A life told in chapters. The bike is between every one of them.
I've been starting businesses since I was nine years old. I've been riding bikes since I was fourteen. Somewhere along the way the two became the same thing.
If you want to understand what I'm building now — the small-footprint AI factory, the vertical farms, the rural infrastructure — you have to go back to the lemonade stand, the one-day college career, and the two-thousand prelit Christmas trees I was shipping the year the industry thought nobody would ever buy a tree online. Every chapter explains the next one. And every chapter is separated from the next by time on a bike.
This is the long version. The one I don't put on the homepage.
Born and raised in Palos Verdes, California. Somewhere along the way my parents moved us to Atlanta, Georgia. As life in the 1980s would have it, that's about the time families started splitting up. Mine did. It was weekends at my father's house and most days with my mom.
My mom and I left Atlanta for Grosse Ile, Michigan. Then Birmingham, Michigan. Then, the year I was turning sixteen, she took a consulting job in New Orleans and we moved again. Five cities by the time I was old enough to drive.
I called her Judy. It's funny that I always called her by a first name — we had a very special relationship, the two of us.
Judy raised me on her own and she was my first entrepreneur. She ran conventions for a living — high-stakes, thin-margin work for someone who got sick to her stomach before every single event. What we didn't know is that the sickness wasn't nerves. It was cancer.
Ovarian cancer, diagnosed in the 1980s. The outlook then was not good. From about 1985 until she passed, Judy was fighting to stay alive. Every experimental thing you could think of — Esiak tree bark, weekly high-dose vitamin C IVs, alternate medicine across the Mexican border. It was like a job for her. It was beyond inspiring.
In 1984 she started a business called Single Source. Think of it as Match.com twenty years before Match.com — events where single people could meet, conventions built around products and services for single adults. She poured her heart and every resource she had into it. I watched her do it. Then I watched it fail.
And then I watched her pick herself up and move to the next thing.
I didn't realize at the time what she was teaching me. Today I know. The reason I can continue no matter what the situation is — the reason I can build one company, lose it, and walk into the next one the same week — it's because of Judy. She taught me there is no limit on your ability to understand any segment of any business and find the best solution. Not by saying it. By doing it while dying.
Because of that relationship, I got access to rooms a kid doesn't normally see. I worked her conventions. I drove her speakers in from the airport. Henry Kissinger. G. Gordon Liddy. Names that meant nothing to me at the time. I kept my mouth shut in those cars and learned more than I ever did in a classroom. By the time I was a teenager I already understood two things most adults never figure out: what it takes to make something work, and what failure actually looks like from inside the room.
Somewhere in all of that, I got on a bike. I didn't know yet what it would become. I just knew that when I rode, the noise got quieter.
I started with a lemonade stand. Then mowing lawns. Then landscaping. Then a really nice home and garden store. Then the growing side of it — I owned the greenhouses, growing wholesale into retail. Every step I had to learn along the way.
The lawn-mowing business grew up into the real thing. At full stride we were doing projects where we'd plant 500 trees at a time, 40,000 of a single plant variety, miles of irrigation pipe underground on a single job. Audubon Park Golf Course. The New Orleans Sculpture Garden. Longue Vue House & Garden. Work that gets graded by people who know what good work looks like.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was training for Whinstone. Deploy at scale. Manage crews who care about the last ten percent. Run something the public walks through and judges. Landscaping is infrastructure — it just happens to be alive.
I was never satisfied. Never challenged enough. That's the true entrepreneur thing that lives inside me, and it took until my fifties to comprehend what it is: I want to figure out how the pieces fit together. I want to get it to work. And then I want somebody else to run it, because once it's working I'm already looking at the next thing.
My mom and I bought into an organic lawn care franchise around 1995. The franchise group were slick snake-oil salesmen. The owners behind them were wonderful people with a genuinely great idea. The problem wasn't the idea. The problem was the year.
Organic lawn care at twice the price of regular, in 1995, in the American South. It was twenty years too early. There was no viable market. We lost. But I learned something on that job that I've used every single year since — timing is the whole game. A great idea in the wrong year is just an expensive lesson. A good idea in the right year is a company.
I'd file that one under "expensive lessons." There were plenty of them. Some of the best ideas I ever had failed because I was early. Some of the ones I thought were smaller became Whinstone.
Alongside the landscaping business, I ran a brick-and-mortar home and garden store. Saplings. Cast stone planters. Jewelry. A really nice store where you browse slow and leave with more than you came for. It was open for years.
Here's a thing I genuinely believe: every single person in the world should have to work a retail floor at some point. And they should have to work a restaurant — serve meals, bus tables, handle the Saturday-night crowd. It's a life-changing experience.
