From Jump Trading, to crypto investing, to climbing Mount Everest: Chase Lochmiller's unusual path to building a billion-dollar tech startup solving one of the oil industry's thorniest problems
After a standout career in quant trading, Chase Lochmiller left Wall Street to climb Mount Everest.Lochmiller's team is working with companies like Exxon to solve one of the oldest problems in the oil industry. Startup ideas can form in unorthodox places. For Chase Lochmiller, that place was Mount Everest.
During his two months in Nepal ascending Everest, Lochmiller contemplated the evolutions in the cryptocurrency space as well as developments in artificial intelligence that had transformed other industries. He had conviction these trends would continue to drive societal advances and wanted to contribute, though the right idea for a company hadn't crystallized.
"The reason flaring is a problem is there's no economic way to physically transport the gas to a market where it will be used to benefit people," Lochmiller said."But computing is a unique application and very modular; you can transport the data instead of the gas, and data is much easier to transport than gas."
That dream faded as he discovered the glacial pace of academic research. Looking for work with a bit more zip, and with an inclination to bank some savings, he turned to Wall Street, landing a job at the high-frequency-trading firm Getco in 2008 to work on its electronic market-making business. While he and his team at Jump brought in hundreds of millions in profits and grew substantially, the impact was somewhat abstract, and Lochmiller felt a tug toward different pursuits.
In the summer of 2017, he took the plunge and left Jump to join Polychain Capital. At the time, it was a small cryptocurrency-investment fund with roughly $25 million in assets. But amid a boom in crypto interest, assets ballooned to over a billion dollars in less than a year — all while staff worked out of a two-bedroom loft in the SoMa neighborhood in San Francisco that at times doubled as a home to staff, including Lochmiller. He recalled the experience as"surreal.
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