From a 9-Figure Exit to a $10 Billion Data Center with Jason Van Gaal

**Brad Weimert** (0:00)
Let me paint a picture. It's 5 a.m., I'm in a lodge in the middle of nowhere, British Columbia. I stumble out of my room, walk into the kitchen area, and in the corner, I see Jason Van Gaal sitting, drinking coffee, hammering away at his keyboard. And when I sat down, I found out that you were building a $10 billion data center. Why come out of retirement for this?

**Jason Van Gaal** (0:19)
I mean, I haven't built a $10 billion data center before, so it sounded like fun.

**Brad Weimert** (0:25)
Jason Van Gaal, since 2010, you've been building data centers. In 2013, you exited your first company, Granite. 2019 was exit number two, which was deemed to be third largest Canadian tech exit. And now you're on to your third, which is an even bigger swing at AI data centers. In 2019, you had a nine-figure exit in less than five years. What was your biggest mistake through that process?

**Jason Van Gaal** (0:44)
Oh, many mistakes. I think if you're trying to build a large business, it's really important.

**Brad Weimert** (0:53)
Congrats on getting Beyond A Million. What got you here won't always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven-figure business in scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I'm Brad Weimert, and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology, and wealth building, and you'll learn some of the specific tools, tactics, and strategies that are working today in those multi-million eight, nine, and 10 figure businesses. Life can get exciting Beyond A Million.
Jason Van Gaal, it is great to see you, man. Welcome to Beyond A Million.

**Jason Van Gaal** (1:39)
Yeah, nice to see you too, Brad.

**Brad Weimert** (1:41)
So your new venture Synapse, which is a $10 billion data center that you're working on right now, what keeps you up at night? Is it power, is it capital, is it community pushback?

**Jason Van Gaal** (1:51)
Yeah, I mean, lots of things keeping me up at night. How do I buy natural gas? How do we make sure that the facility operates in a way that is conducive to what the local regulators require, the cost of ensuring that that happens? It's not inexpensive to achieve those regulatory requirements.
Trying to manage misinformation keeps me up a lot, I would say.
There's things that I see clearly as an engineer and somebody that has been in this industry for many years, that I take for granted in terms of how these facilities safely operate. But uncommon mistakes and disasters make for very interesting Internet videos. And so, no one is clicking on how a data center operates really, really well. 99.9% of the time, it's what happens at that 0.1% and then we need to speak with the community and the province and about how we ensure that 0.1% of the time doesn't happen in our specific location. So that probably keeps me up the most at night these days is articulating that. And then it's how do you articulate what is a very, very technically complex problem that I don't fully understand? Because I have a lot of Jasons that are working on the projects. I know Datacenter as well, but we have missions expert, noise experts, plant experts, environmental experts. And so all of those parts need to work together well. And so how do we articulate that in a way that somebody that is not a professional engineer or an expert in all of those things can understand and have confidence and trust in that we're going to do it well and protect their livelihoods, which is our focus?

**Brad Weimert** (3:30)
Well, let's back out. So Datacenter has obviously been around for a very long time, but the value of them today is tremendously different than they were. And how they get constructed today is different than what it was. Let's back out Root, which was the business that you sold in 2019
What I read was that one of the primary functions there was being able to build those things radically faster with Root. So you cut build time from 12 months for the datacenter to 120 days. Walk me through what that process was like and how you approach that problem.

**Jason Van Gaal** (4:02)
Yeah, part of how we solve that problem is like a modular approach, which is it's not unique to what we do. A subset of that modular approach is sizing of equipment and having it readily available as a commodity versus custom sizing, which some other data center providers will do. The layout of the facility is critical, accessing components and how they're installed and maintained. That feeds into it as well. Then it's closely coupled decision-making between the engineering team and business leadership.