Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller: Turning Stranded Energy Into Intelligence
The CEO rulebook is getting rewritten. Brian Halligan, Sequoia partner and co-founder and longtime CEO of HubSpot, sits down with some of the CEOs who are defining the new one—from hypergrowth AI-native startups to 150-year-old behemoths. Whether you’re an early-stage founder or a scale-up CEO, Brian will be digging for advice you can use on the long strange trip of your own CEO journey.
Show Notes
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Chase Lochmiller runs one of the most operationally complex companies in AI: Crusoe builds power plants, manufactures electrical equipment, operates gigawatt-scale data centers, and runs a managed AI cloud on top, all under one roof. He just closed a round at a $31 billion valuation, and he got there by selling off the Bitcoin mining business that was paying the bills.
Chase explains why Crusoe is modeled on Exxon, not a cloud provider, and why he partners with companies that look like competitors. He makes the case that a company that outgrows the person who got it there is the rule, not the exception, and that CEOs almost always fire too slowly. He also talks candidly about hiring a coach, working hard to become a polished speaker when it didn’t come naturally, and why the data center industry’s biggest problem is a marketing problem.
I meet with a group of Sequoia founder CEOs between 20 and 2,000 employees, and one of them told me his business is becoming dizzyingly complex beneath him. Chase has the clearest answer I’ve heard for how to hold that in your head.
And yes, we talk about summiting Everest.
– Introduction
– The boiling frog: how a founder holds a 2,000-person company in his head
– DRIs, the weekly staff meeting, and saying it until you're sick of it
– Urgency at scale: Elon's "change the world or die tomorrow" tension
– Startups die of suicide, not homicide
– Energy first: flared gas, Iceland hydro, and nuclear
– Bitcoin to AI was the plan all along
– Polish is learned: coaches, public speaking, and Felicis's self-improvement budget
– Firing too slowly, and when the company outgrows the person
– Welders and AI researchers, the data center backlash, and mining for bad news
– Everest: designing around the Khumbu Icefall's stochastic risk
– Brian's takeaways
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