What The Funk?

0:01 We are back and Tim, I'm back on social media. I think you saw my post yesterday. Yeah, it was weird not having you out there commenting and making posts, so I'm glad to see it. You know, I

0:15 hadn't really talked too much about the Hoffman process and the retreat that I went to other than I that I did go. And, you know, eight days, no computer, very kind of a spiritual awakening

0:29 Really, really powerful stuff. But one of the things that I noticed when I came back, especially having eight days off of devices is social media was immediately like just very high on the things

0:41 that made me anxious, toxic, and go into like old patterns of anger and frustration. Really? Things like that, yeah. Less LinkedIn, but Twitter, especially. And I'm just like, ooh, this is,

0:54 this is toxic. But that was one thing I did not miss when I was there So before I was ready to just fully sort of jump. back in, I wanted to make sure I kind of got some thoughts together, one of

1:03 which is that Oklahoma City, congratulations, Oklahoma City, for whatever this is worth, you are officially my favorite business town, number one. I'm sure that you'll be getting a plaque in a

1:15 key to the city soon based on that announcement.

1:19 I just need a key that works to my hotel room in the Sheraton downtown. So we were at the Skirvan, JP Warren happened to be there, sort of random, so I was able to hit a networking event, now see

1:31 a bunch of my friends from, you know, Chesapeake, current ex-Chesapeake, Devon, Continental, Enable. It's just like the hit rate of people accepting meetings there and sitting down and then

1:44 opening up to you and talking about what their business plans are and their needs is just different than it is here. Yeah. And even Houston, it's a little more guarded, but it's like, it's really

1:55 nice I learn a lot every time I go there. I got a kick. We sent autumn are good for an autumn. She shopped when this is energy and navigator days. She goes up to Oklahoma City and it was it was

2:07 kind of funny because she had seven meetings in one day. Yeah, it was you just can't. I mean, one, it's a proximity. Everybody's close together. Even if you're driving, it's still just 10

2:17 minutes away. But to us, it's how friendly everybody wasn't just taking the meetings. But you just can't do that anywhere else No, I really love it. We didn't. We just hired three people in

2:29 Oklahoma City. And I guess up until last six years, I don't think I had anybody located there. It's kind of weird. Just happened in the last two or three months. That's incredible. Are they X

2:42 like industry people? Is it because of like industry layoffs? And now they're available? Or how did how did this happen?

2:49 One person was former Chesapeake. Another person is more fresh out of school and then. Uh, another one had a left from a tech firm, uh, here in Houston, helped somebody start a business up in

3:06 Oklahoma city for the last year. And then kind of getting back into it. No, that's fantastic. So one thing Jeremy, yeah, Oklahoma city has gone through, you know, quite a renaissance. If you

3:15 were, if you had traveled there for business in the early nineties, like that's when I started, I remember my first trip was to go see Kerma Gigi in 1995

3:25 to discuss

3:29 Y2K potential issues with our software. And, you know, anyway, it was kind of an amusing conversation because I hadn't even heard of Y2K at that point, but they were ahead of the game. But back

3:39 then, there was no Bricktown, you know, Oakland, the downtown just evaporated at 430. It was, there was nothing happening. It was, and so if you're traveling, it was, it was kind of a ghost

3:50 town down there at night, and it's really changed since probably 2008. When you started going there, you've, you've had Bricktown. the Oklahoma City Thunder downtown. There's just a lot

4:01 happening down there now. Yeah, the first, the first time I went there for work, I was at Deloitte and

4:08 the Devon building was being constructed. So, and they required all of their

4:16 service providers to stay in this hotel right across the street. Very interesting timing, I guess. So that's probably a symbol of a lot of things changing over there. Oh, absolutely I mean, it

4:29 still sort of sticks out like a sore thumb, right? You drive through a city where the second tall is building is what, 22 or 23 stories high, and then there's one that's 50, right? So just what

4:40 that looks like in a really flat area is like kind of astounding. Yeah, absolutely. Have you ever been conscious of their like water park where you can do the rapids and all of that? No, I

4:51 haven't. Yeah, they have this sweet water park there and we used to do forums in Oklahoma City We take our whole team there. I mean, it's mainly for kids, but it's also fun for people, you know,

5:02 for, for adults too. So we, for big kids, who is this guy, who's talking to say who we have. There's another voice and we haven't even introduced him.

5:12 My guy, Jeremy, sweet. Who the hell are you? Thanks for having. Tell us about yourself. Um, I guess Overview from Dallas, uh, stayed in Dallas for college, went to SMU. Um, start out my

5:31 career, right? When the big financial collapse happened in, in '08. Um, I think we all thought we were going to be big, like Wall Street bankers or something in business school. Oh, yeah.

5:42 That a lot of us became accountants. Um, and, and then I kind of started my career at, at Deloitte and.

5:50 Did a bunch of work with them in different industries, retail, life sciences, insurance, energy, and.

5:57 uh, being in the Dallas office, a lot of the oil and gas work I would get staffed on. Um, that was sort of my connection to the industry. So I became one of the oil and gas guys in that group and

6:09 then did a couple of big projects and said, I really liked the EMP side of the business and, and I want to go kind of get closer to it. So, um, uh, when, um, started working for, for oxy, uh,

6:22 from there and that brought me, brought me down to Houston where I'm at right now.

