The Slack DPO

**David Rosenthal** (0:02)
That's woodblocks, right?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
Do your best impression.

**David Rosenthal** (0:07)
Let's see.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:10)
That's a good one. Welcome to season four, episode nine of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions, IPOs and direct public listings. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:35)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:36)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering the spiritual sister of our previous episode on Zoom, Slack, and the largest enterprise IPO in history. And of course, it wasn't even actually an IPO, but rather a direct listing.

**David Rosenthal** (0:52)
Barry McCarthy, he rides again, the acquired superhero.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:56)
Today, we'll talk about what all that means, the crazy history of Slack's evolution from even before it was founded, where its roots really are, and break down their business and their market cap today, and what it could do in the future. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:15)
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** (1:40)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (1:46)
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** (2:04)
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** (2:20)
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** (2:37)
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.

**David Rosenthal** (2:54)
So we start pretty far away from Slack's gleaming new San Francisco, downtown San Francisco headquarters, pretty far away from Wall Street. In fact, very, very far away from Wall Street. We start in 1973 in Lund, British Columbia in Canada.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:16)
Where is Lund?

**David Rosenthal** (3:17)
Lund is, I'm not sure exactly how far, maybe an hour or two north of Vancouver in British Columbia. And it was where Highway 101 ended in the mid 70s, north of Vancouver. And we start there in a small log cabin located on a hippie commune. And this cabin does not have electricity. It does not have running water. But in 1973, there is a boy born in this cabin to parents David and Norma Butterfield, who were, as you can imagine from this scene I am setting here and describing, pretty hardcore hippies at the time in 1973 And the boy's name that Norma gives birth to this year is Dharma Jeremy Butterfield.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:06)
Dharma is an incredible name for someone born on a hippie commune.

**David Rosenthal** (4:10)
Incredible. Incredible. So perfect. Let's rewind just a little bit though. How and why did we get here? So we start with David Butterfield, the father of Dharma. So David was an American originally. He was from Connecticut and he was a college student at Harvard during 1968 during the Summer of Love. And after the Summer of Love, he decides he's going to drop out of school, drop out of Harvard. You know, he's been disillusioned by the RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, all the both great and terrible things that happened that year in 1968 He drops out of Harvard and he moves to France. But shortly after he gets to France, he receives a telegram one day from the United States government, informing him that he has been drafted for the Vietnam War.

**Ben Gilbert** (5:01)
Does this explain the Canada thing?

**David Rosenthal** (5:03)