What The Funk?

0:01 What up, trippers? Everybody, welcome back to this episode of Tripping Over the Barrel. Oh my God.

0:09 We're just talking.

0:12 Right before this, we're just talking about salespeople going into demos and meetings that are clearly important meetings, right? And they need to nail it. And going right into that radio voice.

0:22 And if we did X, Y, and Z, would you be willing to sign them a deadline?

0:29 I know what not to do.

0:33 He's been coached before. But, you know, I'm a little confused. I've we've haven't done this before. There's two people in the same room. This is a little weird. Yeah, it's not like it's he's

0:45 real. He's a human. So Zach Warren, my guy right here, the CEO of Velocity Insight. No CEO. I've decided he is now CEO. I gave myself the title of CEOs. You also get the title of CEO. Because

0:57 being a CEO, it's gonna be very important for us to get a good message across. Zach lives in Stapleton, which is, well, you know, Tim, you wanted to tell us the story about Stapleton, didn't

1:09 you? Well, I was gonna start it. But, you know, my first trip to Denver was about a week or two after Stapleton had closed and everyone moved out to DIA. And so

1:18 I didn't, in downtown Denver and everybody's still talking about people driving to the wrong airport and I had no context. I had no idea what they were talking about. And people were talking about

1:28 Stapleton. I had, you know,

1:34 I didn't have no clue. And of course it's become, you know, now it's a, you know, a town center with, you know, I guess, complete sub, all the trappings of the good suburbia neighborhood and

1:46 all that. It's kind of awesome, like, it's pretty great. I mean, we'll get into all that with, with Mr. Zach Wands Z-Dubbbz right here Um, so. Zach, interestingly, we didn't meet until this

2:00 year when both of us, you were sort of like in transit and I was kind of in transit about to start funk futures. You had velocity inside, about to launch. And we connected and I think you were

2:10 just like, we gotta meet. I keep hearing about you. And I'm like, I've heard of you now a couple times, Marcia Ville, you asked from her tripper herself. A friend of the show. And

2:23 we, and really enjoyed the time we spent together I'm shocked that we were never in the same conference room, although we may have that at points, whether it was - I've sat there enough schmoozy

2:34 sales pitches from software guys at room. Now you're with us, now you want to know. But yeah, you know, so I've gotten to know Zach a little bit this year. I actually really admire what he does.

2:46 I told him at one point, Tim, you need to start charging for some of the content you're giving out because you're giving people the cheat sheet, right, on what they might need to do and then you

2:55 don't need people like me. to help tell them what to do and sell them on what to do. So with that, Zach, I want to know a little bit more about you, I think you grew up in Dallas, but tell me

3:05 about your path to entrepreneurship in the oil and gas industry. Yeah, I never intended to be an entrepreneur growing up. I grew up in Plano, went to a University of Texas, and then, there we go,

3:20 it's been a rough decade to be a Texas law board football fan, say that. Well, and I say thank God.

3:30 And for that, he is thankful.

3:33 We still have eternal scoreboard, I'm pretty sure. That's true. That's true. That's true. Looking forward to those two teams playing again. Yeah, so they used to always play the day after

3:46 Thanksgiving. And we've got to be technically correct It used to be Thanksgiving Day. Then they moved it for TV to the day after. Okay. And so, you know, we always want to back on Thanksgiving,

3:60 but, you know, TV tools. To away, when did they change that? Early 2000s. Okay, so this is in college when it happens. Really, 'cause for some reason, I remember it, I don't know, I guess

4:11 my memory's just wrong. Either way, I was eating too much food, sitting on a couch and watching football, but it was CU. Nebraska, which don't even get me started, but they don't play every

4:19 year. Like, whatever Yeah, so they were always the morning game on the day after, and then AM Texas was the afternoon game following, right? Yep, yep. I just, I don't know, maybe I'm just

4:32 getting old now, but I really appreciate and want those older school rivalry games, 'cause you know it's like, your neighbor has the Texas flag, and you work with an AM person, and it's just like,

4:43 I just want that guy to shut up. Yeah, it'll be good for the state of Texas, and it'll be good for hallway trash talk at EP companies

4:53 they ever go back to the office? Which they will. If they go back to the office, yeah. I think oil and gas is more than other industries, right? You seem like the heavy tech industries and we'll

5:03 get into all this. Or I shouldn't say heavy tech, but really lighter tech, cloud, SaaS, companies, Oracle. I have a good friend who moved to Austin, has worked for Oracle the whole time. He

5:13 came from LA and he's never been into the office. In the same period of time, Oracle moved their headquarters from Bay Area to Austin. Yeah. You know what I mean? It doesn't affect the employees

5:21 like it doesn't even people You know, but I think even that I would have told you before this started that EMP companies would have been what's the first to come back because of a little bit older

5:32 school, you've got to be there and some companies did. I know Hill Corp certainly, they went back very quickly, everybody in the office, even if they still had restrictions, they want everyone

5:44 in the office. But you know, I heard today that Oxy, at least in the Woodlands, they're heading back to the office next week

5:54 So I mean,

5:57 it's pretty impressive that the EMP companies, the traditional operators have been able to adapt.

