The following interview is a conversation we had with John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $180 Million Raised to Power the Future of Renewable Computing for AI
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey everyone. And welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna, a renewable computing company that’s raised over 180 million in funding. John, welcome to the show.
John Belizaire
Thank you, Brett. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Brett
Yeah, super excited to have you here. So let’s go ahead and jump right in. Talk to us about what you’ve been building.
John Belizaire
So we’re building a next generation data center company that is really helping to drive the convergence of renewable energy and probably one of the biggest transformations we’ve seen in several decades, and that’s generative AI. What Soluna does is we build data centers that are co-located with renewable energy power plants that have wasted or stranded energy. We build these data center projects that monetizes that power, giving AI its much needed access to power. That’s probably the biggest constraint for the technology these days, and more importantly, access to sustainable energy that it can use.
John Belizaire
And we design our facilities in a unique way, using a host of technology that allows us to build a distributed network of these facilities around the country and hopefully in the future around the world that can provide massive amounts of compute for AI while at the same time driving demand and resiliency around the renewable space and driving the development of more renewable power. At Soluna, we like to say we’re on a mission to make renewable energy a global superpower, using computing as a catalyst.
Brett
How did you get into this world? You know, what’s the backstory behind the company?
John Belizaire
So about six and a half years ago, pre Covid was like the time warp. You know, sometimes people are like, that was yesterday. Six and a half years ago, one of my board members was sitting down with me for lunch and explained that he and his family office were working on a project in Northern Africa. It was a very large renewable energy project and it was running into this problem where the power of the site was stranded. They were realizing that they weren’t going to be able to monetize all of the energy that the power plant was going to produce. It was a wind plant and probably one of the best wind areas in the world. And he convinced me to join his team and form a new company to go develop this project.
John Belizaire
And were having all sorts of difficulties developing the project because the grid wasn’t ready to accept that magnitude of power, you know, that our wind farm could produce. And in our research, we found a solution for this problem. It occurred to us that computing, and specifically blockchain and bitcoin mining type computing, was perfect. It was immediately deployable technology and a solution to absorb that excess clean energy. And we had to solve some, you know, gnarly engineering problems. But once we identified the solution, we realized it was unlikely were the only people to have this challenge. And that’s what led us to looking at curtailed energy as a broader problem space that we could attack as a company.
John Belizaire
And post Covid, we took the computing part of that project and started taking it around to all of these power plants that are here in the US that have upwards of 30 to 40% of their clean power generation being curtailed or wasted, which decreases the profitability of those plants. So it really started on another continent. We started the project in Morocco, and here we are back in the US building massive amounts of this stuff combined with some of the best renewable energy resources in the US if we just.
Brett
Look at the two hot trends that you’re part of, or I guess there’s three, it’s renewable is obviously hot trend. You know, crypto is obviously a hot trend. AI is obviously hot trend. How do you do it? Like, you’ve managed to, like, align yourself like just three very hot trends. And there’s probably some other trends that I’m missing, right?
John Belizaire
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Brett. It turns out in this case, we sort of, you know, we wrote this business plan that had a three to five year strategy in it. The first phase, what we call phase one, was to take our bitcoin focused solution and immediately deploy these facilities. And at these renewable power plants, we have several in the US that are integrated with wind and other types of resources. And that technology took us a while to master how to do it. We built a whole set of software and technology to help us manage the power flows, make that data center flexible, et cetera. And the goal was to prove that you could do computing in these more challenging environments, more remote locations than where computing is typically done. And then in our plan, we had what’s called phase two.
John Belizaire
In phase two, we believe that broader computing applications Especially applications that are batchable, things you can put to sleep, pause, et cetera, that are going to be flexible is the kind of computing that could live in these environments. And we hypothesized that it would be high performance computing, machine learning, AI. What we didn’t know, and that’s where the luck came in, was that generative AI would take off so much sooner than our plan. So we’re probably in phase two about a year earlier than we had planned. And not only is it right smack in the middle of the biggest transformation we’ve ever seen, it is the perfect application for the type of data centers that we want to build going forward. So how do we do it? It’s hard.
John Belizaire
We’ve got a lot of great people, but it’s very much along the lines of what we had planned to do for some time.
Brett
Where do you even begin when it comes to bringing something like this to market? What did the first six months look like? Maybe paint a picture for us of that first six months.
