Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller: Turning Stranded Energy Into Intelligence
In a Nutshell
Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller built a $31B vertically integrated AI infrastructure company by turning stranded energy—primarily flared natural gas from oil fields—into computing power, initially through Bitcoin mining before pivoting to AI data centers after ChatGPT's launch. His leadership approach centers on "living in the infinite growth loop" by maintaining extreme urgency, delegating to 3-4 deeply trusted DRIs while retaining macro context across energy, data centers, manufacturing, cloud, and AI domains, and treating people problems as the hardest challenge in scaling. He emphasizes intellectual flexibility—holding strong opinions while changing them with new facts—and that startups fail by internal execution failures, not external competition, while viewing the AI infrastructure opportunity as large enough for multiple winners rather than a zero-sum game.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Crusoe operates a vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform spanning multiple business paths: power generation and electricity provision, building power plants, working with independent power producers and utilities, building data centers at scale from huge AI factories to small ones, and building and operating a managed cloud platform for AI services.
What made Lochmiller scalable as a leader was having vital areas of expertise where he could move and delve deeper with any individual, while trusting team members greatly to make the right decisions as the scope of work expanded. Everyone maintains a broad perspective on what Crusoe is doing at the macro level and how each individual leader contributes to the vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform being built.
Chase Lochmiller is CEO of Crusoe, which is building data centers that fuel the age of intelligence. He achieved a $31 billion valuation and discusses expanding the scope of an operationally intensive business.
Lochmiller's career path included becoming a university professor, hedge fund trader, mountaineer who climbed Mount Everest, energy entrepreneur, and now the best data center builder in the world.
"As a person, I have always been drawn to trying to solve difficult problems. I believe this is the common thread in my career: taking on big challenges and solving difficult problems excites and inspires me."
Becoming a CEO and expanding the role as CEO presents difficult problems. People misunderstand the CEO's journey by assuming it was a simple linear path when looking at someone deep in their experience.
When you're a founder and CEO, you have context about the history of getting to where the company is today. Things weren't always as intense as they are now. Initially, it was just Lochmiller and his co-founder for a fairly long time, then recruitment processes gradually continued.
When the company had 10 people, it seemed crazy, but it doesn't compare to the current scale. The journey of a founding CEO requires continuously improving performance and investing in yourself to scale up if aspiring to build a large-scale business.
Crusoe's core value is "Live in the infinite growth loop." None of us are a finished product. Everything is still under development. Every person is a project under development, and they try every day to be better than they were yesterday. Compound returns from sustained focus on improvement develop amazing results over a month, a year, or five years.
Lochmiller runs the "Kids' Table" and the "Adults' Table" for Sequoia, gatherings of founding executives to talk about problems and help each other. The groups include companies with between 20 and 2000 employees, all achieving tremendous success.
A CEO quote received: "My business is getting incredibly complicated beneath me. How the hell am I supposed to keep up with that?" Lochmiller would feel paralyzing and dizzying anxiety if dropped into running Crusoe without context, but feels satisfied with the current situation because he has been present at every step and surrounded himself with dynamic and competent leaders.
Lochmiller can delegate a lot of responsibilities and resources while trusting his team. The business is complex because it is vertically integrated and spans a huge range of different workflows from generating power, providing electricity, building power plants, working with independent power producers and utilities, to building large-scale data centers, very large and very small AI factories, and building and operating a managed cloud AI platform with managed AI services.
Crusoe has a very wide spectrum of different employees, including factories manufacturing vital electrical equipment for data centers and AI researchers working on the best and most effective ways to service and host AI models and manage cache memory.
Crusoe has vital areas of expertise in energy, data centers, manufacturing, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. Lochmiller can move around and delve into these areas with individuals while trusting them to make the right decisions as the scope of work expands.
Everyone has at least a broad perspective on what Crusoe is doing on a macro scale and how each component and each leader contributes to the integrated AI infrastructure platform being built.
The average number of people executives trust deeply enough to designate as Direct Responsible Party (DRI) for matters extending across the entire organization is about three to four people. Lochmiller's team would not describe him as someone who trusts others instinctively.
Lochmiller's approach is not washing hands of work and telling others to do whatever they want. He wants to understand what is done in each sector, ensure agreement on direction, understand how decisions affect other parts of the business, then hold teams accountable for implementing what was agreed upon.
