Slack + Salesforce Emergency Pod with Packy McCormick of Not Boring

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Since I think I'm editing this one, I'm trying to make it as easy as possible.

**David Rosenthal** (0:03)
Yeah, we didn't actually talk about that. Thanks, Ben. Hopefully, we can just one take this.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:20)
Welcome to this emergency pod of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture firm in Seattle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:33)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor and independent advisor to startups based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:40)
And we are your hosts. Well, David, here we are live on the scene. We've got a special guest. What are we talking about today?

**David Rosenthal** (0:49)
We are talking about Slack being acquired, and we have the best in the business, the number one Internet and Twitter Slack bull out there, and probably we're going to discuss how happy, but probably a very happy man here today, Packy McCormick of Not Boring. Welcome to the show.

**Packy McCormick** (1:08)
So great to be here, and I'm both happy and sad, which I'm sure we'll dive into.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:13)
He comes to us with mixed emotions. All right, David, you've got this lovely introduction written up here. Take us in.

**David Rosenthal** (1:19)
This is nontraditional in so many ways, because this is a big week here at Acquired. We've got DoorDash, we've got Airbnb IPOs coming up. We're gearing up for those. We're going to be live on the scene for those. We have Roblox, which maybe we'll cover next season. A couple others happening. We literally just recorded an awesome special episode, which is coming out later this month, but we knew this was happening. So last week, we dialed up Packy on Twitter. We said, hey, if this happens, can you come on the pod?
Will you do an emergency pod with us? And here he is, super excited to do it.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:51)
Yeah. Why doesn't every company just leak their acquisitions ahead of time? So that way we have a little bit of warning. I think we got totally blindsided, if I remember, with LinkedIn, with Whole Foods. I woke up to a frantic text from David around the Whole Foods acquisition.

**David Rosenthal** (2:07)
I had just moved back to the Bay Area and did it in my in-laws' attic.

**Packy McCormick** (2:13)
And LinkedIn was acquired for right around the same amount.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:16)
If I remember, $24 billion?

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
That's right.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:18)
Yeah, I think that's probably the interesting comp. But I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:30)
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** (2:55)
yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:01)
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** (3:19)
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** (3:35)
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** (3:51)
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 crusoecloud.com/acquired, that's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. So we've talked about Slack a little bit here on Acquired before. We did a full episode around their direct listing that we'll link in the show notes. When this comes out as a podcast, you can, you know, if you want to remember Stuart's epic blog post, we don't sell saddles here, or perhaps-