Energy Bytes

0:00 Welcome to the Petro Papers podcast. Say that 10 times fast. This is where you get your oil and gas intellectual stimulation by asking the technical questions. I'm Yogashi Pradhan. And with me

0:11 here today, I'm John Kalfayan from Digital Wildcatters. You might be wondering that this is a different location than when I typically do my podcasting, whether it's in my bedroom with my cat or

0:25 whether if it's in an office Today, we're at the Digital Wildcatters Studio, and we're going to be asking some tough technical questions. Not necessarily about a paper, but real oil-filled stories.

0:37 But welcome to the podcast, or I should say, or I'm welcoming myself. Yeah, thanks for coming. I'm super glad that this worked out as far as the travel and stuff and being able to just have a

0:47 studio that we can plug into real quick and easy. It's someone who has a podcast and also travels with the company doing podcasts. It can be a huge pain trying to find a place do what we've done

0:58 them in Airbnb's, we've done them.

1:01 It's studios and all over the place, so I'm really glad we could get this this worked out really nicely Absolutely, and I always enjoy coming here and you can call in and the team have been just

1:11 nothing but graceful and nothing but nice And we love the way we wish more people got out there And I mean that's one of the things that we love to do is get out there and talk about the industry and

1:21 all the cool stuff that we're doing So I'm glad there are people like you out there that share that same vision and mentality because without us The world in the outside of our industry doesn't know

1:31 anything about what we do Absolutely on top of that our industry as you're well aware is terrible about talking about stuff Anyway, and so being able to get on and just have these candid

1:41 conversations about What it's really like and what's really going on. I think is incredibly important Yeah So wanted to get to know your story I posted on collide and you can talk more about the

1:53 collide platform as well But I posted on Collide if anyone was interested in the podcast and you were the first responder that you also had field experience. So that prompted me to talk to you and

2:05 not just have a purely technical career, but also, you know, a unique career. So I'm just curious to know, how in the world did you get here and talk about your experience? For sure, so we'll

2:18 kind of start at college, if that works, feel free to ask me about anything prior. But I went to the University of Arkansas, I got my degree in mechanical engineering. I also got my minor in

2:30 business. At the time, a lot of the feedback that the ME department was getting from people that were hiring out of the department was you make y'all are training great engineers, but they need

2:44 more business acumen. So the University implemented a program where instead of taking whatever it was, six hours of senior technical electives that I didn't want to take Anyway, I could get a

2:56 business minor. And I was like, well, I bet these business classes are probably easier than, you know, whatever circuits and electronics, three and all these other classes. And I felt like the

3:08 business side was always in, regardless of what my actual career was going to be, which at that time, you don't know what you're going to do in college. Um, I thought that would be just a very

3:18 good, like life skill that would work. It'd be beneficial to have across sports. So I ended up getting that, um, the two, so two summers when I was in college, I actually worked for the same

3:29 company, uh, at that time it was LM glass fiber. So they were, I think a Danish, um, company, but they built wind turbine blades. Um, I think they originally started out in boats. They

3:41 became experts essentially in fiberglass. Um, and it's ironic how much similarities a boat as with a wind turbine blade, but they're basically all made of fiberglass and wood that's laminated

3:51 together. And so that was my first exposure You know, I grew up, I was born here in a leaf. represent the SWAT. But I grew up in Memphis. I had no energy exposure. None of my family was in

4:04 energy. Both my parents moved to Houston from somewhere else and then left Houston. So I'm not like a wife or anything. I

4:11 knew nothing about energy coming into college. So I had these internships, I really enjoyed it. They're more industrial engineering based about processes, workflows, lean manufacturing, all this

4:22 stuff. And but that was my first exposure to the energy industry and I never thought about it And I was like, man, energy demand will never go away. The source of that energy is going to change

4:32 throughout everyone's lifetime based off technology and a bunch of other things. However, energy as a whole seems like a pretty good industry to go into just because as population growth continues,

4:45 so does energy demand, right? And so I was like, huh, this is interesting. So then my last summer, something happened in the wind side And they had no internships that summer. So I was

4:57 originally. They had asked me to come back for the third year

5:01 prior to me leaving after my second year. Anyway, they didn't have any internships that following year. So I randomly fell into a field engineering internship role at a very small operator in the

5:15 booming metropolis of Smackover, Arkansas, which most people have no idea that there's any oil and gas production in South Arkansas. But it was a very prolific field back in the thirties and

5:25 forties I believe Murphy and Phillips, that was one of their first fields. So I knew nothing about it. I get this internship

5:36 and basically they say, OK, here's, you know, where the where the office is, literally in a town called Smackover, which is just outside of El Dorado and South Central Arkansas. And, you know,

5:48 the best we can do is we'll also give you a trailer that's across the street from the yard that you can stay in for the summer. you know, whatever, 2021 at that point in time, I have, you know,

5:59 no responsibilities. I'm like, I can go do this. They're paying me good money, absolutely fall in love with it. I rode around with the pumpers. Um, I actually helped them implement or move over

6:09 from the old school, uh, echo mirror with the shotgun shell blanks to the digital one, um, which was fun. You know, a lot of interesting stories around that. Um, I did a lot of help on like

6:21 the production reporting side for them I mean, they're still doing things in spreadsheets and on paper tickets that someone hands in from the, the pumper goes and does all their stuff, brings it in,

6:31 hands it to the, uh, you know, the, uh, admin, she types it in the spreadsheet and then, but no one had been aggregating any of their data had been looking at, you know, fall offs declines,

6:41 anything like that. So really fell in love with the field. It really got me hooked. I had one more semester left finished out during that semester I went to a job fair could happen to be there.

6:52 This was in 2010. If Fayetteville was still a thing, I was at the University of Arkansas. So I was like, hey, man, this would be a great opportunity for me to not only stay in Arkansas, which

7:05 is what I wanted to do, but also get more oil field experience 'cause that's what I'm coming out of an internship. That's kind of what I wanted. So

7:15 I started, got a job with CUT as a field engineer running crack jobs.

