Josherich's Blog

The Future of Everything: What CEOs of Circle, CrowdStrike & More See Coming in 2026

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.

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I think most of us agree going into 2026, stablecoins and AI crypto are having a huge resurgence, and we were lucky enough to get two of my friends:

• Brian Armstrong, from Coinbase
• Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle.

We’ve known each other for 30 years.
“Yeah, that’s amazing. What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
“I know. It’s great to be with you again.”

Yeah, and this is not your first time at Davos. You’ve been here a couple of times.
“Yeah. I started coming with my last company, Brightcove, back in 2008, 2009. And a very different time, both for WEF. It was a different time in the world. There was a 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.”

“Yeah, it’s fascinating. I think it’s Game of Thrones.

Chaos is a ladder.
Chaos is a ladder.”

Yeah. And for guys like us who’ve been through this three times now — we went through it in the dot-com boom. I think we’re too young to have… You remember, obviously, that Black Friday in ‘87, but we were in college. And so we had our dot-com boom, great financial crisis, and then we had COVID.
COVID.
“Yeah, which was also pretty spicy. That was a great disruptive moment. But 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.’”

“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 year, actually, I got my company profitable, Flickr. And then not long after, it went public. And so we deal with what we’re dealt with — constraints.”
“Yeah. Constraint makes for great art, is, I think, the old expression.”

So let’s talk about your journey with Circle. And stablecoins, obviously, are top of mind because we have the Genius Act. My bestie, David Sachs, 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?

David Sachs:
“I mean, look, 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 in 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 like a new commodity money like Bitcoin. My view is that we needed a bridge. We needed to connect kind of the existing fiat system to crypto and to these new networks and build like what we called like an HTTP for dollars on the internet. And that was the idea.”

“And eventually that’s called stablecoins. Early on, we talked about we’re building fiat digital currency or fiat tokens or all this. But stablecoins stuck.”

“But I mean, 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 that can transact peer-to-peer, which is super, super powerful and provides a huge amount of value to people. And really importantly, because of the technology of blockchains, like we actually have programmable money.”

“And so we’re right at the front edge of kind of, I think, 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 stablecoins provide.”

“And variability and not knowing how much your dollar is worth when you open your wallet or your bank…” Volatility was a blocker for consumers. Volatile cryptocurrencies—no one’s going to buy a cup of coffee with a Bitcoin, et cetera. 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? That’s a whole different thing. And that’s where the model that we built, which is fully reserved with ultra safe assets, comes in. We have regulators look after it and auditors look after it to make sure it’s all done the right way.

I remember talking to you offline about this. It was the easier decision for most people in crypto to go to the ZUG.

• What is it?
• ZUG—the ZUG here in Switzerland, or just be based in Zurich or maybe Dubai.
• And yeah, just YOLO it and don’t worry about regulations.
• 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,

“I’ll just do this offshore and give up my United States, or even go to jail.”

Why not?

Yes, we have many crypto people right now watching this show from San Quentin and, yeah, I mean, look, shows popular there.

Going back to even the founding of the company, when I looked at: if we want to establish a new way to put what we think of as regular money on the internet, and we want to actually build a new internet native financial system that the whole world uses—like actually uses—businesses, are you going to use it? And people are going to use it. 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, well, you have to integrate with the existing system and work with policymakers to figure that out. There’s just no other way.

So I testified to the Senate in November of 2013. If you read the testimony, it’s saying all the same stuff now as I did then. And it was received slightly differently. It really was.

I mean, I got a lot of hate.

Explain, 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’s different than what you maybe anticipated.

Well, I think with a lot of technologies on the internet, I was around, I think we were both around in the early stages of the internet, early stages of the web. There’s a very kind of hard libertarian view, and then there’s obviously the statist view at the other end of that.

I lean libertarian, but I think also in the early days of the internet, it was like,

• If we want to allow companies to get on,
• We need to have regulation for ISPs,
• We need to be able to have secure transactions, secure transactions and SSL.

Well then we’re going to need people who are making decisions about who’s a valid site and who’s not a valid site. These were really controversial things at the time that the more anarcho side of things was against.

Now crypto itself, cryptography, and crypto kind of birthed out of that. These are people who wanted to be outside the system. Wanted to be outside.

And I think Circle has always kind of tried to find this middle way, which is:

• 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 the legacy money systems.

So there is a very deep commitment to those fundamental internet ideas. But at the same time,

• If you want BlackRock to use it,
• Or you want the biggest tech companies in the world to use it,
• Or just someone to hold it in a digital wallet and say, “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.

Obviously, people talk about

“In code we trust,”

which is sort of what you’d kind of put around, easy for a developer to feel that way, easy for somebody extremely technical to feel that way.

But for a civilian, a non-anarchist, maybe you want to understand how the dollar is actually backed.

That’s exactly right.

So I think we just took that path, and that was like a harder path. It took more. Capital. It took more, I had to hire, you know, my first executive was a general counsel and chief compliance officer. Right. 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. Totally. And don’t take this risk.”

I mean, one of the stories actually is that before, you know, Jim Breyer and General Catalyst would give me capital when we were starting the company, they were like, “we really need to know that if you do this, it’s like, it’s not illegal. Like we’re not going to have some kind of liability issue.”

So I personally, on my own, with my own money, hired the top kind of 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. That’s because the US Treasury Department actually had given guidance about how to deal with virtual currency in the banking system. This was in March, 2013, so super early. But yeah, we needed to know:

• Is there a legitimate legal pathway to accomplishing what we want to accomplish?

It’s always been important. And as we’ve seen, there are 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?
Yeah, I would say in the entire history of building this, it’s been huge uphill battles with regulators and incumbents.

What’s interesting is that over the years, I found if you come into a policymaker or regulator and say,

“Hey, there’s this 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 risks. Let’s come up with ways to address that.”

Actually, people are pretty interested in talking.

Generally, when you go to the incumbents and say,

“Hey, we want to work with you or integrate this because we kind of need to work with you to make the whole thing happen,”

there’s a lot more skepticism and constraint there.

And so that’s changed now. I mean, we’re in a very different world. It’s gone from a threat to an opportunity.

But there is still some reticence to stablecoins and crypto by some of the major banks and big players because they are maybe a little concerned that

“you’re too good at what you do and you might be too far ahead.”

If you weren’t so dexterous and capable and had started five years ago, they might feel differently about it.

Is my intuition close to your assessment or am I wrong?
I think that there’s some truth in that for sure.

It’s interesting — both you and I have this juxtaposition against other eras of the internet. When digital media happened:

• You could stream media
• You could put up content on the web
• There were all these digital media startups

The media companies were like,

“well, we can do that too. Okay, our business model might have to change,”

and digital advertising transformed:

“You can make it more targeted.”

But then there were companies that executed fundamentally different technical and software approaches. They built completely different types of utilities with different unit economics that turned the product, user experience, and economics upside down.

Those companies are:

• Craigslist (to classifieds)
• Google Ad Network
• New York Times
• Amazon Marketplace

and many more like that.

I think we’re in a similar place now where:

• Media companies
• Communications companies
• Software enterprise companies
• Retailers

have said,

“This is a new paradigm. It’s better for customers. I can deliver a better product. The economics are better.”

They accept,

• “We just have to do this,”
• “We’re going to face the innovator’s dilemma,”

and they make that transition.

It takes like 5 to 10 years. It takes them three times longer than probably the innovator.

For example, Walmart and Target now do an exceptional job. The United Airlines app… is not terrible. Right. I mean, it’s not Uber, but this is the difference between a software-driven company and, and they’re not like, “we’re a software company,” like, you know, we fundamentally, 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. And that’s kind of the sticking point. The Genius Act says,

“Hey, you can have rewards, but you can’t have interest.”

And that was, I guess, where this was able to get through the legislative process. Explain that to the audience.

Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of things. So if you go back a few years, when stable coins sort of 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, and all this didn’t come out, but, you know, Meta tried to do their own project and 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 interns.

Yeah. It’s interesting. Is that your understanding as well? Broadly?

I have a variety of insights about it, but I think we’re kind of like a neutral company. We’re not a giant big tech, et cetera. But kind of coming back to your question, regulators got together and said, “Hey, there is this payment system innovation. It is this thing called stable coins.” And they all kind of said, here’s some recommendations for how you could regulate this.

And actually, all around the world that happened. So it happened first in Japan, there are stable coin laws. Then it happened in Europe years ago, actually stable coin laws. Then, you know, in the UAE and Hong Kong, and then in the U.S. with the Genius Act.

In all of these, stable coins are designed as a cash-like instrument, a payment instrument. They’re designed as this form of money to be used in the payment system. And that’s really at the heart of it. That’s how these laws have been written, and it’s pretty consistent around the world.

So the Genius Act does that, but it also, I think, provides. So, you know, as a result under the Genius Act, Circle, as a payment stable coin issuer, is prohibited from paying interest directly to stable coin holders. It’s the same thing in Europe—we’re regulated there—the same rule. Same thing in Japan, that all these markets maintain.

At the same time, we’re building a business. We do generate revenue, and we work with lots of different types of platforms, markets, distributors, and brokerages. We work with everyone from:

• Robinhood
• Revolut
• Coinbase
• Visa
• And lots of other companies.

Those companies, stable coins are really important too because they are how people hold money, make payments, trade, and do a lot on those platforms. They want to be able to pay rewards or have loyalty programs or incentives and other things. And if they’re making money from their relationship with us, they want to be able to do that.

And that’s what the Genius Act captured. I think it’s a good model.

So you’re happy with it as is?