6:06 So it's kind of interesting. So maybe not quite like, you know, the space for the world and all those guys. And Zach, well, I want to get into your history, but this leads me to a logical

6:15 question. I've never worked for an oil and gas company, but I've been in conference rooms of upwards of 275 or 300 probably at this point over the course of from double wides, Tim that we've gone

6:27 into, the highest floor on the most beautiful high rise in the downtowns of various cities. And what is it? I mean, the technology is available where people can, if you need to live stream or

6:41 even look at subsurface as it's happening in real time, that technology is available. Why are companies so hell bent on being together in person? Or is it like Tim says, it's just sort of the

6:52 nature of a business where people have always gone. Yeah, I definitely think there's sort of a natural conservatism to EP companies that's appropriate, right? Like your job is to bring stuff that

7:04 burns to surface and sell it without it ever catching fire, right? So I think that sort of conservatism is normal and is appropriate. The other thing that I think is a little bit different about EP

7:16 companies is that there are so many different disciplines that you have to have to get the thing to work You've got to have accounting and finance and land and midstream and marketing and a bunch of

7:27 different kinds of petroleum engineers and a bunch of different kinds of geologists. And I think that, you know, if you have like an e-commerce business and you really only have like three or four

7:37 disciplines inside that business versus an EP company, I think that changes how important the interaction is. The best descriptor anyone's ever given of the differences between kind of the modern

7:49 technology company everything that comes out of oil and gas because this is

7:55 Those people go, even if they go to the same schools or in completely different departments, right? The lease analysts probably did a bunch of work as either, what a, like a legal intern, right?

8:07 Potentially even went to law school or as a lawyer. We've had a few of those on this podcast, accountants, laser focused on spreadsheets, right? Getting their CPA, CFA, whatever it may be,

8:17 right? And then you talk engineers, you know, Tim, I mean, it's very hard, you're focused on this And the geologists, even though to a lot of people, including me before I met a lot of them,

8:27 geologists and engineers go together, they're actually very different. Yeah, in a lot of ways. Well, you know, I think like, I was gonna say the geologists interacts with the reservoir engineer

8:38 quite a bit. And then the reservoir engineer overlaps with the production engineer and completion engineers. So there's a, so I think one of the other keys just to layer into this is the level of

8:48 collaboration that was required kind of old school I think those really good collaboration tools finally getting in place because when we all stood around a map and we're doing things on a map or

9:02 looking at a log on the on the wall drawing and coloring on it, we're finally to that stage where I think the collaboration tools are there that you don't have to be in the same room to evaluate

9:16 a play or a well location or anything like that. Yeah, I think it's added in the right direction and I think a lot of companies are making that flip. I think one of the other really interesting

9:26 things is watching, you know, we've been watching middle managers change over from, you know, the baby boomer generation to sort of go through the great crew change that will see suites are going

9:39 through the great crew change now. And culturally, I think that's been really interesting for me to watch from the outside of seeing some of my peers at other companies that have gone through that

9:50 kind of shift when the when the CEO changes a lot changes. culturally. That's very different from the reservoir manager being, you know, on the other side of that of that crew change when the CEO

10:03 of the CFO Change out that can make things move. So I've seen a lot of of EP companies go through a C-suite transition and six months later They're a very different from a technology forwardness

10:16 perspective and a lot of those kinds of always interesting when I was you know coming out of school and even at 35 years old Whenever I went into a to an operating company to give a presentation. I

10:32 was still the youngest guy in the room Yeah, it wasn't until maybe You know, maybe about 40 years old or so. I'm now I'm aging myself, but about 40 years older. So I started to notice there's

10:44 enough Kids in the room now that now they're looking at me differently than you know, everyone else would so It was an interesting transition. I remember going to a meeting

10:56 at Murphy Oil when we were at Energy Navigator Jeremy going in and then suddenly realizing there's a bunch of two and three years experienced people in the room and it had never occurred. It was the

11:07 youngest room I had been in. So it was the first time I really recognized, holy crap, the shift has happened. And I happened to be that dip in the great crew change where they show the employees

11:20 My age group is the one sitting at the bottom of that trough. I mean, there's so few of us in the industry, we're just starting to get that push out. And I started at ExxonMobil in 2003. And so I

11:34 was right on the front edge of the ramp up and all of my mentors from Exxon, like they've all retired. All these guys that worked amazing assets all over the world and did all this really cool stuff

11:48 At this point, they're all, you know, sitting on. retirement house on Lake Travis or whatever is for sure. And there's just kind of this big gap in front of me. So we haven't got, we haven't

11:58 gotten into your bio yet, but since you said Exxon Mobil, there's just a interesting conversation has been going around, at least Houston in the last, you know, what's going on? What's going on?