As companies grow and organizations expand, executives find it difficult to get things done across different departments. The larger the institutions, the more difficult it becomes. Crusoe has four major institutions under management.
Crusoe suffers from the problem of finding people to work across departments like any other organization. Anytime work spans across an organization, bringing resources from one team to work with resources from another team gets complicated.
Crusoe has a program management function that helps, but weekly staff meetings attended by key executives and direct reports are crucial for discussing matters pertaining to the entire business. When weaknesses arise in how teams work together, they surface in those meetings.
There is inherent tension in doing things that require overlap between jobs or institutions. Being a vertically integrated company means having collaboration between layers in the business structure is a key feature for success.
Lochmiller discovered that as soon as he gets tired of hearing his own voice repeating something, they've just begun to absorb it. The layer of communication to get people on the same page and moving in the same direction can be painful because of the number of times messages must be repeated about what is being done, why it's being done, and who is doing what.
This communication challenge is one of the challenges of managing larger organizations and why there are always opportunities for startups, which can be more flexible and move faster than large companies. Crusoe tries to combat the inertia of large corporations to continue moving quickly and seize opportunities.
The nature of Crusoe's work requires moving quickly without slowing down. Most CEOs complain they slow down as companies grow, but Crusoe continues moving with incredible urgency.
Crusoe tries to get rid of any sense of entitlement, comfort, or belief that they have reached the top and now need to relax. They maintain urgency by eliminating these attitudes.
Elon Musk is probably the best in the world at maintaining tension, making people believe that if they succeed they will change the world with amazing financial returns and spectacular results, while holding them accountable under extreme pressure. Maintaining this level of tension is a superhuman ability.
Lochmiller is not as extreme as Elon in stirring up tension about "we will go bankrupt tomorrow" versus the opportunity to change the world, but striking the right balance between the two is critical to driving a large organization to act quickly with high urgency.
Crusoe is now the largest company Lochmiller has worked for, surpassing the 2,000 employee mark. He changed his reading approach when starting Crusoe, devouring every recommendation for good business books. He had great mentors and a coach who helped him grow into a leader of individuals.
Leading a large organization required work and effort. It took making mistakes, failing, learning while working, and accumulating painful experiences to draw upon. Lochmiller looks up to people like Elon Musk, considering him one of the greatest entrepreneurs, company builders, and visionaries humanity has known.
One early insight was that executives individually focused on building businesses feel anxious looking behind them at competitors. The best advice received was: "Most startups die by suicide, not by being killed by others." It's not other companies that ruin startups, but failure to execute, build the right culture, attract the right people, and focus on the right business opportunity.
Any real business opportunity worth pursuing is not usually monopolized by only one winner. If it's a good business opportunity, there is often room for several winners. Someone else pursuing it should be considered a compliment and affirmation of the value of that opportunity.
Lochmiller is not really suspicious of competition because Crusoe is an infrastructure company, not a category where one side wins everything. Multiple great companies will be built in this space, and there are far more ways to work together than against each other even with groups described as rivals.
The greatest opportunity is to build the infrastructure layer of intelligence, which will not be an opportunity where one side wins everything.
Lochmiller compares the computing infrastructure layer of artificial intelligence and superintelligence to the oil and gas industry value chain, which is divided into upstream (drilling wells), transport and distribution, and downstream (processing raw outputs into usable materials).
Different profit margins fluctuate up and down across the oil and gas value chain depending on oil prices, consumer demand, and corporate demand.
Crusoe is trying to build an AI giant similar to Exxon and Chevron in the oil and gas industry, possessing integrated risk management through vertical integration.
Exxon is known for not hedging exposure to oil price volatility because when prices fall, profit margins of the exploration and production sector are squeezed, but margins of the refining sector widen due to lower raw material costs.
Crusoe is willing to partner with companies they may compete with in other cases, believing there are many ways they can help each other rather than work against each other.
Lochmiller started an ocean fund called Propeller through Sequoia. A presentation was heard about mining rare earth minerals from the ocean using an integrated process model similar to Exxon's vertically integrated version.
Lochmiller has had a long journey with energy, starting with the idea of wasted energy utilization and continuing that approach. The Abilene facility relies heavily on natural gas.