6:28 So I want to Deloitte. All right. Let's go back to your early career. You come out, you go to work for Deloitte. I guess the, you know, they're used to what the big six consulting and then the

6:36 big four or five. I don't know how many there are now, but you know, it's got a reputation that whole industry, the various competitors, just really being a grind. What was that light coming out

6:47 of school and going through that early grind. Just, you know, I don't know, I don't know what your hours were like, but I hear horror stories about just the. the amount of effort that you go

6:59 through those first couple of years paying your dues. Yeah, I don't know, dude. The hours are pretty high, but at the time, it's sort of a pretty selfish time in your life. When you're that

7:10 young out of school and if you're focused on your career, so you don't really have a lot of other obligations. So I always kind of viewed it as like my moving time from a development standpoint. So

7:21 really just embraced it So yeah, I mean, pretty long hours, a lot of travel. But I think that actually kind of made it fun since I didn't have a wife or kids for the early part of that And. so

7:37 fairly humble beginning. So I didn't travel a lot whenever I was a kid. And the first project I had was out in Orange County. And I show up on my first day of work. And they mail me a laptop out

7:50 there I don't even show up at the local office, you know, and I'm like, I get in the It was for a pack son, the retailer, and I get in the elevator and I'm like full suit and tie. Like, I'm

8:03 pumped for my first day of real work. And this guy walks in the elevator and flip-flops and board shorts. And he looks at me and he goes, he looks at me and he goes, You're a consultant? And I'm

8:13 like, Yeah. And he goes, I'm like, what about you? He goes, I'm the CFO. And I'm like,

8:23 Welcome to the business world Yeah, yeah,

8:27 that's amazing. That hours are, I

8:32 mean, I think it's just more of like, it didn't really bother me, but yeah, like they're not short. It's not 40 hours a week. And it's not for everybody. I mean, I just, you know, I know

8:45 that the, I guess the pattern that you see from the outside look it in is they work you and after a couple of years, they know they got a certain attrition rate. people are going to go from their

8:58 consulting, they're going to go to work for the clients they're consulting for or things like they know that they're going to lose those guys. So they just use them as much as they can. And then

9:06 the guys are stick around or partners and. Yeah, it's a good model though in the sense that like, they also know you're probably going to be a client again, you know, like if you leave. And so

9:17 there's a certain sort of acceptance and

9:23 I don't know, like a community around that, you know, where like, yeah, you sort of accept these tours of duty, but what a, you know, straight out of college, those are great places to launch

9:33 your career just in a way, 'cause I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do. And, but it was a way to figure out things you didn't like doing, you know, along the way, which by getting a lot of

9:44 different industry experiences. So you get to, so you get the opportunity to have some real hands-on professional training. in a variety of different industries with a kind of famous consulting

9:58 firm. Then you take a job at Oxi in Houston. What part of the business were you in? And then did you go from Oxi to starting Darcy? What's the progression from there? Yeah, yeah, I joined their

10:13 F-PA group. So I was just doing a lot of the, working a lot with the reserves guys and a lot of just the modeling stuff And I kind of tagged on to the Permian business units that were there and

10:26 worked a lot with their EOR, grew CO2 forecasting, these types of things. And

10:33 that was good. So you really learned the business as a, I'm not an engineer, but you sort of got your hands on it and kind of just understood the kind of the business of that business a lot better

10:45 and just kind of how these different departments work together, the tools that they use. And so a lot of the tools that we were using Um, uh, uh, we're like sticky legacy software, you know,

10:59 like, um, no offense to the, to the slumber Jay people. We're using like peep for a lot of the forecasting and, and these types of things. And, and if you were to compare that at that time to

11:10 other industries where you'd seen like mind blowing analytics stuff going on, like, Hey, what, why this is very, very, uh, inefficient, but it was really sticky and hard to replace So it was

11:22 hard to make a chain currently. And so I started looking around externally, like, surely there's some venture capital guys or others that are investing in this because there's a big gap here.

11:34 There wasn't a lot, but there were a few runs around. There was, there was a group here locally that had a all sort of accelerator and venture model that they were, that they were focused on

11:44 energy tech, um, a lot more like, uh, clean tech stuff at the beginning but.

11:53 But I found them and started to spend time with them. And then that's where I'm at, my partner for Darcy Hossein. He was already there and he convinced me to join them. And that was sort of the

12:04 transition into the Darcy path.

12:07 By the way, I can empathize with the, you drop peep. I banged my head against that wall at Oxy a few times when I was an energy navigator, trying to find a way to get that sticky software out and

12:20 get ours in to ultimately try to make it as sticky is, you know, anyway, you guys mentioned that you had Jeremy from a combo curve on a few episodes or something, you know, and it's that type of

12:35 stuff that you were maybe expecting to see back then, you know, and what you had were like these softwares that were kind of built by engineers, four engineers, so it's almost like when you open

12:49 up some of the Microsoft products in this guy A.