7:19 Excuse me, right out of school. And yeah, the rest is kind of history I've gotten just kind of became addicted to the wealth of things there are to learn in this. Like I'm, I love learning things

7:32 and I don't feel like I'll ever know everything about energy, which I love, right? Like it's an infinite kind of rabbit hole that you can always go down. But also the fact that it's important to

7:44 everyone's, like it's so important to everyone's lives. And it's something that everyone takes for such granted until it's missing or it's out or something like that And so, yeah, I really. I

7:56 just fell in love with it. So I worked in the Fayetteville with CUD, then I moved down to Houston. My wife had graduated with her master's girlfriend at the time and I had been working in the field,

8:10 you know, field hours. And I got this offer to come work in Houston with a higher salary and normal hours and I was like, okay, no problem. I knew I wanted to get back to Texas at some point. I

8:22 was gonna be in oil and gas. Why not Houston, right? It's the place to be, so took that job. That was actually what I was just telling you about the

8:31 guy I called on in New Orleans. So that was with, oh man, DRC Data Retrieval Corp, which was the company that invented the spider gauge. So I did that for a little bit. They had me coming in

8:43 from the unconventional side. I ended up trying to sell into the offshore side, which I had no experience in and knew nothing about and that wasn't a great fit for me. I ended up moving to a

8:55 company called Greenfield Energy Services, which was a startup, a frack company startup, started by a couple of people who had kind of industry, successful industry ventures prior. And it was

9:09 fascinating, right? It was a - the idea was, hey, we've got these essentially decommissioned military turbines. They will run on anything with a BTU content. Is there a way that we can run or

9:21 fuel fracks using field gas, LNG, CNG, et cetera? So this company raised, I want to say, was like300 or400 million. Jeff Reese was involved. Conoco, Shell, like lots of money.

9:34 And we did the first ever LNG-fueled frack. We did the first ever fueled gas-fueled frack. And it was starting to work. But at that point, the company had very

9:48 accelerated growth. They were trying to grow very quickly And they basically outspent cashflow. And as anyone that's ever worked in the service side of industry goes, you can be making plenty of

9:58 revenue, but your cash flow problems are always a thing. You know, people don't think about for a frack job. You would have to order the chemicals a month ahead of time and you have to go perform

10:08 the job and you have to send your invoices in, you know, however many weeks or we were trying to do it, you know, as quickly after the stage was done as possible, and then you have to wait 90

10:18 days to actually get paid So you've got almost, you know, three, four, six months sometimes from the time you spend the money to the time you actually recoup it. And so combining that with the

10:28 growth plans, they ran out of money. They went through chapter 11. That was an interesting thing that many people my age at that time had not gone through, so they laid off the whole company and

10:40 ended up breaking it up. Then I went to work for another frat company called ProSTEM,

10:46 which I thought was like a safe bet, ProSTEM almost exclusively focused on conventional. cracks and refracts. I learned way more in my, I wasn't even a full year before they ended up closing

11:00 because that was 2014, 2015. So 2015 hit prices went, went negative or I don't think they went negative, but they dropped really quickly. They were private equity back company. So they instead

11:11 of trying to deal with it, they just shut the company down. But you know, we were doing, I mean, we did a gilled oil frack. We were doing nitrogen ferax. We were doing CO2. We were doing all

11:19 kinds of stuff. I learned way more. That was the best frack crew I've ever worked out. Shout out to those guys

11:25 there. So they laid everybody off that I went to work. I somehow got a job in 2015 when everything went to shit at a company called Reservoir Data Systems. So this was kind of going back to the

11:37 spider gauge days. But they were really intriguing to me because they had real time streaming One of the biggest issues with surface gauges and any kind of PTA or any kind of well testing. is the

11:51 uncertainty. At least historically used to be the uncertainty, right? You would put a memory gauge out on a well, you would run your test, whether it's a PTA buildup or a DFID or a drawdown,

12:00 whatever it may be. And then you would go pick up the gauge, one, two, three, four, six weeks later, download the data off the gauge in hope that nothing screwed up the test. Well, that's not

12:12 a very efficient thing to do, especially in the oil field where everyone's trying to bring the wells online. And most of the time, you're either shutting in producing wells, so you're turning off

12:21 the revenue stream, or you're delaying a frack or production, essentially. And so you have very conflicting

12:30 incentives that happen a lot in these oil and gas companies, which I think that's one of our biggest problems as an industry, just internally, is you've got reservoir engineers that are

12:39 incentivized to get data and understand what's going on. Then you've got completions and drilling guys were incentivized to drill and frack as many wells as possible and come in under budget as

12:48 possible Those conflict directly with each other. as an industry, we have to figure out how to do it differently. But like I said, I came in there and noticed that they had this real-time

12:58 streaming element, a basically a robust oil field proven kind of streaming component. I was like, you guys aren't, they weren't really marketing it as that, but that was a huge differentiator at

13:08 the time. So they could log in to a website and view the data, download the data, pull it into, look at their DFIT or their buildup and see where they're actually at in the test. You could

13:17 confirm that yes, I have enough data at this point that we can pull the gauge off the well. I've got enough data for my analysis. And that was a big deal. We 3X the company revenue over four or

13:27 five years, the following four or five years. From that, just kind of how we, changing how we framed what we did on top of the fact that, then I realized, you know, this communications package

13:39 that we had didn't really care where the data came from.

13:44 You know, most industrial data comes in a handful of forms. our data acquisition system could ingest data from all of them. So that could be rate, that could be pressure, that could be

13:52 temperature, that could be all these things. And so as more real-time data was being demanded from the field, that's kind of one of the things that I ended up getting. I got my master's in energy

14:03 business from TU while I was there, and they moved me into kind of the product development role, because that's always where I love looking at technology and figuring out how it can help aid assist,

14:17 improve a process. And so that was essentially what we were looking at. We had this thing that could connect to pretty much any kind of digital source of data and stream it, and we had the industry

14:26 that was saying, we need more real-time data. So it was like, hey, this is a really interesting thing. We developed a workover rig monitoring system. Workover rigs are probably one of the least

14:40 digitally instrumented things in the oil field, which is crazy considering the risk you have when you're drilling out a well and it's like, oh, well, we stuck pipe. Okay. Well, why? I don't

14:50 know. And there's no data. It's all written on a sheet of paper, like there's no digital data for it. So that was a really interesting use case. We had operators telling us, Hey, we want to be

14:59 able to monitor this because if we can figure out why we stick pipe, we can stop sticking pipe and, you know, sticking pipe on one will is millions of dollars if you can't get it out. And so that

15:11 seemed like a really interesting project We were also working on real-time frack data back in the day, you know, Corva had just started doing that. Um, there were a couple other companies trying

15:20 to do that and stuff. And so you got a lot of experience on the data side around real-time data, IoT kind of piece of things. Um, then COVID happened, that was the first year that I actually had

15:31 a legitimate full product development budget. COVID happened, that budget went to zero. And then I immediately knew that my time was, my time was sticking at the companies. So ended up getting

15:42 laid off again from them in I think 21, yeah. Then I went to work for my first and only kind of true SNCC at a tech company, which was a company called the Hivesil. They were an edge compute

15:56 company, so they had these little cool edge servers that you could stack on top of each other and cluster, and you could deploy them anywhere. It's a really cool technology.