We think it’s a very solid model. There’s ongoing discussion about:

• Is there a specific set of things that qualify for those kinds of loyalty and rewards?
• How prescriptive should the law be?

It’s kind of getting relitigated a little bit.

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

I think banks see stable coins as both a threat and an opportunity.

Right.

You know, I can say we’re having more engagement with more banks in the world than we’ve ever had before. Major banks, global banks, regional banks, banks all over the world want to integrate this and use it in payments. They want to use it in how capital markets work.

Think about,

I need to post collateral on an exchange to trade and I'm trading different...

Different assets. Stable coins are a better way to do that. Whether it’s in capital markets, trading, wealth management, or payments, there’s uses for this. Definitely, banks see a lot of opportunities because it’s faster and cheaper. It’s instant and it’s free essentially.

If you talk to a global money center bank, like JP Morgan or Citi, and ask them, “How many different payment networks are you integrated into as a bank?” they’ll tell you over 200. They integrate to over 200 different payment networks, all over the planet, with all different standards and systems.

If you go to them and say, “Stable coin networks are like a new payment network,” they’re like,

“I get it. This is on the internet. It has the attributes of how the internet works. We understand that. And this will be your fastest, cheapest, and most trackable version.”

We actually work with a global systemically important bank that’s moving their own money between their global branches using USDC because it’s faster than going through the correspondent banking system. They trust it more.

Bottom line is there’s a lot of opportunity for banks. This is not a black or white thing. We’ll figure out the rewards aspect, I’m very sure.

Amex figured it out, and so have video games. There was some initial confusion, like,

“Is this a currency?”
People were trading items on eBay, like swords from World of Warcraft, and asking if that counted as currency. The response:
“They’re playing video games, who cares? Can we just move on?”

There are more important things than sweating Amex points being traded and pretending it’s a currency.

You’re up against an offshore platform that manages maybe three to five times the amount under management. Who’s counting? Tether.

But USDC has been catching up quickly. Amongst the largest stable coins, USDC has been growing faster. For two years straight, USDC is the second largest stable coin, with Tether first. USDC is by far the largest regulated stable coin network.

Our growth in transaction volume with USDC is increasing quite a bit faster as well. We feel really good about this.

Our view is that if stable coins are going to be part of the actual economic system — used by households, firms, corporations, and financial institutions:

• A remote worker who’s a software engineer in Pakistan,
• A small business importing products from Vietnam in Brazil,
• Or a hedge fund in the US trading derivatives,

all of these actors will want a safe, fully reserved, audited, compliant, liquid stable coin that is available in and out of the global financial system.

The Total Addressable Market (TAM) of legal electronic money today is about $120 trillion and growing due to monetary easing and similar factors. Of that, about $60 trillion is physical cash and non-interest-bearing demand deposits — basically working capital money sitting out there.

This is a huge amount of value stored and used both as a store of value and payment system money. Stable coins can grow into that, supported by a well-integrated infrastructure.

The business model benefits from a float on this large base of capital, which underwrites your business when interest rates are high. In boom times, Tether makes over $10 billion a year on their float. We assume we’re making billions on our float as well.

Since we’re a public company, you can look that up.

Regarding interest rates dropping to zero, that could pose challenges. When interest rates were very low previously, we saw a 1000% year-over-year growth two years ago. Straight. So growth was off the charts. When interest rates actually started to rise, we actually saw declines in circulation.

Why? Well, it’s really the price of money, the opportunity cost of money. So interest rates set a kind of cost to holding money. The incentive matters. And so what’s interesting is that if you actually look at from like December 2023, when basically the forward curve, which was sort of the kind of short-term kind of price of money, in a sense, the forward curve kind of being the market’s view of the short-term price of money, when that started to fall because the expectation of interest rates came, USDC started to grow.

Actually, from the peak of whatever it was, five and a quarter, five and a half, down to where we are, which is three and a half or whatever it is now, that’s, I don’t know, exact percentage. Let’s call it a 35, 40 percent decline in the interest rate. We’ve had a multi-hundred percent increase in the amount of USDC in circulation. And so there’s an inverse correlation there.

And so I’ve—and I’ve said this publicly. I’ve said this publicly in the media. I’ve said this many, many times. I have wanted—when interest rates were really high, my view is we really need interest rates to come down. Yeah. We really need them to come down because that will help us grow. That will put more velocity of money in place.

• The pie gets bigger, yeah.
• The pie gets bigger and actually—
• Which also impacts adoption.
• It impacts adoption as well.

So more people are investing capital in technology to transform their businesses to grow. Tech on, right? And so that is a catalyst. And so my view has been that is really important.

And so I think our view is there is some conceptual neutral interest rate. And given the persistence of inflation of around 2.5 percent or whatever it is, some people argue, is the neutral rate—should the neutral rate and the kind of baseline of inflation be 2.5 or 2.8?

You know where the 2 percent came from? I talked about it in a previous All In episode. I don’t know if you’ve heard it. I do, but go ahead.

“Yeah, New Zealand.”

Yeah. There was a politician in New Zealand who was talking to their central bank, and he’s like,

“What should it be?”

And he’s like,

“I think 2.”

And he’s like,

“Yeah. How did you come up with the number?”

It’s like,

“My instinct.”

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

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? I mean, when you have a society that is doing as well as ours is or the European Union is, some people just choose to not work.

I think labor participation now is 61% or 62%. And then when you and I were coming up, it had peaked at 68%, 69%. So it was like 15% higher.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s really interesting to think about that. Big structural changes.

Yeah.

Tether as a competitor would not be able to operate in the US. Lots of reports. I’m going to be judicious here. Claims, reports, concerns from politicians to the press and everywhere in between and regulators that they’re doing some stuff in the dark areas that maybe you wouldn’t want to touch in terms of 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 GOs and there was some very big concerns that they might have a run because they weren’t dollar for dollar backed and people had all kinds of claims about, hey, maybe they have Chinese paper and all these different concerns and they wouldn’t do an attestation. But they would do an attestation with a bank and somewhere in the BVI that nobody’s heard of and a big KPMG maybe doesn’t.

You seem to know a lot about this. I was not a tether truther, but I did go down the rabbit hole because I reported on it on the pod and talked about it. But they’re 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 in that way.

I mean, look, 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 you’re regulated by, if you’re large, by the national bank regulator, the OCC, which is a very serious regulator, a serious prudential regulator. And we’ve received conditional approval for something called First National Digital Currency Bank, which is a national trust bank that we’re setting up to be part of how we operate USDC as well.

But again, level playing field. If you want to comply and build a product… Under that regulatory framework, you can do that. And I think many people will. This is like when net neutrality happened and common carrier rules came. Anybody can get into providing data services to the internet. Anyone can build these things. So that’s great. And so free market, clear rules, love it.

So my view is there’s absolutely going to be more competition. My view is also that the structure of this market, stable coins are network businesses, meaning they actually exist as platforms and utilities on the internet. Like the USDC and our stable coin network is literally the software protocols. But it’s also the tens of thousands of applications that have integrated to the APIs.

Every time an app integrates, you know, Cash App just said,

“Hey, we’re adding USDC support.”

That’s great. Now all those—

• Coinbase has you.
• Coinbase has it.
• Revolut has it.
• Banks have it.
• Visa’s using it.

Every time someone adds it, you know, Stripe merchants, Shopify merchants can use it. Every time someone adds that, it adds utility to the network. It adds network effects. And then the next developer who comes along and says,

“Hey, I want to build an app that uses digital dollars, etc. Which one should I use? Well, I have interoperability with all this stuff.”

Great. So you have these network effects that are really key.

Then you also have what I call liquidity network effects, which is the ability for one 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  
- UAE  
- European Union  
- US  

This is an easy thing to do. I mean, this is a huge build. Yeah. It’s a huge build. And now it’s at a point where—it’s defensibility. It is defensibility.

We have pipes in a sense where some of the biggest capital markets participants in the world, companies like BlackRock, can enable a tokenized fund that enables USDC to come in and out of it. Their institutional participants know that’ll work, right?

So I think it’s a long-winded answer. But the answer is essentially, we feel like we’ve built a great platform and a great network. And we have really strong network effects. And they’re accelerating. We’ve been publicly audited as a corporation, as a New York Stock Exchange governed publicly listed SEC supervised company now for a period of time, but more broadly for a long time.

When companies are going to choose what they’re going to build on and what they’re going to use, they’re going to look at all that. Yeah, the footprint matters. It does. And so the marginal value of a net new dollar stablecoin coming into the market is essentially zero. All these things are needed.

And what do you think about this concept that everybody’s going to have their own stablecoin? There’ll be an Amazon one, obviously PayPal’s added one. Do you think that’s realistic? Or do you think people are going to be like,

“I might as well just use Circle”?

Yeah, I don’t see that. I think this is a lot like other internet platform markets. Like, everyone doesn’t need their own data center. Everyone didn’t need their own vertical search engines. There are a lot of things that people thought everyone didn’t need to build their own video platform.

Internet scale utilities achieve:

• network effects
• unit economics
• developer flywheels

Like all these things. They tend to lower their prices over time. It tends to get more and more economical and more and more capable. So there’s a lot one would need to do to do that. I think even the biggest banks who have pretty big technology budgets may reach that same conclusion.

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. Yeah. I mean, look, I think we’re at an interesting place where we have a big piece of the regulatory clarity done. There are more pieces that are needed. So there’s work related to markets, related to how digital tokens work.

That’s actually really, really important because we believe in kind of tokenization as a phenomenon, smart contracts as a way that people are going to intermediate things on the internet. So there’s more that’s needed there.