Crusoe is focusing heavily on enabling megawatts for artificial intelligence, requiring all kinds of energy resources and various use cases. Sometimes the source is natural gas. Focus is on finding and stimulating innovative and new energy solutions.
Partnerships include Blue Energy experimenting with new technologies for producing nuclear energy, and Alo for creating the first AI factory using small nuclear reactors (SMRs) at the Idaho National Laboratory. Projects rely on behind-the-meter wind power, behind-the-meter gas, behind-the-meter solar power, and batteries.
Iceland offers abundant low-cost geothermal energy, very cheap hydroelectric power, low population density, and efficient inexpensive cooling. Norway has low-cost hydroelectric power that is not fully exploited. Crusoe adopts an "energy first" approach when building computing infrastructure.
Crusoe does not believe in a single magic solution. Computing infrastructure will be ubiquitous, serving the intelligence infrastructure layer driving global economic development, requiring different energy solutions in different situations.
Innovations in new battery technology are exciting, from Redwood Materials reusing electric vehicle and lithium-ion batteries to long-term storage solutions like FormEnergy and Intura providing cost-effective batteries lasting for 100 hours.
Demand for energy for artificial intelligence is extremely high and will accelerate human progress while increasing opportunities to obtain energy.
Crusoe started in the Bitcoin mining industry using wasted energy, channeling that energy into work as a very good business. From the beginning, they were anticipating the future need for AI infrastructure.
Many people thought selling the bulk of the Bitcoin mining business was a radical shift, but from inside, investors and long-time employees knew this was the plan from the beginning - an approach that prioritizes energy in computing.
Lochmiller was conducting research in artificial intelligence as a quantitative portfolio manager, then at Stanford Graduate School working in artificial intelligence doing work in computer vision and natural language processing. He was very enthusiastic about artificial intelligence from its earliest days.
Tim Urban's "Wait But Why" blog articles on the path to superintelligence influenced Lochmiller significantly. The thesis was that multi-layered neural networks are very good nonlinear modeling mechanisms, and the more data and computing power they had, the better they became at modeling whatever they tried to model.
Lochmiller felt artificial intelligence was a comprehensive science that would improve everything, not just one thing. Professor Andrew Ng at Stanford famously said artificial intelligence is like electricity - useful for everything, not just one application.
Lochmiller was absolutely convinced from the very beginning that if data and computing capabilities were the obstacles, then computing would eventually become an energy problem. This was already seen unfolding with Bitcoin mining.
The basic idea of the business was to find wasted, untapped energy and bring a market to that
The basic idea of the business was to find wasted, untapped energy and bring a market to that energy using computing. Instead of trying to move that wasted energy to a market where it could be bought and sold, the approach was to bring the market to the energy itself. This led to the primary source of wasted energy: natural gas that was being burned in oil fields, where oil companies were drilling for oil and producing natural gas as a by-product. In the absence of a pipeline, they simply burned it. This constituted a huge environmental burden and was a waste product that oil companies were paying money to dispose of. This practice still happens on a large scale today.
The solution was to bring in small generators and small data centers, using that gas on-site to power the computing infrastructure. The first way to profit from it was through Bitcoin mining, which was the easiest way to turn energy into money. A kind of wonderful "balance wheel" effect was created with Bitcoin activity.
There was criticism in the early days when the statement was made: "I'm trying to build a cloud platform for artificial intelligence." People were asking "What are you talking about?" "Why are you spending any resources on that?" "You have this amazing thing." "You're making all this money from Bitcoin." "What the hell are you talking about?" "Why are you focusing on anything else?" Many things were tried, failed, and messed up in terms of building the first AI teams. The goal was to figure out what the product would look like and who would be served.
Contacts were made with research friends at universities, asking: "Do you have a need to use these graphics processing units that I power from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota?" There were many different attempts to make that work a success. The truly magical moment was the launch of "ChatGPT." November 30, 2022 was believed to be the moment that changed everything and led to the emergence of all these startups that were demanding the same kind of computing infrastructure and solutions being built in terms of storage, processing, networks, and so on.
