CEOInterviews.AIThe Future of Everything: What CEOs of Circle, CrowdStrike & More See Coming in 2026

I

Interviewer0:00

All right, everybody. Welcome back to All-In at Davos. We're here at the World Economic Forum. For some reason, they invited me and I'm here interviewing all the most important people in the All-In style, which is Full Contact.

N

Narrator0:13

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I

Interviewer0:50

I think most of us agree going into 2026, stable coins and AI, crypto having a huge resurgence and we were lucky enough to get two of my friends, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, and Jeremy Allaire, who's the CEO and co-founder of Circle. We've known each other for 30 years.

J

Jeremy Allaire1:07

Yeah, it's amazing.

I

Interviewer1:08

What a long strange trip it's been.

J

Jeremy Allaire1:10

I know. It's great to be with you again.

I

Interviewer1:11

Yeah. And this is not your first time at Davos. You've been here a couple times.

J

Jeremy Allaire1:15

Yeah, I started coming with my last company, Brightcove, back in 2008, 2009. And very different time both for we it was a different time in the world. There was great financial crisis breaking out everywhere. And that was an interesting backdrop and also notable I always reference that same week was when the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain was minted with the Chancellor on the brink bailout kind of embedded in the blockchain.

I

Interviewer1:46

Yeah, it's fascinating. I think it's Game of Thrones. Chaos is a ladder.

J

Jeremy Allaire1:49

Chaos is a ladder. Yeah, it's and for guys like us who've been through this I guess three times now. We went through it in the dot-com boom. I think we were too young to have we were you remember obviously that black Friday in '87 but we were in college I think.

I

Interviewer2:06

And so we had our great financial crisis and then we had co

J

Jeremy Allaire2:11

Co. Yeah, which was also pretty spicy.

I

Interviewer2:14

That was a great disruptor. When you have those moments happen, I'm guessing for you and many of the founders I talked to, you just think this is the time to build.

J

Jeremy Allaire2:26

Yeah, totally. I mean, constraints have a huge impact on what an entrepreneur does. And even in the history of Circle, we've had extraordinary ups and downs, some of which are endogenous shocks, exogenous shocks, all of this. And back to that 2009, that was that year actually I got my company profitable pre-IPO and then not long after it went public. So we deal with what we're dealt with constraints. Yeah.

I

Interviewer2:54

Yeah. Necessity makes for great art is the old expression. So let's talk about your journey with Circle. Stable coins obviously are top of mind because we had the Genius Act. My bestie David Sacks, who's our crypto and AI czar for America, who's here with me at Davos, or I should say I'm here with him. He invited me to come. This technology is important. Why?

J

Jeremy Allaire3:17

Well, when I got started working on this almost 13 years ago, Bitcoin had emerged and it was from my perspective as an internet technologist I was thinking about wow, this seems like a new infrastructure layer for the internet, like a missing infrastructure layer of the internet. The internet had ways to represent data, media, audio, video, software, but there was no notion of money on the internet and there was no protocol for money on the internet. And it was very clear at the time that that was going to happen. And when we started, I wasn't convinced that everyone in the world is just going to use a new commodity money like Bitcoin. My view is that we needed a bridge. We needed to connect the existing fiat system to crypto and to these new networks and build what we called an HTTP for dollars on the internet. And that was the idea. And eventually that's called stable coins. Early on we talked about we're building fiat digital currency or fiat tokens or all this, but stable coins stuck. The basic idea is we now have a general purpose, general architecture form of money on the internet, digital dollars that can move just like everything else, and can transact peer-to-peer, which is super powerful and provides a huge amount of value to people. And really importantly, because of the technology of blockchains, we actually have programmable money. So we're right at the front edge of a renaissance in how money is used in the world. We'll come back to AI, I'm sure, because it ties into that. But fundamentally, we need a native way to have money on the internet. We need a very safe form of dollars on the internet, and that's what stable coins provide.

I

Interviewer4:25

And variability and not knowing how much your dollar is worth when you open your wallet or your bank account was a blocker for consumers. Yeah, volatile cryptocurrencies, no one's going to buy a cup of coffee with a Bitcoin. So that's where the word stable coin came from. It's like, well, it's a coin, but it's stable. How do you actually achieve that is a whole different thing and that's where the model that we built, which is fully reserved with ultra safe assets and regulators look after it and auditors look after it and make sure it's all done the right way.

And I remember talking to you offline about this. It was the easier decision for most people in crypto to go to the Z, the Zug. What is it? Zug.

J

Jeremy Allaire6:03

Zug.

I

Interviewer6:04

The Zug here in Switzerland or just be based in Zurich or be based in maybe Dubai. And just yolo it and don't worry about regulations and don't worry about audits. Don't worry about regulators. You made a different decision. You told me, 'No, I'm going to do this buttoned up and proper.' And why didn't you go for the quick, you know, I'll just do this offshore and give up my United States citizenship.

J

Jeremy Allaire6:33

Yes, we have many crypto people right now watching this show from San Quentin. I actually, you know, going back to even the founding of the company, when I looked at okay, if we want to establish a new way to put what we think of as regular money on the internet and we want to build a new internet native financial system that the whole world uses, like businesses are going to use it and people are going to use it and we're going to do loans in it, we're going to do all these things with it. If you want it to work that way, you have to integrate with the existing system and you have to work with policy makers to figure that out. There's just no other way. So I testified to the Senate in November of 2013 and if you read the testimony, I'm saying all the same stuff now as I did then. It was received slightly differently. I got a lot of hate very early on. Take yourself back to that moment in time where you're in the right, you're trying to explain how to do this correctly and you get a reaction that is different than what you anticipated. With a lot of technologies on the internet, I was around in early stages of the internet, early stages of the web. There's a very kind of hard libertarian view and then there's the statist end of that. I lean libertarian, but in the early days of the internet, it was like, well, if we want to allow companies to get on, we need to have regulation for ISPs and we need to be able to have secure transactions and SSL. Then we're going to need people who are making decisions about who's a valid site and who's not. These were really controversial things at the time that the more anarcho side was against. And now crypto itself, cryptography and crypto kind of was birthed out of that. These are people who wanted to be outside the system. Circle has always tried to find this middle way: open public networks, permissionless innovation, building on public blockchains, using open-source infrastructure. What you can do with something like USDC as a dollar and as a technology is far more open than the legacy payment systems and legacy money systems. There is a deep commitment to those fundamental internet ideas. But at the same time, if you want BlackRock to use it or the biggest tech companies in the world to use it, or just someone to hold it in a digital wallet and be like, 'Yeah, this is actually a dollar and I can rely on it,' you end up needing to have this kind of structure around it for trust. Trust remains a key thing. People talk about 'in code we trust,' but that's easy for a developer to feel that way. For a civilian, non-anarchist, maybe you want to understand how the dollar is actually backed. So we took that path, and it was a harder path. It took more capital. I had to hire my first executive as a general counsel and chief compliance officer.

I

Interviewer10:13

Well, you had to bring those in house, I suppose, because if you went to a law firm they would be like we don't know and don't take this risk.

J

Jeremy Allaire10:23

Yeah. One of the stories actually is that before Jim Breyer and General Catalyst would give me capital to when we were starting the company, they were like we really need to know that if you do this it's not illegal, we're not going to have some kind of liability issue. So I personally on my own with my own money hired the top regulatory advisory firm in the world to go look closely at this, talk to people at the US Treasury Department, talk to others, really figure out can we do this. And actually we could. There was a path to do it because the US Treasury Department had given guidance about how to deal with virtual currency in the banking system in March 2013, so super early. But we needed to know there is a legitimate legal pathway to accomplishing what we want to accomplish. That has always been important.

I

Interviewer11:18

And as we've seen, there's things that are legal and then there are incumbents. Incumbents will use the legal system to try to stop innovators. You've also faced a little bit of that.

J

Jeremy Allaire11:28

Yeah. In the entire history of building this, there have been huge uphill battles with regulators and incumbents. What's interesting is that I found over the years that if you come into a policy maker or a regulator and say, 'Hey, there's a new technology, it can improve things in this way. We're trying to figure out how to deal with the risks. There are real risks. Let's not pretend there aren't and let's come up with ways to address that,' actually people are pretty interested in talking. So that's there. But generally when you go to the incumbents and say, 'Hey, we want to work with you or integrate this because we need to work with you to make the whole thing happen,' a lot more skepticism and constraint. That's changed now. We're in a very different world now. It's gone from a threat to an opportunity, but there is still a little reticence to stable coins and crypto by some of the major banks and big players because maybe they're a little concerned that you're too good at what you do and you might be too far ahead. If you weren't so dextrous at doing this and capable, and they started 5 years ago, they might feel differently. Is my intuition close to your assessment or am I wrong?

I think there's some truth in that for sure. It's interesting, it's both you and I have this juxtaposition against other eras of the internet. When digital media happened, media companies were like we can do that too. Digital advertising, you can transform advertising. But there were companies that executed fundamentally different technical execution, software execution, built completely different types of utilities with completely different unit economics that turned the product user experience and the economics upside down. We know those companies: Craigslist to classified, Google ad network, New York Times marketplace, and many more. I think we're in a similar place right now where a lot of media companies, communications companies, soft enterprise software companies, retailers have said okay this is a new paradigm, it's better for customers, the economics are better, we just have to do this. They make that transition and it takes 5 to 10 years.

I

Interviewer14:32

It takes them three times longer than probably the innovator. Walmart and Target actually do an exceptional job now. The United Airlines app is not terrible, right? It's not Uber, but this is the difference between a software-driven company and a non. We're a software company, of course we're going to go faster, of course we're going to understand UX. So the banks now, my understanding is some of them are threatened by the concept of a stable coin having the ability to generate points, incentives, or interest essentially. That's the sticking point. The Genius Act says you can have rewards but you can't have interest. That was where this was able to get through the legislative process. Explain that to the audience.

J

Jeremy Allaire15:21

So a couple things. If you go back a few years when stable coins emerged, the biggest regulators, bank regulators around the world got together, what's called the Financial Stability Board, and said we have to have regulations around this. This can't just go crazy. That was also when Libra was coming out. Meta tried to do their own project.

I

Interviewer15:44

They gave up on that project based on my insider information because the government felt they had too much power already with their platform. Zuckerberg said, 'I have enough heat on this company already. I don't want to have another group of people thinking I have too much power,' and he shut it down. That's what I was told by insiders.

J

Jeremy Allaire16:08

That's interesting. You know, we're kind of a neutral company, not a giant big tech. Coming back to your question, regulators got together and said, 'Hey, there is this payment system innovation called stable coins.' They all made recommendations for how to regulate this. Actually all around the world that happened. It happened first in Japan, stablecoin laws. Then in Europe years ago, stablecoin laws. Then in the UAE, Hong Kong, and in the US with the Genius Act. In all of these, stable coins are designed as a cash-like instrument, a payment instrument, a form of money to be used in the payment system. That's at the heart of it. The Genius Act does that. Under the Genius Act, Circle as a payment stablecoin issuer is prohibited from paying interest directly to stablecoin holders. Same in Europe, same in Japan. But at the same time, we're building a business. We generate revenue and work with lots of platforms, markets, distributors, brokerages. We work with everyone from Robinhood to Revolut to Coinbase to Visa and many companies. Those companies, stablecoins are important because they are how people hold money, make payments, trade, do a lot on those platforms. They want to be able to pay rewards or have loyalty programs or incentives. If they're making money from their relationship with us, they want to be able to do that. That's what the Genius Act captured. I think it's a good model. There's ongoing discussion about what qualifies for those kinds of rewards, and how prescriptive the law should be. It's being relitigated a little bit.

I

Interviewer18:37

The banks, my understanding, maybe want to try to kill it. Some of them who feel the most threatened. Is that the back channel here at Davos?

J

Jeremy Allaire18:44

I think banks see stable coins as both a threat and an opportunity. We're having more engagement with more banks in the world than we've ever had before. Major global banks, regional banks, banks all over the world want to integrate this and use it in payments, in how capital markets work. Think about posting collateral on an exchange to trade different assets. Stablecoins are a better way to do that. Whether it's capital markets, trading, wealth management, payments, there are uses. Banks see a lot of opportunity because it's faster and cheaper, instant and essentially free. If you talk to a global money center bank like JP Morgan or Citibank, ask them how many payment networks they are integrated into, they'll say over 200. All different standards, all different systems. If you go to them and say stablecoin networks are a new payment network, they get it. It's on the internet, it has the attributes of how the internet works. This will be your fastest, cheapest, and most trackable version. We have a global systemically important bank that we work with who is moving their own money between their own global branches using USDC because it's faster than going through the correspondent banking system. They trust it more. So bottom line, there's a lot of opportunity for banks. It's not black or white. We'll figure out this rewards thing. I'm very sure.

