What The Funk?

0:00 Okay, we are back on the what the funk podcasts with my friend. Josh pulley, how are we doing today, Josh? Yeah, pretty good. I'm beer. Pretty good, pretty good. Because you're getting up at

0:14 3 am. every day with a newborn. I made it to 4 am. For starting to stretch it out. Just a little

0:22 bit. New dad, a new dad. I love it. I love it. I mean, you're you know, I have three kids. We've talked about this a bunch, but my daughters are 15 and 13. My, my son is seven, but I try

0:35 to put myself back in that place where, where you are right now with like a two week old, maybe a 17, 17 day old. Yeah, I was trying to do the math. I think it is 17 days.

0:47 Yeah, they're very young. It's a, it's a magical time. It's an exhausting time. It's a emotionally amazing time, right? probably developing a different connection than you had before. It's not

1:01 just about you or you two. It's now about your son as well, which is amazing. And you know, when I had my kids, I wasn't an entrepreneur, right? So it was a little bit easier, I think, for me

1:13 to step away. Sales, you know, where my career has been is still pretty entrepreneurial, right? Like you're kind of running your territory as a business. But at the same time, like, it was

1:25 easy for me to step away I really am curious about how, you know, if you've been able to even step away at all, 'cause it doesn't seem like you've stepped away a ton. We'll talk about all of that.

1:35 But I have to hit you with my favorite question. The question is, who are you, man? Who's Josh Polite?

1:43 I don't know, that's a lengthy conversation. I guess we'll unpack that over the next 45 minutes. We got time. Josh Polite, I don't know what, like, what do the people identify themselves as?

1:52 like me, mechanical engineer, I don't even know Thank you. launched into my career as petroleum engineer, BPEs, and BHP. And then entrepreneur rides, I feel like those are key things that

2:03 identify me. My wife likes to joke, you know, I've never done that for a few years. But I'm always an engineer, so I think I'm definitely not doing engineering on

2:15 a day-to-day basis. Certainly, husband and then most recently, father, and really enjoying the whole role here. Not wrong that there's some sleep deprivation, but I often joke that I've been

2:25 doing sleep deprivation training for four years, so I'm good to go.

2:32 I love it. I want to go back further though. Where are you from? Where did

2:36 you grow up? What were you kind of like as a kid? Were you a rocklicker? Were you a baseball player? Are you from Houston? I think you're from a big family? Go way back. Tell me about young JP

2:50 So, so per my birth certificate, I'm a kunas. I was born in Lafayette or Slido, Louisiana. You can tell that my family was in oil and get asked 'cause my dad was at Exxon, he did Lafayette,

3:01 then New Orleans, I was born in Sidel, and then Houston, but moved to Houston I was like four months old, so grew up in Northwest Houston, spring area, people from North the area, and really

3:14 just grew up here. So, traveled a lot, I've been to 50 countries now, but my permanent residence has typically or almost always been Texas with the exception of living in Egypt for you on a PP,

3:26 so, yeah. 50 countries? Yeah, 52,

3:34 53, something like that. Yeah. To have installed me a little bit. Yeah, well, in many ways, for many, many people.

3:41 Wow, okay, and was that like, was your family like a big travel family, did this happen like before your professional life started? It's a good question, Andrew Yes, my, my, my, my, my, my,

3:54 my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

3:54 my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

3:54 my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, grandmothers from France, so I've been to France a few times growing up, but generally

3:59 speaking, I hadn't traveled that much with my family, but I went on like this big like you're a trip with like Texas AM alumni right at the end of mine, undergrad, did 11 countries in like 28 days

4:12 or something, had a lot of fun and then moved to Egypt for a year and had two weeks in Cairo, two weeks in the field office and then two weeks off, so didn't exactly stay in Egypt a ton for those

4:22 two weeks off, so that's why I really caught the travel ball. I used to traveling solo and joining four groups and a lot of fun along the way. So what was that like living in Egypt for a year? And

4:34 that was for work, I assume you were out of big company at that point? Yeah, that was at BP, so living in like a compound and it was actually 2011, just after every spring happened, so it's a

4:45 really unique time in their history. I found it really enlightening and rewarding, in part because I'd always sampled cultures, but I've never worked in one, right? I felt like I really got to

4:56 know Egyptian culture in a much greater level of detail than if I just went and visited the pyramids for two weeks or so on. So I really enjoyed that. Really enjoyed seeing their country get excited

5:06 about having an election and the transition that went through as a country when I was there, post-Arab spring. Yeah, it was a great rewarding experience for sure. And highly advising about me.

