Stratechery (with Ben Thompson)

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Ooh, Marquette's got a nice bump today. You had a good feeling about Jerome?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
Yes. I get these vibes from him, you know?

**David Rosenthal** (0:06)
I want Jerome to wake up on his 2021 side of the bed one day. Just to be like, you know what? Time's for good back then.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:13)
We caused cataclysmic damage that needed to get unwound at some point, but while it was up, it was all good.

**David Rosenthal** (0:19)
Do I really need to keep bringing down the hammer?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:21)
Let's take this FOMC meeting off.

**David Rosenthal** (0:24)
I'm going to post a story on Instagram just on a beach with a drink.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:46)
Welcome to season 11, episode 8 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** (1:06)
And we are your hosts. Today we are telling the entire history and strategy of Stratechery, and we are joined by the man himself, Ben Thompson, on the eve of Stratechery's 10-year anniversary. Stratechery is innocently billed on his website as the business strategy and impact of technology. Stratechery, as Ben puts it, started as some guy in Taiwan with no access. Today, Stratechery is a powerhouse, shaping the thoughts and conversation of the entire technology industry around the world at the highest levels. Ben has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Rich Barton, Meredith Copp-Levian of the New York Times, Pat Gelsinger of Intel, and John Collison and many, many more. Many of which are regular readers. He is the father of aggregation theory, the most important business framework developed in the last 20 years. And Ben really pioneered the internet subscription newsletter business model. We sat down with him to talk about a bunch of his recent changes going big into podcasting, bringing on co-hosts and expanding the empire, and even now launching a Stratechery property that he does not appear on at all.

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
Regardless of what your business model is, regardless even almost of what your content is, I don't think there's any creator, certainly not any business creator out there today, who doesn't directly or indirectly look to Ben and say, you inspired me, you paved the way for what I do. I mean, we certainly feel that way. I feel that way.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:37)
David, I even feel like you're in my friendship developed early on from reading Ben's pieces and sharing them with each other with our thoughts. We have these old e-mail threads in 2014 of you and I discussing Ben's writing.

**David Rosenthal** (2:50)
Totally. We might talk about that on the episode here.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:53)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:59)
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** (3:24)
Yes. We talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:29)
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** (3:48)
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** (4:04)
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** (4:20)
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. After this episode, come hang out with the other 13,000 smart thoughtful members of the acquired community at acquired.fm slash Slack. We'll all be talking about it. Without further ado, this is not investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Now onto our interview with Ben. Ben Thompson, welcome to acquired.