Virgin Galactic

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Should we put in a little bit of fake reverb in post so that it sounds like we were actually live, like at an auditorium?

**David Rosenthal** (0:06)
That'd be awesome.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:08)
Live from the cavernous ascend auditorium.

**David Rosenthal** (0:12)
Live from Spaceport America.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:25)
Welcome to season seven, episode six 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** (0:40)
And I'm David Rosenthal. I'm an angel investor and independent advisor to startups based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:46)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are coming to you live from Ascend, the event defining the future of space. Over the next hour, we will tell the fascinating story of Virgin Galactic and the swirling cocktail of the billionaires, Richard Branson, Paul Allen and Chamath Palihapitiya, and the aerospace pioneers, including Burt Rutan and Peter Diamandis, behind it. We also thought it would be very timely because in the next week, Virgin Galactic expected to make their first flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico, followed by next year, in early 2021, Sir Richard Branson himself flying on their first commercial trip. However, the news did break this morning that, and this probably won't surprise long time followers of the company, they announced that this flight is delayed indefinitely, and we'll put a link in the show notes to read that press release. But for you regular Acquired listeners, this is our very first episode covering a company that went public via a Spac, and we will unpack the business behind and hopefully ahead of the company, and a few fast facts. Virgin Galactic, if they are successful in opening up space tourism, it will have a massive impact on the percentage of our species to go to space. As pointed out in their S4, the Spac version of an IPO prospectus, only 573 humans had ever been to space by August of 2019, and Virgin Galactic already has over 600 customers, or as they call them, potential future astronauts who have prepaid deposits on their trip to space. And the sticker price for one person to take that trip, $250,000.

**David Rosenthal** (2:29)
It's a cool quarter mil.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:30)
Pretty steep.

**David Rosenthal** (2:31)
There were, just yesterday, was it two more new first time folks in space with the SpaceX launch?

**Ben Gilbert** (2:38)
Oh, interesting.

**David Rosenthal** (2:39)
I know one of them was the first trip. I think maybe two of the four astronauts might have been the first trip.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:44)
Super cool. Well, I do know now SpaceX, I think, has sent more humans to space than the entire Mercury program. That was a stat that I saw thrown out yesterday. So amazing how the pace is picking up. Well, for those of you watching this live at Ascend, a few words about Acquired, this podcast and sort of what the show is. So first of all, David and I are not from the aerospace industry. We are venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that invest in consumer and B2B startup technology companies. But we're big fans and observers of space. So today, this episode will reflect an outsider's perspective, albeit we hope a fairly well-researched one. And our goal, besides our own self-indulgence in getting to geek out on the topic that we love, is to try and make space more accessible to those in adjacent fields. And I know I'm not alone when I say this, but I think that the space ecosystem is poised to explode over the next decade or so.
And this is one of the most exciting places in technology to be right now. Though I'm sure all of you who are watching this live probably feel like it's been this way for a while, and who is this guy who thinks he just discovered something waltzing in here. So really excited to tell this story with you today. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (4:00)
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** (4:25)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (4:31)
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.