BTC032: BITCOIN MINING & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

W/ JASON WILLIAMS

30 June 2021

On today’s show, Preston Pysh talks to Bitcoin miner, entrepreneur, and influencer, Jason Williams. Jason sold his first company FastMed for more than $300M, and has created a Bitcoin mining company that focuses on turning renewable energy into hashing power for the Bitcoin protocol.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

  • Jason’s first company that he sold for 300 million.
  • Jason’s thoughts about growing a business to a national level.
  • Jason’s thoughts on leadership.
  • How Jason started his Bitcoin mining business.
  • How Jason got involved with Morgan Creek Capital.
  • Jason’s thoughts on Bitcoin mining and China.
  • China’s hash rate migration to other domains.
  • Jason’s thoughts on El Salvador.
  • Jason’s best advice to new Bitcoiners.

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BOOKS AND RESOURCES

  • Jason’s Book on Amazon.
  • Check out Kraken‘s industry-leading exchange where you can buy Bitcoin.
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TRANSCRIPT

Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.

Preston Pysh (00:00:03):
Hey everyone, welcome to our Wednesday release of the podcast where we’re talking about Bitcoin. On today’s show, I have an incredible entrepreneur and Bitcoin influencer with Jason Williams. Jason sold his first company FastMed for more than $300 million, and has made many other venture deals throughout the years totaling a half a billion dollars. He’s an author, a Bitcoin miner that uses renewable energy harvested from used tires, and he’s got one heck of a story. This was such a fun conversation, and we get into a lot of relevant topics near the end of the show about mining and the current negative 25% difficulty adjustment due to policy decisions in China.

Preston Pysh (00:00:43):
Without further delay, here’s my interview with the one and only Jason Williams.

Intro (00:00:51):
You’re listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Now, for your host, Preston Pysh.

Preston Pysh (00:01:10):
All right, so like I said in the introduction, I’m here with Jason Williams. Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason Williams (00:01:15):
Man, thanks for having me. I’m a huge fan, man. This is a long time coming.

Preston Pysh (00:01:19):
Dude, I’m a fan of yours. I’m just going to start off. I love your book. I think the thing that I like about your book so much is it’s able to show the really big picture, but then get down into the weeds and the sections where it’s important for people to understand it. For people that are just coming into the space, and they’re trying to wrap their head around the big macro picture, also drill down into the smaller nuance things that are important but get a lot of people confused. You do such a great job of painting the canvas in a way that a person can capture.

Preston Pysh (00:01:53):
Before we go down that path, I just want to start off hearing your story, because I know you have one heck of a story, and just the background and everything. This is all I’m going to say, you were born in Queens. Take it from there.

Jason Williams (00:02:08):
Born in Queens, immigrant family, mom’s Sicilian. My dad’s Jamaican and British, left when I was born. Mom is a bartender and loves me very much and provided for me, gave me a great home. We were low class, poor family, and eventually moved to Florida, had aspirations to be a doctor, got on my rocket ship, played a little soccer around the world too, Preston, but eventually arrived back in school, and fortunately became a physician assistant. PA is… That profession started around 1974. In regards to physician assistants, I’ll give you a little color and then continue, but they were like naval corpsman returning from the Vietnam War, and when they returned, they didn’t have a place.

Jason Williams (00:03:00):
These were highly competent medics that could save your life and do all kinds of field medicine, but there was no transition for exiting military people into civilian life in the practice of medicine, so Duke University started a physician assistant program. I think there was this guy named Harvey Steed. I think that’s his name. But anyway, I was in the first class of physician assistants at a small school called Methodist University. From there, I was accepted to Yale, thought I wanted to be an orthopedic surgical PA. I was a licensed physician assistant, ended up dropping out of Yale, starting a company.

Jason Williams (00:03:37):
That company was FastMed. I grew that over my entire adult life into the nation’s second largest privately-owned urgent care and primary care practice, cross country, had 1,400 employees, 400 PAs and doctors working for me, and then sold that company in totality in 2015 for right around half a billion dollars.

Preston Pysh (00:04:02):
I’m fascinated at just the drive, first of all, to want to become a doctor, became a physician’s assistant. From everybody that I’ve ever talked to, that’s almost a parody with each other as far as the schooling and difficulty to get the education there. What drove you at such an early age to want to achieve at such a level? What was the driving factor behind all this?

Jason Williams (00:04:26):
I appreciate the question, but I don’t think it’s any different than what drove you to your career, I believe your military career and beyond. It was, for me, the fear of the life I knew, that level of poverty, the lack of options, all the other things. This isn’t a psychology session, but growing up where I did, there was substance abuse, psychological abuse. There was all types of abuse, and I just wanted to break free from it, Preston, and my escape was through education and becoming a professional of some sorts. Again, I had no roadmap. There was no one to call and say, “Okay, I want to be a doctor. How do I become a doctor?”

Jason Williams (00:05:10):
That just wasn’t available to me, unfortunately. I just hacked it together and landed on physician assistant. Shot for the moon. Landed on some meteor close to the moon.