12:08 Exxon, there's this path. There's a lot of people leaving Exxon through just natural attrition, being hacked off for whatever reason. The chain is in the board, all the different reasons that you

12:20 might want to leave Exxon, they're just too big or whatever. But pretty much everybody when they leave Exxon, they go take a picture in front of the cube. Yes. Oh, yeah. Take a selfie in front

12:29 of the cube. So in my head, I've got this vision, is there like a photographer permanently just set up there and a line of people just going to stand and take their picture and leave? But it's a

12:41 fascinating thing. It's become its own mean If you don't do that, you're the option by the seat.

12:47 By the drone that - Don't worry, they're security cameras and hidden drones that you're not seeing right there. Yeah, it's so interesting. Now I wonder if Exxon won't just rope off that area and

12:58 just not let anyone stand there. I don't know. You know, the Exxon has always done that though. Yeah. One of my peers that started with me at Exxon had this spreadsheet and she kept track of all

13:10 of the reservoir engineers that started in 2003 with us They were like 45 between the international upstream development company and the US. production office. And she just like started checking

13:23 them off. And it's a bunch of people who've done really, really well, friends of mine that are in, you know, reserves audit firms and one guy who helped to run Silver Hill and I don't know how

13:34 much money he took home. He did really well. You know, great group of people. Of those 40 something, there are two that are still there. Wow And I would guess it was less than 10 at the five

13:46 year mark. So that's always been a part. They went from 40 something to less than 10 inside of five years. And that's always kind of been the way that Exxon, you know, new hires went through.

13:58 And I think it's a little bit different than some of the other super majors, but they went through it too. And then I think the assumption was always ExxonMobil is such a name-brand. It's such a,

14:08 it's like a good housekeeping stamp of approval on your resume. Procter and gamble or something. Well, I mean, there would always be a new generation that wanted to show up to work there next to

14:19 you. There would always be a crop of people coming out of school that said, man, I want nothing more than to go to work for ExxonMobil. I'm not sure that's the case anymore. And that's the really

14:29 interesting thing about the CUBE photos and all of that stuff. I know a couple of people who have recently left Exxon that were in that less than five year demographic. And I'm not sure how easy

14:40 it's gonna be for Exxon to backfill them with fresh meat. It's always been a meat grinder, right? new hires. Are they going to be able to find fresh meat going forward? Yeah, that is an

14:52 interesting dilemma. But I will tell you that is still Exxon always had the reputation. We hire the best. You know, so everybody knows it's kind of like having a Harvard degree. You were everyone

15:07 knows if you were hired by Exxon right out of college, got pretty idea where your grade point was. Okay. And you're coming from a reputable place. So they hire the best and they're not worried

15:19 about hiring from places not traditionally oil and gas. They know you're smart. If you're top of your class in Purdue and they're going to bring you down and train you to be a reservoir engineer,

15:28 production engineer, whatever you need to be. So so it's always had that reputation. So when someone says, oh, I worked at Exxon mobile for five years, there's a little eyebrow raise. Oh, okay.

15:40 Yeah. I believe you just mentioned Purdue because that so many dots together for me. Purdue is like a mini AM in that they're in this like land of public university and everybody cares about Indiana,

15:55 right? A basketball is a big deal up there and they got these engineer kids and it just develops this like cult that you know it too but it's like a smaller version of AM and that's I'm glad that

16:05 that you mentioned them but it's true, right? Same sort of caliber of student, same passionate fan. This is what we like, right? AM per do and you guys just go for it which is cool. Yeah and I

16:18 mean my time at Exon was amazing like I worked. Huge projects, really really cool stuff. I worked in the research lab there for a couple years

16:27 and I got to travel a little bit. It's just it was an amazing culture to be in. I could tell pretty early on that I didn't want to spend 30 years there but in terms of a place to start it was really

16:37 great. You're from Dallas, a plan on you said, that are your parents and energy, oil and gas, anything? No, my dad's an accountant. And my mom was a teacher.

16:47 I actually, I grew up squaring that I would not go into oil and gas. 'Cause my best friend across the alley when I was a kid, his dad was a geophysicist. Mobile or Arco and I think I was in the

16:59 first grade and his dad got shipped down to Houston. And so my best friend like kicked out and from then on, I was like, I'm definitely not going into oil and gas. Whatever I do, I'm not doing

17:10 that. I've most of the boys are going to be used to all over the place You get laid off all the time. That doesn't sound like any fun. And here

17:20 I am. Well, I'm looking when you started school, I've got your LinkedIn profile up here. So you started at Texas in 1998. And that happens to be one of those years of holy crap, what's going on,

17:35 price of oil actually hit, what, 12 a barrel that year? Yeah. Um, so it's not surprising in New Hampshire. once the summer of '98, '99, I'll never forget under a dollar at Cumberland Fams.