12:53 1, 000 menu options and possible settings and things that you can do and it just is a bit overwhelming the user experience isn't too great. We were just seeing a lot of that, not just peep, but

13:04 just, I mean, a lot of these legacy platforms. Same thing when you, I mean, pick your product, if it's in place, let's just take that family of products, you know, I guess the guerrillas in

13:17 the US is Aries, you had peep, which is kind of international and that's why oxy had it You had, you're up in Canada, there's two of them, Val Nav and Mosaic, but to take them out, you know,

13:30 at the time anyway, it's always, well, do you have this show me this button, because this is a button I use all the time Oh shit, I don't have that button, but I have 17 other buttons that they

13:44 don't have, and you get into a feature fight and, you know, in order to replace them, I used to tell, I think I was telling Jeremy Funk this was in order to replace that kind of incumbent, you

13:55 can't be two times better. You got to be five times better, or 10 times better. Andor do something crazy different, which ultimately that's the approach that combo, the guys at combo curve are

14:07 taking. And I hope they do a great job doing that. So it's interesting. So

14:14 we're building up to this, but you met up with Hossein, and I guess you guys are incubating the idea of Darcy Partners. What was the vision and how has it changed over time? Why Darcy Partners?

14:28 Why did you guys form it?

14:30 Yeah, like originally, we, like a lot of folks that you'll see come maybe in our mutual social networks. It's an attraction to venture, I think, and kind of there's a bit of a

14:43 sort of a glorification or celebration of that part of the world. And that was interesting to look at the investment opportunities that might be there but then once we spend more time on it.

14:54 you realize that a lot of this early stage stuff, it's not really an access to capital problem that these guys were having. So we're spending a lot of time with the founder groups of these portfolio

15:04 companies and it was really like

15:10 an information flow problem. So you have these big enterprises and you have typically people that have never really maybe sold anything in their life or built a company, right? And they've got a

15:23 thing that works and maybe it's been piloted by a couple of people and now trying to get beyond this death by pilot phase was like the real issue you, know? And so we'd see this, we always call it

15:35 like an information asymmetry problem where somebody, there's some a thing where the tech risk has been mitigated to some degree but people don't really know about it or the right people don't know

15:46 about it at the right time. So sort of different than sort of blasting things on social media about like tech. broadly, but just do the right people within the organization know about these things

15:59 at the right time and we kind of became obsessed with this and that was sort of the evolution of Darcy where we were saying a lot of our LPs at that group were the strategic oil and gas companies

16:13 anyways and in a way you realize you were actually acting as this innovation as a service concept to them more than the financial returns that they were going to generate from that fund model that we

16:26 constructed so we said hey is there just a as a service business here that makes more sense and that was Darcy. So connecting the innovators and the operators right I mean there's definitely

16:42 similarities with what I do today and we'll get into that a little bit later but the thing that has impressed me a lot with Darcy Jeremy is how you guys have been able to pivot because when Darcy

16:53 first hit. my radar, this was late 2017. And I'm like, this is a good concept because it is an awareness issue. And there's also a marketing branding issue that all these companies, no offense,

17:04 Tim OVS, is part of this. It all sounds the same. Production, optimization, or analytics, or business intelligence, or whatever the buzzwords are at the time, all these products start to sound

17:16 the same. So if you're a busy executive at an EP company, how do you decipher what you should even look at? Which of these things fills what niche? And then what overlap is there on tech? So you

17:27 hit my radar with doing these sorts of events. I think you had one in Denver, and it was like, somebody came over from Santos, or their BHP building, or something, and it was like, hey,

17:37 they're gonna evaluate certain technologies, so you brought in a bunch of vendors to do it. So a very in-person model, right? Like connecting in-person for a day, a bunch of logical innovators to

17:50 meet with oil and gas operators within those companies. And then can then COVID. And it's a bit connects back to both of our backgrounds. So like, Hussein was, I mean, he was at McKinsey, a lot

18:02 of consulting work. And what we had found was that you sort of have two things going on here. You've got like the market research people, you know, so whether it's the gardeners or the CB insights

18:14 or whoever that do a lot of like tech research and hype curves and these types of things. Not a lot of specialization in our industry or a very good understanding of the value chain at a deeper level,

18:28 you know, and then there's a network component to it, you know, and so you look at say a LinkedIn or something like that, it's a bit, it's useful, but there's no curation. I mean, it's just

18:40 kind of like a public restroom sometimes with what it comes to some of the content that on there. And so really it was like, hey, how do you combine sort of elements of like, let's take the

18:52 curation and apply to both the network and the kind of tech research and scouting and do more than just create like market maps and things like that. But actually do do diligence, you know, on

19:04 these technology companies. And Tim has had exposure to us before. And I think that's the part that people love. Like if I was at Oxi, if something new came out and the GM or whoever wanted us to

19:16 go look into it, it sounds great. And the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna call your buddy at Pioneer or whoever and say, have you heard of these guys? Like this is a real thing, like

19:25 it sounds great, you know? And so part of what we were doing, we were like, well, I could just do that for a lot of these guys, you know? Like why would I not talk to the users of these, you

19:34 know? And so we kind of built that into the business to say, I could help de-risk all the way up to that initial decision point, just remove a lot of that administrative friction for these guys.

