Harnessing Renewable Energy in High-Tech Crypto Operations

Unlock the mysteries of blockchain's energy appetite with Aidan Keleck, the trailblazing President and CEO of Hive. In our electrifying conversation, you'll navigate the complex currents of combining high-performance computing with the green revolution. Aidan's narrative arc sweeps from the pioneering days of ICOs to the present, where Hive harnesses the power of renewable energy sources. His insights into Hive's global operations, which stretch across seven time zones, illuminate a business model that thrives on innovation and efficiency, achieving remarkable revenue per employee through their eco-conscious approach to blockchain and AI.

Tackling the crypto audit gauntlet, Aidan lays bare the treacherous terrain of compliance and regulation that companies like Hive must conquer. He digs into the nitty-gritty of SOC 2 compliance, the reluctance of major audit firms to dip their toes in crypto waters, and the pioneering spirit required to set new standards in this emerging field. Our discussion peels back the layers on the nuanced relationship between blockchain innovation, such as Bitcoin Ordinals, and the massive server infrastructures that power them, offering a peek into the future of business legitimization in the crypto realm.

As we wrap up, Aidan maps out the strategies driving Hive’s AI and Bitcoin mining endeavors. He skillfully demystifies the Bitcoin halving event, while forecasting the role of large language models in shaping our digital existence. Hive’s dedication to ESG initiatives takes center stage, showcasing their commitment to a greener future through strategic equipment acquisitions and renewable energy practices. Aidan's parting wisdom on how AI is seamlessly woven into our everyday lives, alongside the key traits of a successful CEO, leaves us with food for thought about the importance of leadership in steering the ship of innovation. Join us for this thought-provoking journey, as Hive blazes a trail toward a sustainable and technologically advanced tomorrow.

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The Startup Journey podcast is dedicated to spotlighting the journeys and insights of tech founders and investors shaping Web3. Guests of The Startup Voyage podcast join a world of industry leaders, startup visionaries, and seasoned investors who share valuable lessons, stories, and advice to inspire and empower a global community of tech founders.​

We take a journalistic / reality show concept to ignite conversations that empower the next generation of disruptors. Join us as we dive deep into the dynamic world of technology, unraveling success stories, industry trends, and game-changing innovations.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Startup Void podcast. Have you ever wondered how the rapid demand for blockchain and AI has sustained? Is it more beneficial as digital progress or a negative impact to the environment? Now, the explosive growth in blockchain and AI demands immense computing power, poses challenges in energy consumption and sustainability. Hive digital technologies, with their advanced data centers, is at the forefront of addressing environmental concerns by providing sustainable, high performance computing power. What data centers are large energy consumption platforms? Where this energy comes from is of utmost importance. This is why Hive ensures their HPC data centers are run by renewable energy sources hydroelectric and geothermal power and that premise dictated the location of all the data centers. Now, professionals from every industry can leverage accelerated computing power on demand from Hive from training machine learning models, rendering astonishing special effects in video game characters to enabling scientists to predict storms in her king past. Hpc empowers all that endeavors in technology.

Speaker 1: 1:31

Today, we're honored to have Aidan Keleck, the president and CEO of Hive, as our guest, and he's joined Hive back in 2018 and has been instrumental in steering the company through periods of significant growth and expansion. Of the 20-year career, marked by a blend of entrepreneurship and engineering, aidan brings a wealth experience to the table. He's an electrical engineer with a deep understanding of cryptocurrency, capital markets and real estate development. His expertise doesn't stop there, because he also has a rich background in scientific research. Before his tenure at Hive, he founded Fortress Blockchain Corporation, a Canadian public company in the blockchain industry, mining BTC, and his multifaceted career and his role at Hive, especially in the context of the company's commitment to green energy and ESD strategy, make him a pivotal figure in the blockchain and digital currency space. So I'd like to welcome you to the show, aidan. Thank you for joining us today. Hey, arthur, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: 2:28

Great to be here. Thanks for the intro. I was sort of like, wow, this is my life. Well, I hope I saw my. Well, I'm right, yeah, that is good. Well, I mean, look, I'm interested.

Speaker 1: 2:38

I know you like I've been talking about you. You've founded a company before doing Bitcoin mining. How did you share that journey in even getting into mining and moving into Hive? How did that happen?

Speaker 2: 2:50

Yeah, so in 20s I started investing in ICOs, even a little bit, looking into them previously to that, and also I mean some of my friends that lived in Vancouver and Richmond we had bought some miners because we were going to set up just a small facility in a warehouse and so I had these two prongs. That was my first exposure into crypto. And then I saw Hive go public and hit a billion dollar market cap in a month. It was amazing. I was like, wow, and I knew I knew of a two megawatt Bitcoin, mine in Washington state. So basically, long story short, I founded Fortress Blockchain Corp. We acquired this two megawatt site in Washington state, which was big back then, raised 20 million bucks, took it public on the TSXV as a tier one issuer. That company is still public today. It's a Bitcoin.

Speaker 2: 3:36

I sort of arranged a succession plan when Hive, led by Frank Holmes, the executive chairman, invited me to step into the role as president, chief operating officer at the time, summer 20. And over the course of that journey, I then got promoted to CEO at the beginning of this year Sorry, the beginning of 20s. Wow, this has been a. You know, frank and I we met on a panel. Wow, we met on a panel six years ago. Six years ago, january 20th, the Vancouver resource and investment conference called VIRIC and Frank's a legend in the capital markets and he was on like five stages. That day I was like what Whoa, who's this guy? And I was on a panel with him and he was representing Hive, I was representing Fortress, and so we were on a panel as a friendly debate and we became friends and I sort of become a mentor to me over the years and that's how that journey started and it's been just, you know, riding a rocket ship since. We've done so many things at Hive. I think my team gave you a, you did great research in terms of the media brief, but one of the things that we didn't get to touch on I'll talk about more later. It's really the first and only crypto miner that has successfully built a Bitcoin mining server using Intel microchips. You know, and we did that two years ago yeah, intel released a chip called the block scale.

Speaker 2: 4:45

Hive is an innovative company. It was first an Ethereum miner with GPUs, and that's very significant, because GPUs were used to mine Ethereum, whereas A6, or application specific integrated circuits, were used to mine Bitcoin, and so Bitcoin miners mine with these servers called A6, and they're about you know, three kilowatts each, which is about two hair dryers, and GPUs are not as power intensive A GPU a single GPU is, you know, maybe two 300 Watts, and so you then take those GPUs and you put them into a server. It's similar but it's different, and so Hive has this rich history of being a large scale GPU operator. Later on, hive also became a Bitcoin operator, and we'll talk more about that, but the GPU component is very important because that is what gave us a leg up to get into AI infrastructure, which we kicked off last year as well. So a lot of fun stuff in our technology ecosystem.