I think now, one of the things that concerns me is sort of the changing geopolitical, geo-economic landscape. There’s lots of different points of view on where economic alignment is, etc. As a global company that is building technology that we want to make available globally, that introduces new complexity, right?

Yes. We’re entering an era of new alliances and national champions. Yeah, for sure. And you’re an American company. And America first. And so, yeah, you might be looked at differently based upon how the American enterprises is generally done. Yeah. That is very true. Our headquarters is Freedom Tower in New York City.

At the same time, the technology of these networks, there’s an opportunity actually to develop versions of this that are more geopolitically neutral, geo-economically neutral. So that if you’re from India, Brazil, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East, you can build—these are high growth markets that you’re comfortable building on this with a variety of different nexuses of economic relationships. And so that’s something we think about actually.

Yeah, like a euro-based stablecoin. We have the largest euro-based stablecoin.

How many currencies have you done that with so far?
We’ve really only focused on dollars and euros.

Why?
Well, I think those are two widely adopted currencies for both—as a store of value and as freely floatable, circulated, tradable currencies. And we have a big commitment to the European market. And so it’s also part of just being committed to that market. We think it’s a big opportunity.

And then for everything else, we’ve really built a technology stack for other stablecoin issuers from other markets now that there’s laws around the world.

Ah, so if they want to do their national stablecoin—

Absolutely.

–centralized. Are you doing that with Bermuda or some sort of partnership?
The Bermuda partnership is related to helping them kind of have digital dollars and have economic activity, commerce activity, treasury activity all happen on chain.

Got it. So that’s infrastructure play, not—I don’t know what their dollar is.
Well, they’re a dollar. It’s a dollar-backed currency. They’re already their own stablecoin.

But in other places, you know, in the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and other markets like Australia and Korea, there are stablecoins coming. And we want to make sure that we can provide technology so that they can do all the same things—

To the government or to banks?
Well, 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 follow the same—

So easier for you to partner with a major partner in those markets?
Yes. Yeah. And we want to see that grow and flourish, you know, this idea of an internet financial system where all the economies of the world can be on chain and all of the contracts and financial contracts and markets and capital formation, lending—everything can happen on chain.

It’s obvious that small businesses and people who are very—and poker players—people who are concerned about their fees will, and are focused on that, are being driven to stablecoins. 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 or America.”

People are figuring it out. 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, 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.

Yeah. Well, now, you know, Polymark and Kalshi both—you fund your account with USDC.

Right.

To give that kind of thing.

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

• Speed, speed, yeah.
• But they’re looking for edge.

In a poker game, like, if you were a novice and I was an expert, I was Jason Kuhn and you were Phil Hellmuth, whatever it is, you know, it’s got a bigger edge on him. It’s an inside joke. Anyway, point is, like, you might have a 1% or 2% advantage, but it compounds after 100 poker games to be a bigger number.

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

Well, you know who the biggest users of USDC are?

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

It’s actually—a form of gamblers, which is the biggest electronic markets firms in the world.

Got it.

The guys who need the—they 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.

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

They love it too.

Yeah, because they’re like,

“Wait, I’m paying Western Union 12% of this? This is a bullshit.”

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 too.

What’s the QuickBooks TurboTax thesis there? Because that seemed like there’s something underlying that I wasn’t getting to. I mean, it’s obvious that like, OK, there’s money flowing through there. But what’s the big picture there?

Well, Intuit’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. QuickBooks, obviously, we all know if you run a small business, you use QuickBooks. And actually, QuickBooks, they invoice 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. And 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 too, it’s a very innovative company. It’s a tech company that is in these financial technology adjacencies. And so we’re super excited about the collaboration that we have.

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, because they must call at some point?

I mean, look, 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 on-chain economy and on-chain 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.

How would that work? And what’s the advantage?

Well, so already today, there have been trillions of dollars of loans made in stablecoins through DeFi protocols. 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. You become the house. You become the bank. Well, the protocol 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. It’s like margin loans. If I own a million dollars in Bitcoin and yeah, I want to spend 100,000, but I want to liquidate any Bitcoin, somebody else can make some number of points.

And you can borrow USDC against your Bitcoin and so on. But I think this is like, this is 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:

• Hiring a new employee
• Buying new equipment for a kitchen or restaurant
• Factoring
• Equipment leasing

All of 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 risks failing can be priced.

And so you can build credit markets entirely in software, entirely with software machines.

So AI coming into play, AI plus these sort of smart contract machines and stablecoins, I think creates a really interesting little cauldron for credit market innovation. 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 clear and settle credit decisions at the speed of which an auction happens for attention. Yeah. 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.

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

Exactly. More jobs created, more chances, more swings at bat, more shots on goal. 100%. 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.

Many people think exchange of value means just making a payment. No. Value exchange is the sort of time value of money transformation. It’s the idea that 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. That’s where actual growth comes from. So that’s what we want to see.

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 end on that a little bit and get your ideas and your thoughts.

There’s a movement towards socialism in New York City, my hometown. It’s kind of heartbreaking for me to watch. California is seizing billionaires’ 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 yeah, they’ll just take 5% of it once. They lost 200 billionaires and a trillion dollars worth of wealth — and they don’t seem to have any problem with it.

As a technologist, a builder, and 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 the socialist movement?

That’s interesting. I just moved to New York City just in time. Just in time.

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 Capgain’s guy.

Here’s what I would say — and actually, I was with Dario from Anthropic a couple times over the past couple days. 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. He has deep concerns. And I also do.

When I look at the very positive side, I think we’re going to see an acceleration of GDP growth. Pick your timeframe — 3, 5, 10, 15 years. We’re going to see, I think, an extraordinary period of economic growth acceleration. Even more than the internet and PCs.

More than the internet and PCs.

Strongly agree.

Very, very big transformation. But where most of the labor is actually executed by AI machines.

And the capital accrues to the capital owners.

Right. And that’s just kind of there in front of us.

Yeah. It’s the fundamental nature of capitalism.

Fundamentary nature.

I think that is going to challenge us in ways we haven’t dealt with in a long time since other periods. Labor was necessary for capital to succeed.

The industrial revolution was mechanized human labor. This is mechanized AI.

By the way, the CEO job seems ripe for AI doing a better job than we would do at times.

Like, I don’t know if you’ve—

I use AI all the time in my place. And do you ask it?

I don’t know if they realize what they’re interacting with.

No. But 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. He said this on the program — I’m not speaking out of school.

He asks it, “What do I need to know about my organization?” It’s like,

• Oh, there’s non-consensus about this important issue in the corner over here.

And he responded,

“I didn’t know that. Like, whoa, was that a coach? Or is that like a parallel, like another CEO? Is it a duplicate CEO? Did you clone yourself?”

How do you think about that?

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.

Commissions matter.

Yeah. So there’s a lot of work. We invest a lot in that. But nonetheless, creating the avenues so 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 can learn how to do is manage AI.”

Yes.

So, invest in how you manage AI and AI agents. Actually, that’s how you might actually become a better manager and leader through that. And I mean that.

It is one of the — if you think about the tasks of these product managers who would run the stand-ups or, you know, your mid-level manager historically, it’s to keep tabs on a group of people and their targets and their timeframes and who’s excelling and who’s got blockers.

AI is kind of better suited. For that. Really good.

And so, a great middle manager, which is a derogatory term, but let’s just say you use the word manager. A great manager should be able to manage 10 groups using, say, Claude’s co-work. I don’t know, have you been playing with it yet? It’s incredible. It’s wild. It’s really incredible. I mean, it’s out of a week and I’m like, I’m sitting there like—

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

Yeah. What impresses you about that?

I mean, look, 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.

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?

You don’t have a domestic—

I don’t have a domestic Slack.

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, you know, the family office and this, you know, can kind of—they know the same tool Slack. Then Notion has been investing in their AI so much that when you do a query, like an AI query of your Notion, and you’re like,

“Hey, this house with this HVAC, you know, this issue is 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.

Yeah.

What else did Dario think? I think I might have cut you off before—

Yeah. I mean, look, I think 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, I think, in the coming years, going to kind of have to get thought about again in different ways. And I don’t think it’s going to—it’s not going to be the straightforward answers that we’ve turned to.

No.

It can’t be. And so that’s why I, you know, my answer is like, yeah, there’s things California, New York, et cetera, 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 about.

By the way, we fixed it in startup land long ago. It’s called stock options.

And if you look at the Trump accounts, which Invest America, Michael Dell, and Brad Gerstner, and a number of our friends did, if the 42% of Americans who don’t own an equity, and are not part of that, let’s just say it’s 50, because some of them own them kind of passively, hey, 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.”

Yeah, being stakeholders in the success of this technological transformation is critical.

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.

Thank you, Jason.

And it’s just a pleasure to spend time with you. It’s always one of the great discussions I have.

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.

Yes.

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

Yeah.

We’ll get into it. Why are you spending the week at Davos?

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.

Yeah. It’s efficient.

Very efficient.

It’s this tiny little ski town.

Yep.

It’s not fancy at all. This is in Aspen.

And everybody’s within five blocks once you get through security.

Yeah.

Speaking of security, AI has had, or is going to have, I want to get your opinion on this, 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?

Well, there’s a couple of different areas. One is if we think about the adversaries, I kind of, 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 hacktivism.

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 sort 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: the speed and the sophistication have dramatically increased. Because the answers have been compiled, the scenarios can be run even by somebody who is a level six hacker out of ten. I’m just making a number up here, and they can become an eight.

