Special: Invest Like the Best on Acquired

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
Sweet, nice, that was great. You guys do awesome preparatory work. That was by far the best one I've done, by far.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:18)
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 firm in Seattle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:31)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am a angel investor and independent advisor to startups based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:38)
And we are your hosts. Now you'll notice this is a very abnormal episode for us. I didn't say a number. We didn't talk about a company in the intro. David, what is this episode that we were doing today?

**David Rosenthal** (0:50)
We have a very, very special guest episode we've been looking forward to, I think all of us to do in for a long time. We have Patrick O'Shaughnessy, CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, and also host of the Invest Like the Best podcast, one of our very favorite shows here at Acquired. And so excited to have him on. So Patrick is a master interviewer, as we all know, and he gets these amazing guests, talks all about their businesses and their stories. Other than, I think, like the old episode you did with your dad, your audience doesn't get to hear about you. We want to hear about your business. What is this O'Shaughnessy Asset Management thing? How did you come into this? You were a philosophy major, now you're running a quant fund. You have a venture fund. You've built this amazing podcast empire. We're going to dive all into it. Welcome, Patrick.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:39)
Thank you guys so much for having me. I'm always hesitant to do any of these because I'm scared of boring people with the same stories, but there's a mutual admiration society here of all the podcasts I listen to. Yours is the most regular, so it's an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:53)
Thanks for joining us. Well, before we dive in, if you love Acquired and you want to hone your own craft of company building, you should join the Acquired community of 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 LP monthly calls where we talk with all of you directly, and of course, our book club and Zoom calls with the authors. So if you aren't already an LP, 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. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:29)
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** (2:55)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:00)
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** (3:18)
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** (3:35)
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** (3:51)
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 special with Patrick O'Shaughnessy of Invest Like the Best.

**David Rosenthal** (4:12)
All right. Well, before Invest Like the Best, there was, well actually not before Invest Like the Best as we'll get into. The first iteration, there was O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, of course, where you are CEO. But before that, there was O'Shaughnessy Capital Management. Now it's started by your dad, right Patrick?