Speaker 2: 5:38

We're about innovation. We have a high revenue per employee business model. We basically want the best of the best working for us and, yeah, we had a little over seven time zones. Every day I've got guys in Europe Montreal, texas is where my chairman is. I'm in Vancouver, our data centers in Sweden and Iceland, montreal sorry Quebec and New Brunswick. So we're geographically and globally diversified, all using hydro and geothermal energy.

Speaker 1: 6:04

On the mining side and I'm sure everything's on the news right now about this Bitcoin ETF a lot of crazy movements, right, it's not really considered a crash, but maybe Bitcoin is re-correcting itself for whatever reasons. I'm sure there's a lot of analysts kind of figuring that out. What is your impression about the ETF? The good thing, bad thing, yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:25

I think, broadly, it's something that anyone in the cryptocurrency ecosystem would welcome, at least in the idea that it will encourage more people to perhaps invest in cryptocurrency because they'll have an easier channel to acquire. I think it's important to point out that if you're buying an ETF the spot Bitcoin that the funds will be owning they'll have it in their cold wallet storage, so it more becomes an investment, which is fine. But I wouldn't expect more transaction fees on the Bitcoin network as a result of people buying and selling it. But then again, I'm sure the ETF will have to settle at some frequency. I don't know, do they settle daily or weekly? If they're positioned, their flow changes. How quickly do they have to top up and buy or sell Bitcoin? Now we've seen Bitcoin fall to below $2.39 just below $40 within a couple of weeks of the ETF approval, so some people are like going what the heck?

Speaker 2: 7:22

Well, I think broadly in the media there was a lot of hype and excitement that led to a rally in Bitcoin price of $48 before the ETF was even approved. It was described as a sell-the-news event and then, once the ETFs got approved, there was a large outflow of capital, specifically the grayscale ETF and the thing is grayscale, which is a digital currency group. They also coined us. They're kind of a conglomerate in the world of crypto. They originally had a product called grayscale Bitcoin trust right, which was a closed and fund that they allowed people to invest into get exposure to Bitcoin. But the funny thing is it was a closed and fund. It always traded at like a premium or discount to its actual Bitcoin holding, so it wasn't an efficient investment vehicle. But then once it got approved as an ETF, it was a big outflow of capital because I think people wanted their money in ETF with lower fees and grayscale had these higher fees. So the idea is the money flows out and once it flows back in whether it's back into grayscale, but probably BlackRock, fidelity, all these other ones we'll see more of that spot demand for Bitcoin and hopefully an increase in the price. But you know I even read that there was an FTX liquidation because they owned a billion dollars of grayscale trust right, so that billion dollars got liquidated. So you know, when you've got a bankruptcy proceeding liquidation, the traders aren't probably saying, oh, I hope we don't. You know, crash the market. It's like, oh, law orders. You know we have to sell this Bitcoin's like emotionless, you know, corporate citizens or something to that effect. Now, that's my two cents.

Speaker 2: 8:51

On the ETF, I think that you know crypto enthusiasts, like a Bitcoin maxi, I don't know, like, if you ask the hardcore guys, do they like the idea of the ETF? I'm pragmatic, right, I'm an entrepreneur. I think the more that you can have the powers that be embraced and define a framework for Bitcoin to flourish yeah, of course, the better it is. You know, of course there's going to be people that are saying this is my crypto, this is my cold wallet. I'm not putting on exchange, I only send anonymous transactions, the hardcore guys. And then you've got people that have Coinbase accounts, that have uploaded their driver's license and report their crypto gains on their personal tax. And I think that, broadly, for society to get comfortable and tangible with crypto currencies a means of investment or exchange, you want to have that more tactile usability and I think that the exchanges that came about in the last few years, like Gemini, they went for SOC2 compliance early on. Because I'll give you a little bit of a history lesson we're NASDAQ listed. We're listed on the.

Speaker 2: 9:46

TSXB in Canada and we're even listed in Frankfurt right, it's a public company, we have disclosure requirements, we have audit requirements right. So it's highly regulated and for us to get our audits passed the Canadian public accountancy board because the TSX is our home listing jurisdiction In 2020,. They made it very difficult for crypto companies to get their audits done and almost every company in the crypto space filed their audit late because no auditors would sign off. All the big four PWC, kpmg, deloitte, etc. All stepped away In Canada. Mnp was a big one and they all backed away At the time.

Speaker 2: 10:21

Fortress had MNP and all the big four EY is the other one they were not touching crypto. They dropped crypto files. Mid audit Companies are like what the heck? This is unprecedented. And then there was three small shops in Vancouver that took it on.

Speaker 2: 10:33

C-pad, made a very onerous. Somebody even called a draconian mandate on how you would have to audit crypto and it was just super complicated. But it set the bar higher. So seasoned executives and sophisticated finance teams could go the distance and say, okay, yeah, we can fully prove exactly how much Bitcoin we've earned. There was this thing called revenue recognition. Prove it, you have to download the hash tables from your pool to get very granular, and so I think it just set the bar higher.

Speaker 2: 10:59

But the point is that this was what it took to become a publicly traded company after the initial hubris. So a bunch of companies went public in 2020 and regulators, kind of like, started getting a handle on it, made it a lot tougher. So that's just the way it goes. But now you see, in 2020, all these other companies that came like Hive was a pioneer, we laid the tracks right. Then, in 2020, all these new companies Marathon got really big, clean, spark, et cetera. You have Bit Digital Terrible. They're all kind of like in second wave, right. I think Hade and Bitfarms are the original three big crypto miners from the 20s era and that are sort of the large scale ones. And so here we are in 2020 now.

Speaker 2: 11:37

So you look at how long it took to get a Bitcoin ETF approved. Well, our chairman, frank Holmes. He actually wanted to start a Bitcoin ETF back in 2016, but he realized he couldn't do it. That's when the whole crypto mining thing Frank was a co-founder of Hive, so that's how I came about, right.

