What The Funk?

0:08 Bitcoin and energy go together like two peas in a pot. Everybody knows that, Dan.

0:15 Yeah, well did you know that our 12 gauge shoots very violently?

0:30 What's up, wildcatters? That's what people do back here, right, John? Yeah.

0:36 I. What the fuck? We're here. Actually doing a podcast in person at the digital wildcatters worldwide headquarters. Let's get off of Britmore Road. I'm excited. I did one podcast here before

0:50 where I was a guest on oil and gas startups and had always wanted to get in here and film a podcast with Tim. Unfortunately, that didn't happen The podcast mostly existed during COVID. And then

1:02 once they had the office and studio set up, Tim had cancer and sadly passed away. So it was nice to see his picture sitting out there. They blew up a picture of us from Empower to see my guys. So

1:13 definitely with a heavy heart thinking about Tim today, but also getting to know some new friends in here as well. So for my consistent listeners, three people that are going to introduce

1:24 themselves, we'll start with my guest co-host today, John Calphian.

1:30 Yeah, yeah - Yeah - Yeah. And then we've got Tyler and Rodney. So give a kind of a quick introduction and then we'll just do this conversation style - Yeah, appreciate it. Appreciate you let me

1:40 fill in and guest host for you here. So John Calfan worked for VW prior to that. I was a Frack engineer for half my career and then got into kind of sales marketing, BD and data side of things.

1:53 And so done everything from Frack jobs, our working Frack jobs, selling Frack jobs, all the way to gauges and breast work testing and stuff like that. And now I'm here at VW. So turn over to you

2:09 guys - Yeah, Tyler Cherry, co-founder with Rodney over a bit out and we have a 15 year track record in the old field services space. So, let Rodney kind of go for there - Yes, I'm Rodney Giles.

2:24 I'm co-founder of BitOut with Tyler here So I'm really calm a self-assarial entrepreneur built and sold a few companies, mostly in the cloud technology space and done some investments in the oil and

2:34 gas base for a while as well. So that's it. If you haven't checked out the digital wildcatters headquarters, you got to come out here. It's pretty nice. Studio picklewalk court. It's a pretty

2:44 impressive modified picklewalk court because the ceiling makes it very interesting playing pickleball when it's only whatever it is, eight, ten feet. Isn't just a compressed form of tennis

2:56 It's more like ping pong than it is tennis in all honesty. But yes, it's like adult size ping pongs or tennis, but it's a ton of fun. I feel like it's whatever. It's the fastest growing sport in

3:08 America. It is. I think it is that way because it's

3:13 a good enough workout, but it's not so intense because we always play doubles, but trying to play singles with that is just like playing singles tennis It's very intensive, but having four people

3:25 playing doubles. really fun and get your heart going, but you're not like just exhausted and feel like, oh, this person is so much better than me. It's just very easy to pick up. It's a little

3:34 tough one. Yeah, it's fun. It was one of the sports, I think that we picked up during COVID because there was some outdoor pickleball boards near us and the kids could play, even though they

3:46 ended up like crying a lot because I couldn't always hit it over the net. But that's what you get with young daughters. Anyways,

3:54 you guys office right next door over here We've been out at two and a half years and having to have a known call on some of the guys over here at Digital Wildcat or short while. And but yeah, great

4:03 location here in Houston at the Cannon and. Yeah, actually when we landed here, Rod Aylizal in the north side of town. So kind of a backstory, Rod and I grew up together and we, Tom Ball, Tom

4:18 Ball proper. So north of, north of Houston went through high school together. and kind of went our own paths. Rodney, he could speak more to that, but built and developed and sold some software

4:31 companies or work companies. And I got sucked up in the oil field pretty shortly after university. And so Rodney and I reconnected probably about three years ago, and I was living in San Antonio

4:43 covering South Texas in the Eagleford. And it made sense for us to kind of land here at the cannon. It's about halfway in between the two of us and kind of central to Houston. Most of our customers

4:55 were in Houston anyways. So yeah, made a good sense. Where'd you go to school? I'm telling him. That's what I thought. Don't hold against me.

5:05 You already for snaggy jokes?

5:09 I like the Aggies, man. You know, Mike Evans, Robert Williams, one of my favorite players, I don't know if you're like a big Aggie sports fan or anything like that, but. I kind of fell off the

5:20 cliff this year. Wow, this was the best year for a lot. No. And how about you? We know what you guys grew up together, right? Elementary school, same year in high school? Yeah, same year.