Bitcoin and artificial intelligence go very well together because AI data centers do not consume energy in the same way that Bitcoin mining does. Bitcoin mining allows a fixed amount of energy to be given with instructions to "Stay at this energy level and just consume it." Its consumption will be very consistent and stable, and can be increased or decreased based on demand response and available energy.
Artificial intelligence has greater variability in terms of overall energy consumption, which is evident when running large workloads for inference and training, in addition to seasonal variations in cooling. Higher Power Use Efficiency (PUE) tends to occur during the day when air conditioning and chillers must be run intensively because it is hotter, compared to night when more natural cooling is available. Depending on the workloads being operated, things can go up and down.
The decision was made to sell what was considered a good business. The question was why not simply keep it. A great partner was found who would find a good home in the business that had been built, and that was NYDIG. Ross Stevens has become a close friend, and there is great respect for Tehas Shah, the CEO there, and their entire team. They were felt to be wonderful people who would be truly trustworthy with this job. They had extensive experience in the field of natural gas, with Stone Ridge having built one of the largest natural gas companies in the United States. This intersection of people who know the origins of natural gas and have managed it extensively, and who are deeply involved in the Bitcoin system, made them feel like excellent partners for this business.
What prompted the decision to give up that activity was simply the need to focus. A lot was being done at Crusoe with increasing expansion, and there was a need to balance allocating capital, resources and attention to the Bitcoin business or to the AI infrastructure business. Feedback was also received from investors that this made the story very complicated from the investor's perspective, as they said: "I love what you are doing in the field of artificial intelligence, but my company is prohibited from making any investments related to cryptocurrencies." There were challenges in making the business focused and transforming it into a leader in its category in vertically integrated AI infrastructure, without being distracted by anything related to Bitcoin.
Personal support and investment in Bitcoin remains, with the belief that it is important for the world to have as an open, authentically digital, decentralized, and non-state-controlled monetary system. But the right decision for Crusoe was to focus entirely on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
A coach was had and the relationship remains very close. Work together is not as frequent as before, but Shane Metcalfe has been an exceptional coach. A lot was learned from him. Speaking in front of an audience was not something natural. It was something that had to be worked very hard to master because it was not being practiced regularly. Lectures had been given at universities, but it was not something done regularly, especially since the field of "Quantum" is a very technical field where work is done with very intelligent people in a very secretive way. There was not going out into the world to give performances, so very hard work had to be done to be prepared for what was going to be said and how it was going to be said.
The belief is that if enough practice occurs, experience will be gained and at some point preparation will not be needed so much. Most things at this stage are somewhat improvised because there are definitely things that require a tremendous amount of preparation. Often improvisation works better because that is the way things are thought about. A good set of skills has been developed that enable explaining what is on the mind very clearly to whomever is being spoken to.
One investor, "Felicitas," had an amazing thing they were offering to companies that had not been seen elsewhere. They have a budget for what is essentially a personal investment designed for something similar to self-development. It is about things like executive training, outside meetings, and ways to elevate oneself as a leader, because they say: "Look, we're making this big investment in the founder or CEO, and we're betting on your ability to improve, that you're not a fixed version of yourself, but will become a better version over time as the business grows." This is considered a very thoughtful approach to investing, especially in venture capital where investments are centered around people and the founder's ability to scale.
In the early days, Shane always had the answer to the problem being strained to think about. He was like a coach and even more like a psychotherapist. The feeling about CEOs is that they are similar to a psychotherapist. A very special relationship was had and still has based on a great deal of trust, and it is felt that something should be worked on and built with the other person. Even if progress does not feel like it is being made in a particular session, groundwork is being laid and the way paved for the moment when that really big problem emerges. This person knows you deeply, knows your weaknesses, knows how you might react in certain situations, and knows how to guide you to correct your course so that any circumstance can be faced.
A lot of the problems in building companies are people problems. The ability to deal effectively with the human aspect is the biggest part of the challenges. Intelligent, ambitious, and opinionated people are being dealt with. Making everyone work and move towards the same goal, or even if they disagree, to stick to the path that has been chosen, is always the hardest part.
As a CEO, sometimes the biggest challenge is knowing when to continue to believe in someone and when to decide that moving on is needed and someone different is needed in that role. The challenge also lies in how to get two brilliant people to work together on something they fundamentally disagree on. Dealing with people is the hardest thing, but it is also the greatest power possessed if managed well.