Preston Pysh (00:05:22):
I’d say you did quite well. The transition to Yale, that transition, I just can’t imagine how driven you would have been when I’m hearing the story. You go to Yale. Then you dropped out.

Jason Williams (00:05:36):
It’s one of those defining moments. I’ve had this discussion with friends recently, where you get to a certain point in your life, where you’ve transcended your CV. You’ve transcended the social norms, the defining things that you think you need so that you can continue to be employable, be a good partner, those things. Early on, I bought into the fact that I needed Yale on my resume, because my resume was weak. Again, I was more fear driven like, “I’ve got to get here. I’ve got to have these trophies or these things to help me get away from where I am.” That poverty has tremendous gravity. To get escape velocity, it was like… I can’t tell you the drive.

Jason Williams (00:06:25):
That’s why most people don’t escape Queens. They don’t escape Borkel place. They’re stuck there. Everyone wants to leave. It’s just the common discussion, but it’s very hard, but look, I got there, came up with an idea, socialized it to my professors, called my mom, told her I was going to drop out and go for this, Preston. She wasn’t happy, but it worked out for me.

Preston Pysh (00:06:51):
It’s one of those things where when people can see it in hindsight is just so obvious. Jason, I follow you on Twitter. I think somebody who would look at your Twitter feed, and see you on the surface would say, “Oh, that guy is just joking around, or he’s out there having fun, but has never sold a company for a half a billion dollars, and build it over decades, dropped out a yield to do it all. The risk factor there is just crazy to me. You start the company, and what was the product or service or idea around the company that just started?

Jason Williams (00:07:28):
FastMed, the thesis was I could do 80% of what you’d find in a US-based emergency department. It would be non-life saving procedures and diagnosis that you’d find in an emergency department using Allied Healthcare professionals or physician assistants, and leveraging technology to do it at one-tenth the cost, so 80% of the service offering of an emergency department at one-tenth the cost, placing it in a retail setting, so not going where all the doctors are or the hospital, but going where Starbucks is. This is 2000, 2001, so super early, pioneering in that space, no physician assistants owned medical practices, let alone employed doctors.

Jason Williams (00:08:10):
I was like public enemy number one from a career perspective. That was it, Preston, and I just self-funded and went one, two, three, 10 more private equity, 20, 100.

Preston Pysh (00:08:24):
You just skipped over this stuff, and I’m telling you for somebody who has never built a business before, even if you do this at a local level, and you have success, growing it then across the nation at a point where you don’t take on too much leverage, or you get yourself in trouble, or you just hire too quickly with bad people and bad strategic, so much of this is way bigger than you just brush stroking over it than I think people realize. This is massive. Talk us through the growth piece of this.

Preston Pysh (00:09:01):
You set up one site. It’s successful. Now, let’s copy and paste. Let’s do it again. Talk us through some of that growth that you had to manage, and just walk us through the decade plus of that experience.

Jason Williams (00:09:15):
You haven’t… Like so many things happening at once over the let’s call it 15 years that I was building that company that it’ll be too much to unpack, but just imagine opening up a doctor’s office. You’ve got a technology package. You have to have some type of charting system. You have to have some type of recruiting, HR, culture, all of those things. You’re building. I had no business training, so I’m winging it with a bunch of college friends at first. But over time when the system starts to break, and new technologies start to show themselves, you’re just implementing as you go. You’re essentially building the plane while you’re flying it. Most people are uncomfortable doing that.

Jason Williams (00:09:57):
I meet founders that they’re stuck in prototype forever, raising enormous amounts of capital to protect and perfect their craft. Then there are those who don’t know what they don’t know, and rush fast in the wrong direction, and then those same people that don’t know what they don’t know rush in the right direction, and build something extraordinary. For me, retrospectively, we got it right more than we got it wrong, Preston. We built these systems. We adopted electronic medical records. We went from traditional x-ray to PAC systems and digital x-ray. We went from trying to train people how to code to having coding algorithms assist people to how do you deal with real estate?

Jason Williams (00:10:43):
Do you buy all the buildings? Do you build in DeNoVo, or is there some plug-and-play? When we went into our blitzscaling phase, blockbuster video stores went out of business. Those were in this perfect location for the retail play I was doing, so I just went out and warehoused all these blockbuster video stores so that we could open up. You’re just recognizing patterns, and aligning these things. But again, it takes a different mentality. Someone who feels very comfortable not knowing has the self-confidence to stand before his mistakes, make corrections, be confident changing his mind. These are like mantras.

Jason Williams (00:11:25):
I always reserve the right to change my mind. I say it all the time to people, because it’s kept me out of trouble in my life. FastMed was an amazing moment. It took me from this start that I had in life to someone who had options. Selling that company was the hardest thing I ever did, because when I raised some capital in 2010, I had the sign of a 10-year non-compete. My 10-year non-compete started in 2010. I exited the whole company in 2015, so I had five more years where I was blocked out of healthcare. Everything I knew my whole adult life, I spent working on that business, Preston.

Jason Williams (00:12:07):
After I sold it in 2015, I was done. I couldn’t work in that space any longer, but they gave me a boatload of money to do that, right?

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