16:05 They had lots of really interesting use cases. I have one of the things I will say that I've learned is through all of the, I don't even know how many times I've been laid off and all the startups

16:16 and stuff. But you can have the right technology, the right people, the right idea, and just be early. And it is what it is, right? And so you have like, that's as someone who's been a part of

16:30 two different startups that, in my opinion, had really good ideas that were being executed fairly well, but their financial planning was much more accelerated and around growth, which most know.

16:45 startups and private equity back companies are, and because of that, they can't play the longer game. You know, they, they make these assumptions that, okay, well, once we do a pilot for one

16:55 oil and gas company for this edge instance, then they're going to want to deploy it company wide. It's like, that's not how the industry works, right? You're going to do one or a handful of small

17:04 pilots in a small area, then maybe you'll scale up to a field. Then maybe you can find someone in another asset that might be interested in doing the same thing, then you go and get into that asset.

17:15 Then you kind of zoom out and try and scale out to the company, but it's not this like, Oh, hey, once we do one or two jobs, we're going to go ahead and deploy you across the end. That's not how

17:23 it typically works, at least on the hardware side.

17:27 That was, again, another really, really fascinating idea that just didn't work out for a number of reasons.

17:36 Then I started, at some point during that time, I'd already started my own LLC just to have it,

17:45 Hivesil laid off half of the company in

17:49 '23, I guess. Yeah. And so I was part of that. That was also the same time the war in the Ukraine broke out, which is where all of our developers happened to be. So that did not help anything.

18:02 But so then I started doing kind of data, sales, automation, marketing, consulting type stuff. And that's how I ended up here calling, called me. I was like, hey, we need someone to help us

18:13 with all of our data We've got a lot of it and we're not really doing anything with it. And now that's quickly evolved into product management for AI tools and to collect that or it's kind of wild.

18:24 But I've always been interested in a lot of things. And so that's why I personally think I'm so drawn to like the startup life, because you have to wear a lot of hats. I'm not the type of person

18:35 that wants to go and do the same thing all day every day for the rest of my life. And so the dynamics of a startup

18:43 fit me. very well. My wife would probably disagree that the risks and the vulnerability from a job perspective are not the best, but especially in our industry, just because you work at a big

18:57 company, it doesn't mean you're safe from a way off. To me, it's one of those things where it's like, I can invest the same amount of time and effort. I might have a little bit more reliability

19:08 career-wise from a job at a bigger company, but I also don't get any of the upside benefit of that. And I also don't get the dynamics of, you know, one day I can be doing this, and the next day I

19:18 need to pivot and do something completely different. And so that's, I've always considered myself a jack-of-all kind of person, but my daughter calls me a

19:28 fixer. You know, dad has a fixer. That melted my heart. I was like, You're damn right. That's exactly how it. But that's what I like to solve problems. As an engineer, that is the root of

19:37 what I want to do. Go to or bad. That can be a bad things sometimes. But that's that's all I'm trying to do. And so that's I mean, that's one big piece of advice I'll give to anybody, especially

19:47 at a startup or coming into a startup. Be as useful and productive as you possibly can. If you wanna stick around, be as useful as you possibly. If you don't know how to do something, figure it

19:58 out. If somebody else at the company doesn't know how to, guess what, you can be the SME on that at your company and now you have a lot more staying power than you would if you weren't. Even if

20:07 it's something new that you don't know or you weren't necessarily coming there to do or explore, provide value and people will keep you around typically, depending on the exterior circumstances.

20:21 But that's kind of been, that's my journey in a, I say that, I say a nutshell, that was probably a 10 minute tie drive, but. No worries, I let you keep going and going 'cause there was a lot of

20:31 interesting tidbits that you mentioned about your career and there's a lot of things I resonate with, especially with the volatility of the industry and just where the industry takes you. You know,

20:40 a little bit about myself, that was laid off my first two jobs. as far as brand building goes, a lot of people tell me how'd you end up building your brand. That wasn't the intention. I was

20:49 trying to survive, trying to stay in this industry. So, and I was trying to get job security. Just, I was trying to make it. Yeah, no, that's something, you know, I hate, I saw a LinkedIn

21:03 post a week or two ago and it was talking about, you know, if you jump jobs, we don't even apply to this job listing or whatever And it's like, I mean, is that the hard and fast take you want to

21:17 take on something? Because if you look at, you know, our resumes, it shows that we've worked a lot of places that doesn't mean it had anything to do with the quality of work that I put out, you

21:27 know, most startups don't make it. It's over 90 fail in the first couple of years. So, you know, that's another thing we I'm happy to talk to you too. 'Cause like, first, a couple of times you

21:36 get laid off, it's hard not to take it personally. Like, what did I do? What did I do wrong? How could I have done better, et cetera, et cetera. But then you zoom out and as an engineer, I

21:45 love person facts. And so you zoom out and you're like, oh, well shit. Yeah, nine out of the 10 startups that I worked at failed. Well, that's because nine out of 10 startups fail. It's like

21:54 hard stuff, right? It doesn't matter whether you're there or not. They're just, that's how it is. And so that's another fun one to deal with in our industry. Absolutely. And just the way to

22:05 change, the willingness to embrace that change and that diffusion of

22:11 innovation curve of early adopters or first adopters to fast followers. Very interesting. We can definitely talk about that. But one thing I did want to talk about was early in your career, you