You learn which product gets picked up and put back down. Which one walks out the door. Which one collects dust. You watch the same customer come in three times in a week and figure out what they actually need, which is almost never what they said they needed the first time. You learn customer service by losing a customer. You learn pricing by mispricing something.
You also learn something most founders never learn because they skip retail: you learn that the customer is not always right, but the customer is always *the customer*. That distinction keeps you humble without making you a pushover. I still use it every single week.
Easily one of the best ideas I ever had: sell Christmas trees online, sight unseen, delivered to your living room. And yes — people told me this was impossible.
I'd drive to North Carolina and hand-select Fraser firs. Every tree, personally. They'd ship to New Orleans, where we'd mount them on proper stands and string them with iridescent white lights. 800 lights on an eight-foot tree. 1,000 on a ten-foot. 1,500 to 1,800 on a twelve-foot — because the ceilings in those New Orleans homes get real tall.
The customer ordered online. We delivered the tree, brought it inside, hooked up their surge protector, plugged in the lights, checked every strand, made sure they loved it, added water, left them the care instructions, cleaned up our mess, and drove to the next house.
Math a Christmas tree business does to itself: two thousand trees in ten days is two hundred deliveries a day. Not drop-offs. Full-service installs. Across the narrow streets of New Orleans. In large trucks. By a team that still had to smile when they walked through the door.
As the years went by I raised prices and reduced the quantity — not to make more money, but to keep my sanity. It was still the most lucrative retail concept I ever ran.
But I'm never satisfied. And when the commercial landscaping contracts started rolling off and the garden side started softening, I could see the derailment coming. I couldn't stop it. So I did what I've always done when the answer is obvious and uncomfortable — I closed the physical stores and took the whole business online.
My bankers at the time didn't see it my way. Let's just say we weren't friends anymore after that.
My youngest son Ashton — ninth grade — had started mining Bitcoin. I wasn't interested in Bitcoin as a product. I was interested in how to put the parts together. How to remove the heat. How to make it more efficient. How the pieces actually fit. I loved the puzzle.
The three of us — me, Ashton, and Lyle Theriot — built a 300-computer pilot in a New Orleans warehouse. The miners threw so much heat that the warehouse hit 100°F in winter. We built a 20-foot wooden tower to house a rack of computers, rigged an exhaust system with parts from Home Depot, ducted the hot air out through the roof. Thermometer dropped into the 70s.
Lyle and Ashton were at a Bitcoin conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, explaining our homemade tower to a stranger at a bar. Three weeks later, fifteen managers from a Japanese conglomerate walked through our warehouse door. They'd been to eleven countries looking for a cooling solution. Ours was the best they'd seen.
I called my older son Aiden — accounting grad student at Northeastern — and he flew down that same day to write the business plan. We paid him in student loan payoff. By mid-November 2018 we had a contract.
Then Bitcoin crashed to $3,500. New Orleans electricity was 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour. The math stopped working before the math got a chance to work.
We needed Texas.
I know how that sounds. I'll explain.
Hurricane Katrina took my city apart. No power. No water. No income. A house to rebuild. A business to rebuild. An insurance company to fight. Everyone I knew was in the same boat, and most of them didn't know how to start.
What I didn't know at the time was that Katrina was basic training for everything I would do next.
You learn to do things without the grid. You learn to negotiate with people who are trying to run out the clock on a claim. You learn to make decisions when the information is bad, the deadline is tomorrow, and the money is running out. You learn to show up for people who have less than you, because in New Orleans after Katrina, that was everyone.
Every skill I used at Whinstone — getting things done when the supply chain seizes, paying contractors before their invoice clears, finding a way to "yes" when every answer should have been "no" — I learned it in the months after the storm. You don't get that in a classroom. You only get it from a catastrophe.
I'm not glad it happened. I'm glad for what it taught me. Those aren't the same thing.
July 2019. I read a Wired article called "The Hard-Luck Town That Bet on Bitcoin and Lost." It was about Rockdale, Texas — where Bitmain had walked away from a facility after Bitcoin's 2018 crash, and where Alcoa's old aluminum plant had closed before that, taking eighty percent of the town's jobs. The story read like a eulogy. I read it like a listing.
I flew to Rockdale. Sat in on a town hall meeting that was mostly about the need for speed bumps. I understood that town immediately. A place that's been kicked needs somebody willing to bet on it.
By 2020 I had a Texas driver's license in my wallet. That's the rule I made for myself a long time ago — if a place is going to be where I work, it's going to be where I'm from. California by birth. New Orleans by tenure. Texas by the time the ink dried on the license.