So just like a developer using a co-pilot goes from being an average developer to above average, the same thing is happening with hackers. Absolutely.

And one of the things that we’re seeing is autonomous malware. Most people are probably familiar with malware that 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.

Oh wow.

So just to unpack that and translate it, I did a little hacking in my day in the 80s. Okay. A little phone freaking mainly. All right. Hayes modems. I had a Hayes 2400. I started with the Vantel 300 baud.

I think we’re of the same. I had a 300 Hayes.

You had the 300 Hayes. It was a tank. It literally had such a great form factor that’s never been repeated. It’s great—like rectangle, but… We’re old.

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.”

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 could say,

“I’m going to do a thousand attacks today and I’m going to make each one different and unique.”

And unique. Absolutely. They’re unique. So scary. They’re not actually code because they’re prompts.

Right. And traditionally malware would phone home. There would be like a tether. You’d always be able to see the signature of something phoning home. Now these can run autonomously, whatever, without ever phoning home. Like a sleeper agent. Like you drop them into America, 20 years later, they start pursuing, but they never have to return to base.

Exactly.

How does one counter that?

Well, you need AI to counter it.

And I mean, that’s been a big part of the success of CrowdStrike. When I started the company, I founded it 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 basically 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, right?

• 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.

Yeah. And these, it’s the same way in the computer world. There are certain—we call indicators of attack. We’ve trained our models to look for these. So it doesn’t matter kind of what you look like or what car you’re driving. We can identify that.

And a big part of our success has been the AI we’ve built over the years with this tremendous data set.

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.

Exactly. That’s where you can catch them.

Exactly.

You mentioned state actors and you mentioned for profit. When we look at a country like North Korea, they need revenue. Yep. Hacking is a 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 factor: actually infiltrating companies as employees because of this remote work nonsense.

Well, we were one of the first to ever find that. So we were actually going… Through developing some new AI algorithms, we saw something that was called Signal, which basically strips the noise from the signal. We saw the signal and said, this is really weird. We investigated it and said, okay, this looks like somebody using remote tools to, you know, what’s going on here. We went further and then said, we think it’s North Korea. We think that it’s an employee who, or the company thinks it’s an employee.

So when the R and D team came back to me, they said, okay, we want to notify our customers. We want to say, we think we found this, but we have to tell them that the employee they think is an employee isn’t really their employee.

• The phone calls were coming from inside the building.

Exactly. For us, it was, you know, when you have a piece of malware, it’s like, okay, that’s bad, you can detect it. But when you have to tell a company that their employee may not be their employee, you have to be gentle. You’re letting them know just how incompetent they are when it comes to security. I said it, not you.

Okay. It’s hard to find these guys, but in any event, we found 40 of them. We were right. Forty—that’s for the first run. We found hundreds now, over hundreds in America.

Yeah.

Now, they were doing it, my understanding is, for the high-paying salary to fund stuff in North Korea. Is that correct or not?

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

Oh my God.

You know, so it’s a lot easier to get somebody hired.

So true story: we actually say, “We think this employee is not an employee.” The company investigated. They investigated it and they went, yeah, you were right.

I said, “Well, tell me the story.”

They said, well, we went to this person’s boss and said, “We don’t think that’s a real person.” They went through all the reasons why.

Finally, they said, we think it’s the North Korean.

The guy, his boss, said, “Well, do we have to get rid of him? Cause he did such good work.”

Oh my Lord.

So the value of a top-tier developer is so high that you’ll take a spy.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s like, “Ah, you know, we kind of need him to ship.”

Yeah. He was doing such good work.

He was shipping one of our best performances.

True story.

What now? Remote work has opened up so many factors. You believe in remote work. Do you support it in the company?

We do. Yeah. We started the company in a remote-first model, but this opens up all these attack vectors.

Well, even without remote, best practice really. What we see companies doing is:

• I will take a simple one: meet whoever you hire.

Wow. Shocking, shocking.

But with COVID and remote work and things of that nature, a lot of people get hired that people never met. You never see them on the screen, but the work gets done. Emails get written, and then, you know, these things happen.

So what we’re seeing now is the best companies are actually embedding a security person in the HR group where they’re pre-filtering all these resumes because:

• The resumes are AI generated,
• The LinkedIn profiles are AI generated.

So you want to catch them upfront rather than in the interview process.

Here’s a crazy idea:

Hey, for your final interview,
can we fly you in?

Or hey, week one, you're going to be at HQ.

That’s it. You solve the whole problem because then they don’t take the job. They move on to the next person. That’s it.

Okay. So we’re looking at state actors.

• Russia is still number one state actor,
• China,
• Russia.

It depends. Like if you talk pure intelligence, pure ability, Russia, Russia.

Why are they so good?

I mean, like the cold war is over, but you have really smart people that went to work in various areas, right? Obviously from a nation-state, but also from an e-crime perspective. They’re smart. They know what they’re doing.

Typically, they’re what we call low and slow.

The Chinese over the years have been a little bit noisy, kind of a smash and grab. They’ve gotten better, not subtle—not subtle, but much better now. But the Russians are very targeted, they’re patient, and they’re not always gathering IP information to steal it, but they’re gathering intelligence for reconnaissance, for nation-state activities or then they moonlight for e-crime.

And let’s go to China. Ten years ago, we’d be talking Kumbaya, China, we’re all going to win together. But the decoupling has happened essentially.

Do you have operations there? Do you work with Chinese companies?

We don’t have operations there. We don’t have any revenue. We don’t sell to China. Never have, never have, from the start of the start of the company.

And what’s your take on the decoupling? Let’s go a little geopolitical here. Like they are our adversary, obviously competitor, their technical ability is pretty strong. We’re seeing that with AI. Are they the future competitor and the future attack vector that you have to worry about, China?

Well, I don’t know that the future, because I think it’s already there. It’s here, yeah. It’s been here for the last, you know, 20 plus years. I mean, some of it may not have been talked about in the early days, but they’re very, very prolific. They’re very good. And you know, it’s one of those areas, obviously nation state is always going to be nation state versus nation state. You know, that just happens.

The big thing with China is there is a commercial aspect to what they do. So:

• If the government breaks in and steals a trade secret from some company in the U.S., they’ll just give it to another company in China.
• That doesn’t happen necessarily with all nation states.

Yeah. We’re certainly not breaking into China to steal their trade secrets, right? It’s going and giving them to a U.S. company. The CIA is not breaking in to figure out what BYD is doing to give it to Tesla or something. Correct. So it’s a one-way relationship there.

Now there’s also something very unique. They make hardware. They ship a lot of hardware, our laptops in some cases, Huawei, other countries, they’re putting spyware or backdoors into all that hardware.

In your estimation, over the years, there’s certainly been cases where people have had concerns on what was actually shipped, and supply chain can be problematic, whether it’s actually shipped with something or in some cases packages get diverted somewhere else. It’s the malware gets installed and it gets reshipped out. Right. So you’ve seen that.

So it’s important to have:

• Good hygiene on whatever equipment is being brought in.
• The provenance of that manufacturer and that software that goes on it.

And that applies really around the world.

Do you trust Signal and your iPhone to protect you as a corporate executive? Like what measures do you take?

Well, cause you’re a target. Yeah, we’re a target. I mean, our team spends a lot of time making sure that we try to do the right things.

What’s that, Signal? What about those two? Do you think those are attack vectors?

I think you can do insertions there.

Well, you know, I think you have to look at the privacy versus the actual attack vector. You know, if you’re clicking on links that are in different, you know, because you got a link and Signal doesn’t mean the link is secure. Whether it could be Signal or something else. Right. So there’s a lot of ways to get implants on these devices.

I would say, you know, an iPhone is safer than just a regular computer because of the way it runs.

But you know, if you look at the nation states and some of the creative ways they can actually get into a phone, as an example, if they want to get in bad enough, they’re going to get in.

How do they get in? What’s the attack vector?

• They get you to click on a link.
• They insert something.

That’s the typical one.

Yeah. Typically what they’ll do in there is there’s a whole, black or gray market on the value of a zero day. So there are zero days in all software. And if you have one, say for Apple iOS, that’s super valuable.

Generally, if you click on something and it’s not a known zero day, you just by going to a browser–

Explain in plain English to the audience what a zero day is.

A zero day is a—yeah, sorry, you know, we’re talking technical jargon. Not everybody’s got the hacker. I know. Not everybody’s a haze guy.

But yeah, if there is a software vulnerability that hasn’t been found and patched, it means that they can exploit that and then they can run code. And in some cases in the past, there was a vulnerability where they could simply send you an SMS message, like you didn’t even know. You didn’t have to click on anything. Wow.

The SMS message would process this information and then they would put an implant on the phone.

Biometrics, two-factor authentication—this has changed everything in the industry, made it much more secure.

Secure, but not much more.

If you look at a lot of the attacks, they’re identity-based attacks. And what you see is that even when you have a credential or if you steal a credential or if you have a session token, which means that you’ve already authenticated—

Right. So even if you have two-factor, if you have the session token, you can replay that and get access to a system. The crypto people learned this the hard way.

They basically were using two-factor over SMS. People call the phone company. Yep. Reset the SIM.
Yep.
And then they got you.
Game over.
Yeah.
Game over. Now your Bitcoin wallet is emptied.
Correct.

Where there’s money, the hackers will go figure out a way. They figure it out. And the humans are normally the weakest link.
Yeah.

You know, the way I was able to get my first exploit was I called the New York Public Library. I knew they had like a VAX system with the dial-up.
Okay.

