YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Williams

lines on the record: 85
first: 2021-06-30
most recent: 2021-06-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We had started to think about could we raise another fund and focus it directly in this space. Another thing happened that was really interesting. Pop and I were driving to Charlotte to buy a McDonald's to turn it into a coin laundry mat. He had met JP Barrick, who owns the mining store. And JP was like mining Ethereum in his dorm room at NC State when he was, you know, in college. He and Anthony had started to tinker with GPU mining. So on that car ride to Charlotte, Pomps telling me about GPU mining and Ethereum. And I'm sitting on a plant that generates six megawatts of free power as a waste stream here in North America. And, you know, I'm kind of like hitting a wall because I'm like, they're only going to pay me three cents a kilowatt hour for this power.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Easy. We immediately said we got to do something together. And what we did was we developed the concept for full tilt capital, which was going to professionalize friends and family investing. And we raised, I don't know, about $3.5 million to go into early stage stuff and put it into like 60 different companies. And then we had another maybe $15 million that we put into late stage pre-IPO stuff. SpaceX, Reddit, Airbnb, Lyft, like a lot of cool stuff. And man, we were deploying capital. We were kind of local heroes in terms of like the early stage venture stuff, getting to know each other and then recognized that there was a lot of talent going into blockchain and a lot of pro money moving in that space.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A young woman or man could put this nail polish on, dip it in there, drink, and detect six typical date rape drugs. I had invested in that company early and were working with the founders to perfect it. Mark Cuban had invested in that as well. A friend of mine, and I didn't know at this point, friend of Anthony's Pompe Liano, had said, hey, this guy named Pomp is leaving Snapchat and moving back to Raleigh. You need to meet with him. Like, I think you guys would get along well. He put us in contact. This is like 2015, 2016. And we set up to meet in downtown Raleigh for 30 minutes. We ended up staying for two and a half hours. It's like you meet someone and you just know. Yeah, it's like us talking right now. It's like”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I had said to you I was doing some like early stage investing. And one of the investments I had done is in a technology that had made a claim. I was a nail polish that could detect date rape drugs. It came out of NC State University. So the claim was that”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of those tires ourselves. And I had a replicatable model that could exist in certain environments that would allow us permitting.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I shake off the carbon, I sell the steel, they just come pick it up and give me scrap steel price. I use the solid fuels or I sell them into the solid fuel market to create power. I use the oil, either sell it into the blended fuels market or use it for our own energy use. And the gaseous fuel I use, the vapor stream I use for power as well. All of those things when I first endeavored to monetize them, I thought I would just produce power for the grid, but that led me to cryptocurrency mining. There's a whole another track or discussion. That's kind of the story of PRTI and its evolution to that point where I had at scale taking care of 10% of all the waste tires in North Carolina. So we had 12 million waste tires a year. We were taking care of like 1.2 million.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm pulling that vapor stream off and collecting and cooling a fuel. And that fuel is like a bunker fuel. When I say bunker fuel, you'd use that in, it's a high sulfur fuel that you would use in a ship once it gets into international waters. The vapor stream that I can't condense into an oil is like a syngas. So it's all the butane, propanes, methane. It's got a lot of the different combustible components. I can pull that in, scrub it, and combust it in terms of energy as well. So I've got liquid fuel. I've got a gas stream. And then after 11 hours, I'm left with a carbon that's like a mid-grade Appalachian coal. So it's a solid fuel and then steel. There's a fair amount of steel in a tire. So I dumped that out after a...”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tire is 40% oil. It's got carbon in it, steel, Kevlar. It's got a lot of things in it that are volatile in terms of the synthetic polymer. That heat is monitored with about 80 different sensors up the stack of tires and up this 40 foot container. So I'm measuring the temperature differences up the stack. And over a 11 hour process moving those tires down to this hot spot just using gravity and turning them from a semi-solid to a gas. I'm not lighting them on fire. I'm heating them and they turn into a gas. And then I'm pulling that vapor stream off at a certain temperature. It's around 350 to 400 C.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Minutes and creating coals, like hot coals at the bottom. The bottom of the cylinder is actually, there's thermal concrete and some other really cool technologies in it, but in essence, it's just a green egg. So after 20 minutes, I pull the torch out, closed that port, and then I start to drag oxygen or atmosphere back over those hot coals. So there's no additional fuels. There's no catalyst. There's no other energy. I've spent 20 minutes of some type of gas to create hot coals and now I'm dragging atmosphere over that with vacuum pumps. That becomes super hot at the base. Imagine blowing on a coal. It gets red hot.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Produced one of these tire disposal systems where you had no preparation of the tire. You could just take a dirty tire and throw it in my machine. So you put 300 tires in the machine, the machine then goes back into a vertical position. It's all done by computer. And then lid closes on top of it and it informs a seal. We put a vacuum pump or some pressure and we evacuate the atmosphere out of that vessel. So all you have is tires and we've pulled out the atmosphere. I insert a torch into the bottom of this giant cylinder and you've got all the tires randomly inside of it. And I blast it with this torch and create like a Coke layer. So it's not on fire. I'm blasting those tires with this torch for 20.