GRTiQ Podcast: 178 John Belizaire

The following podcast is for informational purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute tax, legal or investment advice. Take responsibility for your own decisions, consult with the proper professionals and do your own research.

John Belizaire (00:00:18):

It may make sense to leverage the digital infrastructure rails that have been built around cryptocurrencies to do that, right? You might go out and send your robot to do these transactions and use those rails because you trust them. They’re safer, they’re hard to crack, versus the old credit card and financial rails for doing that.

Nick (00:01:05):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna Holdings, a pioneering developer of green data centers designed for batchable computing utilizing wasted renewable energy. Put more simply. Soluna is essentially using unused energy or wasted energy from renewable power sources like solar power to power data centers that serve industries like the emerging AI industry. During our conversation, John shares his remarkable background, recounting his early entry into the tech industry, and sharing some fun antidotes from his time working at Intel during the era of Andy Grove. We then talk about the evolution of AI, discussing how Soluna not to be confused with Solana addresses energy challenges associated with AI and blockchain. John also shares a lot of insights into business, entrepreneurship, management, and his vision for the future of Web3 and crypto. We started the discussion by talking about where John is from.

John Belizaire (00:02:10):

I grew up in Brooklyn. I was actually born in The Bahamas, came to the States when I was about four to five years old. Grew up in Brooklyn in the late ’70s, ’80s when New York City was very different than it is now. I think New York is bit more like Disneyland now. Back then, they were putting out movies like Escape from New York. I mean, it was almost like a war zone challenging bankrupt city, and it’s just amazing to see the transition that it’s made over the last 30 plus years. I went to high school in Brooklyn, went to the New York City public school system, and then I went upstate for university. I went to Cornell, did my grad and undergrad in Computer Sciences.

Nick (00:02:57):

When you think back to your childhood, what types of things were you into and was it an early indication in your life that you were going to go into tech?

John Belizaire (00:03:04):

Absolutely. I was a geek by all definition, definitely a nerd. I saved up allowance money and gift money to buy my first computer, which was a TRS-80, probably dating myself, Trash-80, Tandy Computing created that. It was a home PC. I used to hang out with friends that had Commodore PCs, and so forth. It started actually in junior high school. I was fortunate enough to start at a junior high school in New York called Maggie L. Walker. It was a brand new school, new curriculum design that was focused more on what today would be STEM skills.

(00:03:41):

They had a computer lab there that showed an incredible interest in the technology, and the teacher took me under his wing and started giving me extra coding homework. I bought my first computer and started doing these exercises and wrote this program that did text to speech. It was pretty funny. My aunt happened to be visiting from Haiti and came into my room and saw me working on this program and I says, “Look, I wrote this thing that can make the computer talk.” And it says, “Hello, my name is so-and-so.” And she says, “Wow, that’s impressive, but if you want to impress me more, make it speak French.”

(00:04:23):

That really set me off. I was a very inquisitive kid. I was the kind of kid that would take my toys and throw them on the ground, break them, and try to see how they actually worked inside. In summers, rather than hang out at home watching TV, I would submit myself to these summer camps that have science fairs and things like that, and I would buy all sorts of transistor radios and put them together. I was very inquisitive, interested in how the world works, and trying to be inventive around things. I wasn’t really big into sports. I like to read a lot and just learn things.

Nick (00:05:05):

John, you’re not the first entrepreneur I’ve featured on this podcast. In fact, I have a long list of people I’ve had the opportunity to speak with and that theme of being a young person, and tearing something apart and then putting it back together just to see how it works has come up time and time again. When it comes up, I love to ask the follow up of what is it you think that that brain pairs well with entrepreneurship and technology? Have you ever thought about that?

John Belizaire (00:05:34):

Entrepreneurship is about creating something from nothing. You’re taking an idea, and then you’re bringing it into the world, and then you’re essentially creating this breathing, humming entity that hopefully will survive you over a long period of time. Tinkering is what I describe this concept of taking things, breaking them apart, and everything. I guess it’s really about gaining insight about how did they do that. I also would read a lot about companies and I was following IBM when I was younger. How did they do that? How did they become this company that was in every business and what were these machines that they were building? I guess it’s a way to find a blueprint, to take ideas into reality.

(00:06:21):

Entrepreneurship is really about that. I spend most of my time convincing the world that some new innovation, a picture of the world is coming or is here that they just don’t realize yet or don’t see it, and I have to be able to explain it in a way to help them see that vision. The other aspect I think as I’m talking here is the process of tinkering helps you find the complexities with what seems like simplicity. I like to say that the most successful companies do really, really hard things or they solve really hard problems, but they make them look really easy.

(00:07:08):

So when you look at these toys that do these amazing things, I used to break apart, it’s like the farmer toy where you pull the thing and then it spins around and then each animal it says the name. I was like, how do they do that? It’s so simple, but how can they do a different animal, a different voice? You know what I mean? How does it know when an animal got to that particular location? I had to throw that thing against the wall and see what types of interesting problems they had to solve to do that. Ultimately, when you start to take apart companies, that’s what you realize. You’ve got to build a really strong culture. You’ve got to find ways to innovate in a consistent way. You have to build systems to help people communicate, solve problems. You have to build a brand. There’s a lot going on that ultimately is experienced by the world as a very simple elegant solution.

Nick (00:08:00):

John, as you mentioned there, you graduated from Cornell University and you got your career started at Intel as a network architect. I want to ask you this question about what it was like working at one of the most important early tech firms in the US that of Intel?

John Belizaire (00:08:16):

Yeah. Intel was an incredible experience. It actually was a formative experience for me. I have a longstanding relationship with the company. I was, what is known as an Intel scholar, which basically means that they find young students with high potential to have them join their pipeline of future leaders, and then they go all the way back to university and get involved in their education and support. They give them internships, and so I would be going out to Intel every summer for about five straight years, something like that. I learned a lot about what big companies are like, how do you create a legendary company, if you will. Andy Grove, who was the CEO at that time probably is to this day one of the best leaders I’ve ever seen. I learned a lot from him about shaping technology, getting your team to be focused, and doing it in a way that’s forceful, but yet not too forceful and thinking about big technology waves and how they shape the future.

(00:09:18):

I was part of a software group that was formed at Intel to essentially drive the demand for chips. Andy Grove, who was one of the founders and chairman of Intel, he is the creative of Moore’s Law, and I was there watching and living the experience of Moore’s Law where every 12, 18 months we had to build a new giant fabrication facility, drop $2 billion down plus, and one had to create as much demand for those chips as they started to come out of that manufacturing facility as possible. To do that, we had to think about ways to create software that would enhance and demonstrate the power of the chip and get that software out there, and go out and teach and explain what that looks like. I was part of this group that was focused on that.

(00:10:10):

In fact, that was the beginning of what ultimately changed the trajectory of the PC. There was a famous keynote speech by Andy Grove at one of the big PC conferences. He said that the PC can be more than just a calculator. At that time, spreadsheets was the biggest use for the PC, and he says it can be a communication device. He puts up on the screen this grandma and child talking to each other over the PC and people were just blown away like, what does that mean? It’s funny to be saying that because now we talk to so many people, I’m on like 10,000 Zooms a day, and we just take it for granted that the PCs are much more than their communication collaboration devices. The key to that was through this concept of convergence. You took two ideas, one was a computing technology and you combined it with telecommunications.

