The New York Times Company

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
All right, high energy.

**David Rosenthal** (0:02)
Yeah, need some energy to get through 170 years. Woo, it's literally 170 years, it's crazy.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:22)
Welcome to season eight, episode two 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** (0:37)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:43)
And we are your hosts. For over a hundred years, you would have been hard pressed to find a better business in the world than an American newspaper. Each one had a local monopoly, an incredibly profitable advertising business, and it was one of the earliest examples of a reasonably low marginal cost business. It's dirt cheap to just print another copy of the paper.

**David Rosenthal** (1:05)
The newspaper business was, for a long time, Warren Buffett's canonical example of a franchise, like the best type of business you can possibly own.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:16)
Indeed. And this, today, listeners, is the story of the paper that loomed large over all the others, the New York Times. Today we peer into what I think is the oldest company we've ever done on this show, founded over 170 years ago before the Civil War. The Times has seen the majority of American history, and for the majority of its life, it's been controlled by a single family. And for many of you, a family you've probably never heard of. This is a family whose paper shaped the American perception of current events through World War I, World War II, Vietnam. I mean, really, their newspapers shaped your perception of America itself, and your parents' perception, and your grandparents' perception. You get it. It is probably safe to say that the five generations of the Ochs-Solzberger family has been the closest thing that America has ever seen to a dynasty. After a century of near-continuous prosperity, The New York Times has seen an incredibly dramatic fall and then rise just in the last 20 years. The internet and social media on top of it brought ruin to the entire traditional journalism industry. In the late 2000s, The New York Times got to such a low point that they even sold their office building to free up some cash while they rented it back from the buyer.

**David Rosenthal** (2:38)
Oof, indeed, can't wait to talk about that part of the history.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:43)
And yet, somehow today, they've been accused of being a monopoly in the journalism industry and they have more digital subscribers than they ever did in print and they employ the former editors-in-chief of Buzzfeed, Recode and Vox as columnists. So how did they turn it around? Who is this mysterious family and what does the future hold for The New York Times? Today, we dig in. If you love Acquired and you want to be a deeper part of what David and I do here, you should become an Acquired limited partner. You'll get access to our library of over 50 interviews and deep dives on company building topics, monthly Zoom calls, and this is new, live access to listen in while we record big events like emergency pods and our book club discussions with the authors. So if you are not already an LP, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquired.fm slash LP and we can't wait to see you there. And if you want to talk all things acquired, the goings on of the tech world, and find just a genuinely smart community to talk about all this stuff, you should join the Slack at acquired.fm slash Slack. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:56)
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** (4:21)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (4:27)
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.