The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Chase Lochmiller
[00:00:00] S0: So absent having a purpose, I was like, man, I guess I guess I should get rich. Like, that's maybe the next best thing to, like, having a, you know, a monastic calling that you're devoted to. The infrastructure to support AI wasn't gonna be centralized. It was gonna distributed where energy was low cost and abundant. Energy prices actually come down. It's actually the opposite of the narrative that's being told. People are very emotional about data centers. There's really like three products that we ultimately sell to customers and where we're making money. We can sell data centers, we can sell GPUs, and we can sell tokens. Well, you know, the GPU is actually the most valuable thing in the entire data center. Most moats are a illusion. Most moats don't exist.
00:00:40 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:40] S1: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Steppings. Now my job is to bring you the most relevant interviews in technology. Right now, we are in a race for data centers, for compute capacity, for energy, and there is not a more pertinent guest that could join me in the hot seat today than Chase Locke Miller from Crusoe Energy. They provide several different layers of this very important business, which is they provide the data centers, they can provide the compute, and then they can provide the inference, three of the most valuable pillars of this value chain. He sits down today to join me following their $3,900,000,000 series f, which was raised at a $30,900,000,000 valuation. Get the notebooks out. This one went very granular into the build out that's required over the next few years to supply the incessant demand for AI. But before we dive into the show today, founders and investors sleep on Eight Sleep. It is the intelligent sleep system trusted by mister Mark Zuckerberg, doctor Andrew Huberman, Charles Leclerc, and the Aston Martin f one team. The pod is a smart mattress cover that fits on any bed. It cools each side to 55 degrees, heats to a 110 degrees. It even tracks your heart rate, HRV, and sleep stages without a wearable. Thank god. The new Pod six has a hub 50% smaller than the last one and starts at just $1,999. Visit 8sleep.com/20vc. That's eightsleep.com/20vc. While Eight Sleep helps you sleep better, MongoDB helps you build better. MongoDB has always been the database developers love. Well, now it's the data platform AI agents need. Agents need accurate context, fast. MongoDB stores, searches, and reasons over your data in real time. JSON native database, vector search, and Voyage AI embeddings all in one place. One system instead of 10. No data pipelines to maintain. Ugh. This sounds too good to be true. Build and scale from your first user to billions of vectors. Run on any cloud, on prem, or your laptop even. That's why 75% of the Fortune one hundred run their most critical apps on MongoDB, moving trillions of dollars every single day. And it's why AI native companies like Eleven Labs run 40,000,000 agents on MongoDB. So if you're building an AI, MongoDB for startups helps you move faster with Atlas and Voyage AI credits and dedicated support. Don't build agents that answer once and forget.
00:03:12 · Harry Stebbings, Chase Lochmiller
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00:04:43 · Chase Lochmiller, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:43] S0: I'm pumped to be here, man. [00:04:44] S1: I am just gonna start with a totally weird one that I never expected to start with, mountaineering. I hear that you are an experienced and skilled mountaineer. I haven't had that often in the hot seat. What do
00:04:56 · Chase Lochmiller
[00:04:56] S0: you learn from mountaineering that you think makes you better as an entrepreneur? It's a great question. We've actually ingrained mountaineering into the culture of Crusoe, and we have a core set of company values. One of our core values is actually to think like a mountaineer. And so what does that mean? You know, mountaineering is a practice where things are subject to change, and you need to be prepared for change. With it, it really embeds this sense of, like, cultural resilience that I think is really, really important for a business like ours that, you know, is doing both... Stuff both in the digital world as well as the physical world. But to, you know, further the analogy here, for mountaineering, you know, you come up with a plan to basically set out from your camp, go summit the peak, come back safely, and, you know, you you know, take your photo and your glory is, you know, written written in the history books. But you have to be prepared for things to go wrong. Right? You have to be prepared for the weather to change. You have to be prepared for gear to fail. You have to be prepared for your partner to get sick or an avalanche to occur. And the idea is really having here's a plan a, and then I have a plan b, a plan c, a plan d. I have plans all the way down in case different things go wrong. You know, additionally, like, you have to have a sense of willingness to endure difficult challenges and difficult times. You know, this notion of enduring the expedition. The expedition can be long and hard and arduous, and, you know, you have to really dig deep at those moments of of pain to work through those challenges. That's a different aspect of thinking like a Mountaineer. And then, you know, another big aspect is thinking with a with a safety culture, having this this this notion of safety as a huge priority, which is important when you're doing things at at the scale we're doing from a construction standpoint, thinking with the safety mindset of, you know, safety first, second, and third. There's this saying in mountaineering that getting getting up to the top is optional, getting down is mandatory. We try to practice that that safety culture here at Crusoe, and really, you know, try to avoid any sort of physical injuries or or challenges with digital attacks on the platform as well.
00:06:51 · Harry Stebbings, Chase Lochmiller
[00:06:51] S1: I have so much respect for Mountainous. I I... It's one of those ones where I almost can't get my head around the complexity and the mental fortitude it takes to get through the change of plans, the weather, the partner that's sick, the endurance, as you said. I met an entrepreneur yesterday that climbed Everest, and he showed me pictures of the dead bodies along the way. I mean, to see that is just [00:07:12] S0: so harrowing. Yeah, it's tragic just kinda seeing when people take unnecessary risk. Because actually spending a lot of time within high altitude mountaineering culture and and communities, you do see oftentimes people taking unnecessary, very careless risks. It's actually quite shocking. Oftentimes tragedy is avoidable. It is preventable. And, you know, I think having that mindset of thinking like a mountaineer and planning ahead is what enables mountaineers to do it for a long period of time. [00:07:42] S1: Can I ask, you said about resistance to change? What change did you find the hardest in your life?