What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Win with Nabs. Let's get right into the episode and I'm so excited to be here today at the Hut 8 offices with Asher. Let's get right into the interview. So Asher, thank you so much for coming on today. How you doing?
I'm great. Great to see you crushing it. I love the podcast. Love everything you're doing.
Thank you. I appreciate it. So we're going to start tough. Okay. So actually, no, we're not going to start tough. Let's start with your background. You gradu...
No, no, no, no. We're going to start with your background. I feel like we got to build you up, right?
You graduated summa cum laude from USC when you were 19 years old. For context, I'm 18, so only a year older than I am now. You graduated at nearly the top of your class. What were you doing while everyone else your age was just being a teenager?
Good question. Um, I didn't try to do that. That wasn't the goal. And it's actually interesting because as you asked that question, I was thinking about the answer. And that wasn't the goal. And I think a lot of my life has been focused on the input of why and not on kind of the output of the goal itself. And I think the goal has ended up being a byproduct. And I think that same kind of theme translates throughout my career. And so at the time, I mean, look, my parents immigrated to the US. I was a first generation American, first generation college grad, high school graduate and I had the opportunity to go to USC and I did well in high school. I got a full ride to go to USC. I took a bunch of APs in high school and I went to USC and my scholarship let me take as many credits as I wanted. And most times in school, I realized like people in college go to class two, three, four hours a day and that's about it. And they go to class like three or four days a week. And so what I ended up doing, I said, I'm just going to stack my classes from 8:00 a.m. to 10 p.m. straight. So 14 hours straight.
So you were doing school for 14 hours straight,
but only on Tuesday and Thursday.
Only on Tuesday and Thursday.
And then the rest of the days I did whatever I wanted. So, similar to you and we were talking about what you've kind of done in high school. I was in student government. I was on the rowing team and competing on rowing. I was doing a fraternity. I was on a thing called the value investing group. I was a part of this like the president of the university had this group of students that would go to like fundraisers for the university. So, I did all of this other stuff. Um, and finally I also did an internship at a hedge fund my sophomore year as well. And so because I took classes the way that I did, a year and a half in, they asked me, "Do you want to graduate early because you're done with you don't have any more classes left." And so at the time I thought about either staying and picking up another major. And the two majors I thought about were either philosophy or computer science. And I believe both of those majors just like push you to think differently. And I think college is about learning how to think and learning how to learn and gaining this love for learning. Um, but I wasn't that wise back then. And then I said, uh, I feel like most of my learning in college has been outside of the classroom. And so, do I want to pick up another major or do I want to learn what I want to do in the world? And I thought I wanted to go into finance and the buy side. We made this investment at the hedge fund. And I realized the stock tripled after like nine months of work. And I realized that nothing in the world changed. The bank account went up, but nothing changed. And I felt like I wanted my life to be working on things that I could see a tangible and real impact in the world. And so that was why I decided I came up with this idea that I was like, okay, I grew up in the US, grew up in California. I need to have a better understanding of the world, the perspectives of different people in the world, and the problems that people face. And then I can figure out what is a problem that's worth solving that I'm passionate about. So the idea I came up with this go to Israel, China, India and Nigeria. And each country had a theme. Israel is for technology, China's for advanced manufacturing, India is for emerging markets and Nigeria is for social enterprise. And I had 10 CEOs that I admired. I emailed them all. I was like, "Hey, can I just come work for you? You don't have to pay me. Just let me come and shadow you and learn." And that really kind of kicked off the When I told the dean of our business school, he's like, "You should 100% go and do that."