I

Interviewer20:51

Yeah. I mean AMEX figured it out and video games figured it out. There was a little rattling even in those cases where they were like, 'Hey, is this a currency because people are trading it on eBay?' Trading my sword from World of Warcraft. They were like, 'Oh, do you have your own currency?' It's like, they're playing video games. Who cares? Can we just move on? There's more important things to do in the world than sweat pretending it's a currency. You're up against an offshore platform that has I think maybe three times the amount of assets under management. Tether, who's counting? Three, four, five times. But you have been catching up pretty quick.

J

Jeremy Allaire21:37

Yeah. USDC amongst the largest stable coins has been growing faster for two years straight. We're the second largest. Tether's first. We are by far the largest regulated stablecoin network. Our growth in the amount of transactions happening with USDC is growing quite a bit faster as well. We feel really good. Our view has been, to the earlier question, if this is going to be part of the actual economic system, if households and firms and corporations and financial institutions are going to use this and depend on this, whether you're a remote worker in Pakistan, a small business importing products from Vietnam in Brazil, or a hedge fund in the US trading derivatives, you're going to want to know that you have something that is safe, fully reserved, audited, compliant, liquid, available in and out of the global financial system. When we think about that opportunity, it's enormous. The TAM of legal electronic money today is about $120 trillion and growing. Of that, there's about $60 trillion in physical cash and non-interest bearing demand deposits, working capital money sitting out there. There's a huge amount of value stored and used as a store of value and payment system money. Stablecoins can grow into that. There will be an infrastructure that is well integrated.

I

Interviewer23:22

And the business, there's a float on this large base of capital that underwrite your business. If interest rates are high, it's boom times. Tether's making over $10 billion a year on their float. You're making billions of dollars or low billions on your float. I'm not sure if that's public knowledge.

J

Jeremy Allaire23:41

We're a public company. You can look it up. We talk about reserve income as a line item. It's a significant amount. But if we go into a zero interest rate phenomenon, this could be challenging for the business or not. Well, a couple things. When interest rates were very low, we saw 1000% year-over-year growth two years straight. When interest rates started to rise, we actually saw declines in circulation. It's really the price of money, the opportunity cost of money. Interest rates set a cost to holding money. The incentive matters. What's interesting is that from December 2023, when the forward curve, the market's view of the short-term price of money, started to fall because the expectation of interest rates came down, USDC started to grow. From the peak of 5.25% or 5.5% down to where we are now, let's call it 3.5%, a 35-40% decline in the interest rate, we've had a multi-hundred percent increase in the amount of USDC in circulation. There's an inverse correlation. I've said this publicly many times: When interest rates are really high, we really need them to come down because that will help us grow, put more velocity of money. The pie gets bigger and impacts adoption. More people are investing capital in technology to transform their businesses. That is a catalyst. Our view is there is some conceptual neutral interest rate. Given the persistence of inflation around 2.5%, some argue the neutral rate should be 2.5 or 2.8.

I

Interviewer26:13

You know where the 2% came from? I talked about it on a previous All-In episode. I don't know if...

J

Jeremy Allaire26:15

I do, but go ahead.

I

Interviewer26:16

Yeah. New Zealand. There was a politician in New Zealand talking to their central bank and he's like, 'What should it be?' And he's like, 'I think two.' And he's like, 'How'd you come up with the number?' It's like, 'My instinct.'

J

Jeremy Allaire26:28

America's been 2.8. 4% unemployment, 2% interest rates. Both of those are going to be challenged because of very significant technological and macro forces.

I

Interviewer26:40

Yeah. Job displacement, globalization have had impacts on this depending on the country. The unemployment rate and also how many people choose to be employed. When you have a society that is doing as well as ours is or the European Union, some people just choose not to work. Labor participation now is 61 or 62%. When you and I were coming up, it peaked at 68-69%, so it's 15% higher.

J

Jeremy Allaire27:07

Yeah, it's really interesting to think about that.

I

Interviewer27:09

Changes. Tether as a competitor would not be able to operate in the US. Lots of reports, claims, concerns from politicians, the press, and regulators that they're doing some things in the dark areas that maybe you wouldn't want to touch, the dark web, dark economy. But rumor is they're going to do a US version of Tether and maybe try to go legit and audited. How do you think about them as a competitor given that they've been banned in multiple geos and there were very big concerns that they might have a run because they weren't dollar-for-dollar backed, and people had claims about maybe they have Chinese paper, and they wouldn't do an attestation or they would do an attestation with a bank in the BVI that nobody's heard of. I was not a Tether truther, but I did go down the rabbit hole because I reported on it on the pod. But they are a significant player. I'm wondering how you think about them coming to the US and becoming more legit and maybe trying to catch up with you.

J

Jeremy Allaire28:33

The beauty of having the Genius Act is that it creates a level playing field. It defines a federal law that you have to come in, not just be audited, but regulated by the national bank regulator, the OCC, which is a very serious regulator. We've received conditional approval for something called First National Digital Currency Bank, a national trust bank that we're setting up to be part of how we operate USDC. But again, level playing field. If you want to comply and build a product under that regulatory framework, you can do that. Many people will. This is like when net neutrality happened and common carrier rules came, anyone can get into providing data services. That's great. Free market, clear rules. My view is there's absolutely going to be more competition. My view is also that the structure of this market, stablecoins are network businesses. USDC and our stablecoin network is literally the software protocols, but also the tens of thousands of applications that have integrated to the APIs. Every time an app integrates, like Cash App just said they're adding USDC support. Coinbase has it, Revolut has it, banks have it, Visa's using it. Shopify merchants can use it. Every time someone adds that, it adds utility to the network and network effects. The next developer who comes along and says, 'I want to build an app that uses digital dollars, which one should I use?' They have interoperability with all this stuff. So these network effects are key. Also, what I call liquidity network effects: the ability to easily get it and use it within banking systems all around the world. We've built out this incredible liquidity network by being regulated in Singapore, the UAE, the European Union. This is a huge build. It's defensibility. We have pipes where the biggest capital markets participants like BlackRock can enable a tokenized fund that enables USDC to come in and out. I think it's a long-winded answer, but we feel like we've built a great platform and network with strong network effects that are accelerating. We've been publicly audited as a corporation on the New York Stock Exchange, SEC supervised for a long time. When companies choose what to build on, they look at all that.

I

Interviewer31:58

Yeah. The footprint matters. The marginal value of a net new dollar stablecoin coming into the market is essentially zero. You need all these things.

J

Jeremy Allaire32:10

And what do you think about this concept that everybody's going to have their own stablecoin? There'll be an Amazon one. PayPal's added one. Do you think that's realistic or do you think people are going to be like, 'That's just I might as well just use Circle.'

I don't see that. I think this is a lot like other internet platform markets. Everyone doesn't need their own data center. Everyone didn't need their own vertical search engines. Everyone didn't need to build their own video platform. Internet scale utilities achieve network effects, unit economics, developer flywheels. They tend to lower their prices over time, become more economical and capable. There's a lot one would need to do to do that. Even the biggest banks with pretty big technology budgets may reach that same conclusion.

I

Interviewer33:09

What worries you now? What's 2026 forward looking like? What keeps you up at night? The opportunity is obvious. I think you've explained it perfectly.

J

Jeremy Allaire33:18

Yeah, I think we're at an interesting place where we have a big piece of the regulatory clarity done. There's more pieces needed, related to markets, how digital tokens work. That's really important because we believe in tokenization and smart contracts as a way people will intermediate things on the internet. One thing that concerns me is the changing geopolitical and geoeconomic landscape. There are lots of different points of view on economic alignment. As a global company building technology we want to make available globally, that introduces new complexity.

I

Interviewer34:16

Yes. There we are entering an era of new alliances and national champions.

J

Jeremy Allaire34:23

Yeah, for sure. And you're an American company and America first and so you might be looked at differently based upon how the American enterprise is generally done. Our headquarters is Freedom Tower in New York City. At the same time, the technology of these networks presents an opportunity to develop versions that are more geopolitically and geoeconomically neutral, so that if you're from India, Brazil, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East, you can build on this with a variety of different economic relationships. That's something we think about.

I

Interviewer35:13

Yeah. Like a euro-based stablecoin.

J

Jeremy Allaire35:15

We have the largest euro-based stablecoin.

I

Interviewer35:18

How many currencies have you done that with so far?

J

Jeremy Allaire35:21

We've really only focused on dollars and euros.

I

Interviewer35:24

Why?

J

Jeremy Allaire35:25

Those are two widely adopted currencies, both as a store of value and as freely floatable, circulated, tradable currencies. We have a big commitment to the European market. It's part of being committed to that market. We think it's a big opportunity. For everything else, we've built a technology stack for other stablecoin issuers from other markets now that there are laws around the world.

I

Interviewer35:57

Ah, so if they want to do their national stablecoin centralized, are you doing that with Bermuda or some sort of partnership? The Bermuda partnership is related to helping them have digital dollars and have economic activity, commerce, treasury activity all happen on chain.

J

Jeremy Allaire36:16

Got it. So that's an infrastructure play, not I don't know what their dollar is.

Well, they're a dollar-backed currency. They already have their own stablecoin. But in other places, like the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Australia, Korea, there are stablecoins coming. We want to make sure we can provide technology so they can do all the same things.

I

Interviewer36:44

To the government?

J

Jeremy Allaire36:46

More to the private sector, because stablecoins are private sector innovated, but these companies all need to be regulated by the government. They need to be following the same rules. It's easier for you to partner with a major partner in those markets.

Yeah. And we want to see that grow and flourish. This idea of an internet financial system where all the economies of the world can be onchain and all the contracts, financial contracts, markets, capital formation, lending, everything.

Can happen on chain. It's obvious that small businesses and people who are very concerned about their fees...

I

Interviewer37:27

Will and you know are focused on that are being driven to stablecoins. Like they get it. They're like, 'Yeah, I'm doing my design job for you know, I'm a designer in the Philippines working for somebody in India.' They're starting to figure out, hey, I don't need to pay these. And then consumers are starting to figure it out. Maybe if they're...

J

Jeremy Allaire37:46

Yeah. Yeah.

I

Interviewer37:46

Like me, a poker player, you're sending a lot of wires. Every year I send tons of wires back and forth for different poker games.

J

Jeremy Allaire37:52

Well, now you know Polymarket and Kalshi both, you fund your account with USDC, right?

I

Interviewer37:58

And well that's because that audience understands because they're always looking for edge.

J

Jeremy Allaire38:02

Speed. Speed and but they're looking for edge in a poker game like you as a novice and I was an expert. If I was Jason and you were Phil Hellmuth, whatever it is, it's a bigger edge. It's an inside joke. Anyway, point is you might have a 1% or 2% advantage, but it compounds after 100 poker games to be a bigger number.

I

Interviewer38:24

It does.

J

Jeremy Allaire38:24

This is why the rake matters and you know gamblers and people like to wager things.

I

Interviewer38:29

You know who the biggest users of USDC are?

J

Jeremy Allaire38:32

Yeah, that's what I was kind of getting at.

I

Interviewer38:33

It's actually it is a form of gamblers which is the biggest electronic markets firms in the world.

J

Jeremy Allaire38:39

Got it. The guys who need every edge in terms of milliseconds and cost and capital efficiency to be able to move capital in markets because at the end of the day they are algorithmically trying to figure out the very next best thing to do. And if they have dollars that operate with the physics of the internet and the cost efficiency of data, they have an edge. And so they love it.

I

Interviewer39:04

They love it. And then the people who are sending money home to their family, they love it too.

J

Jeremy Allaire39:08

Yeah. Because they're like wait I'm paying Western Union 12% of this, this is crap.

I

Interviewer39:12

Right, they can have a wallet, they directly send to their counterparty and it's like wait a minute, this literally arrived. And there's proliferation of these digital wallets now that also can where you can hold it in USDC but spend it through Apple Pay, that are being issued all around the world too. So people can store value in digital dollars, use it through payment terminals, and that's pretty cool.

J

Jeremy Allaire39:37

Thesis there, because that seemed like there's something underlying that that I wasn't getting to. I mean, it's obvious that like okay, there's money flowing through there, but what's the big picture there?

I

Interviewer39:47

Well, in two, it's an amazing company. Obviously, they've been around for a long time. They have franchises that are huge. Credit Karma is a huge franchise, actually, huge. They're growing what they provide to people through that franchise. Um, QuickBooks, obviously, we all know if you run a small business, you use QuickBooks. And actually QuickBooks invoices people through QuickBooks and it's actually trillions of dollars of transactions a year that are invoiced through QuickBooks. And if you can invoice people and settle in USDC, that's better than ACH and it's faster. And you can imagine a world where small businesses can gain an advantage from something like that reconciliation. If you're a TurboTax user and you file your taxes and you get a refund, imagine being able to get your refund instantly. So I think there's a lot of cool stuff. And two, it's a very innovative company. It's a tech company that is in these financial technology adjacencies. So we're super excited about the collaboration that we have.

