# Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller: Turning Stranded Energy Into Intelligence

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Chase Lochmiller says Crusoe can scale AI by integrating power, data centers and cloud services while trusting experts to run each domain.

- Show: Training Data
- Hosts: Sonya Huang & Pat Grady
- Guest: [Chase Lochmiller](https://realalpha.app/builders/chase-lochmiller/) is CEO of Crusoe.
- Published: Oct 29, 2026
- Length: 1 h 1 m

## The best minutes

- [2:09](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=129) [A founder scales by growing alongside the company](https://realalpha.app/s/a-founder-scales-by-growing-alongside-the-company/) (5 min)
- [14:54](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=894) [Most startups fail through execution, not competition](https://realalpha.app/s/most-startups-fail-through-execution-not-competition/) (5 min)
- [24:06](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1446) [Bitcoin mining bridged Crusoe to AI infrastructure](https://realalpha.app/s/bitcoin-mining-bridged-crusoe-to-ai-infrastructure/) (8 min)

## Also worth watching

- [7:09](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=429) [Cross-team alignment takes repeated communication](https://realalpha.app/s/cross-team-alignment-takes-repeated-communication/) (4 min)
- [37:16](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2236) [Companies can outgrow people who once fit their roles](https://realalpha.app/s/companies-can-outgrow-people-who-once-fit-their-roles/) (4 min)
- [48:32](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2912) [CEOs need to actively seek out bad news](https://realalpha.app/s/ceos-need-to-actively-seek-out-bad-news/) (2 min)
- [32:30](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1950) [Coaching and practice can make a CEO a better communicator](https://realalpha.app/s/coaching-and-practice-can-make-a-ceo-a-better-communicator/) (5 min)
- [44:01](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2641) [Data centers need to explain their local impact](https://realalpha.app/s/data-centers-need-to-explain-their-local-impact/) (3 min)

Skip the energy portfolio rundown, the Everest summit account and Brian’s closing recap.

## Full analysis: Chase Lochmiller says ChatGPT brought AI demand in 2022

- For Crusoe, Bitcoin monetized stranded gas while its energy-first thesis pointed toward AI.
- Lochmiller says ChatGPT brought demand, but gives no sale price or project economics.
- Boards should test power access, customer demand and local acceptance separately.

Its 6 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/#analysis), free with an account:

- [26:36](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1596) Crusoe’s energy thesis came before Bitcoin
- [27:35](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1655) Bitcoin mining monetized power, but did not prove AI economics
- [28:39](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1719) ChatGPT aligned Crusoe’s stack with new demand
- [31:24](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1884) Crusoe sold mining to protect AI focus
- [22:01](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1321) Multiple energy choices still face local limits
- [9:32](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=572) Vertical integration makes execution the next test

## Summary

Crusoe builds power plants, manufactures electrical equipment, operates data centers and runs a managed AI cloud. Lochmiller says the company began by putting stranded energy to work with computing, first through Bitcoin mining, before selling that business to focus on AI infrastructure.

Lochmiller says Crusoe’s complexity comes from combining energy generation, electrical equipment, data centers and managed AI cloud, and that he relies on domain experts while keeping a broad view of the business. He argues that scaling requires repeated communication, urgency and continued investment in a CEO’s own skills. He says Crusoe’s energy-first computing strategy began with Bitcoin mining, but the company sold that business to focus on AI infrastructure. He also discusses energy choices, data center community concerns, people decisions and the risk planning behind his 2018 Everest summit.

### Minute by minute

- [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=0) **Crusoe spans energy through AI cloud.** Lochmiller describes Crusoe as a vertically integrated operation spanning power generation, data centers and managed AI cloud services. Its work ranges from large AI factories to small ones.
- [2:09](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=129) **Founder context helps leaders scale.** Lochmiller says a founder CEO has seen the business grow from its earliest days, so its current complexity does not arrive all at once. He says he can delegate to capable leaders because he has followed each stage of the journey and understands the company’s context.
- [7:18](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=438) **Cross-functional work needs repetition.** Lochmiller says he aligns teams on a direction, then holds leaders accountable for execution. Crusoe uses a weekly staff meeting to surface cross-team problems, and he says leaders must repeat priorities far more often as organizations grow.
- [11:13](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=673) **Urgency needs both pressure and purpose.** Lochmiller says Elon Musk balances the promise of changing the world with the pressure that a company could fail tomorrow. He aims to create urgency without going as far as Musk. Lochmiller says learning to lead a company of more than 2,000 employees took books, coaching, mistakes and on-the-job learning.
- [14:54](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=894) **Execution matters more than competition.** Lochmiller says startups are more likely to fail through poor execution, culture or focus than because a competitor defeats them. He sees AI infrastructure as a market with room for multiple winners and compares Crusoe’s integrated business to Exxon and Chevron, including its ability to partner with companies it may compete against elsewhere.
- [20:29](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1229) **Energy first shapes compute choices.** Lochmiller says Crusoe uses different energy sources for different locations and needs rather than expecting one solution to work everywhere. He cites natural gas, wind, solar, batteries, Icelandic geothermal and hydropower, Norwegian hydropower, and partnerships exploring nuclear power, including an SMR-powered AI factory at Idaho National Lab.
- [23:23](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1403) **Bitcoin mining was the first compute market.** Lochmiller says energy-first computing was Crusoe’s plan from the start, not a pivot. The company brought generators and data centers to flared gas in the Bakken and used Bitcoin mining as its first way to monetize the power. He says ChatGPT’s launch brought startups seeking the kind of AI compute infrastructure Crusoe had been developing.
- [30:06](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1806) **Crusoe sold mining to focus.** Lochmiller says selling the Bitcoin business to NYDIG let Crusoe direct more capital, resources and attention to AI infrastructure. He also says some investors could not invest in businesses tied to crypto, which made the company’s story more complicated. He remains personally supportive of Bitcoin.
- [32:30](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1950) **Coaching helped build speaking skills.** Lochmiller says public speaking did not come naturally and improved through preparation and practice, with coaching from Shane Metcalf. He praises Felicis for budgeting for executive coaching and other personal development. He says a coach can help a CEO see blind spots and navigate people problems.
- [37:27](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2247) **Lochmiller says CEOs fire too slowly.** Lochmiller says CEOs usually wait too long to fire someone, even when they have been considering it for a while. He argues that people may not grow at the same rate as a company; someone suited to a role today may not fit when the business is 10 times bigger two years later.
- [42:34](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2554) **Shared work connects researchers and welders.** Lochmiller says Crusoe’s culture depends on people with different expertise learning from one another. He says electricians have contributed innovations that researchers can use, and that the company’s work spans the system from electrons to AI tokens.
- [44:01](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2641) **Lochmiller says data centers have a marketing problem.** Lochmiller says the industry has not explained the facts about data centers well enough. Crusoe meets with local officials and communities to discuss impacts and benefits, and he says the company has increased security. He also says CEOs should seek bad news and frontline feedback rather than relying on good news.
- [50:44](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3044) **Lochmiller reduced Everest icefall exposure.** After an avalanche killed 15 Sherpas in the Khumbu Icefall in 2014, Lochmiller says he and his climbing partner changed their acclimatization plan for his 2018 summit. They trained on nearby mountains and made four passes through the icefall instead of the eight typical of a commercially guided expedition. He says he nearly turned back at the Balcony before continuing to the summit.

