Special: Acquired x My First Million

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
And this is for our podcast, correct? Or this is going on your podcast, or both?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
Good question, we're open to whatever. Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (0:06)
I think we should record it and see what fits, but by default, I think it'll definitely work on our feed. If you guys feel good about it on your feed, I think great, just dual purpose it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:14)
Great.

**Shaan Puri** (0:14)
I love it, okay. Are we rolling then?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:27)
Welcome to this special, unnumbered crossover episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:37)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:39)
And we are your hosts. This episode is a crossover between Acquired and the My First million podcast, a podcast from The Hustle for business builders, schemers and dreamers. The show was hosted by Shaan Puri and Sam Parr, and this crossover episode was just Shaan and us. Shaan works on special projects at Twitch, and was most recently the CEO of Bebo, a once massive part of the consumer Internet in the early 2000s. Shaan was also the CEO of Blab.im, which some of you may have used a few years ago. Our episode today has two parts. First, we had Shaan take us through what it was like to buy Bebo out of bankruptcy many years after its heyday, and build something new with the assets, eventually selling it to Twitch. This is the first time on our show that we'll be talking about a company that was sold and not bought, which for those of you who have ever been through an exit, know that that is the far more common scenario. The second part of the show is more of the My First million format, where David and I spitball startup ideas and talk tech trends with Shaan. Also, we should say that while Acquired is normally a family-friendly show, at least for families who love analyzing business histories together, this episode has a bit of profanity.
As always, if you love Acquired and want to hone your own craft of company building, you should join the community of Acquired Limited Partners. You'll get access to the LP show, where we dive deeper into the fundamentals of company building and investing, in addition to our monthly LP calls where we talk with all of you directly, and of course, our book club and Zoom calls with the authors. The most recent episode in the feed is the recording of our book club Zoom with Will Thorndyke, author of The Outsiders. If you aren't already a Limited Partner, you can click the link in the show notes or go to Acquired.fm slash LP, and all new listeners get a seven-day free trial. Also, if you want to hang out with the Acquired community and discuss all things tech news, strategy and ideas, you should join us in our Slack at Acquired.fm slash Slack. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:43)
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** (3:08)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:14)
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** (3:32)
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 and video for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:48)
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** (4:04)
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. Now, over to our crossover episode with Shaan Puri of My First million. Shaan, are you open to telling us a little bit about the story of Bebo? Because I think listeners of Acquired probably don't know your background and might know an element or two of that story, but I think getting a little bit of context around all that would be really fun.