5:32 Yeah, same year. I think we went to intermediate school and high school together. Yeah, and the - Yeah, grew up in the northeastern area, spring, Tom Ball, Woodlands area, still live up there

5:41 now. When I was in high school, I was very interested in computers and the internet and started a web hosting company, really, a cloud company before it was called Cloud Senior year in high school,

5:52 when I graduated, I had about a dozen employees working for me already. So I decided to skip college and continue to grow that business over the next 10 or so years. Had about 150 employees, had

6:04 offices in Singapore and Los Angeles and New York and sold that business off about 10 years after I started it. And went out and bought a bunch of oil and gas royalties, minerals, all over 10

6:16 states, thousands of wells, operated a few at the time. and don't operate anything anymore. Realized I'm a lot better at technology than I am the oil and gas business. To me, it was a, I wasn't

6:29 geologically sophisticated enough to make very expensive decisions. So I would follow people into drilling wells and participating in them based upon how much other people were investing of their own

6:40 money. So I would find these promoter guys that were drilling wells and they weren't putting any money up while wanting anything to do it. And then I would find guys in West Texas who they would let

6:50 me in on a part of the well and they were putting up 50 of their own capital, of their personal capital, not other investors' monies. And so I would be successful on some of those wells, but

7:00 pricing turned down and just decided it was a lot better to get back in the cloud space than I was really good at. And so took a company there and grew it and expanded in the multiple markets in New

7:11 Jersey and San Francisco and Lana Dallas, Houston and ultimately exited out of that a couple of years ago.

7:19 During all of those ventures, we were always building very sophisticated software, but the businesses were always valued as like a typical infrastructure company, very capital intensive business.

7:28 So our buyers were never looking at us from a, you know, a SaaS product or anything like that. So I was really searching for an ideal to build a SaaS business and just so happened, the Tyler

7:38 reached out to me, kind of with an ideal. And so,

7:45 I mean, he gets the credit on that and the - Oh, you were in the brain's mind - of the rest is kind of history. So it was, you know, I think three and a half years or so ago, it was kind of when

7:54 we really started putting some ideals together and the rest is history. So, yeah. So, so bit out, full disclosure, working with funk futures. They're a client of ours. I'm really bullish on it

8:06 for a few different reasons. One, like you guys, I think you have the right mindset. I have no doubt that the product will be successful. the competition or perceived competition that I see in

8:17 the space is all very big companies that come with a really large price tag. And probably because of the other systems that they have around it may not care as much about the procurement platform,

8:28 whereas you guys have gone all in with procurement. And Tyler, I want you to talk about this a little bit. But what was very obvious to me when I first got into oil and gas 15 years ago is there

8:39 are so many deals that happen and are decided behind the scenes in the field in somewhat nefarious ways, right? So bringing transparency into how a vendor is chosen just fundamentally makes a lot of

8:54 sense to me. And when I saw a bit out, I'm like, all right, these guys know what's going to how many service companies do you have as listeners to this podcast? I mean, there's probably a few

9:02 hundred Yeah, you know, when we launched the product, ultimately

9:07 we

9:10 were looking to launch the most comprehensive, easy to use platform out there. I was accustomed to probably the likes of what you guys were using, such as Reba and Oracle, really complicated

9:23 systems, really financial tools that were not sourcing procurement straight-up supply chain systems. So they were rolled out as an integration with a lot of these big companies and come to find out

9:37 they actually weren't even fully utilizing the sourcing tool because it was too complicated So your supply chain folks were still sending out spreadsheets. If they did source through, let's say I

9:48 had to beat up on a Reba, but let's just say a company like a Reba, they would use it, but your support was offshore. So if you needed support on the tool, you're dealing with the time dilemma

9:58 and then trying to deal with the language barrier. And so we just looked at this, we said we're going to be Houston based, we're going to be near shore, onshore for development and be able to

10:10 support our clientele here immediately a land-based lower 48. and continue to expand from there. Today, we actually reached in Canada as well. And offshore. Yeah, and offshore as well.

10:25 Nice. Well, so yeah, I've done a number of RFPs in my life. And they've been through everything from SAP or RIBA all the way down to just, here's a spreadsheet template. And here's the term,

10:38 you know, the term sheet. We've got a customer of ours who just so happens to be probably one of the top four operators here in the US They were telling us a story the other day. They did a, I

10:46 think it was a water disposal job. One of the vendors took a screenshot of Excel, printed the screenshot off, had like a Sharpie marker filled in the pricing. I'm not kidding. Texted the photo to

10:58 the procurement rep. I was like, here's RIBD. And they ended up winning the work.

11:04 Wow. That's the most oil field thing I've heard in a minute. And I'm like, I'm sure he's a one-showery child while he was driving an 18-wear.

11:13 probably holding a Yeti on the other hand too - Yeah, no, I mean, that highlights perfectly, kind of a lot of the issues with it in the space, right? Is that you've got everybody from, you know,

11:23 account managers in the office to guys in the field that are doing something else on a daily basis that all end up touching or being part of that process. And so it's like, even for a sophisticated

11:35 self, that's what I'm calling myself, a sophisticated technology user going through some of those as you've mentioned, ridiculously complicated, it's unnecessary. Plus you have to have, as a

11:46 service company, everybody uses something different. So you have to learn all these different tools. It's just a huge pain. And then so expecting people that aren't sophisticated with technology

11:55 to try and go into these processes, these applications and deal with all that stuff, it's just the same thing with every technology, right? Like if it's too complicated, they just don't use it -

12:04 I think for us, the beauties and the simplicity is that service providers can onboard in 60 seconds Operators can create a bid in 60 seconds. You know, we do that so that everything flows much