J

Jeremy Allaire40:47

I don't want to say there's a loser in this, but there are people who are going to be challenged by it. How does American Express and Bank of America look at Circle and stablecoins in your mind?

I

Interviewer40:59

Because they must call at some point or do they not? I think all these companies have an opportunity to use this technology, right? They have an opportunity to use this technology to improve how they provide payment utility. They have an opportunity to use it if their customers want to interact with the whole onchain economy and onchain investments and what's happening there from a wealth management perspective. I eventually think that there's going to be more credit products that are actually built using stablecoins.

J

Jeremy Allaire41:30

How would that work? Well, basically and what's the advantage?

I

Interviewer41:32

Well, so already today, there have been trillions of dollars of loans made in stablecoins through DeFi protocols. Yes. So you take your USDC and you effectively deposit it into a protocol and on the other side of that protocol is a borrower and you're paid an interest rate for the amount of time.

J

Jeremy Allaire41:53

You become the house, you become the bank.

I

Interviewer41:55

Well, the individual does actually. I mean these are as someone years ago said these are like self-driving banks meaning it's software machines where the risk management, the collateral management, the liquidation, all of the liquidity that's there is all just smart contract machines that we can all observe in real time perfectly auditable in real time, transparent. You don't have that with a bank. So you have a really interesting thing there. And right now a lot of that is like lending to people who are borrowing to do things like investing like margin type...

J

Jeremy Allaire42:23

Like margin loans. I own a million dollars in bitcoin and I want to spend 100,000 but I don't want to liquidate any bitcoin, somebody else can...

I

Interviewer42:32

And you can borrow USDC against your bitcoin and so on. But I think this is like the early stage of that. And so I think our view is that if you have these digital cash things like USDC, you can create lending protocols that are lending for I want to hire a new employee or I need some new equipment for my kitchen in my restaurant or...

J

Jeremy Allaire42:59

Factoring, equipment leasing...

I

Interviewer43:01

All these forms of lending can be done and the risk that is taken, there's real risk there, can be underwritten and the insurance on the risk failing can be priced and so you can build credit markets entirely in software, entirely with software machines coming into play. AI plus these smart contract machines and stablecoins creates a really interesting cauldron for credit market innovation.

J

Jeremy Allaire43:33

Yeah. And I have a gleam in my eye which is imagine a credit market that worked like Adwords. Imagine something that was that efficient and could clear and settle credit decisions at the speed of which an auction happens for attention. And so like those kinds of things will become possible and that probably would be pretty good for people who are on the other side of credit need.

I

Interviewer43:58

Yeah. If you think about also monetary velocity and the economy, you can get more things moving.

J

Jeremy Allaire44:06

Exactly. More jobs created, more chances, more swings at bat, more shots on goal. So money velocity increases. And I think these kinds of credit intermediation models powered by AI and blockchain networks can actually further increase money velocity. And we have a mission statement to increase global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. That is literally our mission statement. And people a lot of times they think exchange of value means like making a payment, like no. Value exchange is the sort of time value of money transformation. It's sort of I have value I don't need right now, you have a need for that value and I'm going to use time to transform that and then create new things from it. And that's where actual growth comes from. So that's what we want to see.

I

Interviewer44:54

One of the interesting things since we're here talking politics at Davos, you and I are talking tech but politics is one of the big topics here. So we'll sort of end on that a little bit and get your ideas. There's a movement towards socialism in New York City, my hometown. It's kind of heartbreaking for me to watch. California is seizing the billionaire's assets, literally asking them to write down and audit everything they own, put a value on the painting or the piece of jewelry they bought for their spouse, and we'll just take 5% of it once. And they lost 200 billionaires and a trillion dollars worth of and they don't seem to have any problem with it. As a technologist, a builder, a capitalist, as long as I've known you, what do you think about this moment in time us Gen Xers are living in watching this socialist movement?

J

Jeremy Allaire45:54

It's interesting. I just moved to New York City. Yeah. Just in time.

I

Interviewer45:57

Just in time. Yeah. By the way, that's costing you I think you're going to have to pay 2% more a year, but I don't think you're an income guy. I think you're more of a cap gains guy.

J

Jeremy Allaire46:06

Yeah. Look, here's what I would say. And actually I was with Dario from Anthropic a couple times over the past couple days, and he obviously talks a lot about the economic disruption, labor market disruption, what's going to happen with AI. He's not a doomer but he has deep concerns. I also do. Which is when I look at the very positive thing, which is I think we're going to see an acceleration of GDP growth. Pick your time frame, 3, 5, 10, 15 years, we're going to see an extraordinary period of economic growth acceleration even more than the internet and PCs. This is a very, very strong, very big transformation. But where most of the labor is actually executed by AI machines, and the capital accrues to the capital owners, and that's just kind of there in front of us.

I

Interviewer47:04

Yeah. It's the fundamental nature of capitalism.

J

Jeremy Allaire47:07

Fundamental nature. And I think that is just going to challenge us in ways that we haven't dealt with in a long time since other periods where labor was necessary for capital to succeed.

I

Interviewer47:22

Yeah. The industrial revolution was mechanized human labor, right? This is mechanized AI.

J

Jeremy Allaire47:30

And by the way, the CEO job seems like ripe for AI doing a better job than we would do at times, right? Like I don't know if you've...

I

Interviewer47:38

I use AI all the time in my... Do you ask it?

J

Jeremy Allaire47:41

I don't know if they realize what they're interacting with. No, but I literally when I was talking to Brian from Coinbase, our friend, he said he's got all of his data into a proprietary LLM internally. And he asks it, 'What do I need to know about my organization?' And it's like, 'Oh, there's non-consensus about this important issue in the corner over here.' And he's like, 'I didn't know that.'

I

Interviewer48:05

Like, whoa, is that a coach or is that like a parallel like another CEO? Did you clone yourself? It's like how do you think about that?

J

Jeremy Allaire48:16

I mean, I think about it all the time. I'm pushing very hard to encourage that we are all inside of Circle doing more with AI. We're making sure obviously with safety and compliance in mind because we're a regulated company. So there's a lot of work. We invest a lot in that. But nonetheless, creating the avenues so that that awareness and understanding can be there and that as leaders we can turn to that. I put a Slack post in a Slack channel recently that sort of said if you want to become a great manager at Circle, probably one of the best things that you could learn how to do is manage AI. Yes, and so invest in how you manage AI and AI agents. Actually, that's how you might become a better manager and leader through that. And I mean that.

I

Interviewer49:08

It is one of the, if you think about the tasks of these product managers who would run the standups or your mid-level manager historically it's to keep tabs on a group of people and their targets and their time frames and who's excelling and who's got blockers. AI is kind of better suited for that, really good. And so a great manager should be able to manage 10 groups using say Claude's co-work. I don't know if you've been playing with it yet?

J

Jeremy Allaire49:36

It's incredible.

I

Interviewer49:37

It's wild.

J

Jeremy Allaire49:37

It's really incredible.

I

Interviewer49:38

I mean, it's out a week and I'm sitting there like...

J

Jeremy Allaire49:41

We haven't deployed that inside the company yet, but I've outside looked at it and used it.

I

Interviewer49:46

What impresses you about that?

J

Jeremy Allaire49:48

I mean, the ability to take tasks that I have to do and just teach them and then it just can do them is extraordinary. And I'm trying to get this deployed in my household too. But it's really amazing.

I

Interviewer50:01

Interesting way to do it is because I went down this rabbit hole like estate management stuff like when you have to deal with this when you get a second home or however many you wind up having. Notion is I think the best solution right now because Notion put AI into it. Do you use Slack personally too for your domestic affairs?

J

Jeremy Allaire50:19

Uh, you don't have a domestic?

I

Interviewer50:20

I don't have a domestic Slack.

J

Jeremy Allaire50:22

Okay. I have a domestic Slack and a domestic Notion. So I took the stack from the office and I just did it at home. And what that did for us was the people who bridge the family office and this, they know the same tool stack. Then Notion has been investing in their AI so much that when you do an AI query of your Notion and you're like hey this house with this HVAC issue, it's like answer. You're like oh my god that would have taken like three phone calls in an hour. And I think it's going to change everything about how we work.

I

Interviewer50:55

Yeah. Is what what else did Dario think? I think I might have cut you off before you...

J

Jeremy Allaire50:59

Yeah. I mean, the big picture there was just like whatever your politics are, whatever you think about taxes, whatever you think about the social contract, all that's going to have to get thought about again in different ways. And I don't think it's going to be the straightforward answers that we've turned to. No, it can't be. And so my answer is like yeah, there's things California, New York, etc. are doing, but I think when we look at that in comparison to the broader political economy that we're going to have in front of us, those will seem modest in comparison to what we've got to think.

I

Interviewer51:39

By the way, we fixed it in startup land long ago. It's called stock options. And if you look at the Trump accounts, Invest America, Michael Dell did, and Brad Gerstner and a number of our friends, if the 42% of Americans who don't own an equity, and you know, are not part of that, let's just say it's 50 because some of them own them kind of passively. Half the country doesn't own equities. If everybody had equities in a superannuation fund like they have in Australia and they're watching them go up, then you're not like, well, screw those guys at Amazon and Apple and Google. Being stakeholders in the success of this technological transformation is critical.

J

Jeremy Allaire52:18

Yeah, that would I think solve so much of the problem. Jeremy, I could talk to you for hours. You and I have talked for hours in our lifetime about all these paradigms. Continued success and it's just a pleasure to spend time with you.

I

Interviewer52:33

It's awesome. I can't believe it. George Kurtz is here. He's the CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike. This is your second Davos.

G

George Kurtz52:38

Yes.

I

Interviewer52:41

Why are you at Davos? Obviously, everybody knows CrowdStrike. Why are you spending the week at Davos?

G

George Kurtz52:47

Well, I have all the world leaders here and all the best company CEOs are here. So really, it would take me a year of activity and flying around the globe to meet all the people that I need to meet. And it's just a fantastic opportunity to meet customers and get business done.

I

Interviewer53:01

Yeah, it's efficient.

G

George Kurtz53:02

Very efficient.

I

Interviewer53:03

It's this tiny little ski town. It's not fancy at all. This is in Aspen. And everybody's within five blocks once you get through security. Speaking of security, AI has had or is going to have a profound impact on defense and also offense, black hat, white hat, everything in between. What is the attack vector that AI is most effective at sitting here in 2026?

G

George Kurtz53:28

Well, there's a couple of different areas. One is if we think about the adversaries, I kind of create a pyramid where you've got nation state at the top, very sophisticated, but less of them. The middle band of the pyramid is e-crime. More of them, a little less sophisticated than the top. And then the bottom is just activism. So essentially, you're minting new adversaries because you don't have to have all the knowledge that you had to have in the past. You can ask any number of LLMs and you can get answers back. So what's happened is the attack timeline has been compressed. You can automate all of these sorts of attacks and you can do it with a level of sophistication that looks like a nation state. That's one of the greatest areas of exposure is the speed and the sophistication has dramatically increased.

I

Interviewer54:13

Because the answers have been compiled. Yeah, the scenarios can be run even by somebody who is a level six hacker out of 10 and they can become an eight. So just like a developer using a co-pilot goes from being an average developer to an above average. The same thing is happening with hackers.

G

George Kurtz54:31

Absolutely. And one of the things that we're seeing is autonomous malware. So most people are probably familiar with malware runs on your computer. Typically people would use antivirus to protect against that malware. But what we're seeing now is prompt only autonomous malware meaning I can drop the prompt on your computer by a variety of means and then it will autonomously interact with an LLM and it will give a unique fingerprint every time it runs. So your computer is different than the next guy's. You have different data and it will begin to prompt its way to getting to what it needs without ever phoning home to someone controlling it.

I

Interviewer55:07

Oh wow. So just to unpack that and translate it. I did a little hacking in my day in the 80s. A little phone phreaking mainly. We'll get into it offline. I think I had a Haze 2400 baud. I started with the Ventel 300 baud. I think we're of the same.

G

George Kurtz55:22

I had a 300 Haze.

I

Interviewer55:24

You had the 300 Haze. It was a tank. It literally had such a great form factor that's never been repeated. But we're old.

G

George Kurtz55:33

We are old. People are now saying, 'Hey, I'm going to use the Comet browser by Perplexity. ChatGPT's got a browser. Claude has an extension.' And it's really wonderful to say, 'Hey, get all my emails from LinkedIn and then put that into a database and add it to my CRM.'

I

Interviewer55:48

Wonderful. You watch it work. Get me the cheapest flight. The same thing can be used by an adversary to get on your computer. And one of the great ways is detection in security. You're in the business of detecting the attacker. But what you've just informed me of which kind of blew my mind even though it's completely obvious is the LLM can say, 'I'm going to do a thousand attacks today and I'm going to make each one different and unique.'

