Oprah (Harpo Studios)

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Did you see the, I think this was a tweet. Is it Tom Morello that has a-

**Ben Gilbert** (0:06)
You don't have to go to Harvard.

**David Rosenthal** (0:07)
Yeah. Actually, I did.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:12)
Really good.

**David Rosenthal** (0:12)
So good.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:24)
Welcome to season six, episode eight, the season finale of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:33)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:34)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering an incredible entrepreneur, Oprah Winfrey and her company, Harpo Studios. Oprah is a fixture of American life, entering the home of tens of millions of Americans through their television set every day at 4 p.m. for the 25 year run of her show.

**David Rosenthal** (0:53)
The Oprah Winfrey Show! So great.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:58)
It is. But it is the unique story of her business decisions, how she created her brand across her show, a magazine, a cable channel and more. How she controlled every detail and grew from TV personality to business mogul that we're going to cover today. She is the first black female billionaire and perhaps most relevant to the acquired audience. She really invented the idea of what we today call an influencer. If you watch a YouTuber, TikToker, have ever bought a product that an internet personality recommended or even more abstractly, you like thinking about how social platforms are transforming the consumer economy, you really have Oprah to thank for paving the way.

**David Rosenthal** (1:40)
I don't know if you saw, I was watching the David Dobrik YouTube a little bit ago where he and his crew drove around LA.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:46)
Oh, I didn't see it.

**David Rosenthal** (1:47)
And tossed out gifts to, he was tossing out PS4s and cell phones and Xboxes and then like to tossing out like $10,000 checks and stuff. But it's like, yeah, I guess you don't get it at all.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:58)
Yeah.

**David Rosenthal** (1:58)
You get a car. You get a car. You get a car.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:02)
Oh, we will get into it.

**David Rosenthal** (2:03)
Oh yeah.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:04)
As always, if you love Acquired and you want more, you can become an Acquired Limited Partner. Our most recent episode was the first in a mini series that we were calling Venture Capital Fundamentals. We kicked off the six part series with a deep dive on sourcing. How different firms do it, why it's important and the different schools of thought around the topic. So if you want to join, you can get access by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash Acquired and all subscriptions come with a seven day free trial.

**David Rosenthal** (2:35)
And we have a big announcement about the LP program coming later in the show. So we're going to put a little box on everybody's chair. Who's listening? Don't shake it. We're all going to open it at the same time. We do have an announcement in the middle of the show. Stay tuned.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:50)
The more you learn about Oprah, the more that you learn that as a media personality or a media, I guess that's the right way to phrase it, there's nothing you can do that Oprah hasn't already done.

**David Rosenthal** (3:01)
Literally nothing.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:03)
Yep. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:09)
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** (3:34)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:40)
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** (3:58)
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** (4:14)
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.