I want to take this a couple notches down. First off, how did you find the time to be doing course I even if it's only Tuesday and Thursday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. studying, being involved in all these different student activities, doing an internship, reaching out to CEOs, how are you able to balance all of that? And I think also as you were figuring out, you know, like I want to make impact on the world or work on projects that interest me. At what point did you realize that for you graduating early would help make help be the catalyst in that change and enable you to pursue some of the things that you thought were cooler? When I first started college any other freshman in college, you go so fun. You're meeting a bunch of new friends. You're enjoying it. But I had like a life scare early on in my freshman year and my dad had a potential diagnosis of cancer. And it just like gave me a wakeup call at that moment in time of what am I doing with my life? If god forbid anything happened like my mom wasn't working, I would have to step up in the family. And it like really kind of bootstarted my adult life and mindset. And at the same time I joined this group called the value investing group in college. And it was a group of eight individuals. Every year two had graduated accept two new people. And they really pushed one another to become the best version of themselves and gain this like intellectual curiosity, this love of learning. And so for school, the reason I was able to do all of that was like I actually like found it super interesting. I didn't take the classes because I try to graduate early. I took the classes because I went from going to a small school with 40 kids per class to this college that you had the coolest classes in the world that you can learn all this interesting stuff. And so I just picked up the ones that I thought were interesting and I just filled it up and then I did the activities that I thought were interesting. And that's where I think this kind of has this theme has stayed with me throughout my life, which is I work a lot and I work really hard. And I remember earlier in my career, my mom would say, stop working so hard. The money isn't worth it. And my response to her is like, I don't care about the money. I love this and this is fun. And so I think in college, that's where that really started, which was I loved going to the classics. I felt like I was just like a sponge soaking information. I loved doing all these extracurriculars because I was meeting people and getting exposure that I never had before. And then as a byproduct, it's like, hey, you have great grades. You can graduate early. can do all these things, but I did it because I was actually really interested and curious and that fueled me and drove me because I never needed a break because I just was doing things that I loved. I think what you're hitting right now is something that a lot of college students or young people kind of need to be hearing right now because you hear all these stories about amazing kids, they're excelling in high school, perfect SAT, perfect GPA, all the extracurriculars, and then they flatline when they hit college, right? because they're never driven by the curiosity or love of learning. It's more of I need to do this so when I eventually graduate I'm going to be able to get X job and do Y thing instead of focusing on how can I learn grow as a human and develop my skill set. Do you think for you especially I mean this is a little bit out there either when you're hiring professionals or looking to talk to other people in your space uh build partnerships, grants, contracts, whatever it looks like. Do you think that for you as an individual and a CEO, you take into your calculus and how you're thinking about things, you know, how curious a person is, like do you think curiosity matters in 2026?
100%. Like one of my top things that I look for in new candidates is what is their capacity to be able to learn new things and to be able to solve problems. I actually care much less about experience. I care much more about their capacity to solve problems because at the end of the day we're building businesses at the frontier and a lot of the problems that we're solving have never been solved before. And so it's less about bringing in folks telling us this is how it's supposed to be done. I want people figuring out how do we do it better. And so when we think about like I was no different when I was in high school. The first company I ever started was an education company. I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point. But when I was in high school, I knew how to get good grades, but I didn't have this deep level of learning. Like I knew how to get good grades. If I didn't wasn't interested in a book, I would spark notes a book and know how to get all the information I needed for a good test.
Hel you make and and and I I I optimized for good grades to go to go to college.