19:46 And, well, and I can vouch for, I think, I don't know if I was in one of the early workshops, with OBS. Thank you, Jeremy Funk, for putting me in that category. But

20:03 as an early company, small company, don't spend a lot of money on marketing, you know, you want to go talk to the VP of technology or innovation or the CIO. But they have, they don't want to

20:18 talk to vendors They don't want, I mean, there's a natural, hey, we're busy, we can't be talking to vendors all day. And I empathize with them. Yeah, you don't want to have 20 guys selling

20:29 stuff all day. So there's a natural blocker right there to prevent these, all these little guys that come in. But if you talk to the CIOs, they tell you, we don't have exposure to all the new

20:42 stuff that's coming out. So we don't know what's out there. So what I liked about the Darcy model was you kind of, Okay, guys who really want to see new stuff come see to the new stuff and we'll

20:53 put all the stuff you tell us you want to see about, you know, we'll bring the right vendors in to talk to you. So that was what I thought was so unique was solving that problem. How are we going

21:04 to introduce it to these guys that need to see it and say they want to see it, but they're not getting a chance to see it. And we as a small company, simply not ready to go out and spend4 million

21:16 on a marketing campaign to get in front of every CIO Anyway, so I don't know if you've got to comment on that, but I found it really refreshing to get 10 minutes in front of 12 clients that I want

21:31 to talk to. Yeah, it's an alignment of incentives thing

21:38 that underlies the whole business model from day one. And so, like as you know, we don't try to make money from the startups, or it's not even just startups, but just the. supply side of this

21:52 equation. We don't monetize that, and yeah, the innovators, we don't monetize that intentionally because we're really a trusted advisor to the operator side or the demand side. And so it creates

22:08 a good dynamic where a lot of the founder team or executive teams of the innovators have a great relationship with us because there's no bait and switch, like you're not gonna get on our list and

22:17 then we come back and ask you to buy something so that then the operators know that you're not just pumping things where you get kickbacks or something like there's a trust there and so what you've

22:30 been able to do is you help a lot of the innovators by saying, Hey, I'll aggregate all these operatorsand I'm a great voice of the customer. So let me do, like say I do the scoping work with a lot

22:44 of these EPs or utilities now as well, have a very good sense of the. voice of the customer and you're doing that mapping to a lot of the trends and the themes to figure out what's the best use of

22:56 everybody's time. And so when we started the company, it was like this big digital wave. You're right in the middle of it, Tim. So it was like, like all this fluff around AI and machine learning

23:08 and this and that. And like, people were struggling to make heads or tails of it. So we built the business originally on like that theme because we're like, hey, this is where there's lots of

23:18 misinformation and confusion, you know, and so we started very heavily on the digital front.

23:25 So, so you continue doing these in-person events. I remember, you know, great trajectory and Calgary as well. I met Andrew and of course, Darren does some business with funk futures and he came

23:37 on this podcast maybe a month ago. I know you guys are our buddies. So, so the, the model was let's have these really not traditional sales guys, like, like almost SME, types that have contacts

23:49 within the industry to get people comfortable with the with the Darcy model had some success with it. I would say very, very clearly, like no, no real competition. I like the approach you guys

24:00 took. And then COVID hits. And I'm thinking, what the hell are these guys gonna do? Right? This is an in person company. It's based the values based on the event or whatever you call it, right?

24:11 The forum. So, so what did you do? Like you guys are at a crucial point here where we got to pivot our company somehow. And what have you done? And what do things look like going forward?

24:22 We got lucky a little bit. But the, um, so we had, I mean, we were kind of killing it back in like 2019, to be honest, like we had a hub in Calgary, we're doing stuff in all the key hubs

24:35 basically. Oh, yeah. But then you were like, you know, from a North America EMP standpoint, we had a lot of coverage and You're running into maybe some scalability issues that you tried to go

24:49 more international. You know, what am I going to do to like Spain? Like it's international was going to be a new challenge for us already. And then we were running a ton of live events, man.

24:58 Like we were doing like, I don't know, like 50 of these things and constantly like going to Calgary, Denver, Oklahoma, Midland, you know, which was fun, but you were shipping a whole like

25:10 events ops team in and out of these places Like it was a, it was a whole production. I never thought I would be like an event management expert, but I kind of became, we became one through that.

25:23 And, but we were like, man, we to scale this, just getting butts and seats was a huge pain. So like you had people emailing, who's coming? I can need the SME. Like maybe you're doing something

25:34 on artificial lift, maybe the theme in Midland or something like that. And so you're, it's not just random people from the clients you want to find the right person to attend because these things

25:44 were intimate. They're like 40 people, you know, and you got one or two guys from each company in this United Nations style format to say, hey, Darcy, you know, give us the synthesis of all

25:58 your research here, and then these innovators are gonna be sort of actors in this play, in a way, and they'll kind of come in and participate. And so we started looking externally for software for

26:11 event management, 'cause we're like, this is now, I mean, there's too many people hard to coordinate. And looked at like C-Vent and these other platforms, and we're like, I'm really gonna play

26:22 like30 or40, 000 a year for something like this that doesn't seem that complicated. So let's just build our own event management software, you know? And so, but like just mainly for ourselves

26:33 from like a ops excellence standpoint. And so mid 2019, we started that. And then a lot of our clients wanted the research that we would email them our research. or here's some inside baseball on

26:48 this theme. And they're like, can we just access this in one spot? So we're like, well, maybe we should just build a content management system to house this. And in Q4, we kind of just built

27:02 the management piece, started to dabble with the content management. And we said, let's just commit to building an actual platform, not to displace the original one, but we started testing these

