Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller：从闲置能源到 AI 基础设施的规模化之路

简要描述Brief Description

Crusoe 首席执行官 Chase Lochmiller：将闲置能源转化为智能算力Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller: Turning Stranded Energy Into Intelligence

目录Table of Contents

• 引言
  Introduction
• 温水煮青蛙：一位创始人如何将一家拥有 2,000 名员工的公司装在脑子里
  The boiling frog: how a founder holds a 2,000-person company in his head
• DRI、每周员工会议，以及把这句话说到自己都烦为止
  DRIs, the weekly staff meeting, and saying it until you're sick of it
• 规模化紧迫感：埃隆“改变世界，否则明天就死”的张力
  Urgency at scale: Elon's "change the world or die tomorrow" tension
• 初创公司死于自杀，而非他杀
  Startups die of suicide, not homicide
• 能源优先：火炬气、冰岛水电与核能
  Energy first: flared gas, Iceland hydro, and nuclear
• 从比特币转向 AI，一直都是原定计划。
  Bitcoin to AI was the plan all along
• 得体是可以后天习得的：教练、公开演讲与 Felicis 的自我提升预算
  Polish is learned: coaches, public speaking, and Felicis's self-improvement budget
• 开火过慢，以及公司规模超出个人能力所及时
  Firing too slowly, and when the company outgrows the person
• 焊工与人工智能研究人员、数据中心引发的反弹，以及搜寻负面消息
  Welders and AI researchers, the data center backlash, and mining for bad news
• 珠穆朗玛峰：针对昆布冰瀑的随机风险进行设计
  Everest: designing around the Khumbu Icefall's stochastic risk
• Brian的要点
  Brian's takeaways

引言Introduction

我们的业务很复杂，因为我们采用垂直整合模式，涵盖了范围广泛的各类工作。从能源生产、让电力并网、建设发电厂，到与独立发电商和公用事业公司合作；从建设数据中心、规模化运营超大型和微型 AI 工厂，到构建并运营托管式 AI 云平台，提供托管式 AI 服务。作为领导者，我之所以能够高效扩展，得益于我们在一些关键领域拥有深厚的专业知识。我可以在这些领域之间灵活切换，也可以与任何一位成员深入探讨具体问题，同时我非常信任他们能够在我们逐步扩大规模的过程中做出正确决策。大家也都对我们在宏观层面所做的事情有广泛的认识，并了解每位领导者如何为我们在 Crusoe 打造的垂直整合 AI 基础设施平台贡献力量。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 and then building and operating a managed AI cloud platform with managed AI services. What's made me very scalable as a leader is that we have these critical areas of domain expertise where 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 a broad perspective of you know what we're doing at the macro scale and how each individual leader contributes to that vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform that we're building here at Crusoe.

主持人：好了，各位。今天我们请到了 Chase Lockach Miller。Russo 正在建设众多为智能时代提供动力的数据中心。他是一位非常专业的 CEO，他会详细讲述公司如何从零起步，发展到刚刚敲定的 310 亿美元估值。他还会深入探讨如何扩大一个运营密集型企业的规模。我想你们会喜欢这期节目。Chase，欢迎来到这段漫长而奇妙的旅程。Host: Okay, everybody. Today we have on Chase Lockach Miller. Russo is building so many of the data centers that power the age of intelligence. He's a very professional CEO and he talks all about the road from zero beginnings to a $31 billion valuation that he just closed. He gets into the nuts and bolts of scaling a very operationally intensive business. I think you're going to like it. Chase, welcome to the long strange trip.

嘉宾：布莱恩，谢谢你邀请我。Guest: Brian, thanks for having me.

主持人：我们把这称为漫长而奇妙的旅程，因为我作为 CEO 的经历就是一段漫长而奇妙的旅程。回顾你的职业生涯，你也走过了一段漫长的旅程，或许谈不上奇奇怪怪，但确实很有意思。你原本一路朝着成为教授的方向发展，后来成了对冲基金交易员，又成了登山家，攀登过珠穆朗玛峰，等等。至少在我最初认识你时，你算是个能源领域的创业者，而现在你已经是全球最出色的数据中心建设者。贯穿这一切的主线是什么？蔡斯。Host: 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.

温水煮青蛙：一位创始人如何在脑海中掌控一家拥有 2,000 名员工的公司The boiling frog: how a founder holds a 2,000-person company in his head

作为一个人，我一直都，呃，被尝试解决难题这件事所吸引。我想，这始终是我职业生涯的主线。迎接重大挑战，解决那些让我感到兴奋和鼓舞的难题。As a person, I've always been uh attracted to trying to solve hard problems. That's I think that's been the throughline of my career. Take on big challenges, solve hard problems that are exciting and inspiring to me.

嘉宾：一个难题是成为 CEO，而作为 CEO 带领公司发展壮大本身也是个难题。你知道，突然之间你成了 CEO，还得创办这家公司，有什么事情让你感到意外？人们对 CEO 的成长历程有哪些误解？Guest: 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?

主持人：有时候，只是截取某个人深入其中时的一个状态，就以为他们是沿着一条线性路径走到这一步的，这可能会让人产生误解。我之前还和另一位 CEO 聊过这个。你知道，作为创始人兼 CEO，你多少会受益于一种“温水煮青蛙”效应。你知道，现在 Crusoe 的情况真的很疯狂，发生的事情实在太多了，一切都在飞速推进，发展的规模也大得惊人。嗯，你知道，大家刚加入 Crusoe、开始在这里工作时，会觉得节奏非常紧张，公司里各个方面都有很多事情在发生。Host: It can sometimes be misleading to just take a snapshot of someone like deep into it and just assume it's some linear path on on on how you actually get there. I was actually having this discussion with another CEO. you know, when you're a founder CEO, you sort of have this benefit of uh sort of, you know, the boiling frog syndrome where, you know, right now things are really crazy at Cruso. There's just so much happening. Everything's happening very quickly. The scale at which it's happening is crazy. Uh, 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.

而且你知道，问题在于，怎么才能把这一切都装进一个人的脑子里。你知道，作为创始人兼 CEO，你对一路走来的历程有很多背景了解；这家公司也并非一开始就这么疯狂，对吧？我们刚起步时，只有我和我的联合创始人，就我们两个人，这样持续了相当长一段时间。后来我们招了第一个员工，又陆续增加了人手。你知道，我们有 10 个人的时候，感觉已经很疯狂了，但跟今天的规模相比，那根本不算什么。CEO 的历程，尤其是创始人兼 CEO 的历程，就像是你必须不断提升自己的能力。你必须持续投资自己，才能跟上规模扩张的步伐——前提是你想把业务做大。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 you know quite a while and then we you know had our first hire and we had our first you know incremental hires and you know when we were 10 people it felt crazy but it's nothing compared to what it is today and the journey of a CEO is journey of a founder CEO is like you have to continually be upping your game. You have to be continually investing in yourself to be able to scale if if you want to have a scaled business.

你知道，这在一定程度上也体现了出来。比如在 Cruso，我们有一项核心公司价值观，就是始终处于无限成长循环中：没有人是已经完成的成品，对吧？我们在这里做的任何事都不是最终成品。一切都还在不断完善，每个人也都在不断成长。我们每天都努力比昨天的自己更进一步。如果你回过头来看，持续专注于改进所带来的复利效应，以及一个人如何真正变得更好——放眼一个月、一年、五年——结果可能会令人惊叹。And you know this is partially reflected like you know at Cruso we have a core company value that's like live on the infinite growth loop like nobody is nobody's a finished product right no nothing we've done here is a finished product uh 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 how you actually get better when you zoom back out over you know the course of a month, a year, five years. Uh the results can be astounding.

嘉宾：好吧。我今天其实——我今天过得挺有意思的。我在 SEOA 组织了一个叫“儿童桌”和“成人桌”的活动，基本上就是把一群 CEO、也就是创始人兼 CEO 聚到一起，聊聊他们遇到的问题，试着在各自的创业旅程中互相帮助。我们有不少这样的 CEO，他们的公司员工人数从 20 人到 2,000 人不等。他们全都发展得飞快，真的特别快。今天我听到其中一位 CEO 说：“我的公司正在我眼皮底下变得复杂得令人眼花缭乱。我到底该怎么跟上？”你今天也有这种感觉吗？或者说，你有过这种感觉吗？我有，我就有这种感觉。Guest: Okay. My I had an actually I had quite an interesting day today. I run something called the kids table and the adults table for SEOA. And it's basically getting a bunch of CEOs together, all founder CEOs to kind of talk about their problems and try to help each other with the journey. And we've got a bunch of them between 20 and 2,000 employees. All of them are ripping, like really ripping. And I got a quote from one of the CEOs today. My business 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 that feel? I had that I had that feeling.

主持人：如果有人把我从街上带走，空降到这里，然后对我说：“嘿，去经营这家公司，Cruso。”我绝对会感到那种令人眩晕、让人动弹不得的焦虑。嗯，实际上，我对我们在 Cruso 所处的位置感觉很好，因为一路走来每一步我都参与其中，而且我也能让非常有活力、能力出众的领导者围绕在自己身边，把很多责任和资源交给他们，让他们承担并信任他们。你知道，我们的业务相当复杂，因为它是垂直整合的，涵盖了范围极广的各类工作。从能源生产、让电力上线、建设发电厂、与独立发电商和公用事业公司合作，到建设数据中心，以超大规模运营 AI 工厂，也运营规模很小的 AI 工厂；再到构建和运营托管式 AI 云平台，并提供托管式 AI 服务。Host: If someone were to take me off the streets and parachute me in and drop me in and say, "Hey, go run this company, Cruso." I would absolutely 100% have that have that dizzying, paralyzing anxiety feeling. Um, I actually feel great about where we're at within Cruso 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 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 you know energy generation and you know 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 smallcale AI factories and then building and operating a managed AI cloud platform and with managed AI services.

这是一个非常广泛的员工群体，涵盖了各种不同的人。你知道，我们有工厂，生产数据中心所需的关键电气设备；也有 AI 研究人员，致力于探索服务和托管 AI 模型、管理 KV 缓存的最佳且最有效的方法；除此之外，还有许许多多不同岗位的人。所以，作为一名领导者，我之所以能够有效地扩大管理规模，是因为我能在能源、数据中心、制造业和 AI 云计算等关键垂直领域中找到领域专家。看看 Crusoe 的团队就会发现，我们在这些关键领域都具备专业知识。面对每个人，我都可以灵活切换，并深入探讨他们各自的领域。不过，在我们逐步扩大规模的过程中，我非常信任他们能够做出正确的决策；而且每个人至少都对我们在宏观层面所做的事情有一个整体认识，也了解每个组成部分、每位领导者如何为我们在 Crusoe 搭建的、纵向整合的 AI 基础设施平台贡献力量。It's it's a whole wide spectrum of uh different employees and you know we have factories where we're manufacturing critical electrical equipment for data centers and then we have uh AI researchers that are working on the best most effective ways to serve and host AI models and manage the KV cache and uh 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 I can move around and I can go very deep with any individual. Uh but I trust them a lot to be making the right decisions as we're sort of scaling things and everybody has a at least a broad perspective um of you know what we're doing at the macro scale and how each individual component each individual leader uh contributes to that broader vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform that we're building here at Crusoe.