17:50 Yeah, and I was a mechanical engineer, and in Austin at the time, everybody wanted to go to work in the tech bubble, right? That was the thing, and so that's what I assumed I was gonna go in,

18:01 and then the bubble crashed, and all those jobs suddenly dried up, and so I, being a mechanical engineer, you can kind of go with it, whatever. And so, ended up interviewing with Exxon, and I

18:10 can't, I'll never forget that my interviewer, Warren Wagner, after a 30-minute interview, he was like, I think you should be a reservoir engineer. I ended up like, How did somebody do that?

18:23 Like, I'm a mechanical engineer. And he's like, I think you're a reservoir engineer. Yeah. And he was right, so how about after Exxon, what was next? So then I moved to Dallas to get married

18:33 and join Nettle and Sewell and Associates. Wow. So like, the standard ExxonMobil resume, go work from Nettle and Sewell doing reserves for a couple of years, My wife graduated medical school and

18:46 got matched to do her pediatrics residency here in Denver. And she works at Children's Hospital. And she works at Children's Hospital. She's a great, great hospital. Attending physician over

18:56 there. So that's what brought us up here in the first place. We never really planned to come to Denver. I think my mom's still upset about it. But are you, are you typical of people who have

19:07 moved to Denver? Is it you're locked in now? Yeah, now we've got two kids in school and my in-laws moved up here. They live 10 minutes from us. And it's great, it's a great city to raise kids

19:22 and all that stuff. And I also love Houston and Dallas. I don't have anything against Houston like a lot of Denver people do. I think it's a really amazing city. But

19:33 the family stuff at this point and my wife's job will keep us here long-term. Yeah, one thing - Tim and I are very different in this regard. We talked about this before, You know, we could go

19:43 move to Dubai for 18 months for a couple of business opportunities. And I'm like, this house that we're sitting in right now, this is the house. Like, I might be here in 30 years, but I know

19:54 I'll be here in 15 years, right? You know, so our mutual friend, Peter Allen, he always wanted Denver as a territory. And I was like, Peter, if you liked in Denver so much, why don't you just

20:08 move up there? And he said, because, Tim, if I lived in Denver, I couldn't visit Denver.

20:16 That's his thing. He lives down here, but he tries to get to Denver once a month so he can visit. Yeah. So then we moved up here, and I had commuted back and forth to Dallas for a while, working

20:27 for Nell and Sewell. And then since that, I worked for a series of the typical Denver tight oil companies. There's lots and lots of them. So I worked for Samson and Resolute and most recently

20:38 Great Western Patrol. And is that the same Samson that's the, used to be in Tulsa or the old Samson Tulsa? There it is, that's a lot. Yeah, old Samson Tulsa, the Schuchtubin family. Yeah, I

20:49 joined like 18 months before they went through the KKR buyout. I was trying to track down, 'cause I missed all of that. Where did Samson go? I couldn't figure out who they got bought into or?

21:00 Well, they, so most of Samson got bought by KKR and then loaded up with a bunch of debt and priced a spell and they ended up going through bankruptcy And those assets basically got liquidated. They

21:12 got carved out and went to a bunch of different places. The last chunk was the powder river basin asset, which I worked that went to continental, just maybe two years ago, a year and a half. I

21:25 didn't know they were there. Yeah, gradually over time they, that the KKR piece, you know, got divested. Old family stamps and still has some interests the Wyoming side of the DJ basin. so they

21:40 still have some pieces. But that whole experience of going through the acquisition and then we took the bonds public, which was, I mean, we went from an old family run company to publicly traded

21:53 socks compliant bonds in like 15 months. It was a wild ride. And that changes the complexion of everything you have to do, right? Yeah, yeah, everything. I mean, the way that the financing was

22:06 structured, the way that we had these kind of new overseers from KKR and their involvement, sure. It was a heck of a time. I learned a ton, you know, got a sweet little payout from our unit

22:22 appreciation rights.

22:25 Sometimes it's better to be lucky. Lucky then good. That somebody said to me on the golf course, maybe this morning

22:32 when I was playing golf. Me, but, and I didn't even get my payout, but I can still play golf sometimes. But no, you know, hit a tree, bounces back in the throw, okay.

22:40 that are to be lucky and good. So you're good too. So I'm not going to call off here. You're good at business, reservoir engineering, you name it. So go ahead, Tim. I know you - I was looking

22:51 here. So I want to get into the - You got a reservoir engineer here. I know you're excited. So well, I guess I get ready to pivot on you a little bit. So velocity inside. That's your new gig.

23:01 You just started up in March. You're a reluctant, I don't reluctant to say the right thing, but you're an entrepreneur now, not that you wanted to be ever before, but you are now. So what is

23:11 velocity inside? What made you start it?

23:15 Now that you've been promoted to CEO, what's that like?

