The Electronic Arts IPO (with Trip Hawkins)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Cool, one more time.

**Trip Hawkins** (0:01)
This is Trip. We're on Santa Barbara Radio.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:07)
And there's our opener. Welcome to season four, episode seven of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:29)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
And we are your hosts. With all these A-plus IPOs going on, we wanted to do a throwback episode to another era, 1989, where an IPO meant something very different. We come to you today from sunny Santa Barbara, birthplace of Logan Green's transportation dream, if you listen to the Lyft episode, and of course, the home of Sonos, if you listen to that episode. And today we sit here with Trip Hawkins, the founder of the most legendary gaming company in the world, Electronic Arts. Trip worked as an early employee at Apple Computer as the Director of Strategy and Marketing until 1982, before starting EA, taking it public, and later moving on to start other companies in the gaming space, such as 3DO and Digital Chocolate. Trip is now a Professor of Practice in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and we are incredibly lucky to have him here with us today. So welcome, Trip.

**Trip Hawkins** (1:25)
Well, thank you. I'm delighted to be here.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:27)
Yeah, it's great to have you. For anyone who's new to the show, here's how it works. We walk through the history and facts of a company from founding all the way through an acquisition or IPO, then we analyze and grade the transaction where we issue judgment on if that was a good idea or not. So the show is really one of storytelling followed by one of judgment. If you are involved in startups and you want to dig in with us on company-building topics rather than just the exit, we've got a second show for you. You can become an acquired limited partner by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired and get access to these limited partner episodes, featuring interviews with expert operators, investors, and of course, David and I diving deeper on topics like finding product market fit term sheets and how venture firms really work.

**David Rosenthal** (2:13)
It's pretty cool. I mean, we started this as an experiment, what, like six months ago and it's like a real show now. And we're just so pumped about how many you guys are listening and getting value out of it.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:23)
So it's been super fun. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:31)
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** (2:56)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:02)
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** (3:20)
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** (3:36)
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** (3:53)
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. All right, David, it is time.

**David Rosenthal** (4:12)
It's time. So excited to dive in with Trip here. So per usual, we'd like to start way back at the beginning on this show. So you grew up here in Southern California, right? In the 1970s?

**Trip Hawkins** (4:25)