John Belizaire
The original first six months, you know, was convincing people that they should trust us to build both a power plant and a computing facility. When we sort of, you know, did this grand refocusing or pivoting to renewable computing and focusing on the data center, only the first six months was convincing people that what were talking about actually would work. Like, what are you saying now you’re going to put a data center back there? Like, nope, there’s no kind of computing you can do back there that makes sense. And we’re like, actually there is. So a lot of the first six months was an education around a new form of data center. Air cooled, Lego block design, computer controls, and running this new type of computing that most power plant owners had never. They’ve seen it in the news.
John Belizaire
Most of the news headlines were not exactly that great. And they were talking about like, what is this now? And how do you guys make money? You know, and so we had to educate a lot of these folks. And by the way, many of these folks have become, you know, really big in crypto after this education and also convincing them that this would not increase any risk for their project. We had to go through basically a long list of all the bad things that could happen. Credit engineering or technology concerns. The substation that we connect into, that’s the equipment that the power plant uses to send its electrons to the grid. We have to connect into that equipment to draw energy for the data center.
John Belizaire
The last thing a power plant wants is for you to damage that equipment in any Way so de risking them there and you know, essentially doing a missionary, sell to these potential partners to take a flyer with us and allow us to prove that everything we’re saying is true. While that sounds pretty challenging, I think every young company and innovation team has a similar experience. That first few months, right. You’re doing a lot of education, you’re trying to find a customer that could believe in you and take a bet, you know, and be one of the first. And you’re trying to come up with how your business model is going to work and all of the tools and tricks to make that happen. So that’s what our first six months look like.
Brett
Who is the average power plant owner? Like, what does that typically look like? And maybe just so we can understand like how many power plants are there in like the US or maybe just.
John Belizaire
Say global, Thousands of them. There are thousands of power plants. If you look at the renewable energy space, it is now the fastest growing form of energy. Renewable energy that is. And it’s also quickly becoming the cheapest form. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts. One thousand megawatts is like, call it the size of, you know, a medium sized city, let’s say to get a sense of like the power draw from 2022 to 2024, we’re approaching 5,000 of those gigawatts. So that’s a thousand megawatts.
Brett
Hurts my brain a little bit.
John Belizaire
Yeah, yeah, Exactly. And by 2030, you know, we’ll be well over 10,000 of those, sort of quickly approaching 12,000 gigawatts globally. So the growth rate of renewables has accelerated since COVID There has been this grand awakening to the importance of climate and investing in sustainable resilience technology. And so there are more power plants being built every day in the US than there are days in a year at this point. And most of that capital is coming from some of the largest pension funds in the world. And the power plant owners are these giant funds. Some folks, you know, you might have heard, so the Brookfields of the world, you know, the giant sort of billion dollar funds, the Blackstones, the actions. If you want to look at some, you know, international folks like edf re one of our partners.
John Belizaire
These are some of the largest power and renewable power owners in the world. And they’ll have gigawatts under their management and billions of dollars available to deploy. And they will build these projects where the resources are most rich. They look for the best wind and they look for the best solar. What happens, and this is Part of the issue is everybody’s chasing the best wind and the best solar and they end up in the same location. I like to call it the McDonald’s and Burger King problem. Both of these companies are really real estate companies. They try to find the best location to sell their burgers and wares and they end up right across the street from each other. Right, because they’re optimizing for where people will be to buy these products. The same is true here.
John Belizaire
Big investors in renewables end up building power plants right next door to each other. And so you have massive generation facilities trying to get their electrons through, into and through electric grid that doesn’t scale to meet that demand. And so you’re going to have some of that power not being able to get into the grid. And that’s the problem we solve by bringing load to those generators and consuming that energy that would otherwise not make it to the grid.
Brett
How do you approach marketing?
John Belizaire
If you just had to paint a.
Brett
Picture of the high level marketing strategy, what is that marketing strategy?
John Belizaire
We are big believers here in content marketing. So inside of Soluna, you will find a team of developers who are developing access to power and developing access to data center projects and land. So your traditional sort of project developers, you’ll find an engineering team that’s building software, you’ll find an operating team that’s running the facilities. You’ll find finance and all the classic things. And then you’ll find a small media company, essentially. And in that media company, we are developing a host of content. That’s one place where we’re rich. We produce our own podcast, if you didn’t know, Brett, it’s called Clean Integration. And there we cover everything about what’s happening in this space. So some of those questions you’ve asked about what is a power plant owner, what do they look like? That’s covered in the show.
