The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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?
00:07:48 · Chase Lochmiller
[00:07:48] S0: I think maybe one of the most difficult moments of change for me was in my life, I always had sort of the next thing planned before I left the previous thing. So what I mean by that is when I left high school, right, I knew exactly where I was going to college before, you know, the end of high school. When I left college, I knew exactly where I was going to work and, you know, what I was gonna do. And when I left my first job, I knew I was, you know, gonna work and going to grad school, and I had a job lined up even after that. When I left to go climb Mount Everest in 2018, I did not have a plan after that. You know, I had been... Had a reasonable amount of financial success in my life to that point, but I didn't have the thing planned. And actually having that void, that sort of emptiness, really was both challenging and empowering for me because it felt like I could do anything. It was sort of like a blank slate. I had thoughts of, like, maybe I'm just gonna invest my own money and just kinda, like, enjoy the rest of my life and not do much. But I could also start a company. And if I were gonna start a company, what what are the most most challenging things that I could, you think about tackling that are interesting and that I would be excited about pursuing on a daily basis? And that was kind of like the emergence of Crusoe sort of came through that chapter of difficulty and challenge of just nothingness. Right? Just having an empty empty slate. My job is to find signals that will determine a potentially great entrepreneur. And one the things that I find now is actually often richer entrepreneurs are better entrepreneurs because they're not worried about downside protection, and
00:09:21 · Harry Stebbings
[00:09:21] S1: they just see what is possible. How do you think starting Crusoe with a little bit of money and success already changed how you think about building it?
00:09:29 · Chase Lochmiller
[00:09:29] S0: Oh, I think it absolutely changed the way I think about building it. There's a bunch of psychological aspects to it. I mean, you could look at like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, and just like it is empowering to know that like if I take risk and this all goes to zero, I'm still gonna be fine. I'm gonna be able to cover my rent and, you know, feed my family and cover these base needs that I may have in my life. When I was in university, I mean, I was convinced I was gonna become a theoretical physicist and likely a professor, and I was spending time doing research in basic science. Right? So I was I was doing research in physics both at MIT and then at Los Alamos National Lab. So early on in that journey, was, like, pretty committed to living this monastic life of, like, not really earning a bunch of money, but just having this life of discovery where I get to go discover the mysteries of the universe, and that that would be my my my life's work and pursuit. At some point, I realized it's a very slow moving industry, this industry of discovery. You know, it may be changing today because of AI, but at least at that point in my life, it was a very slow moving industry, I felt like I wanted to do something very fast paced. And I felt like I had sort of lost my life's purpose. Like, I was like, okay. I don't I don't feel like I have a purpose anymore. 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. You know, I was looking around for different ways to to make money, and this headhunter found me and and recruited me in... Into this field of quantitative finance. And it was like, Hey, you're really good at solving math problems. If you come work in this industry, they just pay you a lot of money to, you know, solve math problems. I said, This sounds great. Sign me up. But I think once that need was met of like, Okay, I have enough money. Okay, what next? And I think to your original question of like, you know, starting from this position of strength of, you know, being an entrepreneur and actually having had some financial success, it's empowering to take bigger swings, empowering to take bigger risks, which can ultimately lead to bigger outcomes.