12:16 faster and much easier and there's no friction along the way. So yeah, we actually came to this meeting from meeting with the chief accounting officer, director of supply chain, his whole supply

12:26 chain team. So we look at it as kind of a field to finance type level, like easy enough that a field a company man can use to call out white plants like who do I use for a company man trailer, etc

12:39 And comprehensive enough that CFO chief accounting officer can look at this historical data and look at trends on spend. They see a lot of upside from the cost controls that we built into the

12:49 platform. Yeah. Yeah, it's nice to have both sides of that coin, like what they're using, right? Because that's, you know, in a lot of those field services, they get called out from the

12:59 company man or the field consultant or whatever, right? Yeah. And you don't want to forget about suppliers too. So you have to have both sides of the equation to actually make the system work So

13:10 we wanted to ensure, and we actually had the feedback from. probably exclusively every service company that we have on the platform that are using it. They're like, this is so simplistic. Wazier

13:18 than Phil Ants spreadsheet. We've got salesmen on the golf course on Friday afternoon that are responding to requests, responding to QA, and they can get on down the road. Well, I think I've got

13:29 a friend of mine who's kind of in the fulfilled cell space, and I've seen him respond to some bids before. And really, the buyers were really asking for eight or nine price numbers, but he had to

13:40 fill out a hundred cells with all sorts of repetitive information that these companies should not have to do every single time. Yeah. He would delay the process till the very end because he's got to

13:51 do all this work, where they really only needed these eight blanks. So anyways.

13:58 So I'm curious about the size of the bids. Do you guys have oil and gas companies that are bidding out things like office desk chairs and computers all the way up to a 10 million dollar? you know,

14:11 fleet or job out in the field? Like what are some of the biggest and smallest bids if you guys can talk about it that you've seen - Yeah, so we try to focus on just oil-filled services. And we tell

14:22 our buyers that,

14:26 you know, you're not gonna find your copy, paper, vendors and our platform. In theory, they could do it that way, but we just don't see that's the best use case scenario. But I mean, we've

14:37 done very large scale pipeline jobs We've done, you know, nine figure directional jobs. I mean, we've done very large jobs and small jobs, we have clients that do like repetitive, like MRO bids

14:50 that even include line items, like hard hats - Hard hats, extra small reserves - So as simple as that. So it just varies. And we don't really care what size they are - You just want bids for bids

15:02 - Yeah, it's not. I mean, I don't want it to be misunderstood. This is not like an e-commerce or, you know, an Amazon for the oil field I think there's some companies that. that are out there

15:11 that are trying to replicate that. But we're doing some very basic bids, as mentioned, with HSE all the way up to complicated frack designs. So it really takes in the whole breadth of that

15:24 audience - Yeah, I mean, we have bids that are two line items that go out every day. We have bids that are 150 line items that go out quite frequently. So, you know, it can go as, and that's

15:35 why it's so hard to do a, you know, we're just gonna order services like Amazon 'cause it's a very complex situation, where the locations are and how the, you know, every company bids things

15:44 differently. Some folks wanna pay per stage, some folks wanna pay per well pad. I mean, it's just, and we're talking some of the same services sometimes. So it's a complicated process. And we

15:55 do recognize that our buyers, the operators, generally they're very sophisticated people. But, you know, I think the suppliers, they're also sophisticated, but they see different formats every

16:04 time. So they, and that's our goal is to just focus simplicity make it unified.

16:17 And I hope for you to take the process a lot easier - Yeah, that's a, on the frackside, that's one of the most painful things, right? Is it's like every Q3 comes around, you get all RFPs in,

16:22 and it's like, okay, well, this major, this is how they wanna do it, they wanna pay by stage. This one wants to do it by well, this one wants to do, you know, by stage plus you get bonuses on

16:33 top if you exceed a certain average daily. And that like, I mean, there's so many, a lot of the big problems with procurement, in my opinion around the oil field, is that typically the supply

16:43 chain person that's responsible for bidding out some of these things, not all of them, but may not have a ton of domain expertise on what exactly they are bidding out, right? And I've heard,

16:55 I was complaining, this was years ago, somebody told me that when I buddies, who's a procurement person, an operator had like an intern or one of the new supply young supply chain guys come in,

17:05 they were talking about a workover job, He's like, well, what if we just use less pipe? And it's like, well, you can't really do that on a board. You're really, there's a certain depth that

17:15 you've got to get to, which means you have to have so many sticks of pipe. And so it's just things like that, right? Like I can't tell you how many frack jobs I bid where it's like, okay, they

17:25 send out the design, but the design doesn't have any of the chemicals. Right. So it's like, okay, well, I can did this out with no chemicals, but you're going to need chemicals. And then, and

17:33 then it gets really convoluted because of course, most of the time, they, the procurement person is the point of contact, which then, so all the questions have to go to them and they have to turn

17:43 around and send them to the engineer, even though you're the one who has the relationship with the engineer and you know all of this stuff, but you can't contact them directly. And there's, it's,

