CAA (with Michael Ovitz)

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
I was watching you with Bill Murray at the 92nd Street Y.

**Michael Ovitz** (0:03)
How great is Bill, right?

**David Rosenthal** (0:05)
He's like the worst interviewer ever, but he's hilarious, he's Bill Murray. We'll let you talk more than Bill did.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:29)
Welcome to Season 9, Episode 8, the season finale 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 and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:45)
I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:50)
We are your hosts. He was the most powerful man in Hollywood for two decades. He is responsible for movies and TV shows you love like Late Night with David Letterman, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Rain Man, Goodfellas, and literally hundreds of others. We are here today with Michael Ovitz to tell the story of Creative Artists Agency, CAA, the legendary talent agency he founded in 1975 that changed the power structure in Hollywood forever and not just Hollywood. As many of you probably know from our earlier episode this season, Michael and CAA inspired none other than Mark Andresen and Ben Horowitz to similarly change the power structure of Silicon Valley.

**David Rosenthal** (1:33)
Boy, did he ever. Ugh, what a great way to end the season. I am so pumped.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:39)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:44)
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** (2:10)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:15)
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** (2:33)
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** (2:49)
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** (3:06)
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. Listeners, before we dive in, many of you already know this, a ton of you have already subscribed, but the LP show is now publicly available in all podcast players for free. So only the first two weeks of brand new episodes are in the private feed. Everything else, you can go search acquired LP Show in the podcast player of your choice and get all those episodes. Now, without further ado, our conversation with Michael Ovitz.

**David Rosenthal** (3:50)
Michael, welcome to acquired.

**Michael Ovitz** (3:53)
Thank you very much.

**David Rosenthal** (3:55)
It is so great to have you here with us. We're thinking, of course, like any good creative artists, we're going to steal from your book and we're going to start in Medius Rest and then rewind just to set the stage for what's to come.

**Michael Ovitz** (4:12)
Just don't ask me any hard questions.

**David Rosenthal** (4:15)
Well, I think you'll enjoy telling this story. Can you tell us the Jurassic Park story?

**Michael Ovitz** (4:20)
You must be like me and like dinosaurs.

**David Rosenthal** (4:23)
Well, that was the key to all of it, right? Everybody likes dinosaurs.

**Michael Ovitz** (4:26)
I think that's accurate. That's what got that movie made basically.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:31)
You had a pre-existing relationship with Michael Crichton, but he hadn't produced any new material in a while. Is that right?

**Michael Ovitz** (4:38)