GGV Capital. So Hans and Zara do a podcast called 996 that you should absolutely check out if this topic is of interest to you at all. I've listened to about half their episodes so far, and it's a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to understand what's going on with Chinese companies, one of our focuses here on season three of Acquired. Hans was an investor in the very first round of Xiaomi and was involved in the initial ideation of the company, a rare and amazing feat to be with a company from Conception all the way to IPO. And in another rare feat, Hans is a top venture capitalist both in the United States and in China. He has been ranked six times on the Forbes Midas list and is a true pioneer in venture as one of the first Silicon Valley VCs to move to China full-time from 2005 to 2013 Zara is an investment analyst with Hans at GGV, also in their Menlo Park office. She's a former journalist, and it really shows on the creation of the 996 Podcast. So welcome so much, Hans and Zara. Thank you for joining us.

**Hans Tung** (2:09)
Thank you for having us.

**Zara Zhang** (2:10)
Thank you for having us.

**David Rosenthal** (2:11)
We're going to aspire to at least do half as good as you guys do on a 996 episode of this.

**Hans Tung** (2:16)
Oh, please. You guys are great. You're too modest.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:19)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:24)
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** (2:50)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:56)
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** (3:14)
Yeah. 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 in NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:30)
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** (3:46)
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. Our sponsor for this episode is a brand new one for us, Statsig. So many of you reached out to them after hearing their CEO VJ on ACQ2 that we are partnering with them as a sponsor of Acquired.