Special: Ho Nam from Altos Ventures — A Different Approach to VC

**Ho Nam** (0:00)
I feel like I know you guys because I listen to you guys on your podcasts and it's really fascinating because I think the three-part series on Berkshire is kind of like, is your signature piece because I think you guys said, it's like, oh, geez, you know, you never thought you could go beyond two hours. And I know you guys have to cut a whole bunch of stuff out just to fit it into six hours, right? But there's nobody who goes into the depth like you guys. And so it's great to talk to you guys here.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:36)
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** (0:52)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:57)
And we are your hosts. On today's show, we have a guest that both David and I have looked up to for years, Ho Nam, from Altos Ventures. Without giving too much away in this early intro, I will say that this episode could be summed up as, what if you tried to be a value investor with Berkshire Hathaway's principles, but for early stage technology companies? This episode is the perfect cousin to everything that we talked about on the Berkshire trilogy. Now, before we dive in, I want to say, first, if you are new here, join us in the Acquired Slack. We'll be talking about this episode and everything going on in the tech and investing news of the day. That's acquired.fm slash Slack. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:48)
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** (2:13)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:19)
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** (2:37)
Yep. 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** (2:53)
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** (3:09)
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.
All right. Now, as you know, this is not investment advice. We may hold interests in some of the companies that we discuss on the show. And this is for informational and entertainment purposes only. We also have one more exciting announcement today. As the world opens up, we are marking the occasion by having an acquired party as we wrap season eight. Yes, that is an in-person event. It is going to be here in Seattle at Gas Works Park on Thursday, June 24th at 5 p.m. It will have picnic vibes, so bring anything you want to eat or drink. Rumors are circulating that David Rosenthal is even going to fly up for it. We cannot wait to see you there. Now, on to our conversation with Ho Nam from Altos Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (4:13)
Ho, we are so excited to have you here. This is an episode we've been wanting to do for a long time. And just speaking personally, the last VCs we had here on the main show were Alfred Lin and Doug Leone from Sequoia. And of course, I have so much respect for them. But even though Altos isn't as well known, I have learned just as much from following you over the years. And I am so excited to share that now with everyone. So I thought maybe a good way to start is Altos has made so many incredible investments. But I thought we could start off with probably your best known one, which is Roblox. And I think it will tell your whole story in a really nice way, including the most amazing part, which is how Altos ended up investing multiple hundreds of millions of dollars into one company, Roblox, out of what was originally just an $85 million fund.