22:23 spoke about being in the field. And I've made videos on the benefits of going to the field, why people should experience field internships. And a lot of people ask me, they send me a lot of DMs in

22:34 terms of how do I get an office job or how do I get some experience? Or early career people, I tell them to go experience the field. But I want to hear from you in terms of some of the highlights

22:44 you've gotten from the field and why people should pursue some field experience. Yeah. So for me, you can learn as much as you possibly can from a book, from videos, et cetera. But until you're

22:54 there seeing, you can't, you can't experience what it's like being on a frack job until you're on a frack job. You can't do that on cool tubing, on flowback, on wireline, on drilling until

23:06 you're out there Even, you know, they've got simulators and stuff nowadays, and those are great. I personally think as an industry, we should be doing more with those because learning on the job

23:16 is a very risky thing in our, especially operations wise, is a risky thing in our business. And that also leads to safety issues and all kinds of other stuff. And it's like, if, you know, we

23:26 expect these people to be working the hours that we expect them to work and all of these things, then they should be prepared for the chaos that is field operations at times at times, the field

23:34 operations are the most boring place to possibly be. right? There's nothing going on effectively. And at times, it's the most exciting place to be, or at times it's terrifying, right? And so

23:45 that, that to me is one of the, you know, even when I started, most of the operators would do six months a year rotations, right, where it's like, okay, you're going to be in reservoir for six

23:55 months, you're going to be production, they're going to be completions and drilling, and then you get to pick or we'll place you or we'll you pick whatever, right? And I don't know how much that

24:03 has changed, but I feel like because it appears that the kind of cycles of the industry are getting shorter, it appears that people are doing that less just because they don't have the capacity to

24:16 take that much time to train people. And so that's kind of a scary thing to me. I mean, I think that's not to shamelessly plug our stuff, but I think that's one of the things that language models

24:27 are actually going to greatly enhance for people moving forward is, you know, they 10x your productivity, your knowledge, your ability for you to do things. So if you can go. ask a language

24:37 model a question real quick about, Hey, what is our procedure for replacing the packing on this pump? Now, you know exactly what it is instead of being like, Well, I think I remember I'm

24:48 supposed to do this and this, or having to have someone physically show you every single time, right? It's just an augmentation of your ability. But there's just so many things that happen in the

24:58 field that you can't replicate and you'll never know unless you're in the field, right? Because it's the tail end of your distribution curves. It's the reason why you don't have full self-driving

25:09 cars yet, right? It's not that they don't have a lot of data. They have a shit ton of data. It's the outlier cases. You have to train models on all of the outlier cases where they won't know what

25:19 to do and they'll run into the back of a box truck on the highway like a Tesla did, right? And so that's the, I think that's the tricky part, but I highly, highly, highly recommend everybody,

25:31 if you have the opportunity to work in the field to do so, I caveat that with Once you work in the field, it's also my experience at least, and I'm not a petroleum engineer, I'm a lowly mechanical

25:42 engineer, but my experience was that it was much harder to get a job outside of the service industry as someone who started in the service industry than it might have been if I had gone straight to

25:55 an operator. That's just purely just my experience. I have no idea if that's true or not, but

26:03 the field experience stuff is just so, even just the logistics of everything. Like that's probably one of the biggest things I don't think people truly understand is this is a full-blown

26:12 manufacturing process that you have to pick up and move every week to two weeks in the most remote desolate parts of the world with minimal cell phone reception, connectivity, all of this stuff.

26:23 And so, the actual operation itself could be going fine, but on top of that job, you as the frack engineer, the drilling engineer, whoever have this, also have this job of the logistics of the

26:34 whole operation You've got sandhalls, you've got water, you've got. You've got all these things happening, and it's all dynamic, right? You could screen out of what I mean. I remember one of my

26:42 first wells that we fracked and it was crazy because I came from this lean mentality of being ingrained. I mean, I was standing out on our production facility with a stopwatch, literally measuring

26:53 the seconds that it took people to do different things, seeing if there were any opportunities where we could streamline down seconds or minutes, right? And I get to the oil field given this is

27:00 2010, 2011 prices are high. Everyone's happy Everyone's making money and, you know, I looked out the window from the fragment and there's like six sand trucks sitting there, all charging to merge

27:12 because we screened out and I'm sitting there like, this is nuts, right? I don't know. They were probably charging us10, 20, 000 a day just to sit there and I'm just sitting here thinking like,

27:21 this is crazy that this isn't a connected, they should know what's happening in the field so that they know what to do. But none of that happens, right? It's a completely disconnected thing So it

27:31 was this weird dichotomy of like hyper-efficient,

27:35 hyper focus on improving every single little thing to oilfield when prices are above100 barrel and gas was over4 or5 a MCF. No one cares about optimization or efficiencies. That's another weird

27:48 thing about our industry is like once you exceed a certain commodity price, whether it's gas or oil, optimization and efficiency goes out the window and the mindset flips to get it out of the ground

28:02 as quickly as we possibly can before the price goes down like that, somebody explained it to me that way and it really clicked and so that's how I regurgitate it and that's a hard thing to like

28:13 comprehend right because it's like well that's when you guys have the most money and the biggest budgets and the most revenue and all of these things and you would think that that would be the time

28:20 that they would use that money to invest in efficiencies and technology and all this stuff but it's not. It's when prices go negative or go below 40 or50 a barrel but that's when there's no revenue

28:31 that's like that's where the dichotomy is so kind of weird in our industry. Um, you know, I think coming back to the question,

28:42 you, you just can't teach the things that happen in the field, right? And so it's like, Oh, you know, if you're building software for someone that's in the field, or if you're building an app

28:49 for them to use in the frack van or whatever, you can do that all day long, but until you go out there and understand what their responsibilities are on a daily basis on a minute by minute basis and

28:58 understand that like, Hey, you want them to go fill out this form, well, they don't have the time to fill out a form So you got to figure out a better way to do that, or, you know, they can't

29:08 go take pictures of this if that's what the app is based on. So you can't like being able to understand, I think that's personally what one of the advantages that I kind of bring on the software

29:18 product side is that I understand all the way down to potentially the user level, what the conditions they operate under are going to be, even like at Hivesol. That's why I thought Hivesol was such

29:28 an interesting company because if you can push models machine learning out to the edge, then you could automate. track and drilling because you don't have the connectivity risk issue, right? And

29:40 so that's the, I don't know, it's,

29:44 you can't replicate it is really the root of that.