(00:11:07):

At that time, telecom was going through deregulation. They had to find new ways to generate revenue because they weren’t protected by this monopolistic position. Competition became huge, so they had to innovate and connecting to the PC was an exciting thing. It set the stage for transforming the entire telecom infrastructure globally and allows us to do a host of different things. It set the stage for the internet and all of this. Effectively, the experience at Intel set the foundation for my entire entrepreneurial career. I learned about innovation from a fundamental level. I learned about management and leadership. I learned about technology ecosystems, scaling a business, manufacturing. It was a very exciting time for me to be part of that company because they were on top of the world.

(00:12:00):

It saddens me actually to be talking about them because they’ve lost their footing and they missed mobile, they missed AI. They’re catching up, and that is a quintessential innovative dilemma. They fell because their business became so successful, they couldn’t kill their own business to embrace new innovation. Given the leadership that’s back there, they’ll certainly come back and make progress, but it’s an exciting time again. Hardware is sexy again. It’s interesting you asked that question, but when I joined Intel, hardware was really sexy and then software became king, and now hardware is coming back. It’s pretty exciting.

Nick (00:12:36):

I’ve never had the opportunity to speak with anybody who knew or worked alongside someone like Andy Grove. He’s somebody I deeply respect. Do you have any stories or anecdotes or anything you can share for us, with us about what Andy was like?

John Belizaire (00:12:49):

Yeah, he was an amazing leader. There’s some great books about his life that I’ve read many times. He had just an incredible background and just an incredibly resilient individual. But he ran the company with an iron fist. He had this list. If you came in to the sites after 8:00 AM and so I had this thing, you got to get in the office by 8:00 AM and if you weren’t there, they had to write your name down. And then, he would get that list every day and talk to people and say, “What’s going on? Do you know what we’re trying to do here?” We’re under fire because Japan was really starting to eat people’s lunch. I was actually there. He wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive, which talks about this existential decision that they had to make about whether they would stay in the memory business or go into the microprocessor business.

(00:13:43):

It was the first time that they made a decision to kill their own business, get out of something, and then go do something else and ultimately bet on that thing. It takes you through that entire process of making that decision. I was there like the Hamilton Show. I was in the room when it happened. I would go to these labs where these guys were playing with neural networks and microprocessors and saying, “I think this is what we should be focusing on, not this memory stuff. This is the future.” They were making their case to Andy about this.

(00:14:11):

I finally remember the town halls that he would do. He would present what he sees in the future of the PC industry, what are some of the challenges ahead, and people can ask him questions, any question. The question that invariably comes like, “Why is our stock down?” He’s like, “When you find out, you tell me. I can’t control our stock. All I can do is tell you what to do, do the right things and then people will eventually figure it out.” I remember that because everybody asked me that. I’m like, “When you find out, you tell me.” I would say the same thing. Then the other story was Andy Grove and Gordon Moore would actually come to Jones Farm where I was based in Oregon once a quarter and they would sit down and do a full technology review every single project that was being funded by the company, because this was a big R&D location both on the chip side and the software side.

(00:15:03):

They wanted to know in detail what was the progress, what were the challenges, what was going on. People would be so nervous when those visits would happen, people would be on their toes because invariably, projects would be killed. They were not afraid to say, “Look, this isn’t working. We have to get out of it. Just stop doing it.” There’s no point in continuing to divert resources to something that’s not working and the things that are working, they would get more resources. I just really feel fortunate to have started my career at such a legendary company, one of the best managed companies I’ve ever worked for, and I’ve tried to take those learnings and insights into every entrepreneurial experience that I’ve had for the ensuing 25 years since I’ve been there.

Nick (00:16:54):

Well, as you mentioned there, you’ve been an entrepreneur ever since. I have a list of all the different firms and all the different things you’ve been involved with and there’s no question you’re a serial entrepreneur. I do want to ask this question of when you’re working at Intel and you’re having this positive experience, why does someone like yourself say, “Actually, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to go do my own thing.” What’s the moment that you realized that and is there a lot of risk and courage behind a decision like that?

John Belizaire (00:17:23):

About 10 years ago, I had lunch with an old friend who was my suitemate at Cornell. He reminded me of a question he asked me. He says, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And I said, “I want to be a CEO.” He says, “How did you know at that time that’s what you want to do?” I’ve always wanted to do that. It started, I think all the way back again when I was talking about studying IBM in high school. I just was really enamored by the concept of building an enterprise and creating, again, something from nothing. I’ve always had that passion.

(00:18:00):

In grad school, two of the co-founders of my first company and I wrote a business plan. We actually released three engineers. We wanted to create a software company really inspired by one of our professors who had done that, built the company, sold it, and he was our advisor. We wanted to take this business school class, and we went to the business school and said, it’s entrepreneurship class. And they said, “We don’t allow engineers in there.” And we’re like, “Why not? We can join the class.” So we went and complained to our advisor, to the dean, and some people made some calls and they allowed us into the class. Dr. David Ben Daniels was the professor at the time. May he rest in peace.

(00:18:43):

We joined his class and people are talking about concepts and it was a case model and everything. We’re like, “Oh, my God. What have we done?” We don’t know anything about what these guys are saying. In some of these cases, you had to just say, “What would you do if you were there?” To make a long story short, David became fond of us because we were using our gut. One thing he was trying to teach the class was decisions aren’t always about spreadsheets, A and B and X, Y, Z. Sometimes you just got to go with your gut feel because no one really knows what the best answer is. You know the outcome now because you’re looking backward.

(00:19:21):

We wrote a business plan, and then he read the business plan and he says, “This is the first venture backable business plan that anybody’s ever written.” Most people write lemonade stance or whatever in the class just to get it done. We started working on doing it and then we realized, well, wait a second. We don’t have any experience. We have to go work. There’s a lot we have to learn. The professor was really upset. He’s like, “Wait a second. What? You have to start this company. What is wrong with you, people?” We’re like, “But prof, we don’t know anything about starting a business.” He says, “Well, if you don’t start the business, I’m going to fail you.” We said, “But if you fail us, then we can’t start the business.” He’s like, “God damn it.”

(00:19:56):

So we all decided we’re going to go and learn about entrepreneurship. My two co-founders went to Boston and joined a startup. I went to Intel and it was basically in a startup group because they were expanding into the networking business, trying to diversify the business out of PCs. Every Saturday we met to discuss what we were seeing in the industry and what ideas and companies we can form. And that ultimately led us to say, “Okay, we would like to leave where we’re working right now and go take the plunge and start a company.” I moved to Boston and slept on the floor of one of my co-founders’ homes after he just got married. I don’t recommend that for anybody, but it happened. I guess the answer to your question is, it’s always been inside of me, this drive to entrepreneurship, this attraction to it.