嘉宾：信任是个很有意思的词。我们在电话会议上聊过这个话题。其实我在这之前刚开完一个电话会议。我差不多是这样问大家的：在你们组织里，有多少人是你们真正信任的，信任到可以说“这件事涉及整个组织，你就是负责人”，而且对他们有很深的信任？平均下来大概是三四个人。你天生就很容易信任别人吗？还是说你得学着放手？Guest: Trust is an interesting word. 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 DRRi on 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?

主持人：我觉得，我的团队大概不会说我是那种天生就特别信任别人的人。我的管理方式不是那种放手不管、跟你说“去吧，放手去做，想做什么就做什么”的方式，这不太符合我的管理风格。我其实是想了解我们在做什么。Host: I don't think my team would describe me as like a just naturally very trusting person. I look I it's it's not that I'm like you know hands off go you know go for it you know go go do whatever you want that's that's not really my approach to management it's it's really uh I want to understand what we're doing

DRI、每周员工会议，以及把这句话说到你自己都烦了DRIs, the weekly staff meeting, and saying it until you're sick of it

在这个垂直业务领域，我们对前进方向达成了一致。我明白这一点，也明白它会如何影响业务的其他部分。然后，从计划的角度来说，我会要求团队对执行我们达成共识的事项负责。in this vertical we're 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.

嘉宾：好的。关于 DRRi 这个话题，我觉得随着 CEO 们成长，他们的组织也随之发展壮大。组织规模越来越大，跨组织推进工作就变得越来越困难。发展到某个阶段，他们会觉得：“我们需要 DRRI。我们需要把这些 DRI 的职责托付给他们。”而组织越大，这件事就越难。你下面有四个不同的大型组织。你怎么找到一个能跨组织协调的人？你怎么让自己有好几个分身？你知道，我们和任何组织一样，也会为这个问题苦恼，对吧？每当你试图做一件跨组织的事，比如从一个团队调动资源去和另一个团队的资源协作，就会变得很复杂。我们确实有项目管理职能来提供帮助，但你知道，最终是谁要对很多这类事情的交付负责？Guest: Okay. On that DRRi 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 DRRI. 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? You know, we struggle with this problem just like any organization, right? Anytime you're trying to do something that is crossorg, you know, pulling in resources from one team to work with another resource from another team. You know, it just is complicated. You know, we do have a program management function which helps, but you know, who's ultimately accountable for delivery of a lot of these things?

我的做法是这样：你知道，我每周会开一次员工会议，参会的有很多关键高管和我的直接下属。我们会讨论整个业务的方方面面。团队协作中出现的问题也会在这些会议上浮现，我们会尽量解决。不过，开展跨职能或跨组织的工作，本身就存在一定的矛盾。我们也只能摸索着找到办法。作为一家垂直整合的企业，要让不同层级之间、尤其是在跨越技术栈各层进行交接时实现协作，我认为这是垂直整合公司能否成功的关键。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 my direct reports in the meeting and we cover things across the whole business and, you know, when there are pain points of how teams are working together, they surface in those meetings and, you know, we try to address them and but, you know, it there is an inherent tension to doing things that are are are crossunctional or across across organization. We've sort of had to figure it out though, you know, just being a vertically integrated business, having collaboration between those layers that are where 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.

主持人：那你从中学到了什么？你肯定在这件事上碰过壁吧。除了员工会议之外，还有什么顿悟吗？Host: And then like what have you learned about that? Like you must have skinned your knees on it. Any ahas other than the staff meeting?

嘉宾：你知道，我以前一直习惯在规模较小的团队和组织里工作。我只要说一次，大家基本就会听进去；我们在一个小团队里共事，很多事情也就自然而然地解决了。我发现，一旦我开始有点厌烦听自己重复某件事时，我们其实才刚刚触及表面——也就是说，我才刚到那个需要把同一件事说够多遍的阶段。所以，要让大家达成共识、朝着同一个方向前进，这整个沟通环节有时真的很让人头疼：你得一遍又一遍地提醒大家，我们在做什么、为什么要做、谁负责什么。不过，你知道，要实现步调一致，这就是必经之路。我认为这是经营一家更大规模组织所面临的挑战之一，也正因如此，初创公司总是有机会脱颖而出：它们更灵活，行动也比大公司更快。Guest: You know, I was I was always used to just working in smaller teams and smaller organizations. And if I said something once, people kind of listened and, you know, we worked in a small group and, you know, it all kind of worked itself out. I found it that as soon as I'm sort of getting sick of hearing myself say something, then we're just scratching the surface of when when I'm just hitting the point where I, you know, I'm saying it enough times. And so just that whole communication layer about getting people on the same page to march in the same direction. it's sometimes like painful the amount of times you have to remind people um of what we're doing and why we're doing it and who's doing what and but you know that's sort of what it takes to get alignment and I think that is one of the challenges of running a bigger organization and it's why there are opportunities always for startups is that they can be more nimble they can move quicker uh than bigger companies.

规模化紧迫感：埃隆“要么改变世界，要么明天就死”的紧张感Urgency at scale: Elon's "change the world or die tomorrow" tension

我们正努力克服大公司的惯性，以便继续快速行动，并抓住当下的机遇。在如今的商业时代，要想成功，组织必须保持灵活、充满活力。and we're trying to fight that inertia of a bigger company to be able to continue to move fast and uh capture the opportunity at this moment in time when it's sort of required to be a dynamic dynamic organization to succeed in you know today's today's business age.

主持人：是的。你的业务性质决定了你必须快马加鞭，不能慢慢来。大多数 CEO 都抱怨，公司越做越大，速度就越慢。你有没有找到保持发展节奏的方法，还是说你们也慢下来了？我的意思是，感觉现在比以往任何时候都更快、更疯狂。比如在 Cruso，每天都有很多大事发生。所以我会说，我们仍在以惊人的紧迫感不断前进。我觉得埃隆可能是全世界最擅长这件事的人。他有办法消除一切理所当然的心态，或者说，消除那种“嘿，我们已经成功了，现在可以安逸了——我们已经到这一步了，接下来只要顺其自然就行”的想法。埃隆有一种超能力：他能同时让人们相信，只要他们成功了，就能改变世界，也会获得巨大的经济回报，并带来巨大的影响力，推动深远的变革。Host: Yeah. Your business is such that you have to go fast like you can't take your time. Most CEOs complain that as they get bigger they slow down. Have you figured out ways to keep the pace up or have you slowed down? I mean, it feels faster and crazier than it's ever been. Like at at Cruso, there's a lot of big things happening uh on a daily basis. So, I would say we are we are continuing to move with incredible urgency. You know, I think Elon's probably like the best in the world at this, but like you know, just trying to eliminate any sense of like entitlement or uh you know, eliminate any sense of like hey just you should be comfortable like we made it like we're here now we just have to coast. Elon has this superpower of, you know, simultaneously enabling people to believe that if they're successful, they're going to change the world and there will be this incredible financial outcome and this incredible outcome that's driving massive impact.

同时也要让大家承担责任，施加巨大的压力，比如告诉他们：“我们明天就要倒闭了；如果你不以自己身体所能承受的最高紧迫感采取行动，我们就完了。”你知道，能够把握住这种张力，确实是一种相当了不起的超能力。嗯，我想说，在推动这种张力方面，我没有埃隆那么极端——一边是“我们明天就要倒闭了”，另一边是“嘿，我们拥有改变世界的机会，这应该激励你努力工作”。但我确实认为，知道如何在两者之间找到平衡，对于推动大型组织快速行动、保持高度紧迫感，至关重要。好吧，这是你第一次经营这样一家公司。uh while also holding people accountable through the high pressure of like we're going to go out of business tomorrow and if you don't act within, you know, the greatest degree of urgency that you're physically capable of, we're going to we're going to die. And you know that like holding that tension is quite a quite a superpower. Um, I would say that I'm not quite as extreme as Elon uh in driving this tension of we're going to go out of business tomorrow versus hey, the opportunity we have to change the world is, you know, should inspire you to work hard. But I do think that, you know, threading the needle of that is an incredibly important thing to be able to drive a large organization to move quickly and with a high degree of urgency. Okay, this is your first time running a company like this.

你会研究其他 CEO，试着借鉴他们的一些策略吗？埃隆是你的偶像吗？你是想借鉴他们很多做法。嗯，你仰慕谁？Do you study other CEOs and try to borrow pieces of their playbook? And is Elon your guy? You're trying to borrow big pieces. Um, who do you look up to?

嘉宾：这事儿还挺有意思的。嗯，Cruso 现在是我工作过的最大的一家公司。呃，你知道，我们最近员工人数超过了 2,000 人。我以前读过很多书，小说、非小说类都有，嗯，基本上只要是我感兴趣的，涉猎范围挺广的，从科幻小说、技术类书籍，到小说，还有当时最新、最热门的《经济学人》推荐书籍之类的。不过，我加入 Cruso 后就转变了：有一段时间，我简直把别人推荐给我的每一本好商业书都一口气读完了。我很幸运，遇到了几位很棒的导师。我还有一位很出色的教练，嗯，他真的帮我成长为一名领导者，因为在创办 Crusoe 之前，我其实从来没有领导过一个大型组织。Guest: It's kind of funny. Um, Cruso is now the largest company I've ever worked for. Uh, and uh, you know, we recently surpassed uh, 2,000 employees. And you know I used to read a ton of books across fiction, non-fiction um you know kind of whatever I was interested in sort of a wide ranging things from you know science fiction and you know technical books to you know novels and you know whatever the latest and greatest you know economist book was but uh I shifted when I started cruso 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 I had the fortune of having a number of great mentors. I had a great coach um that really helped me grow into becoming a leader of people because I'd never really been a leader of a big organization before starting Crusoe either.

所以，这绝对是需要下功夫的。要走到我现在这个阶段，弄明白怎么才能成为一名优秀的管理者，确实需要付出努力。我一路犯错、失败、边做边学，也走过了自己的个人历程和道路，积累了很多经验教训，以后就能从中受益。And so it definitely took work. It took effort to, you know, uh 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 like embed a lot of scar tissue that I could then, you know, leverage in the future.

初创公司是自我毁灭的，而非被他人扼杀的。Startups die of suicide, not homicide

我确实认为，有一些导师和我敬仰的人，与我的关系更亲近。我非常敬仰像埃隆这样的人，我觉得他是有史以来最伟大的企业家、最杰出的商业缔造者，也是人类历史上最伟大的远见者之一。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 greatest entrepreneurs and greatest business builders and, you know, greatest visionaries that, you know, humanity's ever ever had.

主持人：如果你不介意的话，能不能说说那些错误具体是什么？有哪些惨痛教训，可能其他 CEO 也会犯同样的错？我很早就意识到一件事：有时候，作为 CEO，你会一门心思地打造自己的企业，同时关注市场上发生的事情。你会刷 X，或者看看你常看的新闻来源，然后看到市场上又发生了什么，就会想：“嘿，那个团队好像也在尝试做和我一样的事。”或者“我有个新竞争对手，刚刚融到了一大笔钱。”你总是忍不住回头看看，总有那么一点疑神疑鬼。Host: 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 going to make the same mistake? One of the things that struck me early on was, you know, sometimes when you're a CEO, you're 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, you know, scrolling X or uh, you know, what, 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 like trying to do the same thing that I'm doing or uh, you know, I have this new competitor that just raised this big round or you know, you're always kind of like looking over your shoulder. There's like a bit of a paranoia."