Speaker 2: 11:50

So it's about having highly regulated like exchanges. Now they're highly regulated, and that was my point. You know, talking about SOC too, that was a requirement auditors had for our pools Like these are independent, like tech startups, and you ask them for SOC, too, compliance, and eventually they got it. But it took a long time and there was a lot of really extensive analysis done where auditors would have to hire third party tech consultants to sign off on their review of the crypto mining companies, and eventually companies like Gemini got that SOC, too, compliance as a crypto exchange. So, yes, regulation is necessary for adoption and those that can, you know, make the cut and figure it out will be the businesses that exist right, like not every internet startup from the dot com bubble obviously made it right, and so now there's, like massive internet companies that are venerable. So it's a good mix of, I think, rigor and innovation that will allow you to flourish as a crypto company.

Speaker 1: 12:45

Well, I think back then for sure these, like the KPMG's and DWC's, they probably did have the knowledge or talent inside to even learn how to audit. I was with a outfit that basically did a backdoor listing onto the Hong Kong stock exchange and they also went through to get the governments or the regulators first, virtual assets service provider license. Through that effort they went through everything. Same thing. You know. They look at audits. Should we do SOC to compliant? Who's going to audit our code and smart contracts?

Speaker 1: 13:16

They even got insurance, so there's whole push to get insurance from Lloyds of London and those guys for sure didn't understand how this works right and we had to go through all the security measures for eyes and what happens transferring, you know, air gap devices. It was really crazy because they basically took the understanding of how traditional markets work today and they tried to align every single thing to how it gets done in this new digital world and that's how they end up approving at the very end to get the license. But it was a long time. It was like 18, 24 months, right, that was a long time, exactly what I'm referring to you got lawyers accountants CFAs and there's like everyone's working, like okay, you know, we got to make this.

Speaker 2: 14:03

It's like interdisciplinary expertise.

Speaker 1: 14:05

It definitely is. And then sometimes you also wonder, even though they do the audits like, for example, I was just on another podcast with a web free founder they were going out to look for third party auditors and they charge about $40,000 by contract or I guess I don't know what, the length of the scope of service, but $40 to start up, it's a lot of money just to get audited and if something happens where it happened, there's no liability on that auditor, right. It's kind of like, oh, we did our job, we got our money and there's no insurance, right. So you're kind of like, okay, I don't pay this money, but what does it get me? Right Checkbox, you know, to move forward in public perception as we've done our DD. So what do you think? So you're saying that, so I do agree.

Speaker 1: 14:46

But I think if we look at all the ETS and how the capital markets work today, they probably settle. It's kind of like managing the balance sheet at the end of the day. But you know, and they don't do 24, seven crypto trading, right. So that's the biggest difference. But let's talk about Bitcoin Ordinal. So that came out in 22. That has increased the fees on, you know, on Bitcoin network. Has that increased in processing power? Do you think that will pick up as mainstream and become more of an impact for the server?

Speaker 2: 15:13

Yeah, I mean the ordinals were, I think, a very impactful, important and historically relevant and very relevant for the future as well aspect of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Why? Because ordinals allow the advent of information to be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain in addition to just the rudimentary financial transaction data right. So, as your viewers likely know but it's always good to get a simple explanation and recap and maybe some people don't know this but you know that Bitcoin blockchain right is a ledger, and what is a ledger? Well, it's a chain of blocks. Imagine your credit card statements for the last 10 years. Every month you get a credit card statement. What does it say? Where you spend your money, the date and how much right. That's all the Bitcoin blockchain is. Each block is about two transactions per block your address, so sender address, receiver address, amount of Bitcoin and the date, and then there's a block header and Merkle tree and all these other tech things that go into the hash algorithm. But that's really what it is right, and you can look it all up on any block explorer, which is really cool. Except the Bitcoin blocks come every 10 minutes approximately, not monthly, and so that is the core information. You can go to block explorer C and that's how you can validate your transactions gone through, right, you could copy and paste your own hexadecimal address, put in a block explorer C, every single transaction you've ever made, and if somebody you sent Bitcoin to, you could see their address and you could see if they received yours and every third transaction they've made. So it makes it blockchain right. So it's awesome. It's immutable. You can't hack those records, right? What you see on the website is just a web API. It's just showing you what's stored in the blockchain, but the blockchain is immutable.

Speaker 2: 16:47

Now, how do ordinals fit into that? Well, you're able to put information on to the blockchain. You inscript them, right, and so you do that. You kind of have these finite units. Like the smallest divisible unit of a Bitcoin is one, one millionth of a Bitcoin is called a Satoshi, and so because that's the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin, now you can make Bitcoin, in effect, non-fungible because you can identify which Satoshi of which block each ordinal was. And then it's really cool because they're starting to become these things called like rare SATs or like rare Satoshis.

Speaker 2: 17:22

So it was, for example, a significant Satoshi in terms of a block. So 100 million Satoshis in a block, right? Well, there's 900 blocks in a day. The significance is that you have 9 million I'm sorry, 900 Bitcoin are mine today. Each Bitcoin has 100 million Satoshi. So how many of those Satoshi are the first Satoshi per block? Well, there's only 900, right? So that's still per block. It's the first one out of 100 million that constitute that. Now, even more rare, the difficulty changes every two weeks. Imagine you had the first Satoshi of the first block at the difficulty change, right? That's even more rare, statistically, right? And what if it was the first Satoshi of the first block at a halving event, like there's literally only, I guess, 12, 16, 20. Yeah, there's been like three halving events, right? So 12, 16, 20. And that was going to be four. So there's only four of those Satoshis in existence, right?

Speaker 2: 18:21

So they're like mega rare right, so that's cool. So then there's like collectability and we've got some uncommons, like we have a few, first Satoshis of a block right, which is super cool, and then we've got the yeah, so there's a whole, there's a whole table you can find online that explains. There's different nicknames, there's like uncommon, rare, et cetera, and we've been made offers to sell these Satoshis of like five, five times face value, like we could sell like two Satoshis for like 50,000 Satoshis. It's like pay the price of Bitcoin divided by two. So one Bitcoin is 43. What's that divided by a million? Right, it's a fraction of a penny. It's still a fraction of a penny, or maybe it's like maybe it might be nine cents I think that was the number we looked at last time but someone's going to pay 50 grand for it. That's crazy. Right? That's crazy. That's five. Yeah, that's what it was like. Nine cents to Satoshis.

Speaker 2: 19:14

It was like nine cents right, so you know the collectors are like oh, wow, like that's going to have more long term intrinsic value, right, yeah, so it's kind of like real estate in Hong Kong or Vancouver there's only like so much land, so people will pay premium. But, moreover, we're just talking about the Sat. Now you've got to talk about the actual information, right? People are putting like information on Bitcoin. So there's, like you know, taproot wizards I think was our friends at Luxor, luxor's mining pool, and they were doing a lot of work with ordinals. We work with them. They're great, and they were working with the guys that did taproot wizards.