## Transcript

Training Data, hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, with Chase Lochmiller.

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

[0:03](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3) and then building and operating a managed AI cloud platform with managed AI services. What's made me very scalable as a leader is that we have these critical areas of domain expertise where I can move around and 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 a broad perspective of what we're doing at the macro scale and how each individual leader contributes to that vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform that we're building here at Crusoe. okay everybody today we have on chase lockmiller grusso's building so many of the data centers that power the age of intelligence. He's a very professional CEO, and he talks all about the road from zero beginnings to a $31 billion valuation that he just closed. He gets into the nuts and bolts of scaling a very operationally intensive business. I think you're going to like it.

[1:21](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=81) Chase, welcome to The Long Strange Trip. Brian, thanks for having me. We call this The Long Strange Trip because my journey as a CEO was a very long, strange trip kind of tracking your career you've had a long maybe not strange but interesting trip like you were on track to become a professor you became a hedge fund trader you became a mountaineer climbing mount everest among other things you're kind of an energy entrepreneur at least through my lens when you first got going and now you're the world's best data center builder Is there a through line in all of this, Chase? As a person, I've always been attracted to trying to solve hard problems.

[2:05](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=125) I think that's been the through line of my career, take on big challenges, solve hard problems that are exciting and inspiring to me. 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 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

[3:22](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=202) 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,

[3:41](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=221) **Chase Lochmiller:** 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

[3:52](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=232) 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.

[4:32](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=272) 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? 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

[5:49](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=349) electrons online, building power plants, working with independent power producers and utilities 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 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

[7:12](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=432) 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 before this. I kind of said to everybody, like, how many people in your organization do you deeply trust enough to say you're the DRI on this thing that cuts across the whole org and have deep trust? And it was like three to four people on average. Are you just a naturally trusting fellow? Did you have to learn to let go? I don't think my team would describe me as like a just naturally very trusting person.

[7:49](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=469) Look, it's not that I'm like, you know, hands off, go, you know, go for it, you know, you know, go, go do whatever you want. That's, that's not really my approach to management. It's, it's really, uh, I want to understand what we're doing in this vertical where we have alignment on a direction we're headed. I get it and I get how it influences the other pieces of the business. And then I hold, you know, my team accountable to go execute on what we agreed upon, you know, from a plan perspective. Okay. On that DRI topic, it seems to me as CEOs grow, like they've got their orgs, those orgs get bigger.

[8:25](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=505) They struggle with getting things done across the orgs. They, at some point, are like, we need DRIs. We need to entrust those DRIs. And the bigger the orgs get, the harder it gets. and you've got like four different major orgs underneath you. How do you get someone that cuts across? How do you have many versions of you? You know, we struggle with this problem just like any organization, right? Anytime you're trying to do something that is cross-org, you know, pulling in resources from one team to work with another resource from another team, you know, it just is complicated. You know, we do have a program management function which helps, but, you know, who's ultimately accountable for delivery of a lot of these things.

[9:11](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=551) The way I find is like, you know, I run a, I run a staff meeting once a week that like has, you know, a lot of the, you know, key executives and my direct reports in the meeting and we cover things across the whole business. And, you know, when there are pain points of how teams are working together, they, they surface in those meetings and, you know, we try to address them and, but, you know, there There is an inherent tension to doing things that are cross-functional or cross-organization. We've sort of had to figure it out, though. You know, just being a vertically integrated business, having...

[9:45](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=585) collaboration between those layers that are where you're transitioning across the stack, I think is a critical function if you're going to be successful as a vertically integrated company. And then like, what have you learned about that? Like, you must have skinned your knees on it. Any ahas other than the staff meeting? You know, I was always used to just working in smaller teams and smaller organizations. And if I said something once, people kind of listened and, you know, we worked in a small group and,

[10:13](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=613) **Chase Lochmiller:** it all kind of worked itself out. I found it that as soon as I'm sort of getting sick of hearing myself say something, then we're just scratching the surface of when I'm just hitting the point

[10:28](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=628) where I'm saying it enough times. And so just that whole communication layer about getting people on the same page to march in the same direction, it's sometimes painful the amount of times you have to remind people um of what we're doing and why we're doing it and who's doing what and but you know that that's sort of what it takes to get alignment and i think that is one of the challenges of running a bigger organization and it's why there are opportunities always for startups is that they can be more nimble they can move quicker uh than than than bigger companies and we're trying to fight that inertia of a bigger company to be able to continue to move fast and capture the opportunity at this moment in time when it's sort of required to be a dynamic organization to succeed in today's business age.