我早期听到过一条很棒的建议：大多数初创公司都是死于自杀，而不是他杀。呃，杀死你的不是其他企业，根本上说，是你没有把眼前的事情做好，没有建立正确的企业文化，没有吸引合适的人才，也没有专注于合适的商业机会。因为任何真正有意义、值得追求的商业机会，通常都不是赢家通吃的生意。嗯，如果这是个不错的商业机会，那很可能意味着有多个赢家的空间。所以，如果有人也在追逐这个机会，你几乎应该把这看作一种赞赏，甚至是对这个商业机会的认可。但最终，真正要把握这个机会，取决于你、你的管理团队，以及你组建的团队。别总担心竞争会怎么把你干掉。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. Uh 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. Um, 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 uh you know killed by the competition.

主持人：我的疑心会随着时间像正弦波一样起起伏伏。呃，我想如果我处在你的处境，现在肯定会相当疑神疑鬼。你现在处于疑心正弦波的哪个位置？Host: My paranoia would go up and down sine wave over time. Uh I think if I were in your shoes I'd be pretty paranoid right now. Are you where are you on your parano paranoia sine wave?

嘉宾：你知道，我其实并不会对竞争感到特别紧张。我的意思是，在某些方面，比如说，Cruso 是一家基础设施企业，对吧？而且我们并不认为这是一个赢家通吃的领域。我们认为这里会诞生许多优秀的企业。我觉得，甚至是那些被人们视为我们竞争对手的个人或团体，在我看来，我们合作的方式远比彼此对抗的方式多得多。我觉得，我们这一生中最大的机遇，就是构建智能的基础设施层。而且，这同样不会是一个赢家通吃的机遇。我常做的一个类比是，我把 AI 的计算基础设施层——或者说如今人们称之为 SI 的东西——看作……Guest: You know I'm not really paranoid with competition. I mean, you know, in certain regards, like, you know, Cruso is an infrastructure business, right? And there are we don't view it as a winner take all category. We think there's going to 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 work against each other. I think, you know, the greatest opportunity of our lifetime is building the infrastructure layer of intelligence. And it's again it's not going to be a winner take all um 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 as people are calling it now today.

超级智能的这一基础设施层，确实可以和石油天然气行业做很多恰当的比较。如果你看看石油天然气行业的价值链，通常会把它分成三个环节。首先是上游业务，人们在这里实际进行钻探，并从油气井中开采石油和天然气。然后是中游业务，也就是把这些原始商品从井口运送到天然气处理厂或炼油厂。最后是下游业务，实际加工这些来自地下的原始产物，并将其转化为可用材料，无论是汽油、航空燃油、塑料，还是其他任何产品，最终再把这些产品卖到市场上。This infrastructure layer of super intelligence 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 the upstream business where people are actually drilling holes in the ground and pumping wells of oil and gas. Um you have the midstream business which is where you're taking those uh those raw commodities and transporting them uh from the wellhead to the natural gas processing plant or the oil refinery. And then you have the downstream business which is actually processing uh those raw outputs from the earth and then converting them into usable materials whether it's gasoline or jet fuel or plastics or you know what whatever it is and then you're ultimately selling that into the market.

而在这个业务组合中，各个环节的利润率会随着油价、消费者需求以及企业需求的变化而上下波动。对我们来说，我认为我们正试图打造一家 AI 超级巨头，就像埃克森美孚和雪佛龙是油气行业的超级巨头一样。这样一来，你在某种程度上就拥有了内嵌的风险管理机制。众所周知，埃克森美孚不会对冲其石油敞口，因为油价下跌时，其上游业务——也就是井口端——的利润率会受到挤压；但其下游业务——也就是炼油厂——的利润率反而会扩大，因为原材料投入成本实际上会下降。你知道，它们在某些领域存在天然的协作关系，而在另一些领域则相互竞争：它们会与其他上游企业竞争，但当它们在某个地区拥有管道时，也会为那些可能与之竞争的其他上游企业提供服务。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 super major in the same way that Exxon and Chevron are super majors in the oil and gas industry. And wii with that you sort of have this embedded risk uh 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 uh those margins actually get compressed but their downstream business uh at the refinery those margins actually expand because the raw input costs costs actually go down and um you know they have these natural areas of collaboration versus compet 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.

能源优先：火炬燃烧气、冰岛水电和核能Energy first: flared gas, Iceland hydro, and nuclear

我觉得 Cruso 在这方面也有点类似。我们愿意与那些在其他情况下可能会与我们竞争的企业合作。不过话又说回来，这还是源于我的一种看法：我们彼此帮助的方式要多得多，远胜于互相对抗的方式。And I think Cruso's, you know, kind of similar in that regard. We're willing to partner with businesses that we may compete with in other cases. Um, 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 uh for us to work against each other.

主持人：我能跟你说件奇怪的事吗？嗯，Host: Can I say something weird to you? Um,

嘉宾：嗯，好的。除了我在红杉资本的工作之外，呃，我还创立了一只名为 Propeller 的海洋基金。昨天我听了一家公司的项目介绍，我不太确定这家公司怎么样，或者说这个行业怎么样。这个行业是从海洋中开采稀土金属。思路也类似：我们要从头到尾把整个流程都做起来。所以，我们要打造一家埃克森美孚——他们当时提到的正是这家公司——做成一个高度垂直整合的版本。说到这个，我们投资了 Blue Energy，我知道你认识 Blue Energy 的 Jake，他们在海上建造核电设施。你能聊聊这个吗？你在能源办公室这方面似乎经历了一段历程。感觉你一开始只是觉得，外面有很多被浪费的能源，我们要把它利用起来，而你现在还在做这件事。Guest: yeah, please. In addition to my sequoia work, uh I started an ocean fund called Propeller. And I heard a pitch yesterday from a company, and I'm not sure about this company, but uh or about this industry is mining, you know, rare earth metals from the ocean. And same analogy like we're going to do it end to end. So, we're going to build an Exxon was the exact same company that they talked about as a as super vertically in uh integrated version. Speaking of that, uh we invested in Blue Energy and I know you know Jake from Blue Energy building nuclear in the ocean. Uh can you talk about that? Like you're you've had a kind of a journey with the energy offices. It seems like you started in just like there's there's wasted energy out there and we're going to put it to work and you're still doing it.

不过听起来，阿比林设施用的基本上都是天然气。你们现在进展到哪一步了？你知道，Crusoe 非常专注于为智能计算启用兆瓦级电力，这需要各种能源资源，也涉及各种不同的应用场景。有时候用的是天然气。你知道，我们致力于寻找并推动创新型新能源解决方案，比如蓝色能源。他们也在尝试新的核能生产技术。我们最近还宣布与 Alo 建立了另一项合作，计划在爱达荷国家实验室打造首座由小型模块化反应堆（SMR）供电的 AI 工厂。我们还尝试过表后风能、表后天然气、表后太阳能以及电池。你知道，我们尝试过很多不同的方案。But it sounds like the Abolene facility is a lot of just natural gas. Like where where are you at this point? You know, Cruso is very focused on activating megawws for intelligence and that requires all sorts of energy resources and all sorts of different use cases. Uh at times it's natural gas. you know, we're focused on trying to find and catalyze innovative new energy solutions that can be things like blue energy. They're trying out new nuclear, you know, energy production technologies. We have another partnership with Alo um that we announced recently where we're trying to bring to life the first uh SMR powered AI factory at the Idaho National Lab. We've done stuff with behind the meter wind, uh, with behind the meter gas, with behind the meter solar, with batteries. You know, we've tried many different things.

我们去了冰岛，对吧？冰岛本身就像是一种地质奇观，是一片冰与火之地，拥有非常充足、成本极低的地热能源和水电，人烟稀少，而且冷却成本很低、效率很高。我们的理念是通过计算来把电力需求带到那里，这也正是我们所说的以能源优先的方式建设计算基础设施。挪威也是另一个很适合我们的市场。那里有大量成本低廉的水电资源，目前尚未得到充分利用，而且水电规模还可以比现在扩大。因此，我们不认为这是什么灵丹妙药。我们认为，计算基础设施将无处不在，为智能的基础设施层提供支撑，而这一层最终将推动全球经济发展。We've gone to Iceland, right, where Iceland's this sort of like geological phenomenon that it exists, but it's this land of fire and ice where you have very abundant, lowcost geothermal energy, very lowcost hydro power, and not a lot of people and very, you know, cheap efficient cooling. uh and bringing the demand for power there via compute has been our philosophy of and that's really what we mean when we say take an energy first approach to building uh compute infrastructure. Uh Norway is another great market for us where you know they have you know a lot of lowcost uh hydro power that's you know being underutilized and can can be built bigger than it is today and so we don't think it's a silver bullet. Uh we think compute infrastructure will be ubiquitous to serve the infrastructure layer of intelligence that's ultimately going to power uh global economic development.

因此，在不同情况下需要采用不同的能源解决方案。我们对行业内正在发生的许多创新都感到非常振奋。蓝色能源就是另一个很好的例子：我们能否利用同一种蒸汽轮机技术——这种技术既用于燃气发电，也用于核能发电——在燃气发电和稳定的基荷核电之间充当一种过渡方案？我们认为这些都很不错。我们也认为，新型电池技术方面的许多进展令人十分兴奋。从 Redwood Materials 这类公司正在做的事情——重新利用废旧电动汽车电池和锂离子电池——到 Form Energy 和 Antora 这类公司开发的长时储能解决方案，我们认为它们有望打造具有成本效益的百小时电池。因此，这里有一个完整的谱系……And so you need to use different energy solutions in different cases. And so we're really excited about a lot of the innovation taking place in the in the industry. And you know blue energy is another great example of like you know can we leverage the same steam turbine technology that you know is needed for gas generation uh to basically uh that's needed for both gas generation and nuclear energy to be a sort of bridge between gas and base load firm nuclear power. You know all of these things we think are great. We think a lot of the development in new battery technology is really exciting. Everything from like you know what's happening with companies like Redwood Materials that are you repurposing used electric vehicle batteries and used lithium ion batteries to long duration storage solutions like form energy and in Torah um that we think will be coste effective 100hour batteries and so there there's like a spectrum of whole

从比特币转向人工智能，一直都是计划的一部分。Bitcoin to AI was the plan all along

各种不同的东西，而我们某种程度上觉得，好像一样都少不了。智能对能源的需求极其旺盛；随着它能够获取更多能源，你知道，这确实会加速人类进步。different things and we kind of view it as like we sort of need them all. the demand from intelligence for energy is voracious and you know it's really going to accelerate the human progress as it has more access to energy.