Speaker 2: 19:48

And there's these kind of silly drawings of where I can show you some silly. They're cool drawings, but very kind of rudimentary digital art and people were putting them on the Bitcoin blockchains. This is like Bitcoin's answer to the NFT world, right? Yeah, but you know where's the NFT world's, like you know? Hey, like I got a board ape and I drive a Lambo and I'm in Miami, like that, without kind of whole, like oversold, like crazy era.

Speaker 2: 20:10

Bitcoin is more just like hey, we can do the same thing. People are paying a premium but, like, justin Bieber isn't buying a taproot wizard, right? So it's more, like, you know, crypto nerds like are like getting these things right. But anyways, what it did more specifically and might be interesting for your viewers, is it increased the transaction fees on the Bitcoin blockchain dramatically, right, so like 25 transaction fees, right, yeah, which was pretty crazy. And so we I mean typically to put that in context for everybody like, normally, transaction fees are like one to two percent. What I mean by that is, you know, the block reward is every day, right, nine Bitcoin are awarded on the blockchain and your contribution of the total hash rate you get a pro rat. A portion of those 900 Bitcoin is your reward. So, if you're 1% of Bitcoin network, you get nine Bitcoin a day, and that's pretty much what we did on average. Like we mined over 30 Bitcoin in 24 days it's about nine Bitcoin a day on average.

Speaker 2: 21:06

We average about 1% of global network. If you are like the global network, well, you get. You know point. You know nine Bitcoin a day. So that's block reward, that's block reward. But on top of that you get this little extra and that's a transaction fee. And what that comes from is when users send Bitcoin, it says, oh, like, you know how much do you want to pay? And some people go like low, medium or high fee. You know more people are saying.

Speaker 2: 21:29

Hey, I don't care, I just want my transaction go through quick. If you hire fee, that goes to the miners, right. But you know, that's sort of like the weather it ebbs and flows and it changes Sure, sure, most drove a lot of transactions which is a little bit different than the whole ETF thing, because, again, if people are buying an ETF, you know at the end of the day, if they settle like, okay, so we got to go buy a bunch of Bitcoin, that's like one big transaction, right? Yep, yep.

Speaker 2: 21:53

Yeah, but anyways, it's all cool, but that was a great question. I'm glad you asked that.

Speaker 1: 21:56

Okay, well, I wanted to ask you something else, and this is around a focus, a focus on ESG, environmental sustainability, and everyone's got the perspective of what is actually being done. What is conspiracy theory? Do people really even care? And there's a lot of companies getting into the space. Number one, maybe a perception right? We're a company where you know we're supporting ESG initiatives. Maybe they might get some funding from the government, so on and so forth. What is your take and Hive's take as far as really attacking your operations? And, yes, you can make it equal, friendly, but are you doing anything else to inspire or help? You know other people get into this space and make a difference as well?

Speaker 2: 22:39

Yeah, that's another great question. I think that, well, I mean, hive has been an innovator and a leader, being ESG conscious before that word even existed. We were ESG before. It was cool to be ESG. Really, that went back to our chairman, frank Holmes, you know.

Speaker 2: 22:53

Yeah, this vision about green and clean Bitcoin Bitcoin minus green and clean energy really is paving the way for institutional Bitcoin. Right, Because, yes, bitcoin is an energy-backed currency. Let's prove that you can make Bitcoin a sustainable, digital, decentralized currency using renewable energy. And that's tougher because obviously there's less renewable energy. If you can only use renewable energy, well, by definition, that's a subset of everything available, and a lot of the bigger crypto miners, you know, use natural gas, maybe coal, just grid mix, whatever they can get their hands on. Oh, there's a big old substation. Let's, let's. We're going to build up a site next to it. What is it? 40% coal, 30% gas, 20% nuclear, doesn't matter. Is it cheap power? Okay, good, that's not as a high.

Speaker 2: 23:37

All of our data centers were in northern Sweden, not in Stockholm, in the south of Sweden. That's the capital. We're in the north of Sweden by the Arctic Circle. Seriously, it's by the Arctic. You can see the Aurora Borealis up there. It's a town called Bode right. And what do we do in Bode? We sponsor the local hockey team right. They have the high logo on the jerseys and it's called the Hype Arena. Kids in the ages 16 can go watch the games for free right, and this hockey team has spawned two NHL Stanley Cup finalists. So it's, you know, it's a serious team.

Speaker 1: 24:05

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 24:06

They've got their own stadium. We give back to the community. We sponsor the local sports teams in New Brunswick as well, and in northern Sweden we're also developing a greenhouse that's going to recycle the heat from our 30 megawatt facility to grow cucumbers and tomatoes. An engineering study was done. It was something like 900 tons of tomatoes annually can be produced, or cucumbers, which is phenomenal, and slightly less cucumbers, I think 700 tons. And it's remarkable, right? Because now you can grow produce by the Arctic Circle. So now think about this. Now it's carbon negative because, guess what? Now you produce in the winter from Spain and Italy because you can grow it in northern Europe. So now you're reducing the carbon for pre-needed, also using energy and screening renewable.

Speaker 2: 24:47

See, there's sorts of things we did before the whole idea of ESG came out and we've long been proponents of the mindset that green Bitcoin should trade at a premium. And I remember Frank was speaking at Miami Bitcoin in 20 on, giving a keynote speech, sort of expressing it, and it was interesting. Back this before ESG was a big thing, but you know, some of the people in the audience were like, didn't even like the idea of making a case for green Bitcoin. So there's a lot of people with divided opinions, like some hardcore crypto guys. I know they hate the idea of ESG.

Speaker 2: 25:19

For us, it's like hey, we've always been green energy from the beginning. Now there's this whole thing where companies have a mandate to invest in ESG companies All right. Well, guess what? Let's see environmental, renewable energy, social sponsoring, the local sports team right, doing a greenhouse. We're doing heat recycling. Go back, we heat a two and a square foot factory with the heat from our 30 megawatt Bitcoin mine Well, right, yeah. And there's staff that work in there right, we're doing that. We have a glycol pump system. So it's kind of nice when people acknowledge these sorts of things and say, hey, you know this is ESG, so we've never necessarily said you know, hi, we are the ESG friendly miner, but when you look at everything we do, we tick those boxes right, and so if somebody is saying hey, you know what I want to buy Bitcoin or invest in a company that is a Bitcoin miner, using green energy or has ESG initiatives in place, that's what we've done, just as part of our company DNA.

