What The Funk?

0:00 We're back on what the funk I was out last week. I wasn't able to do a podcast. So I'm actually going to double up today, but first we have Greg Heilman of Arbo get into him in just a second and

0:13 all of his background, but I just wanted to say last weekend. I went to Oregon. Have you ever been to Oregon before I have not been. Well, no, I've been to Oregon briefly for a wedding. I was I

0:25 was there for a wedding last weekend. I mean, you talk about a place that, you know, whatever you picture Oregon to be, it's exactly what it is. Right. All the coffee shops, very granola,

0:37 very farm to table. The wedding was great. The weather was awesome. Had a really nice time and that sort of led into the July 4th weekend, which, which was a blast So, nice little break. We all

0:49 need those every once in a while. And here we are back working, podcasting, diving into the middle of the summer heat. So, Craig. We met a few weeks ago just after Nigel Gorbold came on my

1:01 podcast. I think you guys had a listen. We talked a little bit of business and invited you to come on. So excited to have you on today. I don't know a ton about your background or about Arbo, but

1:15 I know that you're passionate about the company that you work for. You're based out of Washington DC, which is a little bit unusual for people we have on the pod. So we'll get into all that stuff,

1:25 but since our listeners don't know who you are, who are you, Craig Hyman? Who am I? Well, thanks for having me, Jeremy. And I'm delighted to be on the podcast and recognizing that I might not

1:38 be the usual in terms of being a washi todian. So I look forward to kind of exploring that a little bit. You might ask the questions around that. I guess in terms of who I am, I mean, I'd

1:50 identify myself as an entrepreneur. I mean, I guess, first and foremost, professionally an entrepreneur, kind of a general manager as the other other. and to be kind of master of Notre Dame's

2:02 master of none, if you will, although most of my business is very kind of on the sales and marketing side.

2:10 Personally, I'm a husband and father, I think like you. I'm a proud veteran of the United States Navy, so that's a part of my identity.

2:20 I see some sports pictures behind you, so I guess I'm a fan of the Baltimore Ravens, the Washington Nationals, and the Virginia Cavaliers, so there's an interesting mix there. I grew up in

2:32 Baltimore, but now I guess I'm kind of abandoned PC since 2004, and my wife here settled down here, so I guess I'm, you know, like we're not on the Washingtonian now, but I kept the Ravens. I

2:47 enjoyed the napkin. The Orioles are good again, so I'm back being the Orioles fan as well. Really? Really good. Yeah, really good. Kind of fun. We're on the other side of that the Nationals

2:57 going to be. gonna be another couple of years, but we're getting in there. Other than that, you know, I enjoy doing outdoor sports, like skiing, like live music, and I'm a very amateur drummer,

3:11 I guess, is kind of another passion of mine. So, I don't know, I forget that. Where do you wanna start with all that? Well, first of all, I think I have to end the podcast. You did say you're

3:22 a Baltimore Ravens fan, me being a die-hard Patriots fan. I'm not sure if we can do this, but I'll allow it. I'll allow it. Ravens fans are pretty passionate, and we actually had some guests

3:33 this past weekend from Baltimore and sort of had all that fun. There's like a healthy level of respect and dislike at the same time between Ravens fans and Patriots fans, almost like we're division

3:44 rivals, but they got a great franchise, man. Well, in my family, it's kind of a challenge because most of my family's from Pittsburgh. Oh, wow. So I went into the Steelers for a pretty, well,

3:55 when Baltimore lost their team, kind of young, but I remember it. When they lost their team, you know, I kind of rooted for Pittsburgh after that. And then that became kind of a real problem at

4:05 once. Once we got what we were, you know, we're then the Cleveland Browns, I think. So, so I'm used to having that, you know, little bit of a family rivalry. I mean, that's what it's like in

4:17 the Northeast too. Everything's so congested, right? That you could, like my wife is from York, Pennsylvania, not too far from Baltimore. When we go back to that area, we typically fly into

4:27 Baltimore. Her dad lives in Pike's Bell, which I'm sure you're familiar with, just outside of Baltimore. But it's like, you talk to somebody in York and there's an equal likelihood of them being

4:39 a red skin, sorry, a Washington commanders fan. Oh my God. Formerly the red skins, it's hard for me to break that. So you've got the Washington fans, you've got Pittsburgh fans, you have

4:52 Eagles fans, and you have Ravens fans. It could be any of those, right? if you're from a place like York. or Harrisburg or really sort of the center of the state and in Pennsylvania, it sort of

5:03 depends on family allegiances, but same thing in certain areas of New England, right? Depending on where you are in Connecticut, it's Red Sox fans, it's Giants fans, it's Patriots fans, Celtics,