[11:21](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=681) Yeah, your business is such that you have to go fast. Like, you can't take your time. Most CEOs complain that as they get bigger, they slow down. Have you figured out ways to keep the pace up or have you slowed down? I mean, it feels faster and crazier than it's ever been. like at Caruso, there's a lot of big things happening, uh, on a daily basis. So I, I, I would say we are, we are continuing to move with incredible urgency. You know, I, I think Elon's probably like the best in the world at this, but like, you know, just trying to eliminate any sense of like entitlement or, uh, you know, eliminate any sense of like, Hey, just, you should be comfortable, like we made it, like we're here, now we just have to coast.

[12:06](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=726) Elon has this superpower of, you know, simultaneously enabling people to believe that if they're successful, they're going to change the world and there will be this incredible financial outcome and this incredible outcome that's driving massive impact, uh, while also holding people accountable through the high pressure of like, we're going to go out of business tomorrow. And if you don't act within, you know, the, the greatest degree of urgency that you're physically capable of, we're going to, we're going to die. And you know, that, like holding that tension is, is, is quite a, quite a superpower. Um, I would say that I'm not quite as extreme as Elon in driving this tension of, we're going to go out of business tomorrow versus, hey, the opportunity we have to change the world should inspire you to work hard.

[12:56](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=776) But I do think that threading the needle of that is an incredibly important thing to be able to drive a large organization to move quickly and with a high degree of urgency. Okay. It was the first time running a company like this. Do you study other CEOs and try to borrow pieces of their playbook? And is Elon your guy? You're trying to borrow big pieces? Who do you look up to? It's kind of funny. Crusoe is now the largest company I've ever worked for. And, you know, we recently surpassed 2000 employees. And, you know, I used to read a ton of books across fiction, nonfiction, you know, kind of whatever I was interested in sort of a wide ranging things from, you know, science fiction and, you know, technical books to, you know, novels and, you know, whatever the latest and greatest, you know, economist book was.

[13:49](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=829) but uh i shifted when i started crusoe there was like a period where i just binged on like every you know every good business book recommendation anybody would give me i would like you know binge those things and i got to you know i had the fortune of having a number of great mentors i had a great coach um that that really helped me grow into becoming a leader of of people because i'd never really been a leader of a big organization before starting crusoe either and so So it definitely took work. It took effort to get to where I'm at in terms of what does it take to be a good manager. And it took making mistakes and failing and learning on the job and just going on my own personal journey and my own personal path to embed a lot of scar tissue that I could then leverage in the future.

[14:39](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=879) I do think that there are certainly mentors and people that I look up to that I have closer relationships with. I do very much look up to guys like Elon that, you know, I think is just one of the greatest entrepreneurs and greatest business builders and, you know, greatest visionaries that, you know, humanity's ever, ever had. If you don't mind, like what were some of those mistakes with some of that scar tissue that all the other CEOs out there are probably going to make the same mistake? One of the things that struck me early on was, you know, sometimes when you're a CEO, you're sort of singularly focused on building this business and you're sort of watching what's happening out in the market. You're scrolling X or whatever news sources you have, and you see something else that's happening in the marketplace. And you're like, hey, that other group's kind of like trying to do the same thing that I'm doing. Or I have this new competitor that just raised this big round. Or you're always kind of like looking over your shoulder, there's like a bit of a paranoia. And like one of the great pieces of advice that I

[15:41](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=941) **Chase Lochmiller:** got, you know, early on was like, most startups die from suicide, not from homicide. It's not other businesses that kill you. It's you fundamentally not executing on the thing

[15:53](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=953) that's in front of you and you not building the right culture, not attracting the right people, not focusing on the right business opportunity because any, you know, real meaningful business opportunity worth pursuing. You know, it's not typically going to be a single winner-take-all business. And, you know, if it's a good business opportunity, it probably means there's room for multiple winners. And so if someone else is pursuing it, you should almost kind of view that as a compliment, almost a validation of like the business opportunity. But it's really up to you and it's really up to your management team. And it's really up to the team you put together to really execute against that opportunity, not be worried about like how you're going to get, uh, you know, killed by the competition. My paranoia would go up and down sign wave over time. Uh, I think if I were in your shoes, I'd be pretty paranoid right now. Are you, where are you on your paranoia, paranoia sign wave? You know, I'm not really paranoid with competition. I mean, you know, in certain regards, like, you know, Crusoe is an infrastructure business, right. And there are, we don't view it as a winner take all category. We think there's

[16:58](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1018) going to be a number of great businesses built here. And I think, you know, even people that even groups that people would paint as competition to us, I view it as like, there's far more ways for us to work together than work against each other. I think, you know, the greatest opportunity of our lifetime is building the infrastructure. layer of intelligence. And it's again, it's not going to be a winner take all opportunity. And one kind of comparison that I've often made is that, you know, I kind of view this compute infrastructure layer of AI and or SI, I guess, as people are calling it now today, this infrastructure layer of super intelligence is really there's a lot of effective comparisons to the oil and gas industry. And if you look at if you look at the value chain across the oil and gas industry, it's typically broken down into three components. You have the upstream business where people are actually drilling holes in the ground and pumping wells of oil and gas.

[17:52](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1072) You have the midstream business, which is where you're taking those raw commodities and transporting them from the wellhead to the natural gas processing plant or the oil refinery. And then you have the downstream business, which is actually processing those raw outputs from the earth and then converting them into usable materials, whether it's gasoline or jet fuel or plastics or whatever it is. And then you're ultimately selling that in the market. And within that stack, there's all these different margins that move up and down depending on the prices of oil, depending on the demand from consumers, depending on the demand from businesses.