People have always said: "You should hire slowly and fire quickly." The exact opposite was done, especially regarding the dismissal of employees. It appears that some people's employment was terminated too slowly. There is always an innate tendency to delay the process of terminating employees. It is simply an inherent bias. So, even if quick to react, most CEOs, when they fire someone, have thought it through clearly for a long time. It is almost as if the time thinking about it started was the right time to separate them, but it is difficult.
The signal being looked for is not just a complaint from other team members that this person's performance is subpar. That certainly represents a single data point. The job as executives is to read this mosaic of information. There are all these little snippets, and they often come from very different parts of the organization, from someone who is very technical or from someone who cares about human relations. All these different things come together, and all this information must be put together to make a decisive decision about what is best for the company.
Reference was made to First Round Capital's blog called "The Physics Laws for Startups." The crux of the matter lies in the fact that individuals grow linearly, while companies grow exponentially. An amazing company is owned that is growing exponentially. This is how the dynamic arises where even if the team is pushed to continue to grow and invest in themselves, if the company grows in the way the ambitious leader aspires to, often the person who was suitable for a particular role at one time may not be able to develop and grow to be the right person for the same role two years later when the company is ten times larger. This is a difficult reality for a leader, because work happens in the trenches with these people, working late into the night and early morning. These people are seen giving their all for the mission. When those moments come when the company exceeds a person's capabilities, it is really difficult because there is great care about these people on a personal level, even if it is known that it would be best for the company to find a new person for a particular role.
Every case is unique and different, and ultimately it is up to making the right decision in the best interest of the business. Recently two interviews were conducted, one with Ali Goudsi from DataBracks, who kept almost the same management team for 10 years, with the exception of changing only one person. Dave Eticheria, a friend who will be a guest on the show, on average changes two people a year on the same team for various reasons. They work in similar fields and both are very good, yet they are completely different. In fact, the current operations and finance directors worked alongside Dave at MongoDB for about a decade, so he was not one of the people who were let go.
By the word "dispensing," some people leave. There is not one right answer, and different things have been seen to work. What has been found most effective is that if someone is really struggling, the team recognizes it, and consideration is given that the team is ultimately there to win. Growing up playing competitive sports, if on a team, teammates are always liked. There was a strong and special bond that extended from the dressing room to the pitch, and if there was a teammate who was struggling or was the weak link and caused the team to fall behind, it was known that the right thing to do was to replace him with someone else.
One of the great things about the work, thinking of the culture built at HubSpot where people fit in, but in this organization there are AI researchers and welders. The question is how to create a culture that brings them all together. Are they different cultures? How are employees compensated across all these disciplines? How does all this work? There has always been a feeling of having a very diverse culture just by looking at the people who come to help build this. One of the core values is to harness collective genius. No single person possesses all the necessary expertise to deliver the complete solution being tried to achieve. Everyone can learn from each other, and working together towards a coherent solution will lead to an enhanced outcome that none could have achieved alone. Crucial innovations have come from people like electricians working on connections, and researchers are taking advantage of these specific use cases. How the entire building management system is thought about, and how the operating system from electron to code is thought about, is what really sets the company apart.
A magazine article was read about venture capitalists and people in this field when they give presentations at conferences, where they face attacks or protests. Standing in a way at the heart of this wave, data centers have become an election issue. The point of view has been heard on why it is beneficial to societies and to humanity as a whole. The question is whether personally any of this harsh criticism is faced, and how it is dealt with on a personal level. Are there security guards? How complicated does the situation seem?
When looking at colleagues at "Cruise," they are all people who want to do good for the world. Not a single person has been met at Cruise who does not want to do good for the world. There is firm belief that there is a right way to make this infrastructure a tangible reality that benefits everyone, whether in terms of energy, water use, tax revenues, support for schools and the community, or even through its end applications and how it contributes to driving human progress through the greatest technological wave ever seen. The explanation has been heard and it makes very logical sense. The wish is that the rest of the AI leaders would explain it as eloquently.
The basic approach is to always try to adopt first principles in dealing with things. If strongly convinced of something based on proven facts, there is no problem disagreeing with others. An attempt can be made to refute the reasons why the other party's point of view is wrong and explain why things are being tried to be done the right way. The "cruise" culture is felt to be rooted in a sincere desire to do things the right way. Everyone here strives to provide a useful service to the world.
