The Pinterest IPO

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Oh, the users used to drop by the office. That's so crazy to me.

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
I know, and the woman dressed up as Pinterest for Halloween.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:08)
Yeah. And oh, here's ornaments for all of you. How many people work at your company? Great, I'll hand make you 25 ornaments.

**David Rosenthal** (0:16)
I know, so great.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
Welcome to season four, episode five 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. Today, we are talking about a company that is not a social media company, or is it Pinterest? For context, this is a company that has more users than Snap, though a little bit less than Twitter, is used by 80% of moms in America, and is actually a pivot of an early failed mobile shopping app. But we will get into that.

**David Rosenthal** (1:03)
Indeed, we will. As always here in Acquired.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:07)
This is episode two of the A plus IPO saga. We are proud to be coming at you, what, two days here after trading? We started trading on Thursday, and then yesterday the stock market had the day off. So we've got one day of data here, and we'll be, of course, talking about the entire story of Pinterest, but I had a nice little pop in the market as well that we'll touch on.

**David Rosenthal** (1:30)
Yeah, we've got, so far, we have the PNL of the A plus.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:36)
Indeed, indeed. All right, so listeners, today we are talking about a company's exit, and really that's what we do on every episode of this show, but there are lots of company creation topics that David and I can't help but discuss, and as many of you know, we have a second show for that, the Limited Partner Show. So last week on the LP show, we spent an hour diving into a required topic for every entrepreneur, the term sheet. We went through line by line analyzing each term of a standard series seed term sheet, and of course, offering our editorial on each one. If you are interested in hearing us, two non-lawyers, try to put it in as plain of English as we possibly can, you should definitely consider becoming an LP. And we have a big announcement today, it's big news on that front. We have heard from a lot of you that you wanted to listen to the LP show, but you weren't sure how it worked. So we decided to change the sign up and offer every new person who joins a seven day free trial just so there's no need to take the plunge blind. You can listen right here in the podcast player of your choice and sign up in two taps, yes, only two taps, by tapping the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired. Yes, note the new and official name of the company Glow. And as the person who works on the product behind the LP show, I am selfishly very excited to see how well the new trials feature works, so please do not be shy to check it out.

**David Rosenthal** (2:57)
Yeah, big congrats to Ben and team for getting all that out.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:00)
Thank you, sir. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:07)
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** (3:32)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:38)
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** (3:56)
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** (4:12)
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.