5:13 it's Nix, right? Which is some of the beauty of the Northeast, right? Out here, like everybody's a Broncos fan, everybody's a nuggets fan. Everybody's an avalanche fan. There's nothing,

5:25 there's no professional sports teams within like 10 hours in any direction that you go in. But out there, you go 10 hours, you're talking about completely different allegiances. So it's one of the

5:34 things I miss about the Northeast and some of that kind of fun camaraderie and banter. But let's stick on Baltimore for a second. So I actually really like Baltimore. When I was in college, I had

5:46 a girlfriend who lived in North Baltimore, like just off of I 83 as you go north of the city and developed a little little bit of an affinity for the town. Talk about what that was like growing up

5:58 in in Baltimore, and then did you go to Annapolis? Is that what happened with your naval career? Well not not not quite but getting in the Navy was sort of an interesting career twist for me and

6:13 Hopefully you have a lot of listeners that are kind of getting into the careers and oiling gas, etc And and so some of these twists might be of interest, but um, so I I started out in finance I

6:24 went up to school for business and I went back to Baltimore after school and Worked for a company called like Mason that was a brokerage firm and that's all yeah, yeah, and uh, that was great It

6:36 was interesting. I liked it, but I just kind of hadn't thought I'd be not didn't do a lot of family was young kind of you know, most of my life was kind of all for centric and I sort of you know

6:46 kind of have that see the world join the Navy that was the commercial at the time But even more importantly that was kind of the last sort of tail end of the first top gun generation in the Navy If

6:57 you watch Top Gun too many times, it can lead you down to the recruiter's office. And I'm seeking, again, a little bit of leadership, a little bit of an adventure. I left finance and went in a

7:11 totally different direction, which kind of surprised my mom and dad at the time

7:18 and went to the Navy, went to flight school and had a really great career in the Navy. But also, you know, as that was happening, I'll still, still love business, still thought I'd get back

7:33 into business someday. And so when I finished in the Navy, went back to business school and kind of restarted my business career, but it was interesting to watch Top Gun again and think about all

7:45 the kids out there that are going to try to go down the same, maybe go down the same road, which is good for the Navy because we certainly need to have people interested in serving the you know,

7:56 it's a great, it's a great career choice. You, you, you, you, you learn things that you never thought you'd learn if you think you never thought you'd say, uh, it's a chance to really, you

8:05 know, really just develop, you know, as a, as a whole person. And, uh, and of course, yeah, you know, it's a, it's a chance to get back to your country and observe. So all those things.

8:17 Yeah. So you, you mentioned, so you were in the Navy and, but you also went to flight school. So were you literally one of those guys that was like, taking off in planes and landing planes on

8:26 these big naval ships in the middle of the ocean. So yeah, it does a naval flight officer and I flew an airplane called the S3 Viking that we had that was carrier bait. And it was used to hunt subs.

8:39 And it was used to do surface surveillance reconnaissance that we used to do air air refueling. We were kind of organic refueling assets for the battle group, the carrier battle group. And so now

8:51 what I was in Iraqi freedom, was kind of the first wave of a rocky. freedom in 2003, and what we would do is we would take off with a strike package, we would take them into, you know, in

9:04 country, essentially. We would make sure they were topped off with fuel because after the first couple of days of the war, you know, all the sort of pre-planned targets were, you know, already

9:15 gone and really what the strike aircraft were doing or trying to support troops in contact on the ground. And so the most critical part of that was gas because the longer they could stay on the

9:25 station, the more chance they would have to, you know, to be of use to the troops on the ground. And so gas was sort of

9:35 the critical enabler. So we would drag them in, gas them up. We would look back to the ship, land, and then meet them on the other side. And that was kind of what we did day in, day out, you

9:46 know, for the whole deployment. But yes, S3 was a cool airplane, and it was a lot of fun we had a crew, normally crew up too. Sometimes it grew up war and then know what we're doing. I mean,

10:00 that sounds awesome, right? Like that feels like a scene out of a movie or something where you get to play soldier, but you were doing it in real life, which is super cool and obviously I

10:10 appreciate, we appreciate your service to the country. So you took a different path, right? You were a leg mason, which big finance company based out of Baltimore. You decided to go into the

10:20 Navy, spend a bunch of time there. Then you get back What did you do when you got back from being a naval officer? Well, I was lucky because I kind of experienced civilian life. Prior to one of

10:35 the natives, I kind of knew what that was about and had some ideas, again, around getting back in the business. And so I go back to business school full-time. That's kind of the natural thing for

10:45 me. I still got my last duty station. I was serving in a place called off Naval Intelligence I'd move to DC, you know, let my wife to be.

