Hi, my name is Melissa Medina and I'm CEO and co-founder of Emerge Americas.
Hi, I'm TJ Viami and I'm the president of business development here at Emerge Americas.
And welcome to 20 by 20 by 20. This is our new series that's counting down to one of the biggest moments on the global stage. That's right, the G20 is happening right here in Miami, Florida.
Absolutely. 20 weeks, 20 visionary leaders, one destination, the 305.
Asher, thank you so much for having us here in your amazing new office space. TJ and I are really excited to have you on our mini podcast series called 20 by 20 by 20, where we're highlighting 20 South Florida leaders, and your name came to mind immediately. So, thank you for joining us and being part of this.
Thanks for having me. Excited.
Of course, of course, and also full circle because we really enjoyed having you at Emerge this spring, too. And now, you know, coming to your office is sort of the full circle moment. We're going to go ahead and dive right in. But before we get into Hut 8, where we are right now, and into tech, I'd love to share with the audience a little bit more about your personal journey. How did you start in entrepreneurship and what led you to build what you're building today?
I think growing up, my parents immigrated to the US and I was the first one to go to college. My dad was an entrepreneur. So most folks in my family have been entrepreneurs. Part of that is no one's college, and so I think they just end up starting their own paths. And I grew up with kind of that bug around me. Ultimately, when I went to school, I thought I wanted to go into finance and into investing.
And I realized that if I'm going to work really, really hard, I want to actually be building the thing that I'm spending the hours on.
And ultimately went on this path of building businesses. And so, I've built a couple of businesses before Hut 8 today. But I think what I tell the team every day is life is short. And if you're going to spend time and if you're going to maximize your limited time on earth, do the thing that you love and figure out how to create value in the thing that you love. And so figure out something that you're deeply passionate about and do that as your career.
I love that you started with quite literally your parents, I guess, immigration, right, journey and how that breeds opportunity. I think that's very parallel to so many of our stories right here in Miami, right? And that it's in your DNA, that entrepreneurial sort of spirit.
It is the American dream, right? It's our parents and everything. So, it's incredible. You've described power as the foundational layer of technology, and as AI just drives unprecedented demand for compute, you know, what do you think about power as a strategic asset and how important is it to the future?
We're deep believers that as humanity progresses, as quality of life increases, and ultimately GDPs and countries grow, that is centered around the ability to harness energy. And so there's this great chart that has really kind of underpinned this for us as a company. It was GDP per capita and energy consumption per capita. And the world thing came out with it and it showed that there is no rich country that has low energy consumption and there's no poor country that has high energy consumption. They're linearly correlated.
And so if you think about the different innovations that we've had, the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution, all of that had to do with utilizing new technologies that at its core were powered by an additional usage of power, right.
And so you can think through kind of the obvious things of like the inventions of electricity and the light bulb, and instead of going from a fire-based environment, but even fire is a source of energy that you're cultivating. And so I think overall, like the world we live in, energy was what drives us forward. And so as a company, we thought, what if we built a business around this concept of sitting in between frontier technologies and energy? Energy might be electricity, it might be molecules, it might be the sun. And then let's build large-scale infrastructure that connects those two together, empowers frontier technologies to push forward and make the world a better place.
Yeah, I've seen that chart and it's so true. Impressive. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. So impressive.
And you are, and you chose, I should say, to build Hut 8 here out of Miami.
And for us, extremely validating to have you, your company here in South Florida.
Ultimately, why Miami? What differentiates Miami from other tech hubs that I'm sure you could have potentially chosen?
Miami at its surface level is not an easy place to actually go build a fast-growing company. And the main reason is Miami is still a city in its early history.
Correct. We're still in the history.
And as a result, a lot of kind of the core talent that we're recruiting from when it comes to deeply technical roles, financial roles and so forth, Miami has not been historically known to be those hubs, right? New York, San Francisco, places in Texas, Chicago have been more so where those hubs are. But there's something beautiful about Miami as a city today because we believe that like the city is growing and it's what all of these other cities that I just mentioned were 20, 30 years ago. And so, not only can we build a company, we can also help build a city alongside it as well. And you have, when we first moved to Miami, it was because all of our investors came to Miami during COVID and that's how we ended up coming down. I never saw myself living in Miami my whole life, right?
And I started spending a lot of time here in 2020 and 2021. And so you have a cohort of people who've done very well in their careers that live here now. You're seeing more and more people move here, which is why the real estate prices are going up. But it's really this kind of younger cohort of people who are still building in their careers. And when they think about Miami, do they think about it as a place where they have their bachelor parties or do they think about it as a city where they can actually go and build? And what I tell folks is I think we have almost 200 people here, the majority of which aren't from here. Probably 90% of folks moved here for this role.