29:49 Not just, you know, the experience or the, because that's the thing, like, there's always times where just one off random things will happen. And that's where you learn what to do in those

29:58 scenarios. But if you're not even, you know, I worked in the field and there were plenty of times where I wasn't there when there was a screen out or we stuck guns or whatever, and I didn't get

30:06 the opportunity to learn what they did to resolve that because I wasn't there, even though I was a field engineer and I was working in the field, I was just on days off, right? And so it's like,

30:15 it's hard to justify all the time and agony in the field, but at the flip side, it's one of a kind experience that you literally can't get anywhere else So it's this weird dynamic, but my whole

30:30 thing is, if you can connect and understand the end user of whatever product you. building or selling, you're going to have a much bigger advantage over someone who, you know, was coming in from

30:39 outside industry, or even just not from that level, and doesn't understand all the nuances of what it takes to run a frat job or, I mean, perfect example. There's a thing called a K factor on a

30:51 frat van. Most people outside of the service industry know nothing about a K factor or what that does. The K factor allows me to pump more or less sand, downhole, then what I'm actually showing on

31:03 the screen so that I can manage my logistics. That's ultimately why they do that. They didn't run enough sand the prior stage. So now they've got extra sand and they want to catch back up. So they

31:14 pump more sand. But then you get down stream of that and you think about, okay, well, now all these operators have this frat data. The frat data itself is probably actually wrong because they

31:23 were adjusting K factors the whole time. Then they're plugging all these into machine learning models. And it's like, well, no wonder we don't know what the hell is going on. The guys that are

31:31 getting the data don't understand how the data is generated, right? I know that's such a nitpicky detail, but it matters if you're gonna feel all this, if you're gonna try and use all this data,

31:42 you have to understand the context of the data, where it came from, the variability of it, why it could be variable, all of these things. And so that's just one of those things that like, my

31:52 company man, when I was fracking, they knew about, they worked for Haliburton before they were consultants. So guess what, they knew about the K-factor. They knew about all of these things, so

32:00 they would keep them in check. But once you get out of the frack fan, there were a lot of people that don't, right? And the engineers I was working with that just had no idea. And then prices go

32:11 up and they hire like crazy and you bring in a bunch of people that have no experience. And I'm sitting there, you know, doing RFPs and bids with frack engineers who just graduated have no

32:19 experience. I've got four or five years at that point in time. I'm like, you're the guy that's telling me how to do this job, but you don't even know what half of this stuff, like it doesn't make

32:28 sense, right? So there's situations like that that happen all the time too So that's where I truly feel like. the field experience is so critical in a lot of scenarios in our industry. So it's, I

32:42 highly recommend that. You make a lot of great points and I resonate with a lot of them too. You get a lot of appreciation for people in the field in terms of building relationships with folks. You

32:52 get a lot of knowledge in terms of how the data is generated as you talked about. And I like to call it a street cred. Like a lot of people start believing you more whenever you told them that

33:02 you've worked in the field, you work with people that have been doing it for 20 plus years. It's not only about the degrees and - Oh, for sure. I mean, that's the craziest part about our industry,

33:11 especially I worked on the sales side for a while. And it's like you go into a sales meeting with a new company or new engineers. They don't know you. You don't have any existing relationships.

33:20 And it's like a test. It might as well be a college exam, because they're sitting there grilling you on these random questions or asking you all this stuff. And all it is is to quantify how much

33:29 you actually know. If you're sitting there lying to them, If you're bullshitting them. or if you actually know what you're talking about because you worked in the field or whatever, and it's wild

33:37 how then that happens in our industry, but that's, I didn't know how to deal with that originally, but then I kind of took the approach of like, these guys get caught on every single day by dozens

33:50 of people across different service providers and stuff, and all they're trying to do is make sure that they're working with people who know what the hell they're talking about. And so, originally I

33:58 was kind of offended by that a little bit, but I've slowly learned to understand that they just don't want to get burned and they only have so much time in the day to deal with that stuff. And so,

34:10 it's, yeah,

34:13 it's fun. Absolutely. I wanted to pivot a little bit onto, you know, you've talked a lot about your experience, but I know the experience and where you've gotten to, there's like a network of

34:24 people that that'll probably helped you out or that you've tapped into to get a better understanding of this industry and helping you survive and helping you make it. So my question for you is do you

34:34 have any role models in the industry that you'd like to give a shout out to or? For sure. Yeah. I'd say one of my first bosses, Gary Prehoda, shout out to Gary if you're doing well, man. He was

34:45 my boss at Greenfield. He worked at Dowell back in the '70s when they had the Turban-powered rack pumps back then. They got bought by Slumber Jay, they brought him in. He was a 40 year slumber Jay

34:59 lifer guy, right? He literally helped write some of their textbooks and stuff. And so he just had an absolute wealth of experience. He lived all over the world. He worked everywhere.

35:11 Still, like I said, friends with him to this day, he's been a great kind of mentor advisor for me. He was also the person that hired me out

35:21 of spite of having two jobs in basically three years. So took a chance on me on that, and I appreciate that. But he was a great one. That's, that's the thing I love about our industry too. It's,

35:32 it's such a weird thing where there's, you know, a 10 to 20 year age gap and basically across the board, but I love, I kind of love that aspect of that. Because the times, like the time that he

35:44 worked in the oil field was incredibly different than the time that we have worked in the oil field, right? Like, all right, he told me when he first went from the field to sales, they bought him

35:53 a, he drove a Lincoln town car. It's like, why the hell would they put you in a Lincoln town car? If your job was to go out to drilling rigs and frack locations in Wyoming. That doesn't make any

36:02 sense. Oh, well, it's because they had the biggest trunk of any car available. And his job was to go to the liquor store, stock up on Crown Royal. He would go to the sporting goods store, get a

36:13 bunch of shotguns and stuff. And he would just go around to the rigs and those would be the client gifts and stuff, right? Like just all this crazy OG oil field stuff that you hear about these old

36:21 guys, right? Like that was part of his field engineering job And like, it's funny because, you know, as I was a field engineer, part of my job was your dinner, you're like bringing snacks and

36:31 like, you still have that customer service element to it. And so it was really funny to see what that was like. I mean, you know, there's much my father-in-law's also old school oil field. And

36:42 he had his own consulting company for a long time. And he's got all kinds of stories about, you know, yeah, we had two guys that were, you know, pissed off each other. They'd go behind the

36:52 water tanks and they'd figure it out. And then they'd come back and keep working. And it's like, yeah, they don't do that anymore. They don't really do that anymore. But, you know, it's

37:03 interesting to hear their stories because they're so fascinating. You know, it was very Wild West back then, seemingly. We also get a lot of the repercussions because of that, right? Like all

37:13 the, you know, you can't take people to lunch if it's more than15 and all that fun stuff.