And I just said,

“Hey, it’s Joe from IT at the 34th Street branch.”
Yeah. I need the number for the dial-up.
Yeah. Literally, the person gave it to me at IT over the phone. They want to be helpful.

I dialed it and then I could search the stack.
There you go. I could search all the books. That was the only thing you could do.

What year was this?
‘87.
Okay.
Yeah. I was at Fordham and they had BitNet. They had the internet there.
Yeah. And I was just starting to see these things.

But it’s almost universally that:

• calling somebody on the phone,
• meeting somebody,
• compromising somebody.

That’s it.
That’s it. And normally the weaknesses between the keyboard and the chair.
The keyboard and the chair.

What is the best practice then for you when you’re advising your customers, explaining to them just how the human factors part of this is the most important one to focus on?

Well, there’s certainly an educational element and you also have to look at how people get paid in the motivation.

So typically, they’re going to call a help desk. How does a help desk get paid and what are their metrics? Their metrics is get a call, open a ticket and close it as quick as you can.
Right. The incentive is speed.
Right. Particularly if it’s a third party.
Oh, in another country.
Right.

So their whole job is to open a ticket, solve a problem, close a ticket. So if you follow the money and the incentives, you can see why there’s a problem. And people want to be helpful at the help desk. And hence, they get into the situation.

So, you know, first start with the education piece and then having the right controls, identity protection, things like what CrowdStrike builds is going to be additive to making sure those sort of things don’t happen.

People using their own devices.
Bring your own device. This is the other major attack vector corporations make the mistake on you.
Yes, that, you know, your own device could be like a cesspool if you let your kids, you know, use it or it could be pretty good. But that’s the reason why now there’s enterprise browsers to kind of contain what people do, even if you bring your own device.
Yeah.

The enterprise browser is running on a virtual machine at some headquarters.
You provide that kind of situation?
That’s sort of the old school way of doing it.

So what we’ve done, we actually just acquired a company called Seraphic.
I saw that. Explain to me the state of the art there.
Yeah.

So the state of the art is not switching out a browser because if you use Comet or, you know, Firefox or whatever, you want to use the browser you have. So it’s actually running beneath the browser and will support any browser, which basically looks at the interaction with the browser is doing.

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 us through the browser.

How should companies implementing AI in the enterprise, putting their data into these clouds and working with partners—Claude co-worked this week, kind of blew people’s mind.

I don’t know if you saw the announcement or played with it.
Yeah.
And I was using it earlier this week and I’m authenticating. Gmail, Notion, oh, yeah, my desktop files.
And I got like halfway through this and I was like,

“this probably isn’t a good idea,” but
It can be pretty scary.
Yellow.

Well, let me, let me tell you a story, not specific to that, but…
Right.
Yeah, we don’t want to throw them under the bus, but it was a lot of authentications I did.
Exactly, exactly. They’re doing great work.

But there was a customer who basically created a whole suite of AI agents to help their automation in their IT department, right?

So they had one agent that was looking for sort of IT problems, software bugs, and it found something, you know, 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 was an agent that raised his hand and said,

“Oh, I have access and I can fix it.”

Do you see how scary this is?
Yeah.

These two agents are reasoning and they went right around the guardrails that were put in place. 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. Right. 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.

Well, this is it. It’s called AIDR.
AIDR.
Yeah. AI detection and response. Got it.

So there’s a concept that’s been around that we helped pioneer, which is really endpoint detection and 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.

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

We, well, 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.

Are you concerned about it?

I can see you’re kind of like thinking,

“Hmm, yeah, like maybe there are some concerns here.”

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

Got it.

Right. Because you want to leverage, and this is the thing, you know, it’s tokenomics. 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. And then for other bigger, you know, 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.

Yeah. You’re also a race car driver.

Yes.

And, hey, you’ve done well in your life.

Yeah.

You got to buy a piece of an F1 team.

I’ve been going to F1 races. I went to three this year.

Okay. Tell me everything about it. Where do you want me to start? How did you get the bug? When did you get the bug? Because this has been an American thing the last couple of years. I can’t believe the rack of these F1, well, you guys are doing. Somehow you made this the most important thing in America ever.

Drive to Survive was fantastic.

That is a big driver. And then it’s a luxury experience.

So now I’ve gone to, what did I do?

• Miami
• Austin
• Vegas

I’ve been to three in the last year.

Okay. I hadn’t even heard about it five years ago.

That’s fantastic. Well, I mean, a little backdrop. I grew up, I had zero money as a kid. I always liked…

Where’d you grow up?

New Jersey.

Oh, really? I grew up in Brooklyn.

Yeah. You know, we used to play Fordham.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

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

First car?

First car was a Toyota Celica.

Toyota Celica.

Yeah.

‘73 Mustang, Grande, 351 Cleveland.

Okay.

351 Cleveland engine and slightly more horsepower than yours.

I know.

Mine was just a, I had a commute in the thing.

Yeah.

Okay. It’s functional. It worked. It’s functional.

Yeah.

But, so I never had the opportunity to do it. And then I got into, I mean, I always followed sports racing. Mostly it was Indy.

And then, you know, got into racing later.

We talk about that, but I’ve been in Formula One since 2018 because CrowdStrike became, well, Mercedes became a customer of CrowdStrike.

Nice.

And then I met Toto Wolff, who runs a team. And you said,

“Hey, why don’t you think about working with this?”

You got in at the right time.

Yeah. That was a good trade.

It 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.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Nice.

I’ve got the 24 hours Daytona.

What do you drive? What kind of car?

LMP2.

Explain what it is.

Yeah. It’s a full-fledged race car. I mean, it looks like a…

Like an F1 car.

With, with, with, with covers over the wheels.

Got it. So it’s safer.

Yeah.

What do you think of this new Corvette ZRX1? Have you seen this beast?

I’m trying to get one.

Yeah, it’s fantastic.

I know. I got a contact.

Okay.

At GM.

Everybody’s got a guy.

They gave me an E-ray to play with.

Yeah. Which is kind of the precursors.

Yeah. You know, they took the E-ray and they put it in the ZRX1. Yeah.

And, my Lord, off the line. It’s like having the Tesla acceleration off the line. And then you have the, you know, 600 in that one. I think it was 600 horsepower plus 150. You got about 800. This new one. It’s a thousand horsepower. It’s a great car. Plus 250. I think it costs $200,000. And for the money, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a tremendous car.

And you know, I, I still think to this day, I mean, someone will keep me honest that…

“The ZR1 will, and we’ll still have a warranty, even if you track it.”

Really? Yeah. It’s one of the rare cars. At least it used to be. Yeah.

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

You want to hear the engine? I think that’s right. I had a C6 convertible in that generation, which was just dynamite. Yeah. Canary yellow.

What color are you looking at? This is where we’re going to get real. You saw that crazy green. I like the blue. You like the blue. Yeah. It’s beautiful. They have like a really beautiful, vibrant blue. Yeah.

That’s a— 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 keep all my Mercedes silver. You do? Yeah. Oh, interesting.

All right. Listen, the question everybody wants to know, Greenland, what should we pay? You know, I’m—

How do we make a deal? I’m sure, 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 activities. So I think it’s good, 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. Yeah. Supportive of the business community. I think so.

And you know, 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, right? And they don’t want this piecemeal buying across the government.

So absolutely, I think they’re doing a great job on security. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

So whatever you think politically, you know, all these cultural issues, they’re listening and they’re engaging the business community. I think it’s 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 VTOLs, 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 VTOLs, nice and quiet ones.

Adam Goldstein, CEO of Archer Aviation.

Welcome back to All In.
Thank you. Good to be here.

Two years ago, you were at the summit. You promised us we’d get flying cars. Let’s just get to brass tax. 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?

The hardest part about bringing these aircraft to market is the certification. We have to prove that these aircraft are really safe. You can’t blame the regulators. 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 the most 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 going 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 work with this. Yeah. And so we don’t want to be fighting that. And so they’re giving us a chance to go do that.

Okay. So it’s 2026. We’re sitting here in January of 2026. You guys are going to announce five cities? The government will. DOT will. Oh. Here in the United States. They’re going to… And these are for all veto companies.
Jovi, yourself, all the contemporaries will get to do those five cities first.

Correct.

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

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

You live there?

I don’t, but we won the exclusive for the LA-28 Olympics.

Oh, wow.

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.

Hawthorne, the private…

I’ve flown out of it many times.

Exactly. So that’s a great platform.

You bought it…

Wait, let’s just let this soak in, folks.

Archer Aviation bought an airport.

We did.

Can you just buy airports?

It’s a privately owned enterprise, Hawthorne.

What did that cost you?

Yeah, you can. It’s… I’ll call it 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.

So if you look back…

What did that cost you?

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

So you own all the real estate. That’s got some residual value.

Right. 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?

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.

Oh, yes. I’m sorry. I was thinking Van Nuys. Hawthorne in the South.

Yeah.

Funny story. Name drop.

Elon was like,

“Hey, I’m thinking about renting a place for my rocket ship company before I 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 off of space immediately.”

Yeah.

So you own the SpaceX office or you’re the…

That’s on the other side of the fence. Got it.

And so we have the airport side. They have some hangars there. What a perfect location.

Because if memory serves me, it’s just south of LAX. About two miles from LAX, about two miles from SoFi Stadium.

So the goal is to make that a hub of Los Angeles. Imagine a Grand Central type of facility.

Yeah, 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.

Yeah. And all of a sudden, you could really transform LA.

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

Well, FAA and DOT are going to be the ones that choose.

Okay.

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.

