The Uber IPO

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Oh my god, this is insane. I have literally 21 pages of notes in the Google Docs.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:21)
Welcome to season four, episode six of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions, and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:29)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
And we are your hosts. We sit here today on the day of Uber's long-awaited IPO, and David, let me tell you, I am super pumped to be here today.

**David Rosenthal** (0:39)
Me as well, Ben, me as well.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:41)
Well, here was my alternate intro, and frankly, I have a few here. We covered Pinterest and Lyft recently, both valued at about $15 billion. Today, we are covering a company who has raised over $20 billion in Uber. Or perhaps this third, Uber just raised $8 billion, or approximately one half of Lyft's entire market cap in its IPO. Or maybe this fourth one. Today, we are diving into a company whose epic history is matched only by its epic operating losses with over $3 billion last year, the largest of any company to ever go public. But what you really need to know about Uber, they are a broad, multi-mobility transportation platform, a hyper-growth food delivery service that leverages Uber's existing customers and driver assets, and an international ride-sharing holding company with enormous chunks of DD, Yandex, Taxi, and Grab, and a trucking shipping marketplace called Uber Freight to top it all off. So holy God, David, there is a lot to cover here.

**David Rosenthal** (1:42)
I thought we were doing an Uber episode, not a Softbank episode.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:46)
At this point, what's the difference?

**David Rosenthal** (1:47)
What is the difference?

**Ben Gilbert** (1:48)
Yup. All right, well, listeners, before we dive in, I want to say this past week's Limited Partner Bonus Show, we had an incredibly appropriate guest join us for a deep dive on Uber's history, Brian Tolkien. Brian was one of Uber's first 100 employees, helped start the product operations group, and eventually ran Uber Pool when it was first getting off the ground. Brian had some really practical insights on how Uber developed their infamous Playbooks and launched cities in the early years. So if you like Acquired and you want to go deeper on company building topics, you should totally consider becoming an LP yourself. It's brain dead easy, it takes two taps in 10 seconds, and you can listen right here in your favorite podcast player. And aside from great interviews like Brian, you can also get David and my walkthrough of a term sheet, how VC firms really work, and some of our personal investment theses. You can click the link in the show notes, join, or go to glow.fm slash acquired. That's right, glow.fm slash acquired, or click the link right in the show notes from this episode, and everyone gets a one week trial, so feel free to check it out.

**David Rosenthal** (2:49)
Man, so professional. We've come so far. It's great.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:52)
It's funny, we're finding fit in how to actually describe that thing. I think when we first got started, we were a little all over the place in describing the LP show.

**David Rosenthal** (3:01)
It's all about the ride.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:02)
It is. Oh, David.

**David Rosenthal** (3:04)
There we go. All right.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:06)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:12)
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** (3:37)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:43)
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** (4:01)
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** (4:17)
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.