G

George Kurtz56:12

And unique. Absolutely. They're unique.

I

Interviewer56:14

So scary.

G

George Kurtz56:14

They're not actually code because they're prompts, right? And traditionally malware would phone home, there would be a tether. So you'd always be able to see the signature of something phoning home. Now these can run autonomously without ever phoning home.

I

Interviewer56:28

Like a sleeper agent. You drop them into America, 20 years later they start pursuing but they never have to return to base.

G

George Kurtz56:37

Exactly.

I

Interviewer56:38

How does one counter that?

G

George Kurtz56:39

Well, you need AI to counter it. And I mean that's been a big part of the success at CrowdStrike. When I started the company, I founded in 2011, it was using, we'll say AI, but machine learning at the time to detect malware that's never been seen before. Now, obviously, that's evolved into Gen AI and really leveraging the large data set that we have that we've amassed over 14 years to train our own models to be able to counteract with the speed that you need what the adversary is doing. So, we took, if you think about it, there's only a few ways to break into a bank. I'll use this analogy. You can drive there, you can walk there, you can use a gun, you can blow the safe, but at the end of the day, you got to get the money and you got to get out. And it's the same way in the computer world. There's certain, we call indicators of attack. We've trained our models to look for these. So it doesn't matter what you look like or what car you're driving. We can identify that. A big part of our success has been the AI we've built over the years with this tremendous data set.

I

Interviewer57:37

Yeah. So you might be able to get into the bank, but at some point you got to leave with the diamonds and you got to get to the safe. That's where you can catch him.

G

George Kurtz57:44

Exactly. Uh you mentioned state actors and you mentioned for profit. When we look at a country like North Korea, they need revenue. Hacking is pretty great revenue source. They were even using AI, my understanding, and I'm sure you've been following this, to get developer jobs in the United States, convince Americans to put laptops in their homes so that they could remote work. Talk to me about that attack vector actually infiltrating companies as employees because of this remote work nonsense.

I

Interviewer58:15

Well, we were one of the first to ever find that. So we were actually going through developing some new AI algorithms and we saw something that was called signal which basically strips the noise from the signal. And we saw the signal and we said this is really weird and we investigated it and we said okay this looks like somebody using remote tools to you know what's going on here. And we went further and then we said, 'We think it's North Korea and we think that it's an employee who, or the company thinks it's an employee.' So when the R&D team came back to me, they said, 'Okay, we want to notify our customers and we want to say we think we found this, but we have to tell them that the employee that they think is an employee isn't really their employee.'

G

George Kurtz58:54

Yeah. The phone call's coming from inside the building.

I

Interviewer58:57

Exactly. So for us, it was, you know, when you have a piece of malware, it's like, 'Okay, that's bad. You can detect.' But when you have to tell a company that their employee may not be their employee, you have to be gentle.

G

George Kurtz59:09

It's you're letting them know just how incompetent they are when it comes to security. I said it, not you.

I

Interviewer59:14

Okay. Well, it's hard to find these guys. But in any event, we found 40 of them. We were right. 40 of them.

G

George Kurtz59:20

That's for the first run. We found hundreds now over hundreds in America.

I

Interviewer59:26

Now, they were doing it, my understanding is for the high paying salary to fund stuff in North Korea. Is that correct? Or were they doing it to get trade secrets?

G

George Kurtz59:31

They were doing it to buy access. Why break in when you can just log in.

I

Interviewer59:38

Oh my god.

G

George Kurtz1:09:46

And if there's sort of malicious activity in the browser or there's an identity that's compromised, you can stop it at the browser and you can wall off what you do with the browser, including what data you take out of it. So it's the front door now for how people work and how adversaries get in is through the browser. How should companies implementing AI in the enterprise putting their data into these clouds and working with partners? Claude Co this week kind of blew people's mind. I don't know if you saw the announcement or played with it.

I

Interviewer1:10:17

Yeah.

G

George Kurtz1:10:17

And I was using it earlier this week and I'm authenticating on Gmail, Notion. Oh yeah, my desktop files.

I

Interviewer1:10:25

I got like halfway through this and I was like...

G

George Kurtz1:10:28

This probably isn't a good idea.

I

Interviewer1:10:30

It can be pretty scary though.

G

George Kurtz1:10:31

Well, let me tell you a story. Not specific to that, but we don't want to throw them under the bus, but it was a lot of authentications I did.

I

Interviewer1:10:38

Exactly. Exactly. They're doing great work.

G

George Kurtz1:10:39

But there was a customer who basically created a whole suite of AI agents to help their automation, their IT department. So they had one agent that was looking for IT problems, software bugs, and it found something while the code was being before it was committed. So the agent said, 'Hey, I found this bug. I want to fix it.' But it didn't have access to fix it. So it went to the Slack channel that had the other 99 agents and said, 'Hey, does any other agent have access to this thing because I need it fixed?' And there's an agent that raised its hand and said, 'Oh, I have access and I can fix it.'

I

Interviewer1:11:15

Do you see how scary this is? These two agents are reasoning and they went right around the guardrails that were put in place.

G

George Kurtz1:11:21

This is unintended consequences. And these LLMs are essentially guessing what you want them to do. They're reasoning it. Oh, it is reasonable for me to go ask for help.

I

Interviewer1:11:33

Right?

G

George Kurtz1:11:34

It is reasonable for me to give help. Now, what if it pushes the wrong code? What if it makes a mistake? And then how do you ever track that down? Who's monitoring these agents? The agent technology has unlimited upside, but my lord, you're going to be in business for a long time.

I

Interviewer1:11:49

Well, this is it. It's called aid.

G

George Kurtz1:11:52

AID. Yeah. AI detection and response.

I

Interviewer1:11:55

Got it.

G

George Kurtz1:11:55

So there's a concept that's been around that we helped pioneer, which is really endpoint detection response. So on your computer, most companies have it, you can monitor and see what's happening and prevent bad things from happening. We have to do that now with an agent. And this is why it's a huge opportunity for us because on average, each employee is going to have about 90 agents they control. So we're going to have protection and visibility across all of those agents, whether it's from a third party or whether it's a homegrown agent. And that is a massive TAM opportunity for us.

I

Interviewer1:12:26

Do you trust the LLM operators with CrowdStrike's data or do you want to stand up your own large language models?

G

George Kurtz1:12:33

We have our small language models and we do work with just about all of the large language models. But we've built our own guardrails around what gets shared, how it gets shared, and how we process any of the data back.

I

Interviewer1:12:47

Are you concerned about it? I can see you're kind of thinking like, hmm, yeah, maybe there are some concerns here.

G

George Kurtz1:12:53

No, no, there is. But we tried to engineer for that.

I

Interviewer1:12:55

Got it.

G

George Kurtz1:12:56

Right. Because you want to leverage and this is the thing, it's tokconomics. There's an economics to how you use the tokens as well. Plus, you want to get the right data. So we've built small language models for things that we control with our data.

I

Interviewer1:13:09

And then for other bigger, frontier type models, I mean, you're not going to replicate billions in R&D. You want to leverage what's out there and take the best of it.

G

George Kurtz1:13:18

Yeah.

I

Interviewer1:13:18

You're also a race car driver.

G

George Kurtz1:13:20

Yes. And hey, you've done well in your life. You got to buy a piece of an F1 team. I've been going to F1 races. I went to three this year. Tell me everything about it.

I

Interviewer1:13:30

Where do you want me to start?

How did you get the bug?

G

George Kurtz1:13:32

Uh...

I

Interviewer1:13:32

When did you get the bug? Because this has been an American thing the last couple years. I can't believe the racket these F1 guys are doing. Somehow you made this the most important thing in America ever.

G

George Kurtz1:13:42

I knew...

I

Interviewer1:13:43

To survive was...

G

George Kurtz1:13:44

That is a big driver and then it's a luxury experience. So now I've gone to Miami, Austin, and Vegas. I've been to three in the last year.

I

Interviewer1:13:53

I had even heard about it five years ago.

G

George Kurtz1:13:55

It's fantastic. Well, little backdrop. I grew up with zero money as a kid. I always liked...

I

Interviewer1:14:00

Where'd you grow up?

G

George Kurtz1:14:00

New Jersey.

I

Interviewer1:14:01

Oh, really? I grew up in Brooklyn.

G

George Kurtz1:14:03

Yeah, we used to play Fordham.

I

Interviewer1:14:04

Yeah, exactly.

G

George Kurtz1:14:05

Okay. So I always liked cars and fast things and never had the opportunity to do that.

I

Interviewer1:14:10

First car was a Toyota Celica.

G

George Kurtz1:14:12

Toyota Celica. Yeah. 73 Mustang Grande, 351 Cleveland.

I

Interviewer1:14:16

351 Cleveland engine and slightly more horsepower than yours.

G

George Kurtz1:14:20

I know. Mine was just a commute in the thing.

I

Interviewer1:14:22

Yeah. It was functional.

G

George Kurtz1:14:23

It worked. It was functional. But I never had the opportunity to do it. And then I got into sports racing. Mostly it was Indy. And then I got into racing later. But I've been in Formula 1 since 2018 because CrowdStrike became, well, Mercedes became a customer of CrowdStrike.

I

Interviewer1:14:39

Nice.

G

George Kurtz1:14:39

And then I met Toto Wolff who runs the team and he said, 'Hey, why don't you think about working with us?'

I

Interviewer1:14:44

You got in at the right time. Good. That was a good trade. So we got in then and then over the years I built a great relationship and then just last fall I put a deal together and own 5% of the Mercedes team now.

Congrats.

G

George Kurtz1:14:56

And now you ride yourself. You're in the bronze league, I hear.

I

Interviewer1:14:59

Yeah. So I race. In fact, I got to go back for a race in Daytona.

G

George Kurtz1:15:03

Nice.

I

Interviewer1:15:03

Still got the 24 hours.

G

George Kurtz1:15:04

What do you drive? What kind of car?

I

Interviewer1:15:05

LMP2. It's a full-fledged race car. It looks like an F1 car with covers over the wheels.

G

George Kurtz1:15:16

Got it. So it's safer.

I

Interviewer1:15:18

What do you think of this new Corvette ZR1? Have you seen this beast?

G

George Kurtz1:15:21

I'm trying to get one. Fantastic. I know.

I

Interviewer1:15:23

I got a contact at GM.

G

George Kurtz1:15:25

Everybody's got a guy.

I

Interviewer1:15:26

They gave me a ZR1 to play with.

G

George Kurtz1:15:30

Which is kind of the precursor, you know? They took the ZR1 and put it in the ZR1.

I

Interviewer1:15:34

And my lord, off the line. It's like having the Tesla acceleration off the line and then you have 600 horsepower plus 150. You got about 800.

G

George Kurtz1:15:46

This new one, it's 1,000 horsepower plus 250.

I

Interviewer1:15:50

The thing costs $200,000.

G

George Kurtz1:15:51

And for the money, it's a tremendous car. And I still think to this day, someone will keep me honest, that the ZR1 will still have a warranty even if you track it.

I

Interviewer1:16:03

Really?

G

George Kurtz1:16:03

Yeah. It's one of the rare cars. At least it used to be.

I

Interviewer1:16:06

Yeah. They said you can take the ZR1 with the ZR1 version. You can change the driver profile, lower the RPMs, when it shifts and everything. So you can actually talk on the phone and have a conversation and not make the passenger throw up.

G

George Kurtz1:16:20

You want to hear the engine?

I

Interviewer1:16:22

I think that's right. I had a C6 convertible in that generation, which was just dynamite.

G

George Kurtz1:16:28

Canary yellow. What color are you looking at? This is where we're going to get real. You saw that crazy green.

I

Interviewer1:16:33

I like the blue.

G

George Kurtz1:16:34

You like the blue? It's beautiful. They have a really beautiful vibrant blue. I was looking at the silver and I don't usually like silver on cars, but it looks on that car. It looks tremendous.

I

Interviewer1:16:47

I keep all my Mercedes silver.

G

George Kurtz1:16:49

You do?

I

Interviewer1:16:49

Yeah.

G

George Kurtz1:16:50

Oh, interesting. All right. Listen, the question everybody wants to know, Greenland, what should we pay?

I

Interviewer1:16:55

You know, I'm sure there's lots of deals that's above my pay grade, but I think whenever you see the geopolitical tensions go up, there's always more security activity. So yeah, good for business.

G

George Kurtz1:17:06

It's good for business. So seems like something we should... The Trump administration is spicy on the margins. You may have seen, but they've been good for business. Supportive of the business community.