27:14 virtual events back in 2019 just to see if we could get some scale out of it without having to travel everywhere. And yeah, then February hits, and I'm walking back from the last live forum we

27:27 would have done. And it's one of the executives from Hunt, and we're walking back to his hotel, our office. And he's like, this COVID thing, you know, it's a real deal. He's telling about some

27:42 of the changes they were making, you know, and some of the advisors that they were working with and talking about our personal investments, whether it actually go all cash, you know, different

27:51 things and

27:53 that was like a weird moment for me because this guy's super smart and I was like, he's seeing something I don't see here and a month later, like everything stopped. And we just pushed this

28:05 platform out to all of our clients. And I think from that perspective, they probably thought that we had just went real hard and just popped this thing out. But really, we kind of got lucky that

28:15 it had been evolving since mid 2019 up to that point. So. So now you've got a portal, right? So you basically took, you know, the events maybe will, maybe will come back regardless. But now,

28:28 and I really actually like this platform to him. Like you should sign up. I think they have a three week type trial thing. You go in and you look for, you know, you just do a search for certain

28:38 softwares and they've done their due diligence on it, right? So somebody's kind of analyzed the company. There's high level, like quick hitter information and it's very robust. Jeremy Funk, I

28:49 think you should do some research because I believe if you were to go search their site, you would find me on there, sir. Oh, yeah, just do a little bit more research. Fine. No, I agree It's a

29:04 great portal, and I think, you know, you've got at least one reason we're doing this, we're recording on a Friday morning as opposed to a Friday afternoon is because they have quite a bit of

29:14 content delivery and virtual meetings going on between innovators on Friday afternoons, and I've been on a few of those as well. It's a very sweet, I've heard you on a couple of those, so I think

29:25 that content is great, and there's also another thing that's going on at Darcy that maybe is equally valuable to these.

29:35 up and coming smaller companies. And that is the innovator to innovator conversations because at the early Darcy events, you know, say you've got the Apaches and Oxes all sitting in a room and,

29:50 you know, you go in and do your 10 minute presentation and then they throw darts at you when you leave the room and they rates you and there's all kinds of stuff that goes on. Well, what's going on

29:58 in the other room is all the vendors are sitting around meeting each other, you know, in a bullpen. And I wound up having some great conversations with the guys at ambient and Kelvin and, you know,

30:11 and it was kind of a, are we competitors or are we not competitors? And we're doing that little dance that we always do when vendors meet each other and finding out where there's overlap, where

30:23 there's not, should be working together. And we wound up having a lot of great conversations with the guys at ambient specifically and Kelvin that since I've mentioned them And, you know, figuring

30:32 out if we could go work together, And, you know, so that's where, you know, some guests on our show have come from those meetings and those bullpens, but now you've got innovator to innovator

30:44 presentations going on. So I don't know if you want to go into that at all, Jeremy? Yeah, it's just yet another like community gap that I think that you, from a, it's just a good business, you

30:57 know, for us like you're not monetizing it directly, but like by having a robust innovator community, it's, it kind of helped everyone benefits through this little marketplace. And so,

31:10 but part of our, the reason why we started that, one of the reasons we started doing that with you guys this year was that we actually learned a lot from those discussions too. And so I think the,

31:23 even if you are, aside from the things that you mentioned, like there are partnership things that I think aren't clearly visible, you know, unless you have a reason to collide with each other.

31:32 But in addition to that, like

31:36 all the systems and processes and sales strategies and marketing things that you got, you're all dealing with the same problems. So it's actually good to hear from people that are maybe looking at,

31:47 I don't know, like,

31:50 I don't know, even technical sales handoffs, like SDRs to account executives and these types of things. Like I don't see a lot of that type of stuff happening in our industry versus like you'll go

32:00 to maybe California or something like that And you'll see these very deep communities or you have to go on to pavilion or something for kind of a broad sales community. And so because it tends to our

32:17 relationship, a lot of times it's with the kind of founders or executive teams, it's also a good kind of, it's the right profile of people to be colliding, a lot of times as well to see those

32:28 opportunities. So it's been good and you've worked with David I wish now I think he was one kind of leading. leading a lot of that this year, but we've gotten a lot of value out of it and we get a

32:39 lot of good feedback from it. So

32:42 we like it.

32:44 Now, let's talk, you've talked about operators and of course, this is an upstream oil and gas centric podcast, generally speaking, but talk to me a little bit about, of course, the energy

32:55 transition, ESG, emerging technologies that are also in your platform So I'm assuming you do a lot more than just upstream, but want to get a sense of like what you're seeing with ESG and I want to

33:09 dive into some of the conversations I had in Oklahoma and shine some light on that. Yeah, well, I mean, what I'll start is maybe the analogy to what we saw back when we started the company on

33:20 analytics. It's a new thing that the world decided like is important now and there is a, not everyone speaking the same language, you know, at the beginning. and so there's a lot of

33:33 misinformation. And those are typically areas where we can be very useful. And so of course, we've been working on that for a few years now and

33:47 I've seen two things. One, just the

33:52 EMPs for sure

33:54 are really well-versed on this step at this point. It's been a while, there's been a lot of work on methane and things like that,

34:03 and I think now you have this, maybe I'll be dorky, but I almost have this bi-modal distribution where you've got the best-in-class folks that really are doing a lot of great things and you've got a