10:55 And so I went back to business school full-time at Virginia, which is why I'm a Virginia Cavalier fan. And then started to think about what type of business I could start to kind of think about as a

11:06 career shift. And I

11:09 started a business while I was in business school. It was my first startup, and I had a lot of startups. I didn't have a lot of up, which can sometimes be the case in entrepreneurship. And I

11:21 learned a lot from that I ended up when I graduated, I went to DuPont into their kind of executive development program. And I got to do something super cool there, because I ended up managing their

11:36 military, Kevlar, and Nomex business. And Nomex is the material that the flight suits are made out of. It's the fire-resistant material that flights it out of NASCAR drivers, their race suits,

11:49 et cetera, and all kinds of industrial applications for plain resistance, I cable our courses usually. body armor. And

11:57 those are two iconic brands of DuPont and really incredible advanced materials. And so I spent a lot of years of DuPont. And that was my exposure to the oil and gas industry. DuPont, around for

12:11 250 years, is one of our older companies in America. They grow a long time ago when they wanted to vertically integrate their entire supply chain. They were early in to violate materials and all

12:28 kinds of different things. But I was real familiar with the oil and gas supply chains because, of course, a lot of advanced materials, what starts at all is

12:41 oftentimes a petroleum-based product. And so kind of understood that industry from being at the park and, you know, ultimately got it. back into the industry after a couple, couple, couple more

12:56 twists and turns. Yeah, it's, I mean, this is honestly like what I love about podcasting is getting into people's stories because, because everyone's story is different. Like I can see how it

13:07 got there. You understood the value obviously of, of petroleum and literally gassing up jets in Iraq, right? You saw it firsthand and produced petroleum products and refined products working for

13:22 DuPont, right? Despite not being in the traditional oil and gas hubs, you still found your way into the industry. So after DuPont, like what year are we talking about and then what? Well, we're

13:35 now kind of coming up around 2010, you know, the kind of a period of that decade. I had had some children come into my life, you know, blessed with some children. And I was still, you know,

13:50 thinking about entrepreneurship and, and, and, you know, I had that big DuPont wasn't really reinvesting in the military side of the business, which is where I was really, really focused. They

14:01 were moving into other industries since a lot of

14:05 restructuring of that great company. And I actually went into government because I also kind of have the urge to serve again. I did miss serving. And being in DC, that's kind of the, you know,

14:17 we're a company down somewhere in some way, like Houston is, but the business here is government I got a really, really cool gig at the US. Small Business Administration because the time they were

14:30 super focused on helping veterans transition back. Like I mentioned, I'd been in civilian life. I had to stand to what that was like. It wasn't that scary to me, but for a lot of that, it's

14:38 really scary. You know, they've never done anything but wear the uniform and a lot of the jobs that they have, you know, don't really translate very well. It's not many sniper jobs, you know,

14:49 in civilian life I'm not going to use a morbid example, but.

14:55 So, I got the gig running entrepreneurship development programs to help military veterans become entrepreneurs because they kind of had sort of that disposition, right, that not risk adverse, like

15:10 the kind of, you know, be general managers, understand how to lead people, understand operations, processes, et cetera So that's made great entrepreneurs, and in fact, become entrepreneurs at

15:23 a much higher rate than on that. So the government, to its credit, said, We ought to be supporting that. We ought to be actively trying to help that start businesses. And I got a chance to lead

15:35 some of those programs as they were emerging at the SBA, which was really fun, and to close the loop. So what happened with that is I was spending a lot of time traveling the country looking at all

15:46 these great businesses that are starting, and again, I still have that itch. I want to get that, I want to be an entrepreneur.

15:55 I had served at the Office of Naval Intelligence, which Chip Malmauer, who's the CEO, founder of Arbo. Oh, okay, there we go. There we go. Exactly, how is this going to Arbo? Well, in a

16:05 roundabout way, but I had served with Chip at the Office of Naval Intelligence, and when I went off to business school, you went off to law school. And he took his turn in big law and was doing

16:16 energy regulatory stuff, and kind of grinding it out one of the big firms Also, he comes from a family of a lot of priorities they can add, you know, I want to do my own thing. And again, a

16:26 little bit of a veteran mindset. You spend a lot of time kind of, you know, in the chain of command and kind of doing what the machine needed you to do. And so a lot of vets kind of like to, you

16:36 know, be their own boss after that, and I think Chip has a little bit of that. Anyway, so I'm travel around looking for a great business, you know, or looking for a great idea, sometimes the