17:52 it's, there's so much opportunity for just clearing up the way that people communicate, centralizing it, and then also making sure that everything is clear as far as what exactly is going to be

18:02 better not because that was a, uh,

18:05 There's a lot of service, specifically big oil field service companies that. have the bid at low and logic room mentality. When you're on the other side of that and you're competing against them,

18:15 it's very frustrating because it's like, well, I'm giving you a bid that this is the maximum amount I'm going to charge you for - For their second exception, certain lines - Right, exactly - The

18:25 bundle services, yeah - Yeah, yes, God, don't even get going with everything integrated, bundling and stuff - I get the pain points. We work with several of these companies where they'll

18:35 actually ask us for recommendations on best case scenarios with certain categories and what we've seen in the market. We really look at the software as an extension of their supply chain, an

18:48 extension of their purchasing department, truly. So there's a human component that comes in as well.

18:55 We're not a company based out of Boston and we're just not going to support you - Nothing gets Boston - Yeah, it's wrong with Boston - Nothing gets Boston. So we're Houston based, we're right here

19:03 in the middle of it. And I think it's also noteworthy the generational. move and

19:13 see, can I say, I can't say, okay, so the boomers, we're just calling them boomers. We can do that. Okay, that are coming up on retirement that are exiting with a ton of knowledge, but then

19:23 you have a generation that's moving in that is very apt to using technology. Yep. And we have some internal checks around that, but we want to make it app friendly for these folks. Yeah, I think

19:34 everybody's used to ordering everything on demand now Whether it be DoorDash, Hoover, GrowHub, you know, and something from there that's, I think that's the goal. Yeah, let alone Amazon where

19:46 my wife spends all the money that comes in. Exactly. Every month.

19:52 I want to pivot a little bit. We'll come back to bit out a little bit later, but I want to pivot to talking about entrepreneurship because all of us have been through it in a number of different

19:60 ways. I'm fairly early in my entrepreneurial journey I'm 43 years old and had an idea of what I wanted funk futures to be when I was about But it took a little more stubbing my toe, a little more

20:12 failure until I was about 40, 41 to really launch what Funf futures has become. And it's been awesome to see it grow, not without its challenges, of course. And still balancing family and

20:25 entrepreneurship is not an easy thing. John, I'm curious a little bit, like you're sitting here working for digital autocadders now, but when you first hit my radar, I think you were the CEO of a

20:35 small company. So entry into your entrepreneurship journey, I wanna talk about that. Ronnie, obviously you've been at this for 20 some odd years, going back to high school. And then Tyler, you

20:45 kind of took more of a path like I took where you put in the work, right? You gained expertise and then made that pivot and transition a little bit later. So I wanna kind of get a sense of all of

20:57 our entrepreneurial journeys and how that's sort of taking us to sitting here today. Let me start with you, John - Yeah, so, I mean,

21:06 going all the way back to high school, one of my neighbors, he was a couple years older than me, had a long business. And I think I was 14 or I don't even know how old I was, but he needed help

21:18 with it because it was growing and I needed money because I needed to buy a car when I turned 16. And so I started working for him, working with him. And then he went off to college and basically

21:27 handed me as the route, so to speak, that he had built up. And I immediately fell in love with just being able to be in kind of control of what, you know, how, what you're doing And the money

21:38 that you're making. And so, you know, my undergrad is mechanical engineering, but I got my math and my minor in business because I was like, hey, there's, you know, there's. I wasn't the

21:50 engineer that was going to be going and designing things because I'm not confident enough in myself and my math that I ever wanted to be a PE to be able to put a stamp on something. I just couldn't

22:01 personally live with myself if something ever happened like that And so I knew that, you know, the business side of things. with the technical side would be a pretty interesting kind of combo. And

22:13 so after I got out of the field, I basically have worked for kind of startups or growth mode companies ever since. And so it's, it's just one of those things I personally love the being able to

22:24 come in and build something and see the impacts of it on a daily basis and see how, you know, hey, here's this problem. Let's go fix it. Right. And it's just this continuous string like you're

22:35 talking about, right? Like everyone, I think a lot of people get discouraged because it's like, Oh, well, you know, this happened and I mess this up and I should have done that. It's like,

22:41 well, that's part of the process. Right. Like everyone has failures and it, you know, pretty much every startup I've worked for has not done well. So it's been, it's been interesting in that

22:45 aspect and it can be, you know, uh,

22:52 it can

22:55 suck at times, but it's one of those things that 90 plus percent of small businesses fail. Like it's just how it is. And so once you kind of reframe that it, it continues to motivate me and stuff

23:06 And so, you know. like you mentioned, yeah, therefore, I think maybe two whole months, I was the CEO of a company that me a couple buddies had started and wanted to bring me on with, but we

23:17 couldn't figure out the terms and conditions and stuff of that. And so that was an interesting time in my life because yeah, you get all these, I mean, whether you're the entrepreneur or you're

23:27 working for a startup, it definitely comes with its highs and lows all the time. You know, it's got to be kind of have some emotional fortitude, so to speak, to be able to be in this, it's