34:16 group of maybe laggards that then the industry as a whole are trying to solve for But that

34:27 connected us also to the further downstream to when we started doing that work, We saw an opportunity with utilities because their worlds are starting to come together a lot more and see more

34:39 vertical integration and just new business models that are going to have to be made on the utility side. And so that was the biggest shift for us was saying not just sort of in an evolutionary way

34:51 focusing on sustainability for oil and gas, but then also kind of going through deeper energy transition topics and working with utilities directly and in the same way that we work with EMPs. That's

35:06 great. It seems like there's room for this across the board, right? I mean,

35:11 you guys have done a ton of research and it shows within within the model. Tim, real quick, so on the ESG topic, and I'm curious from Sweet, we'll get to him in a minute, around what you're

35:23 hearing from your sea levels, but but I had some meetings and meals with some pretty high level folks within publicly traded organizations when I was in OKC. And the general sentiment was, there's

35:35 still not a clear understanding of what they're supposed to do around ESG as it relates to technology. I'm not talking about physical things out in the field. I'm talking about back office,

35:45 tracking, analytics, forecasting, how you present these things to investors and executives above them in their company, right? And what was indicated to me is that there's basically text threads

35:58 and email chains of people that are keeping in touch on this, right? So you might have, like you said, a COO at Hunt on the

36:05 same thread as the CIO at Denberry, who's also on with Conoco ESG of director Phillips's

36:13 , right? And they're like, what the hell is going on? What are you doing? And what I've seen is, the answer's still the same as it was three or four months ago is that people don't know. So I'm

36:23 curious, kind of from Sweet's perspective, are you seeing more people coming to you asking you the same question? Like, what are people doing in this area? And is that sort of the most rapid -

36:34 You know, the most interest, the most growth, are you seeing other areas too? Yeah, I think the first wave was maybe very much on what are people doing. And so our community was very useful for

36:47 that originally where if you go back in time, like 18 months or two years, you know, if you hadn't created a sustainability report or something like that, a lot of those were first time motions

36:57 that people were going through. And so even for a few customers, we kind of worked on them to create their first sustainability report, you know, because that was a new thing. And then, but now

37:10 I feel like the literacy level was just a lot higher on these topics in general. And for those folks that have kind of like pushed that for a couple of years now, they're kind of moving more into

37:21 like

37:24 more optimization-related problems. And you have less people sort of saying, hey, let me just get familiarized with some of these issues.

37:33 It's evolved pretty quickly, to be honest. Yeah, it has, it has. There's just no standout, like what is the playbook? What do we do? Whereas I think people have started to figure that out,

37:42 slightly more for other things, whether it's production optimization, routing by exception, analytics, data management. Those things have come along a lot in the past decade, right? Where this

37:51 is, I could see major growth in the next 10 years. I think we're evolving out of the, just do something. We're gonna make a bunch of big statements and then go do something and not what is the

38:06 something and everybody's kind of doing different things and learning about things like scope one emissions versus scope two emissions versus something beyond that. I know from our side, we're

38:17 seeing the same thing is some people are talking about getting rid of

38:24 diesel generators out in the field in favor of something else and some of the other clients actually just getting rid of of. assets, so they can achieve their goal and passing it off to someone else.

38:38 I mean, and I always make reference because we always talk about this, but I've seen it happen in Alaska where BP exits something that's going to be high emissions and the company that takes it up

38:49 is now the biggest emitter in Alaska.

38:54 So what did they solve? Okay. You know, obviously we're going to move away from that eventually, but for BP, it looks good, but for the acquisition guys, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. I'm

39:04 working with a client in another continent, as it turns out, where we're actually looking at emissions forecasting, but in the long term. So if you, if you're going to develop a gas field to

39:17 lower your emissions,

39:20 a new gas field, so it's, it's lower emissions to develop a new gas field than to take on an old brownfield because of the compression needs and all that. But so for five years, your emissions are

39:32 less. In five years, you're going to have to start putting compressors out in that location. What does that start to look like? So we're starting to look at those kind of long-term emissions, but

39:41 it's, it is a very interesting time to see all of the, there is no playbook, funk, as you said, that people are following. So it's interesting to see how they all step into this. Anyway, long

39:53 story, but go ahead, Jeremy. Yeah. We, the, I think at a minimum, like on the collaboration front where you see a lot of that is nobody wants to be last, right? Like, like, even if you

40:05 don't want to be first, you definitely don't want to be last.

40:09 I spoke with this Earth Tech thing and I had this like cat catchy title on like, like about like the ESG bear, you know, it's like, you know, you just don't, you don't want to be the last guy

40:19 you met the bear. But the, the, the, um, these guys are focused on generating returns. So I think sometimes the ESG thing becomes a bit of a distraction It is important to these guys, but.

