Special: Acquired x Indie Hackers

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
They've got new M1 MacBook Air. It's the first episode we're doing on it.

**Courtland Allen** (0:04)
Nice.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:05)
Nice silent recording in the background.

**David Rosenthal** (0:09)
No, what do they call it on the Pro?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:11)
The Active Cooling System. Don't call it a fan. Welcome to this special episode 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 capital firm in Seattle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:39)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor and advisor to startups based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:46)
And we are your hosts. As regular listeners know, we typically cover some of the biggest companies, those that IPO, see Airbnb and DoorDash last week, and the companies that get some of the splashiest press coverage. But today's episode is quite a bit different. In our conversation with Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers, which is the largest community of startup founders, we dive into the stories of the underdogs. What happens when there are millions of people doing small business entrepreneurship? How does the globally addressable market of 3 billion internet users open the door for the nitchiest of products? And importantly, what was Courtland's lived experience of starting his own string of companies that ultimately led to starting Indie Hackers and its acquisition by what is now the hottest private company in the world, Stripe?

**David Rosenthal** (1:37)
Yeah, man, last one left standing after last week.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:42)
No kidding. And a lot of people cannot wait for it to IPO soon enough.

**David Rosenthal** (1:47)
I can't, that's going to be, I got to imagine our biggest episode of next season. Hopefully next season. When is this thing going to happen?

**Ben Gilbert** (1:55)
Season eight, season nine. We'll see, David.

**David Rosenthal** (1:57)
We'll see.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:58)
Well, as always, if you love Acquired and you want more, well, good news, we have the answer for you. The community of Acquired Limited Partners is now an army in the thousands. For those of you who aren't already a part of the gang, becoming an LP gets you twice as many episodes, access to live events with us and other LPs, even in an all-virtual 2020 And most near and dear to David and my hearts, you have the biggest influence on what we cover in the show. So if you want to join, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquired.fm slash LP. 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. 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** (3:02)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe 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** (3:26)
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** (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 internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:59)
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. Okay. Now on to our crossover episode with Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen, welcome to Acquired.

**Courtland Allen** (4:23)
Ben, David, thanks for having me.

**David Rosenthal** (4:25)
So great to have you here.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:27)
Our pleasure. For anyone who has not listened to your voice for the many hours that I have on the Indie Hackers podcast, obviously, we're going to reference it lots and lots throughout this show, but go check it out. And very excited to be doing a crossover episode with you.