Speaker 1: 26:16

I like that recycling of the heat. Actually it's very simple.

Speaker 2: 26:20

It's awesome I've been there. Yes, cool.

Speaker 1: 26:23

Yeah, All right. So let me ask you, I guess, for any person, any layman who's trying to understand energy consumption, is there a very simple way to get someone to understand how much energy is actually consumed on a daily basis, even in a state in the country, to just understand the magnitude of what the earth uses in a 24 hour period.

Speaker 2: 26:43

Is there any simple way to say yeah, I mean basically we measure our data center consumption, like our facility in New Brunswick is 70 megawatts, quebec 30 megawatts and we've got 32 megawatts in Bowdoin. Megawatts usually, and globally like, our total portfolio is 100 megawatts. But if you look at what is a country consume or what is, you know, a region or a city consume, they'll have different things, like I don't know off the top of my head how many megawatts a city of New York consumes, but it's a lot for sure. Usually power plants will be, you know, perhaps a few hundred megawatts. You might have a hydro down. That's a few hundred megawatts you might.

Speaker 2: 27:17

I've seen a natural gas plant in Texas that I think was like one gigawatts. Depends on the region, right, texas is a massive energy producing region, right. Energy is, in physics, is just joules of energy. Megawatts are just a unit of power, which is joules per second, or energy is a function of time. So you know the oil that comes out of the ground is combusted into energy, but you know it's not like you use crude oil to power a crypto mine, although one thing that the secret did some crypto miners were using flared gas, right, and converting that flared natural gas into electricity using generators, right. The idea is to reduce the methane imprint, right, so it's all energy, and the Bitcoin mining council, with which Michael Saylor chairs, tracks all these statistics and they do a great job.

Speaker 2: 28:01

You know Bitcoin has this reputation as an energy intensive industry. Yeah, it is, but it's the trillion dollar asset class. If you look at the amount of energy that the global gold mining market uses, think about all the energy expended in excavating gold, all the raw ore, and then extracting it into gold bars and then storing it, and trying to think about just the energy to send a bunch of gold bars, of gold that gets mine in Africa to New York. Like, just think about since the beginning of time, right? So, you know, I think people need to just think about the whole ecosystem. And then, moreover, crypto I think globally, the average for the Bitcoin mining council is 66% renewable energy, and globally, bitcoin mining is something like 50% right, so a lot of crypto.

Speaker 2: 28:41

Look, if a guy in Kazakhstan or Iran is using like natural gas, there's nothing we can say about that, right, sure, sure, but you know, what are you going to do? Like, if there's a factory that makes tires in China that pollutes, what are you going to do? Shut it down. People are still buying the tires, and what can I say? Right, all you can point to is the best examples that are trying to be renewable, sustainable, et cetera. So we're trying to, you know, lead the way. I remember I think it was PayPal had this crypto summit. They had all these different stakeholders and they were like hey, what do you think if there was advocacy for this polluter pays? If you?

Speaker 2: 29:13

if you're using dirty energy polluter tax and I was like it was all these proof of state guys. A couple of guys are in Solana or something and they're like, yeah, polluter pays. I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, that's a great idea, because a guy in Kazakhstan that's gotten illegal crypto mining, is burning coal is just mail them the bill. He'll be like oh oh yeah, I owe this 2% tax.

Speaker 1: 29:31

You're burning right.

Speaker 2: 29:32

I'm just no like. What you got to do is you have to incentivize people to lead, and so you should ascribe a premium to green energy coins, whether it's a one or a half percent or 2% premium. That's the way that you'll cause. Then it also make it more commercially viable. It's, everybody wants green and recycle. Okay, put your menu where your mouth is right. Yeah, consumers don't choose that, even at the grocery store. I mean, I do. I try to buy organic and I try to buy, you know, products that are good quality but don't have like unnecessary, like you know, have a biodegradable packaging and so on. But it's just the mindset, right.

Speaker 2: 30:06

So the crypto, bitcoin, when you look at the value, you look at how many transactions. I think it was something like I remember there was a council, it was this guy, jack Ballers, and it was a micro strategy Bitcoin forum, I think a year ago, and I think Bitcoin transacted like something like $7 trillion of value last year and you look at how much value gets transacted in the Bitcoin ecosystem. So when you ever measure all that up and it's, you know, the decentralized digital currency that is backed by energy. So it's not just something, it's not a proof of state coin. Oh boom, let's go make Arthur Eiden coin. Call it double A coin. Go, you know, get to billing with some code, airdrop some to our promoter pals, do a big pump and dump, I mean no the world doesn't need more of that right.

Speaker 2: 30:49

The world needs less of that and we need more adoption of.

Speaker 1: 30:51

Bitcoin? Yeah, True. Well, I mean I want to say congratulations because you guys recently got funding, some new financing, but 28 million. You know, I think I work with a lot of early stage startups and it's really amazing Sometimes the allocation of how funds are used is, especially when you're inexperienced, how it gets used in many different ways. But you know, you guys are well established and, as you mentioned, on different stock exchanges, what is, what are your plans to use this money? And you know what are the, what are the focuses for your company? And to an expansion.

Speaker 2: 31:22

Well, we actually made an announcement right after the financing that we bought seven bit main S21 to the next generation, the latest and greatest Bitcoin miners. And, for your technical viewers out there, these machines have a 17 Joules per TeraHash efficiency ratio, right, and so what that means is, for every hash they produce, they only consume 17 Joules of energy. The best miner on the market right now is about 22 Joules at TeraHash, so it's a significant increase. And we did that in anticipation of the halving event this April, because what's going to?

Speaker 2: 31:53

happen. And there is these crypto money economics and it's something that I, you know, honed my expertise in over the years being an electrical engineer. I love my mathematical models and I did a lot of. You know vector calculus and wave mechanics and all that stuff when I was in school. So you know, you learn to think of multi-dimensional mathematics and you know, in crypto mining where, when you saw them for ROI, you have Bitcoin price difficulty, electrical price, machine efficiency and dollar per TeraHash purchase price of the machines that you buy, right, and these five variables will tell you the six variable which is ROI. You know of those variables, some you control, some you don't control. You don't control Bitcoin difficulty. You don't control the price right, you can control the price you buy machines at. You can choose the machine efficiency you purchase and, to a certain extent, you can choose the choose to set up shop with the electrical price. And sort of a secondary variable is the dollar per megawatt cap X.