40:31 important for some of the, maybe the more macro things that you're talking about, Tim, which is like, look, as some cohorts of the EMP industry are going to fully pivot, which means that someone

40:42 is going to take over those hydrocarbons, and the people that will take over those hydrocarbons, just as a country, you don't want that to be the most irresponsible operators. I mean, there's

40:55 like geopolitical raster to this as well. And so I think there are other, because you know that there's going to be some of those pivots, then it makes business sense too, to just be in the

41:08 peloton at a minimum. You want to be in the peloton. Don't be the laggard. I like the term fast follower. You want to be a fast follower. So once you let someone else cut their teeth on the

41:20 bleeding edge, it will be right behind them with followed up on some of those ideas. Some people, one of our clients, there's an independent that We've been talking about like more vertical

41:32 integration and these types of things. And I mean, I think it's public. They

41:40 actually went and bought their own generation asset down in Temple, you know, for their own gas to kind of control the more of the supply chain, you know. And I think you see more of these types

41:53 of transactions and business model augmentations that like,

41:60 maybe are just less traditional, you know, as people see opportunities. So it doesn't even mean to be a technology pivot necessarily more than just like a business strategy shift. But they're sort

42:12 of like the bigger companies, like if say, you know, BP or whoever has like a mobility strategy or something like that, you have this weird nexus being created now through energy transition

42:25 between like the pure play utility operators in these EP's is a very interesting. time. And those guys haven't really had to compete with each other the same way like an oil and gas right on the

42:37 utility fresher. And now these new business models are going to create a lot of just, just interesting opportunity. Well, even beyond that, now that the hydrogen economy, whether, you know,

42:50 depending on where you are on this blue, green, ammonia, and all that other stuff, suddenly storing hydrogen and ammonia is going to be interesting. And these are the things that

43:02 oil and gas companies and utilities. That's going to be another crossover point.

43:07 How are we going to do that to make it economical first and maybe profitable later?

43:15 So

43:16 the whole transition is going to be fun for the, you know, I think that's obviously the more for the energy industry. Yeah. And I get it too on the other side, because we look at tech all day

43:26 long. So we We've got a bunch of this hydrogen stuff we'll look at, you know, all the, you know. solar, we've been looking at nuclear. I mean, we cover the key topics. And I think some people,

43:38 especially like my pure play and P friends, like my personal friends, just like you did on the analytics stuff, five, six, seven, eight years ago, there is a certain amount of drifting that

43:48 occurs, you know, for a period of time as these new things like, it's almost required to have that marketing push on the supply side, you know, for, you know, it's going to happen that way

44:02 until sort of the literacy catches up and then like sort of you hit the right balance, you know, I think, so that's why I was like, look at the big cloud and AI ML thing as like an analog for some

44:15 of this, you know, because if you go back in time, there was a lot of the same grifting and stuff going on there as well, you know. That's a good, that's a good point. Love drifting reference.

44:25 So I don't think we have one of those before First, first time grifting spend that mentioned. Um, I got two more questions and then we're going to, we're going to let you run because I know you're

44:36 a busy guy, Mr. Sweet. So one is, what is darcy going to look like in five years, given the, the pivot that you guys have made, um, and just curious sort of what comes to mind. I know you,

44:50 you're kind of a big brain guy. You think both tactical and strategically. So I'm curious what your thoughts are, what your company is going to be. Is it full blown sass And then any advice you'd

44:60 give to entrepreneurs, like you, you know, you had a background where you could have easily stayed and, and become a partner or worked your way up to a VP or C level position at an operator and

45:11 decided to go out and branch out on your own. So sort of those two things. What's, what's Darcy going to be when it grows up and any advice you'd have for young entrepreneurs Yeah, I think the, I

45:23 think the opportunity for for Darcy is to almost like. create an asset class around innovation that didn't exist before. And so I

45:38 don't know how people will say something is the Uber of this or the Uber of that. I feel like what we're doing around the network and the

45:45 research and some marketplace dynamics that exist with the business model.

45:51 I hope that the brand is sort of identifies with changing the way industries innovate for the better and not viewed necessarily as a sort of niche mercenary group to go help a few operators innovate,

45:60 but it's actually like a system and platform that is sort of broadly effective. So

46:20 I think we'll stay in energy, but I don't think that this is exclusive to energy, kind of the playbook itself So that's it. That's one thing. What was the other question? Oh, I'm not a printer.

46:32 Yeah, it's nice for entrepreneurs

46:40 I mean, you weren't stumped him, you weren't stumped him, Jerry. Well, I could talk for like an hour. I mean, like I have like my little, my buddy group, you know, that we provide counsel to

46:49 each other. We're always talking about this stuff. I think, so when we started the company,

46:56 you know, I'd never had a sales job or anything and I almost like viewed sales. Like it's kind of weird in business school. There's no sales classes. I don't really understand It's not a view

47:08 viewed as like this nasty thing. Maybe, I don't know, like, and I laugh about it. Like now it's just very bizarre to me. And everything you do, whether you're gonna go start a company or

47:18 whatever, everything you do is a, you know, some form of a selling process, you know, and not to be tried about it. But I think some people maybe don't like,

47:33 sort of embrace that in the early days, you know, between like building great things. and figuring out how to have a business around it. And for us,

47:45 so we didn't have like a product. We had a process that lived for three, four years before we had sort of like, productized it. And part of it was like, humbly listening a ton and just sort of,

47:59 can I generate money for a thing that I create value?

48:05 And then it became a product. I'm not saying that you shouldn't start with a product I just think that

48:11 there's a lot of like, tried stuff around product market fit. And I think that's hard for founders to navigate. I think it's interesting. We've brushed across this top a couple times on the show

48:24 Jeremy, we should probably have a whole session on it, which is

48:29 sale. And I'm an engineer that went into sales. So I had the same problem. And I think a lot of founders, including the founder of my company, cannot sit with salespeople, just cannot do it.

