The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Dude, I cannot believe that in recording this, we asked the chief architect of Netscape to restart his browser to see if that fixed the problem. 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** (0:42)
I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:46)
We are your hosts. Today's episode is a mashup between one of the newest things on the Internet and the oldest things on the Internet. Our guest today is Brendan Eich, CEO of the Brave Browser, an application right at the heart of the rapidly emerging Web3 world. It is arguably the single largest blockchain-based app with over 50 million monthly users. However, Brendan is no new kid on the block. He holds the credential of inventing JavaScript, a source of much joy and also much pain for many of you out there. And Brendan was the chief architect of Netscape and eventually became the CEO of Mozilla, the makers of Firefox.

**David Rosenthal** (1:28)
So you're saying 50 million MAUs is nice, but Brendan wants this to go a lot higher.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:34)
It's crypto nice, but it's not browser nice.

**David Rosenthal** (1:37)
Yet, yet.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:38)
Yes, but it is rapidly growing. We had a wide-ranging conversation with Brendan that you'll hear today that bridge this old world and the new in some really fun ways. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:54)
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** (2:19)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:25)
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, et cetera, and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:43)
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** (2:59)
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 energy net happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:16)
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. Well, if you want to hang out with us and discuss this episode, you should do that. We will all be there at acquired.fm slash slack.
And if you want to go deeper behind these topics, especially crypto, you should come check out the LP show. It is deeper, nerdier, and covers a lot of more up-and-coming topics. It includes interviews with people like Ro Neal Runberg, who have built Audius, Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the startup HitRecord. Who else did we do on the LP show recently? We talked with some of Solana and FTX's earlier investors from Race Capital. That's our newest LP show episode. You can find that in any podcast player by searching Acquired LP show. Of course, become an LP if you want to get super early access two weeks before everyone else, and talk with us on Zoom calls every month or two. All right. As you know, none of this is investment advice. Do your own research. Now, on to our interview with Brendan Eich. Brendan Eich, welcome to Acquired.

**Brendan Eich** (4:32)
Hi. Thanks for having me.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:33)
Great to have you here. We've been big fans of your work for a long time. Grew up using Firefox and the Mozilla browser before that, and Netscape before that, and God knows I use plenty of JavaScript every day and all facets of my life. So my life would not be what it is without your work over the years.