Of course. And if those things didn't happen in freshman year, my is situation with my dad, joining the value investment group, I wouldn't have gained this like real intrinsic drive and love of learning that really transformed kind of the rest of my life. And I think that that's a key thing is I think most people in life if they have the privilege and opportunity to go to college, if you ask a senior in high school, why are you going to college? Most don't have a deep thoughtful response. It's the next thing to do. I want to go get a good job. It's like these very kind of shallow responses, but there isn't like this deep, I'm going to go achieve this thing in my life or this purpose. And then you go to college and you spend the first two years having fun, screwing around, having a good time. Then your third year, you're like, oh, I'm about to graduate soon. I got to get this junior year internship that everyone's talking about. And then your senior year, you try to go get a job that everyone thinks is a great job. And most people go there and they do it for a couple years and they realize they don't love the job. They don't love work. And some people end up pivoting, going and getting an MBA or masters. But I think a lot of people end up settling with I work to make money to be able to fund my life and then I live my life outside of work. And I've always been a deep believer that in this world you can make money doing anything as long as you add value to the world. So if you can find what you're passionate about at a much earlier age, that's what can drive you in driving real value. And then as a result, like you just do what you love and then you live a great life and you have a work life harmony. And so I think that that element of like the why is like really really critical and I push people to think about and try to find things that they're passionate about. I have friends that make millions of dollars a year selling charcoal bags on Amazon that you put in your closet to take out the scent, right? But they love the idea of like consumer behavior and how to be able to work on online marketing and and consumer dynamics and it may not be charcoal bags itself, but like you can do really well just doing that one thing. And so that's one out of millions of opportunities to create wealth. And so figure out what you're passionate about and do better than everyone else. So obviously you graduate top of your class. You have this passion for learning and curiosity and you want to start building things, right? So you built some education startups. You're extremely young. Did you ever at any point feel like I'm too young to be doing this or I'm in some of these rooms with people who are more experienced than me. They have more capital. How do I compete? Did you ever have some of those moments where you weren't sure if you belonged and how did you rise above them?
All the time. When we first started the company, I was 19 turning 20 and I would wear a suit every day. And I actually had glasses that weren't prescription glasses. I didn't need them at the time. Now I do unfortunately, but they weren't prescription just so I welcome to the club. Just so I could look older, right? Because I didn't want people to ask me how old I were. So the perception mattered that much that you put on glasses so that other people didn't ask how old you were.
Correct. I try to I try to play the part so people didn't ask my age. And then eventually once you people know who you are and you're able to hold your own then when people ask you your age it's actually a benefit because they're always surprising like oh my god you're so young. And so I believe that like young talent has the ability to do amazing things if they're given the opportunity and they have the drive and the work ethic. If you think about our company today, a lot of our talent is really, really young. And you have people in 20 in their 20s that we empower and they're across the table from counterparties who are in their 40s and 50s and have 20 years of experience and they're equally as smart, if not smarter, many of the time. And so I think it's about like do people have this pride in this excellence of work and are they willing to go and dive in and figure out problems and I think that's like the element I believed this years ago like a decade ago where with the internet you can learn anything you want and you can set your mind on anything. I think today with AI it's even easier to learn anything. So there's no excuse for anyone to not dive in. That's why if I was a person graduating high school or college today, I think it's one of the most exciting times in the world to be able to grow because I think a lot of people are scared of is there a job for me when I graduate? And I would actually like push them to think about the world differently. You're at a moment in time where the whole world is transitioning. And so if someone showed up for an interview or applied for an interview and they said, "I'm applying for this role. I've used AI to create all of these things, these dashboards, these agents, etc. And I can come in, I can do this for the business in a unique and differentiated way. I would hire that person 10 out of 10 times versus anyone else who has 10 years of experience. And I think that's the thing that folks coming into the workforce need to really think about is how can you use that AI and be at the frontier of what AI can do for whatever field you're interested in and be the expert in a field that doesn't really have experts because it's so new. In 2020, you co-founded a company that was largely built around power and large-scale computing infrastructure, US Bitcoin Corp. long before AI, I mean, it wasn't an AI company, but before AI infrastructure was on every front page like it is now, what did you see then that most people don't uh didn't, right? Because even when you talk about, you know, your vision 10 years ago with the internet and being able to understand that there's so many things, the breath of opportunities is wider. Now with AI, the learning curve is massive. There's all these things that young people can do. What did you in 2020 see? Not even about the Bitcoin or the mining, but the compute, the data, the infrastructure. What called to you back then to start something that was a little bit risky?