主持人：你和你的公司有一点让我觉得特别有意思：你们最初基本上是从比特币挖矿行业起步的，利用闲置能源，把它们投入使用，而且这是一门非常不错的生意。你们在这方面干得风生水起。听起来，从一开始你们似乎就预见到 AI 基础设施会有需求，于是开始着手建设，这两者也恰好契合。后来有个时候，你们决定要出售大部分业务——也就是比特币挖矿业务。你们是什么时候做出这个决定的？你们是怎么告诉董事会的？带我们回到幕后，聊聊这个想法是什么时候在你脑海中变成一个好主意的。那真是个大胆的举动。 嘉宾：嗯，事情是这样的。我觉得很多外界人士认为这是我们的一次转型，但在公司内部——你要是问问我们的投资人，或者那些在这里待了很久的员工——他们都会告诉你，这其实一直都是我们的计划：采取以能源为先的计算策略。Host: One of the things I find fascinating about you and your company is you started essentially in the Bitcoin mining industry with stranded uh energy putting that to work and it was a really good business. you were cranking with it and it sounds like from the beginning you sort of foresaw there's going to be a need for AI infrastructure and you started building it out and it rhymed. At some point you decided we're going to sell off this most of our business is this Bitcoin mining business. When did you make that decision? How did you tell your board? Take us behind the scenes on when that became a good idea in your head. That was that was a bold move. Well, so the thing was is that I think externally a lot of people thought this was a pivot for us, but internally and if you talk to any of our investors or any of our employees that have been here for a very long time, they'll tell you that like this was sort of the plan all along was this energy first approach to computing.

你知道，我之前一直在做 AI 研究，当时是个量化投资组合经理。后来我在斯坦福读研究生，同时从事 AI 研究，做了很多计算机视觉和自然语言处理方面的工作。我算是很早就对 AI 深信不疑了。那还是早期的时候，你知道，我读过一些东西，其中对我影响比较大的一篇，其实是 Tim Urban 写的。他有个博客叫《Wait, But Why》，他写了那个博客？you know, I had been doing research in AI like as a as a quant portfolio manager and then, you know, I was at as Stanford for grad school and working in AI and doing a lot of work in computer vision and natural language processing and I was like pretty AI pilled like early days like you know when uh you know I was reading things like one of the more influential things on me was actually Tim Urban had this blog called Wait, but why and he wrote the blog?

嘉宾：是啊，真不错，太精彩了。嗯，我觉得大家都应该去读读那个，你知道，不过有几篇作品对我的影响尤其大。Guest: Yeah, it's great. It's fantastic. um just like everybody should go out and read that you know but there were a couple pieces that were particularly influential on me.

嗯，有一个节目好像是关于通往超级智能之路的。他在里面提出了这样一个论点：这些多层神经网络本质上是非常出色的非线性建模机制；随着数据和算力越来越多，它们就能越来越擅长对各种事物建模——无论是自然语言、计算机视觉，还是其他任何你想建模的东西。 所以我当时就在想，这似乎意味着 AI 是一门元科学，它不会只改进某一件事，而是会改进一切，对吧？我在斯坦福有一位教授叫吴恩达。他有句名言：AI 就像电一样。电不是只对某一件事有用，对吧？如果你问别人电有什么用，答案不会只是“电可以用来开灯”，而是“没错，它可以开灯，也可以给我的电脑和汽车供电，还能给炉子加热”，以及我们对电习以为常的各种其他用途。Um there was one that was like about the path to super intelligence and in it you know he sort of like espoused this thesis that like you know these these multi-layer neural networks were essentially like really good nonlinear modeling you know mechanisms that as they had more data and more compute they just got better and better at modeling you know whatever whatever thing that you're trying to model whether it's you know natural language or you know computer vision or you know whatever it was and so I was sort of playing that out and felt like you know AI was this meta science that wasn't going to improve one thing it was going to improve everything right so I had this professor at Stanford named Andrew Wing and you know he has this famous saying where he says you know AI is like electricity right electricity is not good for one thing right if you ask someone what is electricity good for it's it's not like oh electricity is good to like turn on the lights it's like yes it's good at turning on the lights and it's also good at powering my computer and my car and uh heating my stove and you know all these different things that we really take for granted with electricity.

所以，这并不是说人工智能只擅长某一件事。它其实几乎什么都擅长。我很早就对此抱有很强的信心。我当时觉得，如果数据和算力是瓶颈，那么最终算力就会变成一个能源问题。把这个逻辑推演下去，想想它在大规模应用时会是什么样子，我们其实已经看到这种情况在比特币挖矿中逐渐显现。因此，这项业务最初的设想是：找到那些被闲置、利用不足的能源，并通过算力为这些能源带来市场。与其把这些闲置能源送到一个可以买卖能源的市场，不如把市场带到能源所在之处。我们最初找到的闲置能源资源，是油田中被燃烧掉的天然气——石油公司在那里钻井开采石油。And so it's not just like one thing that you know uh that AI is good for. It's it's really good for everything. And you know I was I had like high conviction of this fairly early days. And you know I felt like if data and compute were the bottlenecks ultimately compute becomes an energy problem. And when you sort of play that out and think about that at scale and we'd sort of seen this unfolding actually with Bitcoin mining. And so the original thesis for the business was like go find stranded energy that is otherwise being underutilized and bring a market to that stranded energy with compute. Instead of trying to bring that stranded energy to a market where it can be bought and sold, bring the market to the energy. And you know that's what led us to you know our initial stranded energy resource was was natural gas that was being flared in the oil in the oil field where you know oil companies were drilling for oil.

他们生产天然气作为副产品，但由于没有管道，就只能把它直接点燃，于是这成了一个巨大的环境负担。这些气体本来是废弃物，他们还得花钱处理，简直是一场灾难。嗯，而且你知道，这种情况今天仍在大规模发生。不过，我们当时的解决方案是，运来这些小型模块化发电机和小型模块化数据中心，基本上就在现场利用这些天然气，为计算基础设施供电。嗯，你知道，我们最初靠它实现变现的方式就是比特币挖矿，对吧？这是把能源转化成金钱最简单的办法。你知道，我们也算是通过比特币业务打造出了一个很棒的飞轮效应。早期确实有人批评我。当时我说：“嘿，我想做这个 AI 云平台。”大家就会说：“你在说什么啊？你为什么要在这上面花资源？你已经有这么棒的业务了，靠比特币赚了这么多钱。”They produced natural gas as a byproduct and then absent having a pipeline they just light it on fire and it was this huge environmental liability. It was a waste product. They were paying money to dispose of it. It's a disaster. Um and you know it's still happening at scale today. But uh you know our solution to that was we would bring these small modular generators and these small modular data centers and we would we would basically utilize that gas on site and use it to power compute infrastructure. Um which you know our first monetization engine of that was was Bitcoin mining right? It was the easiest way to take energy and turn it into money. And you know we sort of created this great flywheel effect with the Bitcoin business. And you know there were definitely criticisms early days when I was like hey I'm trying to do this AI cloud platform and people were like what are you talking about like why are you spending any resources on that like uh you have this great thing you're like making all this money in Bitcoin.

就像，你到底在说什么？为什么要把注意力放在别的事情上？而且，嗯，你知道，我们尝试了很多东西，也失败了，还把不少事情搞砸了，比如搭建我们最初的 AI 集群；当时我们还在摸索产品该是什么样，以及要服务哪些人。我给很多在大学做研究的朋友打电话，说：“嘿，你们能不能……这些 GPU 对你们有用吗？我用北达科他州巴肯油田腹地的天然气给它们供电。”嗯，要让这门生意真正运转起来，我们经历了很多次不同的尝试。不过，你知道，真正的神奇时刻，其实就是 Chat GBT 的发布。我想，2022 年 11 月 30 日，那一刻彻底改变了一切。Like what are you what are you talking about? Why would you focus on anything else? And um you know we tried a ton of stuff and we failed and we screwed a bunch of stuff up in terms of like building out our first AI AI clusters and we're trying to figure out what the product looked like and who we were going to serve. And I called a bunch of my friends that were researchers at universities and saying, you know, hey, can you can you do you have a use for these GPUs that I'm powering from this, you know, gas in the middle of, you know, the Bakan oil field in North Dakota? And uh, you know, that there there were just like many different iterations of trying to get that business to life. But, you know, the magic moment was was really, you know, the launch of Chat GBT. So, November 30th, 2022, I think that was just like the moment that changed everything.

而且你知道，这就催生了所有这些新创公司，它们需要的正是我们一直在构建的那类计算基础设施，以及我们一直在打造的那类解决方案，比如存储、计算、网络等等。我一直觉得，比特币和 AI 配合得非常好，现在我还是这么认为，因为 AI 数据中心的能耗方式和比特币挖矿并不一样。比特币挖矿很像是——你几乎可以给它设定一个固定的功率，然后说“就保持在这个功率水平，只管消耗这些电力”，它的功率曲线就会非常平稳。然后，你可以根据需求响应和可用能源的情况上下调节功率。and you know just it led to all these new startups that you know were demanding the exact type of compute infrastructure that we had been building and the exact type of solutions that we had been building from a you know a storage compute networking etc. Now I had always felt that like Bitcoin and AI and I still feel this way that they actually go together very well because AI data centers do not consume energy in the same way that Bitcoin mining does. Bitcoin mining is very like you can you can almost give it like a fixed draw amount of power and say like stay at that power level and just like consume that and it will be like very flatline and uh and then you can move that up and down depending on demand response and what available energy is.

AI 在整体功耗方面的波动会稍微大一些。你知道，在训练大型工作负载、进行推理和训练时，肯定能看到这一点；但制冷也有季节性因素。嗯，白天你通常会有更高的 PUE，因为天气比晚上热，需要更积极地运行空调机组和冷水机组；而到了晚上，气温较低，就能更多地依靠自然冷却。嗯，这也取决于集群上运行的工作负载。情况会有一些起伏变化。AI has a bit more variance in terms of you know its overall power utilization and you know you see this in you know certain certainly when you're training big workloads for inference and training but you also have seasonality with cooling um you know you tend to have higher pee during the day when you're having to run your your air conditioning units and your your chillers more aggressively because it's hotter than at night when the cool when you have like more natural cooling um you know depending on workloads that are being run on the cluster. things can eb and eb and flow a bit.

主持人：好。不过我还是要问你。所以，你一直都把它看作一家人工智能公司。你做了个决定，把原本经营得很好的业务卖掉。为什么不干脆留下来？你什么时候跟团队提起这件事的？你是什么时候觉得这会是个好主意的？有人反对吗？ 部分原因是，我们有一位很棒的合作伙伴。我们觉得，自己打造的这项业务能在一个非常合适的地方安顿下来，那就是 Naidig。你知道，这些年来，Ross Stevens 已经成了我的好朋友。还有他们那里的首席执行官 Tis Shaw。我对那个团队非常敬重。我们觉得他们都是很优秀的人，能够很好地管理这项业务；而且他们在天然气领域有丰富的经验。你知道，Stone Ridge 已经在美国建立起规模最大的天然气业务之一。Host: Okay. But I'm gonna come back to you. You so it was it was on you were thinking of it was an AI company all along. You made a decision to sell off what was a good business. Why didn't you just keep it? When did you broach that with the team? When did that become a good idea in your head? Did you get push back on it? Uh part of it was we had a great partner that we felt like this business we built would land in a really good home which was Naidig uh and you know I really Ross Stevens has become a good friend you know over the years and I and uh Tis Shaw who's the CEO there um you know just deep amount of respect for that team and we felt like they were great people that would you know be great stewards of this business and they had a lot of experience within natural gas in terms of you know Stone Ridges built out one of the largest natural gas businesses in the United States.