5:17 It's like an opportunity to study or work abroad. Was it safe? I mean, granted you were insulated a little bit, but did you feel safe when you got outside of the compound? I mean, it's like

5:26 traveling anywhere. It felt like you just needed to have your, what's about your awareness. And there's a few times where it's like, okay, I'm not gonna walk that way. Or like one time there's a

5:34 lot of protest outside of the joint venture we had with the national oil company. So we just go on the side entrance, but then the military part to tank up front protest dispersed after that. So it

5:46 was fine to go to the main entrance after that. So it was kind of cruel to see, very interesting. You don't see that in the US where all the guards have, like, you know. AK-47s, I'll park and

5:56 tank to solve the

6:00 problem, things of that picture. At least not give it to a recently separate conversation. Yeah, yeah, you know, God, there's a, you and I talk business a lot. Full disclosure, we are

6:09 working together, right? Act, your company is a client of funk futures. It's exciting, it's been, I don't know, about five or six weeks, and I think it takes a minute to

6:19 kind of figure out the best way to pitch and present what you're doing And it's in part because pitching services, pitching consulting is a little bit different. It's a lot different than just

6:29 pitching a product. But like most good tech forward consulting firms, you do a few projects, you realize, okay, there's a need for this, and boom, all of a sudden you have products. So it's

6:41 that fine line of do you lead with a product? Do you lead with the services? Like, you know, what direction do you take this? But for me, you know, going back to what you were just saying, in

6:53 the summer of 1997. It was awesome, but that was also my first experience with like armed guards, right? We were on a bus going all over the place and staying on, you know, various university

7:05 campuses. And yeah, I mean, these, you know, full on, you know, M16s and AK-47s, like it's, you feel safe in a way. You also feel like you have to have your guard up in a way as well, but a

7:19 much different experience than just what we do day-to-day over here. Yeah, yeah, very different. And it certainly gave me a much deeper appreciation for being born in America and living in America

7:31 as well. It

7:33 feels like there's things that just should be, and it, you assume, is kind of human nature, but a lot of those incorrect assumptions were quickly dispersed, having been like fully immersed in

7:43 living in each other. Was it hot? I mean, you live in Houston, so everything's relative. So the analog I gave is, I think, in July, I like, what half mile to lunch? It's like 110 degrees out,

7:56 but it was super, super dry. Full workloads, you know, slacks in the butt, I'm sure. And it didn't come back to the office, sweaty, no. Probably it smelled a little bit, 'cause I probably

8:05 did sweat and evaporated, but it's not any different from the Houston system. I can call Houston a swamp, or you wanna put a Texas. So it's a much different type of heat Yeah, what do they say?

8:16 It's more like, it's like an oven versus a sauna. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I guess Arizona versus Houston or Louisiana in theory, right, if we're looking stateside. And yeah, I'm used to that

8:30 here in Colorado too, super dry. So anytime I go anywhere humid, which I'm going to Houston tomorrow for air tech and various different things, dude, I am gonna sweat my, body's just not used to,

8:44 Like my pores just open up like crazy down there, and I have to be mindful of what I wear, 'cause I will sweat through anything. Yeah, I was like, nearly my whole life, and that hasn't changed.

8:56 I will say the most unique weather I saw when I was in Egypt on the forecast was sand, and that it's not something I've ever seen, it's a forecasted, I think, we're in sand storms. It wasn't like

9:05 you see it in a carat and

9:08 stuff, but certainly I had to sweep away and walk sand through the windows so that time. Well, when you're completing a well in oil and gas, the forecast calls for sand as well. So the different,

9:20 different mindset altogether. So, you know, you also, I think, have spent some time in Colorado, right? Like your family, I think, has had a place in Breckenridge for years and years and

9:32 years. So you and I have hung out in Lafayette, not Louisiana, but Colorado, where I live when you're heading up to Breckenridge. Is that something you're gonna be able to do with the kiddo and

9:43 talk to me about your Colorado experience.

9:47 Yeah, that's for, I think I'd say all my passions are right. So I love to snowboard and hike. So I go up there as much as I can. I'm certainly a COVID, made that a lot easier in the know and I'm

9:56 a business and working with clients remotely on it and actually made it easier as well. So like the last five years I've been spending almost two months up there a year, four or five different trips.

10:07 I'll go up in like September October

10:10 for three weeks and do three ski trips and stuff. So just love it up there. And like if I'm working 12 hour days, but still get to look out the windows and just see the mountains and enjoy the snow,

10:20 then that's a great day. It doesn't feel like work at all. So I will eventually make it up there if I can convince my life that I haven't happened quite. Yeah, but with the kiddo, obviously

10:31 priorities change. So my loss of figuring out the combination of enjoy the mountains and childcare. Hope to not slow down too much.