37:18 But yeah, they lived in a hell of a time. So I think it's crazy because they, you know, they essentially went through almost a similar cycle like we did, right? They came out will most. most

37:29 commodities were high and lots of activity. Then they went through a terrible bus that basically lasted almost 20 years and now they're going through the same kind of cycle again, seemingly, but

37:39 completely different, right? And so Gary's a big one. My boss at RDS, Rebecca Shipman was an incredible one. She helped me grow quite a bit. She pushed me in a lot of ways, pushed me into

37:54 doing not bigger roles, but different roles as an engineer that I thought I was originally going to be in. And then I mean, Colin, and not just Colin, our whole team here is awesome. Just their

38:05 approach on how we do stuff and why we do stuff. Our first company value is community over everything, and that is,

38:16 that could not be more true. Like we truly live that when Colin's making a decision on a new feature or a partnership or whatever, that is the first thing that he considers. I find that incredibly

38:30 important and valuable, especially in this kind of time that we're in with with oil and gas, or just technology in general, right? There's so many people selling technology products and all of

38:41 these things. But to know, you know, that a company truly believes in what their values are and they actually act that way is is really awesome. It's the best job I've ever had. I can just say

38:53 that flat out. I get to make cool people like you and I mean, I'm literally getting paid to sit here and talk Yeah. It's hard to, I mean, we had lunch with Scott Tinker yesterday. Yeah. OG. I

39:04 just, we get to meet these awesome people just by working here. So it's hard not to love so many things about what we do. Awesome. Now you mentioned quite a few role models that pushed you. Yeah,

39:15 as far as takeaways go, there's a lot that I can record that I could, that I could resonate with as far as people like role models in the industry, people who push you, people who introduce you to

39:25 things, people who like share their stories. make you feel grateful about where you're at. And at the same time, help you grow. Yep. So that's awesome. Yeah, I mean, for example, when I was

39:38 consulting, I was briefly kind of pseudo CEO at a company that I was talking to about working with them, another startup. And we were going back and forth on compensation and all this stuff. And I

39:53 could pick up the phone and call Colin and ask him, Hey, what is this sound like? He had no, there was nothing in it for him, but he always wants to help people. And he has a wealth of

40:02 experience, especially around startups and fundraising and stuff. And so just being able to have a network like that, of people where it's like, hey, you're getting nothing of value from this

40:11 conversation or anything to come from this conversation, but you're still willing to sit there and talk to me on the phone for 30 minutes about this thing that's stressing me the hell out and you're

40:21 just there. And so it's, yeah, my thing with that is, I feel like a lot of people in our industry are just timid about asking. And it's like, I have gotten more, you know, cold email or cold

40:37 meetings just by reaching out to someone on LinkedIn and being like, Hey, you know, don't make it a generic spammy message. Make it personal, tell them what you're trying to do. And you'd be

40:46 shocked at how many people are willing to help. Yeah. That's probably one of my favorite things about the industry, especially circling back to kind of the field conversation My biggest advice

40:56 around if you want to get field experience or if you go and work in the field, go out there with the understanding that you don't know shit. You don't know a damn thing about what they're doing,

41:07 even though you could have learned about it in school, you could have a PhD in it, you don't know what's happening in the field. You have no idea what those guys are going through, you have no

41:13 idea what they do on a daily basis. So go out there with under the guys that you know nothing about what you're doing and that you want to learn everything you can and they will absolutely help out

41:25 there and show that you want to help and you want to be a part of the team, I guarantee you they will return the favor tenfold, right? And like, that's why it's so cool at the field level, in my

41:33 opinion, is that that becomes like your family. I mean, you're with them more than anybody else when you're in the field all day long. And then on top of that, most of those guys have, I mean,

41:44 you know, you get some of those 10, 20 year guys out there that have seen everything and they're a wealth of knowledge and they want to progress the industry. They want the industry to keep moving

41:53 forward. They don't want it to die. And so they want to help people. You know, if you come out there and you're, oh, I've got an engineering degree and you don't even have a high school degree,

42:02 just because you've been out here for 10 years, you're going to get run off and you're going to hate your life. They're going to hate you. You're going to hate them. It's not going to be a great

42:07 relationship. It's going to suck. So, but if you go out there with the mentality of, I don't know anything about this. These guys are the experts. I just need to go out there and contribute as

42:18 much as I can and be open and willing to learn and listen. It will take you

42:25 So that's another just big thing, especially at the field level, you know, it's very easy. Engineers, we love to play who's the smarter and whose ideas are better and all of this stuff. And

42:35 that's fine, you know, in kind of a less formal setting. But if you're on a bright job or a drilling rig and it's live and everything, like that's a very high risk environment. It's very

42:45 stressful. Compound that with, you know, you might be sleeping six hours a night max, all of these things and then driving to and from location you've been on your two week tower. And so, you

42:57 know, all those things compound. And so, yeah, that's, that's my thing. Go out there with an open mind. You don't know, you don't know nearly what you think you do. And so be willing to learn

43:10 and listen to the guys out there. You know, one of my treaters, his name was Rabbit. He had no teeth. He knew more about, about a frack operation than I did the entire time I was there, right?

