Sequoia Capital (Part 1)

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Ah, I love it, you know what they, I had been intending to upgrade them when I was in New York. I was like, oh, I'm gonna go to the flagship Nike store and get the latest, latest model. They don't make them anymore.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:09)
They don't make the Fly Nets anymore?

**David Rosenthal** (0:11)
Well, they make Fly Nets, but they don't make the free Fly Nets.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:14)
Oh, crap.

**David Rosenthal** (0:15)
The Nike free Fly Nets. So I think this might be the last model.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:18)
Well.

**David Rosenthal** (0:18)
We'll have to stock up.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:19)
Yeah, I know what I'm doing this weekend. Welcome to season five, episode four of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and early stage venture fund in Seattle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:45)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am a general partner at Wave Capital, an early stage venture fund focused on marketplaces based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:53)
And we, as you know, are your hosts. Today, we are talking about the absolutely legendary Sequoia Capital, and because it would be inappropriate to try to cover Sequoia's immaculate history in just one episode, this is only part one. And typically, I try and throw out some stats in this section about why the company that we're covering on this episode is important. Well, today, I'm only going to throw out one. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has helped to catalyze companies that now represent $3.3 trillion of public market value. And for context, the entire NASDAQ is $10 trillion. It is frankly absolutely unbelievable that a single firm can be responsible for helping to create so much of our modern economy. David, this is bananas.

**David Rosenthal** (1:43)
Yeah. For comparison's sake, what did we say? Next, which is one of our A pluses, we said generated $1 trillion in market cap value, the next acquisition. So here we are talking about $3.3 trillion. Now, obviously, it's a venture firm, not a company, but this is one of the reasons I've been so excited to dive into this new category here on Acquired, and can't wait to tell this history of Sequoia Capital.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:10)
Absolutely. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
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** (2:42)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:48)
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** (3:06)
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** (3:22)
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** (3:38)
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. Lastly, our limited partner bonus show this week was a fun flip for me. David interviewed me on what is a startup studio and how does it work, and I dove into our process here at Pioneer Square Labs. If you want to listen and become a limited partner, you can get started with a seven-day free trial and listen right here in the podcast player of your choice, by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired. I promise it's very easy.