John Belizaire
We talk about some of our projects, some of the engineering problems we run into, and then we bring on guests that can talk about everything from technological innovations that are Happening in and around the grid, renewables and computing, and now data centers and AI, but also the regulatory frameworks and how those are getting stretched with all of the new approaches that are taking place around deploying this technology. We write articles that touch on very specific insights around all of those areas. We are very involved in social media and then we have a newsletter that we run that’s just touching on a few things we do, videos, et cetera. All of that content that is being produced continuously and at scale these days is used to educate.
John Belizaire
You know, John, me going out and talking to every single power plant owner on the whole planet is just not scalable. And so by getting our content into and through these different platforms, it allows us to educate these communities at scale. And through that education, we get people calling us 80% of our pipeline, and that’s a development pipeline. Of all the different projects that we have when we started was through outbound calls. We would call these people and try to engage them in a conversation about how we can help solve their problem. Now, 80%, it’s flipped. 80% comes from people who call us directly. We know who you are. We’ve heard great things. We want to show you four or five projects where we have some real challenges. Let’s talk.
John Belizaire
And the hope is that as we begin to build data centers and build customers around our AI footprint, you know, we’re going to get those inbounds too. And on the crypto side, the same is true. We have built a very strong brand in the space around, you know, the sustainability focused company, great service, you know, almost white glove service to our customers and they call us. So our approach to marketing is something I’m deeply passionate about and that is, you know, scalable content and storytelling to draw demand.
Brett
What’s the content team look like and what have you learned from building out that content team?
John Belizaire
So we have a host of folks, we have everything from content marketers. So these are folks, you know, interviewing our people, taking news and updates that we have and then turning those into small micro content pieces to blog articles, long form blog articles that are driven by research. So we have writers, we have audio engineers. So folks who are taking that podcast content that we have and turning it into a fully produced show. We have a whole team now of folks who are taking some of our content and using AI to change the copy and focus of the content to target different Personas that we’ve defined and deliver that content out through different platforms that are targeted as well. And then marketing and sales is highly integrated on the AI side is more B2B focused and more scaled.
John Belizaire
And so we are building a whole pre sales function that is, you know, has a combination of research and Persona based playbooks, automation around content push out and delivery target customer engagement, injecting the content machine that we have into that pre sales and basically bringing sort of sales and marketing together. It’s amazing. In the 10 years that I’ve got introduced to like, you know, dedicated pre sales function and how it can be used to drive sales, a lot has happened in terms of the advancement of technology and new tools and best practices. It’s amazing. But none of that works unless you have content. So that’s where we start with a leg up because we understood the value of content. So we have this massive library of content that keeps growing and you can use that content then to drive sales activity and marketing activity.
John Belizaire
We’re very big on branding here and storytelling as I’ve touched on. You know, we curate the brand very carefully. How we pick projects has to fit with the brand and then we project that brand ethos out into the world. And you know, the goal is to essentially find a space in people’s minds such that when they’re thinking about doing something, they call us first. And so far that works. It does take time for this to build up, especially if you’re starting from zero with your content. But eventually it does work and it works really well.
Brett
When did you become a believer in content? You know, a lot of the CEOs I speak to, they don’t believe. They hear about content, they know they should be doing it, but they don’t believe in it like you do. So where did that begin for you?
John Belizaire
That’s a good question. I think it was in the last company I ran. It was an insurance software company. And there what we did was were trying to teach underwriters that computing can help them make better underwriting decisions. And I’m talking about very complex risks. So a lot of like, you know, when you go get car insurance or homeowner insurance, a lot of that is very automated and uses predictive data and so forth and progressive, sort of helped to create that whole industry. But for commercial, it was still very bespoke. Right. An underwriter would look at some information, they would go by their gut and then they would price this thing and determine whether the company should take it on based on certain guidelines. And what they found was that over time they weren’t scaling those companies as well, the profit wasn’t increasing.
John Belizaire
And as new investors came into the space to back them. They said, hey, you guys actually have to make money doing what you do, not just investing the premiums. And so they had to think about using technology. And through an 18 month research process, we discovered that, hey, there’s lots of data out there you can use to improve your process. And if you do your process inside of a workflow system, we can actually capture some of that bespoke stuff that you do in the data that is unstructured. And we can then create a automated version of that or at least help you go faster, do some stuff ahead of time almost in a sort of AI, you know, support mode. And that will be the future of underwriting.
