Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:13:37 · Chase Lochmiller
[00:13:37] S0: It's kind of funny. Crusoe is now the largest company I've ever worked for. And, you know, we we we recently surpassed, 2,000 employees. And I used to read a ton of books across fiction, nonfiction, kind of whatever I was interested in, sort of a wide ranging things from science fiction and technical books to novels and whatever the latest and greatest, you know, economist book was. But, 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, 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 it it it definitely took work. It took effort to, you know, get to where I'm at in terms of, like, what is it... What does it take to be a good manager? And it took making mistakes and failing and learning on the job and just, like, going, you know, on my own personal journey and my own personal path to to to, like, embed a lot of scar tissue that I could then, you know, leverage in the future. 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 the greatest entrepreneurs and greatest business builders and, you know, greatest visionaries that, you know, humanity's ever, ever had. Mhmm.
00:15:13 · Brian Halligan
[00:15:13] S1: If you don't mind, like, what were some of those mistakes? What's some of that scar tissue that all the other CEOs out there are probably gonna make the same mistake?
00:15:21 · Chase Lochmiller
[00:15:21] S0: 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 trying to do the same thing that I'm doing. Or, I have this new competitor that just raised this big round. Or you know, you're always kinda, like, looking over your shoulder. There's, like, a a bit of a paranoia. And, like, one of the great pieces of advice that I 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 it's it's you fundamentally not executing on on the thing 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, you know, killed by the competition.
00:16:50 · Brian Halligan
[00:16:50] S1: My paranoia would go up and down sine wave over time. I think if I were in your shoes, I'd be pretty paranoid right now. Are you... Where are you on your paranoia sine wave?
00:17:02 · Chase Lochmiller
[00:17:02] S0: 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 going 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 to work against each other. I think, you know, the the the greatest opportunity of our lifetime is building the infrastructure layer of intelligence. And it's, again, it's not going 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 of super intelligence is 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, you know, it's typically broken down into three components. You have upstream business, where people are actually drilling holes in the ground and and and pumping wells of oil and gas. You have the midstream business, which is where you're taking those, those raw commodities and and transporting them from the wellhead to 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, then you're ultimately selling that into 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. And for us, I view it as we're trying to build an AI supermajor in the same way that Exxon and Chevron are supermajors in the oil and gas industry. And with with that, you sort of have this embedded risk risk management where, you know, 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.
00:19:09 · Chase Lochmiller, Brian Halligan
But their downstream business at the refinery, those margins actually expand because the raw input costs costs actually go down. And, you know, they they 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 is 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. [00:19:47] S1: Can I say something weird to you? [00:19:49] S0: Yeah, please.