Standard Oil Part I

**Ben Gilbert** (0:30)
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** (0:40)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:46)
And we are your hosts. Today's episode is 150 years in the making. David, somehow we missed this IPO, if or when it happened.

**David Rosenthal** (0:56)
Can we still get secondary shares? Put together a little SPV?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:59)
I think it might be of a spinoff or something like that at this point.

**David Rosenthal** (1:02)
Ah, okay.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:03)
At least the Standard Oil that we will cover today never IPO'd. It was privately held the whole time. Its financials were kept very secret. That must be why we have missed it until now, David, surely.

**David Rosenthal** (1:16)
Ah, yeah, must be, must be.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:18)
Well, this episode on Standard Oil is, of course, the oil monopoly founded in the 1870s by John D. Rockefeller, the wealthiest person in modern human history. Embarrassingly, until I had started to do the research, I didn't realize the oil in Standard Oil did not refer to gasoline, at least until much, much later in the life of the company.

**David Rosenthal** (1:39)
Automobiles? Model T was like 1910 or so.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:43)
Totally. Standard Oil predates the Ford Model T by like 40 years.

**David Rosenthal** (1:47)
Yeah. John D becomes the wealthiest person in like modern human history before gasoline. This is a different kind of oil.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:57)
Yeah. Gasoline helped later. Turns out compounding can kind of show up, especially when the second business line gets layered on top, but we will get into it. Listeners, the other thing that is crazy that I want to point out, I didn't realize how much Standard Oil is very much with us today. Despite being famously broken up, the parts went on to become both Exxon and Mobil, Marathon, Amaco, which of course is now a part of BP, Chevron and several other companies. When you look at a gas station, you are probably looking at some remnant of Standard Oil.

**David Rosenthal** (2:29)
Just wild.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:30)
So, this one will be at least a two-parter. It turns out the company responsible for creating the entire modern energy industry has a lot of wild stories. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:45)
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** (3:10)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:16)
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** (3:34)
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** (3:50)
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** (4:06)
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 Crusoe cloud.com/acquired. That's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. All right, well, listeners, before David takes us in, as always, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss.

**David Rosenthal** (4:31)
Unlikely in this case.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:32)
This is for information, entertainment. Let us know if you find the Standard Oil stock ticker. We'd love to go check it out, evaluate. No, without further ado, Standard Oil.