(00:20:49):

Even when I was at Intel, look, I was progressing in my career, I just reconnected with my first manager at Intel, Raj Yavatkar, very successful leader, now the CTO of Juniper Networks. He told me at lunch, he says, “You were this star. You always knew you would be good.” The other day, I was throwing some boxes out and I found one of these awards I got from Intel. Clearly, I had a great career there, but I just didn’t feel satiated. I knew that ultimately, I had to follow this dream like, “Let’s go try it out.” If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just come back to Intel. That’s what actually one of my mentors there told me. He had this whole, actually, it is a good story.

(00:21:30):

I was losing sleep. I was like, okay, should I really go do this startup thing? My career is really starting to take shape here. It was this guy, Arts Perel, who was one of the advisors of the Intel scholars. They gave you these key leaders that you can talk to. I had lunch with them in the Intel cafeteria and I explained my dilemma. “I got this career here. My friends and I, we sort of decided we want to go do this startup, but I’m really worried about it. I’m losing sleep.” He puts a glass of water in front of me and there was ice in it, and he says, “Put your finger in there.” And I said, okay. He would do stuff like that. He would make people do pushups during their interviews.

(00:22:06):

Anyway, he makes me put my finger in the glass and I say, “Okay.” He says, “What do you see?” “The water’s all around my finger.” “Pull your finger out.” I says, “Okay.” I pull my finger out of the glass and he says, “What do you see now?” “Nothing.” “The gap is gone, right? So we’re going to be okay if you leave and go do the startup. If you come back, we’ll just plug you back in. Don’t worry about it.” Maybe I just needed permission to just go do it. That was a pivotal meeting that ultimately drove me to one or more successes over the course of my life. Like I said, that was a very formative experience for me, the whole Intel experience.

Nick (00:22:53):

As I said, there’s been a bunch of these ventures, and I’ll put a link in the show notes for any listener that wants to go through and take stock of all the different opportunities and businesses that you’ve been involved with. But we’re speaking today primarily John, because of what you’re working on presently, which is Soluna. I’d like to just start with this question about how did you first get involved? What are the early seeds of the idea of getting started on Soluna?

John Belizaire (00:23:19):

The company that I ran before Soluna was in the insurance business. We were building a, it’s called a Bloomberg terminal for insurance underwriters, can insurance underwriters use data and analytics and digital technology to improve their decisions for very complex risks. I ran that company for 10 years. We became very well known in the space, and then I took a break. It was a challenging to build. Building a business and insurance base is hard because they’re in the business of risk mitigation, not risk taking, risk management, not risk taking, I like to say. Bringing innovation to them is risk. It takes a long time to make decisions, that sort of thing. To build the company at that level takes a lot of work, but I grew a lot as a leader, learned a lot, and I finally felt after that company that I didn’t have to be the brainchild or it didn’t have to be my idea.

(00:24:14):

I feel like now I was confident in my ability to be a CEO and I can go run other companies that have existing products or teams that need help with that growth and transition. So I started visiting with venture capital companies in the New York area and found some interesting ideas, but nothing that I was super passionate about. Right before I was about to decide on one of them, I got a call from a longtime friend of mine who is the head of a family office. He was on several of my boards, has been an investor with my companies in the past, and he said, “Hey, John. Have you decided on anything yet?” I says, “No, I’m still looking.” He said, “Good. Why don’t you swing by my office? I got something you should look at.” And I said, “What’s it about? Because your company, you don’t run software companies. You run these manufacturing companies. I don’t have anything to do with that.” He says, “Just come by.”

(00:25:11):

The quick thing is that it has something to do with renewable energy and blockchain. I said, “I don’t know anything about renewable energy and blockchain, I’ve heard of. Okay, I’ll swing by.” My wife and I are about to go on some big trip. I swing by his office totally expecting to just hear this thing and say, “No, I’m not going to do that.” He started talking about this concept of having stranded energy and this project that they owned in Northern Africa, in Morocco, and blockchain computing was this energy intensive capability, and they have this thesis that you could combine those two things and solve this problem of how do you monetize wasted energy?

(00:25:54):

What intrigued me about it, I said it earlier, it’s like, huh. What are these things? Why is this a problem, a hard problem that no one’s ever solved before? Huh? Let me dig in. What is this blockchain thing? I literally downloaded the Satoshi white paper on my way to the beach and I couldn’t put it down. I was reading it on the plane. I’m like, “Oh, my God. These are some of the most advanced distributed computing and computer science problems. It seems to have been solved here. Holy smokes.” I started reading about power and energy markets in a first principles way like, what is energy? Energy is not just owned by the utility company and they just build it out. It’s like, no. It is a very huge complex industry with multiple facets and capital. Not to mention energy in Northern Africa, and I started looking at energy markets in the African continents, and it just became very intriguing to me.

(00:26:54):

The reason he reached out to me, by the way, is because the company that owned the project was an energy company. Combining it with data centers and computing changed the nature of the company. It was no longer an infrastructure or a development company, it was a technology company, and they needed someone to have that mindset, that insight. I decided to give it a swing, and plus it wasn’t insurance. When I was doing those walk arounds, everybody’s like, “Oh, so you’ve done this whole insurance thing. This is fantastic.” There was capital rushing into the insurance industry, which I wish they had done 10 years ago and I was like, “No, I don’t want to do insurance. I already did that. I figured that out. I solved the hard problem there. I want a new problem.” This was one that was intriguing to me, and everything happens for a good reason in life.

(00:27:45):

That’s how I got into it. When people ask me this question, I answered by saying, “Well, I was walking down the streets of New York. This black van showed up. A bunch of guys jumped out and grabbed me, threw in the back and says, “You’re going into the energy business now,” because I just would never have imagined myself, a software guy getting into the energy business. But because of what’s happening with climate change, so many people with varied experiences and really smart guys have come into the space to try to help. It’s really amazing and exciting, actually.

Nick (00:28:20):

Let’s reset the table just a little bit here for anybody who doesn’t have a clear understanding of what Soluna is. If that’s the way you got involved in it and it piqued your interest, talk to us about what it is and the types of problems it’s working on.

John Belizaire (00:28:34):

Absolutely. Soluna is on a mission to make renewable energy a global superpower, and we want to use computing as a catalyst. For the past couple of decades, renewable energy went from this small propeller heads conferences, talking about how we can build green electrons to a massive global industry. In fact, renewable energy sources are the fastest growing and cheapest source of energy in the world. For us to hit our climate change goals, we need more of that form of energy that’s more sustainable, use the power of nature to power the planet. There’s a lot of capital that’s come into it. That capital has accelerated since 2020, so there’s lots of power plants being built. But there’s a little secret about the industry. Most people don’t know this, but about 30 to 40% of the power that these power plants produce never makes it to the grid. It gets wasted. It can’t be monetized, and there are very few solutions to that problem.