10:41 You got it, yeah. I mean, I think the earlier you get him on skis on the snowboard is better. right? And then all of a sudden, then he's asking you, hey, when are we going back up there? Yeah,

10:51 exactly. Got to take advantage of it when I'm not on like the school schedule too. So now when he's five or six, we'll try to get up there as much as we can. Yeah, no doubt. So yeah, I want to

11:02 go back and talk a little bit about your career too. So you went to AM, right, Gigum, you, were you like fully immersed in the in the cult? I have a lot of great friends there. I wouldn't say I

11:16 was fully immersed in the cult. I think a lot of people are surprised that I went to AM and don't have a Texas accent and a bit of 50 countries. It's a great community and I really enjoy coming back

11:26 there, but I can't say I watch every football game still, but I

11:33 didn't want to say it. Yeah. So, you know, coming out of AM, and I would assume AM has it's probably a feeder school for, you know, a lot of oil and gas company opportunities. Did you have a

11:45 job lined coming out of AM and what was that job and what were you doing and talking about that transition, getting out of school, kind of learning in the classroom, but then now being put into the

11:56 field and earn the office and truly being an engineer for an oil and gas company. Yeah. So I actually had my first oil and gas exposure. My senior year of high school work was actually did like

12:06 this part-time internship at Anadarko in the Woodlands At 1250 an hour, it was like 50 more I can make any other high school job I could find. But I worked for this like long-sutter reservoir

12:20 characterization team. There's just like some

12:24 DGS and RDS that we're trying to look at across the sub-service and look for potential in the field of the only opportunities. But I had exposure to the production team. I really liked it because

12:35 they were doing more optimization, looking across the sub-surface and operations, and doing relations, and I knew going into college at the beginning, I wanted to be a production engineer, so a

12:45 long-winded answer to say. I picked DP to me out of college, I had several offers, including ultra-moxie and one from Southwestern as well. But I picked DP because they gave me a production

12:57 engineering experience, as well as I felt like it's easy to go from big to small and harder to go from small to big on one of the international experience. I was fortunate to get that at year three

13:07 in my career to go live in Egypt for long since people. Yeah, I think that when you were evaluating your options, if you already sort of had that idea that you wanted to travel, picking a large

13:20 international company makes a ton of sense, right? And then you were a young man, really, being put into this situation where you went to Egypt. Did they ask you, like, hey, dude, you wanna

13:31 go to Egypt? Or did you like get to write down a list of like five places that you wanted to go to to kind of advance your career? Yeah, the graduate program logic, like request roles. And I felt

13:42 like a lot of my peers were requesting in London or Aberdeen in a BP dashboard. 10 quarters for it, but everybody want to do that. And they rarely had opportunities for ex-pats. And so I did not

13:48 put that on my list. I put all the crazy places that one would want to

13:57 get us to put as a bunch of cargo and things of that nature. I think it was one of three that got it that year, or two in the US, I think, three internationally. So it was very fortunate to be

14:08 able to do that. But it was a little strategic and to not pick the most popular posh places.

14:12 Yeah, they're like, oh, sure, no problem. There's only five people that put in for this We can pick three. Yeah. Did you,

14:21 were you homesick at all? Yeah, they actually put you through cultural training before you go a little bit broad. Yeah. Or be like, like two or three months you're gonna hit this kind of like low

14:30 between like the excitement of being a new expat and like really being a great community. And so I felt that in full force, but having a third of my time off, I came back to the US and traveled a

14:38 lot. And so I don't feel like I got the

14:43 expat to lose like some people do.

14:46 they were correct after a moment.

14:48 It would probably be different now, right? I mean, if you were to go away from your family and not see them all the time, then the heartstrings get tugged on a little bit differently. Yeah. I've

14:60 even noticed that myself, especially early on, with young kids, I really just hated being away. You know, it's part of the job. It's part of, you know, we call it the Denver tax A, if you're

15:14 an oil and gas and you're based in Denver, you make a little less money. I think then you would if you were in Houston, but you also have to travel. Like, that's just part of it. And the market

15:24 here is really consolidated and shrunk. And there's just simply less companies and there's less private equity money flowing in for startups in terms of operators and pipeline companies and so on and

15:35 so forth. So yeah, it's just something that I've sort of had to do. It's gotten easier It's still, now you miss things like your son's soccer game. Right, and while that stinks, it's a little

15:49 bit different than missing like your daughter's first step.

15:54 Those are two very specific examples of those first-hand experiences you speak of. No, I'm just creating generic examples and I don't want to get emotional to talk about the things I actually have

16:04 missed and started to question like everything that I'm doing in my life that put me in this situation. Why am I in Midland, Texas right now? My daughter has her second grade recital or whatever

16:15 But again, it's just sort of part of the deal and the trade-off is generally worth it. Plus I've worked from home for 15 years. So how did you get so technical? Like act as a whole, like you are

16:30 a consultant, but you were sort of a tech forward, custom development,

16:39 Microsoft centric development shop Development Shop. But your background is as truly like an oil and gas engineer. Like, where did you get all of this, I guess, scale and capability around doing

16:53 the technical stuff? I have to admittedly go back to high school to answer that question. It's definitely one of those nerds that built those own computer in high school and built websites and

17:04 things of that nature. Even in like our computer class in school, I built like a little slash, if you're old enough from your flash, a little video game, and I submitted that to like a state

17:15 competition and things of that nature. And then within Nanodarko, I had like two full-time in through-ships there. Once I started college, I actually built a data integration platform. I didn't

17:27 realize what I built at the time, but now that I've been in digital transformation, I mean, I was really ahead of my times, but it pulled into a lot of the subsurface data, the core photos, the

17:36 annotations they had, we're using scalar vector lines our graphics SVG.