23:19 I was just the founder this morning. I don't know what happened. Did you get promoted or? I guess, yeah. No, so the last two years at Great Western, I started up a data warehousing and data

23:30 analytics team at Great Western. So we kind of built that from scratch, did some software implementations and things like that. I never would have guessed it, but I really liked it. It was a

23:42 whole new set of problems that I never really had to grapple with before. It was

23:48 a new set of disciplines and functions that I needed to learn about. I had to learn a lot of land and accounting and stuff like that that hadn't really been, you know, a reserves guy, like you

23:58 touch that stuff once a year or once a quarter, but you don't do it in the kind of depth that you need to if you're gonna build a report based on that data So found that I really liked it and decided,

24:09 well, and the other thing I saw was we made a bunch of mistakes. You know, we went down rabbit trails and things like that and that project there that, man, if you took that same team and that

24:19 same technology stack and did it again, it would take you half as much time and half as much money and then the third time and the fourth time and the fifth time and having a little bit of a

24:29 consulting background from Nolan Sewell, the first thing that comes to mind man, this shouldn't be done in house by every single EP. it would make way more sense to have a team that could come into

24:41 a company and bring lessons learned and all that sort of stuff to solve it. So I started out actually looking for a consulting firm to go to work for. Again, not really being somebody who's just

24:55 like built to be an entrepreneur. I just assumed that somebody already did this in the way that I had in mind and spent some time looking, couldn't really find it. And so I said, Hey, I guess I

25:06 should go startsomething on my own. And to be completely transparent, you told me what you were looking to do. And I go, Yeah, I don't know, man. I'm not totally sure about it. But what I

25:16 underestimated was you and the caliber of your team. Truth be told, there is a huge demand for data management and oil and gas. Now that oil prices start to tick up, people are really going to be

25:31 ready to tackle this. There comes a point where if it hits like 120, people are gonna be too insane to know what to do. I feel like that's almost true at 80.

25:40 People are running fast. But I would think now people are like, okay, we've got some runway. I need to talk to a subject matter expert who's done this stuff before, what's your approach? So I am

25:52 curious without giving away all the secret sauce and I told you to give out too much for fruit. But what is sort of the secret sauce of velocity insight that you guys bring to market that's new and

26:03 different? I think it's really the deep experience in-house-out operators. So everybody on our team is like a decade plus of working for small, mid-sized, super majors, kind of everybody in

26:15 between. And that experience of knowing what it's like to actually work at an operator and to know all the lingo and where the bodies are buried from a data quality perspective. All of the present

26:28 names are well named. Oh my gosh, well naming, API numbers, interest factors, all the data types that are troublesome. And I think having a team that has seen all of those problems puts us in a

26:44 position where we can solve things quickly and

26:49 with better quality than you could with hiring, let's say like an industry agnostic data engineer, right? Like a data engineer might be fantastic at SQL programming or Python programming or what

27:00 have you, but if they don't have the background of understanding what it's like to be in on a rig or understand what it's like to try to get accounting and land to talk to each other, it's just not

27:11 the same. That skillset you just described is very hard to find. It's like an oil and gas expert that's also somewhat of a technology expert in seven different things including SQL and then six

27:23 other niche applications. So literally on the drive over here, I was on the phone with a recruiter who was calling me looking for a reservoir reserves engineer SQL, ETL work, business intelligence,

27:38 dashboarding, and machine learning, and that's a unit when I got done laughing, when I got done laughing, I was like, well, that's not one person, right? That's multiple people. It would take

27:48 you thousands and thousands of hours to be legitimately good at all of those things. And when you find that guy, there's three of them probably in the whole world, and we find that guy, it's a

28:00 whole point. You're going to pay a lot for that guy I mean, so let me ask you, I want to get more detail on what you do, and I'm going to ask it in a different way. So what is the run of the mill

28:12 or the ideal situation that you run into where people need, you know, velocity to work on? What is the ideal situation? You know, I think our sweet spot is small to mid-size ENPs that are trying

28:28 to get their data to talk to each other better And we can act like the kind of data analytics team a really big EP might have, like

28:37 an Apache or a Pioneer or somebody that has a real substantial in-house team. And we can say, okay, for that project, you need a quarter of a BI dashboard developer and you need a quarter of a SQL

28:52 programmer and you need a production engineer that just actually understands what life is like and on a well side and stitched together the set of skills. 'Cause like you're saying, there's not that

29:03 unicorn available and I'm not that unicorn, nobody is. What you've gotta be able to do is bring a little bit of the multidisciplinary team to solve something. So are you bringing those resources to

29:13 bear or are you leading your client in that effort? We're bringing the resources to bear and fitting with what the client already has, right? So if the client already has somebody who's really

29:27 great at the SQL piece, but they need sort of the, Thank you. the pieces that are missing to solve that particular problem. Well, we've got a 12 person team. We would be in a position to fit

29:39 that team together. And because our team has all worked together for quite a while, we know each other really well. We know our strengths and weaknesses. We can do things like agile project

29:50 management and all the fancy buzzwords.