(00:29:42):

If more of it gets wasted, it’s harder to build power plants because of the economic challenges with that. One way is to store the energy where batteries just aren’t scalable enough or big enough to support that. The other is to move the energy, put it on a transmission line, and move it across the country to where the power is needed. When the wind is blowing at night and everybody’s asleep in Oklahoma, maybe you want to send it to Atlanta, and power some of the parties happening there. Those are hard to build. They take years, sometimes decades, and sometimes they never get built. How do you take power that basically is stranded and get it to load? It turns out the way to solve the problem is to invert the problem, and that’s one of my favorite tools.

(00:30:30):

I know we’re going to talk a lot about entrepreneurship, but mental models is a really key thing for me. Inversion is a fantastic mental model. If you have a really hard problem to solve, invert the problem. If you want to realize how to make more money, invert the problem. How do you keep from losing a lot of money? How do you do that? You want to figure out how to get that 30 to 40% wasted energy closer to load, invert the problem. How do you get load closer to that stranded energy? You have to think differently about what load you can move to that location. Bringing load to generation is the insight that we had, and the perfect load is something that is fluid. It can be done anywhere in the world, is energy intensive. Well, guess what? That’s computing.

(00:31:16):

It turns out that Bitcoin computing and blockchain is very compute intensive and energy intensive on purpose because it provides a elegant method for securing the cryptocurrency networks that are powered by proof of work mining. It also turns out that AI is also compute intensive. There’s billions if not in a very short period of time, trillions of tokens that need to be processed, and processed over a long period of time. The computing that’s needed is these very powerful GPUs that plug in and keep cranking to build out these models. They use a lot of energy. But guess what? You can do those types of computing anywhere.

(00:32:00):

You can’t do Netflix computing. Netflix has to be close to you. It’s streaming. You can’t lose power suddenly. But these other forms of compute are batchable in nature. What Soluna does is basically goes to these wind farms, we go all around the country, we assess how much wasted energy they have, and we build data centers that are co-located with those wind farms to turn that power into global computing resources. We are building data centers for hosting Bitcoin mining activities. We are building data centers now for AI and generative AI applications that can live close to renewable energy. It turns out that I am taking a page out of Andy Grove’s book here at Soluna, and building and benefiting from another big convergence wave.

(00:32:55):

Essentially the convergence of energy, which is the biggest bottleneck to the growth and future success of AI right now, and combining it with the characteristics of that computing to create something new. We call renewable computing. Energy needs a user for its wasted energy and AI in order to reach its goal needs more sustainable energy. Well, guess what? There’s a novel way to get it. It’s to go to all the places where energy is just being wasted. That’s what Soluna does. We’re really excited about this. This is probably one of the most exciting companies I’ve run because it creates an opportunity to build a legendary company; creating something from nothing, solving a big problem, not just for the renewable energy industry, for the climate, for the next big computing transformation that we are about to see. It’s a very exciting time for us right now.

Nick (00:33:49):

Before we push record here, we were just catching up for a moment, and you mentioned there’s a couple of big announcements and things that have happened in recent times with relationship to Soluna. What can you tell us about that news?

John Belizaire (00:34:00):

We launched a new business unit we call Soluna Cloud. Soluna Cloud is focused on delivering sustainable, scalable AI solutions for enterprises. So big companies that are looking to dip their toes into the AI revolution can feel comfortable that they can do so in a secure way, so their data will be safe because they’ll have a private reserved computing facility for that computing, so they can feel comfortable moving their proprietary data in there. They can feel good that they’re not going to break their ESG goals by investing in this technology. There have been a number of announcements by Microsoft, Google Meta, I believe, around the effects of their investment in AI really setting them back on their ESG goals.

(00:34:49):

Enterprises can’t afford that. In the boardroom, what you want to be able to say is, let’s invest in AI and let’s do it in a sustainable way. Soluna is the answer to that. Soluna Cloud is launched. We have launched our first through an important partnership with a big OEM partner. We have now access to some of the latest and greatest NVIDIA GPUs, H100 GPUs. We launched the first cluster of that, the first wave of that, 512 of them that are available now. They’re immediately available for enterprises to use them to download your favorite model, tune it using your own data and start doing inferencing to see if it can have benefits for the growth and acceleration of your business.

(00:35:36):

We’re inviting folks to go to solunacloud.com to reserve GPUs for that purpose. It’s very exciting. It’s powered by a tier three hydro powered facility. As customers want more GPUs and as they grow as they find these first tests with the, it’s like think about it as a startup cluster you can use, do some testing, “Hey, this is going to work for us. I want to scale this up,” then you can come to us and get thousands more. We’ll build entire facilities to support that at these renewable energy plants and grow from there. Our team is changing. Our focus as a business is changing. It’s a very exciting time for us.

Nick (00:36:17):

I’ll put some links in the show notes for anybody that wants to dig a little deeper and click through some of that. John, I should say, as you know, a lot of my listeners are enthusiastic about cryptocurrency and blockchain. There’s a big blockchain in the crypto industry called Solana. We’re not talking about Solana, we’re talking about Soluna. There’s a little bit of a differential there that we should double click on there. But I do want to ask you, what is someone like yourself who is a lifelong technologist, worked on a lot of interesting technology over your career, how do you make sense of the emergence of blockchain and crypto? Is it something that baffles you or is this a natural extension of Web2, if you will, and the evolution of tech?

John Belizaire (00:36:55):

That’s a great question. I am no longer surprised by technology development anymore. I think the reason is because let’s assume there’s a big wave every five to ten years. There was a point where you had multiple waves happening at the same time. You had mobile Web 2.0, you had social media, all this kind of stuff. The exciting thing about it is every time you get these big waves and then they mature, the next wave is actually built on top of that level of technology. The waves accelerate as you go along. 2008 was the timing of the white paper. It was right after the financial crisis and people were trying to figure out, how do we build a better, more resilient financial system that doesn’t rely on the frailties of humanity? What they did is they picked up old technologies like CyberCash and things like that, and revisited them.

(00:37:56):

It turns out that some of the challenging things about those ideas was that we hadn’t built the infrastructure and technology to support it yet. We didn’t really have the internet in a broad ubiquitous way like we had by 2008. We didn’t have this concept of social graphs where people can be connected, and this concept of like, “Hey, you can actually crowdsource things and things can be solved without a central body.” Those frameworks allowed you to think laterally. Satoshi or the group of people who represent Satoshi clearly benefited from the advancements of technology to go back and solve some of the hard problems you would need to solve to build essentially digital money. Everything else was being digitized, why not money? I think that digital currencies was inevitable. I think they will mature to become important parts of the global financial fabric.

(00:39:00):

They already are starting to be integrated into our traditional finance platforms with these ETFs. People are starting to understand the value of digital gold. It’s a maturing process that’s happening and all of the things that you’ve seen, everything from the collapses and fraud, and all that kind of stuff in the industry is natural as people try to figure out how to leverage this technology. But once it matures, it will have important ramifications for us going forward and it will be part of the newest platform of which we can build the next innovation. I am always fascinated, but not surprised.