17:42 I had to help draw the correlations to the tops across things of that nature. And I just did that. I learned SQL at summer. I'm dotnet versus C and dotnet to be able to build that application. At

17:53 the end of the summer, I had an IT department come in and run it and test, they're like, okay, looks big, we're gonna put it on the server, it's like, summer well done. And so really learned a

18:02 lot around technology and that space back then. And then I kept that on my resume. And then my next internship was at a pipeline company And then I got shoved into a skater team that was like kind

18:14 of scrolled away. So I'm gonna take some of the tech stuff off my resume. I want the business experience. And so I still did a lot of that. You know, I was the guy building

18:24 Dr. Spreadsheet as well as call it one point. The complex spreadsheets with the VDA's playground model, Python on an MRI

18:33 stack when it came into fruition in the last kind of decade. And then eventually let digital transformation at BHP

18:40 I think it's just my combination of. business strategy and business knowledge, as well as the technical sign, innovative thinking, agile mindsets, thoughtful changes. It's just this really good

18:48 blend of how to make the business better, love that enough to jump out and start walking soon. The digital transformation groups that I see, that succeed and that do well, really are made up of

19:03 people that truly understand the business, right? I think it's sort of the nature of oil and gas, if you work in the field, whether you are a lease operator, production foreman, geologist,

19:15 reservoir engineer, completion engineer, you don't really like people saying, Oh, here's the technology that's gonna come inand revolutionize your job. They're like, You don't even know my job,

19:26 dude. Like, Why are you giving me other stuff to learn? I'm here trying to maximize production or complete a well over here, like, Leave me alone. But I think it was probably helpful, super

19:38 helpful for you that you had that business. Backgrounds that you went into digital transformation. It wasn't just like here's something. I think that will help you It's hey, I've been in your

19:47 shoes, right? I've lived your life I want to hear from you and understand like what your pains are and your challenges are and Then identify and create a solution whether it's off the shelf or

19:58 whether it's an existing vendor That can help do that that must have been pretty fulfilling for you. I would think so so you ran the full-on digital transformation team At BHP. What was that like?

20:11 It was if anybody was doing digital transformation back in 2019

20:19 It was a lot of fumbling around in the dark and you nicked yourself a few times a long way So definitely have the scars to show it what we had I think a budget of three million dollars and built 50

20:25 applications in 12 months which was just unheard of right? So part of what we did is apply our principles and practices to the program itself I was able to eliminate a lot of waste and just moving

20:37 insanely fast and I remember early on talking to a censure, an info assistant actually hiring if you like change management people, and they try to coach us on, Oh, you need to make this matrixand

20:46 think about it. Well, it's just valuable. I realized my change management strategy was going to fix problems people want fixed. And there's of course some effort to learn stuff and to change a

20:56 little bit. But when you're solving people's problems, it's taking a look from 10 hours, 10 hours a week

21:02 to two hours a month or something like that. They'll eat it up. You don't have to sell them on anything or do

21:11 a

21:18 big communication system. I think

21:22 that's really where we differentiate ourselves then as well as now, is that we just come in and solve problems and make people's lives easier while adding other mind that. Yeah, I mean, Elizabeth

21:24 Gerbel, who's the CEO of EAG, who I want you to meet at some point, said something a few weeks ago to me, maybe a couple months ago that really resonated and that the conversation was around

21:34 strategy and execution and what she said was, Um, people pay for strategy wants, they'll pay for execution 50 times. Right. And I think that you've had a bias toward execution, right? Like,

21:49 yeah, of course there's a strategic component, but at the end of the day, for your business to stay sticky, you have to identify sort of like, what is a tactical problem that we can execute on?

22:00 And then you can figure out sort of what the bigger pains are beyond that. Um, when did you launch your company? Like, what was it called out of the gate and, and was it hard to leave? Like sort

22:11 of the cushy, um, digital transformation type gig and start your own thing. Uh, yeah. So we were originally, um, essentially consulting team launched in 2021, um, at DHP had already helped

22:25 quite a bit with the shale divestment, like10 billion of assets back, um, in 2018 to BPX from the most part of and energy as well. And then, so I had line aside on 2022 in 2021 that. the DHP,

22:39 which one division was selling to Woodside. And so it was an easy decision of like, this is all trick for me. I love what we're doing. We're gonna cease all improvement opportunities in business

22:48 'cause we're dumping the business. So I opted to make a jump then. And I found it to be surprisingly easy from

22:59 just kind of transitioning from the day to day there. I think COVID helped a lot, right? So I think that when I think about what I saw as my father doing as a consultant was on the road traveling

23:10 and engaging clients, I could teleport between clients and teams meetings. We still have made that much easier. I was fortunate to have been exposed to the Houston startup and innovation ecosystem

23:25 quite a bit leading to transmission. And so I was able to really just hit the

23:36 ground running with that existing network, get onboarded as a consultant into several different companies and connected to a few VCs, port codes and that kind of full capacity seems to me.