29:54 We can put you in a position where the problem gets solved faster and better than you could if you were trying to whiten up the lit and do it on your own And when it comes to hiring full-time

30:03 resources, he goes right to folk futures in the recruiting department. Oh, I'm sorry. That's actually not, that's not true. I

30:12 do wanna say,

30:14 we need to put this on our list of topics is I really wanna someday, I think there's a whole episode on agile project management and agile product development because I've yet to find anybody that

30:27 actually follows agile all the way. So Tim, a little interesting tidbit about my life in the year of our Lord 2005. Our Lord, maybe not mine, but you're working on it. I was gonna get it and say,

30:42 wait a minute. I just hear people say stuff like that and it's like, you know, I want to fit in. So the year of the Lord

30:49 2005, I worked at a company called Rally Software in Boulder that was legit, I was employee like number 12 or something. I was legit like a sales guy and the products I was selling was a cloud SaaS

31:02 product that helped for Agile project management workflows as well as custom training that was very expensive to fly to Microsoft, BMC, software, Amazon, you know, FedEx, you name it, to teach

31:17 them Agile. And I probably would be retired and not on this call had I just worked there for like five years. They did really well. Yeah, they did really well Um, so I'd actually like, I'm

31:29 somewhat of an expert. in my mind on those things, but it's very logical at its core. Well, I just made a kid out of how many

31:40 projects start out with we wanna use an agile implementation methodology, and then usually question two or three is completely, no, we don't wanna do it that way. Well, okay, well, we're not

31:52 doing agile, then we're gonna do some sort of modified agile, I guess. Yeah, I think the really hard thing for oil in gas companies is that basically everything you do physically in the field has

32:03 to be waterfall. And so the culture and the way that people think about it is I'm gonna drill it and then I'm gonna prep for frack and then I'm gonna frack and it's that linear waterfall approach and

32:14 when you take a C-suite or mid-managers who have spent their whole career in that kind of framework and try to do like a20, 000 software implementation, It's a big shift, it's hard. Oh yeah. I

32:30 think having a team that can set a way, set aside that waterfall approach is useful. That's a good point, a real good point. So, I think our ideal client, like I said, is small to mid-size ENPs,

32:45 but I've got a meeting next week with a really large ENP that they already outsourced a lot of their data management and analytics. By the time this show airs, by the time this show airs, you have

32:55 already had that meeting, so I think you should feel free to just name them

33:01 You don't kiss and tell, right? Yeah, have a

33:05 minute and go. You know, they're outsourcing a lot of their stuff to like, programmers in India and things like that. And I think one of the problems that I've seen with consulting firms that come

33:16 from outside of the industry, outside of the country, is there's a little bit of a culture shock and there's that learning curve to learn the industry that we can just skip right now That's in it.

33:28 I mean, I guess the The oil and gas industry, probably more than others, at least in my mind, has a lingo that is so different. And you may just take the API number, okay? API 10, API 12, API

33:42 14. And you say the word API. People may be thinking about the American Petroleum Institute, the organization not, the standard. And then you've got, it's just a fascinating thing to go through

33:54 and then come to find out that wells are named all kinds of different ways and

34:01 yeah, anyway, it's just, it's a crazy, crazy thing to try to pick up and that's where the nuance has really come in. Yeah, and I think, you know, given my time in the industry and our team's

34:12 time, those questions are just easy, right? You've already answered those questions 10 times and so you're able to move on to the really useful stuff like, okay, what is it you want on your

34:22 report? What is it that you're trying to achieve? Okay, you say you want to do pump by exception. What does that mean? a combination of. technologies you're going to need to actually implement

34:32 something like pump-eye exception. That's a buzzword that I think is difficult for most management teams to turn into reality. Jeremy's not only an expert in his own mind on agile, he's also an

34:46 expert on pump-eye exception in his own mind. One of the first people who ever sold iPad-based field data capture to pumpers, so I can say that probably with a level of truth, maybe not a high

34:58 degree of it, but I was trying to do it. I'll tell you that. So I want to shift real quick. I was in Houston this week, and first of all, the weather in Houston was amazing. Good week to be

35:15 here. Good week to be here. As Tim would say, a Chamber of Commerce week, and I had an absolute blast at Energy Tech Night. This was the first one that I've been to. Have you been to one of

35:24 those? Not yet. I am waiting for a show up in Denver. So for those who don't know, the Digital Wildcatters, one of their events is Energy Tech Night. They bring a lot of industry together,

35:34 technology providers to do presentations, and then they just have a big party, a networking event. And then this was the same night as the game two of the World Series. So they like pushed it an

35:46 hour earlier, and then like showed the game in the background. We're like, all right, let's get this thing over with. Let me get the game out of the background But really well done, and as has

35:56 been the case, now a couple times this year with both Evolve and NETN, I think Digital Logcatters is a good job of setting a high bar and then going beyond that bar. But that was a very

36:07 professional event, the energy check. You know, it's professional and

36:10 fun. That's what makes it interesting to me, is it's not stuffy, like a lot of the events, you actually want to attend, get the content, but you're having a good time all the same.