48:44 It's not, and sales, after going through a lot of different sales training, sales is a science. It's not a trick,

48:53 good sales guys, hopefully Jeremy and I are good sales guys, are not trying to trick you. It is in fact, trying to add value to your company, but we have to go through, there's a process and

49:05 things that we're looking

49:08 to do. And I think a lot of founders really miss that. They think sales is just, you got to get the slick guy to go out and chat up a bunch of people and it all just happens after that. The

49:19 product will sell itself. The process will sell itself. I don't know how many times I've heard that, but anyway, it's just an interesting topic and I'm happy to hear you have gone through that.

49:29 But a lot of founders, I think that's where they cross the innovators dilemma that when they're trying to cross the chasm of buzzwords out here now, but when you're trying to cross that chasm,

49:38 having sales as a profession, part of your organization, plugging funk futures now, is a big deal. Yeah. I've enjoyed learning about it. And

49:55 one thing, like I kind of subscribed to a lot of like Aaron Ross's stuff, the guy wrote predictable revenue. And the,

50:05 like some people look at it and they think I'll become selling something. And like, it sounds kind of lame, but like, especially in a B2B context, usually the people you're interacting with want

50:17 to buy something, you know, they wouldn't be interacting with you if they weren't interested in the thing that you were working on. Generally, it's hard for these guys to buy. Like think about

50:26 like, if that's why I think sometimes it's good if you're at the on the EMP side for a while, because just the amount of stuff that is required. to buy something. Like these guys are taking on a

50:37 lot of political risk as well, you know, like to the peep example, like you wanna be the face of the thing that you're gonna rip out and like change a lot of people's daily activity. I think that

50:48 gets lost sometimes in the relationship between vendor and

50:54 buyer, even with sales teams. Like I think sales teams struggle with that. But so that was a whole learning for us that I still don't think I've mastered like it's a continuous thing. And like,

51:06 and it actually the needs, it's evolutionary even with the company's maturity, you know? So the sales stuff you needed on day one is way different than what you need now. And we blew off a lot of

51:19 stuff early around like, like people topics, like values as a

51:27 company, you know? And I don't know if I have the right answer. I just know that that has always been the hardest part, like before we started the company, someone might ask us like, well, what

51:37 are your values? Like you personally, Tim, if someone asks you what are your values? Like it doesn't just roll off the tongue a lot of times. I'm like, these are the four things that like I

51:45 really care about. And there were a couple of advisors, you know, that pushed her saying to me like to think about that more. And

51:55 one of them, Susan Cunningham, she's great And like at first, she's like, oh, this mushy value stuff. And that's actually been very beneficial like the last few years, though, because like

52:10 sort of hiring on values is actually a really important thing, you know. And it was something that didn't really even enter my head in the early days, you know, like when we had started the

52:23 company. I'm like, who do you want to surround yourself by? You can have the smartest people in the world, but like if one of your key values is unlike. Like hunger and ambition but they're not

52:32 like or a super hungry like you're going to really have is a good southpaw yes see we can talk about this for a laugh yeah and that the wholesales like the whole sales Guy Thing Yeah I mean so so me

52:47 like and I talked to David Forsberg former guest about this and like right now I'm sort of going personally from you know I've been a sales guy my whole career right I'll always be a sales guy but

52:56 eighteen years as a sales Guy I've I've I think made the transition now to being a sales consultant that the transition from there would be to being like an executive like a CEO you know what I mean

53:09 so so it it's going to take awhile to get that sales stink off but I can have more open conversations now because I'm a consultant vs oh you represent one brand i Gotta be careful for you cause you're

53:21 always trying to bring it back to that one product now people like what are you got I'm like what what do you need like you do me what do you guys Oh, what we got is a real need around XYZ. I gotcha.

53:32 Right. So, you know, I think people appreciate that sort of white glove approach and, and, and frankly, some of it was my inspiration was around Darcy. It's like, where you guys take it to the

53:42 point, I think I like to pick it up because you're saying, Hey, we're not going to charge the, the innovator, you're going to have access to this. And it's great. I'm saying we will charge you

53:50 Mr. innovator and we'll get you those immediate connections and more of a direct sales I am biased conversation versus you guys playing an unbiased role. So I love the model that you came up with.

54:01 You know, I'm glad that we've been able to spend time and get to know each other. And I'm excited to see where this, this whole thing goes and see how robust your database becomes in other

54:11 industries because it's, it's just a very logical solution. I appreciate it. Thank you guys for having me. It's been, it's been fun. I don't, I don't know how much wisdom I've actually shared

54:23 on this stuff

54:26 stuff. I always tell my wife, I'm like, I actually Like if I had to codify what I've learned, I don't even know how I would do it. It's just like the, I think five years from now, you probably

54:34 really realize what you really learned, you know, or 10 years from now, you know, but it's definitely not a real time, a lot of times. Oh, absolutely. Hey, thanks for coming on Jeremy. It's

54:44 been great to have you. It's where our second time having a Jeremy. So it was tough on me having to figure out which one I'm addressing, so. You'll live, you'll live. Here we go.