16:47 limitations to entrepreneurship It's just sort of like, you can't come up with the idea yourself all the time, you know? But that shouldn't stop people because maybe you can find somebody else

16:57 that's got a good idea And you're willing to kind of take the risk and be part of the jury and and you need lots of you need people to start stuff But you also need people to join you need people to

17:06 join those ventures too that are willing to kind of you know be part of it Those early days that can be the ones that are you know the most scary but also the most fun And and so it turned out that

17:18 the company that was I thought the most interesting one big started was the one that was Happening my own backyard because chip was starting it. Yep, and and because he was doing all the energy

17:30 regulatory Was working on each big infrastructure? Projects at the time a lot of them were nuclear when there's still some nuclear, you know Things happening. It's all that there was an awful lot

17:42 of data an awful lot of risk involved in how the regulatory So may intersected the business domain and the impact on these assets and all these businesses But a lot of that data wasn't really being

17:54 hardest and utilized in the way that you would think it could be a lot of the decisions were being made based on the high-paid person's opinion or whatever the law firm was saying. And I just thought

18:08 with, now we're talking 2013-2014,

18:13 we're kind of the big data technologies are really starting to mature and there's a lot of data out there just waiting to be better, you know, better accessed and better put to work to make business

18:24 decisions. And so he happened to live on Capitol Hill and I do be Capitol Hill. And that was unbeknownst to the both of us because we, you know, we went our separate ways after serving, you know,

18:37 and I, and then we kind of found each other again 'cause we moved to the same neighborhood. And so we had a lot of late night discussions about starting companies and I told them us to strip us

18:46 'cause like, don't ask me 'cause I'm the last person you should ever ask if you should leave your, you know, leaders, you know, you're too - your stable job and start a company because I always

18:54 say yes, I absolutely should do that.

18:58 And he ended up doing that. I was able to be an early advisor and investor in the company when he was doing the early friends and family, kind of around the friends, families, and fools. They

19:08 call it an entrepreneurship, the three Fs, and I said, Hey, listen, if this thing gets going, I'll put my job at the small business administration and enjoy it That, you know, this startup had

19:22 some up, and I was able to start hiring people, and I got to be one of them, and, you know, I knew, you know, getting shipped, you know, have a lot of the characteristics you go, you know,

19:32 you look for an any business leader, but I'm particularly an operator. I mean, I think, number one, you know, you got to have kind of the idea, you got to have the intelligence and the

19:40 fortitude to go after that idea. You got to be tenacious, you know, so it's a tenacious guy, he's persistent, and you got I'm integrity, you know, because it's just if you don't, if you don't

19:53 inculcate kind of values into the very first, you know, team that you put together and, you know, if you're not able to communicate to the customers that are taking a chance on a startup, you

20:02 know, which isn't, you know, the only gas industry is pretty traditional, right? They, you know, it's the whole maximum that you never, you know, you never lose your job, iron, IBM, kind

20:11 of a thing, right? You know, and they're not, you know, you get a lot of, and you know that from all your time, you know, carrying a bag in the oil and gas industry and making the sale, but

20:20 they haven't heard of you. It's generally top to, you know, if somebody's not recommending you, it's a little bit top to close to the, or actually not close to the oil, but just to get in the

20:23 door, you know. Oh yeah. So it's not

20:31 to be the more. Completely, it is, it is. And, you know, there's a couple of, of quotients that I like to use. One of them that my friend Justin Bougie gave me, which is, you know, if you

20:43 have the will, I'll teach you the skill. And I think will and skill is, are two very important traits. for any entrepreneur and certainly for a business leader. And additionally, we talked about

20:57 this a few weeks ago on one of the more recent podcasts with the spirit data guys that came on. They have something literally on their wall that's called the say do ratio.

21:09 You know, if you're skewed too much toward the say and there's not enough toward the do, that's a problem. And you lose credibility really fast So just do what you say you're going to do. And I

21:22 think those are very important entrepreneurial skills as well.

21:27 Yeah, I love the say do ratio. We have a good friend of Arbo who happened to be Westboy guy, not a Navy guy, but we know that against him at all. He's a big customer of ours too. So, but he

21:37 loves the say do ratio. He introduced me to that fair amount. I think that's a great one during. And I, you know, I'd like to say, you know, plan the work and work the plan. Yeah, it's the

21:47 other thing we like to say, you know, You'll have to have some plan in the work, but you don't. You spend a lot time playing the work and not working the playing kind of got to do with reverse

21:55 sometimes. Yeah, no, I agreed. And beyond that, while we're throwing these phrases out there, um, I think it's a Mike Tyson phrase, right? Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.

