0:00 All right, guys. Well, we are, we are here today. Another episode of Energy Bites. Bobby is, uh, I believe in Oklahoma City at the women's college world series. So I hope he's having fun.
0:12 That sounds like an awesome experience. And so, uh, but he's, he's not here with us today, but our guest is Kamsen Claire co-founder and CEO over at Smart Chain. How are you doing today, man?
0:23 Good night. How are you doing? Fantastic Yeah. Uh, ending, it's Friday. So ending the week, uh, in the afternoon in the studio of when I could be doing much more, uh, monotonous and
0:38 laborious tasks of data cleansing and stuff is, is a welcome, a welcome interrupt. So, well, it's your, it's your daughter's birthday, man. So hopefully we can get your home to say yes. He,
0:50 uh, he, he turned six today So
0:54 no worries, man. You got, you remembered, uh, so that's all that matters that he, uh, yeah. Shout out to Kase. Happy birthday, buddy. Maybe we'll turn six today, crazy. He's going in the
1:03 first grade. So anyway, how are we doing? Smart chain. Yes, what is it? Well, so we'll get into what smart chain is, but tell us about cam first. Right on, I can give you a quick bio. I'm
1:19 born and raised in New Zealand. No way. That's right. Yeah, what gave it away?
1:24 Yeah, so born and raised in New Zealand, half in Auckland, which is in the North Island, and then I did my college engineering degree down in Christchurch. And after that, I was a professional
1:35 weight lifter for a year and a half, which was fun, right? I made around the Commonwealth Games. And then after that, I quit and moved over to Calgary, working with Slumberjae. So I did this
1:45 where I do all my failed career as
1:49 a MWD. How did you go from
1:52 one side of the world to the other in a completely new industry and doing something completely? You know what I mean? I mean, New Zealand is a great place to live. but in terms of just career
2:02 perspectives, it's just a really, really small place. So I love New Zealand, don't get me wrong, I love the retire there, but as a place to have a job, it's not necessarily ideal. In fact,
2:11 the country just generally encourages young people to get away, go see the world. So yeah, I spent some time overseas and then I settled on Canada. I got into the oil and gas industry because it's
2:22 just this fantastic merging of industry and resources, right? Just the amount of money that's involved in this industry is spectacular, but you've also got this really cool can-do attitude, tech,
2:35 forward, you know, yeah, you feel what I'm saying, right? So I honestly, I felt a calling to the oil and gas industry. New Zealand's medium on oil and gas, I should say, but certainly I
2:47 jumped at the opportunity to get out of there. Someone recommended slumber's rate of me. So I pursued that. Originally, I was supposed to be going into the Gulf of Mexico. but then at the last
2:58 minute, they called me up and said, Hey, how would you go to Calgary instead? And I said, Cool. Is that a - Oh, yeah, yeah. It brings a rass off of North instead of - I don't know where
3:06 Calgary was. I said, Hey, is that a land location offshore? And they're like, You should look at a map. And that was it. Yeah, and then three weeks later, I was in Calgary. Yeah, and then
3:15 after that, I was 18 hours North, so I spent most of my time out of Fox Creek and then over like Fort Leard and things like that. What were you, what'd you just break out in? So yeah, it was
3:25 MLWD So I was doing much of like nuclear work with all the operators that were up there. All the logos that were there when I was there in like 2012, 2013, most of those logos were gone, right?
3:36 And there's new guys up there now. They're still drilling away. But yeah, as I say, I did all WDMWD there, touch the directional work, and then I was field service managers that's when I got my
3:47 test first test to the office. Loved it, and then in that time, I found a nice Houston girl. And so she was calling me down to Houston. And so I found a way to move down to Houston to work on
4:01 their work in their RD department. So working on the various downhall tools and things like that. What a nice, like that's a very happy pairing right there. It worked out really well. Houston's a
4:12 good place to be if you're in the energy business. Oh yeah, exactly. You can't take a Houston girl away from Houston for too long. So she was very supportive. She came to Calgary after a couple
4:23 of times, but after all, she made it pretty clear that she wanted to come down to Houston. So I did that. She mostly he made it there, huh? There's a funny story about that. Like, I realized
4:33 this might be too much information, so you can cut this if you want. But I love the story about knowing your customer, right? I spoke to Emily about, about how you should come to Calgary, the
4:44 Canadians are really nice people, we'll stand in a nice house, you know, you get looked after, there's all these great people. And she was humming and hiring, and she didn't like the temperature,
4:51 but she came up because she's a good sport And,
4:55 She turns out she loves it up there, right? And it wasn't because of any of the reasons that I had. She's got really like long sort of Italian hair and - No frizz. No frizz, that's exactly right.