Nick (00:39:41):

You were talking about these cycles and how they typically occur, and correct me if I’m wrong with these convergences, and I’m curious then if your brain says, the convergence here might be AI and blockchain. AI’s been around for a long time, as you said, we’re going back to ’08 with the Bitcoin, white paper and things like that, but there’s a lot of interest in AI right now. There’s a lot of interest in blockchain and crypto. Is there a convergence there that maybe people aren’t recognizing?

John Belizaire (00:40:10):

Maybe some of the ideas for how AI can be used is this concept of AI agents, so you can set off these robots to go do stuff for you, book your travel and all that kind of stuff, and do it in a safe way. It may make sense to leverage the digital infrastructure rails that have been built around cryptocurrencies to do that, right? You might go out and send your robot to do these transactions and use those rails because you trust them. They’re safer, they’re hard to crack versus the old credit card and financial rails for doing that. That might be an example of how those two worlds come together. Many times, we’ve tried to create this personal financial assistance with some of these big next generation financial platforms. They have not worked so well because mostly, they’re not really all that automated.

(00:41:06):

Maybe there’s a way to use this new platform to build out true financial management systems that are powered by AI and can really look at all sorts of … These huge hedge funds, they use AI and machine learning to look at all sorts of things that are happening in the market, the news, et cetera, and then make investment decisions. Why can’t an individual do that? If you can set off an agent to ingest lots of interesting developments in the market, and then create insights around how you can invest, and then you can use AI to do that, and of course different forms of financial investment resources to do that, you can start to create a whole new financial system, and experience, and services and so forth.

(00:41:49):

There are a couple of things that people maybe aren’t realizing about this whole AI movement. There’s a lot of talk about it, and I think what you’re going to see is people get tired of it, and then there’ll be a cycle there. And then suddenly, it will resurge and become one of the biggest waves we’ve ever seen. The internet did that. The web did that, right? The web grew and grew and grew and then exploded like an atomic bomb. A lot of people lost a lot of money, and then now it has integrated in our lives so deeply that we actually don’t even think about it anymore. We don’t talk about the internet, but it is part of everything now, right? We’re always connected. In fact, when we’re not connected, we’re very sad.

(00:42:33):

AI has the same kind of potential. OpenAI has ingested just about every piece of data that it can get its hands on, and I’ve heard mention that in some of the other big AI labs, they’re running out of data. In fact, they’re using the AI to generate data to train the AI. They’re so in need of continuously making these models more complex, but there’s a tremendous amount of data that they haven’t even seen that lives inside of, from the smallest to the largest companies in the world. Think about biotech companies and about the information they have about molecules and drug discovery, and so forth. Imagine that was pushed into their own AI systems. The rate with which we can discover solutions to some of our biggest challenges as a species around ailments and so forth, we could significantly advance that drug discovery process by using that technology.

(00:43:30):

Imagine the travel industry and how it can leverage travel patterns and what’s happening with the weather to improve the experience of travel. I hope to God that they do that, and I hope they don’t charge us extra money for that. There’s lots of ways that we can use AI that we haven’t even thought of yet. That’s what makes it exciting because its potential is really limitless. Everyone is going to need access to computing. Everyone is going to use it to enhance what it is they’re doing. Maybe Steve Jobs taking one of his quotes that, computing is the bicycle for the mind. I think AI is like a rocket ship for the mind. It’s the next industrial revolution.

Nick (00:44:16):

When we talk about computing and energy needed to do that, whether it’s AI, whether it’s blockchain or any other sort of novel or innovative tech, people generally just don’t appreciate or understand how much energy that takes. In other words, John, because of the things you and the team are working on, you guys understand that energy and ensuring that computing has the energy to do what it needs to do is a huge friction point for growth and adoption worldwide.

John Belizaire (00:44:48):

Yes. It is, yeah. I mean, to give you a sense, I’ve heard, tell that ChatGPT took one gigawatt hour. It’s a thousand megawatts. So think of a New York City size power plant. They trained it over several months. GPT-4, I think I’ve been using GPT-4 recently, it took 10 to 20 gigawatts hours, and so 10 times the size, every time they do one-step change. If you go into a typical data center and you look at the racks that these machines are sitting in, the power being provided to the rack is 10 times what it used to be before. You’re basically running out of space to put this much computing in these concentrated locations, and they’re connecting these data centers directly to the grid, and they have to be on 24/7 in their view, and that is driving basically massive increases of power usage and keeping legacy power plants on more often.

(00:45:55):

We don’t want that. We want to not go backwards as we progress from a technological standpoint. We don’t want to go backwards from a climate perspective as we progress. We want to use this advancement to also accelerate our progress in climate. I think that’s why it’s important to think laterally about where we source this energy, go to places where it creates additionality. By putting data centers with renewables, we will bring more economics and catalyze more renewable development, which is ultimately what we want on the planet. If we went and took this computing and we built the pipes and we landed this on the continent of Africa, there is so much resources to develop power there.

(00:46:50):

It would do two things at the same time. It would accelerate the sustainability of this technology and it would equally lift the economic position of so many countries there that have no other way to grow their economy. Computing is a distributed liquid, ubiquitous thing that we can do anywhere on the planet. We finally reached a point where we’re building the computer on the enterprise and had that basically can help us to think about and solve challenging problems at an accelerated rate. We don’t need to destroy the planet in the process to do that. We can actually make the planet greener in the process by using it to drive convergence. That’s our view on it.

Nick (00:47:35):

John, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask someone like you some questions about entrepreneurship and startups, and I should mention that you’re the founder and managing editor of the CEOPLAYBOOK, and I’ll put links in the show notes for people that want to learn more about what that is and the work there. But let’s assume that we’ve got listeners to this episode who want to be an entrepreneur. They want to create a startup or they already have an idea, and they’re just a little trepidatious about getting started. But you’ve got a wealth of experience here. You’re working on something exciting now. What are the one or two insights about startups specifically that you would be willing to share that you’ve learned over the years?

John Belizaire (00:48:14):

Having done several startups, it is not for the faint of heart. You really got to be out of your mind to go on these startup ventures and stuff like that. But most entrepreneurs are a little bit out of their mind. They’re the crazy ones, right? They’re the folks who are trying to change the world. What I can tell you is that it’s the greatest journey you’ll ever go on if you’re an entrepreneur, whether it’s short-lived, long-lived, it will change your life in the following ways. Number one, what I find is that running a startup exposes you to a constant barrage of challenges that you have to solve. Not just problems, but real existential challenges. You really got to have a drive to survive, and that teaches you a lot about yourself, so you’re going to learn a lot about yourself forming a startup.

(00:49:08):

I like to say that startups are slowly climbing a really big mountain and you’re constantly pushing and pushing up the mountain and it’s getting harder and harder, and the pain is building, but you know, got to get to the top. When you reach the top, you realize that there was no mountain. The mountain was you. You. You are the mountain the whole time. It was about conquering your own abilities and figuring out what your true potential could be. I really encourage people to explore entrepreneurship, but just know that it’s not going to be easy, and that’s okay. Each of those failures that you experience will be information that you can use to drive success. You will now know what does not work. Now, go do what might work. It’s a fascinating experience.