Speaker 2: 32:43

It costs you to build out your electrical infrastructure and you need that to figure out your ROI, and these variables are all fluid in time and so you have to do time variant analysis and you, you know you actually plot this sort of stuff in 3D and we do that a high. Then we always invest for the best ROI, best ROI for our shareholders. That's what we care about. Right, low dilution, best ROI for shareholders. You can just blow money and go bankrupt as a company trying to always get the latest and greatest machines because the latest and greatest machine comes out right, they charge a huge premium for it. Right, especially in a bull market. You have a strong balance sheet. We have over a Bitcoin on our balance sheet. That's almost 70 million US of Bitcoin on our balance sheet. Right, right, that's about 3 billion.

Speaker 2: 33:23

US of Bitcoin last year, right so having a strong balance sheet allows us to be opportunistic in a bear market. By the way, for the last six quarters, we have had a positive gross mining margin. Even during the bear market In 2022, a lot of companies were going bankrupt we had a positive gross mining margin, number one. Number two we have very low GNA. We have the lowest GNA per Bitcoin mine in the sector if you look at the quarterly averages. And so when you take the gross mining margin right, which is, you can look at a public crypto miner and look at their financials and they'll have the revenue minus their data center costs, you get gross mining margin. Okay, how much do they actually make from the core Bitcoin mining business? But here's what people don't talk about the corporate GNA, your auditors, your lawyers, your D&O insurance, your office travel, conference sponsorships right and a lot of these crypto miners out there. They're blowing money like crazy because they're just like raising stock, diluting their stock, huge banners and like, oh, we're buying all these machines and putting out these crazy press releases and where you know all they? They all have these like hockey stick growth charts. It's just like that's not how crypto miners back in the day like the true school crypto miners.

Speaker 2: 34:30

Before all these public companies existed, you bought your ASICs, you set them up, you mined until they were obsolete, or at least until your break even price, right, it was below water, and then you had to upgrade. So in that time you had to make more money back than you invested, otherwise you're going to go out of business, right, and most crypto miners would sell some Bitcoin to cover their optics and hodl the rest right, and so that's the real way that you mine, like my CTO has been mining since 2008. He's one of the OGs in the game. You know, I've been in the game since 20. So this isn't something that just you know we thought was a cool idea over a couple of years a few, you know, a couple of summers ago, like this, you know, and so we're veterans, we're experts, and so when you look at that, that is why we bought the machines we did.

Speaker 2: 35:11

We've upgraded our entire fleet very opportunistically, though we buy a thousand machines there, two of the machines there we do opportunistic orders for immediate delivery when there's a really cheap price. We work with a great network of brokers. We also look at the big manufacturers right, whenever there's a great machine, best price, dollar per tarash for a given efficiency boom. We get it and we want to ROI immediately and plug them in right. Because usually when you buy the big orders, when the machines first come up, first of all the machines don't even exist. It gets announced and then manufacturers are like yeah, give us 30% now and like a year later you'll get your machines, and there's always like delays and they're like capital's not performing right.

Speaker 2: 35:46

And what happens if Bitcoin drops, People say, oh well, if it goes up, I've locked in my price. But like it's just, we want to be like okay, we're true school miners, we want the miners, we want the machines. Boom, when the S21 first got announced, we didn't buy until we knew it was imminent. And we made our order just before the holidays. And you know what Our S21s are shipping next week Nice.

Speaker 1: 36:06

They're getting our lives.

Speaker 2: 36:08

That's why we do it right, yeah. And so you know that's part of the game. And I think one other thing you know, a big hedge, a strategic hedge for us, was building our own miner using Intel Box Scale Chip. It's called a Buzz Miner. We built almost 11th of Deeds, we got over an X of hash of our own crypto miner and when we did that deal, the price that we had which I can't speak to specifically under NDA, but broadly I can say it was half what the market price was at the time.

Speaker 1: 36:33

Well, huge.

Speaker 2: 36:34

Huge competitive edge. Right yeah, and it wasn't open to the public. We get allocation to four companies and other four companies were the only one that went on to successfully develop, deploy and mass produce our own miner. So I'm very proud of that.

Speaker 2: 36:46

And then, you know, the price of crypto came down and you know then we were like wow there's better deals in the market from the brokers, or you know, there's a lot of distress sales, like we bought some brand new S19J pros December 22. I said I want to see a picture of the hardware, because they said it was in some kind of like customs clearance warehouse. I'm like what are you talking about? They sent me a photo it was like a security camera footage. All I saw was a sea of boxes. These machines hadn't even been opened yet, you know and people were selling them for a loss, right? So we play on the other side of that. We're like, yeah, we'll take those off your hands for 11 bucks a terrahash. Thank you very much. We already are a wide on that batch in 11 months, right, because you're going to run the machines for three or four years, hopefully. Sure, so we pride it on ROI in a year and then free cash flow, right? So that's how we play the game.

Speaker 1: 37:31

So what other trends do you see happening, like, for example, defi has been talked about for some time that it's coming back, and I'm talking about DeFi because I believe that if infrastructures were in place to support more DeFi activity, transaction amounts would increase naturally. What other trends or what do you think about DeFi or other trends? What's your prediction? That's going to increase usage of computing power in the next I don't know four years.

Speaker 2: 37:54

Well, I think more prevalent than DeFi by a long shot, is more so AI, because I think that you know I'm a Bitcoin guy, right, I believe in Bitcoin and so if we're going to talk about, you know, centralized finance, bitcoin is it for me. You know, I think all the other like tertiary stuff it's, you know, might be an interesting article on CoinDesk from time to time, but I'm a proof of work guy and I think that the real interesting stuff is actually in AI. And why do I say that? So, for your viewers who have been studying AI, I'm going to be careful what I say here because I don't want to confuse anybody, but if, for those who maybe have a tacit knowledge, this will be extremely interesting to you. So it's all about large language models. Okay, large language model. The most popular architecture for that that we see right now is something called the generative pre-trained transformer, or GPT. That probably sounds familiar to you because you might have something called chat GPT right.

Speaker 2: 38:52

So chat GPT is a generative, pre-trained transformer, right, which is a large language model, and they have rumor GPT parameter count of about 1 trillion parameters. So what does that mean? That model was trained on 1 trillion parameters of data. That's a lot of data, a lot Okay. But when you use open AI and use chat GPT, all you're doing is using a web AI API, prompt your inference, which is, when you ask a model, something is going over to their servers, which are centralized in a cluster which is closed-ended.

