Becoming Crusoe's Second Believer
“Wait, let me get this straight. You are turning large fire balls coming from the ground into Bitcoin in North Dakota?” I exclaimed to Chase Lochmiller.
“Yes, and one day this will power the future of AI.” Chase replied.
When I met Chase at Dandelion Chocolate in 2018, we hadn’t yet formalized our Long Journey thesis of “investing in the absurd before it became consensus,” but in that moment I could feel his conviction in this seemingly preposterous idea and I felt moved to support him and be his “second believer” (founders are the first believer). He wasn’t just another technically sharp entrepreneur; he had vision, drive, and the uncanny ability to bring others along for the journey.
I ended up becoming Crusoe’s first advisor and helped Chase with fundraising to put together their seed round. Now, as I reflect on the years since our initial meeting and the rise of Crusoe, it’s evident that this will be a generational company.
A Chance Encounter
Chase and I met years ago when I was building my venture fund, Edelweiss, which would later become Long Journey. He became an LP, and I remember his obsession with details of various startups. I had a feeling then that this was a guy I needed to pay attention to.
When Chase approached me about Crusoe in its early days, I was floored by his pitch. He wasn’t asking for money for a traditional tech company. Instead, he wanted to tackle stranded energy—the 125 billion cubic feet of natural gas burned off as flares every day—and turn it into something valuable. His solution? Use that energy to power modular data centers for compute-heavy applications like Bitcoin mining and, eventually, AI cloud infrastructure.
On paper, it was absurd. In practice, if he could pull it off, it was brilliant. I was enthralled.
Gaining a Second Believer
Crusoe’s vision emerged from an extraordinary mountaineering trip Chase took with his old friend, Cully Cavness. Their conversation about gas flaring and its environmental toll turned into an ambitious idea: Why not repurpose that wasted energy to fuel computing? Chase’s experience in crypto and machine learning, combined with Cully’s background in oil and gas, made them uniquely suited to tackle the problem.
Two things stood out to me about what Chase and Cully were building:
First, It was clear to me that no one in Silicon Valley was showing up in North Dakota oil fields with a shipping container of servers and conversely very few people in North Dakota oil fields were thinking about the future of AI. This idea was novel.
Secondly, these two guys were not messing around. They had already partnered with an energy company and had Bitcoin rigs working in the field. They showed character — the grit and willingness to get their hands dirty, paired with the audacity to believe in this crazy vision. I left the meeting with more conviction than ever.
A Pilgrimage to North Dakota
One of my favorite memories with Crusoe was a trip to see their early operations in North Dakota. Chase and I, along with Scott Nolan from Founders Fund, drove three hours to a site where a gas flare blazed into the sky. I asked Chase, “What are we going to do with that flare?”
He turned to me with determination and glee. “We’re going to get rid of it. We’re going to turn it into Bitcoin.”
“Gas to cash! Gas to cash!”, I remember saying. Little did I know this would become a tiny piece of Crusoe folklore as a company slogan. Feeling the heat from these enormous fireballs made me realize just how insane what they set out to do was and how hard it was going to be for anyone else to follow.
Thinking Like a Mountaineer
Crusoe’s success isn’t just about brilliant ideas; it’s about values and culture. Chase knew from the beginning just how important company values were and with the help of Shane Metcalf, a frequent Long Journey collaborator, they went to work on putting Crusoe’s values to paper. “Think like a mountaineer” captures the essence of meticulous preparation, mastery of tools, and readiness for things to go wrong. Anchored around these core values, they were able to bring together a team as diverse as the problems they aimed to solve, from the mechanics in North Dakota to the engineers in Silicon Valley.
Their approach was mirrored in their financial discipline. Even in Crusoe’s earliest decks, Chase projected every variable with the precision of a climber plotting a summit. Unlike most startups, he focused on free cash flow as a guiding metric, a decision that would prove critical in navigating volatile markets.
Scaling the Mountain
Crusoe didn’t stop at Bitcoin mining. While it was a lucrative beachhead, Chase always had his eye on something bigger: distributed computing. He made the bold decision to pivot resources toward AI cloud infrastructure, even before the market fully appreciated its potential. On this journey, one of our venture partners, Jonathan Bruck worked from Crusoe’s office helping Chase prototype and build the beginning of the cloud and datacenter business. Jon recruited two crucial industry veterans who positioned Crusoe perfectly for the AI boom ignited by innovations like ChatGPT.
Today, Crusoe’s distributed compute platform is a leader in AI cloud services, built on the back of their experience in modular data centers and stranded energy. Their impact is tangible—reducing CO2 emissions equivalent to taking 162,000 cars off the road in 2023 alone.
Looking Ahead
Today as Crusoe announces a $600 million Series D Round, led by our friends at Founders Fund and continues to scale, it is clear they are not just a tech company or an energy company. They’re something new: a transitional energy company with the operational expertise to build data centers anywhere, for any use case. Their latest project, a 200 MW datacenter in Texas and raising this next round of funding, is just the beginning.
We recently hosted a team retreat where we invited Chase to join for an interview and share some of the wisdom he’s accumulated as a founder. That evening, our dinner plans fell through and we were forced to “think like a mountaineer” and make it work. Chase sprung to action and assumed the role of “head chef” cooking up a gourmet meal of grilled fish, macadamia nut salad, and roasted wild mushrooms with our team. This reminded me not only of his brilliance, but also of his heart.
For me, watching Chase and Crusoe succeed has been deeply moving. They’ve proven that the combination of intellectual independence, curiosity, grit, and a willingness to solve problems no one else dares to tackle can lead to magically weird outcomes and truly reshape industries.
Chase often says Crusoe is like climbing a mountain: you need practice, planning, and process. From where I stand, they’re not just climbing—they’re redefining the peaks themselves.