36:24 You get a real wide range of ages too. Like it probably skews to younger, but you don't feel old if you're in your fifties showing up there, right? I mean, it's still kind of mixed. And I think

36:35 the beauty of it is everybody's thinking forward. The critique I gave to Jake, which he totally agreed with is, some of these companies are going in and presenting and not realizing how expert the

36:44 audience is, that you just can't come in with some of this shit that's like, what we do is we pull your data together and build you dashboards It's like, no, you need to start talking within

36:55 industry terminology. Give me a use case that's been exploited and then tell me how you're gonna help me while you just feel like you're introducing yourself. 'Cause a few of the companies went up

37:06 and I still don't know what they do. And if I don't know what they do and someone like Zach doesn't know what they do, this is what we do. Like we have to know. I'm like, you just sound generic,

37:15 right? So, you know, interesting and I think there's a lot of value to be had at those events.

37:23 kind of went above and beyond. And I told him, I'm like, you know, you want to do something in Denver, we can start to help out. We have that energy tech showcase here. We did, yeah. It'd be

37:32 nice to get Denver going on that cycle again. Absolutely. So to me, it's really interesting like, how do software companies actually get something done in the EP space now? So we started building

37:43 a database when I kicked this thing off of all of the pieces of software available for sale targeting EP companies I've got about 300 in there right now. I'm 100

37:55 sure the numbers north of 400, and I think it might be north of 500. It is just upstream, just EP target. I'm not even talking about stuff that targets service companies. The target's completely

38:05 overwhelmed. And because I would guess you don't even have my company on the list. I do because I - Oh good, I'm glad to hear that.

38:16 You are number 288, Tim, don't feel bad about

38:20 it. It's crazy. The old legacy software doesn't die. And there's a new round of software startups, like every year, it's crazy. Combo curve is trying to knock a couple of them out, but

38:35 I have a question. Since you're a new entrepreneur, since what, March 2021 of here? What's your less, what is the biggest learning or lesson that you didn't expect to get that you got in the last

38:53 six, seven months? Yeah, you know, as an entrepreneur, who started their company in March, I'm just kidding, good.

39:00 Jeremy, yours is January, so you got a whole other couple of months on. I think it was March, according to the late, didn't think, but no, is that this question, what was the question again?

39:08 Sorry, I was just excited. Biggest learning of starting your own company, that maybe you didn't expect to learn I think my biggest learning is how willing people are to help.

39:22 you know having been in the industry for a long time man there's a there's a ton of people that I worked with a long time ago and and reach out and yeah let's grab coffee let's grab a beer let's let's

39:33 talk about what's going on and and like bouncing my my business model off off of other people as there's been a lot of fun and and really encouraging of Yeah sure let's let's give this thing a shot so

39:45 have you found it people are encouraging you to go into that or they're saying nah it's not going to work

39:52 more the former Yeah I think a lot of my friends on the MP side have struggled with a lot of the same things that I've struggle with so when I walked through the business model there was I Oh yeah

40:04 that makes sense I can see why that might work and then also I think maybe this is sort of like an American perspective but people love the idea of jumping out and and going in certain something like

40:17 that there's just the There's the excitement and the sort of the risk-taking aspect of it that people root for you, you know? It's like how people used to root for the Astros 'cause they were

40:29 underdogs, that used to happen. Yeah, well. It doesn't seem to be the case. After 2017, that's over.

40:37 So Jeremy, same question. Biggest learning, do you echo, find the same thing or do you have a different, biggest learning?

40:46 There's just no roadmap You know, I think I had in my mind an idea of what the business might look like right now and it looks absolutely nothing like what that roadmap. I thought was, right? I

40:58 thought that I would really only work with these sort of newer emerging tech companies, bring them to bear, get them to the table, but there are so many companies out there that are established,

41:09 that have never branded or marketed or pushed their company out there. Yeah, I share that I read the lean startup.

41:19 April or May and, um, kind of like, yeah, this is a, this is a software, you know, startup book. I'm not sure it's going to apply to me. And man, I go back to lessons from that book and the

41:30 way of thinking about like, try something, see if it works, figure out how to measure whether or not it's working, and then try something new. Uh, you know, don't stay stuck on, on your idea,

41:40 that, that's tough. Cause you really want to also be like true to yourself and true to your business bottom. This is what I believe the world needs and I'm going to go fill that need Um, but at a

41:51 certain point, like you, you got to pay attention and listen. When I think that's not what the world wants, what I have seen, not that I've done it yet, but is there are shifting visions. You

42:02 have to be willing early in charge of entrepreneurship to shift visions. Cause you got an idea of what's going to be highly valuable, but then the market will tell you, well, maybe, maybe this is

42:13 more valuable and you've got to really think and shift. And so maybe it, it, I guess the question is, does it take you out of your passion

42:21 or, you know, or is that a new passion or anyway, it's, it's just a curiosity as I start to go down that path. I'll give an example of that. We started the company really thinking we were going

42:33 to do advisory and implementation work, right? We were going to help advise companies on what they ought to do. And then we would support them in making implementations effective, right?