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Speaking a language, I don't know. I did the same thing with a hospital emergency room, right? I said, this thing is big and inefficient. People are unhappy. Let's make it small. And kind of tactically more replicatable and usable. And so we took these systems, these cylinders. Each one of them had its own programmable logic controller. It worked independent of the other system. So there was some redundancy. You had this 40 foot chamber. You had an oil processing and containment system behind it. Then you have an emergency flare behind it. The cylinder rotates forward. you load it with about 300 whole tires and that's really novel because no one had ever”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To that and this, and then it goes here and then that has to go into here. But if any of those systems breaks, the whole plant goes down. So I wanted to make sure that we had something called like a continuous batch system that was modularized.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a big scale endeavor, and no one has, this is 2014, no one has ever built something like this to scale and had it persist. So the waste management, waste industries, republic, Goodyear, Bridgestone, all of these companies, they've always wanted some other solution to dispose of tires other than throwing them in a landfill or shredding these things. Here I come making these claims and they're like, yeah, we've heard it all before. You've got a magic machine and you can put this in here and get that. We built it, Preston, and we built it at scale. So what you would see if you came to PRTI is I've got six 40 foot cylinders and they rotate on an axis point. They're all independent. So one of the things that I didn't like about massive industrial complexes is they're all connected. You've got like conveyor belts feeding this.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And everyone can participate. Some guy who's a like nuclear physicist sitting on top of everything because I've had those guys come to PRTI. We're just like, okay, that sounds interesting, but it's not applicable because we just don't understand it. The PRTI is a cool thing.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it doesn't need to break, and I need to be able to anticipate its failure. And I know that. Failure mode analysis is a whole engineering discipline, but it's nothing like I'm going to arrive at that instinctively. Like I'm going to say that pump keeps breaking. That's a crappy pump. Like, find me another pump and put some system in place so we can predict its failure. Because when it fails, I lose primary control of the whole system. We can't let that thing fail.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like I'm out of discipline. Like, I sit in a room with electrical engineers, welders, computer engineers, programmable logic coders. I'm totally out of discipline, but I'm like, I need this to work in 13 steps. That step doesn't make sense to me. Explain to me why we're doing this. Like, what is a vacuum pump do? And then I'm like, draw that for me. The ess”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and I wanted it to be, even though it wasn't in my voice, I wanted people who know me or have ever talked to me to say, that's him talking. I can hear him saying that. I apply that same type of philosophy to engineering. He's funny. Only recently have I realized like that's kind of Elon Musk's mode as well. Like he doesn't let people use like industry-specific nomenclature. Like it's banned. Like if it needs to be big, use the word big. If it's small, small, light. heavy like that's me it's funny i wonder if that comes because elon musk is really out of discipline you know what i'm saying like”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like I think there's some things that I can lean on. One of them is when you're dealing with highly technical, highly sensitive situations, specifically around people's health, you have to be able to deliver the message and you have to be able to deliver that message to people who speak English, to people who this isn't their primary language through an interpreter. I mean, you've been trained this way. So you understand what I'm talking about. For me, I think one of the things that I'm able to do is take complicated processes and systems and speak very plainly. I write like I talk. And that, I think, is why people relate to the book. Like I needed to write that book because it imprints in my brain, these complex things, but I didn't want to write it in a highly academic kind of way because that's just not how I talk.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, part of it. But I also like it's all those things. It's all those things. But I don't know, again, I'm not formally trained. Like my formal trainings in medicine and hard sciences, I'm not an engineer, but I built a very big waste management business at scale that eventually mined cryptocurrency. So like we can go down that path. I'm as proud of PRTI as I am FastMed because it really, to your point, like I kind of got lucky that life-changing idea and realized it and monetized it. My second gig was PRTI. And right now, you know, that company's valued at about $125 million and is expanding. And I'm very proud of that. And we survived COVID, the shutdown, et cetera.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With absolute intensity, those are fun people to be around. And if you share success along the way and everyone understands what winning is, oh my goodness, you can build some amazing teams. So really for me, I don't need to be the smartest guy in the room. I just want to be a part of the team. And sometimes on the quarterback, and sometimes I'm just running the ball hard.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know, Press, and I can just tell you that looking back, like if you were ever at a pickup game, like pickup basketball game or like I was the guy that people would pick. Like, hey, I want Jason on my team. And then, like, I would be the guy picking the teams as I started to get older. And that just naturally happened. Yeah, and my mode has been conflict resolution, focus on aligning goals, finding everyone's unique motivation and pushing hard in that direction. So when you find someone's unique motivation, you align goals and you resolve conflict.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With something that I thought was viable on paper. Then I took a, I don't know, 50 gallon barrel, cut a tire into a fourth, and insulated it. It looked like a satellite and heated it externally until we got the temperature around 300 C internally. And I started to pull a vapor stream off of it and condense that into a really crappy oil. That was the beginning of it. I had that on the back of a picture. I put a bunch of money in, bought 10 acres of land close to where I live and lived in that field for a year. I really lived in the field. I had a very small team of engineers and we perfected the technology.