This has become a political issue, especially with regard to artificial intelligence data centers. There is a lot of misinformation on this subject, and it has always been said that the biggest problem facing the data center sector is a marketing problem. The truth has not been conveyed to the people. As far as concerned, the truth is on our side. When the truth is explained, being in these rooms where local communities are gone to, meeting with the county judge, and meeting with people in these communities where the infrastructure is being built, when sitting down and really explaining to them what is going on, the perspective is not "I'm smarter than you and you have to listen to me." Rather, it says this is what is happening, and this is how the best is being tried to make it good for you, good for us, and good for the world. When those conversations take place, people are receptive to them. Regardless of politics or political affiliations, people accept honesty and facts. This is really the approach to this matter.
There is worry from a security point of view. The security footprint has had to be increased, given that there are crazy people out there who want to make a big deal out of it. Some of these rooms entered contain hysterical people. What it is like when entering the first room and people are yelling is that there is no training for that. Again, there is sincere belief that appealing to their humanity and understanding why someone says what they say is important. Listening to the facts is important. Strong opinions are often had, but they can always be changed in light of new information and facts. It is important to have that intellectual flexibility to say: "I was absolutely convinced that we were doing things the right way." But after learning this new thing, perhaps things should be done differently and can be done better. This is a growth mindset that is had here as a company, and it has been tried to be employed as a leader. There is liking to have the ability to listen to these criticisms and to try to filter out what is just baseless, insane hysteria and what is constructive criticism that can be used to be better stewards of these communities.
Having a thick skin, the ability to withstand criticism, is absolutely a very important quality for a CEO. The job is to be a frequent recipient of bad news and to be able to think clearly and make decisions in light of that bad news. The other important thing for a leader, and frankly something always struggled with, is that as the company grows and expands, distance increases from the individuals on the front lines of the company. An attempt is made to close that gap and make sure of always being available so that people can speak the truth to authority. The position wanted is where people can voice their concerns and be heard, and in light of presenting the truth within the context of everything that is happening, the course of the business can actually be adjusted.
Ways are had to encourage this, to make sure that people will confront with their opinions. Because hiring the two-thousandth employee puts in a very high position. Meanwhile, employee number twentieth criticizes and holds accountable every day. Frankly it is like digging for the truth, constantly and urgently seeking it. When people see examples of accepting criticism and comments, responding to them, and changing the mind, it gives them the confidence to say: "Oh, actually I should express my concerns." People often assume that as a leader, as a CEO, only good news is wanted. In general, good news is great and liked to be heard, but bad news is cared about much more than good news. An attempt is always made to look for what is going wrong. What are the things not good at? And how can these things be fixed? What are the problems? How can they be solved? This is believed to be a crucial trait for a CEO: the willingness to seek out problems, confront them bravely, and then work to solve them.
This question is directed at the interviewer, and others are imagined to be interested as well. A person who climbed Mount Everest has never been met, and that is really admired. What it looks like, what training looks like, and how it feels when reaching the top of that mountain is asked about. In some ways, company culture is a reflection of the culture of the CEO or founder. That is exactly what happened at the "Cruzzo" company. The core value in the company is "thinking like a mountaineer," which reflects cultural resilience, preparedness, planning, and a willingness to endure the journey. Much of the value and practice written about describes the nature of climbing Mount Everest.
A full internal presentation is had about trips to Everest because an attempt was made to climb the mountain in 2014, and a major avalanche killed 15 Sherpa guides in the Khumbu region. A conscious decision was made, and when returning, the wife said: "Thank God, this chapter is over and you won't have to do it again." The response was: "It haunts me, I can't think about anything else, and I have to go back." She said: "You're crazy." But she added: "If you're going to do that, please finish it before we have children." When thought about, it was very similar to thinking about Mount Everest, where the climb was from the south side, the Nepal side, through the Khumbu Valley. Starting from base camp, then heading up to the first camp, then the second, third and fourth camps, and then making the final attempt to reach the top.