John Belizaire
And were trying to build a company that convinced people who were in the risk management business. I like to say, you know, our customers are in the risk management business, not in the risk taking business. So to come to them and say you should do all of your risk decisions in a risky new company’s platform is going to be super hard. And what we did to help soften our experience of getting in the door is we started thinking about all the things that these underwriters are going to ask and get worried about, you know, when we come into that door. And we started developing responses to that. And then we thought to ourselves, like, what’s the best way to get that information out there before we get there? And that’s when we, you know, got exposed to.
John Belizaire
There’s a friend of mine who were saying, you should really look at content management. The company HubSpot was based in Boston, where our company was based. And so it didn’t take long for my network and others to sort of bang into each other and get introduced to this concept of content marketing. And we just started doing that. So I started like writing articles on LinkedIn to start out and getting this whole idea out there. We started doing some videos. I started going to conferences and doing speaking and then taking the content from the speaking and then using that to do more articles and so forth. And initially, you know, it didn’t change anything, right? We go in there and be like, who are you guys and what do you do? You know? And then very quickly and rapidly we would go in.
John Belizaire
Yeah, we know exactly what you do. We just have three or four questions. We want you to take us through or show us the product. You know, one of the things you guys don’t do in your videos is you don’t show us the product. But we’re really excited to see it because I’ve been telling people there’s this company out there that does exactly what we’ve been trying to do, you know, and so I became a believer at that time. It was the biggest shift in our business to make a conscious decision to invest in, you know, content marketing for that previous company. And it helped to drive sales for us. It helped to just change everything about our go to market motion as a company.
John Belizaire
And so as a big believer and almost religious about it, every company I go to, either where I’m brought in as a CEO or I’m a Founder, like, that’s like the first thing we just start doing is just talk about, there’s this problem, there’s this problem. Here’s the solution, you know, and that’s what we did here.
Brett
What have you learned about building out that content machine? If there’s any founders that are listening in who are maybe doing some blog posts, but not much else besides that, what advice you have for them?
John Belizaire
My advice actually is this is going to sound counterintuitive, but founders usually don’t do this because they feel that it’s just a lot of work. Like, I don’t have time to write blog articles and whatnot, you know, and it turns out that you can do this very easily. You can start by setting a block of time in your calendar. Every day or every few days in any given week, you have one of your marketing content people or marketing team people just come into your office and just start asking you questions on tape. What’s our product about? Who’s our ideal customer? What differentiates us from our competitors? Why did you start this company? Tell us more about your background. What do you see the vision for this business, you know, and get that content on tape.
John Belizaire
Now, what you have there is basically raw material that can then get reproduced into a series of content pieces. Let me give an example. One snippet of the answers to one of the questions that you gave on that can be turned into a blog post because you take the audio and you transcribe it and now you have all the text. Okay. So you can produce that into a blog post. You can take the entire interview and turn it into a podcast episode. And you can do a series of these over five to Six different sittings. And now you’ve got a whole season of a podcast. You can take the video or the content and then produce animation video where you touch on the question and answer.
John Belizaire
You can do slides that you can use essentially to introduce this content, or you can use that to produce it as a one pager on the product and solution. I can keep going. And now with AI, you can take that whole transcription and essentially turn it into a series of email sequences, you can turn it into a newsletter post, et cetera. So those are the kind of things that are pretty exciting. So that’s the power of it. And it’s so simple once you get the power of it. And then you have this machinery that just keeps creating content pieces constantly, you know what I mean? Taking these little snippets and just producing them into multiple different versions. And all of a sudden you’ve got blog article. That’s just a question and answer with our CEO.
John Belizaire
Learn more about our company, you know, and once you got that library built up, it becomes a powerful tool for getting your story out there.
Brett
What about on the podcast side? How do you think about the ROI there of the time spent and the resources spent on the podcast itself?
John Belizaire
So initially were concerned about that because they’re like, okay, you know, we’re just going to create this thing and put it out into the void and who’s going to be listening to it. But podcasting has become kind of like the new medium for people consuming information and learning about things, because there’s these cell phones with these really great headsets and people have a real challenge just sitting quietly and doing nothing. So if you’re traveling at the airport, you might want to be listening to a podcast. And if you’re doing research in a specific area, you can listen to this podcast series and learn some stuff as you plan the acquisition of a solution to your problems. If you’re on the treadmill, you might want to use that to learn about AI and learn about some of the companies that are in the AI space.