23:44 I've been having a lot of fun here since. Including digital wildcatters, who obviously this podcast is hosted on. I remember at one point you stepped in, you were like the interim or fractional

23:49 like CTO, right? Yeah, exactly. And really helping them make that transition from being an events company, like digital marketing company, content company, to Collide, which is a platform,

24:01 right? So it was probably an important transformational time for them, and I would think your background went nicely to doing that. Like talking a little bit about that, stepping in as an interim

24:12 CTO, and effectively you're like telling people what to do. You know, like, well, wait a second, we've already been successful while we do that. How do we do that? Well, I think I actually

24:20 did that, a kind of fractional CTO for a few companies. And what I always found was there's just that connection to the business vision and strategy to actually pour in a roadmap and then help them

24:31 with the execution, right? Regardless of which startup it was, there was about really listening to the founders along somewhat to what we do with enterprise clients. Understand their pain points

24:40 where they're seeing first-hand and living a thought part with them to think through one of the barriers and how do we work on that. And so with digital law matters, it was really around building

24:51 that brand and leveraging the existing community to launch, I'd say, kind of a LinkedIn light for the energy professionals. There's a lot of reasons behind that and then really leaning into a

25:04 deeper AI.

25:08 I want to talk a little bit about the Microsoft stack. So that's one of the things that I think that you've sort of hung your hat on. And logically it makes sense. Like I go back to,

25:20 I guess kind of my seven lakes days, don't bridge days, you know, 10, eight, seven, eight, nine, 10 years ago, people wanted dashboards, right? big push for, okay, we have all of this

25:33 data. How do we improve our data management practices and start to reconcile that data? And logically, you built out a data warehouse, some SSRS reports and then slap a HTML5 dashboard on top of

25:48 it, or Leverage Spotfire, which is what every oil and gas company had to do their sort of deeper analytics and repurpose Spotfire as just a

25:58 front end reporting tool. And then all of a sudden, I mean, this happened very quickly. Everybody was like, Well, wait. With our Office 365 subscription, we get this Power BI thing. And maybe

26:10 Power BI can't do everythingthat Spotfire does for the purposesof like a vendor spend analysis dashboard, or AFE estimates versus actuals, or lease operating statement. Power BI is more than

26:27 functionaland it's really inexpensive In fact, in some cases, it might even be. free, we just need somebody to come in and build something. And it's really kind of continued, right? You see

26:38 people that have this Power BI experience, but Power BI is only one small slice of sort of that Microsoft, you know, Power Apps suite. So tell me a little bit about like how and why you decided to

26:49 embrace Microsoft and how do you make the most of a suite that's effectively off the shelf, but then make it hum for oil and gas companies? Yeah, it's a great question and it's probably a

27:02 long-winded answer. Back in 2018, as we were launching Digital Transformation, we had a guy from the Business Community Office. I built this application. It was Power App. And if you've worked

27:13 in Power Apps, 2018, 2019, it was still pretty rudimentary. And there might be a day or two downtime in these, but I was really impressed with what you were able to do. And as we really built

27:23 the strategy, we realized that, you know, there was this big vision of what's had this map, so the data lake highly contextualized, and the time you wouldn't have gotten paid, it was2 million.

27:31 I don't know how that's what it always was, but that's what it always was,

27:36 and anytime you see a technology project lasting more than 18 months, you're really going to miss the mark and miss the opportunity of the business season. And so we really leaned into that. It was

27:47 accelerated because we were really ramping up our program in 2020, when oil price hit briefly minus 40, then I remember in that 20 to 30. So with a budget cut, we really focused on what can we

27:59 have the biggest impact, at least amount of funding. That's really when we were able to do that 50 products in 12 months by leveraging our self-power platform. But we did everything from production

28:10 allocations to help production years capture well tests and assign that and calculate a lot of their allocated production to

28:21 a drilling like a new oil delivery system to help stagegate drilling to make sure the right functions

28:29 were contributing at the right time. What we saw a lot with that is that if there's this big vision for a data lake, but really the reality was we have 50 spreadsheets. We don't know what's latest

28:38 truths. Three different people own different piece of picture. We just wanna go from there to one step above that of here's the clear data owner. It's accessible for the people that need it, even

28:48 if it doesn't talk this data, that's three data sets are over people. But people can contextualize that on the back and things of that nature. And