So my guess is you’ll see something in Texas. You’ll probably see something in Florida. Maybe you’ll see something in New York.

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

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.

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 now?

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

So you basically can’t do it.

Yeah, it makes it very hard.

Yeah. 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.

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.

Yeah, you’re 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 at Manhattan soon, yeah?
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 are three big heliports that exist already:

• the west side
• east side
• the downtown Wall Street heliport.

Yep. So it’s already naturally kind of configured. It is very complex, congested airspace.

And so I also think the way that this will come to market will be in relatively low volumes. We’ll gain the trust of the public. They’ll allow us to keep scaling this stuff up. So you can start with maybe tens of aircraft and then maybe over five, 10 years, you scale it up to hundreds of aircraft.

It’s like the robo-taxi and Waymo story.
Exactly. You start slow, build trust.

Are you guys on the clock? You’ve been working on this for a decade, yeah?
Yeah. So the tech actually goes back to NASA 40 years ago, having to use multiple electric engines to fly airplanes. And then really kind of thanks to Larry Page and the early work at Xerox. They really helped bring a lot of that technology.

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

With Blade, right? They were doing or—
Yeah. They kind of, well, they really were like almost a research project to showcase what—
Oh, right. I remember when Travis did that, yes.

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

You guys SPACed right after or during COVID, yeah?
2021, yeah.
Okay. So right after COVID started to wane.

And was that the right decision? I know these SPACs have been up and down. 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’re in a multi-decade rollout of a product like this?

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.
$4 billion. Wow.
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 kind of 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.
Yeah. And this was the right avenue for us, for sure.

It’s really interesting when you think about it. Who is 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. And they’re willing to go for it. They’re also willing to kind of look past the quarterly earnings issues and really to say,

“like, this is a technology they want.”

I mean, who wouldn’t want it? It’s safer than helicopters. They’re super quiet. They cost less. It’s convenience for everyone. Nobody loses here. This is a win-win type of product.

Where’s your product out? You guys are flying runs, obviously. Where are you flying the runs currently?
Yeah. So two core places we fly:

• One is in Northern California in the Bay Area. So we fly at 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.
Oh, Mubadala is an investor?
Yeah. They’ve been a wonderful partner.

Ibrahim.
Yeah. It’s really opened up the country. They’re a long term. Yeah. They’re thinking in 50-year cycles, I think.

How often do you fly this thing? What’s the distance that it flies? And are there humans in it?
Yeah. So we fly most days piloted flights. And so you can’t fly them without pilots.

It’s actually pretty easy to fly the planes autonomously or remotely. Or automated is a better way to really describe it. But we fly and 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 mean— How often do you fly in it?
I haven’t flown it. Just the test pilots do.

Why?
They won’t let you?

You’re the CEO.
No, you could.

I mean, if you look at, and we’re just sort of 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, I mean, most of the big aerospace companies have had crashes with early platforms.

Got it.

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.

Virgin Galactic, another SPAC, they had a tragic instance, and yeah, 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 in until you do it every day.

Later this year.

That’d be my guess.

Later this year?

Yeah.

Now, you’re married. You got kids?
Married, two kids.

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

I’ll probably tell her after.

Oh, but what’s our position? When will she let you go in it?

She’s a huge believer and supporter of everything I’ve done.

Okay. So I think she’d trust me when I think it’s time I would do it. She’d be okay.

All right.

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, like by the end of this year.

Yeah.

The challenge with autonomy is regulation and infrastructure. So even if you couldn’t 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, very manual.

If you listen on ATC, when you fly in somewhere, they’re guiding you in.

• Turn 10 degrees to the left.
• Drop 1,000 feet in altitude.

That makes total sense.

So the infrastructure doesn’t allow for autonomy?

Yet.

Yet.

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

You could work your way into the air traffic control system?

Definitely.

The actual, you know, humans make mistakes. Computers make a lot less mistakes. And so maybe no mistakes.

And so it’s certainly, 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.

That’s fascinating.

So when you’re clearing with the tower, it’s just that the VTOL is talking to the tower.

Yeah.

It’s think about like, you know, instead of like looking at your map, looking at the weather, you know, understanding, you know, 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, listen to air traffic control.

Oh, I’ve listened to it.

Public frequency. I’m obsessed with it.

Yeah.

I mean, I’ve seen a lot of people on the channel on YouTube called Blanco Lirio. Have you ever heard it?

No.

So go on YouTube and Patreon and throw this guy five or 10 bucks a month.

Yeah.

He’s based out of, he’s a pilot, commercial pilot, and he’s based out of a 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. And he just breaks it all down.

It’s almost universally the pilot makes some series of incredibly poor judgments.

I’m talking about private aviation as opposed to commercial aviation.

And yeah, it’s just great that there’s somebody like him out there.

Now, how many rotors on the thing?

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

It’s 12.

Which means 12 motors?

Yeah.

There’s actually redundant motors. There’s actually 24.

Right. But we, for simplicity, call it 12.

So there’s 12 redundant motors, 24.

And then how many blades? How many are they double blades? Like one on the bottom, one on the top?

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

Why?

There’s lots of different reasons. They’re 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. What scenario do you have the most concern about and then work on the most? Because with 12 of these, anybody who’s flown just a toy drone, if you come up to it and you push it, you hit 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? Are the electronic systems redundant? The battery failure?

Everything is redundant. Like you have to design it. What do you worry about?

From a safety perspective today, I would say the biggest thing is the pilots. That’s probably the thing you worry about the most.

Okay, take the pilots out. Now what are we worried about? You’re always worried about just different cascading failures.

Got it. So, you know, 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.

• So 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 know, so there’s, you know, you try to protect against cascading failures.

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

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…

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

Yeah. What height, what’s the ceiling on these now?

They can go up to 11,000 feet. There’s no real reason to. It’s not pressurized. You really want to fly helicopter range, 500 to 2,000 feet.

And what do you take from the helicopter industry away from, you know, 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.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it depends. I mean, every scenario is obviously pretty different.

The beauty behind these aircraft is the redundancy allows you to just 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, you know, 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 mechanical complex machines.

Yeah.

And so, you know, with the eVTOL side, you reduce that complexity.

By what if you were to say it’s X times more safer without us, like, you know, 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?

Well, that will be a standard that the FAA makes us certified 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 a hundred million.

Yeah, but you think it’s twice. What would your…

It would be an order of magnitude safer. So three, four, five times safer is a pretty reasonable goal, 10 times a reasonable goal.

Why are you here at Davos? You virtue signaling about being all electric? What’s going on? Selling aircraft. You’re here to do business?

Yeah.

Who are you selling to? Just nation states?

Yeah. So geographically, obviously, easier to sell stuff in the U.S. or kind of close to the U.S. Here you get to meet different companies and countries.

• The Middle East, GCC has been very active.
• Africa has been very active.
• Asia has been very active.

So there’s a lot of great folks to go see where you can kind of line them all up. So we’ll announce, you know, deals here. We’ll, you know, 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. 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. Perfect.

Yeah. Super efficient. The heads of state.

So there’s lots of opportunities to, you know, kind of bring Western tech to this country. I think they see having VTOLs as a point of pride for their country.

Yes. Oh, absolutely. Like this is, I don’t want to say ban any project, but it is something they can point to and Say, look, we got here first.
Yeah. And they can see the UAE. I could see Saudi. I could see Qatar. Absolutely. We’re all feeling that way. Like, oh, we have this. Absolutely.

There is another element where, you know, 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 Anderil.

So we’ve been building the new kind of autonomous, attritable aircrafts. We talked about one of the programs.
Wait, what was the second word?
Autonomous?
Attritable, they call it.
Attritable? What does it mean?

It’s not a 20-year plane. It’s not expendable, like a one-time missile, one-way type of product. They call it the space in between. They call it attritable. If you lost it, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Yeah.

So the goal is, one of the programs we’ve talked about is one called Project NIX. It is an autonomous collaborative attack helicopter drone.

• Think like, sort of like an Apache type of platform.
• There’ll be a big manned asset and they’ll have a bunch of drones that fly with it.

So that’s a program we’re working on with Anderil. We build the core aircraft and Anderil missionizes it.

Think sensors or munitions, those kinds 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.

Oh, I see. It’s almost like, 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:
  1. There’s a person.
  2. It’s super expensive.
  3. Very hard to replace.

If 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 can 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 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 in the replacement cost of a Navy SEAL of a—he wasn’t in the Navy SEALs, but one of these kind of type groups.

You could actually know the replacement cost of a person and they called them assets, you know, these top elite folks.

So you have no problem working in defense?
That’s awesome.

Yeah, I’m a country. I’m a patriot. I’m a super believer in what the U.S. is doing. And they’ve been, you know, as a country, extremely helpful to new industries like Archer and eBtals. And so maybe more so than the last administration. A lot more.

So just the quick example on that was: I could not get a meeting with the former Secretary Trump. But the former Secretary of Transportation? Couldn’t get a meeting. Wouldn’t take a meeting.

And I know he’s busy.

Wait, wait, you’re a publicly traded VTOL company who’s meeting with the Gulf monarchies being courted. Zero meetings.

And you requested meetings? Multiple times.

And they literally—this is Brian Armstrong’s story—he wanted to meet with the SEC. They’re like,

“yeah, no, we’re good.”

Secretary Duffy comes in and all of a sudden, like monthly, it was,

“we want to make sure we can re-industrialize America.”

Yeah. 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, by the way, in the executive order that came out. Yeah.

And so that helped the industry, because I showed them a path. Because we won the exclusive for the LA 28 Olympics to fly air taxis around that city during the games.