43:21 I got paid more than him probably, but it didn't matter. more from those guys than I did anyway else. Awesome. No, that's really good to hear as far as building relationships and just staying

43:32 humble for sure. So, you know, you talked a little bit about calling and digital wildcatters, and I was really curious about, like, what are some of the updates or what are some of the up and

43:42 coming things that y'all are thinking about at the shop? Yeah, for sure. Lots, lots going on. Hopefully you've seen all the stuff about Collide if you haven't Collide is our energy platform for

43:57 energy professionals, think, kind of LinkedIn, Twitter had a baby with Reddit and Stack Overflow, but for the energy industry. So the whole idea, as I've already talked about, as everyone is

44:10 mostly aware, there's this whole crew change thing in the industry, right? You've got this big 20-year generational gap.

44:17 So energy knowledge is basically depleting very rapidly because the averaging industry is still very old. people retiring every day. And so we wanted to build a place where anybody could go ask a

44:31 question about energy, have it answered by experts.

44:36 You know, we're in our first full year, second kind of

44:40 year of development. And I would have never, I mean, I'm a, you've got to be optimistic to be in startup life and do all those things and be laid off a bunch of times. I'm very optimistic, but I

44:52 would have never guessed that we would have seen the growth. I mean, we're at almost 5, 000 users, which is two and a half times what we were at at the beginning of this year.

45:02 We've got, we've been growing 20 almost month over month, the last three or four months, organically, no paid stuff, which is nuts.

45:11 But we wanted to build a place where, you know, that energy knowledge could be not only retained but also transferred, right? And so the idea behind collide is we have this public forum, free to

45:21 join. Anyone can sign up. Go in there, ask. or answer your energy questions. There's also blogs so you can have a blog series if you are a blogger or into that, but it's specifically for the

45:32 energy vertical, right? And so ultimately that data will then be fed back into our language model. So when you ask the language model question, it'll cite an answer if it finds it in a post and

45:41 I'll show you the post and who answered it. We also, one of the big things I do here is work on the energy model, our energy language model itself And so curating, curated hundreds of textbooks,

45:55 papers, articles, we've got, I just finished all of the SPE abstracts, which is over 200, 000 abstracts. We want it to be the densest and energy repository that exists. The other part of that

46:10 that I wanna mention because people, I don't want people to think we're acting in a certain way. Our whole thing with the language model is, One, if it doesn't, if it can't find the answer,

46:24 We've gotten a lot of feedback, but they love that feature. You know, that's the difference in a proprietary model like ours versus one of the big, you know, big foundational models like OpenAI

46:35 or Claude, their, the goal of those models is to give an answer. Not to give a right answer, not to find facts, it's to give an answer. The goal of ours is to find the information from our

46:47 repository, and if it's not in there, tell them that it's, you don't know. Yeah. And so that has been a very, really cool thing to get positive feedback around. But ultimately, we cite

46:58 everything. Every answer from the language model is cited. Right now, it's just kind of generically list the book or paper title, and maybe the author, this next iteration that I'm hoping will

47:09 should be deployed this month. I'm gonna knock on what I hate putting timeframes around software deployments, but it will not only give the full title, author, publisher, date, answer, but it

47:20 also has the link to the source.

47:25 SPE, you go in there, you search for something, it recommends, hey, this paper talks about that, you click on the link, it takes you to the paper site so that you could buy the paper if that's,

47:35 if you're interested in learning it more. And so, again, we want it to be the central kind of knowledge base for all things energy. And so we're looking for as many people as many partnerships and,

47:47 and kind of data opportunities there. If you've got a language model that is, are an agent for something specific or data sets for something specific around energy, we would love to work together

47:59 to provide those things to the greater community.

48:04 The other piece of this, we've got our content library. So it's got over 3000 videos, both our content as a bunch of publicly available content, your contents on there. That's all been indexed

48:17 and is searchable. And with those, we are now also linking out to, we will be linking out to those videos directly as well. Again, we want to drive traffic to the source of the information.

48:28 We're not trying to capture it and keep it for ourselves or anything like that. So it's really cool because, you know, everyone, most people like learning through videos, that's an engaging way

48:40 to learn. But you also, you know, there's so many videos out there and even YouTube, I've noticed our, our engine is a lot more efficient at finding videos because there's a smaller data set,

48:51 videos than even the YouTube search engine is. Like if I go in and search energy bites, my podcast name, I will not get my episodes in the first five results, which is crazy, even spelled the

49:02 exact same way and all that stuff. Um, but you go into our platform and you can search up anything, you know, it transcribes the entire video and then it shows you where in the video, they're

49:12 talking about that subject. So you even have to watch the whole video. You can just jump to the points we're talking about it So ultimately, Collide as a whole is really focused on just this

49:21 knowledge sharing.

49:23 kind of flywheel everything feeds into each other. Over time, we hope that we can develop some back-end models that understand who the user is based off the fields that you put in, based off the

49:34 questions that you ask, based off the posts that you make, the comments that you make, so that we can provide you with better information and better answers and things like that. And so, you know,

49:44 we're also gonna be rolling out kind of courses and certifications as well. And so take those, you have those badges on your profile, then you go to apply a job, apply for a job on collide and the

49:54 HR person sees that you have these certifications. So now they know that you actually have some kind of foundation instead of just coming in cold. There's a lot of things that we're really excited

50:03 about doing with collide across basically all of those facets. So it's fun, it's exciting, it's stressful 'cause we're building while we're deploying. Yeah, I'm building a plane while flying it.

50:14 That's the way it goes, the industry. Yes, that's another piece of advice I would absolutely give to anyone that's interested in the startup side of things is it's not for everyone. at times

50:23 chaotic, it is, you know, I find myself at times struggling as an engineer where it's like, okay, I'm missing data and I know I'm missing data and I know I'm gonna need that data, but I won't

50:35 have that data before I need to finish this. So I need to just finish it. Yeah. But as an engineer, like, but I don't have the data. Yeah. Right, like, I get caught in this, like, infinite

50:45 loop in my head. Yeah, yeah. And so, but, you know, or building things that I like, I know you know you have to build things multiple times in a startup. You're gonna do the same work multiple

50:56 times because that's just how it is. Things change, you have to update your stuff. And so, you have to be comfortable with just the dynamics of all of it, right? Absolutely. You'll get a call

51:07 any morning and be like, hey, I need you to stop everything that you're doing and focus on this one big fire that just popped up that no one thought about was happening. And that's all you focus on

51:15 that day. And the next day you go back to what you're doing. Absolutely. I can resonate with all of that.