5:06 Yeah, up in Calgary, she woke up in the morning, every day's a great hair day, really, the nonsense she has to deal with down here. So yeah, as I say, I didn't pick that, so that's a good
5:13 lesson for knowing your customer, right? Yeah, no, I went, I woke up way too early this morning for no reason, and so I decided to go out, go on a run this morning, and I went outside, and it
5:24 was greeted by that wet blanket of Houston humidity, and I was like, why am I doing this? You don't get used to it, no. No, it's a weird thing, I was born here, so, but then I moved, grew up
5:36 somewhere else, and came back, but one of the things I will always, always remember of Houston is the humidity. But it's weird, 'cause it's like, if I go to a dry climate now, my whole body
5:46 hates it. Yeah, my body. My sinus
5:48 is freaked out, I can't go to Vegas or Denver, no less Calgary for more than a couple of days, in my butt.
5:55 I'm like, this is dumb because this is a beautiful climate, but my body is so used to it. I'm gonna go back to Houston. Yeah. It could be worse. I like it down here. It's a nice place. Like,
6:04 shit gets down here. It's good. For sure. So yeah, man, after that, I did my time when RD out in Katie and then I moved over and did service quality and then sort of - The 199. Yeah, corner 99.
6:17 Yeah, exactly. Great facility. Great people over there. That's awesome. I had a lot of fun. I really got into this where I got the bug just of
6:23 engineering, design, things like that. I dabbled in software at that point, working on slumberjays, drawing, offering, drill ops and drill plan, which is good. And then they moved me back
6:33 into operations for a little bit long, a little bit there, and then I had to work on their SAP deployment, which was - Great. Yeah, well, all right, but, funnily enough, I'm actually using a
6:44 lot of the experience I got there now, which I never thought I would do, but yeah, here I am. Yeah, so that was actually pretty good. Then after a while, honestly, I saw the writing on the
6:51 wall.
6:53 I wanted to be able to diversify my career. So I pushed pretty hard to move into SLB's real digital development division, right? Like, well, a DI. And then after a long time of badgering, I
7:07 managed to get over there. And I worked on their digital data foundation for drilling. And I did that for about two years as a product manager, which was great, really insightful. And honestly,
7:20 after a while, I thought, hey, I want to do this myself, right? I want to work at my own speed. I want to make my own stuff. And so I jump ship, and here I am. So
7:32 what was the kind of
7:37 light bulb defining moment for you when you were like, hey, there's this process that I've been doing or I've done that's really broken. And
7:48 I think there's something to be had here. You know what? I've always had this bug, right? Like the main reason I moved to North America was because this bug was like deep down inside me. And I
7:58 sort of got comfortable through COVID, right? Everyone sort of hunkered down. But I had a buddy of mine who said, he's like, he had this moment. He has this line. He goes, do you want to be an
8:07 entrepreneur or a entrepreneur, right? And I'm like, that's a good line. Yeah, cuts deep. Cuts deep, right? Yeah. And so I had that in my head for the longest time. And then I
8:19 had this opportunity to meet up with an older gentleman named John Hanson, who had recently sold a company like IDES. He sold this reporting company to Slumberjane, right? And he was there as, I
8:34 guess, sort of a transition. A transition, yeah. Exactly, so they're paying a stick around. And I just made friends with John, right? And he was starting this new company or he had this sort
8:42 of dormant company, which is mostly an idea, but he'd started sort of playing around with it called Smart Chain. And he told me about it.
