Super Pumped (with Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I think you both know enough about Acquired that I don't need to go into the general shtick and spiel.

**Joseph Gordon-Levitt** (0:06)
Right on.

**David Rosenthal** (0:07)
I love it. I'm so honored that you guys have listened. It makes my day, thank you.

**Brian Koppelman** (0:11)
That's why we said yes.

**David Rosenthal** (0:18)
Is it you, is it you, is it you? Is it you, is it you, is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:32)
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 and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:46)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:52)
And we are your hosts. David, I feel like today is the natural culmination of a journey we started in May of 2019, when we did our Uber episode on the day of their IPO.

**David Rosenthal** (1:03)
God, it feels like another lifetime ago, but it was only two and a half years ago.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:06)
Well, for listeners who don't know, the events of Uber leading all the way up through their IPO and the implosion around that and the just insane story that all of that was, is coming out as a Showtime series on February 27th called Super Pumped. I have to say, it's a little bit surreal, the world that we live in of venture and startups, as we will talk about on this episode, becoming part of entertainment and pop culture like that.

**David Rosenthal** (1:36)
Even more surreal that this is made by Brian Koppelman and Joe Gordon-Levitt. There is no world that I would have imagined we would find ourselves here.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:46)
No. On top of that, there is no world that I would have thought we would have found ourselves in, where there are guests on Acquired to talk about it.
We are ludicrously fortunate today for that to be the case. For those who don't know, Brian is one of the three executive producers, writers and showrunners for Super Pumped. You probably also know his work from Billions and from Rounders, which is my all-time favorite poker movie that I watched about 100 times in high school and college when I was playing a lot of Texas Hold'em. Brian's work over the decades is just awesome. We're just lucky to have him making stuff out in the world. Joe, as many of you already know, stars in Super Pumped playing Travis Kalanick or TK. Of course, you know his previous work too, Inception, Looper, recently Mr. Corman, many other great movies. Joe is actually a founder himself of the company Hit Record that we discussed a few months back on the LP Show and just a delightful human being. Totally. One note for listeners, we want to wave our arms around and say, we're normally a pretty family-friendly podcast, but this episode does have some strong language as does the show itself, obviously. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:01)
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** (3:26)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:32)
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** (3:50)
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** (4:06)
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.