I

Interviewer1:17:18

I think so. And when you think about what the administration is doing with security, they're taking a business first approach. You know what that means? They want to save money. They want to consolidate. They want platforms. They want better outcomes. And they don't want this piecemeal buying across the government. So absolutely, I think they're doing a great job on security. I've been asking people's perceptions and it's overwhelmingly been, yeah, they're calling us up. They're at the table. They're engaged. So whatever you think politically, all these cultural issues, they're listening and they're engaging the business community, which I think is a great thing. All right, brother. Thanks for doing it. Thank you so much. Talk soon.

And transportation of course is one of the most important parts in the business sector. And we're promised flying cars. We still don't have them. But my guest today, who's spoken and is a friend of the All-In podcast, is going to tell us how close we are to getting rid of these noisy helicopters buzzing around and having eVTOLs, nice and quiet ones. Adam Goldstein, CEO of Archer Aviation. Welcome back to All-In.

A

Adam Goldstein1:18:21

Thank you. Good to be here.

I

Interviewer1:18:22

Two years ago, you were at the summit. You promised us we get flying cars. When can I... Let's just get to brass tacks. This is all anybody wants to know. When can I go from Manhattan to JFK? When can I go from San Francisco to Oakland airport? When is this going to happen? And is it going to happen in the United States first or is it going to happen in the UAE or Saudi or maybe China?

A

Adam Goldstein1:18:47

The hardest part about bringing these aircraft to market is the certification. We have to prove that these aircraft are really safe. It's not a regulatory thing; they actually have to be very safe and reliable. So the rules got put in place. But the most important thing that happened in recent history was that President Trump issued an executive order that was fast-tracking the program through the regulators and really starting to create a platform for us to launch. And so they are now five cities to be announced in the first quarter and then we'll start flying in the summer. And that will be the first time you'll see these aircraft flying around the cities on a regular basis. That will allow the general public to get comfortable with this and they will certify us sometime after that because the political side of this is not a Democratic Republican thing. It's consumers have to feel comfortable with this. They have to watch this and so we don't want to be fighting that and so they're giving us a chance to go do that.

I

Interviewer1:19:39

Okay. So it's 2026. We're sitting here January of 2026. You guys are going to announce five cities.

A

Adam Goldstein1:19:46

The government will. DOT will.

I

Interviewer1:19:47

Oh, here in the United States they're going to and these are for all eVTOL companies. Yourself, all the contemporaries will get to do those five cities first.

A

Adam Goldstein1:19:55

Correct.

I

Interviewer1:19:56

You got any guesses of what they could be? What are people thinking and how are they selecting them?

A

Adam Goldstein1:20:00

Well, my big push has been around Huntington Beach in right around Los Angeles because...

I

Interviewer1:20:05

You live there?

A

Adam Goldstein1:20:06

I don't. But we won the exclusive for the LA 28 Olympics. And so that was a big deal for us. So we need to start trial operations really ramping up the ops because it's challenging. We also recently bought the Hawthorne airport right outside of LAX to help give us a hub.

I

Interviewer1:20:22

Hawthorne, the private I've flown out of it many times.

A

Adam Goldstein1:20:25

Exactly.

I

Interviewer1:20:26

So that's a great platform. You bought... Wait, let's just let this soak in, folks. Archer Aviation bought an airport.

A

Adam Goldstein1:20:36

We did.

I

Interviewer1:20:36

Can you just buy airports? It's a privately owned enterprise. What did that cost you?

A

Adam Goldstein1:20:41

Yeah, you can. It's a sort of buy it. You can control it. So there's a runway that's owned by the municipality. There's all the property around it and then there's the control of the master lease. It is very hard to do. They come up for sale every 50 years.

I

Interviewer1:20:54

What did that cost you?

A

Adam Goldstein1:20:55

It's around $170 million for everything including the FBO and all the real estate around.

I

Interviewer1:20:59

So you own all the real estate that's got some residual value, but this gives you a massive opportunity because Los Angeles is known for its traffic. So that would be a place where you could have a home base for these.

A

Adam Goldstein1:21:12

Exactly. It also happens to be home to a lot of the Elon companies and so it borders SpaceX. The original Boring tunnel was there. Tesla design center is there. You have a lot of good connectivity around people trying to change the future of transportation.

I

Interviewer1:21:27

Oh yes, I'm sorry. I was thinking Van Nuys in the south.

A

Adam Goldstein1:21:30

Yeah.

I

Interviewer1:21:30

Funny story. Elon was like, 'Hey, I'm thinking about renting a place for my rocket ship company before it had a name. Want to come down and see it?' I went down to see it. It was at Hawthorne and I said he had just gotten the Falcon and I said, 'Can you land the Falcon here?' He said yeah. I said get this office space immediately.

A

Adam Goldstein1:21:52

So you own the SpaceX office or you're the...

I

Interviewer1:21:54

That's on the other side of the fence.

A

Adam Goldstein1:21:56

Got it. And so we have the airport side. They have some hangars.

I

Interviewer1:21:58

What a perfect location because if memory serves me it's just south of LAX.

A

Adam Goldstein1:22:02

Yeah. About 2 miles from LAX, about 2 miles from SoFi Stadium. So the goal is to make that a hub of Los Angeles. Imagine a Grand Central type of you go down to San Diego, Laguna, just so many places to the south, Manhattan Beach. And let's push our imagination here. Boring Company is also based there too and so maybe we can convince Elon to start digging some holes around LA and all of a sudden you could really transform LA.

I

Interviewer1:22:25

What do you think the other cities will be in America and how are they picking them?

A

Adam Goldstein1:22:29

Well, FAA and DOT are going to be the ones that choose. So the companies have submitted in partnership with the cities these different bids and I think it's going to be a mix of urban areas, rural areas. I think it's probably going to be a lot of red states. You'll see something in Texas, you'll probably see something in Florida.

I

Interviewer1:22:48

Red states because Trump's a Republican or because they're easier when it comes to regulations?

A

Adam Goldstein1:22:53

I think both. It's also just easier to operate. Got it. And so if you want to land a helicopter in California, there's a lot of rules. You want to land one in Texas, you put it on the grass wherever you want.

I

Interviewer1:23:02

You know, it's interesting. When I got my ranch in Texas, they were like, 'This is a perfect place to put a helipad.' And I was like, 'Hell yes.' Like, 'You can really put a pad down.' And they're like, 'Yeah, it's your ranch. You can do whatever you want.' Now, in LA, it used to be that people would land helicopters in their backyards. I don't know when that stopped, but what are the rules in LA?

A

Adam Goldstein1:23:21

Each municipality has different rules around the different permitting you need, the amount of time that takes to get done, how you certify the helipad if you need to certify the helipad.

I

Interviewer1:23:29

So you basically can't do it.

A

Adam Goldstein1:23:30

Yeah, it makes it very hard. That being said, this is a safer platform than what already exists, helicopters. So I think there'll be a lot of loosening of that because it's just increasing safety to something they already do.

I

Interviewer1:23:41

Now, New York City, that's the big one. I think Joby made an announcement that they're going to be at one of the ports. You're a contemporary. I don't know if I would describe you guys as competitors now because like the early days of say EVs or self-driving cars, if this works, man, we're going to need 10 Archers and Jobys to do it, but they're going to be out of Manhattan soon.

A

Adam Goldstein1:24:00

Yeah. We both will operate out of the city. I mean, it's a wonderful place. It's already the biggest helicopter market in the US. So there's three big heliports that exist already, the Westside, East Side, and the Downtown Wall Street heliport. So it's already naturally configured. It is a very complex congested airspace. And so I also think the way that this will come to market will be in relatively low volumes, will gain the trust of the public, that'll allow us to keep scaling the stuff up. So you can start with maybe tens of aircraft and then over five to ten years you scale it up to hundreds of aircraft like the robo taxi and Waymo story. You start slow, build trust.

I

Interviewer1:24:34

Are you guys on the clock? You've been working on this for a decade.

A

Adam Goldstein1:24:37

Yeah. So the tech actually goes back to NASA 40 years ago on how to use multiple electric engines to fly airplanes. And then really thanks to Larry Page and the early work at Zee.Aero, they really helped bring a lot of that technology.

I

Interviewer1:24:50

Yeah. Larry bet on two or three, right?

A

Adam Goldstein1:24:52

Yeah. So he's been super involved. He was a huge part of the industry. And then if you go back, Uber did a great job when they had the Uber Elevate platform which really put it into the mainstream. That was around 2016.

I

Interviewer1:25:05

The Blade, right? They were doing...

A

Adam Goldstein1:25:07

Yeah, they were almost a research project to showcase what...

I

Interviewer1:25:12

Right, I remember when Travis did that.

A

Adam Goldstein1:25:14

Yeah. And then 2018 Morgan Stanley had a 100-page initiation report saying it's the next $9 trillion market. That opened up the capital markets to everybody and that allowed us to do this.

I

Interviewer1:25:23

You guys SPACed right after or during COVID?

A

Adam Goldstein1:25:26

2021, yeah.

I

Interviewer1:25:27

Okay, so right after COVID started to wane. Was that the right decision? I know these SPACs have been up and being public can be a distraction and you guys are a deep tech company with a long runway. What's it like trying to deal with shareholders in a public company when you know you're in a multi-decade rollout of a product like this?

A

Adam Goldstein1:25:48

Well, I actually give a lot of credit also to the Reddit community because the retail army really helped allow Archer to raise the money it needed to raise in order to get to where it is. So we've raised around $4 billion of capital today.

I

Interviewer1:26:00

Four billion. Wow.

A

Adam Goldstein1:26:01

Yeah. And we'll probably over time raise more, but the stock is super liquid because it has such a huge fan base in the retail market. It creates liquidity which allows the institutional investors to play, which allows the whole cycle to keep going. So as long as we keep performing, there's this pot of gold at the end of the Morgan Stanley sort of pot of gold, we should be able to keep stair-stepping up the valuation, keeping everybody happy, raising the capital, keeping it going. Deep tech is extremely capital intensive and this was the right avenue for us for sure.

I

Interviewer1:26:27

It's really interesting when you think about it, who's a better base of investors for long-term public markets, institutional investors, venture capitalists, private equity, or the lunatics on Reddit? It turns out the lunatics on Reddit, all due respect, I say that with peace and love, they actually probably get it right because they know what consumers want.

A

Adam Goldstein1:26:48

Yeah.

I

Interviewer1:26:48

And they're willing to go for it.

A

Adam Goldstein1:26:51

They're also willing to look past the quarterly earnings issues and really say this is a technology they want. I mean, who wouldn't want it? It's safer than helicopters, super quiet, costs less, convenience for everyone. Nobody loses here. This is a win-win.

I

Interviewer1:27:05

Where's your product at? You guys are flying runs obviously. Where are you flying the runs currently?

A

Adam Goldstein1:27:11

So two core places we fly. One is in Northern California in the Bay Area. So we fly out of Salinas, the airport there, which is about 90 minutes south of the Bay Area, and then also in the UAE. So we have a great partnership with Abu Dhabi. Mubadala has been an investor. IHC has been an investor.

I

Interviewer1:27:24

Oh, Mubadala is an investor.

A

Adam Goldstein1:27:25

Yeah. They've been a wonderful partner. Ibrahim.

I

Interviewer1:27:28

Yeah. It's really opened up the country.

A

Adam Goldstein1:27:31

Yeah. They're thinking in 50-year cycles, I think.

I

Interviewer1:27:34

How often do you fly this thing? What's the distance that it flies? And are there humans in it?

A

Adam Goldstein1:27:39

Yeah. So we fly most days piloted flights. And so you can fly them without pilots. It's actually pretty easy to fly the planes autonomously or remotely or automated is a better way to describe it. But we fly piloted and the goal is to work towards enough flight hours, enough confidence from us, from the regulators that we can start operating a commercial service. We're getting there. It takes time to do that.

I

Interviewer1:28:00

How often do you fly in it?

A

Adam Goldstein1:28:02

I haven't flown in it. Just the pilots do.

I

Interviewer1:28:05

Why? They won't let you. You're the CEO.

A

Adam Goldstein1:28:07

No, you could. I mean, if we're just honest about flight test programs, there's a dangerous part until you kind of cross every T here. And if you go back in time, most of the big aerospace companies have had crashes with early platforms. So you really try to be careful with just the test pilots, very serious testing until you get to the point where you're close to the certification side.

I

Interviewer1:28:27

Virgin Galactic, another SPAC, they had a tragic instance. Aviation is dangerous in the early days. When will you be willing to get in one, I guess, is the question we all want to answer because we're not getting it until you do it every day.

A

Adam Goldstein1:28:42

Later this year, that'd be my guess.

I

Interviewer1:28:44

Later this year. Now, you married, you got kids?

A

Adam Goldstein1:28:46

Married, two kids.

I

Interviewer1:28:47

Okay. So you have the conversation with the wife, I assume.

A

Adam Goldstein1:28:50

Probably tell her after.

I

Interviewer1:28:51

What's her position? When will she let you go in it?