(00:50:04):

You made mention of CEOPLAYBOOK. What I’ve tried to do is to write down all of the insights and learnings that I’ve had over the years. I’m actually a little bit behind. There’s so many things that I just haven’t had time to write down, but I will get back to it. These are insights that come from the perspective of the CEO seat. It turns out that being an entrepreneur and founder, people think that that is the role that you’re going to have the entire time the company grows up from a little baby until a full grown adult. It turns out that as the company grows, you’re going to learn a couple of things. Number one, it doesn’t go up into the right. There isn’t this line that just goes up into the right, it actually goes up, then it goes down and spirals around.

(00:50:52):

You have to figure out if you want to hang on to the plane, you’re falling out on the plane, and then you got to turn it up and fly it back up, and then start pushing it back up again. Then it goes back down. Each time that happens, that’s a sign that the company is actually changing. It’s going through a phase change. In those phase changes, you as an individual have to change. When the company goes from that initial idea, you’ve got your co-founders together, you’re all in a room or WeWork somewhere, WeWork’s going bankrupt, but whatever, WeWork like place, and you’re just sort of figuring it out, and then you bring in that first slug of capital, your roles have to change now.

(00:51:33):

Somebody has to be CEO because there’s a fiduciary responsibility managing other people’s money and investing into your company to return it. Someone has to take that role and become the true leader. The person who goes through that shift, that’s a hard shift to go from a founder to A CEO. A CEO has a very specific role in the company. They have to manage the acquisition and deployment of capital. They have to find the best talent to support the growth of the company at these different stages. They have to exemplify leadership and be a leader. By the way, just being CEO doesn’t make you a leader. It’s like, when you walk down the hallway, there’d better be people following you, otherwise, you’re not a leader.

(00:52:20):

You have to create culture and really think about it and do it on purpose, not happenstance way. And then you have to set direction. People need to know where you’re going, and they need to believe in the future of the business. I tell our company every day, repetition is important, that we are creating a new relationship between renewables and computing. We are setting the stage for renewables to become the future of the planet and changing the relationship with computing. Computing will become the primary catalyst for that. That’s what we’re trying to create. Everything we do has to be about serving that mission, and that’s our vision. We’re going to build a billion dollar company doing that.

(00:53:09):

I just went through a whole bunch of stuff that most people, they’re like, “Yes, I’m a founder and I’m doing entrepreneurship now. This is great.” They just don’t know that as you progress through those stages as I talked about, up that chain, your role as a leader, how you approach leadership, what the people around you have to do, what their growth has to look like over time changes. You have to recognize when the company is going through those changes to make that shift. That’s the kind of stuff that I write about.

(00:53:40):

I write about this sort of lonely role of the CEO and how hard it is to deal with some of that loneliness and the imposter syndrome that might come with, you raise like a billion dollars suddenly, and you think you’re smart. Yeah, I see founders who are like, “We just did this big round. We’re successful.” Actually, no. You just raised a bunch of money. Now you need to make that money sing, and that takes a lot of work. There’s so much to talk about entrepreneurship. It’s a fantastic experience, and I wish anyone the best that does it, and I encourage them to go for it.

Nick (00:54:20):

John, I only have one more question for you before I ask you the GRTiQ 10, and these are 10 fun questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week. That last question is then about fear. My thesis is most entrepreneurs or people who want to be an entrepreneur either fail or never get started because of fear. They’re afraid of failure, they’re afraid of rejection, afraid of a host of other things. My question to someone like yourself is, what’s your relationship with fear? Are you not afraid to fail?

John Belizaire (00:54:54):

No. I am no longer afraid to fail. I was in the past, until I finally realized the role of fear. It actually is a gift. If you feel scared as an entrepreneur, that’s a good thing. If you don’t feel scared, you should be worried about yourself. Something’s wrong with you. I’ve known fear. In fact, there’s a great article on the blog that I think it’s fear is a gift or something like that. It talks about this experience I had many years ago. I was coming from my job, I had a job in high school. I did data entry at this company. On the way back, my brother had asked me to pick up a snack for him or something like that. I get off the bus and I go into this convenience store on the corner not too far from our house.

(00:55:40):

I walk into the store and I feel like suddenly, I’ve taken flight and I’m flying through the air and I crashed into the delectables, the Twinkies stand, the display. I’m like, how did that happen? I turn around and there’s a guy there holding a really large gun facing my chest, and he says, “Get your ass over there.” I’m like, holy smokes. He turns to the guy at the register and he’s like, “Hurry the F up. I ain’t got all day. Put the money in the bag. Faster!” He’s commanding everybody. At some point, he turns back and I’m frozen and my heart’s beating, I think it was probably beating to Michael Jackson’s Beat It song or something. Anyway, I looked around and I see at some point the guy becomes impatient and he says, “Get out of the way.”

(00:56:40):

He starts loading the money in himself, and it’s like one of those movies. A few minutes later, I noticed this old woman who was about to walk into the store. I’m like, “Oh, my God. She should not come in here.” Suddenly, my vision, it’s almost like the world slows down, becomes super clear. I look at the woman straight in the eyes and I’m like, “Don’t come in here. Don’t come in.” Suddenly, she looks at me, looks around, and then she scurries off. And then, the guy’s done, he lines everybody up. Me and the rest of the gang we’re like, “Holy smoke. This is it.” I basically closed my eyes and I hear, bang! It’s the firing of the gun. The guy laughs and he runs out the door. By the time we open our eyes, we see the guy’s gone and we come off with this adrenaline experience and everything.

(00:57:32):

What I realized is that, that was fear. That is fear. Everything else that you’re thinking about when you’re concerned about losing a deal or not getting the latest financing or something like that, the reality of it is, it’s a manifestation of fear that we experience as humanity in the Savannah. That fear is more anxiety. It’s the feeling of what happens when you think about something that might happen in the future, and you attach your feeling to it. It basically creates a signal for you, “Hey, you’re worried about something in the future and you need to do something right now to change that future,” because the future isn’t set, you see?

(00:58:19):

What an entrepreneur needs to do is to begin to become super connected with themselves and notice when they’re anxious, but it’s presenting as fear and realize that the thing you need to do is focus right now, like get out of your head, come back to the present and write down what are the two to three things that I need to do right now such that that thing that I’m worried about in the future does not happen. It turns out that right at that moment, you’re going to write down a few ideas. In fact, at Soluna here, we have an exercise called the 10 ideas exercise. It’s a fantastic way to build that muscle of ideas when crisis happen. We’re constantly using it for solving problems.

(00:59:03):

We try to come up with 10 ideas that can address the issue. If we can’t come up with 10, we come up with 20. We can’t do 20, we do 30. We just try to come up with as many dumb ideas as possible. And guess what? There’s always going to be one that’s just like, “Wow, why didn’t I think of that?” Well, you just did think about it, and you get everybody involved, and suddenly you are solving the very problems that you were worried about. I’ve become very comfortable with fear. In fact, when I start feeling fearful, I’m like, “This is great. I’m going to come up with the solution now because now, I know that there’s something that I need to do right now to set the company on the direction, the future that we need to go on.”

