Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:01:39 · Chase Lochmiller, Brian Halligan
[00:01:39] S0: Brian, thanks for having me. [00:01:40] S1: 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? [00:02:13] S0: As a person, I've always been attracted to trying to solve hard problems. That's 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. [00:02:30] S1: 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 do people have wrong about the CEO journey?
00:02:47 · Chase Lochmiller
[00:02:47] S0: It can sometimes be misleading to just take a snapshot of someone deep into it and just assume it's some linear path on how you actually get there. I was actually having this discussion with another CEO. When you're a founder CEO, you sort of have this benefit of sort of, you know, the 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 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 quite a while. And then we had our first hire and we had our first incremental hires. And when we were 10 people, it felt crazy, but it's nothing compared to what it is today. And the journey of a founder CEO is like, have to continually be upping your game. You have to be continually investing in yourself to be able to scale if you want to have a scaled business. And 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. 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, you know, the course of a month, a year, five years, the results can be astounding.
00:04:44 · Brian Halligan
[00:04:44] S1: Okay, my I had an inter actually, I had quite an interesting day today. I run something called the kids' table and the adults' table for Sequoia, and it's basically getting a bunch of CEOs together, all founder CEOs, to kinda talk about their problems and try to help each other with the journey. And we've got a bunch of them between twenty and two thousand employees. All of them are ripping, like, really ripping. And I got a quote from one of the CEOs today. My biz is becoming dizzyingly complex beneath me. How the hell do I keep up? Did you do you have that feeling today, or did you have the feeling? I had that I had that feeling.
00:05:23 · Chase Lochmiller
[00:05:23] S0: If someone were to take me off the streets and parachute me in and drop me in and say, hey, go run this company, Crusoe, I would absolutely 100% have that 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 energy generation and bringing 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, 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 KBCash. And, you know, there's there's a whole bunch of different 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 that broader, vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform that we're building here at Crusoe.
00:07:34 · Brian Halligan, Chase Lochmiller
[00:07:34] S1: Trust is an interesting where 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 in 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? [00:07:59] S0: I don't think my team would describe me as like a just naturally very trusting person. Look, it's not that I'm like, you know, hands off, go for it, you know, go do whatever you want. That's not really my approach to management. It's really, I want to understand what we're doing in this vertical. 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. [00:08:33] S1: Okay. On the DRI topic, it seems to me as CEOs grow, like, they've got their orgs, those orgs get bigger. 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're... 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?
00:09:03 · Chase Lochmiller, Brian Halligan
[00:09:03] S0: You know, we 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 it just is complicated. You know, we we we do have a program management function, which helps. But, who's ultimately accountable for delivery of a lot of these things? 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 and my direct reports in the meeting, and we cover things across the whole business. And when there are pain points of how teams are working together, they surface in those meetings. And we try to address them. But 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. Just being a vertically integrated business, having 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. [00:10:11] S1: And then what have you learned about that? You must have skinned your knees on it. Any ahas other than the staff meeting?