Speaker 2: 39:27

The inferences run and the service spit out the reply to you, and it's doing that for everybody all at once at the same time, right? So this is a mega-brained supercomputer array that they put together. But all that information, everything you ask it. What happens? Well, it's learning on your information and the inputs and outputs are on their servers. Now, you can turn off the setting and put it on local mode, but then it loses all its magic, right? And even then, how do you know? It's not still sending the performance data back? It's like uploading a photo to Facebook in 2000. Who here has done it? Everybody, now they've got photos of you at a Halloween party, right? Like wearing a Batman costume or whatever. Oh, now you can never delete it. It's there, right, it's fine, but it's just like.

Speaker 2: 40:08

My point is is that people understand data privacy? Now, right, and so companies, more specifically, can't upload enterprise data to chat GBT, especially if it's client data in your law firm, right? So what's the future? How do we empower businesses to use AI and make it simple enough? Okay, it's open source AI. That's where the cool stuff is happening. That is what is infinitely interesting. Here's an analogy Actually, it's a real-world example IBM their total addressable market in the 60s was five, five computers.

Speaker 1: 40:39

I need yeah, because in the 60,.

Speaker 2: 40:41

the computer was the size of our room Mainframe right, yeah.

Speaker 2: 40:44

Right? Mainframes, exactly Now. Your iPhone is more powerful than those mainframes and it fits in your pocket, right? So you know, we know this. Okay. So think of open AI, right? Chat GBT is like old school mainframe that seems powerful and impressive today, but in five or 10 years you're sooner than that, honestly. Um, maybe in a year or two you're going to have these models that can fit on an iPhone, that are completely open source and local Meaning. The model itself is running on your server, right, yeah? Or perhaps you have some servers with company like Hi. If you want real power, like enterprise-grade stuff, right, yeah, that's where we come in. So we've made our GPUs available to people who want to do AI compute, and so you can get a bare metal instance. That means you have root access to your own GPU servers and you can install whatever model you want. That's open source and you own the model. You can fine-tune it, you can train it, and the difference is what's it doing? Between that and Chat GBT, these models are one to 200 times smaller, right so?

Speaker 2: 41:44

we're talking about 7 billion to 34 billion per amperes. Now I'm going to stop right there and ask if you have questions and backfill anything.

Speaker 1: 41:52

Yeah, I mean one thing about.

Speaker 1: 41:53

I do recognize this is a trend and I think you're right.

Speaker 1: 41:56

I mean well, businesses themselves, everyone's applying some AI to the platforms and everyone's got AI enabled features, including, if you look at, let's say, a place on YouTube which I uploaded a lot of my content, there's a lot of students, of research and it looks like the way they feed content based on their algorithm is not only on stats of how many people had clicked or viewed or the length of viewership. It's actually based on facial recognition. So if you're a person and maybe you don't have to have a lot of followers, but someone likes your piece of content it's five minutes long and they're like 30 into watching it and that's a trend then that person would get fed more content based on AI looking for images that look like you. So you can just imagine like AI is being used in a very I wouldn't say unlike touch, but it's becoming embedded in almost everything that we use when we're on the computer and you just don't know it. So I think to your point AI and where, how it's being used, is sometimes unrecognizable to the mainstream.

Speaker 2: 42:55

Yeah, I mean I'm giving a pretty advanced insight into how AI actually is performed and how it operates at the infrastructure level, and how this infrastructure is being democratized and how a pivotal part of that. Maybe just to put some dollars and cents on it If you want to get $100 million of revenue mining Bitcoin, you need about 100 megawatts of infrastructure, right. If you want to make $100 million using AI compute, you'll need about 10 megawatts of infrastructure. So it's 10 times more profitable per megawatt than Bitcoin, or 10 times more revenue about 15 times more profit per megawatt than Bitcoin mining, right. So that's what's really cool about it from a business point of view. But as an engineer, I love innovation and research. We're getting there by being innovators and working with people in the open source space. So I think for people that have an interest in it, check out our press releases.

Speaker 2: 43:42

We did a GPU contest. We were giving away 10 hours. We already chose our winners. Oh, we actually chose three winners. Um gave away 10 hours of GPU compute time for people doing research with large language models, and that is. That is like the brain. That is. That is how it works, right, and, in the meantime, how we're monetizing it, like. We hit $5 million a year run rate revenue, like recently, from our AI compute business and we rent the GPUs in a B2B business model with marketplaces and these marketplaces handle the B2C and we work with three marketplaces and so it's B2B for us and that's how we're generating revenue on the core site. In addition to that, we're doing the innovation with the large language model researchers, because what's really crazy, arthur, is that right now you're seeing models that are a hundred times smaller approximately than chat GB4, whether about like 80 to 90% is good or even as good in more focused subject area and that's what matters for a company, right, because you don't need, like you know these get trained on on data sets that talk about, you know, obama and Cinderella and

Speaker 2: 44:41

radio soup. Like these things are potential, right. Like, if you're a law firm, you might have case law, like hundreds of millions of words worth of case law that you'd want to train a model on, and all your model needs to know is that expertise. It doesn't need to know about Saturn or rocket ships or you know the history of Nike, right, but, like these huge models are trained on all like an encyclopedia. So you just need the volume of encyclopedia relevant to you or, even better yet, make your own volume of encyclopedia. That's where we come in with the open source stuff, because you know a construction company or a law firm, they're not going to know.

Speaker 2: 45:15

How do I build my own AI infrastructure? Right, we're building the platform for that. So companies can rent their own servers, have their own privacy, have their own ownership of data. Everything they upload is theirs, everything they train the model on is theirs. All the outputs of the model are there because they get the root access. It's a bare metal server and for Hive, we just want to be an AI picks and shovels infrastructure provider. Here's your server. We've designed the back end. You're in a Tier 3 data center. You've got power, redundancy, air conditioning, you know. We've got enterprise-grade servers. We've partnered with Supermicro and Dell, and it's a different ball game than crypto mining right, and so that's how we're really diversified as a technology company.

Speaker 1: 45:54

Okay, All right. Well, I've been doing some research recently on this new, I guess, trend coming up in this Web 3 space and it's deep in right, this decentralized physical infrastructure and how that's going to play out. Are you looking at how that's kind of evolving? I mean, do you mean like modular mining containers yes, exactly, exactly. And then how people are using, like these, smaller sets of computing power, I guess, to manage these token networks, I guess community-based and certified communities.

Speaker 2: 46:23

Yeah, I mean we've. Like any large-scale crypto miner will likely have some containers in its arsenal. We primarily have data centers. Like you know, our new Brunswick data center 70 megawatt, it's four building campus, it's beautiful, it's like a military-grade crypto mine. Right, it was built from the ground up and you know we can have a mortgage on that because we own the land and the buildings. Right, in fact, we do have a mortgage on it. A bank can come in and appraise that right. A bunch of containers with some, you know, two megawatt transformers that you propped up on gravel crush, you know, in the middle of nowhere, beside a transformer. Don't get me wrong, get the job done.