Bitmain wasn't going to lease me space. Our Japanese client gave me exactly seven days to find an alternative or they were gone. So I did what any reasonable person would do with a week to spare and no backup plan — I decided to build my own facility from scratch on a hundred acres of empty forest down the road.
Alcoa owned the land. They wanted a Moody's-rated guarantor, a million-dollar deposit, and three years of rent — another three million — paid in advance. Four million dollars we didn't have. The whole team had about a million in Bitcoin and a lot of confidence. I told them yes to everything. Agree first, figure out the money later. Our Japanese client eventually backed the guarantee.
Groundbreaking: early November 2019. Bitcoin was at $4,100. Nobody thought this was a good idea. Four of us on the founding team — me, Ashton, Lyle, and David Schatz, a former railroad diesel mechanic. A small group doing something nobody had done before.
What followed was 183 days of deploying 300 megawatts — enough to power downtown Dallas twice over — on a site we were building in real time. We did the substation ourselves because the sixteen-month lead time on a pre-built one was a joke. We bought every inch of four-inch grey conduit in the country because the supply chain was about to seize up. It did. We paid suppliers before they invoiced us, because suppliers remember that, and when COVID hit in March 2020 and every other project stalled for parts, our orders kept getting filled first.
I lived in a barn. One floor, one bathroom — a real barn, not the pretty kind you see on Instagram. I ran phone meetings with Tokyo that started at eleven at night and ran past midnight. Something like 700 of those calls across three years. I'd sleep a couple hours on the office floor and be back ordering transformers at six in the morning.
Here's what nobody writes about the Whinstone build. At night, after the last call to Japan and the site was quiet, I'd get on my gravel bike and ride the back roads of rural Texas. A buddy would drive slowly behind me with his headlights on, painting the road I was pedaling. That was the whole setup. One bike. One truck. One headlight.
We sold Whinstone to Northern Data late in 2019 in an all-stock deal that closed early 2020 at $164 million. Riot Blockchain bought it from Northern Data in May 2021 for $651 million. I stayed on to run it. The site became North America's largest Bitcoin mine — by some fair accounting, the largest in the world.
If you think Whinstone was just a big data center, you missed it. Rockdale was where I learned how rural America actually works.
Tax abatements. Tax credits. How to sell power back to the grid. How to reskill workers whose old industry walked out on them. How to partner with the local schools so that juniors and seniors who weren't going to college had a gateway into a high-paying job with healthcare — because in rural America, that path just doesn't exist unless somebody builds it. I worked on every one of those. Every skill.
And on my way out of the chapter, I did something that told me everything about what would come next. I planted 300 trees on the site. Holly. Crepe myrtle for color. Ran irrigation lines in the ground with my own crew. I went back to the landscaping I'd started at fourteen, because I don't know how to leave a site without it looking like a garden. The mine was going to look like a botanical garden because that's the only way I know how to build.
Hard times create strong men. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. I didn't write that. But I've lived it on both sides, and the only way through is the ride back up.
Three years ago I wrote what I could see coming. I didn't say the last line out loud because I knew what it would cost me to earn it. So I did what I've done since I was fourteen — I got on the bike.
Thirty-three thousand miles later, I'm ready to ship.
The AI factory I'm building now is the opposite of the one I built before. Small footprint. Self-powered. No grid dependency. Zero make-up water. Stacked with vertical farms and aquaculture. Fed by its own waste-to-energy loop. Graphene and aerogel doing the work the concrete and cooling towers did last time.
The rural thread is obvious once you line it up. Lemonade on a corner. A neighbor's lawn. A golf course. A home and garden store. Two thousand Fraser firs a year. A Bitcoin mine in a town that thought it was finished. Now a factory that makes compute and food and power inside the same walls and drops into a county instead of a metro.
Judy is the other thread. She taught me that when the situation is impossible you wake up and fight like mad anyway. She taught me that a great idea in the wrong year is just an expensive lesson — but you keep going. She taught me that there is no limit on your ability to understand any segment of any business and find the best solution, because she was doing it while dying and she taught me how.
It was always going to be this. The 2022 LinkedIn post wasn't a vision statement — it was a spec sheet. The three years on the bike were the proof I could hold my tongue long enough to build it. The four decades before that were Judy's work inside me, still working.
The next chapter doesn't get written at a desk. It gets decided on a quiet road at dawn, with Shadow in the truck and a fresh cassette clicking clean.
Ask me in a year.
Seven decades of surface. Forty years of pedals. Dozens of business names. One through-line. If you're a builder, you already know: the work is mostly waiting. Cycling is waiting with a heart rate. That's the only secret.
— Chad
← Back to today