[18:28](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1108) And for us, I view it as we're trying to build an AI super major in the same way that Exxon and Chevron are super majors in the oil and gas industry. And with that, you sort of have this embedded risk management where Exxon very famously doesn't hedge their oil exposure because when oil prices come down, their upstream business at the wellhead, those margins actually get compressed. but their downstream business at the refinery, those margins actually expand because the raw input costs actually go down. And they have these natural areas of collaboration versus competition where they're competing with other upstream businesses. But when they have a pipeline in an area, they're serving other upstream businesses that they may compete with. And I think Crusoe's kind of similar in that regard. We're willing to partner with businesses that we may compete with in other cases. But again, it comes back to this perspective that I just feel like there's so many more ways for us to help each other than for us to work against each other. Can I say something weird to you? Yeah, please. In addition to my Sequoia work, I started an ocean fund called propeller and i heard a pitch yesterday from a company and i'm

[19:44](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1184) not sure about this company, but, or about this industry, is mining, you know, rare earth metals from the ocean. And same analogy, like we're going to do it end to end, we're going to build an Exxon was the exact same company that they talked about as a super vertically integrated version. Speaking of that, we invested in Blue Energy. And I know, you know, Jake from Blue Energy, building nuclear in the ocean uh you talk about that like you're you've had a kind of a journey with the energy office it seems like you started in just like there's there's wasted energy out there and we're going to put it to work and you're still doing it but it sounds like the abilene facility is a lot of just natural gas like where are you at this point you know crusoe is very focused on activating megawatts for intelligence. And that requires all sorts of energy resources and all sorts of different use cases. At times, it's natural gas. We're focused on trying to find and catalyze innovative new energy solutions that can be things like Blue Energy. They're trying out new nuclear energy production technologies. We have another partnership with Ollo that we announced recently, where we're trying to bring to life the first

[21:06](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1266) SMR-powered AI factory at the Idaho National Lab. We've done stuff with behind-the-meter wind, with behind-the-meter gas, with behind-the-meter solar, with batteries. We've tried many different things. We've gone to Iceland, where Iceland's this geological phenomenon that it exists, but it's this land of fire and ice where you have very abundant, low-cost geothermal energy, very low-cost hydropower and not a lot of people and very cheap, efficient cooling. And bringing the demand for power there via compute has been our philosophy. And that's really what we mean when we say take an energy-first approach to building compute infrastructure.

[21:49](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1309) Norway is another great market for us where they have a lot of low-cost hydropower that's you know, being underutilized and can be built bigger than it is today. And so we don't think it's a silver bullet. We think compute infrastructure will be ubiquitous to serve the infrastructure layer of intelligence that's ultimately going to power global economic development. And so you need to use different energy solutions in different cases. And so we're really excited about a lot of the innovation taking place in the industry. And Blue Energy is another great example of can we leverage the same steam turbine technology that is needed for gas generation to basically – that's needed for both gas generation and nuclear energy to be a sort of bridge between gas and baseload firm nuclear power.

[22:41](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1361) You know, all of these things we think are great. We think a lot of the development in new battery technology is really exciting. Everything from like, you know, what's happening with companies like Redwood Materials that are repurposing used electric vehicle batteries and used lithium ion batteries to long duration storage solutions like Form Energy and Intora that we think will be cost effective 100 hour batteries. And so there's like a spectrum of whole different things and we kind of view it as like we sort of need them all. The demand from intelligence for energy is voracious and it's really going to accelerate the human progress as it has more access to energy.

[23:28](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1408) one of the things i find fascinating about you and your company is you started essentially in the bitcoin mining industry with stranded uh energy putting that to work and it was a really good business you were cranking with it and it sounds like from the beginning you sort of foresaw there's going to be a need for ai infrastructure and you started building it out and it rhymed at some point you decided we're going to sell off this most of our business is this bitcoin mining business when did you make that decision how did you tell your board take us behind the scenes on when that became a good idea in your head i was that was a bold move well so the thing was is that i think externally a lot of people thought this was a pivot for us but internally. And if you talk to any of our investors or any of our employees that have been

[24:22](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1462) **Chase Lochmiller:** here for a very long time, they'll tell you that like, this was sort of the plan all along was this energy first approach to computing. You know, I had been doing research in AI,

[24:32](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1472) like as a, as a quant portfolio manager. And then, you know, I was at, as at Stanford for grad school and I'm working in AI and doing a lot of work in computer vision and natural language processing. And I was like pretty AI pilled like early. early days. Like, you know, when, uh, you know, I was reading things like, like, like one of the more influential things on me was actually Tim Urban had this blog called wait, but why? And he wrote this. Yeah, it's great. It's fantastic. Um, just like everybody should go out and read that, you know, but there were a couple of pieces that were particularly influential on me. Um, there was one that was like about the path to super intelligence and in it, you know, he sort of like espouse this thesis that like, you know, these multilayer neural networks were essentially like really good nonlinear modeling, you know, mechanisms that as they had more data and more compute, they just got better and better at modeling, you know, whatever, whatever thing that you're trying to model, whether it's, you know, natural language or, you know, computer vision or, you know, whatever it was. And so I was sort of playing that out and felt like, you know, AI was this meta-science that wasn't going to improve one thing.

[25:42](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1542) It was going to improve everything, right? So I had this professor at Stanford named Andrew Ng, and he has this famous saying where he says, AI is like electricity, right? Electricity is not good for one thing, right? If you ask someone, what is electricity good for? It's not like, oh, electricity is good to turn on the lights. It's like, yes, it's good at turning on the lights, and it's also good at powering my computer and my car and, uh, heating my stove and, you know, all these different things that we really take for granted with electricity. And so it's not just like one thing that, you know, uh, that, that, that AI is good for it's, it's really good for everything. And, and, you know, I was, I had like high conviction of this fairly early days. And, you know, I felt like if data and compute were the bottlenecks, ultimately compute becomes an energy problem. And when And you sort of play that out and think about that at scale. And we'd sort of seen this unfolding actually with Bitcoin mining. And so the original thesis for the business was like, go find stranded energy that is otherwise being underutilized and bring a market to that stranded energy with compute instead of trying to bring that stranded energy to a market where it can be

[26:54](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1614) bought and sold, bring the market to the energy. And, you know, that's what led us to, you know, Our initial stranded energy resource was natural gas that was being flared in the oil field where oil companies were drilling for oil. They produced natural gas as a byproduct. And then absent having a pipeline, they just light it on. fire. And it was this huge environmental liability. It was a waste product. They were paying money to dispose of it. It's a disaster. And, you know, it's still happening at scale today. But, you know, our solution to that was we would bring these small modular generators and these small modular data centers. And we would we would basically utilize that gas on site and use it to power compute infrastructure, which, you know, our first monetization engine of that was was Bitcoin mining. It was the easiest way to take energy and turn it into money. And we sort of created this great flywheel effect with the Bitcoin business. And there were definitely criticisms early days when I was like, hey, I'm trying to do this AI cloud platform. And people were like, what are you talking about? Why are you spending any resources on that? You have this great thing.