42:44 Like the first week somebody asked, Hey, we could really use some training on a couple of things. And now that's, I probably spent 25 hours on training this week building a curriculum for we're

42:59 going to put out what I think will be the first oil and gas focused Power BI training on the market. Because there's nobody doing it. And there's a whole bunch of EMP companies that are trying to

43:08 get on that So I think we're going to go live with the first Power BI training class in December. We signed a deal with your boys at Saga Wisdom. So, we're going to be the Power BI and AWS and

43:22 Azure curriculum providers for the Saga Wisdom platform. And I think there's a ton of need for that throughout the industry. So, we're bridging the gap on our show, Jeremy, bringing all of these

43:38 different groups together.

43:41 Well, so there's one thing I want to pivot to because Zach and I talked about this on the way here I'm like the industry bartender a little bit, right? Especially now that I'm like unencumbered and

43:51 not W2. People just want to tell me stuff, right? So, ooh, come on, this company got a layoff. These guys just raised this. They just hired this guy. Like, is this public yet or not? But I

44:02 saw in a couple text messages before I came here, Persephone, the ESG carbon capture technology company raised a series B of 101 million dollars1, 000, 000! Whole hundred dollars is what the

44:19 target is airing that's public Yeah it's public as of now you know it was a screenshot of thing like today Yeah wow Oh my God it tells you about this transition we're getting ready to enter into that

44:33 meeting it just tells me they're like hey this is cause it's it's the money people that are pushing all this as they want the MP to notice look at the funding that these companies are getting start

44:43 paying attention to this because cars with her seventy like it worked tim we talked about this a couple of weeks ago a car that the GMP site is still relatively unsure read this to me shows the

44:56 finance side will be the ones who wall street is certain wall street is certain even if the MP companies aren't exactly so the craziest part of this news there is a business insider article it says

45:07 that their pitch deck was four pages long for

45:13 four pages long to pitch for a hundred million dollar series beat. Wow, wow. That's fascinating. What's the name of our ESG company company? Yeah, right. Dude, get a couple more of these Hazy

45:25 IPAs and then I'm gonna go out and done. This thing's going. Yeah, where are we going after this? Okay, I think the lesson there, so your exit, Zach, is, you know, you should be thinking

45:35 about four pages rather than 30 when you're ready to. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, consulting companies don't really exit, right? Like, consulting companies build a reputation and they become

45:46 trusted and, you know, the Netherlands tools and the Rider Scots, and those guys have been around for decades and decades. And

45:54 I think that's probably the logical choice for us, but it, I mean, some of the money that gets thrown around in the ESG space right now is really jaw-dropping. That's unbelievable. Well, I guess

46:03 we're at our 45-minute mark here, and I guess velocity insight, how do people get a hold of you? How do these small, the midsize EMP companies

46:14 I know the website in Lillington just like everybody else velocity dash insight dot com and then you can find me on Linkedin just like everybody else has been posting some content may be of interest

46:26 to people so good newsletters all the stuff you are doing in doing the research I I see you go into the Tibco now show and and publishing hey this is what we saw that's that's valuable Yeah I hope so

46:40 and I think the the software space is fascinating right now we're really trying to be fully agnostic right not have any conflicts of interest because I think really right now it's really hard to pick

46:52 winners you really have to like I'm very clear with people that I am not agnostic right then that my crew is being compensated by some people to create business opportunities for them but part of my

47:07 job is to find those right companies and the establishment is to bring them back to Yesterday We're still trying to figure that out that like I could see funk futures or companies like mine that do

47:18 sales consulting pivoting to just be in Yes G or energy transition technology company because it's what people don't fully understand right I can see your business taking oH and guess what now you

47:31 need certain reports velocity inside has figured out how to rest or that data array to the table and made your investment back along those lines there are companies like mine that we're we've we've

47:43 done a lot of workflows in upstream production engineering areas what we're looking at those E S G workflows that need to be in place for these emerging requirements and emerging strategies and so

47:57 we're we're embarking on one of those now now well that's that's you have to yeah that was going to be a lot of lessons learned over the next few years but one Lesson I learned today was Not to tell

48:10 Zack Warren that he had a bad idea because then I'll just throw out of my face that he has 12 employees, six months later.

48:17 Thanks for coming to the crib. Absolutely, thanks man, see ya.