It was this belief that electrons power technologies that push humanity forward and change the world. And so there was this chart that the World Bank had and if anyone hasn't seen it, I would implore them to go look it up. And it's basically this chart that has GDP per capita and energy consumption per capita on on and it plots out every country in the world. And you have this linear correlation of the more power a country consumes on a per capita basis, the higher the GDP is on a per capita basis. Meaning the more energy you have, the better your GDP, the better the quality of life and the higher uh living. And so this idea of this kind of energy abundant, energy rich society and culture started becoming really really fascinating. And so the question was how do we build a business at the intersection of power and technology and how do we build large-scale real physical infrastructure at that intersection. So when we started the company originally, the thesis was there's a growing demand for power at scale for compute to be able to securitize a Bitcoin network. And it was interesting because that data center could be located anywhere. And at around that time in 2020, you also had all of this renewable being developed. And a lot of these renewable projects being developed were in like West Texas in the panhandle where there was no demand. Transmission systems weren't built large enough to transfer that power. You basically had all this power being produced in places where there's no local demand. People weren't going to be moving manufacturing facilities in kind of rural areas. And so you had all this power being produced just stuck and stranded. And the thought was if we can bring load and compute load to those power generation facilities, you now make them economical and now they can go and invest in net new generation and produce more electrons to go fuel the world. And so that was the original thesis and idea. In order to be really good in that industry, you have to manage power, which is your biggest kind of opex line item, and you have to manage how efficiently you can build the data centers, which is your capex line item. And so when the AI opportunity came up, we're like, we're already doing this just differently. We have low redundant data centers. We can add more redundancy and we can power AI as well. And we can build purpose-built data centers for AI. And so the way we think about the business and I think this is something that we've done a little uniquely different is Hut 8 is a technology platform in the physical infrastructure world that powers technologies. Today we have a platform that powers Bitcoin and the Bitcoin network and we have a platform that powers AI. Both of them are compute and both of them power these different networks and I think that's very different than just a data center company and that's very different than a lot of crypto companies that have become data center companies and we did that purposefully because we want to be a business that believes in the future of technologies and what power does for those technologies and the availability of electrons to power them. And that's the company that we're building.
So I want to go back also a little bit to how we know each other. So when you were when you founded US Bitcoin Corp, obviously brought me on board. It's much longer story as a chief meme officer when I was 13. What is it about young talent that makes you so excited about the future? Because I feel like, you know, there's all these memes and rhetoric about uh older people or boomers not being as hot on new talent. They want experience. They want people who are sharpened. What do you think is intrinsic to young talent that you don't get out of people who are experienced? I think we were getting on that a little bit earlier.
Should I tell Should we tell everyone the stories when you were a chief meme? Nabs was a lot chubbier back then. He's definitely
Started uh started working out more and looks great. Um but it it was awesome. I mean when I met Nabs, he was so driven. And how old were you at the time?
Yeah, you were 13 years old. I remember uh I met Asher and I asked him if I could work with him and he said I want you to make a pitch deck about AS6 and Bitcoin. He said well what do you know about AS6? I said I don't know what an I don't know [laughter] I don't know what an ASIC is. Um he said okay come back to me with a pitch deck and something to show so I could bring you on board and show it to our uh uh to our seuite and get it approved. So I spent the next three days I was in my room and I was just researching all this information. This is pre-AI before chat GPT.
Um, just a 13-year-old kid in my on my monitor in between like Fortnite games. And no, but seriously, I I logged in, I made the pitch deck, I sent it back to Asher and tell him the rest of the story.
