Standard Oil Part II

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Dude, this is gonna especially kill you as someone that travels even for like two and three day trips just with a backpack.

**David Rosenthal** (0:07)
Oh, it's so gonna kill me.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:09)
Like, you're never traveling that way again.

**David Rosenthal** (0:11)
I know.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:11)
You're checking like car seats and backpacks and... I'll see you at baggage claim, my friend.

**David Rosenthal** (0:18)
Oh my God.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:37)
Welcome to Season 9, 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 and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:51)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:57)
And we are your hosts. When we last left our hero villain, unclear, we saw John D.
Rockefeller supporting the Sherman Antitrust Act as a piece of dead on the vine legislation with really nothing to fear from it. Today, we will cover Standard Oil from 1890 through their spoiler alert breakup in 1911

**David Rosenthal** (1:22)
Ben, you're ruining the punch line.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:25)
We're going to cover Rockefeller's legacy and philanthropy and how today's world is a Rockefeller-shaped one in more ways than one. We will also debate the fighter points of where Standard Oil crossed the line between using legitimate business practices like operational efficiency and economies of scale into straight-up abuses of power to grow their massive, massive profits.

**David Rosenthal** (1:50)
You mean like bribing elected officials?

**Ben Gilbert** (1:52)
David, look, I don't want to spoil anything here, I guess, other than the breakup. Well, listeners, we want to say thank you.

**David Rosenthal** (2:02)
Yeah, we have had a pretty crazy month here at Acquired. Starting with the TSMC episode, we have just been on, I don't know what it is, y'all like semiconductors, but the show has been growing hugely, so much good stuff is going on. We were talking beforehand, like we really do want to keep our intro shorter and just start getting right into the stories.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:23)
And in particular, thank you to our old listeners for spreading the gospel. We've really enjoyed this slow, methodical, linear growth. I think it's helped us hone the product of Acquired, but of course, like an explosive growth spurt is always a fun thing. So thank you to those of you for spreading the word over the years, and welcome to all the new folks.

**David Rosenthal** (2:43)
And then two unrelated to the episode, but special little fun thing to talk about. We are about to have a new addition to the Acquired family.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:53)
Yeah, not an on air edition though.

**David Rosenthal** (2:55)
No, not on air. This is so crazy. By the time you all hear this, Jenny and I will have had a little baby girl that we are expecting any day now. Honestly, it was like coming down to the wire of recording this. It was very nerve wracking.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:09)
This was almost a serious cliffhanger where we just did part one and then David disappeared.

**David Rosenthal** (3:14)
A bunch of my friends were asking me like, hey, so excited for you and the baby and all that, but you're going to get recording for part two and before the baby comes.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:23)
Well, David, congratulations. So excited for you and Jenny.

**David Rosenthal** (3:27)
Yeah, we can't wait.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:29)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:34)
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. 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** (4:00)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (4:05)
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** (4:24)
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.