So we’ll sort of control the air during that. And I said, I need a path to make sure I can do that. Right? This will be a huge opportunity.

I think people have not taken— 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.

• How does that hurt the previous Secretary of Transportation to meet with the VTOL companies?
• How did it hurt the SEC to meet with Brian Armstrong or any number of crypto companies?

It was like they were in contempt, it seems, in hindsight, of the entire technology and business industry.

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 kind of publicly keeps saying 11% of GDP touches aviation. And so it’s capped because of air traffic. We have to upgrade that system. I’m red-pilling myself as we speak here. 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 ax 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, how much should we pay? What do you think? What do you think it takes?

I don’t know. I will tell you. Jump into it. Make yourself an interesting guest. We should take it, right? We should just take it or buy it. I saw something that said there is an offer that was—it’s kind of the buzz here—that was more than the GDP of Denmark.

I mean, there’s 55,000 people. Let’s make a deal. How much do you all want?

Well, the funny thing of my meetings here, so I come to sell aircraft. That’s what we come to do. And I will get asked that question in nearly every meeting.

I mean, literally back in Silicon Valley, like no one’s—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.

It’s literally—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 President Trump gets incredible enjoyment out of negotiating a deal and solving a long-term problem for America, I say let them cook.

Yeah. Let them cook. I agree.

Greenland, we’re here. 51st state, let’s do it.

All right, listen, continued success. Thank you, and thanks for coming on the pod again. We’re very lucky to have Chase Lockmiller with us. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Crusoe Cloud.

C-R-U-S-O-E. Not Caruso, Crusoe Cloud.

You got it.

Which is, or was, the first Neocloud, really.

You were kind of—

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

How did, 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?

Well, so we had started well before Hopper came out.

You know, we were, you know, Crusoe’s a business that’s always taken this very energy-first approach to developing computing infrastructure and really changing, you know, the motion from trying to find, trying to co-locate compute in these network hubs and really focusing on where we can access abundant energy.

So, you know, we, you know, we’re experimenting a lot with, you know, the Ampere 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, you know, do incredible work.

You know, we launched before ChatGPT came out.

And so, you know, sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time.

Yeah, timing was good. Yeah, timing worked.

And your biggest customer by far is Oracle and OpenAI.

Correct.

So, you know, we, we, 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, you know, running things like our managed inference service.

And, you know, as this boom really took off, you know, 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, you know, skill set.

So, please, yeah.

Hey, guys in the back, if you’re talking, can you just take it outside because it’s going to get picked up on the pod? Appreciate it.

Three, two. Thank you.

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?

Yeah, it was really an energy-driven decision.

So, you know, in Abilene, Texas, we had, you know, it’s an area where a lot of actual renewables had been built out on the back of production tax credits.

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. And so the grid didn’t need their energy.

Exactly.

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. Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, we went there and we said, man, you guys have too much energy.
Hey, buddy, I got a do I have a do I got an idea for you.

And so we, you know, 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.

So was there gas under the actual data center or they’re shipping?
No, no, no, no. We had access to a pipeline that feeds into, you know, 10 gas turbines that are on site there.
Amazing.

And the gas turbines, those were a blocker for a while, too, huh?
They still are. I mean, you know, 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, you know, natural gas power 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.
Yes, Boom Supersonic was making the Concorde replacement, Blake.
Correct. Blake’s the CEO. And they’re making their own engines that go pretty fast.

And so what was the idea there?
Yeah. So, you know, they had re-engineered this turbine for supersonic jet travel.

And, you know, Colleen, my co-founder, and I were talking to Blake and said,

“Hey, you know, could we use that to generate power instead of, you know, transport people over the ocean at supersonic speeds?”

And, you know, now we’re, you know, their first large purchase order for $1.2 billion of gas turbines to power critical AI infrastructure.
It’s wild to think about. The gas turbines and jet engines are not super dissimilar.

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

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.

Yeah. You know, power is a great business and, you know, we think he can make a lot of money as, you know, the scaling up of AI infrastructure occurs.

And hopefully, you know, he’s able to build those incredible supersonic jets that get us to Tokyo much faster.

And the Stargate project is a $300 billion project.

What’s the number? Because there was a big announcement at the White House and there’s been a little bit of, you know, wink, wink, like these are numbers were kind of estimates.

What’s the realistic footprint of this?

So, you know, I think Stargate has been a term that’s been used to describe a lot of different things at this point.

You know, initially our campus was called Stargate and then, you know, 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, you know, 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.

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

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

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

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

Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Yes. So, you know what? I mean, let’s think about that for a second.

No. No college degree.

Yeah. 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?

Correct.

Which one? Thousands or hundreds?

Thousands.

So I’ll get into it in a second.

Okay. I’ll give you an example.

So 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.

That’s three hours west of Dallas.

Correct. So it’s in West Texas.

You know, Abilene is a town of 120,000 people. So, you know, 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.

And housing, I would assume.

Yeah. Housing, the market’s actually fairly efficient. There are a lot of people that won’t be long-term permanent workers there; they bring mobile homes and 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 a short-term spike and boom in demand for the construction and installation process, and great long-term permanent jobs to operate the facility. We have a power plant there, and many mechanics will be operating this facility.

This is just one campus. We have another campus in Armstrong County, Texas, with close to 3,000 people on site every day. We also have another project outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, where we’ve announced plans to build a 10 gigawatt campus.

Why Wyoming? Wyoming is a state very rich in natural resources and energy. There have been really favorable public-private partnerships to make this project happen. There’s a tremendous amount of gas there to support what we’re doing.

One of the very cool things 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 have primacy on what’s called class six wells. These are post-combustion carbon capture and sequestration disposal wells, where you can take the carbon that comes out of the combustion process of a natural gas turbine and pump it underground to permanently sequester it.

There’s actually an incentive called 45Q, where the government pays you to do this. It doesn’t quite cover the cost, but for customers who care about the impact and sustainability of the campus and the carbon footprint, this is valuable. They’re not putting the carbon into the atmosphere; instead, they’re putting it underground.

They can produce power from gas in a carbon-free way, which is a really exciting value proposition we can use.

How are batteries? I think we saw Elon bought a lithium refinery in his building and is building his own batteries. They’re one of the larger battery manufacturers.

How do batteries play into all this currently? There are a bunch of different ways batteries play into it. You need batteries in low voltage UPS systems that help operate the electrical system of the plants.

Is this just to normalize and base load? Yes.

One of the issues with these large scale AI factories, when deploying giant clusters of GPUs, is that the entire data center acts as a single computer running one single workload, training a breakthrough foundational model. This results in massive load fluctuations in power draw.

The chips run compute cycles and then publish data over the network to synchronize with other GPUs, causing these fluctuations in overall power draw. Utilities dislike that since it’s terrible for turbines.

You really need a way to normalize and smooth out the load.

We’ve solved that with a one hour battery, a medium voltage battery energy storage system we’ve deployed. There are many other use cases for batteries.

Another example: We’re working with Elon’s former co-founder and partner at Tesla, J.B. Straubel, who focuses on battery recycling through his company, Redwood Materials.

He has a massive supply of end-of-life EV batteries, as well as batteries from digital cameras and other devices at the end of their life. As a demonstration of cost competition and deployment, we deployed a fully off-grid solar plus battery energy storage system that powers an AI data center 24/7 with a power price lower than in Northern Virginia.

We’re able to do this because those batteries were in electric vehicles — maybe the range was originally 300 miles, now it’s 250 miles. The owner trades in the car, considering it done, but there’s still a lot of juice left in those batteries. Yeah, of course. There’s a lot of useful life in those batteries. So we’re able to really make use of them in a second life to power these AI data centers.

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

Yeah, yeah, you could say that. Compared to where you were like two or three years ago, maybe let’s say 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.

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? You know, I think there’s just an incredible demand—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, both the chips and the data center.

So even this year, going into 2026, you’re seeing the same amount of inbound requests:

• “Hey, we need more, we need more, we need more, what do you got?”

Or was last year people putting in their big orders for the next couple of years?

No, we’re seeing things accelerate.

Who are the new customers? Because obviously, Elon, Sam Altman, I’m sure AWS, I’m sure—well, I think Google does their own, yeah?

Google, I think—well, I don’t want to speak directly.

You can. This is all in. If you want to be on All In, you got to just be candid. Just tell us what you heard at the cocktail party.

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

Ah, so they do do some outsourcing, yeah.

Correct. But I think all of the leading labs are seeing a tremendous amount of demand. So, you know, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google.

Elon builds his own.

Elon builds his own.

Elon builds his own.

What was your take when you saw him build Colossus under that short timeframe? 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.

How much faster?

No, but did he—my understanding is he did it in half the time anybody else had ever done something like that.

I mean, it depends on how you sort of measure these things. I think Colossus 1 was sort of this 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 build-out of:

- cooling distribution units  
- RPPs  
- electrical systems  
- hot aisle containment systems  

and then you sort of roll racks of GPUs into these.

Right.

So they were able to execute on that incredibly fast.

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

Yeah, I mean, Elon’s the GOAT of a modern industrialist. So, hat tip to him.

You as running, not competitive to him, but building the same things, you have to look at that and study it a bit. How did he get it done so fast? What do you think?

How do you think he was able to do it so fast?

I think Elon does an incredible job of breaking down a large industrial process into a lot of sub-processes and understanding constraints, and really taking a first-principles approach of:

“How do I build things as quickly as possible? How do I parallelize things as quickly as possible?”

Got it.

Has that informed some of your thinking?