The two most dangerous areas on the mountain are roughly from Camp 4 to the summit, which is often referred to as the death zone. This is where location is at an altitude of over 8000 meters. Therefore, it is very obvious why this is dangerous. At a very high altitude where humans should not actually live. But the other, more dangerous area is the one located between Base Camp and Camp 1, which is called Kombo Glacier Falls. This was the area where the disaster occurred when there in 2014. The thing about Kombo Glacier Falls is that it is a glacier that falls. It is like a wonderful and amazing ice playground. But there are many things that involve random risks. These are things that are completely out of control, like an iceberg falling or an avalanche happening, and suddenly life is over. It was that kind of risk that made thinking occur; there are ways that can be consciously trained and prepared for high altitudes, and risks can be managed there more effectively, and full awareness is had of the risks being taken. The danger felt most uncomfortable with was this random danger.
A traditional Everest expedition involves moving from Base Camp to Camp 1, where acclimatization to the mountain actually occurs. Going from the main camp to the first camp, then returning to the main camp. From the main camp to the first camp, then the second, then back to the main camp. Going up to the third camp, then returning to the main camp. Eight trips end up being made through the Kombo Glacier Falls. That is, four round-trip flights in a typical trade mission. To reduce those risks, a different approach to climbing Everest was devised with the climbing partner, ending up climbing a group of neighboring mountains and spending a lot of time on their peaks until acclimatized without being exposed to these random hazards at
The team only conducted one major acclimatization trip to Mount Everest before returning to base camp, resulting in crossing the Kombo Glacier only four times instead of eight. The conscious risk-taking and intensive planning involved extensive training, long-distance running, and high-altitude training flights. The expedition's spectacular success in reaching the summit in 2018 resulted from deliberate risk management combined with intensive preparation.
At approximately 8600 meters elevation at an area called "the balcony," the summit at 8,848 meters appeared impossibly far away in the pitch black darkness. The team had departed Camp Four at eleven o'clock at night, and it remained dark upon reaching the balcony. Physical conditions included not having eaten much in the past 48 hours, dehydration, feeling unwell, and leg cramps.
The climbing partner provided crucial inspiration to continue despite the physical challenges. The partner felt fine except for the mentioned physical difficulties and did not perceive the situation as putting themselves in danger. The sunrise at great height provided inspiration from the surroundings, serving as a morale booster that delivered the adrenaline needed to push through the final 250 meters.
Upon reaching the summit, the feeling was one of sheer awe before the universe, awe at being on top, and experiencing the whole world visible around. The experience created a feeling of being small and inspired by the world and the wonder of existence. The day was very sunny, and the team spent about an hour at the top taking many pictures while enjoying the heroic moment of achievement.
Chase Lochmiller demonstrates a personality that loves tough challenges, a quality identified as essential when hiring or funding executives. His role as CEO has evolved significantly over eight years since the Everest trip, during which he has become a learning machine, reading extensively about leadership and hiring a private trainer. The coaching relationship proved highly beneficial, providing not just advice but also context, listening to problems, and empathy similar to therapeutic support.
Public speaking skills were deliberately developed despite not being a natural disposition. The importance of eloquence and fluency when addressing companies or investors cannot be understated. Chase worked systematically on these skills, resulting in smooth and tactful communication that serves him well in executive contexts.
The philosophy that "you're more likely to die by suicide than you are to be murdered" applies to business competition, emphasizing that internal failures pose greater risks than external competitors. Chase demonstrates openness to "cooperative competition," a stance that contrasts with many founders who resist such approaches. The successful cooperative competition between HubSpot and Salesforce over many years serves as a model for this philosophy. Building relationships with competitors through direct connection and informal meetings like coffee provides strategic advantages, as future scenarios may bring unexpected alignments.
As organizations grow larger, a tendency emerges where everyone wants to deliver only good news to executives. However, effective leadership requires the opposite - executives should actively want to hear bad news and train their organizations to deliver it. This involves encouraging people to disagree and share negative information, particularly in relatively large work environments. This quality represents a critical distinction for successful CEOs.
A key CEO quality involves maintaining strong opinions while remaining willing to change positions when facts change. Stubbornness represents a particularly difficult trait for CEOs to possess because it creates followership challenges. The ability to adapt viewpoints based on new evidence while maintaining decisiveness enables effective leadership across changing circumstances.
Keep Sequoia Capital in your library
Save the videos and channels worth coming back to, and find them again in one place.