因此，这群人既了解并曾大规模运营天然气资产，又深度参与比特币生态，我们觉得他们是这项业务的理想合作伙伴。但说到底，我认为促使我剥离这项业务的真正原因是专注。你知道，Crusoe 做的事情很多，而且我们做的事情越来越多，我们感觉自己不得不在两者之间权衡：是把资本、资源和精力投入比特币业务，还是投入 AI 基础设施业务？我们也从投资者那里听到了一些反馈：在投资者看来，这会让我们的故事变得过于复杂。他们会说：“好吧，我很看好你们在 AI 业务上的布局，但我的公司实际上被禁止投资任何与加密货币有关的项目。”And so this intersection of people that knew and had operated natural gas assets at scale and um were deeply involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem, we felt like they were they were great partners for that business. But really I think what drove me to divest that business was really focus. And you know we are doing a lot at Crusoe and increasingly we were doing more and it felt like we were having to balance this tension between do we allocate capital and resources and attention towards our Bitcoin business or against this AI infrastructure business and we were also getting feedback from investors where you know it would make the story too complex in the eye of an investor where they would say okay I love what you're doing over here on this AI business, but uh my firm were actually blocked from making any investments that are tied to crypto.

因此，要让业务专注起来，把公司打造成一家在垂直整合 AI 基础设施领域定义品类的企业，同时不再被任何与比特币相关的事情分散注意力，这些都面临着挑战。话虽如此，我个人仍然是比特币的坚定支持者和持有者，而且我认为，比特币的存在对世界来说很重要。So, there were challenges to just making the business focused and making it, you know, this category defining company across vertically integrated AI infrastructure and not having the distraction of being anything related to Bitcoin. And so, you know, I am still personally a huge Bitcoin supporter and holder and, you know, I think it's an important thing to exist for the world

得体风度是后天习得的：教练、公开演讲，以及 Felicis 的自我提升预算Polish is learned: coaches, public speaking, and Felicis's self-improvement budget

作为一个，你知道的，非国家控制、去中心化、原生于数字世界的开放货币生态系统，不过 Crusoe 全力投入 AI 基础设施是正确的选择。我在这次通话中注意到一件事，我也看过你在其他场合的表现：你非常老练，Chase。大多数 CEO 都没有你这么老练。这是你一路走来学会的吗？你说你请过一位教练。他有帮你提升这一点吗？as a, you know, non-state controlled decentralized digitally native open monetary ecosystem, but it was the right thing for Crusoe to go allin on AI infrastructure. One thing I'm noticing about you on this call and I've watched you in other formats is you're very polished, Chase. Most CEOs don't have your level of polish. Is that something you learned along the way? You said you had a coach. Did your coach help you with that?

嘉宾：我以前有一位教练，呃，我们现在仍然关系很亲近。虽然我们不像以前那样密切合作了，但 Shane Metaf 对我来说是一位非常出色的教练。我从他身上学到了很多。公开演讲从来都不是我擅长的事，而是我必须非常非常努力才能做到的事，呃，因为我以前根本不怎么做这件事。我曾经在大学之类的地方做过讲座，但这并不是我经常做的事。尤其是量化领域，你知道，这是一个非常技术性的行业，所以你会和很多非常聪明的人共事，但你们的合作方式非常保密，对吧？你会和队友畅所欲言，却不会向外界透露任何你们在做的事，因为担心泄露一些 alpha。所以我以前从不在外面公开展示任何东西，因此我必须非常非常努力地做好准备，想清楚自己要说什么、该怎么说。Guest: I had a coach uh and I still we're still we're still quite close. we're not working as closely together as we once did, but Shane Metaf, he he was a phenomenal uh phenomenal coach for me. Uh I learned so much from him. I public speaking was never something that came naturally to me. It was something I had to work really really hard at uh because I just wasn't doing it. like I'd given lectures and things like at you know universities and uh but it wasn't a it wasn't something that I was routinely doing especially like the quant space is a very you know it's a very technical industry so you're working with very smart people but you're you're doing it in a very secretive way right it's like you're very open with your teammates and then you don't tell anything to anybody in the world about what you're doing for fear that you might leak some of your alpha so I was like never out in the world like presenting stuff and so it was something that I had to work very very hard at to just be prepared for what I was going to say, how I was going to say it.

你知道，我觉得如果做得足够多，就会慢慢积累经验，到某个时候，你就不必再为各种事情做那么多准备了。现在大多数事情，我基本上都是临场发挥。呃，因为你知道，有些事情确实需要大量准备，但我觉得自己经常即兴发挥得更好，因为你知道，这就是我思考问题的方式，而且我已经培养出了一套不错的能力，能够把脑子里的想法比较清楚地解释给我正在交谈的人听。And you know, I think if you do it enough, you just get practice and at some point you just like stop having to prepare as much for things. And then most things at this point, I kind of just like wing them. uh because you know that like there there's certainly things that like just require a tremendous amount of preparation but uh you know I think I'm often better off the cuff because I you know it's just like how how I think through things and I'm I'm I've developed a good skill set of being able to explain what's in my mind uh you know fairly clearly to whoever I'm talking to.

主持人：除此之外你还学到了什么？首先，我合作的 CEO 是否都应该聘请一位教练？Host: What else did you learn from first of all should all the CEOs I work with hire a coach?

访客：是的。Guest: Yes.

主持人：嗯，对。真有意思。那你从中学到了什么？Shane 教了你什么，或者他在哪些方面督促了你？Host: And like Yeah. So interesting. What did you learn from like what did Shane teach you or what did he push you on?

嘉宾：你知道，我们有一位投资人，呃，Felicis，他们为被投公司做了一件特别酷的事，我还没见过别人这么做，呃，他们会设一笔预算，基本上是用于个人成长的。它，呃，你知道，就是……不是……它是为了自我提升。比如高管教练、异地团建，以及各种能让你作为领导者更上一层楼的方式。因为他们会说：“你看，我们对创始人、CEO 投下了这么大一笔投资，我们押注的是你能不断进步。你不是一个一成不变的人，而是会随着时间推移，成为一个更好的自己，呃，你知道，尤其是随着业务的发展。”而且我觉得，这种对待投资的方式真的特别周到，尤其是在风险投资领域，投资如此看重人的因素，以及创始人能否带领公司不断发展壮大。Guest: You know, one of our investors uh Felicis, they had this really cool thing they do for companies and I haven't seen anybody else do this uh but they have a budget for like personal investment essentially. It's it's like uh you know it's it's not it's it's like meant for like self-improvement. It's meant for things like executive coaching and off-sights and just ways of upleveling yourself as a leader because they're like, "Look, we're making this big investment in like the founder, the CEO, and you know, we're betting on you being able to get better, that you're not a static version of yourself that you're actually going to be a, you know, a better version of yourself over the course of time, uh, you know, as the business grows." And you know, I think I just thought that was like such a thoughtful approach to the investment, especially like in venture where like the investments are so much about the people and the ability of the founder to scale.

呃，你知道，Shane，早期的时候，我总觉得他是那种我为某个问题绞尽脑汁也想不出答案时，总能给出答案的人。你知道，对我来说，他既像个教练，甚至也几乎像个治疗师。就像……Uh you know, I Shane like early days it just felt like Shane was a guy that like always had the answer to the problem that I was like racking my brain on. And you know, he was as much of uh a coach as like almost like a therapist for me. Like

主持人：我和我的治疗师相处时也是这种感觉。那段关系真的非常特别——现在依然如此——我们彼此非常信任。我只是觉得，你知道，这是需要花心思经营的，你会和一个人建立起这种信任。即使某次会谈中你觉得自己没有什么进展，其实你也在为将来某件大事突然出现时打下基础。这个人非常了解你，知道你的盲点在哪里，知道你在某种情况下可能会有什么反应，也知道如何引导你调整方向，让你能够应对各种情况。你知道，我想……我也不确定。人们常这么说，我听起来可能像是在重复一些老生常谈，但你知道，创办公司时遇到的很多问题，说到底都是人的问题，对吧？Host: that's how I feel with my therapist. It was so, you know, we really did have a very uh you know, still do a very very special relationship that's very trusted and um I just felt like, you know, it's something you have to work at and you build this trust with a person. And even if it doesn't feel like you're making progress on any given session, you're laying the groundwork and you're laying this foundation for when that really big thing does pop up. This person knows you so deeply and they know where your blind spots are and they know how you might be responding in a certain situation and they know how to like guide you to course correct uh to be able to, you know, rise to whatever occasion it is. And you know, I think I don't know. I mean, people say this and it's, you know, I may sound like I'm, you know, repeating the common folklore, but like, you know, so many of the problems with building companies are are people problems, right?

能够有效地处理人际方面的问题，就像是……这大概就是最大的挑战。你知道，要让这些聪明、有抱负、又有主见的人一起合作，朝着同一个方向努力，并在事情上达成一致；如果他们意见不一致，也要让他们承诺遵循你选择的路线。我是说，这一直是最难的事。而且，呃，你知道，作为一名 CEO，我觉得有时候最大的挑战是：我该在什么时候继续相信一个人，又该在什么时候决定，嘿，我们得往前走了，这个职位需要换个……换个人来担任。呃，你知道，我……Being able to effectively navigate the people of side of this is like it's that's like most of the challenge is like, you know, you get these smart, ambitious, and opinionated people getting everybody to work and row in the same direction and agree on things or if they don't agree to commit to whatever pathway you're taking. I mean that is always the hardest thing and uh you know as a CEO I think you know sometimes the biggest challenges are you know when do I keep believing in someone and when do I decide like hey we need to move on and like we need a different different person in this role uh you know I

解雇不够果断，以及公司何时会发展到个人无法胜任的阶段Firing too slowly, and when the company outgrows the person

我觉得是……或者说，我们怎样才能让两个非常优秀的人一起做一件事，尽管他们在根本问题上意见不合？嗯，我不知道，我只是觉得，人是最难搞定的事情，但如果你能处理好，他们也会成为你最大的超能力。 嘉宾：大家总是跟我说，你应该慢慢招人，果断裁人。我却反着来，尤其是在裁人这方面。听起来你让一些人离开了。你是不是做得太慢了？你有没有后悔过？是什么信号让你最终下定决心？think it's or how do we get like two brilliant people to work together on something that are fundamentally disagreeing and um I like I don't know I've just found the people to be the hardest thing and also like the greatest superpower if you can get it right. Guest: People always said to me you should hire slow and fire fast. I did the opposite particularly on the fire side. It sounds like you moved some people out. Did you do it too slowly? Did you ever regret it? What were the signals that kind of push you over the edge?