28:57 so we're really focused on solving business challenges, specific process, specific outcomes. And with that, we were actually incorporating a lot of the data along the way. And so we were able to

29:07 actually slowly go team by team and build that data, like data-laked, if you will, liberated data onto that first level of maturity and have a huge impact. And so as I launched my own business, I

29:19 really took a step back. And I saw the startup world that was Google shops, usually a max and things of that nature. And then the enterprise world, which was Microsoft, and I made the strategic

29:29 decision to stick with Microsoft in a lot of what we were doing with the Power Platform and

29:36 Azure and things of that nature because my enterprise clients security is our security, right? We just need credentials, we log in, we launch our applications within their system. So that makes

29:44 it super easy. And the tight integration with the entire Microsoft ecosystem will have SharePoint, Teams, Outlook and everything, just because it's so much easier I'm glad we did that bet, 'cause

29:56 now with all the new team of AI and CodePilot, we're able to leverage Azure services as well as all the CodePilot stuff to go even bigger and faster and more

30:08 powerful. But yeah, it makes sense. And it makes sense that it came out of a downturn, right? Because they're basically like, we're not buying anything new, so what do we have that can still

30:19 solve our business challenges? And you're like, well, you got this Microsoft stack. And there's actually a lot of things in it that you're under utilizing. which I'm sure we are too, you know,

30:28 internally with funk futures, yeah. And I think one of the things that was like a light bulb in my mind is that if we had to spend a quarter of an dollars

30:39 on every single hundred price application, we would move so slow and have such a slow transition in transformation. And so when I can cut that down to 30K or 50K, we can move so much faster and

30:46 have a much bigger impact. And that made a huge difference and was the fundamental shift in why we were so successful.

30:56 Yeah, so you mentioned AI, I have to talk about AI. I can't believe we went 31 minutes and I haven't brought it up yet. But I was in New York City last week at an InsureTech conference, insurance

31:09 technology. I brought out some partners here, folk futures and they have a focus in different verticals. It was, first of all, it was fun for me, A, to go to New York City for a conference

31:18 'cause most conferences I go to or, you know, Houston, Denver, Oklahoma, right? All the patch cities. whom you're in New York City in a completely different vertical. I didn't know anybody

31:28 there, which was cool. But there were probably 50 tech companies there, and 37 of them were AI. It's like, wow, OK. Makes sense for an industry that's been a little bit behind from a tech

31:45 perspective. And that's very manual with humans, entering data, looking up quotes in a very sort of rudimentary way that AI can come in and solve a lot of those problems, which makes me think,

32:01 like, in oil and gas, it's still a little bit undefined. I think that there are companies that want to embrace AI, that view from a baseball game terminology. Maybe we're in the second inning or

32:13 bottom of the first inning for what AI can do, kind of like what internet was in the '90s. And then there are some companies that just feel like, all right, I'm just not even going to be - I'll be

32:23 a laggard when it comes to. It's not even fast at all, or what are some like use cases and ways that you actually do apply artificial intelligence beyond just sort of like the traditional machine

32:34 learning within some of the deployments and things that you do in oil and gas? How do you leverage AI on your projects and get clients to embrace it? Yeah, it's a great question. I probably have

32:45 to take a step back and do a brief clarification. I feel like AI is used to talk about any sort of data integration automation at

32:56 this point And so I would argue that I've been doing that since 2018 as I was getting digital transformation. The big difference here is that we have the contextualized, like large language models,

33:04 right? So the ability to handle unstructured data and do something meaningful with it is just so much easier now on the OCR and some other kind of old-day systems, RPA to look through different

33:18 websites and extract data. But now with AI, there's much more capabilities to do things easier, but it's also more expensive to run. And so we often incorporate AI in our solutions in a fit for

33:31 purpose way, right? We're not going to do AI across the board, and then it takes you to cost5 per run, and you get 50 runs per day. We're going to plug it in and use an optimized number of tokens

33:43 and then build the rest of automation around that. So I like to say, we've been building agents for over half a decade now, and we just have a few extra tools to do all that. And there's a huge

33:52 investment in it as well. And so the rate of tools has been released is massive right now. That's just kind of a one-carbon. And then on the - what do we apply? We actually find that it's easiest

34:03 and most Apple will apply on the highly transactional things. So like IT tickets, finance, supply chain, things of that nature. When we get into deep technical around, which one of the engineers

34:14 work well, the easiest thing is just to think about where like specific large language models.

