The Lyft IPO

**David Rosenthal** (0:01)
I don't know about you, but I've literally, I've had trouble sleeping the last couple of nights.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:06)
Dude, I woke up early this morning.

**David Rosenthal** (0:08)
I know. I woke up at 6.30, and I ran down here to the office, and I spent all last night and all today just getting hype.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:31)
Welcome to season four, episode four of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions, and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:39)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:40)
And we are your hosts. Well, David, as Vince Vaughn once said to Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers, it's wedding season, kid. The IPO floodgates are open, and we are here with the very first one of 2019, the Lyft IPO.

**David Rosenthal** (0:58)
I am so excited.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:59)
I know.
Well, obviously, this is an important moment for Lyft and ride-sharing broadly, but what it represents for the entire technology industry is possibly even greater, that the good times can continue. We've had a serious drought in big tech IPOs over the last few years, with most of these companies opting to famously stay private longer. There was significant risk that the public markets do not value these unicorns as highly as the late stage private investment market has been. If Lyft had not overcome its last private valuation, we'd be seeing a lot of articles right now about how valuations for startups across the board would drop and times could get tough. Now, we've still got a lot more IPOs ahead and we've just seen one day of trading. But from what we know, where we sit today, people in the technology ecosystem everywhere can breathe easy.

**David Rosenthal** (1:52)
Yeah, the signs are good. I mean, this is huge. We've never seen anything like this before. This is a whole generation of tech companies that are all going to go public all in the next probably two months here.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:06)
And seriously pent up demand. I mean, all these companies, the full A+, as David and I were joking about.

**David Rosenthal** (2:13)
You've heard of Faang. Now, the A+.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:17)
What is it? Airbnb, Pinterest, Lyft, Uber, Slack, all from different sort of eras of tech over the last decade, eight and a half, all raising so much in the private markets. And here all in the next six months, all really IPO-ing.

**David Rosenthal** (2:33)
Yeah, here they are. Playoff atmosphere.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:35)
Indeed.

**David Rosenthal** (2:36)
Let's get to it.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:37)
Well, I do have to say the limited partner bonus show that we've been doing, the one that we did with David's partner, Sarah, was so timely and so awesome. Because Sarah used to run Corp Dev at Airbnb and before that at Dropbox. So on the heels of the Airbnb Hotel Tonight deal that now funnily enough feels sort of like old news, we got her inside take on Airbnb strategy with mergers and acquisitions, how to build corporate development functions within companies and we speculated just a bit on where they might be going with Hotel Tonight. So if you want to listen to that and many other great LP episodes and become a limited partner, you can do that in literally 10 seconds, and I promise you literally 10 seconds, with just two taps and you can listen to the show right here in whatever podcast player you use for all of your podcast listening. So you can click the link in the show notes or you can go to kimberlite.fm slash acquired to join and David, I'm not kidding, 10 seconds and you can join and listen right here. So that's awesome.

**David Rosenthal** (3:41)
Man, the people behind that Kimberlite company are really talented. Spoiler alert, that's well us, but mostly Ben.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:53)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:58)
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. 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** (4:23)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (4:29)
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.