[28:02](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1682) You're making all this money in Bitcoin. What are you talking about? Why would you focus on anything else. And we tried a ton of stuff and we failed and we screwed a bunch of stuff up in terms of like building out our first AI clusters. And we're trying to figure out what the product looked like and who we were going to serve. And I called a bunch of my friends that were researchers at universities and saying, hey, do you have a use for these GPUs that I'm powering from this gas in the middle of the Bakken oil field in North Dakota? And there were just like many different iterations of trying to get that business to life. But the magic moment was really the launch of ChatGPT. So November 30th, 2022, I think that was just the moment that changed everything. And it led to all these new startups that were demanding the exact type of compute infrastructure that we had been building and the exact type of solutions that we had been building from a, you know, a storage, compute, networking, et cetera. Now I had always felt that like Bitcoin and AI, and I still feel this way that they actually go together very well because AI data centers do not consume energy in the same way that Bitcoin mining does. Bitcoin mining is very like,

[29:16](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1756) you can, you can almost give it like a fixed draw amount of power and say like, stay at that power level and just like consume that. And it will be like very flat line. And, uh, and then you can move that up and down depending on demand response and what, what available energy is. AI has a bit more variance in terms of, you know, it's overall power utilization. And, you know, you see this in, you know, certain, certainly when you're training big workloads for inference and training, but you also have seasonality with. cooling. You tend to have higher PUE during the day when you're having to run your air conditioning units and your chillers more aggressively because it's hotter than at night when you have more natural cooling. Depending on workloads that are being run on the clusters, things can ebb and flow a bit. Okay. But I'm going to come back to you. You were thinking it was an AI company all along. You made a decision to sell off what was a good business. Why didn't you just keep it?

[30:17](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1817) When did you broach that with the team? When did that become a good idea in your head? Did you get pushback on it? Part of it was we had a great partner that we felt like this business we built would land in a really good home, which was NYDIG. And, you know, I really, Ross Stevens has become a good friend, you know, over the years. And I and Tejas Shaw, who's the CEO there, you know, just deep amount of respect for that team. And we felt like they were great people that would, you know, be great stewards of this business. And they had a lot of experience within natural gas in terms of, you know, Stone Ridge has built out one of the largest natural gas businesses in the United States. And so this intersection of people that knew and had operated natural gas assets at scale and were deeply involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem. We felt like they were, they were great partners for that business. But really, I think what drove me to divest that business was really focus. And, you know, we, we are doing a lot at Crusoe and increasingly we were doing more And it felt like we were having to balance this tension between do we allocate capital and resources and attention towards our Bitcoin business or against this AI infrastructure business.

[31:38](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1898) And we were also getting feedback from investors where, you know, it would make the story too complex in the eye of an investor where they would say, okay, I love what you're doing over here on this AI business, but my firm were actually blocked from making any investments that are tied to crypto. So there were challenges to just making the business focused and making it, you know, this category defining company across vertically integrated AI infrastructure and not having the distraction of being anything related to Bitcoin. And so, you know, I am still. personally a huge bitcoin supporter and holder and you know i think it's an important thing to exist for the world as a you know non-state controlled decentralized digitally native open monetary ecosystem but it was the right thing for crusoe to go all in on ai infrastructure one thing i'm noticing about you on this call and i've watched you in other formats is you're very polished chase most ceos don't have your level of polish is that something you learned along the way you said you had a coach did your coach help you with that i had a coach uh and i still we're still we're still quite close we're not working as closely together

[32:59](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1979) as we once did but shane metcalf he was a phenomenal uh phenomenal coach for me uh i

[33:05](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1985) **Chase Lochmiller:** learned so much from him. I, public speaking was never something that came naturally to me. It was something I had to work really, really hard at, uh, because I, I just wasn't doing it. Like I'd

[33:18](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=1998) given lectures and things like at, you know, universities and, uh, but it wasn't a, it wasn't something that I was routinely doing, especially like the quant space is a very, you know, it's a very technical industry. So you're working with very smart people, but you're, you're doing it in a very secretive way. It's like you're very open with your teammates and then you don't tell anything to anybody in the world about what you're doing for fear that you might leak some of your alpha. So I was never out in the world presenting stuff. And so it was something that I had to work very, very hard at to just be prepared for what I was going to say, how I was going to say it.

[33:56](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2036) And I think if you do it enough, you just get practice. And at some point, you just stop having to prepare as much for things. And then most things at this point, I kind of just like wing them, uh, because you know, like there, there's certainly things that like just require a tremendous amount of preparation, but, uh, you know, I think I'm often better off the cuff because I, you know, it's just like how, how I think through things. And I, I'm, I've developed a good skillset of being able to explain what's in my mind, uh, you know, fairly clearly to, to, to, to whoever I'm talking to what else did you learn from first of all should all the ceos i work with hire a coach yes and like yeah so okay interesting what did you learn like what did jane teach you or what did he push you on you know one of our investors uh felices they had this really cool thing they do for for companies and i haven't seen anybody else do this uh but they have a budget for like personal investment essentially it's it's like uh you know it's it's not it's it's like meant for like self-improvement it's meant for things like executive coaching and off sites and just ways of up leveling yourself as a leader because they're

[35:10](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2110) look, we're making this big investment in the founder, the CEO, and we're betting on you being able to get better, that you're not a static version of yourself, that you're actually going to be a better version of yourself for the course of time as the business grows. I just thought that was such a thoughtful approach to the investment, especially in venture, where the investments are so much about the people and the ability of the founder to scale uh you know i shane like early days it just felt like shane was a guy that like always had the answer to the problem that i was like racking my brain on and you know he was as much of uh a coach as like almost like a therapist for me like that's how i deal with me it was so you know we we really did have a very, uh, you know, still do a very, very special relationship. That's very trusted. And, um, I, I just felt like, you know, it's something you have to work at and you build this trust with a person. And even if it doesn't feel like you're making progress on any given session, you're laying the groundwork and you're laying this foundation for when that really big thing does pop up. This person knows you so deeply and they know where your blind spots are

[36:31](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2191) and they know how you might be responding in a certain situation and they know how to like guide you to course correct, uh, to be able to, you know, rise to whatever occasion it is. And, you know, I think, I don't know. I mean, people say this and it's, you know, I may, I may sound like I'm, you know, repeating the, the common folklore, but like, you know, so many of the problems with building companies are people problems, right? Being able to effectively navigate the people of side of this is like, it's, that's like most of the challenges, like, you know, you get these smart, ambitious and opinionated people getting everybody to work and row in the same direction and agree on things. Or if they don't agree to commit to whatever pathway you're taking, I mean, that is.

