A founder scales by growing alongside the company

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:14

   Hmm. One hard problem is becoming a CEO and scaling as a CEO is in and of itself is a hard problem. What has surprised you about, you know, all of a sudden you're a CEO and you got to build this company. What is what what do people have wrong about the CEO journey? It can sometimes be misleading to just take a snapshot of someone like deep into it and and just assume it's some linear path on on how you actually get there. I was actually having this discussion with another CEO. You know, when you're a founder CEO, you sort of have this benefit of sort of, you know, the boiling frog syndrome where, you know, right now things are really crazy at Crusoe. There's just so much happening. Everything's happening very quickly. The scale at which it's happening is crazy. You know, when people get dropped into Crusoe and they start working at Crusoe, it's like

2. 3:06

   it's intense and there's just a lot going on across the company. And, you know, there's a question of like, how do you actually hold that all in one person's head? And, you know, when you're the founder CEO, you have so much context of like the history of how you got here. And it wasn't always this crazy, right? Like when we first started, it was just me and my co-founder. It was just the two of us for, you know, quite a while. And then we, you know, had our first hire and we had our first, you know, incremental hires. And, you know, when we were 10 people, it felt crazy, but it's nothing compared to what it is today. And the journey of a CEO is, journey of a founder CEO is like, you have to continually be upping your game. You have to be continually investing in yourself to be able to scale. If you, if you want to have a scaled

3. 3:52

   business and you know, this is partially reflected, like, you know, at Crusoe, we have a core company value. That's like live on the infinite growth loop. Like nobody is, nobody's a finished product, right? Nothing we've done here is a finished product. Uh, everything is a work in progress. every person is a work in progress, and every single day we try to improve on who we were yesterday. And if you look at those compounding returns of those continuous focus on improvements and how you actually get better, when you zoom back out over the course of a month, a year, five years, the results can be astounding. Okay. Actually, I had quite an interesting day today.

4. 4:32

   I run something called the kids table and the adults table for Sequoia and it's basically getting a bunch of CEOs together all founders CEOs to kind of talk about their problems and try to help each other with the journey. And we've got a bunch of them between 20 and 2000 employees. All of them are ripping, like really ripping. And I got a quote from one of the CEOs today. My biz is becoming dizzingly complex beneath me. How the hell do I keep up? Did you do you have that feeling today?

5. 5:04

   Or did you have the thing? I had that I had that feeling. If someone were to take me off the streets and parachute me in and drop me in to say, hey, go run this company, Crusoe, I would absolutely 100% have that dizzying, paralyzing anxiety feeling. I actually feel great about where we're at within Crusoe because I've been there for every step of the journey. And I've been able to surround myself with incredibly dynamic and capable leaders that I'm able to offload and trust a lot of responsibility and resources to. And, you know, we, we sort of, you know, we have a complex business because it's vertically integrated and it spans like a huge scope of different work streams, everything from, you know, energy generation and, you know, bringing electrons online, building power plants, working with independent power producers and utilities

6. 5:54

   to building data centers, operating at scale, very large scale AI factories to very small scale AI factories and then building and operating a managed AI cloud platform and with managed AI services, it's a whole wide spectrum of different employees. And, you know, we have factories where we're manufacturing critical electrical equipment for data centers. And then we have AI researchers that are working on the best, most effective ways to serve and host AI models and manage the KV cache. And there's a whole bunch of different folks in between. So what's made me very scalable as a leader is that I have been able to find domain experts in each of these key verticals from energy, data centers, manufacturing, and AI cloud computing. And if you look at the folks here at Crusoe, we have these critical areas of domain expertise where individually I can move around and

7. 6:54

   I can go very deep with any individual, but I trust them a lot to be making the right decisions as we're sort of scaling things. And everybody has at least a broad perspective of what we're doing at the macro scale and how each individual component, each individual leader contributes to that broader version. vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform that we're building here at Crusoe. Trust is an interesting word. We talked about it on the call. Actually, I just finished a call