The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
All right, two episodes in a row from the hotel room. Let's do it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:04)
Let's do it.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:23)
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** (0:36)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:42)
And we are your hosts. This episode is something that David and I have been thinking about for a long time.

**David Rosenthal** (0:50)
Years, in fact.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:51)
It is called the Acquired Playbook and it is basically what we've learned from doing Acquired. Like people often ask us the question, okay, cool, you guys have analyzed like 200 companies and spent an ungodly amount of hours doing that. Like what are the takeaways? This episode is the takeaways.

**David Rosenthal** (1:10)
It was back in like 2018, I want to say, that we had a major book publisher come to us and be like, hey, would you want to do a book on Acquired? And this was the idea we had and then we were just like, maybe at some point, let's just keep doing episodes instead, but maybe at some point. So, consider this the first draft.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:29)
We don't know if this talk was good yet. We are in our hotel rooms at Capital Camp and we are about to go on stage and give it. So, this is sort of fun. This is the first time we've ever recorded one of these before doing the episode itself. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:46)
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** (2:12)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:17)
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** (2:35)
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** (2:52)
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** (3:08)
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. Now, as always, this is not financial advice. Please do your own research. David and I do lots of research, but you may come to different conclusions, and we may have financial interests in the things that are discussed on this show.

**David Rosenthal** (3:38)
Indeed. Speaking of different conclusions, this will be a fantastic episode to discuss in the Acquired Slack. We want to hear what your favorite lessons are from all of these hundreds and hundreds of hours that we've done at this point. This will be awesome. Acquired.fm slash Slack, if you're not already a member, we hang out in there. It's a great community, as you will hear us talk about in this talk.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:03)
Join the Slack, and then this is 12 of our favorite Playbook themes, but there are certainly more, so I'd love to hear from you. All right, on to the talk.

**David Rosenthal** (4:13)
So we thought we would be really clever here with our first one, both because this genuinely is one of our favorite themes, and we thought, hell, this will be counter-positioned. Everybody's going to talk about, you know, it's May 2022 There's doom and gloom. It's going to be good. And then, of course, great friend of the show, Hanu Harharin, came up earlier tonight and already beat the optimism drum, but we will highlight it once again. So, our first lesson from all of the stories we've told is that optimism always wins. So, for folks here in the auditorium, raise your hand if you know who the people are who are on this slide.