8:51 his original perspective was based on his own personal experience. So he'd come up with this idea in 2016. During his time, he had been operating the small company called IDS, which offered
9:03 reporting services to drilling contractors, right? And there would be more than one occasion when he'd sent a bill over to the drilling contractor and it didn't get paid, right? There was nothing
9:12 wrong with the bill. It was within everything was fine. But for whatever reason, the customer didn't pay it. And more often than not, it was because someone was on vacation. We lost your invoice
9:22 and this had put real strain on his small company, right? Like there'd been more and more on one occasion when he had to dip in his to his own pocket to pay his employees, right? And this is a
9:32 story as old as time. I think everybody listening to this has some kind of like experience with this, right? And so I said, I started thinking about it. Like, man, I've had the same experience
9:42 even working with SLB. There have been times when within the same vein, like maybe I'd screwed up an invoice because for the longest time I was writing tickets. there was one occasion when, due to
9:52 a poor handover from the salesperson, we had been leaving off a line, right? Like a standby line. And we went for a couple of months, not charging standby the customer. And then three months
10:02 later, he realizes it. And I get chewed out, which was not fun. But the fact of the matter is, there was no process for managing this. And so we just screwed up the invoices and that money was
10:12 lost. So I started to realize that this is a pretty universal, universal pain. And I'm thinking, hey, yeah, John's on to something I had this sort of entrepreneur bug in the back of my head.
10:21 And I said, John, do you need a guy to help you run with us? I can offer you a young back and an enthusiasm for life that can I go in for this? And he said, yes. And so that's where we started.
10:36 The reality is the solution was supposed to be blockchain based. So you can hear the name blockchain. So we originally came to market with quite a tech forward blockchain kind of solution.
10:51 We figured out very quickly that the value is not the technology. The value is, frankly, how you're making your customers life easier, whether it be the vendor or the operator. So we've started
11:05 to downplay the technology element. Don't get me wrong. Like blockchain's cool. I'm happy to talk about that.
11:13 But going in the blockchain forward, the operator doesn't care. Yeah, I could use whatever technology I want. Like what they care is that I make the life easier I think that's a very common kind
11:22 of,
11:25 I don't know, it's not a flaw. But it's just a very common practice where people lead with how the sausage is made. And at the end of the day, the customer does not give a shit. They just want
11:34 the problem solved or the thing automated or whatever it is. Right. And so that's a, no, that's a smart move on the all's part because I love the blockchain side of things. I've been in crypto
11:47 for a long time I think there's a ton of applications there. That being said, especially when it's something like that, that kind of in technology, there's so many trends that come and go and
11:58 stuff. And it's like, if you can hit the front end of that trend, you can use that to your advantage, potentially from fundraising, et cetera. But also, there's always gonna be a backside of
12:06 that trend. And so if you're on that backside, when everybody's ditching it, or it's not in style anymore, and you're still trying to push it, it's like. Yeah, you're still strapped to it,
12:15 right? Right, right. No, I'm going down. Yeah, 'cause it's not the flavor of the month, right? Right, exactly Yeah, the blockchain theme is certainly something that helps us open doors, but
12:24 it doesn't close deals. Yeah. Yeah, what people want to know is like, how am I going to make my invoices more accurate? How am I going to save time, that sort of thing, right? So we found
12:33 ourselves leaning into that a lot more, looking for really practical applications of just contract automation. And we're always keeping a side eye on what our technology decisions, how that can
12:46 help the next generation of our product, if that makes sense, right? I think that's a big thing too, right? Is it's like, even if you have a great new technology, getting scaled adoption of
12:59 that technology takes years, even within one company, right? And so it's like, yeah, start small. Yeah, yeah. They'll pay you for just a very simple solution, Doug. It's all their problems.
13:12 Yeah, it's all their problems. At the end of the day, that's what it boils down to, right?
13:17 So, give us the smart chain kind of elevator pitch. What is smart chain in a nutshell? Oh, there you go. Okay, cool. We've caught up. So yeah, I've sort of give you a preamble what's going on.