主持人：我觉得几乎总是有一种倾向，导致你最终解雇员工太晚。这就像是一种根深蒂固的倾向。所以即使你反应非常迅速，比如说，我确实觉得对大多数 CEO 来说，你知道，当你解雇某个人时，显然你已经考虑这件事很久了；而且几乎就像是你开始考虑这件事的时候，其实就是解雇他们的合适时机。但比如说，呃，你知道，这很难……Host: I think almost always there's a bias towards you just end up firing people too slowly. It's it's just like there's an inherent bias. So even if you're very responsive, like you know, I do think that for most CEOs, you know, when you fire someone, you've clearly been thinking about it for a long time, and it's almost like when you started thinking about it, that was sort of the right time to fire them. But like, uh, you know, it's hard to

嘉宾：你在看什么信号？是团队里的其他人说这个人表现不佳吗？还是……是什么？呃，我觉得并不是说……你知道，这肯定算是一个参考信息。我觉得，CEO的工作就是去解读这幅由各种信息拼成的图景，对吧？你会收集到各种零零碎碎的消息，它们往往来自组织里截然不同的部门，也来自不同的人——可能是非常懂技术的人，也可能是更擅长与人打交道的人，或者其他各种各样的人。你会把这些不同的信息一点点汇集起来，然后由你来判断，什么才是对公司最好的决定。Guest: What signal do you are you looking at? Is it other people on the team saying this person's subpar? Is it What is it? Uh um it's it's not that it's it you know that is definitely like a data point. It's it's like a uh I think our job as a CEO is you know you are reading this mosaic of information right you have all these little tidbits and you know they're often in from like you know very different parts of the organization and different you know that coming from someone super technical coming from someone you know that's like uh more of a people person coming you know like all these like different things and you're sort of amassing all these different pieces of information and you know it's up to you to like make a judgment call around like what the best decision is for the company.

我确实记不清是谁发布的了，我想应该是 First Round Capital。他们有一篇特别棒的博客，叫《创业公司的物理定律》（Startup Laws of Physics）。嗯，你知道，核心观点大致是：人的成长是线性的，公司的成长是指数级的。所以就会出现这样一种情况：即使你鼓励团队成员不断成长、持续投资自己，但如果公司真的像你这位雄心勃勃的领导者所设想的那样发展壮大，往往曾经适合某个职位的人，到了两年后公司规模扩大十倍时，未必还能成长到足以胜任这个职位。而且，作为领导者，这个现实很难面对，因为你曾和这些人一起并肩作战。I do think that I forget who published I think it was like first round capital has this really great blog called like the startup laws of physics and uh you know the crux of it is something along the lines of you know people scale linearly companies scale exponentially. So you sort of have this dynamic where even if you challenge your people to continue to grow and continue to invest in themselves, if the company really grows in the way that you're sort of setting out as an am as an ambitious leader, oftentimes like the person who was the right person for that role at one point in time may not be able to grow and scale to be the person in that role two years later when the company is 10 times bigger. And um that's that's a hard reality to face as a leader because you end up in the trenches with these people.

最后就变成了熬夜工作、清早开工，你知道的，你会看到这些人真的在为使命倾尽所有。嗯，当公司发展壮大到超出某个人的能力范围时，这真的很难，对吧？因为你在个人层面上非常在乎这些人。即使你知道，对公司来说，最好的做法是为某个特定岗位另寻人选。总之，回到我们刚才的话题——我过去为什么会解雇员工，这几乎就像每个案例都是独一无二的。每一个都不一样，而且你知道，最终还是得由你来判断，什么才是对公司最合适的做法。You end up like working late nights, early mornings, you know, you know, you see these people really giving everything they have, you know, to the mission. And uh when you when you have those moments where the company outgrows the person, it's really it's it's just hard, right? Because you care a lot about these people on a personal basis. even if you know the best thing for the company is to, you know, find someone new for a specific role. Anyway, coming back to what why we why I've fired people in the past, it's almost like every case is a snowflake. Every single one is different and, you know, it's it's it's ultimately up to you to make the judgment call of what's what's the right thing for the business.

主持人：好的。在我最近的两次采访中，我采访了来自呃 Databricks 的 God。Host: Okay. I two of my recent interviews, I interview God from uh data bricks.

嘉宾：爱他。Guest: Love him.

主持人：人很好。而且他基本上十年来一直用同一支管理团队，唯一的例外是换掉了一个人。然后，Devitaria 是我的朋友，也会来上播客。平均来说，他每年会更换高管团队中的两个人，原因有很多。我觉得这很奇怪，他们做的生意挺相似的，而且就是……他们俩都很优秀，却又如此不同。Host: Great guy. and he he's basically had the same management team for 10 years with the exceptional he turned over one person and then Devitaria is a friend of mine and coming on the pod on average he turned over two per year on the exec team for lots of reasons I find that odd they're in kind of similar businesses and it's just so and they're both really good and they're so different

嘉宾：说实话，我现在的首席运营官和首席财务官都曾在 MongoDB 和 Dave 共事了大约十年。嗯，所以他并不是那些……被裁掉的人之一。Guest: totally actually my current COO and CFO uh worked alongside Dave at MongoDB for about a decade. Um so he wasn't one of the people that was you know churned in those

主持人：嗯，我说的流失是指他们中的一些人离开，他们……Host: Well by churn I mean some of them leave they

嘉宾：不，我完全理解，呃，不过你看，我觉得这事没有什么唯一正确的答案，而且，嗯，你知道，我也见过不同的方法都奏效。呃，我觉得对我来说最有效的是，嗯，如果有人真的遇到了很大困难，团队是看得出来的。你知道，我们认为团队最终是为了赢。你知道，我是说，我亲眼见过这种情况。我从小就参加竞技体育，你知道，如果你在一个团队里，你总是很喜欢自己的队友。你知道，你们之间有一种深厚而特别的纽带，就像是从更衣室延伸到了赛场。你知道，如果有个队友就是状态不佳，或者说是团队里的薄弱环节，而……Guest: no I totally understand and uh but look I don't think there's any right answer and um you know I've seen different things work. Uh, I think what I found most effective for me is that, um, if you have someone that's really struggling, the team recognizes it. And, you know, we view it as, you know, the team is ultimately there to win. And, you know, I mean, I saw this. I grew up playing competitive sports and, you know, if you if you were on a team, you always loved your teammates. You know, you had a strong and special bond that like came from, you know, the locker room to the field. And you know, if you had a teammate that was just like struggling or you know, a weak link and

焊工与人工智能研究人员、数据中心引发的反弹，以及挖掘负面消息Welders and AI researchers, the data center backlash, and mining for bad news

呃，你知道，导致了——你知道，团队的垮台。你知道，就像是你知道正确的做法是找别人替换掉那个人。嗯。uh you know, led to, you know, the team's downfall, you know, it was like you knew that the right thing to do was to replace that person with someone. Um

主持人：听起来你正处于这两者之间。Host: it sounds like you're in the middle of those two.

嘉宾：我肯定处于两者之间。Guest: I'm in the middle of the two for sure.

主持人：好。Host: Fine.

嘉宾：是的。嗯，说到团队和人员，你们的业务有一点特别有意思，我也会想到我们在 HubSpot 打造的文化。HubSpot 的员工会作诗押韵，而在你们的组织里，既有 AI 研究人员，也有焊工。你们如何在所有这些人之间营造共同的文化？他们的文化会有所不同吗？你们如何为所有这些人制定薪酬？这一切是怎么运作的？Guest: Yeah. Uh, speaking of teams and people, one thing that is fascinating about your business and I just think about the culture we built at HubSpot. People rhymed at HubSpot, but on your in your organization, you have AI researchers and you have welders. How do you create a culture across all of them? Are they different cultures? How do you comp people across all of it? How does all that work?

主持人：是的。不，这确实是个很棒的问题。我们一直觉得，我们拥有一种极其多元的文化，这源于那些前来帮助我们共同建设的人。我们的核心价值观之一，就是汇聚集体智慧，对吧？没有任何一个人能掌握足够全面的领域专长，独自交付我们试图打造的完整解决方案。而我们都可以互相学习。大家齐心协力，共同打造一个协调统一的解决方案，最终取得的成果将远超任何一个人单独行动所能达到的。你知道，人们也从中获得了一些关键创新，比如电工在负责接线时提出的想法，后来研究人员便从这些具体用例中获益。Host: Yeah. No, it's it's a great question. We've always felt like we've had an incredibly diverse culture just from the people that are coming to help build this. And one of our core values is tapping into the collective genius, right? It's like no one person has all the domain expertise to deliver the full solution that we're trying to bring to bear. And we all can learn from one another. And all of us working together towards a cohesive solution is going to result in an amplified result that none of us could have done individually. And you know there have been critical innovations that people have gotten from you know people like electricians that are you know working on on on wiring things up to you know the researchers are then benefiting from you know those those specific use cases.

而且，你知道，我们思考整个楼宇管理系统的方式，以及我们如何看待某种意义上的操作系统——从电子到词元——我认为，这正是让我们与众不同的地方。And you know how we think about you know the whole building management system how we think about sort of the operating system from you know the electron to the token I think is something that really sets us apart.

嘉宾：我在杂志上读到一篇文章，讲的是风投以及你们行业的人在会议上发言时，常常会有人攻击他们或抗议他们，而你似乎正处在这股浪潮的中心。数据中心已经成了一个选举议题。我也听过你讲述数据中心为什么对社区有益、为什么对人类大有裨益。你自己也面临着一些猛烈的批评吗？你个人是怎么应对的？你有安保吗？这对你来说有多棘手？我的看法是，当我看看 Crusoe 的员工，他们都是想为世界做点好事的人。我在 Crusoe 遇到的每一个人，都想为世界做点好事。我从根本上相信，有一种正确的方式可以让这类基础设施落地，让每个人都能从中受益。Guest: I read an article in the journal about VCs and people in your industry when they're presenting at conferences like people are attacking them or protesting them and you're sort of in the middle of a wave. It's an election issue around the data centers and I've heard your story on why it's good for communities and why it's great for humanity. Are you facing some of that heavy criticism yourself? And how do you deal with it personally? Is do you have security? Like where are how how tricky is this for you? The way I think about it is when I look around at the people at Crusoe, these are all people that want to do good for the world. There's not a single person I've met at Cruso that doesn't want to do good for the world. And I believe fundamentally that there is a right way to, you know, bring this infrastructure to life where everybody can benefit.

你知道，从能源方面、用水方面、税收收入方面、学校和社区方面来看，再从最终应用场景来看，以及它实际上如何借助我们经历过的最伟大的技术浪潮推动人类进步。you know, energy, you know, from a water usage standpoint, from a tax revenue standpoint, from a school and community standpoint, and then from, you know, the end use cases and how it's actually fueling human progress through, you know, the greatest technological wave we've ever experienced.

主持人：我听过你解释这个问题。你解释得非常好，也特别有道理。我希望其他 AI 领域的领导者也能像你一样解释得这么清楚。不过，对你来说，你肯定因此承受了不少批评，比如……Host: I've heard I've heard you explain it. you explain it extremely well and you make a lot of sense and I wish the rest of the AI leaders would explain it as well as you did. But like for you, you must be catching a lot of flak in like

嘉宾：嗯，所以我最主要的一点是，我总是努力以第一性原理的方式看待事情。如果我对某件事有很强的信念，而且这种信念是基于一系列真实可靠的事实建立起来的，那我完全不介意和别人意见相左。你知道，我会试着指出为什么我觉得别人错了，以及为什么我们要努力把事情做对。不过我确实觉得，在 Cruso，想把事情做对、想为世界提供一项有益的服务，这种想法从根本上说已经融入了我们的文化。Guest: Well, so my my major thing is like I'm I'm I always try to take a very first principled approach to things and if I have high conviction in something like I've built up from a set of ground truth facts, I have no problem disagreeing with someone. And you know, I can try to poke holes into why, you know, someone else I think is wrong and why, you know, we're trying to do things the right way, but I do feel like fundamentally at Cruso like permeates in the culture like people want to do this the right way. People want to do this as a as a good service to the world.