23:37 definitely not for everybody. And then you get to that phase where you're like, okay, now we brought on investor funding and that celebration lasts for all of about 30 minutes until they're like,

23:49 all right, we need our money back with some juice. So when are we getting that back? Right? Tyler, talk to me a little bit about kind of your journey, right? Going from the sales side of things

23:59 to straight up running a company with your buddy. Yeah, to your boss or to your point earlier, it's like you go off on your entrepreneur journey to work for yourself. You take on money, now

24:09 you've got a boss. Yeah. Yeah. So,

24:14 you know, I broke out in, I guess about 2011 and kind of industrial generator space dipped into a world filled, realized pretty quickly and, you know, didn't know what I didn't know. I graduated

24:28 AM and '08 and figured out really quickly. I was pretty decent at sales and added an attention to detail. So, I could also project manage my jobs, had a good sense of budget. And

24:43 so, at the time, it was a really small company

24:47 and was project manager sales for them and then went to work for a consulting engineering firm here in Houston and rode that high for about three and a half years up until the end of '14. Yeah I

25:01 don't remember that, but yeah, I lost probably about. two thirds, somewhere around 400 consultants, engineers in the field within a matter of 30 days at the end of 14. So we had to pivot pretty

25:16 quickly and figure out, well, where's really the cross sales here? So we're really primarily focused on upstream work. And I mean, we're based here in Houston, where else can we work? Well,

25:31 it's right here in our back door, it's a petrochemical industry. So we looked to the downstream side and started working with some, just basically cold calling and getting in the door with some of

25:48 these petrochemical companies, DuPont, Chevron, Marathon, and we lost a lot of our engineering consulting services. There was a lot of

25:53 crossover there in the downstream space. So yeah, we actually grew the company with the offset, that nearly got us back to profitability, of the federal lawsuit.

26:10 So we closed our doors

26:13 late 15. So

26:18 that was my first layoff and a downturn in the oil field. And at that point, I immediately thought it

26:28 was like, oh man, I'm a failure - Totally - Like I screwed up. I didn't execute sales. Like what can I have done differently? I'm like, this is my first downturn. And so you grow some callus to

26:39 the fact that this is just, this is the industry trends and businesses are gonna go on as usual. It's gonna take its dips. Your company's gonna close, potentially. When you're at the forefront

26:50 and the only sales person supporting sales in the organization, you do take that, can take that personally. But you grow professionally through that. So went to work for a couple of drilling

27:01 contractors across Houston, then transfer it up to Midcon. covered their from Midcon or Texas, DBs, Texas for drilling contractors and area manager. And

27:14 we wanted to get back to Texas as quickly as possible. Love Oklahoma City, but just was trying to get back to Texas. So

27:24 Tetra Technologies that we're looking to - TTI. Yeah, TTI. They were looking to grow a business in South Texas for water chemicals and then really augment their existing business with Flowback.

27:36 And so I moved down to

27:40 Midland for some time at the end of '19 and then really cranked up the business as employee number one at the end of '19. And man, we had commitments from majors, we had commitments from

27:53 intermediates, from small independence and the Eagle Fords is tough to break into. I mean, that was my second stint in the Eagle Fords Probably a lot of your listeners can. Similate and agree with

28:07 that market, but we have some wins coming down the pipe and some commitments and About 60 days in negative oil hits

28:18 Time that was so yeah, yeah, you're questioning everything in your life back to the cliff scenario so We really fell off that cliff as a business all your commitments dry up and We're strategizing

28:31 with corporate and like what are we gonna do? Midland was basically the only asset that was still doing pretty well and As a startup company we or as a startup business for the company We really

28:42 looked at it and we're like and we're probably just gonna can't as they just go away. We'll start this another time Fortunately corporate looked at it and they said, you know, the things got some

28:52 legs. We'll see what dollar can do so Yeah, we were from employee number one Zero revenue when I exited from the company. I had a million in top line at about 40 employees and really that kind of

29:08 transitioned into the start of bit out - Yeah, so you're a builder, right? Not just a sales guy and I think that's really relatable for me, right? If you are a sales guy and good at it, you get

29:22 put in that box a little bit of, well, why don't you just go out and sell? It's like, yeah, but there's more to it, right? There's strategy, there's onboarding, there's training and then

29:29 there's value creation - Sure - So I speak to, once a semester, I'm really fortunate to be able to come on and talk with Bentley University students. They have a sales program minor, like a sales

29:44 and marketing minor. And one of my good friends is the professor of sales and he has various different sales guys come in and try to motivate them and talk about all different sorts of things. And

29:56 it was really cool for me to talk to these people who have, they're 21 years old, 22 they have no experience but they're eager. and they wanna win. And I'm like, not to be like a wet blanket here,

30:07 but if you're gonna go into sales, like you're gonna lose a lot. And how you respond to losing, 'cause you will lose. I don't care how competitive you are. If you're the captain of the football