Yeah. And it it was really high quality work. Like I would get that from someone interviewing at the company, not a 13-year-old. And I said, you know what, like this kid has drive, is willing to put in the work, so let's give him an opportunity to come do something unique and different. And at the time, the thought process, why did we come up with a chief meme officer was let's get young people to understand how all this infrastructure works. Let's go and educate them and give make the company feel more relatable rather than just a large scale infrastructure. I mean I think also when you think about the framing it's funny of something chief meme officer I think for me and how I approach the roles also how do we get young people excited about technology right when you talk about electrons powering the future and the fact that there is this strong correlation between higher quality of life and GDP per capita in in correlation with electricity consumption. How do we get young people to not see the future as this scary Terminator scenario with AI and technology, but instead get invested and immersed in the technology and excited like this is what we're building. This can change lives, improve our country, improve the world. Um, so I think for me and I think I think your approach as well is how can we make this cool for people.
That's right.
Uh, as well as obviously growing a social image and all the other important corporate stuff, but I think on a broader
uh broader level, I think that was some of the other cool parts of 100%. And from a talent perspective, every problem out there is solvable if you have someone who is deeply curious, has high capacity to learn, and has a relentless work ethic. And so when we think about building the team, if you have someone that will go and run through any wall, will outwork any person next to them and lacks a bit of experience compared to someone who has the experience but wants to go home at 5:00 and won't put in that extra mile to learn the problems. We'll always bet on the first, not the second. And the main reason too is we live in an industry where so much of what we do is net new and we're disrupting and trying to change how things work. If the job was let's just bring someone to maintain the status quo then sure we bring someone with experience they know what they're doing and we don't need to add more friction to that. But because everything we do we take the approach of all right we just did this great $3 billion f financing how do we do it better? Like for us, nothing's good enough. Even if it's the best in class, we push on how do we get better? How do we get better? How do we get better? And so that's across financing, across uh infrastructure, bills, design, engineering, cost, quality. And so that's the philosophy of the company. And I think there's also something unique about like being naive because when you're naive, you think anything is possible and you go and figure out a way to make it happen. And when you have kind of the baggage of saying this is how things should be done, it pushes you and challenges you from thinking how to think about it differently. And so it's interesting because all the folks that join the company with experience, we actually spend months retraining them to think about the world. And we say don't tell us this is how it's done. Explain to us from a first principles perspective why it should be done this way. And so it makes them go to the building blocks of everything they've ever learned in their careers and challenge of Is there a real raw reason that we're doing this from a first principles mindset or is it just because everyone's done it and there's a better way to do it? And I think that's what's made us successful and that's what we take a lot of pride in.
I would also say that that to that note I think with the amount of technology that we have and you're seeing that increasingly I think it's the majority of Claude's code base is being built by Claude code right and you're seeing that the technology is almost building itself. I think the importance of creatives and people who have the ability to think out, it's a little bit corny, but think outside the box really is becoming increasingly powerful. I think for young people being able to understand the world at a deeper level and solve complex problems um is definitely a skill that super important. Um talking about skills that are super important. Let's fast forward a little bit. It's a couple years later now you have this amazing company that's merging with a larger company, Hut 8. You're young, you get handed the role of CEO after some time, and now you're managing an even bigger company. You're managing a shift to more data, power, and infrastructure um and almost repurposing some of the technology that was previously on Bitcoin to just broader um data, AI, energy, and infrastructure implications. What was that like for you? Was that scary? Like, how do you manage such a big shift? Because obviously, US Bitcoin Corp was very large. like don't me wrong it's very large but it's still you're going from uh US BTC to now a publicly traded
company. What is that like for a young Asher?
So in that journey, there were a lot of stories. I think one day I told the team, if we get big enough as a company, this would be a really good movie. But when we merged with Hut 8, it was post-2022, during kind of the collapse of the whole market. You had energy prices skyrocket because Russia attacked Ukraine, Bitcoin prices crashed because of FTX and all these companies blowing up, and we said we need to continue to grow the company. We're a capital-intensive infrastructure business, and there's no capital in the private markets, and so we need to figure out how to go public. But the IPO market wasn't there, and Hut was a company that was trading near cash, like their Bitcoin value, and so it was actually a really good merger. It ended up being a merger of equals, and we merged together as a company.
