Special: Amazon Unbound (with Brad Stone)

**Brad Stone** (0:00)
Oh yeah, no, I mean, I've been a fan of the podcast from the early days.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
Oh, thanks.

**Brad Stone** (0:05)
The first one we did, did we do Amazon Zappos?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:07)
Uber and Didi.

**Brad Stone** (0:09)
Uber and Didi, that's right.

**David Rosenthal** (0:10)
I don't know that I told you guys this. I booked an Airbnb just to get better Wi-Fi, because the place I was living in Paris had crappy Wi-Fi. So I had this really awkward message with the host, where I was like, I just want to come for an hour, but it's not what you think, I swear.

**Brad Stone** (0:30)
That's funny. Just book a love hotel for podcasting.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:46)
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 am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (1:00)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:05)
And we are your hosts. On today's show, we are sharing our most recent book club discussion with you all. We were fortunate enough to have repeat acquired guest, Brad Stone, join us to talk about his most recent book, Amazon Unbound.

**David Rosenthal** (1:21)
Brad is the best.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:22)
Yeah. This book is the successor to Brad's first book, The Everything Store. It is about everything that has happened at Amazon since 2013, including Alexa, Amazon Go, third party sellers. Well, the further development of the third party seller ecosystem anyway, their various grocery businesses and of course, the activities of Jeff Bezos outside of Amazon. This episode was recorded live with our Acquired LPs on the line, and you'll hear some questions from them at the end. As always, if you want to become an Acquired LP and be a deeper part of everything we do here, you can go to glow.fm slash acquired. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:08)
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. 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** (2:33)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:39)
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** (2:57)
Yeah. 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** (3:13)
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** (3:30)
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, on to our conversation with Brad Stone on Amazon Unbound.

**David Rosenthal** (3:51)
So we thought kind of a fun way to start that. I don't think we've heard you do on any of the other pods you've been on yet, that I want to hear the story behind was, what is it called, the monograph page at the front of the book?

**Brad Stone** (4:03)
Oh, the epigraph.

**David Rosenthal** (4:05)
The epigraph. You have two quotes, and the second one I just loved as a lifelong Steinbeck fan myself, you say, I think this is from Canary Row, it has always seemed strange to me, the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system, and those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second. Where did you find that?