这已经变成了一个政治议题，尤其是围绕着，呃，你知道，AI 数据中心。关于这件事，外面有太多错误信息了。我经常说，数据中心行业最大的问题是我们有个营销问题——我们没能把真相传达出去。而在我看来，真相站在我们这边。所以，当你把真相解释清楚时——我参加过这样的场合，你知道，我会去当地社区，和县法官见面，也会和这些社区里的人们见面；我们正在那里建设基础设施。你坐下来，真正向他们解释正在发生什么，而不是摆出一副“嘿，我比你聪明，你得听我的”的架势。this has become a political issue particularly around uh the uh you know the AI data centers and there's just so much misinformation around around this out there that you know I've I've often said that like what the data center industry like their biggest problem is we have a marketing problem we haven't been able to get the truth out there and to me the truth is on our side and so when you explain the truth and I've been in these rooms you know where you know I go to these local communities I meet with the county judge I meet with um you know folks in these communities that where where we're building infrastructure and when you sit down and you really explain to them what's happening and you know you're not coming at it from like a hey I'm I'm smarter than you got to like listen to me.

就像，就像这就是正在发生的事情，这是我们努力做到最好的方式，让这件事对你、对我们、对整个世界都有好处。你知道，我觉得当你进行这样的对话时，人们是愿意接受的，对吧？这与政治、政治立场无关。我觉得人们愿意接受真实和事实，所以这确实是我们现在采取的做法。至于从安全角度来说我担不担心？当然担心。我们增加了安保部署，只是因为你知道，外面有些疯子想要、想要、想要搞出大动静。所以，是的。It's like it's like here here's just like what's happening and here's here's how we're trying to do our very best to make it uh good for you and good for us and good for the world and you know I think when you have those conversations like people are receptive to it right independent of politics you know political allegiances I think people are receptive to authenticity and facts and so that's really our approach to this now am I worried from a security standpoint sure we've had increase our security footprint just, you know, uh given given there's there's, you know, crazy people out there that uh want to want to want to create a big statement. So, uh yeah.

主持人：是啊。嗯，所以我想你走进的有些房间里，会有些情绪激动的人。你第一次走进那样的房间，大家对着你尖叫、吼叫，那是什么感觉？这种事根本没人教你怎么应对。说真的，我觉得还是要试着诉诸他们的人性，也要理解为什么有人会说出那些话。我觉得要倾听事实。我常常有非常强烈的看法，但只要有新的信息和事实，我总是愿意改变自己的看法。所以，我觉得重要的是要有这种思维上的灵活性，能够说：“嘿，我原本非常确信我们做得对。但了解了这件新情况之后，我们或许应该换种方式做，也可能把事情做得更好。”Host: Yeah. Um and so I assume some of these rooms you're walking into, there's some hysterical people. What is that like the first room you walk into and people are screaming and yelling at you? Like there's no training for that. Again, I think honestly like appealing to, you know, their humanity and like understanding why someone may be, you know, saying what they're saying. I think listening to the facts. I think like, you know, I often have very strong opinions, but I can always change them in light of new information and new facts. So, like that's like uh I think it's important to have that like intellectual flexibility to say like, "Hey, I had high conviction that we were doing things the right way. upon learning this new thing, we should probably be doing this differently and we could probably be doing this better.

我认为，这体现了我们公司与生俱来的成长型思维。作为领导者，我也一直努力引导这种思维，比如倾听这些批评，并试着分辨哪些是毫无事实依据的疯狂歇斯底里，哪些是合理的批评性反馈。我们应该利用这些反馈，成为这些社群更好的管理者。And I think like that is like an inherent growth mindset that we have here as a company and you know I've tried to channel as a leader like to you know have uh you know the ability to listen to you know these these these these criticisms and uh you know try to try to filter out like what is crazed hysteria that's you know unfounded in truth and what's like legitimate critical feedback that we should you know be using to become a better steward of these communities.

主持人：你认为厚脸皮是 CEO 非常重要的特质吗？Host: Do you think having thick skin is a very important attribute for a CEO?

嘉宾：百分之百。嗯，是啊，我的意思是，你的工作就是经常接收坏消息，然后还能保持头脑清醒地思考，并根据这些坏消息做出决策。我觉得，作为领导者，另一件重要的事——说实话，也是我一直在努力应对的——就是随着公司发展壮大，我会离公司一线的员工越来越远。所以要努力缩小这个差距，确保我始终平易近人，让大家能够直言不讳，对掌权者说出真话，对吧？你希望营造这样的环境，让大家能够表达自己的顾虑，并且被倾听；而当你听到真话，并结合其他正在发生的事情来考虑时，就能够真正调整业务的发展方向。Guest: 100%. Uh yeah, I mean just your job is to like consu be the receiver of bad news very frequently and then be able to think with a clear mind and you know make decisions in light of that bad news. And I think the other thing that you know is important for a leader is like and you know frankly something that I'm always struggling with is like as the company grows and the company gets bigger I'm like I'm like further from like a distance from like individuals you know on the front lines of the company. So trying to like close the gap, making sure that I'm always approachable to like that people can speak truth to power, right? You want to be in a position where people can voice their concerns and be heard and, you know, in light of presenting truth, you know, in the context of everything else that's happening that you can actually adjust uh, you know, the direction of your business.

主持人：你有什么办法鼓励大家这么做，确保他们敢于顶撞你吗？比如说，你雇的第2000个人会把你捧上神坛；第20个人却会天天把你批得体无完肤。Host: Do you have methods to encourage that to make sure people will stand up to you? Like do you cuz the 2,000th person you hire, they put you on a pedestal. The 20th person's beating you up dayto day.

嘉宾：是的，我的意思是，说实话，这就像是在主动挖掘，反复追问、不断索要反馈。我觉得，当人们看到你接受批评和反馈、作出回应、改变想法时，就会受到鼓舞，觉得：“哦，其实我也应该发出自己的声音，我也应该表达我的顾虑。”你知道，我觉得人们常常会认为，作为领导者、作为 CEO，你通常只想听好消息。好消息当然很好，我也想听，但比起好消息，我更在意坏消息。所以我会努力主动去了解：哪里出了问题？我们哪些方面做得不好？你知道，我们该如何解决这些问题？问题究竟是什么？我该怎么去解决？Guest: Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's it's it's like uh mining for it, just asking for it relentlessly. Uh I think when people see examples of you taking criticism and feedback, responding to it, changing your mind, I think it empowers people to be like, "Oh, actually my voice should, you know, I should voice my concern." And you know, like I think people often have this perspective that you as the leader, you as the CEO, you want only want to hear the good news generally. Like the good news is great. Like I want to hear it, but like I care way less about the good news than I do about the bad news. So like trying to trying to like run into those like what's going wrong? Like what are we bad at? Like you know how do we fix these things? What are the problems? How do I go resolve those?

珠峰：围绕昆布冰瀑的随机风险进行设计Everest: designing around the Khumbu Icefall's stochastic risk

你知道，我觉得这是 CEO 的一个关键特质：愿意主动去寻找问题，就像冲进着火的大楼一样，弄清楚问题，然后试着帮忙解决问题。like you know I think that is a critical characteristic of a CEO is like being that willingness to go seek out and like run into the burning buildings figure out the problems and you know go try to you know help help resolve them.

主持人：好，这个问题是问我的，我想其他人也会感兴趣。我从来、从来没遇到过攀登过珠穆朗玛峰的人，我真的很佩服。那是什么感觉？训练是怎样的？登上那座山的顶峰时，感觉又如何？Host: Okay, this question is for me and I would imagine other people are interested. I've ne never met someone that climbed Mount Everest and I'm really impressed. What is it like? What is the training like? What does it feel like when you get to the top of that mountain?

嘉宾：呃，你知道，很多时候，一家公司的文化某种程度上就像是 CEO 或创始人文化的映照。你知道，Cruso 正是如此。比如，我们确实有一条核心公司价值观，叫作“像登山者一样思考”。嗯，这代表着一种文化韧性，以及做好准备、制定计划，还有愿意坚持走完这趟探险旅程的精神。我们为这条价值观写下的许多理念和做法，都描述了攀登珠峰是什么样的。所以，你知道，我其实有一份内部演示文稿，讲的是我几次珠峰之行。因为我在2014年真的尝试攀登过一次珠峰，当时昆布冰瀑区发生了一场大雪崩，最终造成15名夏尔巴人遇难。嗯，你知道，我回来后，算是有意识地做了一个决定。我妻子当时说：“哦，谢天谢地，这一章总算结束了，你不用再做这件事了。”Guest: Uh, you know, in a lot of ways, like a company culture is sort of a reflection of, you know, the CEO or the founders's culture. And, you know, that's really what's happening at Cruso. Like, we actually have a core company value to think like a mountaineer. Um, which is like this sense of cultural resilience and preparation and planning and, you know, willingness to endure the expedition. a lot of that value and the practices that we've written about for that value describe a lot of what it's like to climb Mount Everest and so you know there's actually this whole internal presentation I have around you know the various Everest trips that I had because I actually tried to climb Mount Everest once in 2014 and there was a big avalanche that occurred and it ended up killing 15 sherpas in the Kumbu icefall and um you know I made sort of this conscious decision like you know I came back and my wife was like oh thank god like that chapter is done and like you don't have to do this anymore.

我当时就说：“听着，这件事一直萦绕在我脑海里，我满脑子想的都是它，我就是得回去。”她说：“你疯了吧。”嗯，不过她又说：“但如果你真要这么做，请在我们有孩子之前去。”嗯，所以，呃，不过我想到这件事的时候，感觉就很像你想到珠穆朗玛峰时的那种感觉，你知道，我是从南坡攀登的，也就是尼泊尔那一侧，呃，穿过昆布山谷。你知道，基本上你先到大本营，或者说徒步前往大本营，然后从大本营到一号营地，接着是二号营地、三号营地、四号营地，然后再冲顶。嗯，山上最危险的两个区域基本上就是从四号营地到顶峰的这段路，这段路经常被称为“死亡地带”。And I was like, "Look, this thing like haunts me and like it's all I think about and like I like have to go back." She's like, "You're insane." Um, but like if you're going to do that, please do it before we have kids. Um, so, uh, but when I thought about that, it was like very much like when you think about Mount Everest, you know, and I climbed on the south side, which is, you know, the Nepal side, uh, through the Kumbu Valley. There's this, you know, you basically start at base camp and then or you trek up to base camp and then you go from base camp to camp 1 and then there's camp 2, camp 3, camp 4 and then you have this push to the summit. Well, the two most dangerous areas on the mountain are basically from camp 4 to the summit, which is which is frequently referred to as the death zone.