22:08 And then what, right? How do you, how do you then bounce back? How do you then persevere? Because it's going to happen in business. The best laid plans always go to hell, right? How do you

22:20 persevere when you take that first? Kind of real, real tough shot in the nose.

22:26 Are you asking or telling?

22:30 I'll tell you know, in our experience, I guess that when we got punched in the face just to bring it, you know, the, you know, an actual space, we had, you know, we, we were fortunate. A

22:41 lot of our value proposition is around helping with project development, right? you know initially brought up with pipelines and because we were able to bring in all this regulatory data and turning

22:53 in the business intelligence and in this, you know, in this video, okay, business intelligence for what my cost of schedule will look like on this project because I know that the regulatory

23:02 environment's changing and getting through these regulatory milestones, whether it's the environmental review, you know, or,

23:12 you know, sort of, okay, the certificate process for interstate pipeline, that landscape which it's not, it's not an automatic anymore, you know, this is going back to the shell boom in 2013,

23:23 2014 and we started to see that just a lot of there are a lot more litigation, a lot more opposition. Yeah. And so, you know, this regulatory data that was kind of maybe over in the regulatory

23:37 department or in the legal department, but not have been, you know, hands-on with the project team or the senior leadership that was, you know, making the final investment the decision of these

23:47 projects. You know, that was really became key. And that's really why we were able to see an initial phase of our business. Well, man, that kind of all killed off of it, right? We got through

23:56 that build cycle. And then we had the whole pandemic thing, right? And so we had a couple of pretty big headwinds and,

24:07 you know, in that, you know, our initial core value prop wasn't as rallying 'cause it was made projects. And oil was minus 40 a barrel for a couple days there And

24:20 we were sort of looking at each other, saying, well, you know, now what. And we were fortunate enough to have enough capital that we could reinvest in product development while we weren't really

24:31 gonna do a lot on the sales marketing side 'cause people were just stopped, right? And that's when we kind of went from gas into the oil side and we were able to kind of build and launch what we

24:40 call our commerce platform, which we can get into But so we, to the point of that is like, When you get punched in the face, you get to figure out where you can make some progress. Once you feel

24:53 you've got punched in the face and get knocked to the ground, you can

24:59 get back up quickly.

25:02 Now it's kind of a punch of the face. Now it's all going to come full circle when we've got, I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars coming into the marketplace to do what to build

25:14 infrastructure again and to have projects And so to us, that really feels like it's come full circle. We've been in business for, you know, going on nine years now. A lot of it is just getting up

25:25 and staying in the fight, you know, just keep staying in the fight, right? Every day that you're still in business and still winning business and still thinking about what you're going to do

25:34 tomorrow,

25:36 it gives you another chance to get where you're ultimately trying to go And so we feel really good about just our staying power in the marketplace in. especially more so in our ability to keep our

25:51 original customers, you know, we still have our original customer,

25:55 and once we get a customer, they kind of stay with us. And

26:02 so let's just one example. So who are our Bose customers, and if you were to summarize it in a nutshell, what do you guys do over at our Bose?

26:16 Well, so let me start with what we do. So essentially we sell four things. We sell data, software research, and consulting, and we kind of do that in different combinations depending on the

26:26 customer and the need. And all of that is about, you know, kind of taking regulatory data and starting it into business intelligence, something you kind of act on, you can build into your

26:38 decision lifts that you can automate and kind of improve your workflow with all those kinds of things And we do that. I mean, all of our vision is like. And this gets a little bit back to the

26:49 military. You feel it's around being patriots and kind of being proud of America and wanting America to see, particularly in terms of energy independence. But we want to help sustain America's

26:59 ability to build infrastructure, right? We've talked a ton about that. We get into the DC thing, but I mean, it has been amazing to see people in DC having conversations about her getting work

27:11 formed. Like you can't get

27:15 something further from the front page and permitting reform if you roll the clock back a couple of years. And so that was a pretty interesting experience for Chip and I and the rest of the team that

27:26 are here in DC. But that's core to our very, like we want, that we gotta be able to build this stuff, right? And we gotta be able to do it on a timeline. And we gotta be able to do it to a

27:35 budget if we want anybody to finance it. And

27:40 so we, you know, we were in that loop And shout, we, we, we. You know, it could be a mid-stream company that's building a project. So mid-stream is a core, mid-stream pipeline operators,

27:56 primarily whether they're a gas or oil, whether they're

27:59 talking about emerging pipelines, 'cause they want to do something like hydrogen, right? Or they want

28:06 to do CO2 real pipe. So that's a very core segment to us. It will help them on the front end of that as it relates to developing South Bay that tends to be with data and sometimes more on the

28:18 consulting side. And then on the, you know, once it's in, once it's in, you know, kind of in the ground and operational, more on the optimization side. And that's where kind of a software

28:28 comes in, where they're able to continuously look at contract rolloffs on their pipes or their competitive pipes or they're able to,

28:37 you know, look at utilization and things like that. So, so that's one side of it. On the other side of it, the other big segment is kind of on the trading side So if you're trying to move.

