Season 3, Episode 4: Recode (with Kara Swisher)

**Kara Swisher** (0:00)
That's different, that's just a bunch of white guys talking. Apple, Apple, Apple. Oh, that damn Google. Facebook, ah!

**Ben Gilbert** (0:19)
Welcome to season three, episode four of acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:25)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:26)
And we are your hosts. We're here today to talk about the acquisition of Recode by Vox Media. And in fact, broadcasting live from the Recode podcasting studio in the Red Shares nonetheless. We're here with one of the greatest people, actually probably the greatest person that we could imagine to help us tell this story.

**Kara Swisher** (0:44)
All right, okay.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:45)
The one and only Kara Swisher.

**Kara Swisher** (0:46)
Nice to meet you. This is not really the Recode. It's just a studio, just so you know. We're not fancy here at Vox Media. That's why I'm here.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:54)
Listeners don't know that.

**Kara Swisher** (0:56)
Yeah, okay. It's really impressive.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:57)
We're in suits.

**Kara Swisher** (0:58)
We had a really nice view of the Bay Bridge before in our other office, but it was too expensive. So here we are looking at the Transbay terminal, which is busses.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:07)
Beautiful in its own right.

**David Rosenthal** (1:08)
This is what happens after you get acquired.

**Kara Swisher** (1:10)
No, no, that was before we had the night. Before acquired, we started the company in my backyard. So this is much nicer than anything else.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:18)
Well, we'll get into that.

**Kara Swisher** (1:19)
Yeah, okay.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:20)
All right, listeners, Kara needs no introduction, but I'll do one anyway because it was fun to put one together. Kara is the executive editor and co-founder of Recode. She is the illustrious host of the Recode Decode podcast. She's an absolute legend in the technology industry, previously founding the All Things Digital Conference and blog at the Wall Street Journal, which is a pioneer of legitimizing blogging and creating an actually good technology conference. Kara has been called one of the greatest interviewers of our time by Ezra Klein and once interviewed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in their only ever combined interview, actually in the chairs we're sitting in. I actually vividly remember where I was when I watched this for the first of many times. She's interviewed President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the mooch, and famously made Mark Zuckerberg sweat through his Facebook Illuminati hoodie on stage. She's an amazing storyteller and a renown author, and we are so, so lucky to have her with us today.

**Kara Swisher** (2:10)
Gosh, that's nice. I think we'll stop now. And scene.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:17)
No.

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
You won't get off that easy.

**Kara Swisher** (2:18)
All right.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:19)
All right. Well, if you're new to the show, you can check out our Slack at acquired.fm. It's the place where David, myself, and 1600 of our favorite listeners discuss episodes right after we release them, along with real-time hot takes and some of the biggest tech news of the day. 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. 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** (3:27)
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 energy internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.