30:17 team and you've gotten straight as your whole life, it's gonna kick you hard in the business world and you're gonna lose and you're gonna be questioning, what did I do wrong? And I don't even wanna

30:27 get out of bed today, right? And have that frustration - Well, it's kinda like baseball. I mean, you're gonna lose 70 of the time at that - And that's for a great player. So - You might make the

30:36 hall of fame - Yeah,

30:39 exactly. I think that's a very valid thing that a lot of people don't, for whatever reason, talk about is that one, sales guys are in general, especially if they've been around for a long time or

30:51 long enough, it basically comes with, hey, that's your stamp of, you've got some fortitude because you didn't quit after two years or one late. Four times - Yeah, I have somewhere like that -

31:04 It's four times - And then you start, yeah, the first couple of times it happens, you internalize it, you're like, what did I do? It starts coming on you. And then it's like, well, in 2014,

31:12 everything stopped. Same thing with

31:14 COVID, right? Oil prices went negative. Like there's only so many things that can be in your control. But I honestly think a lot of sales guys are really set up for that kind of startup growth

31:25 builder space and they don't even realize it because it's like you've been rejected your entire career In some form or fashion, right? Like you've had success, but there's always rejection that

31:35 comes with it at some point. And so it's, I mean, startups are kind of the same thing, right? Like you're grinding and you're grinding and you're putting in all this effort, all this effort and

31:44 you're building those relationships just like you're doing in sales. And then finally, you get that one win and you're like, man, that's like, to me, that on the sales side, whether it's a

31:54 startup or just being a sales guy, after you've put in all that work and invested all the time and energy and you finally get that call and you're like, hey, let's go. That's like, that's a

32:02 gambling high almost to me, right? Like it's, it's the same thing when you hit blackjack. I've got a casino really like it's exciting - A little bit less luck, but yeah - Right - No, it's that

32:11 dopamine hit - Yeah, it is - But I do think as you gain more and more experience, you don't let the losses get you as down and you don't celebrate the wins for nearly as long, right? You might

32:21 internalize it, but I don't learn that much from winning sadly. Like I, maybe I set that expectation out there for myself, but unfortunately I learned a lot from losing and being wrong. And also

32:36 like, I don't know, I think I'm a little bit older than you guys, but nonetheless like my dad had the same job as whole career, so did my mom. And they never lost their job. And then here I was

32:47 at 26, 27 years old and I got laid off. I was at a crappy company. The numbers weren't happening. I thought I should have still been able to stay, but somebody had more tenure. So it was like

32:56 last one in first one - Right And I came home and it's like. what a failure, daddy lost his job. And then you start to get deeper into your career and you're like, the whole climate has changed in

33:08 terms of that, like the best sales people still lose their job - Sure - Negative oil, like good luck, you know, staying put. But you kind of learned this early on, Rodney. I mean, you were 17,

33:20 you just threw yourself right into your entrepreneurial team - Like even before that, I was like 14 and I was mowing lawns, similar to you, John, but like I had the epiphany one day I remember one

33:31 time I went to Comp USA and I had some money and - RIP,

33:38 I was looking at some video game. I don't remember what it was. And I decided to buy QuickBooks. And I was like, I'm gonna get this. Like I'm your typical like 14 year old nerd at this point.

33:47 And I buy QuickBooks and like, what the heck do I do with this? So I could send invoices and all this stuff. So I was mowing lawns and then I kind of came to the point like what if I had one of my

33:57 friends mowing lawn 15 bucks and I'll charge the maybe 20 bucks at the time. And if I do this enough, I don't have to do any work and I can make the same, I can make about the same amount of money.

34:07 So I started doing that. But yeah, it hasn't always been wins. I've had many companies that didn't work out and sometimes we try to, hopefully those things don't work out quick. I don't like

34:20 those to prolong. But at the end of the day, I like the wins play kind of make up for everything else So the kind of my first startup, I mean, we had to learn everything. We didn't know how to

34:32 hire. We didn't know how to find people. We didn't know, I didn't know anything. I grew up and it's my father had his own business. He started it kind of later in his career, but it turned out

34:40 to be very successful. So I got to see him do a lot of that. But we would have an employee quit on us and it's like, crap, we need an employee today. I can't wait for Max from now. So we would

34:50 go to our competitors with flyers and put on the windshields at their office buildings And we would get people to literally say, hey. let's meet at the taco command at 1130 tonight after you get off

35:01 work and we'll interview you, but we need you to start tomorrow. And so we would do things like that. That was just very, you know, not traditional. And we think we had a lot more success by

35:11 doing it that way and as opposed to operating very corporately. And, you know, it was fun during those. It sales was of lot a do Didn't. years

35:20 all online marketing and, you know, we would, I would wake up in the morning, we'd have dozens of more customers that signed up while we were sleeping and stuff like that So it was a fun ride and

35:30 the

35:32 kind of what we're doing right now is kind of fills doing we're what fun really it's where. days original those to back 'Cause we're

35:52 creating our customers are seeing success. And it's fun. It's not fun when you're doing like all this work and nobody's benefiting from it and so forth. But when we actually start to see like