28:46 physical commodities as a trader, one of the big trade shops. And you really care about the impact of infrastructure on the overall supply demand picture in terms of what types of positions you

28:59 might be taking. Or there's a regulatory driven event that's disrupting the market, like, report goes down. And you're trying to figure out, like, well, when to come back online? And you say,

29:10 like, you actually determined that. Like, you have to decide that we can get involved and all that 'cause we sort of have that expertise. We kind of know where to rank with the data. You know,

29:20 Mountain Valley Pipeline. Everything about how that has worked its way through, finally, to ultimately be passed into a law that the Mountain Valley Pipeline must, you know, must go in service.

29:33 You know, we've been, that's been something we've been working with our customers with since the very beginning in terms of trying to anticipate what might happen in the courts, anticipate what

29:45 might happen

29:47 cost and schedule, you know, for all the normal things that go on with the construction of a project like that. That's kind of generally who we work with. We're, you know, forward-looking,

29:59 really looking at transmission because that's going to be a whole entire, I mean, that's where the most critical need is going forward. It's very similar to building the pipeline except it's

30:08 probably even worse if it relates to all the stakeholders that have to, you know, to have to get aligned and because it's so much more of a state and local type thing than, you know, a federal and

30:23 that's where a lot of attention is and where a lot of the, probably the regulatory kind of a form or restructuring after occur to make that successful. No, this is cool. So you, you provide the

30:35 data, you provide the analytics, you provide the effectively the consulting to put companies in the position to be able to garner funding for fairly large projects, right, which, which is cool.

30:49 I mean, it sounds like you're, you really get a first, you know, a first hand view into some of the larger interest state infrastructure projects that are happening happening from a pipeline and

31:01 gathering perspective. I mean, it sounds cool.

31:06 Yeah, we think it is again, I'm the maybe others didn't, but now everybody thinks a little bit cool just because they knew at least they have some sort of sense of gee, okay, you know, we need

31:16 energy infrastructure and what does it take to build energy infrastructure and what does that involve from a, you know, market business dynamics perspective and what does that involve from a

31:25 government perspective and how does that all have to work together. And so it's a pretty good lens on, you know, what American industry has to do generally to continue to evolve and to compete You

31:40 know, and out of the energy enabled everything out, so if we can keep there. You know, then, then, then, then, you know, we can compete downstream of all that by making all the products, you

31:51 know, all the iPhones that rely on these critical materials, a lot of which are, you know, oil and gas based at the end of it. Oh yeah, for sure. So you're based in DC, and I love DC. I

32:03 actually remember going there when I was, I think 16, for something called Presidential Classroom Scholars where you spend a week in DC with a bunch of other kind of high achiever types throughout

32:18 the US, and it was awesome. Like, I got to meet with state representatives from New Hampshire, got to walk around all the businesses, you know, all of the big buildings and the capital toward

32:28 the White House, got to go on sort of the Senate floor, like really, really fun stuff that made me appreciate everything that goes down in the unique city of DC, where there's really nothing else

32:42 like it. in the US or in the world. But there you are in DC and you're doing a lot of business that's outside of DC, right? So do you find yourself on airplanes, going to places like Houston,

32:54 going out to Pittsburgh, going to Dallas, going to Denver, like where is most of your business based?

33:02 Yes, Houston is number one for us

33:07 and thankfully Southwest can get us there pretty quickly and most of the time pretty reliably And so I'm going out on vacation next week and then the following week is Houston and the week after that

33:18 is Tulsa and Oklahoma City. You know, surprised there. We got a pretty good group of customers in New York that are more on that finance, right? They're trading their edge funds that are, you

33:30 know, oil and gas focus. Those are the, that's kind of a trifecta, you know, in a little bit of Denver,

33:37 but that's our world for sure. Hopefully, you know, we liked it. Again, it might not be ideal for running into a prospective customer at a social function or something, or on the golf course or

33:50 something, but it is nice to be able to bring some of that perspective both directions, particularly as folks have got a little bit more divergent in their viewpoints, and they might not interact

34:00 as much with others to kind of understand the different viewpoints, particularly if something is controversial, as sometimes oil and gas can be, it's nice to be able to kind of see all sides of

34:15 that in our own small way as we interact, be able to share perspectives, right? Yeah. And when DCs out it's best, when DCs out it's best, you know, that's happening all the time, right?