[37:14](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2234) always the hardest thing. And, uh, you know, as a CEO, I think, you know, sometimes the biggest challenges are, you know, when do I keep believing in someone and when do I decide like, Hey, we need to move on. And like, we need a different, different person in this role. Uh, you know, I, I think it's, or, or how do we get like two brilliant people to work together on something that are fundamentally disagreeing. And, um, I, like, I don't know, I've just found the people to be the hardest thing and also like the greatest superpower if you can get it right. People always said to me, you should hire slow and fire fast. I did the opposite, particularly on the fire side. It sounds like you move some people out. Did you do it too slowly?

[38:00](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2280) Did you ever regret it? Or were the signals that kind of push you over the edge? I think almost always there's a bias towards you just end up firing people too slowly. It's It's just like there's an inherent bias. So even if you're very responsive, like, you know, I do think that for most CEOs. You know, when you fire someone, you've clearly been thinking about it for a long time. And it's almost like when you started thinking about it, that was sort of the right time to fire them. But like, you know, it's hard to. What signal are you looking at? Is it other people on the team saying this person's subpar?

[38:39](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2319) Is it what is it? It's not that. That is definitely like a data point. I think our job as a CEO is you are reading this mosaic of information, right? You have all these little tidbits and they're often from very different parts of the organization. and different, you know, coming from someone super technicals, coming from someone, you know, that's like more of a people person coming, you know, like all these like different things. And you're sort of amassing all these different pieces of information. And, you know, it's up to you to like make a judgment call around like what the best decision is for the company. I do think that I forget who published, I think it was like first round capital has this really great blog called

[39:24](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2364) **Chase Lochmiller:** like the startup laws of physics. And, uh, you know, the, the, the, the crux of it is something along the lines of, you know, people scale linearly companies scale exponentially. So you

[39:38](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2378) sort of have this great company scale exponentially. So you sort of have this dynamic where or even if you challenge your people to continue to grow and continue to invest in themselves, if the company really grows in the way that you're sort of setting out as an ambitious leader, oftentimes the person who was the right person for that role at one point in time may not be able to grow and scale to be the person in that role two years later when the company is 10 times bigger. And that's a hard reality to face as a leader because you end up in the trenches with these people. You end up working late nights, early mornings. You see these people really giving everything they have to the mission. And when you have those moments where the company outgrows the person, it's just hard, right? Because you care a lot about these people on a personal basis, even if you know the best thing for the company is to find someone new for a specific role. Anyway, coming back to why I've fired people in the past, it's almost like every case is a snowflake every single one is different and you know it's it's it's ultimately up to you to make the the the judgment call of what's what's the right thing for the business okay i have two

[40:55](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2455) of my recent interviews i interviewed ali gozi from uh databricks love him great guy and he's basically had the same management team for 10 years with the separately turned over one person And then Devit Tacharya is a friend of mine and coming on the pod. On average, he turned over two per year on the exec team for lots of reasons. I find that odd. They're in kind of similar businesses and it's just so, and they're both really good and they're so different. Totally. Actually, my current COOs and CFO worked alongside Dave at MongoDB for about a decade. So he wasn't one of the people that was, you know, churned.

[41:42](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2502) By churn, I mean, some of them leave. No, I totally understand. But look, I don't think there's any right answer. And, you know, I've seen different things work. I think what I've found most effective for me is that if you have someone that's really struggling, the team recognizes it. And, you know, we view it as, you know, the team is ultimately there to win. And, you know, I mean, I saw this, I grew up playing competitive sports and, you know, if you, if you run a team, you always loved your teammates, you know, you had. It's a strong and special bond that like came from, you know, the locker room down the field.

[42:18](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2538) And, you know, if you had a teammate that was just like struggling or, you know, a weak link and, you know, led to, you know, the team's downfall, you know, it was like you, you knew that the right thing to do was to replace that person with someone. It sounds like you're in the middle of those two. I'm in the middle of the two for sure. Fine. Yeah. Speaking of teams and people, one thing that is fascinating about your business, and I just think about the culture we built at HubSpot, people rhymed at HubSpot. But in your organization, you have AI researchers and you have welders. How do you create a culture across all of them?

[42:56](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2576) Are they different cultures? How do you comp people across all of it? How does all that work? It's a great question. We've always felt like we've had an incredibly diverse culture just from the people that are coming to help build this. And one of our core values is tapping into the collective genius, right? It's like no one person has all the domain expertise to deliver the full solution that we're trying to bring to bear. And we all can learn from one another. And all of us working together towards a cohesive solution is going to result in an amplified result that none of us could have done individually. And there have been critical innovations that people have gotten from people like electricians that are working on wiring things up to the researchers are then benefiting from those specific use cases. And how we think about the whole building management system, how we think about the operating system from the electron to the token, I think is something that really sets us apart. I read an article in the journal about VCs and people in your industry when they're presenting at conferences, like people are attacking them or protesting them. And you're sort of in the middle of a wave. It's an election

[44:11](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2651) issue around the data centers. And I've heard your story on why it's good for communities and why it's great for humanity. Are you facing some of that heavy criticism yourself? And how do you deal with it personally is do you have security like where are how how tricky is this for you the way i think about it is when i look around at the people at crusoe these are all people that want to do good for the world there's not a single person i met at crusoe that doesn't want to do good for the world And I believe fundamentally that there is a right way to, you know, bring this infrastructure to life where everybody can benefit, you know, energy, you know, from a water usage standpoint, from a tax revenue standpoint, from a school and community standpoint, and then from, you know, the end use cases and how it's actually fueling human progress through, you know, the greatest technological wave we've ever experienced.

