Twitter (with Dick Costolo)

**Dick Costolo** (0:00)
Yeah, I'd prefer the one single take, so, you know, but we'll see what happens. Doesn't matter.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:14)
Welcome to Season 7, Episode 5 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 of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:29)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an independent advisor to startups and angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:36)
And we are your hosts. Today, we tell the story of a company that has changed every single one of our lives, Twitter.
Whether you use the product all day every day, like I know many of you out there do, ostensibly as part of your jobs, or you have just seen the occasional discomforting tweet from a world leader, there is no doubt that Twitter impacts us all, especially heading into this historic US presidential election. But how did these 140 character messages that grew out of the SMS protocol eventually play such an outsized role in our society? And conversely, why is it that despite being the heartbeat of the world, Twitter still pales in comparison both in user numbers and in revenue to its juggernaut social media cousin, Facebook?

**David Rosenthal** (1:20)
So a lot of ink has been spilled on Twitter's founding and its early days of musical chairs between various founders and board members. Most of our listeners know all about that. So as Ben and I were reflecting on what the acquired way to do a Twitter episode would be, we realized that there actually was this pretty significant fork in history. You might say it turned on a knife point where starting in about 2010, it could have been Twitter that ended up owning Instagram, not Facebook. And the conversation we'd be having today about mobile, consumer, and social could all look very different.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:55)
Indeed. Well, we have the most authoritative source possible to help us tell that story, especially this period of Twitter. The former CEO who generated the first dollar of revenue, scaled it to a real business, and took it public, Dick Costolo. So welcome to Acquired, Dick.

**Dick Costolo** (2:11)
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:13)
Pleasure to have you. Well, listeners, as always, if you love Acquired and want to hone your own craft of company building, you should join the community of Acquired Limited Partners. You'll get access to the LP show, where we dive deeper into the fundamentals of company building and investing, in addition to our monthly LP calls, where we talk with all of you directly, and of course, our Book Club and Zoom calls with the authors. Recently, we had Emily Chang on to discuss her book, Brotopia, that is now available in the LP feed, if you missed that, and just awesome to have Emily on. So, so fun to see so many of you on there with us. Looking forward to the next one. If you aren't already a Limited Partner, you can click the link in the show notes, or go to acquired.fm slash LP, and all new listeners get a seven day free trial. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:05)
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** (3:30)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:36)
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** (3:54)
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** (4:10)
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.