13:28 Yeah, as I say, our goal is to deliver contract automation templates to operators and their service vendors, right? So, we like to think of ourselves as contract Switzerland, right? That is to
13:41 say, we can operate as a trusted third party that can exist between the two things So no one's going to. no vendor is going to trust the operator to calculate their invoice, right? And vice versa,
13:51 right? No one's gonna trust them to just, oh yeah, I'll just give you the money to just tell me how much you are, right? So what we did was we came to market with this idea of automating
14:01 contracts and sitting as contracts what's in between operators and vendors. And we started off with our first value proposition which is pretty straightforward, it's just reduced the administration
14:10 and the leakage that exists, right? Everyone's got a story about just a stack of invoices or that one time that, for example, in my case I got chewed out 'cause I was filling it out wrong or in
14:21 John's case, you know, there were delays 'cause someone went on maternity leave and they didn't tell anybody, right? That happens all the time. Everyone's got that story. So that one's a pretty
14:29 easy value case. We go in there with that one straight off the bat. The next thing we realized is, if we were able to automate the contract to the point where we can calculate what the invoices in
14:38 real time rather than having to wait three weeks for invoices to come in, we can deliver real-time financial visibility, right? So now you can pair your operational visibility, all these great
14:49 dashboards and things that are out there with how much is this actually costing me? At this moment in time, what is my diesel built? Which is really cool, right? You can start to understand these
14:58 things. That's one of the things that never ceases to blow me away is that you've got all these billion dollar energy companies that could not tell you on any given day what their daily cost,
15:12 anything, right? Yeah, it's all plus and minus 10 right? So it's like, it's nuts when you think about other industries and how real, like, think of any kind of tech industry. And it's like,
15:24 it's literally real time by the second, you know? It's not the case here, no way, no way. Yeah, especially these field operations, yeah. It's a wild problem. And, you know, before I got
15:35 into it, well, even when I was getting into the data side, I've been on the service company most of my career or services side most of my career. And it's literally a universal problem every
15:45 company I've worked. for from frack to gauges and rentals, they all have the exact same problem. And I've worked for companies that, in my opinion, went bankrupt because of that problem. You can
15:57 make millions or tens of millions in revenue, hundreds of millions in revenue, and still have cashflow problems and go bankrupt very quickly. Because on frack, it's so expensive. Like I've tell
16:08 people all the time, back in the day, you would order your chems in your profit like a month ahead of time Then you would start the job. The jobs back then would take two to four weeks. So then
16:20 you're a month into the job. Order chemicals a month out, now you're two months in. So you finish the job, then you send off your invoices and stuff. That's gonna take, you know, even just
16:31 getting them collected to submit is gonna take potentially a couple weeks to a month. Then you go into the 90 to 120 payments. You're now six months out from when you first started spending money.
16:44 you do that enough times, especially when you're talking about millions of dollars at a time, you can go bankrupt very quick. And especially like, again, all these field service companies, cash
16:54 flow is literally make or break. And so it just never ceases to amaze me that this universal problem has been around forever, essentially, seemingly. And nobody, I can kind of see an argument on
17:11 the operator side of like, okay, well, why should why do we need to pay people as quickly as possible? Like, you know, time value money, blah, blah, blah. However, the amount of issues that
17:23 are caused by that on the back end with reopening AFEs and lost tickets and all of the like, it is tremendous. It happens all the time for every service that every operator has. And yet, and
17:36 because of that, now you have people doing double work, you have to have more people, like just the volume of the accounting departments and the tech. or the data science gets so big because
17:46 they're just managing the chaos and it's like, I can buy a house on DocuSign without being there in person, but I can't get a3, 000 field ticket approved digitally. How the hell is
17:60 that possible? Yeah, you're 100 right. That's exactly the situation that we're looking at right now.
18:03 One of our customers is a very large operator and they're telling me that their average drilling engineer is handling something like 200 to 300 invoice approvals every day. So every week, not every
18:15 day, every week. And that approval is just one step in the chain. The company man's already signed the ticket and it's already gone through some person over in Poland to code it or something to
18:28 that point. Just the number of steps that's involved in approving these things is frankly outrageous. And with today's technology, with the data that's available to us, there's nothing stopping us
18:38 from taking those agreements, digitizing them, tying them into real-time data feeds, and they'd be able to execute. Well, and that's the craziest part of it to me is it's like, it's literally
18:46 just moving data around and it's the most inefficient possible way we could do it because it most of it starts a paper level, which is where everything goes to die, but it's a, you know, I like,
18:59 like I said, it's like, oh, you're, you're the most secure way we have to approve a field ticket by our, our company man is for him to have a stamp that he puts on it physically And then I'm sure
19:13 those never get lost or stolen, like, and no one's ever approved a bunch of invoices that shouldn't have been approved, like, or I can have face ID on my phone. Like, oh, it's so crazy. The
19:24 dichotomy right? Yeah. It's a huge dichotomy, right? Like, yes, that made sense in 2000. Yeah. Okay. Sure. But like we're 25 years later now. Yeah. And you've got some interesting stuff.