34:38 to

34:41 generative AI, is around where you have a lot of repetitive tasks around text, right? And so, workover procedures are often a common conversation. You've actually been put a lot across a lot of

34:43 our enterprise clients around environmental and regulatory, which are both really compliance. So you have a lot of opportunities to automate and use AI in that space. But more and more, we're

34:44 doing more with that, right? So if you think about all of your operator logs, whether that's a pumper or a driller, extracting insights from

34:54 that, let's just learn things about nature. But I think I always come back to what's the value problem here, right? So I think you saw in the last 18 months, two years, people just having fun

35:04 with AI, right? It was a shiny year, too long doing some cool stuff. And now we're starting to see us kind of hit that trough of disillusionment and move into that plateau of productivity under

35:12 people have a lot more dramatic, I think, approach to me but

35:17 find the value out in case. to focus on that, to work on that, to work on the next one, and use the right technology, so I don't beat technology twice. It's really not the business problem.

35:27 Well, how do you get the skeptic on board? Because you probably deal with all kinds of personalities in big and small companies, and your engagements, and

35:39 you're likely going to have people who say, We're not ready for that. Our data isn't clean enough to start to implement AI How do you get people over that hump and say, Here are some ways that you

35:49 can use it that will not disrupt your business, and maybe even solve for some of those data inconsistencies or challenges that you don't feel like making using AI impossible? Probably depends on if

36:00 it's a client or a person within a client. So a client's like, Well, let's just run a pilot. We'll do something relatively cheap. You can prove to me your data so bad we can't do anything. I can

36:10 prove to you

36:16 that we can't do something. You've never not turned that pilot into a broader engagement pilot. a lot of times you can get insights even if it's not the cleanest data and what we often say is we're

36:24 just taking the temperature right taking the temperature of the workflow we're doing as well as the data itself and that informs a broader conversation but we have a lot of really easy ways to handle

36:34 bad data so you can still get insights on 50 or 70 of things. I think people think of those absolutes of zero one right so we like achieving 60 of the value for 10 of the costs and I think most

36:47 people do as well. And then when it's a specific skeptic inside of a business to be frankly often avoid them initially we build a momentum around what we're doing around them and then it's much

36:59 harder to resist when everybody else is saying hey there's a lot of value it's used a little bit of kind of crowd influence if you will to get them on board but you have to be good at spotting those

37:11 people and looking at strategy to ensure you're you're allowing yourself with allies mom and not you know You're creating a lot of noise in the world of space. You create a really program and you're

37:22 not gonna be able to do it a lot about me. Yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense. Do you love this shit? Do you love what you do? All of my long-winded answers really indicative of that. Yeah, I

37:33 think what gets me out of bed a little bit. It's just true even throughout my career. I just love adding value, right? I want to fix problems and solve problems and get people excited about what

37:43 we're doing and what they're doing. So when I hear things like, I just feel like you're one of the team members, or like, Oh my God, you have no idea how much timeis going to save me. It's like,

37:51 Well, I want you

37:53 to tell me thatand let's go on to my app. But that's the stuff that expects me to do.

37:59 Yeah, yeah. Well, what does your company look like in a few years? And I, to put the caveat behind that, like when we had sort of our initial discussions, it was, Okay, you've got some of

38:12 these products, but ultimately you are a services company, you're a consulting firm. And we've seen so many times companies start off as a consulting firm, build a few products, and then boom,

38:24 all of a sudden they're actually a products company, right? They're doing the SaaS subscription models and getting away from sort of the pure services. You've got a little bit of both, which is

38:35 hard, right? Because then how do you pitch that, right? Are you leading with product? Are you leading with value added services? Like, where do you see your business in three years, five years,

38:47 do you become a products company? Is it still like what you're doing today? But now, all of a sudden, you have this whole platform of different solutions, but there's still a services piece

38:56 around it? Or is it just too hard for you to think about that right now because you're not sleeping and have a new -

39:02 No, I actually have to answer that by talking about AI again. So a lot of people are like, oh my god, computer science, or developers are going to go away because all this has occurred. But I

39:11 think what we've seen in every other industrial revolution that was cost carefully coming down, you just see higher demands. Henry Ford is the best analogy of that, right? So owning a car was an

39:23 elite privilege and then he made it 10 times cheaper than available to masses. And so what we've been doing in small ways, which I think is gonna become bigger and bigger ways, is building custom

39:33 solutions to match a business's workflow. And too often do we see business value being eroded by a process that's being forged because of how a tool is. So I'm imagining you're gonna have a big

39:43 platform joint. We'll never suggest giving SAP, but SAP would be a good example or a big platform. And, but then you're gonna have a lot fewer of these kind of third-party 200K, 300K kind of SaaS

39:56 tools. You're gonna have a lot of different custom solutions that integrate between this and really align with your business process. It's not your functional tools that you decided on 10 years ago.

40:06 And so what I'm imagining and what we really position ourselves for is we keep building, we call them modules. If you do a supply chain module or 19 modules and then we deploy that with a company.

40:17 I'm in then customizing configurates to integrate with their specific systems on the underlying their processes. If you think about like supply chain, there's just so many different applications

40:27 involved in that, whether it's SAP, GEP,

40:31 so on and so forth. And there's just a huge opportunity to have that orchestration layer except between those on top of that and help actually support the business process and not just the compliance

40:40 metrics and all those softwares are geared towards.