51:21 just pulling that thread in terms of advice to other people and to our viewers and listeners, whether it's from digital wildcatters or from this podcast as well, who's curious to know about what is

51:33 some advice you can give to someone who's either starting their career in a quarter life, mid life, third life crisis. I don't know whether it comes to their work experience. How do you make it in

51:44 the industry? So humility, I think you got to put that at the top of the list, especially if you're trying to come in externally, don't have any experience. Even if you do have experience, I

51:55 think humility is still incredibly important.

51:58 The other big one is just willingness to go and work, right? Like, that's one of my other favorite things about our industry. It's a 247365 thing, and you have some of the hardest working people,

52:11 in my opinion, the world working in it, because it's not sexy, it's not fun but media hates you, you know, like, there's not a lot of things going for it other than it's great pay, it's really

52:24 good, interesting work, it can lead to a number of things that's, I mean, we didn't even talk about this, but that's the fact that you can start in the field and end up as a manager and an

52:36 operator with no high school degree and just through experience and grinding it out is a very interesting thing to me. I don't feel like a lot of people understand that about our industry Everyone

52:47 thinks you have to go get an undergrad or even now a master's degree just to get a job. It's like, no, you don't have to, Colin doesn't, I mean, I have more degrees than most of our office does,

52:56 right? And it's like, you don't have to do that to be successful at what you're doing or to have a career in this thing, you know, if you want to go bounce around and move crews for a dollar more

53:07 and slowly do that and chase money, that's one thing. But if you want to, if you like what we're doing and you see a career in it, you can absolutely And you can get the company to pay for your

53:16 degree. Like, there's so many things you can travel the world on the company. Like, there's so many really fascinating benefits in the community is just such. It's so filled with fascinating

53:26 people and fascinating stories that I can't recommend it enough. I'm biased, but

53:33 it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's one of a kind in my, my experience. Um, I would, so yeah, I think humility is a big one I think this, you know, willingness to learn and just, just go

53:47 work hard. I mean, that's the thing. Show, show people what you're willing to, to do, you know, relatively. Um, and they'll, they'll put you to work. I mean, there's plenty of work to be

53:59 had in the real field, right? And so, um, but yeah, yeah, I think that even us, we hear a lot of feedback from HR people and, you know, different companies and stuff. And a lot of the

54:09 feedback is how do we prepare people for what the field is really like when we're hiring them. And that's a valid question, right? 'Cause until you do it, you don't know. And so, I mean, that's,

54:21 if you're going in the field, understand it's a full-time, it's a lifestyle. Yeah. It's a lifestyle choice is truly what it is. It's gonna be stressful, you're gonna work a lot of hours, you're

54:32 not gonna sleep much, you're gonna travel a lot, you're gonna be away from the house, but you're gonna learn a shit ton of stuff and it's gonna be worth it from an investment perspective in your

54:40 career in the long run. So hands down, just suck it up, grind through it Most of the time, you're younger. So it's not as big of a deal, right? Like my wife was girlfriend at the time. She was

54:51 still in college when I was working in the field. So it wasn't a big deal. And she was only two hours away. So on my days off, I'd go hang out with her. But when I was working, I was working 12

55:03 hour tours and towers and sometimes I'd wake up to three hours before my tower started. The drive to location worked 12 hours and then drive two or three hours home. two weeks straight. Like, yeah,

55:16 it sucks. But the money was great. Yeah. The people were great. The experience is one of a kind. And again, it's a long term. Look at it from the long term perspective, the kind of the

55:26 infinite game perspective. You're just looking at it as how much money can I make per hour? Yeah, to maximize that you're gonna have a different opinion on that probably. But yeah,

55:36 it's a one of a kind industry and there's always problems to be solved. There's always new things happening and there's always new things to learn. It's just a it's a fun, exciting thing. I wish

55:46 we could figure out a way to flatten our commodities cycles, but who knows? So definitely a choose your own adventure in this industry. Absolutely. Well, it's just so crazy because it touches so

55:59 many things, right? Like, you know, one of the reasons collide is an energy platform and not an oil and gas platform is because we are adamant that the source of energy across the world is going

56:10 to be dynamic. It's going to change based on the part of the world that you're in, right? Like, that's the that's the most frustrating thing is someone in the industry about people outside of the

56:19 industry is everyone thinks that there's like a silver bullet. And in all honesty, in my opinion, nuclear would be the only like true silver bullet outside of the caveat of what do you do with the

56:29 waste at the end of the lifecycle. But there isn't a silver bullet, right? Like, and I personally think it's incredibly arrogant and human hubris is crazy. And the fact that I can sit here from

56:41 my air-conditioned studio with these nice lights and all this stuff. And you want me to tell someone who's burning wood in their hut, what type of electricity they should use because of emissions.

56:53 Like, that's not my place. Like, who am I to tell these people that, you know, especially when

57:03 Scott threw out, it's like 3 million people a year die from smoke inhalation from their own homes. Yeah. Like, that's more than COVID. And we shut down the whole world for COVID Yeah. That's

57:11 every single year because they're burning wood or, dung for heat and light, instead of having natural gas or coal or whatever it may be. And yes, those have emissions, but I don't have as much

57:22 emissions as burning wood in the home that you live in. And so it's all, it's all relative, right?

57:31 So yeah, it's a, it's, it's just such a dynamic, fun thing. Again, energy is never going anywhere, right? Energy demand is always going to be there. The sources will change how it gets to,

57:44 like all of those things around it are going to change

57:54 and be dynamic, but the energy industry as a whole is always going to exist as long as humans exist, because humans thrive when there's cheap, reliable energy. So, so, yeah.

57:60 Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, John. Absolutely. Thank you. Well, folks, you heard from John. Make sure you check out the collide platform and make sure you check out all the

58:09 stuff that Digital Wildcatters is putting up, also just energy tech nights that that may be coming to your city. Most of the viewers and listeners are from oil and gas town. So make sure you check

58:18 that out, as well as check out the Jowalcatters events on their website. This is Yoga Shriper Don, and I'm signing off.