Taylor Swift (Acquired’s Version)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:33)
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** (0:41)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:47)
And we are your hosts. She is Billboard's Woman of the Decade. She was the first woman to ever win the coveted Album of the Year Grammy twice. And now she's won it a third time. She was the highest paid celebrity in the world in 2019, more than Kanye, LeBron James, Roger Federer, or even Beyoncé. Her fan base is so passionate, and she's accumulated so much power that she is leveraging it to reorganize the power dynamics of the music industry in front of our very eyes, taking it back for artists and, of course, standing up for women everywhere. You knew her when she was 15, 22, and now she's accomplished all of this at the still unbelievably young age of 32

**David Rosenthal** (1:33)
That was good. I like that. I like that.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:38)
You probably know her all too well. She's maniacal.

**David Rosenthal** (1:41)
Oh, come on. Okay. Okay.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:44)
You could even say she's fearless, a mad woman, or David, or that she'll never go out of style. Today, listeners, we are telling the story of the business of Taylor Swift.

**David Rosenthal** (1:59)
I have a fun little thing I wanted to do. I thought we should guess each other's favorite TSwift album.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:04)
Ooh. Let's see. I think yours used to be 1989 and now it's Reputation.

**David Rosenthal** (2:16)
Ooh. Oh, man. Reputation is so good. I did not like it at all before starting the research for this. And now I am such a fan. But no, 1989 is my number two. My number one is Fearless.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:30)
Fearless. An uncommon pick, my friend.

**David Rosenthal** (2:32)
I know. I love it. I just love it. So good. And the song Fearless, so good.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:38)
All right. What's mine?

**David Rosenthal** (2:39)
I think yours is 1989

**Ben Gilbert** (2:41)
Mine was 1989 and I am an ever or a folklore fan now.

**David Rosenthal** (2:44)
Oh, oh, and folklore over evermore.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:47)
You can't put Bon Iver on an album with Taylor Swift and expect me not to just immediately like the whole album the best. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

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

**David Rosenthal** (3:30)
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)
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** (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. We also want to tell you, listeners, that if you are new to the Acquired community, you should make it official. Join the over 11,000 smart people at acquired.fm slash Slack. Most of you know this, but we also have a second show called The LP Show, where we cover nerdier, deeper topics on how to raise venture capital, things like that. Recently, what's going on with the very cool startup Italic, which brings manufacturers directly to consumers. You can get access to that by searching Acquired LP Show in the podcast player of your choice. And without further ado, David, take us in. And listeners, as always, the show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies that we discuss, and the show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.