35:54 really success compound, it just creates a lot of joy and a lot of fun. One thing that I've seen just in the month that we've been working together is the level of sophistication from different

36:01 operators. You have some companies who are super advanced and they create purchase orders and they bid out everything. And then you have others who it's spreadsheet or even just a phone call to

36:12 reward the work. What do you see as some of the potential challenges that you deal with as you guys grow? Do you think that it's more of a cultural issue within companies? Is it sort of a

36:24 technology challenge? A resistance to standardization? Because I think you guys are poised to do really well with this. I think it's something that companies need. But where do you think you might

36:36 see some of those stumbling blocks with companies? Organizational maturity, cultural, like what do you think? You know, I think our biggest competitor is the status quo. And it's just people are

36:45 stuck in their ways. But I think a lot of companies are focused on digital initiatives and digital adoptions and trying to drive cost control That's why our platform. We wanted to set out to build

36:54 cost controls in place for these buyers and operators. And we wanted there to be a driving factor there. The, I would say that's probably our biggest kind of competitor there. How do you guys,

37:09 what is the kind of feedback that you guys get? Because obviously selling in the software space, especially in the oil field, it's a very, well, you know, we've been using insert competitor here

37:20 for the last decade Or whatever. And so it's like, there's that barrier of entry, like, sure, coming in where there is an existing platform, especially if it's a big one like that at a big

37:33 operator or something like that. There's a very high barrier to entry just because it's embedded in all of their stuff and it's their systems. How do you guys kind of overcome that? We're kind of

37:43 giving you an example. I think you've got like half the folks who are just going to be slow to adopt anything, you know, you've got to take their time and I get it. They want to be measured about

37:50 what they do. And I think maybe the other half, or maybe a quarter of those, they're coming off of a recent pain point. They're coming off of, well, we found out

38:01 this happened in the purchasing process or we've got such inefficiency on this area that it's driving quicker decisions and quicker adoption. And I think once they get used to it, it's very clear

38:14 and simple for them - Yeah, and to further that point, so we're working with supply chain professionals, we actually work for a couple of majors. But we're working with supply chain professionals,

38:28 but also we're working with NPs that maybe have like 30, 40, 50-well DC projects for the year. And they're out in Midland, they only operate out there, they can drive within an hour to their

38:38 locations. And you've got four engineers that are making all the purchasing decisions within these companies. So you have to speak their language and

38:49 to Roddy's earlier point, I mean, status quo, they're sending out spreadsheets. They actually have, maybe they have a shared drive that they're tracking this information in, if they're tracking

38:57 it. So where's the spin going? All they're thinking about is growth growth growth, being PE backed. And we respect that, but also consider the cost control component, AFE, LOE, like we can

39:10 touch all of that very digitally and very easily - Well, I think we come, like we have a number of customers who are private equity backed companies, new startups, you know, they've got quite a

39:19 bit of equity behind them. But they come from majors, they come from their very smart sophisticated guys, but they've never actually gone out and purchased directional services because it was

39:27 always handled for them in the past. So they're coming to us, some reputable names, and we don't even know who to go out and talk to. You know, we're Googling. And so we've got all these vendor

39:38 relationships. We've got a big directory of coming close to 2, 000 service companies in there now. And where you can go drill down and see who's active in different regions and active in different

39:49 basins and just really simply invite those guys to a bit and so forth. And a lot of those companies, you know, we're more than just a software, like Tyler said, is we try to be an extension of

39:58 their procurement arm. So they'll call us and say, are we doing this the right way, you know, and or are there other guys you recommend for this job and we're able to kind of bring in these

40:06 service companies and kind of help kind of bring them to the table - That is a very different conversation with your competitors when other people call them and ask for things like that. It's not

40:17 much, much more difficult to get a huge product - And we are - I assume - I think one thing that our customers tell us is that what they love about us more is that we are 100 oil and gas focused. We

40:28 have no plans to go do, you know, other industries and niches or whatever. We're focused on the only gas space - Support is a huge deal. And I do like the fact that you touched on that before,

40:40 Tyler So I had an experience recently with billcom. that was incredibly frustrating where somebody had paid, but they had paid with a credit card. And my company doesn't accept credit card payments.

40:53 We only do like 10 transactions a month. We're not set up to do that. So I'm trying to figure out how can I get this money paid to me and I couldn't get anybody on the phone. From buildcom, they

41:03 literally didn't have an individual who I could speak with. This is like, I've got to pay people, right? I've got to pay my resources, I've paid my mortgage. And I can't get this money that

41:13 somebody sent to us And then I can't get you to walk me through it and tell me how. When it was an incredibly miserable experience and really made me realize just the importance of support, you have

41:23 an issue like that with Amazon, you get somebody on the phone, they refund your money right away. They send you another item, whatever it is. And that says a lot about them, but it gave me a lot

41:32 of pause around, I really want to find out how well these companies support people. And if you can't get a human being on the phone, I don't care if they have an accent or if they're offshore.