这里就是海拔超过 8,000 米的地方。所以你知道，那里的危险显而易见。海拔非常非常高，人类确实不该住在那里。嗯，不过另一个最危险的区域，是大本营和一号营地之间的这片区域，叫作昆布冰瀑。我 2014 年在那里时，灾难就发生在这里。昆布冰瀑的问题在于，你知道，它是一座正在崩塌的冰川，对吧？所以它就像一座美丽又酷炫的冰雪丛林游乐场，但其中有很多风险是随机的，对吧？有些事情完全不受你控制，比如一块岩石掉下来，或者发生雪崩，然后你就——哎呀，没命了。而我当时面对的就是这种风险，我心想：听着，我知道自己可以通过有意识地训练和准备来适应高海拔，也知道自己可以更有效地管理在那里的风险，而且我清楚自己是在主动承担这种风险。This is where you're above 8,000 mters. So, you know, very intuitive why that's dangerous. You're at very very high altitude where humans really shouldn't be living. Um but the other most dangerous area is this area between base camp and camp 1 which is called the Kumbu icefall. So this was the area where uh you know this disaster occurred when I was there in 2014. And uh the thing about the Kumbu icefall is that you know it's it's a glacier that's sort of falling right. So it's this beautiful like really cool ice jungle gym but there's a lot of things that are just like stochastic risk right? It's like these things that are totally outside of your control where it's like a S rock falls or an avalanche occurs and you know oops you die. And that was the type of risk where I was like look I know there are ways I can consciously train and prepare for the high elevation and you know I can manage my risk up there like more effectively and I know consciously I'm taking that risk.

我觉得不太放心的风险，是这种随机性风险。传统的珠峰探险通常要从大本营前往一号营地，而且山上会有登山者。你要从大本营到一号营地，再返回大本营；然后再从大本营到一号营地、再到二号营地，之后返回大本营；再上到三号营地，然后又回到大本营。这样一来，你最终要穿越昆布冰瀑八次。也就是说，参加一次典型的商业向导探险，通常要往返四趟。为了降低这方面的风险，我和攀登搭档设计了一种不同的珠峰攀登方案：我们去附近爬了好几座山，并在那些山顶待了很长时间，以便适应高海拔，同时避免在昆布冰瀑中承担这种随机性风险。实际上，我们只进行了一次前往珠峰的大型适应性攀登，然后就返回了大本营。The risk I felt less comfortable with was this stochastic risk. And a traditional Everest expedition involves going from base camp to camp 1 and you're you actually have climate eyes on the mountains. You go base camp 1 back to base camp base camp 1 camp 2 back to base camp up to camp 3 back to base camp. And you actually end up doing eight trips through the Kumbu icefall. So like four round trips on a typical commercially guided expedition. In order to derisk that, me and my climbing partner actually designed a different approach to climbing Everest, which was we ended up going and climbing a bunch of mountains nearby and spending a lot of time at the summits of those mountains so that we would acclimatize without taking this stoastic risk in the Kumbu icefall. And we actually only did one big acclimatization trip up Mount Everest and then back to base camp.

所以最后我们基本上只穿越了四次昆布冰瀑，而不是八次。我很清楚自己想承担什么样的风险。嗯，你知道，规划、准备，诸如此类。我们必须仔细考虑很多事情，进行了大量训练，跑了很多长距离越野，还进行了几次不同的高海拔训练之旅。但我想表达的重点是，我们有意识地承担风险，并进行了周密的规划和准备，最终在 2018 年成功登顶珠峰。So we ended up doing basically four passes through the Kumbu icefall instead of eight. I was conscious of the risk that I wanted to take. Um you know the planning, preparation, you know all that. You know we had to think through a ton of stuff. A lot of training, a lot of long-distance trail running and uh you know a couple of different like al high altitude you know training training trips. But you know the point I want to get across is like you know conscious risk-taking and intense planning and preparation that really went into uh a very successful Everest summit in 2018.

主持人：你为此付出了那么多努力，也那么渴望成功。当你登上顶峰时，内心是什么感受？Host: You worked so hard at it and you wanted it so badly. What was the feeling inside of you when you got to the top?

嘉宾：当时我差点就在一个叫“阳台”的地方掉头回去。那里海拔大约 8,600 米，而顶峰海拔 8,848 米。所以从海拔上说，离顶峰已经不远了，但感觉却遥不可及，而且天还黑着，对吧？我们大概晚上 11 点离开了四号营地。到达阳台时，天还是黑的。我当时感觉糟透了：过去 48 小时里几乎没怎么吃东西，还脱了水，浑身难受，腿也在抽筋。天又黑着，对吧？而且，说真的，是我的同伴激励我继续走下去。除了这些状况，我觉得自己还好，并不觉得自己是在冒险。一旦太阳升起，你看到日出，身处这座山的高处，周围的一切自然会给你力量。Guest: It was like because I almost turned around at this uh this area called the balcony. It's about 8,600 meters. Um so the summit's 8848. Um and so you know not too far from the summit in terms of elevation, but like it felt impossibly far and it was still dark out, right? So we had left camp 4 at like 11 p.m. It was still dark out when we got to the balcony. My, you know, you feel terrible like, you know, I hadn't eaten much in the last 48 hours. Like I was dehydrated. I felt awful. My legs were cramping. Like and it was dark, right? And you know, my partner was really the person who inspired me to continue. I like I felt fine apart from those things. So I wasn't like felt like I was putting myself at risk. And once once the sun came up and you start seeing the sunrise and you're you're sort of high up in this mountain, you're like you're just inspired by, you know, your surroundings.

你知道，那是一种精神上的振奋，呃，让你肾上腺素飙升，得以一鼓作气冲过最后大约250米的路程。嗯，你知道，当我登上山顶时，我想自己心里充满的，真的是一种敬畏之情——对宇宙的敬畏，也对自己身处山顶、尽览周围整个世界的体验心怀敬畏。嗯，我觉得那真是一次特别的经历，让人觉得自己很渺小，对吧？嗯，我觉得这种感受很有意思：意识到自己很渺小，却受到周围世界的启发，也为存在的壮丽所打动。嗯，这大概就是我登顶时的体验。那里美极了，天气也非常晴朗，所以我们在山顶待了大约一个小时，拍了很多照片，尽情享受这英雄般的成就时刻。you're, you know, it was this elevation of your spirits and, uh, gave you the adrenaline to kind of like make the push through that final, uh, you know, 250 meters. And uh you know when I got to the summit I think you know my feeling was was really one of just she sure awe just like you know just a sense of awe for the universe and you know an awe for you know this that you know being on this summit and sort of experiencing you know the whole the whole world around me. um you know I think I think was just a really special one and it makes you feel small right and uh you know I think I think there's something uh very interesting about like you know having that sense of like I'm small and I'm inspired by the world around me and just like the magnificence of existence and uh you know that was kind of my my experience on the summit we it was beautiful we had about we had a very sunny day so we spent about an hour uh up at the summit and you know just took a bunch of pictures uh really enjoyed this heroic moment of achievement.

Brian的要点Brian's takeaways

主持人：恭喜你取得所有成就。我支持你。你是一位出色的首席执行官。感谢你来参加节目。Host: Congratulations and all your success. I'm rooting for you. You're a fantastic CEO. Thanks for coming on.

嘉宾：布莱恩，谢谢你邀请我来。这次聊得真开心。Guest: Brian, thanks for having me. This was really fun.

主持人：好。希望你喜欢这期关于 Chase 的节目。他是一位非常靠谱的 CEO，把这项业务发展得很好。我来分享几点我的收获。第一点是关于他这个人，或者说作为一个智人。他是那种非常喜欢迎接艰巨挑战的人；而我在招募和投资 CEO 时，这绝对是我看重的品质。我很喜欢他谈到 CEO 这份工作变化有多大。他以前从没做过类似的事。呃，他已经走上这段旅程八年了，真是个学习机器。他读了很多相关的东西，还请了一位教练。听起来他的教练确实帮了他很多。我也辅导不少红杉的 CEO，你知道，其中一部分是给他们提建议，但更多时候是了解背景、倾听他们的问题、设身处地地体会他们的处境，某种程度上就像个心理治疗师。所以他从中受益匪浅。Host: Okay. Hope you like that episode with Chase. He is a very legit CEO scaling that business really well. I give you a couple of my takeaways. My first takeaway is kind of on him as a homo sapien. He's a person who really likes hard challenges and like when I recruit and I fund CEOs, that's definitely a quality that I look for. I liked how he talked about just how much the CEO job changed. He had never done anything like that before. Uh he's eight years into the journey and man, he's a learning machine. He read a lot about it. He hired a coach. It sounds like his coach was really useful and I coach a bunch of Sequoia CEOs and you know some of it is giving them advice but a lot of it is gaining context and listening to the problems and empathizing and really kind of being like a therapist. So he benefited a lot from that.

他努力做的另一件事，听起来就是公开演讲。他表达非常流畅，措辞也很清晰，而且听起来这并不是他天生就具备的能力。他一定为此下了很大功夫。我觉得这很重要。比如说，如果你要在公司员工面前发言，或者面对投资人，我不觉得表达清晰、流畅有什么坏处。我喜欢他谈论竞争的方式。他说了一句我们以前在 HubSpot 常说的话：你死于自杀的可能性，远高于死于谋杀。嗯，这非常符合我们的情况。听起来他非常认同竞合。我觉得很多创始人对此不以为然。多年来，我们和 Salesforce.com 之间一直存在重要的竞合关系。所以我不会回避这种关系。我一直以来做的另一件事，就是了解我们的竞争对手，因为你永远不知道会发生什么。The other thing he worked hard on sounds like his public speaking he's very smooth like really articulate and smooth and sounds like that wasn't his default setting. He's had to really work at that. And I think that's important. Like if if you're up in front of your company, you're up in front of investors. I don't think it hurts to be articulate and smooth. I like the way he talked about competition. He said something we used to say at HubSpot all the time. You're much more likely to die of suicide than murder. Um it was very much our case. It sounds to me he's really into coopetition. And I think a lot of founders frown on that. We had major coopetition over many many years with Salesforce.com. So I wouldn't shy away from that. The other thing I always did is I always got to know our competitors just because you never know.

嗯，所以别害怕联系你的竞争对手，和他们一起喝杯咖啡。我特别喜欢的另一点是，随着组织规模不断扩大——我在 HubSpot 时就有这种感受——每个人都想给你报喜。你是 CEO，他们觉得你想听好消息，但你真正想要的恰恰相反。你想听到坏消息，也想培养组织主动向你报告坏消息的习惯。所以，当人们反驳你、在一个规模相当大的组织里向你报告坏消息时，你应该鼓励他们。我认为这是 CEO 非常重要的一种品质。 我认为 CEO 另一项重要的品质是：他具备这种品质，你或许也有。他的观点非常鲜明，正如你听到的那样，但如果事实发生变化，他也愿意改变自己的想法。Um and so don't don't be afraid to reach out your to your competitors and have coffee. The last thing I took that I really liked is as the organization gets bigger and I felt this at HubSpot, everyone wants to give you good news. you're the CEO and they expect you want to hear good news and you really want the opposite. You want to hear the bad news and you want to train the organization to give you that bad news. So almost encouraging people when they push back at you and when they give you bad news inside of a you know a pretty good size setting. I think that's a really important quality in CEOs. The other thing that I think is an important CEO quality that I think he does and you might too, but he has very strong opinions as you've heard, but if the facts change, he's willing to change his mind.

而且，固执是 CEO 身上一个很难对付的特质，也会让人很难跟随他。总之，这就是我的一些体会。我觉得他非常出色。嗯，这是一家了不起的企业，他也是一位了不起的 CEO。希望你喜欢这期节目，我们下次《漫长而奇异的旅程》再见。And being stubborn is a really tough quality in a CEO and makes you quite hard to follow. Anyway, those are some of my takeaways. I thought he was great. Um, it's an amazing business. He's an amazing CEO. I hope you liked it and I'll see you next time on Long Strange Trip.