Season 4, Episode 3: Instagram Revisited (with Emily White)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I can't believe that Instawalk tours were a thing. Like Facebook employees were led around campus to use Instagram and take pictures of things after the acquisition to learn how to use it. Welcome to season four, episode three of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:32)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:33)
And we are your hosts. On our second episode ever, way back in 2015, we covered Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. And in fact, it's the canonical example of an A plus that we use on our show. So today we'll dive into the integration itself, how Facebook spent a billion dollars to take something from zero revenue to an app responsible for almost a quarter of all of their revenue today. And we are super lucky to be joined by the one and only Emily White, who played an important role in making this all happen. So who is Emily? So Emily today is a venture investor and the president of Anthos Capital in Los Angeles. But previously in her career was a longtime executive at Google, where she joined very early, pre-IPO. She worked with Sheryl Sandberg for 10 years, and she then continued to work for Sheryl by moving to Facebook in 2010 And then the topic of today's episode joined Instagram post acquisition as their first business executive. She was tasked with building out the business model, which, spoiler, she did a pretty good job, and then became COO of Snap before transitioning full-time over to what David wrote in the notes as the dark side of investing, and now sits on the boards of Lululemon, Graco, Honey, Hyperloop One, and the X Prize. Welcome, Emily, and thank you so much for joining us.

**Emily White** (1:55)
Thank you for having me.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:56)
Yeah, you bet. So, Emily, I think there's a good chance that you are the only person in the world who has worked at Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Snap. Do you know if that's true?

**Emily White** (2:05)
I think that's true. At least when I left Snap, that was true. I can't think of anyone else who's done all of those. I brought a couple of folks from Facebook with me, but yeah.

**David Rosenthal** (2:16)
It's a pretty exclusive Venn diagram there.

**Emily White** (2:20)
If I'm good at one thing, it's seeing around corners.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:25)
We'll definitely get into that in the show. I think it's been pretty apparent from your journey. So, listeners, you know that a few months ago, we started our limited partner program for folks that want to go deeper on technology, startups, and other VC topics with us. So for LPs, we will have an additional segment with Emily after this episode where we'll cover what Emily and Anthos are looking for in their investments, what it was like to work with Cheryl Sandberg, and her experience serving on public company boards. And if you would like to become a prestigious Acquired Limited Partner, you can do so by clicking the link in the show notes or going to kimberlite.fm slash acquired. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:06)
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** (3:31)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:37)
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** (3:55)
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 NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (4:11)
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.