41:44 prefer them to be here at the same time zone. But nonetheless, that was a miserable experience. And now I'm going to share that experience with people that I talked to. Like, why would I sign up

41:53 for that platform? Yeah. That was terrible. I can't even talk to a support person to get a decent chunk of money to my company's bank account, right - Yeah. No, and that's exactly what I think

42:03 our customers tell us is that they love, is that Tyler got a call late last night, hey, we need some vendors for, what was it - It was a real trailer or something? It was actually kind of an

42:13 anomaly for this company. And so we built that directory to where they can filter based on categories, but this was just a really specialized unit. And so he was needing some help. He's a supply

42:25 chain professional here at Houston, all their assets are Eagleford and Midland. But yeah, he contacted us and we were at dinner last night and they're like, hey, we need some help. He's got my

42:34 mobile phone. And we have some support in office, but we don't try and break those human habits of, because it will feel just very big of the phone and call. And if you're, again, I hate to beat

42:46 up on a rebut, but if I'm calling Spain, 'cause that's where their support is, they're not gonna get, you're not gonna get customer support - And they're gonna open it up - They're gonna take you

42:54 in and get back to you - Open it, take it back with you in 24 hours. No, this is all a field. We're 24 hours today - All right, that's a huge, I mean, the last company I worked for was a tech

43:05 company, all their devs were over in the Ukraine. And it's like, hey, we're doing this pilot at 530 on Tuesday night. Well, guess what, it's midnight in the Ukraine. And so if something goes

43:18 wrong, I literally have no support technically for them at all. And it's unfortunately, it seems to be the trend across a lot of specifically software-based companies, like talking to you. It's

43:31 insane to me that in the United States, there isn't a law or something that says, if you are a financial services specifically, 'cause I've had very similar issues with what you're talking about,

43:40 You have to have a human being. that someone can talk to at some point in this process. Like doing it all digitally, some port tickets and stuff like that, when people are trying to pay bills or

43:50 get a vendor out to look, that's the other thing with the oil field is it's like, time is absolutely money. And so if you can't immediately react to that, they're not gonna use you. It's a huge

44:03 problem - And you get one shot - Yes - Right? You can't mess that up. Couple final thoughts before we wrap up here One of you guys had something that actually stuck with me and that is a lot of

44:16 these PE backed companies are made up of individuals who have had success at larger organizations and built those relationships and seen what it takes from sort of scaling a large company. But then

44:27 they get put in these roles for these sort of startups effectively. And now they're looking at production and downtime dashboards when previously they were focused on IT security or creating 10Ks,

44:38 right? So now you've got people that are thrust

44:42 And candidly for them, they need more of the bit out type tools because they don't have the background in creating a procurement process, right? Reinventing the wheel isn't necessary when you have

44:52 the technology to do it and create that community around the collaboration of technology. And I've seen that now a few times. And it's sort of like people come to me and say, you know, I really

45:02 appreciate what you're doing, bringing some of these small companies out there because my role has really shifted now that I work for a small privately backed company. And I see the importance,

45:12 especially of some of these startups, right? And we want to help shepherd them in their growth to show how a small privately held company operates because it's different than how a Chesapeake works

45:24 or how a Devin works or pioneer or whoever it may be. Where do people find you guys? Where's BitOut at? Where are you on LinkedIn? All that stuff Or just Google BitOut. And we're on LinkedIn.

45:37 We're on Twitter. most of those platforms. But yeah, check us out, give us a call. Send us an email, figure out a way to get in touch with us and we'll be more than happy to really chat with

45:49 anybody. Yeah, have truckable travel. I mean, we just came off of two, three week run between Nikon, Rockies, West Texas, South Texas. So, we actually got shut down two days ago heading to

46:03 San Antonio for the ice It was one of those things that we were leaving here at 545 in the morning. And I saw that it was snowing in San Antonio. And I said, yeah, really good thought. I said,

46:16 you know, we'll be fine. I'm not worried about us. But we've got a point with our client. We're going to make it happen. So we were 20 miles from San Antonio. And we got a call and we did, we

46:26 did email the client at 530 in the morning. And we were going to see several clients a day, but we got a call that they were shutting the office down. It was a I'm a mad one bit because we told

46:36 them we were going to be there and I wanted to be there. We'll just be back next week. So yeah, we're heading out to back up to Oklahoma next week. It's actually turning out to be one of our most

46:47 active regions as a company. It's really picking up up there. Yeah, OKC has been really good to me business wise. I think that there's a culture of wanting to adopt technology and also an

46:59 appreciation for you visiting. If you're based in Houston, you're based in Denver, even Calgary, you just expect that people are going to come visit you But if you're in Tulsa, Oklahoma City,

47:07 even Pittsburgh, Midland, you want people to come to you. You appreciate it and you want to see that multiple times. So I appreciate the fact that you guys are pounding the pavement. I think

47:16 that's going to pay off in the in the long run. So yeah, thanks for coming on today, fellas. It's been great getting to know you and really hope to see this bit outapp. Take the industry by storm

47:27 on the procurement side. Thanks, Jeremy. Yeah, thanks guys.