34:27 People are open-minded in there, they're having conversations, whether they be professional or they be casual and talking about these issues, and so we definitely like being here and we like being

34:41 used to do. So it's not a split, we try to split time. Well, you definitely like humid places if you like DC and you like Houston, man. I've sweat through numerous suits in both of those cities.

34:54 So I appreciate the air conditioning. We just have to wear a suit anymore, right? That's one of the things that changed in our world a bit. Like 90 of the time, there's still a couple companies

35:07 that you got to make sure that you dress up nicely when you come in, not ties anymore, but still maybe a suit jacket or a button down. But for the most part, you know, especially in this whole

35:20 digital wildcatters movement, you can just dress like we're dressed right now and be fine. I wanna shift a little bit towards sort of the future. As you, you mentioned hydrogen, right? You

35:32 mentioned some of the new projects that are going on. Where do you see the future for energy? in the United States. And in your sort of on the forefront for this, helping companies get approved

35:44 for projects that will, I guess, transmit and move product, do you think it's in something like hydrogen? Do you see more of a movement on the geothermal, on renewables? Like, give me sort of a

35:57 sense of what the industry energy as a whole could look like in the next five, 10 years.

36:06 Well, I started to kind of the macro piece to that 'cause I see two sort of big macro trends that if you did have both of them, I would be worried, but we now sort of have both, so I'm pretty

36:16 optimistic. And I mean, 'cause ultimately we've got to sort of redevelop entire markets and industries, right, as we make this sort of energy transition of the evolution. One of the, I was

36:27 really working at the work at Deepop and had that be where a lot of my, you know, training and insight, you know, sort of, because they have that 200 year history of doing not business

36:37 development but home market development.

36:41 where

36:43 you did the basic RD, then you did the application development, and

36:47 then you had to go out, now you've got something that you can supply, then you had to develop the whole entire demand side of that equation, right? Now you have to have it over 20 or 30 years,

36:56 right? And that's sort of the cycle we're on now, and it takes big players, right? You've got to have the super majors engaged, and you've got to have government engaged, and we didn't sort of

37:07 have all that happening, and I feel like a lot of that's coming together. So one, I guess, pillar of this is that I think there's going to be more consolidation, and so some of these big guys are

37:18 going to keep getting a little bit bigger, but because of the money in terms of the government sponsorship and the money is there, the ability to make sort of these big bets on market development

37:32 for technologies that they weren't necessarily as focused on maybe 10 years ago in hydrogen and CO2. you know, CTU apps come to mind. I see that as a really good trend and there's probably gonna be

37:43 some more consolidation on that side. Now, I'll be a little bit worried about that from a market perspective, right? 'Cause, you know, you start to see, you know, you start to see some of that

37:53 innovation slow down once

37:57 you get a little bit over-consolidated. So, the other thing that I'm really happy to see is all the startup activity and the money going into the innovation side of it for not the big players So, I

38:08 want to assume that government money is mostly going to go to a lot of the big players. They're the ones that can more easily come to the table for that type of a. You know, DOE doesn't want to

38:17 make 10 billion loans to folks that are super high-risk, right? That's true. They got to steward that taxpayer money to some extent, right? Not always, you know, doesn't always work out, but

38:30 pretty good hit rate over a long period of time. So, seeing that money coming in on the side of side be the traditional kind of venture route coming back to clean tech and you know, it's really

38:42 important and I think encouraging because you know, there was a, there was a huge clean tech wave and kind of that '06, '05 time and that really played out and all of that money somewhere else.

38:52 You got those two things together. So I see a world where you have that throw and study market development on so many technologies that we already know about and we do get to the finish line on it's

39:02 going to be 20 years of what we get there and that there is a hydrogen economy and there is real

39:10 carbon capturing sequestration and some of these things that we're talking about. But I also see

39:17 that there's going to be some breakthrough innovation that we have no idea what it's going to do when it's going to totally change

39:24 the game because there's so much activity there. So I don't know what exactly that looks like but it makes me a lot more optimistic than I watched 10 years ago,

39:35 you know, thinking about. you know, the space over the long term. Yeah, I'm with you. It sounds like the energy addition, right? If I were to sum it up and also forms of energy that, you know,

39:48 even a few years ago, we didn't consider as viable, which will become very viable. So I'm intrigued to see how it plays out. And then of course, you'll be on the tip of the spear from the