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You know, he’s been an inspiration from building the Gigafactory to everything he’s done at SpaceX and Starbase. You know, it’s all incredibly inspiring. And we try to channel that same sense of incredible urgency, parallelizing a lot of the work.

You know, we self-perform a lot of procurement functions and engineering functions and then 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.

There’s been a lot of talk, 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 a 20, or at the time, 12 billion, now it’s 20 billion run rate,
• How does OpenAI pay for a $500 billion build-out in your contract with them and your relationship with them?

I’m assuming this is being done in stages, not one giant $100 billion contract, but stages, yeah? Yeah, so I think it’s important to understand, in a lot of ways, my role as CEO of Caruso, 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.

And this has actually been a major role that we see these large-scale, blue-chip, investment-grade businesses play a major role in sort of catalyzing the capital formation you need to build these giant infrastructure projects.

So when you have a company like Google or a company like Microsoft or a company like Amazon — and they’re staying on $100 billion in cash and they throw $10, $20 billion to the bottom line every quarter — exactly, they can 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, yeah?

Correct.

So, in our case, I’ll give you an example in Abilene, Texas, because that’s the most public one. We have a long-term lease agreement with Oracle, right? We have a long-term, 15-year off-take agreement with Oracle. And so 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 institutions

And they must be very excited about this opportunity.

Yeah, I think everybody’s really, really excited about the opportunity to build the infrastructure that’s going to power the economy in the future.

And this is collateralized by a data center, which has inherent value.

If a customer of yours was unable to meet their commitment, based on what you’ve told me today and shared with the audience, and I appreciate your candidness — that is the currency of the all-in brand, as candid as — there would be somebody else to take that capacity.

Yeah, 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.

There are people saying that that could happen.

Sure, okay. I’m not saying that. You didn’t say that.

Imagine they did go out of business. The reason they’d go out of business is because some other model company — whether it be Anthropic or Gemini or Grok — really blew them out of the water.

Well, and they’re kind of in fourth place right now, according to some of the benchmarks.

Yeah, parking that all aside, they have an incredible adoption, incredible platform. Billion users.

Billion users.

But if that were to happen, the group that massively surpassed them would have so much demand for that product.

Yes.

They would jump, they’d be jumping for joy to step into the seat. Absolutely. To take over that compute capacity.

So I think 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.

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 I would think there’s probably some people on your board or in your own organization who say:

“Hey, listen, 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.

Yeah. So, I really think about Crusoe being a vertically integrated business. We offer three core things, right?

• We can build the data centers
• We can rent those to customers

We really only focus on a small subset, maybe five customers, these very big tech companies. And that’s really their key bottleneck, their key pain point.

They’re not renting out capacity from clouds because, you know, 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. And that’s really critical infrastructure for the startups that you’re talking about.

This is the development of new AI native applications, you know, 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 kind of charge on a:

• Dollar per KW rent on the data center
• Dollar per GPU hour on the GPU
• Dollar per token on the managed services

Yeah, and that’s thousands of customers, tens of thousands eventually.

And that’s where you’re going up against Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, yeah?
Correct.
Correct, yeah.

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

You know, I think 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, which means their lowest common denominator isn’t AI—it’s every reason.

• You need an email server
• You need storage
• It’s everything

We’re 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, which means all of the optimizations we’re making on:

• High-performance networking systems
• Compute side
• Storage
• 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 will be? A lot of people have talked about:

• Optics and just the transport layer
• Raw horsepower
• Cooling

Where do you, when you talk to some of the hardware providers, think we’ll see the next step function in the next, let’s call that, the 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 company—your current offering, I should say.

Yeah.

So, look, I think what’s so fascinating about this space and what gets me so excited is that it’s actually like the culmination of so many different engineering disciplines. It’s like the pinnacle of human achievement across so many different engineering disciplines from:

• Cooling systems and chemical engineering
• Electrical systems
• Physical electrical engineering for chips
• Silicon systems and the chips
• Networking
• Software engineering

It’s really a full stack solution that ultimately produces intelligence.

Now getting to specific challenges that we see and specific trends, we’re seeing everything go to higher density configurations.

So more power in the rack. A traditional data center maybe five years ago was like 15 KW, 20 years ago 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. And then Vera Rubin Ultra is expected to be 600.

We’re ultimately going to get to one megawatt racks.

One megawatt, to give perspective, is roughly the amount of power of a thousand homes.

Yeah, it’s like a small town in a data center, right?

Yeah.

So a rack will be a town. A couple of dozen of those will be a city.

Yeah, it’ll be a New York city in a data center.

Crazy.

And, you know, Crusoe has over 45 gigawatts in our pipeline, which is about like eight to ten New York cities worth of power, depending on how you measure it.

So it’s an incredible amount of energy infrastructure that’s going to need to come online to help energize this layer of compute.

And there’s, like I said, challenges in every domain—from cooling to networking to… yeah. As that density arrives, this 10 to one density you’re talking about, the heat also arrives.

Yeah.
Correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.

A lot of exciting stuff happening.

And what do you think of the small modular nuclear getting close to hydro?

Yep.

What, what, what do you, you know, obviously gas is the layup at gas.
It’s everywhere.

• We’re leaders in that
• Solar
• That feels like a layup
• And battery, that combo to add

But hydro, I don’t know if there’s much left.

We’re actually doing a lot with hydro, you know, in the Nordics.
So Norway, in Iceland, we have, in Iceland, you know, there’s abundant geothermal.

It’s like this sort of geological phenomenon and there’s ultra low cost geothermal energy and also a lot of hydro there.

So that’s a one, two, you get the one, two punch there.

Yeah.

And I don’t know if you guys heard, but America just acquired Iceland.
That was like the rim shot off of the Greenland.

Yeah.
That wasn’t a mistake.

Yeah.
We’re taking both.
I mean, or you’re giving us both.

It’s, it’s, it’s like Greenland.
We don’t ask for much.

Yeah.
We don’t ask for much.

Okay.
It’s a very simple request.

We have a little Iceland, a little, we have data centers.
You may have heard of big data, big data centers in the fjords.

Just listen, but yeah, go ahead to your comment on small modular nuclear reactors.

We are very bullish on SMRs.

And have you signed a contract yet?
Are you in negotiation or, uh, contracts that we’ve signed?

Wow.
We’re going to energize the first AI factory powered by an SMR in 2027.

1. That’s next year, bro.

2. I know.

And one of the ways we’ve been able to do this is, it’s actually gonna be at the Idaho national lab.

Ah.

Where you actually are, you’re outside of the regulatory domain of the NRC.

It’s considered experimental technology.

So…

Who’s the partner on that?

I don’t think we’ve made it…

You know, it’s okay.

We’re going to make some news here.

The journalists here…

No, I know because I was told this exact same insight by the company that’s doing it, but I won’t say the name of it.

Yeah.
Yes.

Well, I think we can announce it.

Okay.
Let’s, we should announce it.
We should announce it.

The partner is Ollo Energy.

Yes.

So, they’re an incredible partner.

Isn’t it amazing that for solar, it was something we haven’t been able to do since the seventies?
And now it’s like,

“Yeah, we’re going to do solar. It’s absolutely necessary.”

So we’re going to do it.

Yep.

What do you attribute that to?

I think there’s this like human ingenuity and sort of the passage of time and sort of the relentless pursuit of efficiencies.

Like I just think, yeah, it’s really incredible.

If you look at the cost curve of solar, just how much it’s come down over the course of time.

I think you’re going to see a similar thing play out in:

• SMRs
• Next gen geothermal

Like 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 in oil and gas.

And we’re not going to have this impact consumers’ electrical bills.

Yeah.

I think that’s such an interesting story.

When we look at this problem, we say,

“Look, 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 to go with it.

And you know, 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 means, you know, and we’re only using peak demand and call like 0.1% of the time.

So you might have some excess 0.9% of the time.

Yeah.

We have excess power that can be:

• Support the local community
• Create an abundance of energy that drives down the overall cost for rate payers 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 like an incredible future we’re building towards.

And this is something that I think 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.”

Hey, maybe your energy bill will get lower or eventually free.

Absolutely.

And you’re already seeing this trend unfold.

I mean, we’ve taken this energy first approach.

You saw Google recently make the acquisition of Intersect Power. Sheldon and his team are an 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.

Well, really appreciate you taking the time, Chase, and continued success. What an amazing story. 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 absolutely crush it.

And it’s been the latter for you.

But there might’ve been some moments where you stared at the ceiling at night as an entrepreneur and said, “Are we too early?”

It’s mostly been up and to the right, no real… no, I’m just kidding. There have been tons of complex problems and challenges and moments of doubt throughout the company’s lifetime.

But, you know, 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.”

It’s actually a whole organizational mindset shift: from

Will the customers ever show up?

to

Oh my God, I hope my customers are happy and delighted.

Totally.

But scaling people, scaling culture, scaling technology has its own set of challenges and problems. The culture part is important. It’s difficult.

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

And adding… what are you adding?

• A thousand a year?

We’re going to add 2,400 people this year, full-time employees, and then tens of thousands of contractors.

Yeah, I’ve seen that movie before.

And no, I mean, I’ve watched it with Uber and Robinhood as they were adding one person a day, then it was five new people— and now you’ve just got training and recruitment and just trying to keep that culture tight and make sure you hire the right people.

Well, listen, you have to go, and we’re way over time. I appreciate you taking the time and being so… man, I appreciate it.

All right, give it up for Chase. Thanks, guys.

I’m going all in.
I’m doing all in.
I’m doing all in.