And the value, I would say, in that moment was when we merged the companies, the mindset was we bring these two companies together and we would go and grow. We went through kind of the merger, the SEC, learned about how to go public, and we realized there was a really big cultural difference too between the two companies that were merging. We were very much an entrepreneurial, first-principles approach of how do we go and build this business. Meanwhile, like, there was a lot more of a mindset of like, all right, we're a corporate company. We kind of do things like a corporate way. And so kind of very quickly after the merger, we realized that like one of these philosophies had to be the one that really drove the business. I ended up taking over as CEO about two months after the merger.
And it was a tough time for the business because no one knew who we were. When we were private, we decided not to do any press releases because we said all of our investors have invested in us because of word of mouth. We don't need more capital. We don't have customers in this space. We just contribute compute and we get paid for it. And so outside of ego, there's really no reason to do PR. The problem with that was when we went public, it actually ended up being really difficult for people to know who we were. And they're like, 'Hey, you have these young guys.' We ended up getting this short report and the stock went down like 60% right when we went public. And we went through some merger and management issues and all this stuff. And so I remember the day we rang the bell in the NASDAQ, a short report came out and like the stock started tanking. I was like, 'Wow, this was not how I envisioned taking a company public when I was a kid dreaming of starting a company to take it public.'
And so when I took over the company, there wasn't really any belief of how you could go build a great business. Everyone discounted us. Our institutional ownership was like under 10%. The stock was at like six bucks. And when I took over, I went to a bunch of mentors of ours, and we were lucky. Like, we have great board members like Mayo Shattuck, who ran Constellation Energy, on the board of Capital One, John Hopkins, and so forth. And I would ask him, 'What is your advice?' Right? Because when I took over as CEO, I think I was like 29 years old, so I was like one of the youngest kind of public company CEOs. I said, 'What is your advice for how we fix this?' And he's like, 'Asher, keep your head down, execute, under-promise and over-deliver.' That was it. And so that was about a little over two years ago.
And since then, I mean, we're at over 80% institutional ownership. We have some of the biggest and most well-known investors in the world. The stock is up over 1,000% in the last two years. And I think it just comes down to like the foundation, which is we're building things we deeply care about. So this feels much less like work and feels like a passion. We are honest and upfront with people, and like we care about the long term. Like I want this company to be an unbelievably, generationally, humanity-impacting company in the long term. So like I don't care about our stock going up 10%. I care about us going and impacting like humanity and impacting the world. And so as we make decisions, we think about partnerships in the long term. We think about shareholders in the long term. And I think a lot of these things have allowed us to be kind of the company we've evolved into and become today.
And I think it all just like starts in being like authentic, working hard diligently, and then the rest will come. But I didn't know how to be a public company CEO when we started. I didn't know how to build an energy infrastructure company when we started. But I think the willingness to figure out problems, the excitement to go and tackle those problems, is what allowed us to build where we are today, and the DNA that I think is what will carry us to build the company we are building.
Well, I mean, you got thrown into the deep end, and I'd say you learned to swim pretty quickly because you've signed something like 16.8 billion dollars in contracted leases across two different campuses, Riverbend and Beacon Point, for AI compute capacity that's still being built. How did you, or I guess how, not how did you, how do you, and how will you continue to like see numbers like that that your younger self could have only dreamed of and not be like losing your mind, right, and adapting to that? How do you deal also with the pressure of knowing like this is a publicly traded company, we want to impact humanity, but obviously there's a bottom line to protect. How are we able to manage expectations, right? So how are you able to manage all of that pressure?
Sure. On the first, I think the fun's just starting, and that's what I tell people when I'm interviewing. I'm like, we're at this beautiful sweet spot where we're still a high-growth startup company. You have people that are here. I mean, it's late right now, and you see people walking around me.
Exactly. We walked into the office. It was already like talking about people who stay at 5:00 p.m. The office was like full.