40:44 So of course, you answered that like consultant you couldn't get an answer, but no problem. I think I got it. You build like, you build modules for each different discipline within the group,

40:55 right? And then it's sort of like pick our shoes, which of those you want. And there's always going to be a services element because no two companies have the same exact workflow. Yeah. And so I

41:04 think what you'll see us have is what products available for the masses that the small operators, 100, 200 people, come in and pay a relatively low cost for to use, other that's, you know, for

41:14 regulatory compliance or otherwise. operations, project planning. And then you'll see the Chevron's or Exxon's hiring us to come in and customize our modules and integrate with our failure complex

41:23 systems. And then

41:26 somewhere there's going to be your mid-cap operators that are like, oh, we want the cheap option and we want the custom option. And

41:33 so that's what I see us doing. And so the answer is going to be yes. We are products and services.

41:41 All right. We're going to pivot to some hot seat questions. And I'm going to let you take a nap or go to work Or whatever it is you do with a newborn at 955 in the morning on a Monday.

41:52 First, what is your favorite restaurant in Houston? Houston, my wife and I live in the Heights. And so I probably

42:03 really enjoy taco stand the most. We'll walk there. It's like three blocks away. I'd be way too much in the last two and a half weeks. So it's just like an easy no-brainer restaurant that I just

42:14 really enjoy.

42:31 including the margaritas, taco steak. But garden grace is where I go from my steak dinner every year for my birthdays, also personal food. Slade on its way, plus one, maybe two old fashions,

42:31 some mushrooms on the side, excellent. Well, don't worry, your birthdays are gonna change. Like my birthday now is like, well, what would the kids like to do for your birthday? So we end up

42:41 going, I don't know, like boondocks or top golf or

42:44 something like that, right? So it becomes less about your garden grace and more about like, you know, fried chicken fingers and things like that. Yeah, that's okay. Someone asked me, how are

42:53 you looking forward to the holiday weekend, which I ended up having on something a little bit earlier. My response was, I've had plenty of holiday weekends without a kid, which is ready for my kid

43:01 to be here. So that's, I'm okay with that. Yeah, you're just, you're sort of a natural dad. And you're already losing your hair, so it's perfect. My wife was a fashion major at Baylor, so she

43:12 loves to criticize what I wear. I'm just dressing for the part that I want. I want to be a dad. So I've been dressing like a dad for at least half a day.

43:22 Oh, I love it. Your favorite country of the 52 or 53 that you've traveled to? Oh man, I can't pick one. Can I pick five? Yeah. Iceland, New Zealand, Argentina, Thailand, and Spain, my top

43:38 five. Nice. Nice. Iceland, New Zealand and Argentina are kind of the same. They're, you know, it's place you're caught, beautiful outdoors, Thailand, beautiful beach, amazing food, a loved

43:52 island hopping there, and then Spain is also food and beach. Like, I'll have this perfect, this perfect, picture-perfect screenshot on my mind of Pia, angry sitting on this like beach. It's

44:05 like a cove, just this one restaurant I'm right, turquoise water is beautiful in this place. Yeah, I close my eyes and I picture Midland, Texas.

44:16 Yeah, this is exactly what it was, yeah. And then final question. Like, how many kids do you think you guys are gonna have? This is gonna be a big family. Is it, you're gonna stick with just

44:25 one? Like, is this the first of many? What do you think? If you were to, if you were to, you know, gun to your head right now, how many? I'm gonna give you my live stance here, which is

44:33 we'll take it one at a time. But I suspect it's one

44:38 in that So, we enjoy traveling. So we'll look forward to traveling with Artie, but not sure if we'll do

44:47 it as much more

44:52 from the interview. Well, you know, and not to mention, like your sister, Alyssa, who's been on this podcast before, has like a million kids. So nobody gets to be an uncle for all of them,

44:56 and you get all the girls in that case too. On my side, I have nine. This isn't actually between two sisters So a pimple, an uncle 30, and then I have two on my life side. So I have plenty of

45:06 pieces in the future. You were well trained. Josh, this was really fun, man. And I do think we could go longer, but I think you and I will have plenty of one-off conversations, especially about

45:17 innovation, AI, data, dashboards, things that I'm kind of passionate about too, but I don't understand the ins and outs the way that you do. Where can people find you, find more about your

45:27 company?

45:30 Yeah, where are you? Yeah, so our website, actvelocitycom, part of our region to ask solutions consultants, we do one that is just consulting. So check that out, or increasingly active on

45:42 LinkedIn with our company and myself, so feel free to reach out to this one. Fantastic, well, actvelocity, Josh, Polit, New Dad, entrepreneur, business solver, problem solver, extraordinary,

45:58 and oil and gas and probably beyond. Thank you for coming on, what the funk today, and I look forward to hanging out with you at our tech.