Speaker 1: 46:58

But that's not infrastructure right.

Speaker 2: 47:00

So I think people want to come with a cool little acronym Deepin. Now do we have containers? We've got a few like where we've got our data centers and we realize, hey, you know, if we upgrade this, we could fit more power capacity. Well, the building's being built, we've already optimized the existing rack space and we can squeeze a few. We're talking in two, three, four, five extra megawatts, and usually what we're doing there is immersion, where these Deepins I guess that you call them have immersion fluid and the miners are submerged. We do that for a little extra hash rate or R&D purposes, you know, Sure. So, yeah, that's pretty standard issue in the crypto mining world. I've also heard people talk about doing modular tier three containers, which is what I would need to do, you know, for GPU or AI, but you know, for the most part you need very good internet connectivity and typically it's the tier three data centers, like, for example, our tier three in Sweden.

Speaker 2: 47:51

So we have two AI infrastructure outposts, one in Stockholm, one in Montreal but our Bitcoin mine in Sweden is not in Stockholm, it's in the north of Sweden. Remember I said it's voting by the Arctic Circle. Why is it there? That's where the hyperpower is right. We're close to hydro dam. Stockholm is where all the action is. That's a capital. That's where the network infrastructure is right. That's where the tier three day centers Quebec Bitcoin mine hour and a half outside of Montreal, middle of nowhere. Old graphite mill right In Toronto, right. So it's two very different things, and I wanna underscore the diversity of technological prowess that we have at high. We are Bitcoin miners and we're best in class Bitcoin miner when you measure efficiency in uptime, and, additionally, we've emerged as an AI infrastructure provider from our roots, mining Ethereum with GPUs Okay.

Speaker 1: 48:39

Well, thanks for sharing with. You got a wealth of information, I gotta say. Aiden, I'm gonna wrap up this episode, but I did wanna ask you just a couple of questions. This is more on the personal level. When you look at the space of Web3 or crypto, depending on how you label it who are your top mentors or people who've inspired you in the Web3 space?

Speaker 2: 49:01

You know I would say that the people I get to work with out of day to day my team of high we've got a phenomenal team, great talent and I just you know we huddle every day at seven in Vancouver time. We're in seven time zones. You know my CTO has been doing it. My general counsel gave me brilliant. My newly appointed CEO, luke Ross he's phenomenal. Johanna she's our country president in Sweden. She used to work at Fidelity Comes from the finance world. Mario, our chief information officer, has been pivotal in building our HPC infrastructure. So it's been great.

Speaker 2: 49:36

And you know I've seen Frank, our chairman, do so much for the gold world. Right, he used to be a huge gold bug. It still is, and he's in the money management business. His day job is he runs a $4 billion ETF right Through US global. So we've kind of got this like it's the Avengers. You know We've got this team of everyone's got a different superpower. And you know my buddies that I met way back in the day that built the you know, the crypto mine in Washington state Obviously they were the first guys that I saw to do it big Jay and Paul and had, you know, a great team also at Fortress. You know, sean was a CFO there, so I did.

Speaker 2: 50:11

The people I've got the pleasure of working with, the guys at Luxor are brilliant Nick and Ethan.

Speaker 2: 50:16

There's just so many super smart people in the ecosystem Even a lot of the investment bankers highly educated, super sharp, astute guys. Ruben at Steful is just phenomenal and, yeah, so it's. You know, going back to earlier part of this interview, when you shared your experience with all the regulation policy framework you have, you know, engineers, lawyers, accountants, all these sort of like coders having to come together to satisfy these frameworks. It's the same thing on a day-to-day basis public trade, crypto mining, company right, going to conferences. I see guys with startups and then, you know, you got to look at the guys like Geon Wu you know was a co-CEO of Bitmain and now he's doing, obviously, bitdeer, mccree, and then the guys that started MicroBT, so it's pretty cool. I met some really brilliant people at Intel the PhD level guys that were super enamored with developing Bitcoin technology. So it's just super cool Like there's so many people I've been so excited and fortunate to work with and our GPU contest winners are, like, literally, ai geniuses.

Speaker 1: 51:14

Yeah, I want to win a call back and I'm learning things about like oh man, it's just super cool, yeah, okay, so I guess the last question is you mentioned that you were a CEO before and then you moved up to being a CEO, so you've had some time to sit in and play that role. What do you think are you know, just name a few key things to become really good at being a CEO? What would you advise early stage companies with brand new CEOs if they want to succeed in growing the company?

Speaker 2: 51:42

Yeah, and no one ever said it'll be easy. Right, the only way to fail is to give up. That's number two. And number three right, you got to zap gaps, constantly solving problems. Right, and you have to be agile and fluid. Right, there's no playbook. You constantly have to strategize, right.

Speaker 2: 51:59

Delegate, you know, don't micromanage and where. If your team is struggling and you know you're an innovator, use and your superpower can help, then don't be afraid to dive in there. Yeah, help them, inspire them, or if they really need your direct help, I'll get in. I'll crush spreadsheets, still. Right, I'm really good with data. Right, so I'll see patterns in data that other people don't see and I'll show my whole team that like holy shit. And then I'm like good, and then the light goes off and I'm like OK, now you guys run with it. Right, so you're just constantly passing the baton, giving everyone sparks of energy.

Speaker 2: 52:31

Be upbeat and tell the story, let people know what you're doing and do. Aspire for greatness, have great goals and you know, see where trends are going. Right, ethereum is going to prove a state. You know what. We don't want to be caught up in that web. Right, sec is going to have field day. Bitcoin is a commodity, cfc, right, right, we're not going to look at it, evaluate it. You know what we're going to pass on the state. Thank you very much. Put the GPs to altcoin mining Now. Flip the GPs to AI infrastructure.

Speaker 1: 52:58

Right, right, good, ok, thank you. Yeah, I think that's the. Actually, it's almost a formula for life, right? Regardless of the startup. Yeah, exactly Well, I didn't thank you for your time and thank you for joining the podcast. I'd love to catch you with you again in the future. Hey, so that concludes this episode of the Startup Voyage Podcast. I would like to thank all of you for listening to this episode, and I'd really appreciate it if you leave any type of comments that you'd like to share, because it helps to feedback on how I deliver these podcasts.