A

Adam Goldstein1:28:54

She's a huge believer and supporter of everything I've done. I think she'd trust me when I think it's time I would do it. She'd be okay.

I

Interviewer1:29:01

Listen, continued success with it. It's obviously going to work. It's obviously going to change the world. What do we need to know as we wrap here about safety and why these are much safer? Because the idea of even having a pilot seems a little bit performative. Is it just to make the passengers feel a little bit better because these things obviously are going to be flown by computers much better than pilots eventually? And eventually I mean by the end of this year.

A

Adam Goldstein1:29:29

Yeah. The challenge with autonomy is regulation and infrastructure. So even if you could do it, there's no rules in place to get that done. And even if the rules were in place, how does the system work? Because today air traffic control is very manual. If you listen on ATC when you fly in somewhere, they're guiding you in, turn 10 degrees to the left, drop a thousand feet. That makes total sense. So the infrastructure doesn't allow for autonomy yet.

I

Interviewer1:29:52

Yet. Even though autonomy, we would both agree, would be safer this year than a pilot. Would you agree with that statement?

A

Adam Goldstein1:30:00

Assuming you could work your way into the air traffic control system, definitely. Humans make mistakes, computers make far fewer mistakes, maybe no mistakes. So it certainly would. That's the dream, that's the goal. With the advancements of LLMs, it actually allows this interesting period of time where you can now communicate with a machine in a way you couldn't really before. And so there's this probably middle ground that happens where there's pilots talking to machines, machines talking to pilots, and so you can start to implement different systems. And that's where I think it goes first actually.

I

Interviewer1:30:29

Ah, that's fascinating. So when you're clearing with the tower, it's just that the eVTOL is talking to the tower.

A

Adam Goldstein1:30:36

Yeah. Think about it like instead of looking at your map, looking at the weather, understanding all the different trackers you have to follow, the machines can just do that and make the decision and say to do this. So it actually is easier for a machine to do it than a human. And again, I would encourage you to listen to air traffic control. I'm obsessed with it. There's an incredible channel on YouTube called Blancolirio. Have you ever heard it?

I

Interviewer1:30:58

No.

A

Adam Goldstein1:30:58

So go on YouTube and Patreon and throw this guy five or ten bucks a month. He's a commercial pilot based out of the Lake Tahoe area. And all he does is break down every aviation incident. And it's amazing, and I've become a little bit obsessed with it. He just breaks it all down. It's almost universally the pilot makes some series of incredibly poor judgments. I'm talking about in private aviation as opposed to commercial aviation. And it's just great that there's somebody like him out there.

I

Interviewer1:31:30

Now, how many rotors on the thing?

A

Adam Goldstein1:31:33

12.

I

Interviewer1:31:35

12. Now, is that six with two in each or is it like 12?

A

Adam Goldstein1:31:38

It's 12, which means 12 motors.

I

Interviewer1:31:40

Yeah, there's actually redundant motors. There's actually 24, but we for simplicity call it 12.

A

Adam Goldstein1:31:45

So there's 12 redundant motors. 24. And then how many blades? Are they double blades? Like one on the bottom, one on the top?

I

Interviewer1:31:52

There's five blades on the ones on the forward part of the wing and four blades on the ones on the back.

A

Adam Goldstein1:31:57

Why is there difference?

I

Interviewer1:31:58

One are used just for the lifting portion. So the ones in the back and then they stop. And then the ones in the front are used for both lifting and the cruise. So they have different configurations.

A

Adam Goldstein1:32:09

What scenario do you have the most concern about and then work on the most? Because with 12 of these, anybody who's flown a toy drone, if you come up to it and you push it, it just immediately gets back. Now with 12 of these and 24 and your technology, I'm sure it's even smoother and better than that. So what do you worry about? Like some catastrophic electronic failure or are the electronic systems redundant? The battery failure?

I

Interviewer1:32:39

Everything is redundant. You have to...

A

Adam Goldstein1:32:41

What do you worry about?

I

Interviewer1:32:42

From a safety perspective today, I would say the biggest thing is the pilots. That's probably the thing.

A

Adam Goldstein1:32:47

Take the pilots out. Now, what are we worried about?

I

Interviewer1:32:49

You're always worried about just different cascading failures. So there was an incident in the industry where one of the companies had a propeller blade dislodge and it cascaded their aircraft. You don't really know that unless it actually happens. The blade comes off, hits the other blades, and then the whole thing cascades. So you don't really know if that's going to happen until it happens. You have the math behind it that you can try to predict, but when scenarios happen, you try to protect against cascading.

A

Adam Goldstein1:33:16

How many of these 12 could go out and that could safely land?

I

Interviewer1:33:18

Well, one of the beauties is we're also building it to be able to take off and land conventionally, and so you can lose a lot. We have a big 50-foot wing. You can glide. The glide ratio is huge. You can get up to max 10 miles of glide. So you can do a lot of things here. That's the only way to really certify at the standards the FAA wants you to do it. So it gives you a pretty big...

A

Adam Goldstein1:33:37

So you have those nice wide wings. You can glide in.

I

Interviewer1:33:40

Yeah.

A

Adam Goldstein1:33:40

What height? What's the ceiling on these?

I

Interviewer1:33:43

They can go up to 11,000 feet. There's no real reason to. It's not pressurized. Do you really want to fly? Helicopter range 500 to 2,000 feet.

A

Adam Goldstein1:33:51

What do you take from the helicopter industry away from when they have accidents? What happens? It seems like those pilots particularly are really skilled, but also maybe on the margins, maybe I'm reading into this, cowboys a little bit eccentric.

I

Interviewer1:34:11

Yeah. I mean, it depends. Every scenario is pretty different. The beauty behind these aircraft is the redundancy allows you to have a capability to certify with near zero single points of failure or zero single points of failure where a helicopter doesn't have that. So if you think about one big rotor, there's a lot of parts that go into making that one big rotor work and if that one part fails you have a catastrophic event. So that can happen. They're mechanically complex machines. And with the eVTOL side, you reduce that complexity.

A

Adam Goldstein1:34:44

What if you were to say it's X times more safer without us holding you to it? If you were to ask the 10 engineers working across the 10 companies in your field, not you, but what do you guess those 10 engineers would say? It's currently this times more safer than helicopters?

I

Interviewer1:35:06

Well, that will be a standard that the FAA makes us certify to. So the question will be what's the ultimate standard. 10 to the minus 7, 10 to the minus 8, 10 to the minus 9. One in a billion, one in 100 million.

A

Adam Goldstein1:35:16

Yeah, but you think it's twice? What would your...

I

Interviewer1:35:18

It would be an order of magnitude safer.

A

Adam Goldstein1:35:20

So three, four, five times safer is a pretty reasonable goal.

I

Interviewer1:35:22

10 times is a reasonable goal.

A

Adam Goldstein1:35:25

Why are you here at Davos? Are you virtue signaling about being all electric? What's going on?

I

Interviewer1:35:31

Selling aircraft.

A

Adam Goldstein1:35:32

You're here to do business. Who are you selling to? Just nation states?

I

Interviewer1:35:36

Yeah. So geographically, it's easier to sell stuff in the US or close to the US. Here, you get to meet different companies and countries. The Middle East, GCC has been very active. Africa's been very active, Asia's been very active. So there's a lot of great folks to go see where you can line them all up. So we'll announce deals here. We'll sign things here that will ultimately get announced. So it actually is very beneficial from a business standpoint to come here. And most of the companies here are AI and so there's a lot of AI talk. We're a non-AI predominant company. There's a lot of AI in what we do, but we don't sell AI. And so we sell infrastructure and it's the perfect place to meet the ministers of transportation, the heads of state. So there's lots of opportunities to bring Western tech to this.

A

Adam Goldstein1:36:21

I think they see having eVTOLs as a point of pride for their country. Some countries, this is something they can point to and say, 'Look, we got here first.'

I

Interviewer1:36:32

Yeah.

A

Adam Goldstein1:36:32

And they could see the UAE, I could see Saudi, I could see Qatar, Kuwait all feeling that way.

I

Interviewer1:36:39

Absolutely. There is another element where Davos is sort of a non-defense oriented. They don't like you to talk about defense here. We do have a really strong partnership with Anduril and so we've been building the new kind of autonomous attritable aircraft. We talked about...

A

Adam Goldstein1:36:53

What was the second word? Autonomous?

I

Interviewer1:36:55

Attritable. They call it attritable. What does it mean?

A

Adam Goldstein1:36:57

It's not a 20-year plane. It's not expendable like a one-time missile one-way type of product. They call it something in between. They call it attritable.

I

Interviewer1:37:03

If you lost it, it wouldn't be a big deal.

A

Adam Goldstein1:37:05

Yeah. So the goal is, one of the programs we've talked about is called Project Nyx. It is an autonomous collaborative attack helicopter drone. So think like an Apache type of platform. So there'll be a big manned asset. They'll have a bunch of drones that fly with it. So that's a program we're working on with Anduril. We build the core aircraft and Anduril missionizes it. So think sensors or munitions, those kind of things. But it would fly with a bunch of little drones around it to protect it. We are effectively, they're not little, but these are huge aircraft. Think about it this way: if you have an Apache which is a $50 to $70 million asset and it has a person in it, you don't want to risk it for lots of reasons. One, there's a person. Two, it's super expensive. Three, very hard to replace. You're not willing to risk it. It's not that much of a deterrent. And so when you do risk it, you want to be certain you can have these things come back. But what if I could make an aircraft that does the same thing, the same fighting power, maybe more fighting power at 90% lower cost with no pilot?

Wow. That's key. Because these pilots are worth $25 million each. They literally, I have a friend who was in special forces and he told me that they put a number on each of them, how much they invested and the replacement cost of a Navy SEAL or one of these kind of groups. You could actually know the replacement cost of a person. And they called them assets, these top elite folks. So you have no problem working in defense. That's awesome.

I

Interviewer1:38:29

No, I'm for the country. I'm a patriot. I'm a super believer in what the US is doing. And they've been extremely helpful to new industries like Archer and eVTOLs. Maybe more so than the last administration.

A

Adam Goldstein1:38:44

A lot more so. Just a quick example on that was I could not get a meeting with the former Secretary of Transportation. Wouldn't take a meeting. And I know he's busy.

I

Interviewer1:38:52

Wait, wait. You're a publicly traded eVTOL company who's meeting with the Gulf monarchies being courted.

A

Adam Goldstein1:38:59

Zero meetings.

I

Interviewer1:39:00

And you requested meetings?

A

Adam Goldstein1:39:01

Requested meetings.

I

Interviewer1:39:02

How many times?

A

Adam Goldstein1:39:03

Multiple times.

I

Interviewer1:39:04

And they literally, this is Brian Armstrong's story. He wanted to meet with the SEC. They're like, 'Yeah, no, we're good.'

A

Adam Goldstein1:39:08

Secretary Duffy comes in and all of a sudden, like monthly, it was we want to make sure we can re-industrialize America. This is important. Aviation leading the world is important and modernizing air traffic is important. And if you can help in all that, we want to hear from you what can we do to help you. And that resulted in the executive order that came out and so that helped the industry because I showed them a path. We won the exclusive for the LA28 Olympics to fly air taxis around that city during the games and so we'll sort of control the air during that. And I said I need a path to make sure I can do that. This will be a huge opportunity.

I

Interviewer1:39:44

I think people have not taken, and the Democratic Party has not taken this to heart yet. It's not about being subservient to the technology industry or capitalism or corporates. It's about winning the future. And part of winning together for American companies is at least meeting with them and hearing the vision. Like how does that hurt the previous secretary of transportation to meet with the eVTOL companies? How did it hurt the SEC to meet with Brian Armstrong or any number of crypto companies? It was they were in contempt.

It seems in hindsight of the entire technology and business industry.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:40:26

Yeah. I mean in the end if this works imagine the jobs we will create. Imagine the GDP contribution we will create. I mean, the FAA administrator, you know, kind of publicly keep saying 11% of GDP touches aviation. And so, it's capped because of air traffic. We have to upgrade that system.

I

Interviewer1:40:44

I'm red-pilling myself as we speak here.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:40:47

But it's like if you believe that, then you would think you want to unlock that and it will help everybody. Like literally, no one loses. So, you would think you'd want to do that.

It was almost like they had an axe to grind with capitalists for some crazy reason. And the opportunity to embrace the industry was always there for them. Yeah.

Whether it was incompetence or intentionality, the result is the same. They set back the industry years by not engaging. Greenland,

I

Interviewer1:41:13

How much should we pay? What do you think? What do you think it takes?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:41:16

I will tell you.