(00:59:41):

What I would say for entrepreneurs that are listening, don’t run away from fear. Actually embrace it. Embrace fear. It’s a fantastic tool, as I said, for giving you clarity of focus and insight. In that article that I mentioned, there’s a little framework at the bottom actually that helps you understand where you are in time. Are you focused on the past? In my last company, I went through this and everything was really bad. Well, just because the last company was bad, doesn’t mean it’s going to be bad here. So let go. Let go of that experience. “Oh man, I think that we’re definitely going to lose this deal or this product’s not going to work very well.”

(01:00:21):

Now, you’re moving into the future, and when you can determine where you are, then it gives a great framework for determining what to do at that particular moment and what is it you actually need to kind of recenter yourself. That’s proven really helpful for me, and it really does help drive a lot of my success and the team’s success. I have this mantra, keep pushing. You have to keep going. You can’t just become frozen with fear like a deer in the headlights. You actually have to keep pushing. To do that, you have to know what to do. Once you know where you are, then you know what to do. That’s my relationship with fear. I see it as a gift and a tool for focusing my execution.

Nick (01:01:04):

John, thank you for the insights there, and thank you for sharing that story. It certainly sets a lot of context for how someone I felt my think through that. I’ll put a link to that blog post in the show notes. For any listener that wants to learn more about how fear can be a gift. As I said John, now I want to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are kind of a lightning round 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week. Part of it, of course, is to get to know you a little bit better, some of your personal interests and things that you’ve learned. But I always hope that listeners will learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own life. So John, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

John Belizaire (01:01:36):

I hope so. Hit me.

Nick (01:01:50):

What book or articles had the most impact on your life?

John Belizaire (01:01:55):

Oh, I read a lot. So that’s a hard one. I’ll give you a few must reads. Actually, I’ll give you one primary one. It’s Influence by Robert Cialdini. If folks haven’t read it’s an older book. Professor Cialdini has written about the concept of how do you influence as an innovator. 99% of what you’re doing is trying to convince people to do things differently. There are a set of systems that are very effective to convincing people to do things, and Cialdini has written about them in this book called Influence. That’s one of my favorites. I just happened to be talking about that with a friend the other day.

(01:02:32):

Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath is another one that tells you how to create a story or a pitch that’s sticky. Matter of fact, I think I’m going to read it again. I’m going to reread it because there’s so many great insights there and there’s a whole sort of framework there as well. I’m a big believer in finding frameworks that can be helpful for you and reading them. Another one is Super Thinking. I can’t remember the name of the author now, but you’ll know the book. There’s a superhero in the front and it’s like a thousand different mental models that you can learn and apply to problem solving.

(01:03:08):

I’ve read a lot of books about biographies about companies and founders of those companies. The Steve Jobs one was a fascinating one. I cried reading that book. It’s just so insightful and deep in terms of the entrepreneurial experience. I’ve talked about Andy Grove’s book, Swimming Across. Swimming Across is a great mini biography about his life, and challenges and tribulations that have ultimately drove him to his success. Only the Paranoid Survive, also by Andy is another one. So many books. I have book lists on the website, too. You should definitely check them out. Oh, there’s one article, which is about the first-time CEO. You sit in the seat for the first time, what are the five to ten things that you need to think about? In each one of those things, I give you a list of books that can be helpful to do that. That would be the answer to the question. There’s no one book. It’s like asking me my favorite movie. If you’re going to do that, that’s going to be hard, too.

Nick (01:04:07):

What a great segue. Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

John Belizaire (01:04:12):

Oh, okay. Look, I love The Godfather movies. I watched them every chance that I get. TV show, one of my favorite TV shows is the Game of Thrones series. I really love that. I started re-watching The Sopranos recently. But you know what show is a documentary of startup life? It’s Silicon Valley. I wasn’t watching it, and then toward the tail end of my last company, I heard my team talking about it. I’m like, I’ll just watch it for a couple of sessions. I was like, “This isn’t a sitcom. This is exactly what happens.” It is hilarious.

(01:04:52):

A friend of mine was visiting from, he’s a lawyer from Indianapolis. He came to visit with us and he’s like, “I’ve been watching this show, but have you watched it?” I says, “No, I never watch it.” We sat and started watching it together. It was good to have a pal. I was laughing and he’s like, “I was laughing about this too, but I don’t know why.” I explained to him like, “Here’s what’s going on.” He’s like, “Oh!” I would definitely watch that one because they do a great job of showing all the stuff that happens when you’re trying to build a company. Again, it’s not up until the right. You don’t just get the money in and everything goes easy after that. It’s actually, it gets harder and harder and so that’s a great one that I would recommend watching, if not for humor and some kind of like, get your mind off the business. It’ll give you insights, too.

Nick (01:05:39):

How about this one? If you could choose only one music album to listen to for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

John Belizaire (01:05:46):

Wow, that’s interesting. The one that comes to mind is Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. Every time I hear that, it’s just fantastic. Prince, also his Purple Rain album. I’m still connected to the classic artists. I listen to a lot of techno dance music now. It seems to put my brain in this right frequency for deep work. My old co-founder actually is now a DJ, DJ Hools, and he puts some good stuff out there. I’m going to give him some props here on the show. I probably would listen to that, his stuff, if I was decamped in some bunker somewhere. I think that’s it. I’m not going to say all the stuff that my kids make me listen to right now. I think I would kill myself.

Nick (01:06:35):

How about this one then, John, what’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

John Belizaire (01:06:39):

Laser focus. When I first started my first company, I did something unusual. I didn’t know anything about starting a company, so I said, there’s got to be people around here. It was in Boston. Like I said, I went to sleep at my friend’s floor and we’re in the office and there’s a whole bunch of questions like how do you raise money, how do you evaluate the term sheet, all this kind of stuff. This was before the internet was really something. I grabbed the Cornell alumni directory and I looked up all the people professionals that were in Boston. I looked up the CEO titles and I just started cold calling them. “Hey, my name is John. I’m a Cornell alumni. I really need your help. I have all these questions about entrepreneurship,” and so forth.

(01:07:24):

There was this one guy who took my meeting. I went to visit him in his office and I was like, wow, look at this. How did he do this? It was a beautiful office and people are humming away. He built this financial information platform. In fact, it still exists today. It was investor relations platform companies used. It was his third company or something like that. He sat me down and he says, “What questions do you have?” I just started peppering him with questions and he would answer them beautifully, so succinctly like, “Think about this, think about that. This is what you got to do. Here’s what it says.” And he says, “I’m so happy you came. This is great for me to be able to help a young entrepreneur. But listen, if you remember nothing that I said, remember this. For you to be successful as an entrepreneur, you have to be laser focused.”