John Belizaire
Maybe you have a mandate to invest in sustainable AI solutions that are going to help you drive your business forward. But how do you find AI solutions and sustainable solutions? Well, you’re going to put in some search terms and if there’s a podcast out there, you’re probably going to grab that because who has time to read these long form articles all the time? And so you’ll grab that and read it. What we have found is once you get that out there, the buildup of audience goes much faster. Than you think, especially if you promote it well and integrate it into every other piece of content that you have. Put snippets of it out there and suddenly you have a fast following.
John Belizaire
Because it’s very easy for people to add podcasts to their podcast listening app and then they listen to it, you know, when there’s a convenient time to do that, at high speeds, et cetera. So we find ROI to be really high. The other thing that has a high roi, by the way, is newsletters. So now you have the podcast or audience, you see who your audience is, you build a newsletter that even if it just replicates the pod and insights from the pod into small snippets or topics, all of a sudden you’ve got this engine that can feed building up your newsletters. And the newsletter then becomes a very powerful tool. The one thing that we haven’t done yet as a company that I would like to do is to write a book. Believe it or not, books are an extremely powerful marketing tool.
John Belizaire
And I’ve got this idea around renewable computing and how AI is sort of reshaping the energy landscape. And I would love to write that book and, you know, publish it. And that will also create a content. We’ll learn some things, educate people and draw people toward us too.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. I’ve done books with a few clients and I’ll share with you the company that I know who does it really well.
John Belizaire
Awesome. Could be.
Brett
But yeah, books are like the ultimate business card. I think you’re walking around, have that book with you, it’s like there’s no better way to demonstrate credibility.
John Belizaire
Exactly. 100%. And you know, one of the things I like to do is when I meet a person in person after I leave, you know, email has become such a noisy place. What I’ll do is I’ll typically write them a handwritten note, which takes time and people will appreciate. And then I, I mail it to them. Yes, the old classic snail mail. And I’ll send them one of my favorite books that’s, you know, something I find insightful or whatever. Right. So we had our own book. I can come to the meeting with the book and here’s a gift or send it to them after as an after drop off. And that’s just something very personal that allows you to stand tall in all of the noise.
Brett
I’ll have to send you a picture of my living room. Currently I have an operation that does something very similar at the end of the year. I mail, you know, clients and prospects and my you know, kind of professional colleagues. One of my favorite books this year I’m doing. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Ryan Holiday, but Obstacles the World by Him is one of my favorites. And he has this version of it that looks almost like a Bible, like a super cool version signed by him. So I have about 50 of those sitting in my living room getting ready to be shipped out here.
John Belizaire
Oh, that’s awesome. See, that’s fantastic.
Brett
I love it. Yeah, there’s something magical I think about, like, receiving something in the mail. When I get something in my email, I’m like, stop it. You know, why are you bothering me?
John Belizaire
Exactly. Exactly. My email is already a nuisance for me right now because that’s the most challenging tool to manage in my life. Book that comes in the mail. I’m definitely going to spend some time with that.
Brett
Yeah, 100%. I’m seeing that we are up on time. I feel like there’s so much that we could cover here. We’ll probably just have to bring you back on to do a part two before we wrap up here. Maybe let’s end with a vision question or let’s dive into the vision a bit more, paint a picture for us, you know, three to five years into the future, what’s the company going to look like?
John Belizaire
So in three to five years, our goal is to have completely shifted our business to be primarily an AI renewable computing company. So we will have scaled and distributed data centers all around the US we will have exited the US and have operations in South America and Europe and Australia, where the stranded issue, stranded energy issue is a big problem. And we’ll have relationships with more of the world’s top and most elaborated, if you will, asset owners. And I think the final thing that will really prove that our vision has been achieved is we will have the first power plant and data center being built at the same time or, you know, shortly after one another as one integrated project. That’s when we’ve reached our goal where, again, there’s complete convergence, where a renewable energy project and a computing project are the same thing.
John Belizaire
Achieving renewable computing and renewables as the primary source of power in the world.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. John, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve learned a lot. And the audience is going to learn a lot from you as well.
John Belizaire
Thanks, Brett. Pleasure to be on the show.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io Podcast, and for the latest episode, search for category visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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