I

Interviewer1:41:16

Jump into it. Make yourself an interesting guest. We should take it, right? We should just take it or we buy it.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:41:21

I saw something that said there was an offer kind of the buzz here that was more than the GDP of Denmark. And so the offer was big. I mean, there's 55,000 people. Let's make a deal. How much do you all want? I mean,

Well, the funny thing of my meetings here, so I come to sell, you know, aircraft. That's what we come to do. And I will get asked that question in nearly every meeting. And I mean, literally back in Silicon Valley like no one I mean, yes, we've heard it on the news, of course. Yes, of course. It's important, but people aren't talking about it on an every hour basis. I come here at every meeting there's people commenting on it. So, there's definitely an obsession here. And Trump negotiates by tweet or by truth social, whatever they call that, platform, by truth, by post. Say what you will. This has been on the agenda for America for a century or two. And it's a critical deal. If Trump gets in, President Trump gets incredible enjoyment out of negotiating a deal and solving a long-term problem for America, I say let him let him cook.

I

Interviewer1:42:20

Yeah,

Let him cook.

I agree.

Greenland, we're here. 51st state. Let's do it. All right. Listen, continued success and thanks for coming on the pod again.

We're very lucky to have Chase Lock Miller with us. He's the CEO and co-founder of Cruso Cloud. C R U SE, not Kuso, Cruso.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:42:36

You got it. You got it.

I

Interviewer1:42:37

Which is or was the first Neocloud? Really? You were kind of

C

Chase Lock Miller1:42:41

We were part of an early contingent of Neoclouds, you know, between us and Coree and yeah, Lambda.

I

Interviewer1:42:47

How did that occur because you had anticipated buying a bunch of H100s before everybody else and you had the inventory? How did that start that you got such a good lead?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:42:56

Well, so we had started well before Hopper came out. You know, we were, you know, Cruso is a business that's always taken this very energy first approach to developing computing infrastructure and really changing the motion from trying to collocate compute in these network hubs and really focusing on where we can access abundant energy. So we were experimenting a lot with the Amper generation which preceded Hopper. So a lot of A100s, we built out this high performance cloud platform that was meant to enable AI innovators to do incredible work. We launched before ChatGPT came out and so sometimes you're in the right place at the right time.

I

Interviewer1:43:43

Yeah timing was good.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:43:44

Yeah timing worked.

I

Interviewer1:43:45

And your biggest customer by far is Oracle and OpenAI.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:43:52

Correct. So we're a vertically integrated business which means we're focused on not just the compute layer but also the energy development, the data center development as well as the application layer where we're running things like our managed inference service. And as this boom really took off, the scarcity of data centers became very apparent and our ability to build those large-scale AI data centers very quickly became a very in demand skill set.

I

Interviewer1:44:23

Hey guys in the back if you're talking could you just take it outside because it's going to get picked up on the pot. Appreciate it. Three two. So why West Texas? Is it because the politicians there are pretty permissive in terms of giving permits and you can build quickly like Elon experienced with his big factory in Austin or is it because of energy?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:44:46

Yeah, it was really an energy driven decision. So in Abilene, Texas, we had an area where a lot of actual renewables had been built out on the back of production tax credits. So there was an abundant amount of wind and solar that was there that actually had issues with transmission. So power prices were actually frequently negative. There were renewable energy producers that were having to curtail that could be producing power but actually were shutting down because there was no marginal demand.

I

Interviewer1:45:14

So the grid didn't need their energy.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:45:17

Exactly.

I

Interviewer1:45:17

That's wild to think about. It's also wild to think about that Texas has the largest solar base of any state in the union.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:45:26

Absolutely. And we went there and we said, 'Man, you guys have too much energy. Hey, buddy, I got a do I have a command for you.' And so we have a 1.2 gigawatt substation there. We've also built a 350 megawatt gas plant on site to energize one of the largest clusters of GPUs in the world.

I

Interviewer1:45:47

So, was there gas under the actual data center or there shipping?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:45:51

No, no, no. We had access to a pipeline that feeds into 10 gas turbines that are on site there.

I

Interviewer1:45:57

Amazing. And the gas turbines those were a blocker for a while too, huh?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:46:01

They still are. I mean gas turbines are a massive supply chain constraint as people look to energize compute infrastructure. I think a lot of people, we were really one of the first groups to be focused on natural gas powered data centers doing things behind the meter off-grid and I think a lot of people have sort of followed this pathway which has created a lot of supply chain challenges with some of the major producers, folks like GE Vernova, Caterpillar has a company called Solar that we work with very closely, Siemens, Mitsubishi, and we actually recently did something with an incredible company Boom Supersonic.

I

Interviewer1:46:37

Yes, Boom Supersonic was making the Concorde replacement. Blake, correct?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:46:41

And they're making their own engines that go pretty fast. So what was the idea there? Yeah. So they had re-engineered this turbine for supersonic jet travel and we, Colleen, my co-founder and I were talking to Blake and said, 'Hey, could we use that to generate power instead of transport people over the ocean at supersonic speeds?' And now we're their first large purchase order for $1.2 billion of gas turbines to power AI critical infrastructure. It's wild to think about the gas turbines and jet engines are not super dissimilar.

I

Interviewer1:47:20

No, I mean I think this is the full playbook of GE historically, right? I mean the reason GE Vernova exists is their leadership in terms of air transportation as well as power generation.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:47:33

Yeah. And I wonder if it's really interesting about that opportunistic thing for Blake to do from Boom Supersonic is that now that will allow him to fund his Concorde replacement.

Absolutely. Power is a great business and we think he can make a lot of money as the scaling up of AI infrastructure occurs. And hopefully he's able to build those incredible supersonic jets that get us to Tokyo much faster.

I

Interviewer1:48:01

And the Stargate project. Yep. Is a $300 billion project? What's the number? Because there was big announcement at the White House and there's been a little bit of wink wink like these are numbers were kind of estimates. What's the realistic footprint of this?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:48:21

So I think Stargate has been a term that's been used to describe a lot of different things at this point. Initially our campus was called Stargate and then Stargate was then a company for a while and then I think OpenAI sort of described it as all of their spend on compute is just sort of broadly labeled as Stargate. So I think the number is 500 billion and this incorporates chips, data centers, energy to ultimately power this intelligent infrastructure that's running and scaling both ChatGPT and all their other core services. One of the blockers in addition to the turbines has been electricians and construction workers.

I

Interviewer1:49:02

My understanding is you're paying two to three times what they were getting paid before the data center.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:49:11

No comment on exactly what we're paying the electricians, but they're very well compensated.

I

Interviewer1:49:15

Am I in the right zone that their salaries in the industry have doubled or tripled?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:49:21

Look, I think it's an incredibly exciting career path for anybody looking to do work with their hands and get well compensated.

I

Interviewer1:49:29

Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:49:30

Yes. So you know

I

Interviewer1:49:32

I mean let's think about that for a second. No college degree.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:49:36

Yeah.

I

Interviewer1:49:36

You just have to be an apprentice as an electrician and you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and you need how many? Thousands? Hundreds?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:49:43

Correct. So we

I

Interviewer1:49:44

Which one? Thousands or hundreds?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:49:46

Thousands. So I'll give you an example. In Abilene today, we have 8,000 people on site every day. They're working day and night to bring this facility online as fast as possible so we can energize this intelligence.

I

Interviewer1:49:59

And that's 3 hours west of Dallas.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:50:01

Correct. So, it's in West Texas. Abilene is a town of 120,000 people. So when you're hiring 8,000 people to work in that town, you can't source everybody locally. So we've actually had to bring in a lot of labor from all states.

I

Interviewer1:50:15

And housing, I would assume.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:50:16

Yeah, housing. The market's actually fairly efficient. There's a lot of people that won't be long-term permanent workers there that actually bring mobile homes, they collect a stipend. It's kind of a very efficient process in that regard. But long-term we're going to have about 2,000 permanent workers at the campus. So there's both short-term job spike and boom in terms of demand for the construction and installation process, but there's also great long-term permanent jobs to operate the facility. We have a power plant there. There's a lot of mechanics that are going to be operating this facility. But this is just one campus. We have another campus in Armstrong County, Texas, that has close to 3,000 people on site every day. We have another project outside Cheyenne, Wyoming that we've announced we're planning to build a 10 gigawatt campus.

I

Interviewer1:51:05

Why Wyoming?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:51:07

Wyoming is a state that is very rich in natural resources and energy. There's been really favorable public private partnerships in terms of making this project happen. There's a tremendous amount of gas there to support what we're doing. And one of the very cool things that we're focused on is actually trying to bend the arc of energy production towards sustainable resources. Even with the gas, Wyoming is a place where you actually have primacy on what's called class 6 wells. They're post-combustion carbon capture and sequestration disposal wells where you can actually take the carbon that comes out of the combustion process of a natural gas turbine and you can pump it underground and permanently sequester it. And there's actually an incentive there called 45Q where you get paid by the government to do this and it doesn't quite cover the cost of doing it. But for customers that care about the impact and the sustainability of the campus,

I

Interviewer1:52:05

They're not putting the carbon into the atmosphere.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:52:08

Exactly. Putting it underground.

I

Interviewer1:52:09

They can produce power from gas in a carbon-free way, which is a really exciting value proposition. How are batteries?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:52:16

I think we saw Elon bought a and is building he's got his own lithium refinery and he's building obviously his own batteries and they're one of the larger battery manufacturers. How do batteries play into all this?

Currently, there's a bunch of different ways batteries play into it. I think you sort of need batteries in these low voltage UPS systems that help operate the electrical system of the plants.

I

Interviewer1:52:45

Just to normalize and base load or?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:52:48

Yes. Actually one of the issues that we're seeing is when you think about these large scale AI factories, when you're deploying giant clusters of GPUs, the entire data center is acting as a single computer. It's running one single workload that's training some breakthrough foundational model. And what that results in is massive load fluctuations in the actual power draw because what they're doing is the chips are basically running compute cycles and then publishing the data over the network to all the other GPUs so they can sort of be in sync with one another. This causes this massive fluctuation in overall power draw. Utilities hate that. It's terrible for the turbines. So you really need a way of normalizing that power draw. So we've actually been able to solve that with a 1 hour battery. That's a medium voltage battery energy storage system. There's a lot of other use cases for batteries. We're actually working with Elon's former co-founder and partner at Tesla, JB Straubel. He has a business called Redwood Materials that's focused on recycling of batteries and he has this massive supply of end of life EV batteries, batteries coming out of digital cameras, all these batteries that are at the end of their life. As a demonstration to show people what we could do in terms of cost competition as well as deployment, we actually deployed a fully off-grid solar plus battery energy storage system that powers an AI data center 24 hours around the clock with a power price that's lower than the power price in Northern Virginia. And we're able to do that because you're basically taking these batteries that were in an electric vehicle and maybe the range was 300 miles and now it's 250 miles. So the owner trades it in and it's like, okay, this car is done, right? But there's still a lot of juice left in those batteries. There's a lot of life. So we're able to really make use of them in a second life to power these AI data centers.

I

Interviewer1:54:53

You're under massive pressure to deliver these data centers, correct?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:54:58

Yeah, you could say that.

I

Interviewer1:55:00

Compared to where you were like two or three years ago, maybe three or four years ago, you were knocking on doors saying, 'Hey, do you need a data center?' Now your door is being knocked down.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:55:09

I think it just really speaks to the demand for compute. I think people are constantly having this conversation of like, are we in an AI bubble? I think there's just an incredible, there's nobody has enough compute. None of the leading labs, none of the leading application companies can get their hands on enough compute and that's just driving an incredible amount of urgency to deliver infrastructure.

I

Interviewer1:55:34

Both the chips and the data center.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:55:35

So even this year going into 2026, you're seeing the same amount of inbound, hey, we need more, we need more, we need more. What do you got? Or was last year like people put in their big orders for the next couple years?

No, we're seeing things accelerate.

I

Interviewer1:55:52

Who are the new customers because obviously Elon, Sam Altman, I'm sure AWS, I'm sure Google does their own.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:56:01

Google I think, well I don't want to speak for directly.

I

Interviewer1:56:08

This is All-In. If you want to be on All-In, you got to speak candid. Just tell us what you heard at the [expletive] party.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:56:14

Google does a mix of self-perform development as well as outsourcing.

I

Interviewer1:56:19

So they do do some outsourcing. Yeah.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:56:20

Correct. But I think all of the leading labs we're seeing a tremendous amount of demand. So Anthropic, OpenAI, Google.

I

Interviewer1:56:30

Elon builds his own.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:56:32

What was your take when you saw him build Colossus under that short time frame? Like your team must be like that's just not possible and then he did it.

No, I don't think we thought that at all. I think I was really rooting for him. But did he do it in half the time anybody else had ever done something like that?

It depends on how you measure these things. I think Colossus was a unique case where he had this large scale industrial building. He had power to the building. And really what he was doing was what I would call the tenant fit out, which is basically the in the data hall buildout of the cooling distribution units, the RPPs, the electrical systems, the hot aisle containment systems, and then you sort of roll racks of GPUs into these. So they were able to execute on that incredibly fast.