(01:08:15):

Once you set your target, don’t veer off. Entrepreneurs, founders have this disease that they encounter called the shiny object syndrome. Everything’s going well. They’re pursuing this thing, and then there’s this other thing and they’re like, “Hey, maybe we should do that, too,” and it throws the company off. They start to thrash and ultimately fail. Be careful of those shiny objects. One of the things that I’ve become really good at as CEO is just saying, “No. No, we’re not going to do that. That’s not our focus. That’s not our plan of record,” is what I’d say the team. We have a plan, we’re sticking to the plan. I’m okay changing the plan, but we have to sit down and really understand if that’s what we really want to do. Most of the time the stuff that we’re looking at is a distraction, and it takes us away from executing on where our primary focus should be. Be laser focused as an entrepreneur. It is by far, yeah, one of the best piece of advice I’ve ever had.

Nick (01:09:14):

Question five of the GRTiQ 10 is, what’s one thing you’ve learned in your life, John, that you don’t think most other people have learned or know yet?

John Belizaire (01:09:22):

I have this list actually of life insights that I write down. I would say that most people haven’t connected with this concept, and that is that when you’re thinking, when your brain is actually working and thinking, it should be intentional. Most of the time, we’re not actually experiencing the world the way it’s really happening. We’re filtering it through the noisy chatter that’s happening in our minds that actually affects our mood, how happy we are. It has actually nothing to do with the experience that’s happening around us, but what we’re actually thinking at that particular moment.

(01:10:10):

One insight that I think most people don’t know and I think is really helpful to anyone, and not just anyone but entrepreneurs is, when you find yourself thinking, is that on purpose? The stuff that you’re thinking? Did you actually tell yourself, “Let me think about this or did your brain just run off and start doing its own thing?” If you stop and ask yourself that question, often you’ll find that it’ll quiet your mind down a lot and you can think on things a little bit more intentionally, and that will have a material change on your mood, your insights about the world, problem solving, relationships, your connection to life itself. Thinking should be intentional. That’s the insight I think most people don’t realize.

Nick (01:11:04):

How about this one, John, what’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

John Belizaire (01:11:10):

Life hack. Just read a lot and keep learning. If I had to talk to my younger self, I would tell my younger self, “Please read more.” The reason I didn’t actually, I realized it was because I was a slow reader. I would mouth the words in my mind and I would just get tired because the brain can only do that so much. During one of my breaks, I started reading more and I realized that you can buy books on Amazon and then buy the audio that comes with the book. What that allowed me to do was to not have them mouth the words because I can hear them, and I’m reading the words as the words are being read to me. I found that it accelerated the rate of my reading, and then I sped up the audio and tested my comprehension, and I realized, oh wow, that works even faster.

(01:12:05):

It actually increased my reading rate. Now, I can get through books much faster. It’s become actually my system now. I do audio books and written digital books at the same time in an integrated fashion at a high speed rate. Now my reading rate when I’m not audio, because my inner voice is actually going at the audio speed, you can train yourself to pretty much do anything. Now I’m an incredibly fast reader, so I’m able to get through a lot more books, and that has changed my life big time. I can pick up, I’m constantly learning. I’m teaching myself a lot about AI right now. I’ll have three or four books I’m going through at the same time.

(01:12:50):

I highlight them, and then I use that Readwise app, I know folks know about that, but it basically takes your highlights and creates a whole stream of it for you, and then it can play it back to you. I have a Readwise stream that gets played to me every morning and I read it, and so it refreshes my insights from the books that I’ve read, so it continues to consolidate that learning. Sometimes those refreshes are timely. It’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” And then it hits me that this could apply to a problem that I’m dealing with right now and I solve that. Or it’s an insight that triggers a fundamental consolidation of learning, and then it causes me to write something.

(01:13:35):

I have hundreds of these insights that I’ve written over time. In fact, I wrote a book last summer called Keep Pushin’ and there’s a lot of those insights in there, and a lot of the quotes are actually playbacks from my highlights of the books because they reminded me of these things. That’s my life hack. It’s read more, read a lot, just keep reading, never stop. If you look at Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, they’re always saying like, “Set aside time for reading.” I do that every 30 minutes before I go to bed, I try to do some reading that’s part of my wind down. that’s my life hack.

Nick (01:14:13):

Number seven, based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how people find success in life?

John Belizaire (01:14:24):

It’s a persistence. It is fundamentally persistence. We have this keep pushing mantra and the book is basically, do not stop. Never ever stop. No matter how hard things get for you in life and in business, you really have to keep pushing through them because that’s where all of the learning happens. I like to say that pain is where the learning happens. You really need that pain to think about when you work out, that growth in your muscle, that pain that you feel, that’s why they say no pain, no gain, it’s because that’s where the muscle learns that it needs to be ready to lift this big weight the next time. That’s where the brain learns that it’s seen this problem before and it needs to push through it. I have also found that most of the companies that are successful out there, and most people that are successful have been becoming ready to be successful.

(01:15:28):

The persistence in doing the things that they do, the boring things that they do consistently and persistently for a long time, ultimately prepare them to benefit from a big technology wave or some event that is perfect for them. When you take advantage of that event, people think like, “Wow, that person is just so smart, so amazing. They’ve been able to solve for that.” In reality, it was just patience the whole time. It was just persistently doing what you do and keep doing it over time, that it makes you look brilliant. At the end of the day, Soluna, we’ve been running this business for six straight years, persistently learning about energy, solving really challenging problems, and putting these data centers behind the meter and everything. We’ve been saying that energy is going to be a big thing that affects the future of computing. We’ve been saying that for a long time now. Every single article, “We look so smart.” But we just kept saying it. We just kept doing it. Persistence is a key to getting ready to get lucky.

Nick (01:16:50):

John, the final three questions of the GRTiQ 10 are complete the sentence type questions. The first one is, the thing that most excites me about AI is …

John Belizaire (01:17:01):

Its future potential to accelerate the success of most enterprises.

Nick (01:17:07):

How about this one? If you’re on X, still call it Twitter, you should be following …

John Belizaire (01:17:12):

Me. I like this guy. He does a lot of summaries about books, Reads with Robbie.

Nick (01:17:19):

Then the final question, John, is this. Complete this sentence. I’m happiest when …

John Belizaire (01:17:24):

I’m happiest when I’m with my family, enjoying each other. I’m happiest when I’m just sitting outside, ideally on the sand, on a beach reading a really good book.

Automated (01:17:38):

The GRTiQ 10.

Nick (01:17:45):

John, thank you so much for taking the time to join the GRTiQ Podcast. It’s been a lot of fun to learn about you and some of the experiences and perspectives that you shared here today, as well as Soluna and the things you’re working on there. If individuals who listen today want to follow you, stay in touch with the things you’re working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

John Belizaire (01:18:03):

You can find me on Twitter. I’m @jbelizaireCEO. Soluna, you can find us also on Twitter or X. We’re @SolunaHoldings. You can visit our website. We’re solunacomputing.com. Our new cloud business is solunacloud.com. You can find us on LinkedIn. Just search for the Soluna Holdings company page on LinkedIn and follow us there. We also have a podcast of our own. It’s called Clean Integration, and we talk about all things, energy, and computing, and sometimes we do special segments. We’re starting a new one on AI here in our latest season. You also can get insights about more than just John. You can meet some of our members of management. We talk about our big initiatives and what’s happening in the company. It’s a fun listen, encourage you to do that as well.