SONY

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
We keep biting off a lot in these episodes.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:02)
I mean, you're telling the history of modern Japan.

**David Rosenthal** (0:04)
We need to do a two-year-old company. We need another FTX soon.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:08)
Where literally enough days haven't passed for us to make the episode long.

**David Rosenthal** (0:13)
Yeah, exactly. Is it you? Is it you?
Is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:32)
Welcome to Season 10, Episode 3 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 and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:47)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:52)
And we are your hosts. Listeners, today we are telling the story of the company that Steve Jobs idolized and modeled Apple Computer after the Sony Corporation.

**David Rosenthal** (1:03)
Literally modeled himself after. You know the story, right? Of the black turtlenecks and the Sony connection.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:10)
Enlighten us.

**David Rosenthal** (1:12)
Well, so the story goes that Steve idolized Sony, went over to visit, and saw that there was a uniform that Sony employees had. And he was like, that's a great idea. I want Apple to have a uniform. Where did you get that uniform? And so he brought it back. He made a proposal to Apple and people were like, NFW.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:36)
And didn't the Sony employees have uniforms because clothing was scarce after World War II?

**David Rosenthal** (1:42)
Yeah, I think that was part of the origin. So Steve decided, okay, if Apple can't have a uniform, I'm going to have a uniform. And so he went to Issei Miyake, the famous Japanese designer who had made the Sony uniform and got him to make him a hundred black turtlenecks. Amazing.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:58)
There's so much about our generation that we remember from Sony growing up, the Trinitron TVs, Discmans with advanced CD skip protection, 30 seconds worth, even more recently, the excellent professional line of cameras that Sony makes. And actually, David and I are both recording on right now.

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
As well as Sony headphones right now, right?

**Ben Gilbert** (2:19)
That's right. But Sony goes so much deeper than that, and also so much more broad than that today, expanding into a very special type of conglomerate. David, did you know that they own a division that exclusively makes a tiny dog robot?

**David Rosenthal** (2:36)
I did know that. Do they still make that thing?

**Ben Gilbert** (2:39)
Yeah, they do.

**David Rosenthal** (2:40)
You might say it's the Tesla bot of old, the precursor.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:43)
You might say that, yes. They are the second largest Japanese company by Market Cap behind only Toyota. They're the largest video game console company and the largest video game publisher in the world. They're the largest music publisher and the second largest record label, which for those of you who listen to the T-Swift episode, you now know the difference. They have the third largest Hollywood film studio on top of all of that. We have a wild story going all the way from World War II to Spider-Man to tell you here today. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:22)
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** (3:47)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:53)
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** (4:11)
Yep. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost 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** (4:27)
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.