I

Interviewer1:57:22

Jensen said he'd never seen anything like it. He seemed to think it was a unique thing that occurred in your industry.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:57:30

Elon's the GOAT of modern industrialist, so hat tip to him.

I

Interviewer1:57:35

But as running a competitive business building the same things, you have to look at that and study it a bit. How did he get it done so fast? How do you think he was able to do it so fast?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:57:48

I think Elon does an incredible job of breaking down a large industrial process into a lot of subprocesses and understanding constraints and really taking a first principled approach of how do I build things as quickly as possible? How do I parallelize things as quickly as possible?

I

Interviewer1:58:06

Has that informed some of your thinking?

C

Chase Lock Miller1:58:09

Absolutely. He's been an inspiration from building the Gigafactory to everything he's done at SpaceX and Starbase. It's all incredibly inspiring. We try to channel that same sense of incredible urgency. We self-perform a lot of procurement functions and engineering functions and work with a lot of very ambitious folks on the construction side. There's actually a bunch of folks that worked on the Tesla Gigafactory in your new hometown in Austin that are working on our campus in Abilene, Texas, so there's a lot of overlap in methodologies.

I

Interviewer1:58:50

There's been a lot of talk of and I think Brad Gerstner kind of started this discussion on his BG2 podcast when he had Sam Altman on. How does a company with 20 or at the time 12 billion now it's 20 billion run rate how does OpenAI pay for a $500 billion buildout? In your contract with them, in your relationship with them, I'm assuming this is being done in stages not one giant hundred billion dollar contract but stages.

C

Chase Lock Miller1:59:18

I think it's important to understand that in a lot of ways my role as CEO of Crusoe, half my time is really spent on risk management. The amount of capital going into this is just enormous and all that capital is not going to come from dilutive equity capital that we're raising at the parent company. We have to raise project equity. We have to raise a lot of debt. And what debt folks are focused on is how is this person going to pay me back? So it is very much something that's being evaluated in the capital markets. This has actually been a major role that we see these large-scale blue chip investment grade businesses play in catalyzing the capital formation you need to build these giant infrastructure projects. So when you have a company like Google or Microsoft, they're sitting on $100 billion in cash and they throw $10 to $20 billion to the bottom line every quarter, they could just fund it from their existing businesses. But Elon and Sam have new businesses or even Anthropic, they have to come up with that money somewhere.

I

Interviewer2:00:22

Correct. In our case, in Abilene, Texas, we have a long-term lease agreement with Oracle. So we have a long-term 15-year offtake agreement with Oracle. They're committed to paying us for that timeframe. That helped unlock a lot of the construction debt and the capital we needed to build this project. We worked with JP Morgan and a number of other folks in the syndicate, Bank of America, Apollo, SMBC, a bunch of different.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:00:56

And they must be very excited about this opportunity.

I

Interviewer2:00:58

Yeah, I think everybody's really excited about the opportunity to build the infrastructure that's going to power the economy in the future. This is collateralized by a data center which has inherent value. If a customer of yours was unable to meet their commitment, there would be somebody else to take that capacity.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:01:27

I think that's the biggest argument I make when people ask about the AI bubble. Imagine a scenario where OpenAI went out of business, which I don't think is going to happen.

I

Interviewer2:01:37

There are people saying that that could happen.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:01:39

Sure. Okay.

I

Interviewer2:01:40

I'm not saying that. You didn't say it.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:01:42

Imagine they did go out of business. The reason they'd go out of business is because some other model company like Anthropic or Gemini or Grok really blew them out of the water.

I

Interviewer2:01:53

And they're kind of in fourth place right now according to some of the benchmarks.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:01:56

Parking that aside, they have incredible adoption, incredible platform, but if that were to happen, the group that massively surpassed them would have so much demand for that product, they'd be jumping for joy to step into the seat to take over that compute capacity. So if you believe that AI is going to be an important aspect of the operating system of the economy in the future, this infrastructure is going to be very useful and valuable to whoever the winners are in that future state.

I

Interviewer2:02:27

And people don't know this but you've also made a bet on startups. You've been incredibly generous to give credits to startups. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you made that decision to play the long game because there's probably some people on your board or in your own organization says, 'Hey, we got some big fish here. We got whales. What are we doing with the minnows? You're specifically targeting up and coming startups to be their provider.'

C

Chase Lock Miller2:02:54

I really think about Crusoe being a vertically integrated business. We offer three core things. We can build the data centers and we can rent those to customers. We really only focused on a small subset, maybe five customers, these very big tech companies. That's their key pain point. They're not renting out capacity from clouds because Meta doesn't know how to run a GPU cluster? Of course they know how to run big clusters of GPUs. They need data centers. So we're trying to unblock that critical pain point for them. On our AI cloud platform and our infrastructure as a service platform, we offer managed clusters of high performance GPUs and we're a very large partner with Nvidia. That's really critical infrastructure for the startups you're talking about. This is the development of new AI native applications. Coding assistant tools, managed inference solutions, video generation, image generation, all sorts of chatbots and AI applications that are proliferating in the world. We offer great managed GPU clusters there. And then we also offer serverless AI services like our managed inference product where we're charging people on a dollar per token basis. So we can charge on a dollar per kW rent on the data center, dollar per GPU hour on the GPU, or dollar per token on the managed services.

I

Interviewer2:04:14

And that's thousands of customers, tens of thousands potentially. And that's where you're going up against Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:04:24

Correct.

I

Interviewer2:04:25

Those are some pretty significant competitors. How do you compete with those kind of folks?

C

Chase Lock Miller2:04:30

When you look at those really large hyperscalers, they're incredible platforms and they've been able to accomplish so much. But they really are the outsourced IT solution that's meant to be everything to everyone. Their lowest common denominator isn't AI, it's every server, you need storage, it's everything. We are relentlessly focused just on the AI use case and the AI application to deliver the most reliable, most high performance computing infrastructure directly for the AI use case and application. That's all we care about. All of the optimizations we're making on the high performance networking, system compute side as well as the storage and how people access their data is entirely in service of AI use cases. There's going to be some technological advancement in the coming years that really ramps up what we're able to do in building large language models and doing inference. What do you think that'll be? A lot of people have talked about optics and the transport layer. Some people talking about the raw horsepower, other people talking about cooling. Where do you think we'll see the next step function in the next three to five year window? Because you must be thinking about that, skating to where the puck's going because you did that with your current offering.

I think what's so fascinating about this space and what gets me so excited is that it's actually the culmination of so many different engineering disciplines. It's the pinnacle of human achievement across so many engineering disciplines from the cooling systems and the chemical engineering, the electrical systems, the physical electrical engineering that needs to go into these chips, the silicon systems and the chips, the networking and the software engineering. It's really a full stack solution that ultimately produces intelligence. Getting to specific challenges we see and specific trends, we're seeing everything go to higher density configurations. More power in the rack. A traditional data center maybe 5 years ago was like 15 kW. 20 years ago was probably like 4 kW in a rack. The current generation of Blackwell chips is 130 kW in the rack. The next generation Vera Rubin is going to be 250. Vera Rubin Ultra is expected to be 600. We're ultimately going to get to one megawatt racks. One megawatt to give a perspective is roughly the amount of power of a thousand homes.

I

Interviewer2:07:08

So a rack will be a town.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:07:13

Rack will be a town. Exactly. A couple dozen of those will be a city.

I

Interviewer2:07:16

It'll be a New York City in a data center.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:07:18

Crusoe has over 45 gigawatts in our pipeline. I know you're from New York, that's about 8 to 10 New York cities worth of power. So it's an incredible amount of energy infrastructure that's going to need to come online to energize this layer of compute. There's challenges in every domain from cooling to networking.

I

Interviewer2:07:48

As that density arrives, this ten to one density you're talking about, the heat also arrives.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:07:55

Correct. A lot of exciting stuff happening.

I

Interviewer2:07:58

And what do you think of the small modular nuclear? Getting close to hydro? Obviously gas is the layup. Solar feels like a layup and battery that combo to add, but hydro I don't know if there's much left.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:08:20

We're actually doing a lot with hydro in the Nordics. In Norway and Iceland, there's abundant geothermal and a lot of hydro there.

I

Interviewer2:08:40

So that's a one-two punch.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:08:41

You get the one-two punch there. And I don't know if you guys heard, but America just acquired Iceland. That was like the rim shot off of the Greenland.

I

Interviewer2:08:50

We're taking both. We don't ask for much. We're taking a little Iceland, a little.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:09:02

We have data centers. You may have heard of big data centers in a few words. But on small modular nuclear reactors, we are very bullish on SMRs.

I

Interviewer2:09:15

Have you signed a contract yet? Are you in negotiations?

C

Chase Lock Miller2:09:17

Four contracts that we've signed. We're actually hoping to energize the first AI factory powered by an SMR in 2027.

I

Interviewer2:09:26

2027. That's next year.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:09:27

One of the ways we've been able to do this is it's actually going to be at the Idaho National Lab, where you are outside of the regulatory domain of the NRC because it's considered experimental technology.

I

Interviewer2:09:42

Who's the partner on that?

C

Chase Lock Miller2:09:45

I don't think we've made it public.

I

Interviewer2:09:46

It's okay. They're going to make some news here. I know because I was told this exact same insight by the company that's doing it, but I won't say the name.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:09:55

I think we can announce it.

I

Interviewer2:09:58

Okay, we should announce it.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:10:00

The partner is Alo Energy. They're an incredible partner.

I

Interviewer2:10:05

Isn't it amazing that for solar it was something we haven't been able to do since the 70s and now it's like yeah we're going to do solar. It's absolutely necessary so we're going to do it.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:10:17

I think there's this human ingenuity and the passage of time and the relentless pursuit of efficiencies. It's really incredible if you look at the cost curve of solar just how much it's come down. You're going to see a similar thing play out in SMRs next generation geothermal. We're really excited about innovations like Fervo's made in terms of being able to produce geothermal at scale at a very competitive price point leveraging a lot of the technology from fracking and oil and gas.

I

Interviewer2:10:52

And we're not going to have this impact consumer's electrical bills. That's such an interesting story. When we look at this problem, we say a lot of the power on the grid is very saturated. A lot of the data center capacity is saturated. So it just makes sense for the technology industry that wants to bring online all of this new infrastructure to also bring online the power that goes with it. The incredible opportunity from my perspective is that when we bring on new power generation to support an AI data center, we're sizing it to the peak demand of the data center, which we're only using peak demand like 0.1% of the time. So 99.9% of the time we have excess power that can support the local community, create an abundance of energy that drives down the overall cost for ratepayers in the local communities. People will have lower cost power. We're going to have advanced intelligent infrastructure that's driving massive efficiency gains in the economy. It's going to be an incredible future we're building towards.

This is something that the technology industry could be self-aware enough to understand. If we're making this incredible new business, it's a great way to share it with other Americans. Maybe your energy bill will get lower or eventually free.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:12:12

Absolutely. You're already seeing this trend unfold. We've taken this energy first approach. You saw Google recently make the acquisition of Intersect Power. Sheldon and his team there, incredible group of energy developers. They're doing that because they know they need to build the energy infrastructure that's going to support their compute needs in the future.

I

Interviewer2:12:31

Well, really appreciate you taking the time, Chase, and continued success. What an amazing story, man. You really got there early, and one of two things can happen when you get there early: you can just fail fabulously or you can just absolutely crush it. And it's been the latter for you. But there might have been some moments where you stared at the ceiling at night as an entrepreneur and said, 'Are we too early?'

C

Chase Lock Miller2:12:55

It's mostly been up and to the right. No, I'm just kidding. There's been tons of complex problems and challenges and moments of doubt throughout the company's lifetime, but I wouldn't have wanted to do anything else with my life. It's nice to move from 'will the customers arrive' to 'okay, we've got too many customers, we really need to deliver.'

I

Interviewer2:13:19

It's a whole organizational mindset of 'will the customers ever show up' and this fear to 'oh my god I hope my customers are happy and delighted.'

C

Chase Lock Miller2:13:29

But scaling people, scaling culture, scaling technology has its own set of challenges and problems.

I

Interviewer2:13:36

The culture part is important.

C

Chase Lock Miller2:13:38

It's difficult. It's difficult to go from a small startup of tens of people to more than a thousand people.

I

Interviewer2:13:44

And adding, what are you adding, a thousand a year?

C

Chase Lock Miller2:13:47

We're going to add 2400 people this year. Full-time employees and then tens of thousands of contractors.

I

Interviewer2:13:55

I've seen that movie before. No, I mean I watched it with Uber and Robinhood as they were adding one person a day, then five new people, and now you've just got training and recruitment and trying to keep that culture tight and make sure you hire the right people. Well, listen, you have to go. We're way over time. I appreciate you taking the time and being so generous. I appreciate it.

All right, give it up for Chase.

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