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was always interested in early stage seed investing. So I would tell you like starting in 2012 to 2015, I had been looking at things that were interesting and putting small amounts of capital, $50 or $100,000 into things. So I had arrived at some areas of interest for me, energy, robotics, medical applications, service offerings. I've got some restaurants and stuff like that, but that is probably not as impressive. But that was really it. So I had developed a bit of cognitive diversity in my own kind of approach to things and thought I had a good solution. I had looked at some patents that had made some claims on how they dealt with synthetic polymers and tires and de-manufacturing them. And I thought we could iterate on them. So I just hired a bunch of organic chemists and we sat in a room and broke this thing down and came up.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. Yeah. It was like Peter Drucker, right? My first social responsibility is to be profitable after I'm profitable, then I can go give all my money away. But let's deal with that first. So yeah, man, that's where the idea for PRTI came up. Like let's take this massive worldwide problem of trashed tires. You can use an equation like one tire per year per person is disposed of around the world for the most part. So here in the United States, we dispose of about 350 million scrap tires a year. That's not counting the blemish tires that come out of the factories or heavy industrial tires. These are passenger tires or light truck tires. And 20% of them end up on the side of the road in water ponds and lakes in the woods. And then we don't have a nice or good solution for them. And that's where PRTI was born.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally different direction. Wow. So I had some patents that I've written in robotics and synthetic polymer science. And I was really interested in doing some type of renewable energy thing. But I didn't want to, I don't know how this is going to come off. I didn't want to do something that had any subsidies, like that needed any type of government support to survive. It's pure free market capitalism. Like if I'm going to build something, I'm going to build it so it's profitable. So you were.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years where I was blocked out of healthcare. So everything I knew, my whole adult life I spent working on that business Preston, and after I sold it in 2015, I was done, like couldn't work in that space any longer. Gave me a boatload of money to do that, right?”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up and you're just recognizing kind of patterns and aligning these things. But again, it takes a different mentality. You know, someone who feels very comfortable not knowing has the self-confidence to stand before his mistakes, make corrections, be confident, like changing his mind. Like these are like mantras. 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. But yeah, 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 like the hardest thing I ever did because when I raised some capital in 2010, I had to sign a 10-year non-compete. So my 10-year non-compete started in 2010. I exited the whole company in 2015. So I had five more years.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And rush fast in the wrong direction. And then those same people who don't know what they don't know rush in the right direction and build something extraordinary, right? For me, retrospectively, we got it right more than we got it wrong, Preston. We built these systems. We adopted electronic medical rectors. We went from traditional x-ray to packed systems and digital x-ray. We went from trying to training people how to code to having coding algorithms assist people to how do you deal with real estate. Do you buy all the buildings? Do you build them to Novo? Or is there some plug and play when we went into our blitz scaling phase blockbuster video stores went out of business? So those were like in this perfect location for the kind of retail play I was doing. So I just went out and warehoused all these Blockbuster video stores so that we could open.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you have like so many things happening at once over the, let's call it 15 years that I was building that company, that it's going to be, 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, right? 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, right? So you're essentially building the plane while you're flying it. Most people are uncomfortable doing that. 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.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“FastMed, the thesis was I could do 80% of what you'd find in a US-based emergency department. So it would be like 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. And this is 2000, 2001. So super early pioneering in that space. No physician assistants owned medical practices, let alone employ doctors. So I was like public enemy number one, you know, from a career perspective. That was it, Preston. Then I just kind of self-funded and went one, two, three, ten more private. Equity 200”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And 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. That's why most people don't escape queens. They don't escape Borkel place. Like they're stuck there. Everyone wants to leave. It's just a 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. And she wasn't happy, but it worked out for me.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's one of those defining moments. Like 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, like those things like early on, I bought into the fact that I needed Yale on my resume because my resume was weak”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 kind of 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? That just wasn't available to me, unfortunately. I just hacked it together and landed on physician assistant, right? Shafra the Moon landed on some meteor close to the moon.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And 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. That company was FastMed. And I grew that over my kind of entire adult life into the nation's second largest privately owned urgent care and primary care practice cross-country. I had 1,400 employees, about 400 PAs and doctors working for me, and then sold that company in totality in 2000.”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Born in Queens immigrant family, mom 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. 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 so PAs that profession was started like around 1974 in regards to physician assistants I'll give you a little color and then continue but they they weren't like naval corpsmen returning from the Vietnam War and when they returned they didn't have a place these were highly competent like medics that could save”
2021-06-30 · We Study Billionaires · BTC032: Bitcoin Mining & Entrepreneurship w/ Jason Williams (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT