The Shopify IPO

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Dan, you ready?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:01)
She's always ready.

**David Rosenthal** (0:02)
Always ready. She's got her own chair here now. She hopped out of my lap, she's just sitting in the chair.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:10)
All right, let's get started. Welcome to Season 5, Episode 2 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and early stage venture fund in Seattle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:37)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am a general partner at Wave Capital, an early stage venture capital firm that focuses on marketplaces based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:47)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are doing an episode that we have gotten a ton of requests for the Shopify IPO. Now, here's a few fun things to know about Shopify before we dive in today. The company IPO'd in May of 2015 with a market cap of $1.3 billion. In the ensuing four years, it has 27x that, and today has a market cap of $35 billion.

**David Rosenthal** (1:13)
Not bad for a pivot.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:15)
No, no, no. 218 million people have bought from a store powered by Shopify, the vast, vast majority of which do not have any awareness that they did that, and that is equivalent to almost all adults in the United States. Also not bad. The founder and CEO, Tobi Lütke, is an absolutely fascinating character that I can't wait to dive in on the history and facts here. To give you a quick sense before we dive in, he tweeted last year, I firmly believe that I learned more about building businesses from playing StarCraft than I've learned from business books.

**David Rosenthal** (1:51)
He might be right, he might be right, having read a lot of business books and played a lot of StarCraft in my day.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:55)
Yeah, I was going to say. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:04)
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** (2:29)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:35)
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** (2:53)
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** (3:09)
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** (3:25)
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.com.
That's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com.acquired.com. Or click the link in the show notes. If you like the show, you should come join the 2,500 person and growing Acquired fans that are hanging out in our Slack at Acquired.fm. If you want more Acquired than just this, you should consider becoming an Acquired limited partner. David and I release about one LP show for every main show in addition and we use those episodes to go deeper on company building topics. Now, I was really excited about how our last episode turned out, where we dove into Series A and how it is a way different thing that it used to be, how valuations are very different today than what they were, sort of what's market, what's not market, what determines market, how did we end up here, and all of this sort of tying into what we think the next major technology wave will be and when it will get here. So if you're a founder of a startup or a startup employee, this is one definitely not to miss. You can get started with a seven day free trial and listen right here in the podcast player of your choice by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired. All right, David, I think we are ready to hit it.