39:58 regulatory standpoint, understanding what the government's doing and then helping companies comply with that. And then ultimately put them in position to get the level of financing that they need to

40:09 take on some of these massive projects like you guys are doing. So pretty cool stuff. Yeah, I think that's the third, I would not admit it, but there does need to be restructuring. There needs

40:20 to be structural jays that'll come along with all that, whether it's led by the existing major players, whether it's because it has to be adaptive to an innovation that we're not thinking about, it

40:31 would break the technology or it's just sort of the slow, methodical work but yeah, the power markets and the way that they were. And, you know, there's got to be changed there as well. And I

40:41 think that's going to happen. I think, you know, we've made great progress in just the last few years towards at least everybody recognizing the problem and sort of working towards it. And pretty,

40:52 pretty bipartisan weight, where I sit, you know? Yeah. Gladly we buy parts of the way. Yeah, I mean, and to bring it back to Arbo a little bit, like we talked about this when we first met and

41:05 chatted for about 45 minutes, a few weeks back, you really need, at least as far as your business development type people to be consultative. 'Cause you're not really selling a product, right?

41:17 Sure, you have some products that you can sell, but you're selling somebody that can see a vision, right? That can bring a lot of different pieces together. And it's fairly unique, right? So I

41:28 see how somebody in your role and the team that works for you has to listen really well, has to be creative. It has to be able to shift gears relatively quickly, which I'm sure makes for kind of a

41:42 fun business environment for you and your team. It's a little bit unique. You're not pushing one thing. You have to really understand the client needs, the regulatory environment, what financing

41:56 companies are looking for, understand capital markets. It's cool. I'm just putting it all together, but this is not the type of job where you go in and you're pitching one thing every day. I'm

42:07 guessing in the course of two hours, if you're on three or four different calls, they're all very different.

42:14 Yeah, that's a good problem and a tough problem at the same time, as you mentioned, because it is kind of a knowledge-based sale, and even though our costivers might like you take two pipelines a

42:25 book, very similar, one of them might be all about kind of the efficiency part of it and one of them might be all about kind of the growth part of it.

42:34 Yeah One of them might really want to. a lot of automation and digital kind of transformation is out of their enterprise. One of them I want to do none of that and just kind of get as much cash,

42:42 you know, you know, you know, like as much cash off as they can to return to their shareholders or their unit holders. So, yeah, I think we'd like it to be, you know, to be a cookie cutter,

42:54 save widget for everybody and let's just sell a million of them. But that's not, that's not the, not much of the problem we're solving. Nice. So, before we run here, I like to put my guests on

43:06 the spot. Hey, Poppy, how are you doing? I like to put people on the spot and do a little bit of rapid fire. So, I'm going to say a word or a phrase and you have to say the first thing that

43:16 comes to mind. All right.

43:20 The best place to get a crab cake in Baltimore.

43:27 Angelina is on Harford Road, you park fill. Nice, I think it's still there. Well, it was, at least. Ray Lewis.

43:40 Best linebacker that ever played the game. Nice, I'll accept that. Now finally, cocaine in the White House.

43:51 I saw that headlining

43:54 I thought we were on the different, like, drugs these days. You know, we've, like, seemed like we've legalized everything in DC. based on just the aroma that you get

44:07 walking down the street. So I got, like, surprised it wasn't something else. Yeah, yeah. It took very. Must have been somebody, you know, 1980s throwback or something. Right. Well, anyways,

44:19 that's fun stuff Appreciate the me letting you put. You letting me put you on the spot. Finally Craig, where can people find you, find Arbo? Where are you guys at?

44:33 Well, we're right on Capitol Hill and DC physically, so I'm sitting in the Capitol right over there. We're on an old pocket shop, which is no longer a business. We've got the office space. And

44:43 there's an old story about pocket shops in our headquarters office space,

44:51 but wwwgoarbocom. So goarbocom is

44:53 where we're at And our emails are all just our first name at goarbocom. So Craig at goarbocom is me. I'm happy to take an email or call us on the phone 'cause that's really like retro and fun for us

45:06 to talk about. Old school. Right, right. So that's where you can find us and I appreciate you taking the time to get to know us a little bit today. Jeremy, I really enjoyed it. Yeah, this is

45:16 fun stuff. I mean, your background is fascinating and I need to talk to more people that are in DC

45:24 a little bit of a different role. I got enough people from Houston and Midland and Denver and Calgary on this podcast. So fun to discover you. I think your business is doing cool things and

45:35 appreciate having you on today, Craig. You have a have a good weekend, my man.