[45:10](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2710) I've heard you explain it. You explain it extremely well, and you make a lot of sense. And I wish the rest of the AI leaders would explain it as well as you did. But for you, you must be catching a lot of flack. Well, so my major thing is I always try to take a very first-principled approach to things. And if I have high conviction in something that I've built up from a set of ground truth facts, I have no problem disagreeing with someone. And, you know, I can try to poke holes into why, you know, someone else I think is wrong and why, you know, we're trying to do things the right way. But I do feel like fundamentally at Crusoe, like permeates in the culture, like people want to do this the right way.

[45:55](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2755) People want to do this as a good service to the world.

[45:58](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2758) **Chase Lochmiller:** This has become a political issue, particularly around the, you know, the AI data centers. And there's just so much misinformation around this out there that, you know, I've often said that like what the data center industry, like their biggest problem is we have a marketing problem. We haven't been able to get the truth out there. And to me, the truth is on our side.

[46:20](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2780) and so when you explain the truth and i've been in these rooms you know where you know i i go to these local communities i meet with the county judge i meet with um you know folks in these communities that where we're building infrastructure and when you sit down you really explain to them what's happening and you know you're not coming at it from like a hey i'm smarter than you you gotta like listen to me it's like it's like here's just like what's happening and here's here's how we're trying to do our very best to make it uh good for you and and good for us and good for the world. I think when you have those conversations, people are receptive to it. Independent of politics, political allegiances, I think people are receptive to authenticity and facts. That's really our approach to this. Now, am I worried from a security standpoint? Sure. We've had to increase our security footprint just given...

[47:14](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2834) given there's, there's, you know, crazy people out there that, uh, want to, want to, want to create a big statement. So, uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, and so I assume some of these rooms you're walking into, there's some hysterical people. What is that like the first room you walk into and people are screaming and yelling at you? Like, there's no training for that. Again, I think honestly, like appealing to, you know, their humanity and like understanding why someone may be, you know saying what they're saying i think listening to the facts i think like you know i often have very strong opinions but i can always change them in light of new information and new facts so like that's like uh i think it's important to have that like intellectual flexibility to say like hey i had high conviction that we're doing things the right way upon learning this new thing we should probably be doing this differently and we could probably be doing this better and i think like that is like an inherent growth mindset that we have here as a company. And, you know, I've tried to channel as a leader, like to, you know, have, uh, you know, the, the ability to listen to, you know, these, these, these, these criticisms and, and, and, uh, you know, try to

[48:25](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2905) try to filter out like what is crazed hysteria that's, you know, unfounded in truth and what's like legitimate critical feedback that we should, you know, be using to become a better steward of, these communities. Do you think having thick skin is a very important attribute for a CEO? A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, just your job is to be the receiver of bad news very frequently and then be able to think with a clear mind and make decisions in light of that bad news. And I think the other thing that is important for a leader is like, and frankly, something that I'm always struggling with is as the company grows and the company gets bigger, I'm further from a distance from individuals on the front lines of the company. So trying to close the gap, making sure that I'm always approachable to that people can speak truth to power. You want to be in a position where people can voice their concerns and be heard. And, you know, in light of presenting truth, you know, in the context of everything else that's happening, that you can actually adjust, you know, the direction of your business.

[49:44](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=2984) Is to encourage that, to make sure people will stand up to you? Because the 2,000th person you hire, they put you on a pedestal. The 20th person's beating you up day to day. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's like mining for it, just asking for it relentlessly. I think when people see examples of you taking criticism and feedback, responding to it, changing your mind. I think it empowers people to be like, oh, actually my voice should, you know, I should voice my concern. And, you know, like I think people often have this perspective that you as the leader, you as the CEO, you want to only want to hear the good news. Generally, like

[50:25](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3025) **Chase Lochmiller:** the good news is great. Like I want to hear it, but like I care way less about the good news than I do about the bad news. So like trying to try to like run into those, like what's going wrong?

[50:34](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3034) Like, what are we bad at? Like, you know, how do we fix these things? What are the problems? How do I go resolve those? Like, you know, I think that is a critical characteristic of a CEO is like that willingness to go seek out and like run into the burning buildings, figure out the problems and, you know, go try to, you know, help, help resolve them. Okay. This question's for me. And I would imagine other people are interested. I've never met someone that climbed Mount Everest and I'm really impressed. What is it like? What is the training like? What does it feel like when you get to the top of that mountain?

[51:13](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3073) You know, in a lot of ways, like a company culture is sort of a reflection of, you know, the CEO or the founder's culture. And, you know, that's really what's happening at Crusoe. Like we actually have a core company value to think like a mountaineer, which is like this sense of cultural resilience and preparation and planning and willingness to endure the expedition, a lot of that value and the practices that we've written about for that value describe a lot of what it's like to climb Mount Everest. And so there's actually this whole internal presentation I have around the various Everest trips that I had, because I actually tried to climb Mount Everest once in 2014, and there was a big avalanche that occurred, and it ended up killing 15 Sherpas in the Khumbu Icefall. And I made sort of this conscious decision like you know i came back and my wife was like oh thank god like that chapter is done and like you don't have to do this anymore and i was like look this thing like haunts me and like it's all i think about and like i like have to go back she's like you're insane um but like if you're gonna do that please do it before we have kids um So, uh, but when I thought about that, it was like very much like when you think about

[52:19](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3139) Mount Everest, you know, and, and I climbed on the South side, which is, you know, the Nepal side, uh, through the Kumbu Valley, there's this, you know, you, you basically start at base camp and then, or you trek up to base camp and then you go from base camp to camp one. And then there's camp two, camp three, camp four. And then you, you have this push to the summit. Well, the two most dangerous areas on the mountain are basically from camp four to the summit, which is, which is frequently referred to as the death zone. This is where you're above 8,000 meters. So, you know, very intuitive why that's dangerous. You're at very, very high altitude where humans really shouldn't be living. Um, but the other most dangerous area is this area between base camp and camp one, which is called the Khumbu Icefall. So this was the area where, uh, you know, this disaster occurred when I was there in 2014. And, uh, the thing about the Khumbu Icefall is that, you know, it's, it's a glacier that's sort of falling, right? So it's this beautiful, like really cool ice jungle gym, but there's a lot of things that are just like stochastic risk, right? It's like these things that are totally outside of your control where

[53:22](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3202) it's like a Ciroc falls or an avalanche occurs and, you know, oops, you die. And that was the type of risk where I was like, look, I know there are ways I can consciously train and prepare for the high elevation and, you know, I can manage my risk up there like more effectively. And I know consciously I'm taking that risk. The risk I felt less comfortable with was this stochastic risk and a traditional Everest expedition involves going from base camp to camp one. And you're, you actually acclimatize on the mountains. You go base camp, camp one, back to base camp, base camp, camp one, camp two, back to base camp, up to camp three, back to base camp.

[54:01](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3241) and you actually end up doing eight trips through the Khumbu Icefall. So like four round trips on a typical commercially guided expedition. In order to de-risk that, me and my climbing partner actually designed a different approach to climbing Everest, which was we ended up going and climbing a bunch of mountains nearby and spending a lot of time at the summits of those mountains so that we would acclimatize without taking this stochastic risk in the Khumbu Icefall. And we actually only did one big acclimatization trip up Mount Everest and then back to base camp. So we ended up doing basically four passes through the Khumbu Icefall instead of eight. I was conscious of the risks that I wanted to take. Um, you know, the planning.

[54:44](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3284) preparation, all that, we had to think through a ton of stuff, a lot of training, a lot of long distance trail running and a couple of different high altitude training trips. But the point I want to get across is conscious risk-taking and intense planning and preparation that really went into a very successful Everest summit in 2018. You worked so hard at it and you wanted it so badly. What was the feeling inside of you when you got to the top? It was like, because I almost turned around at this, uh, this area called the balcony, it's about 8,600 meters. Um, so the summit's 8848. Um, and, and so, you know, not too far from the summit in terms of elevation, but like it felt impossibly far and it was still dark out. Right. So we left camp four at like 11 PM. It was dark out when we got to the balcony. My, you know, you feel terrible. Like, you know, I hadn't eaten much in the last 48 hours. Like I was dehydrated. I felt awful. My legs were cramping like, and it was dark. Right. And you know, my partner was really the person who inspired me to continue. I, I, like I felt fine apart from those things. So it wasn't like, felt like I was putting myself at risk. And once, once the sun came up and you start seeing the sunrise and you're,

[56:07](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3367) you're sort of high up in this mountain, you're like, you're just inspired by, you know, your surroundings. You're, you know, it was this elevation of your spirits and, uh, gave you the adrenaline to kind of like make the push through that final, uh, you know, 250 meters. And, uh, you know, when I got to the summit, I think, you know, my feeling was, was really one of just sheer awe, just like, you know, just a, a sense of awe for the universe and, you know, an offer, you know, this, you know, being on the summit and sort of experiencing, you know, the whole, the whole world around me, um, you know, I think, I think was just a really special one and it makes you feel small. Right. And, uh, you know, I think, I think there's something, uh, very interesting about like, you know, having that sense of like, I'm small and I'm inspired by the world around me and just like the magnificence of existence. And, uh, you know, that was kind of my, my experience on the summit. We, it was beautiful. We had about, we had a very sunny day. So we spent about an hour, uh, up at the summit and, you know, just took a bunch of pictures.

[57:14](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3434) just really enjoyed this heroic moment of achievement. Congratulations on all your success. I'm rooting for you. You're a fantastic CEO. Thanks for coming on. Brian, thanks for having me. This was really fun. Okay, hope you liked that episode with Chase. He is a very legit CEO scaling that business really well. I'll give you a couple of my takeaways. My first takeaway is kind of on him as a homo sapien. And he's a person who really likes hard challenges. And like when I recruit and I fund CEOs, that's definitely a quality that I look for. I liked how he talked about just how much the CEO job changed.

[57:56](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3476) He had never done anything like that before. He's eight years into the journey. And man, he's a learning machine. He read a lot about it. He hired a coach. It sounds like his coach was really useful. And I coach a bunch of Sequoia CEOs. and you know some of it is giving them advice but a lot of it is gaining context and listening to the problems and empathizing and really kind of being like a therapist so he benefited a lot from that the other thing he worked hard on it sounds like his public speaking he's very smooth like really articulate and smooth and sounds like that wasn't his default setting he's had to really work at that and i think that's important like if you're up in front of your company you're up in front of investors. I don't think it hurts to be articulate and smooth. I like the way he talked about competition. He said something we used to say at HubSpot all the time, you're much more likely to die of suicide than murder. It was very much our case. It sounds to me he's really into competition. And I think a lot of founders frown on that. We had major competition over many, many years with Salesforce.com. So I wouldn't shy away from that. The other thing I always did is I

[59:08](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3548) always got to know our competitors, just because you never know. And so don't don't be afraid to reach out to your competitors and have coffee. The last thing I took that I really liked is as the organization gets bigger, and I felt this at HubSpot, everyone wants to give you good news, you're the CEO, and they expect you want to hear good news. And you really want the opposite, you want to hear the bad news. And you want to train the organization to give you that bad news. So almost encouraging people when they push back at you and when they give you bad news inside of a. You know, a pretty good size setting. I think that's a really important quality in CEOs.

[59:49](https://realalpha.app/v/64vUl9k-IAQ/?t=3589) The other thing that I think is an important CEO quality that I think he does, and you might too, but he has very strong opinions, as you've heard. But if the facts change, he's willing to change his mind. And being stubborn is a really tough quality in a CEO. It makes you quite hard to follow. Anyway, those are some of my takeaways. I thought he was great. It's an amazing business. he's an amazing CEO I hope you liked it and I'll see you next time on a strange trip