19:34 And I'll stick with the diesel example because it's just the easiest one for people to understand But like the logic of even validating that invoice now is really challenging. Sure, the company man
19:44 going out there and looking at the side glass. And the side glass is not a particular accurate thing. And I'd say, and we found that something like one in five strap sheets on the side of your tank
19:52 is wrong. Right, so there's no, I mean, he's citing this piece of paper, but he's not validating the price on the contract. He's not standing over them while they're strapping. No, man. He
20:02 doesn't know what the contract said. Yeah, exactly. So it's not that we can save time. It's that we can just do a better job of it. We know that 7, 000 gallons went into their tank and we know
20:13 that the price was this. So you get a fundamentally better approval process and you get to remove all of those manual steps. So we're doing our best piece by piece to pull the market into the future.
20:24 But the last piece that I'm really excited about, this is the one that I really get. And I'm sorry, we can get kind of wonky about this, but I believe that with contract automation, we can
20:34 actually improve drilling and completions operations, right? That is to say you get, we can save your time, We can reduce lake hedge. And then after that, we can improve your financial
20:44 visibility. But fundamentally, I think contract automation will result in better contracts, right? And what is a better contract? In my opinion, a better contract is a contract that better
20:55 aligns the incentives of the operator and the vendor. So you can actually get yourself to a point where the operator actually gets more for less money and the vendor is happier because of it,
21:06 because all he has to deliver is exactly what the operator asks for I mean, think about with red contracts back in the day, you used to have this day rate. That's the best example of just
21:16 diametrically opposed incentives, you know what I mean? Like the vendor makes more money when the operator is annoyed because things are going slow, right? So that's just crazy, right? Whereas
21:26 now with contract automation, we can start putting in place real advanced performance contracts where the operator can come in and say, I really care about my go-to-bottom strategy, right? I
21:36 really care about footage through this section, whatever you want, like they think about what they want to achieve. and then you can put a contract associated with that. Trying to put together any
21:45 kind of complex performance contract, complex performance contract these days is a bit of a nightmare 'cause inevitably it spreads sheets and no one agrees and the whole thing just falls apart,
21:55 right? People have tried performance contract but it turns into a fight. Believe me, I've been in those rooms, right? We are trying to, three months later, I've got my spreadsheet and you get
22:01 your spreadsheet and we're having a fight. Neither of us can really remember what's going on. Why, your NPT says 50 and mine only says 10. Exactly, yeah, and no one can remember, right? It's
22:10 like, no, it's because he has 40 of that NPT and it's like, no, you have that in, yeah, those are. Yeah, you blame the other guy. You blame the guy that's not the worst. Those are the worst
22:18 meetings because no one wins, right? No one wants to be there, yeah, yeah. So we're able to create this financial source of truth on the fly, right? But we're able to calculate these
22:30 performance clauses on the fly as well, right? So if you want to really dig into your footage rate, if you really, as I say, the go-to-bottom rate is, so that you've got a bottom procedure is a
22:41 really good one. we can map out with a go to bottom procedure is put that procedure into a contract and then use the real time data feeds to map it out, right? And so we've talked to a couple of
22:51 drilling contractors who are really excited about this 'cause they've invested a lot of money in having controls to go to bottom and they wanna be able to demonstrate this value that they've created.
23:00 Now that's a really, really fascinating point because one of the struggles I feel like from the services side is that the operator demands new technology but they don't wanna pay for it. 99 of the
23:16 time. And so it's like, well, how do I, as a service company, spend millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions to invest in technology if you're not willing to pay me for the technology.
23:27 And so now it sounds like there's something that actually kind of bridges that gap. Exactly right, yeah, it really is. I mean, we wanna work with, as I say, we wanna work with the operators and
23:36 the vendors but one of the primary advantages for the vendors that they can better demonstrate the value that they're creating. for their customer, right? And the customer's happy with it. Frankly,
23:45 if it doesn't demonstrate the value, then you don't get paid, and that's fine. So yeah, we're really making that pitch on the first day. People are looking at me a little sideways unless you're
23:54 really into this. But we found that the customers we've working with, we've always started with reducing the admin, reducing the leak is just make it easy. And then after like six months to a year
24:04 of working with them, they start going, oh, cool, okay, what else can we put in here for performance contracts? What index can we peg this to? You know what I mean? Not for sure. And that's
24:14 how it should be, right? Like I've done so many RFPs and then you get to the end of it. And it's like, oh, and if you want payment, if we guarantee you payment in 15 days, you'll give us a 10
24:25 discount, our 20 discount or whatever. And I'm like, it's like,
24:30 and what world is that fair to anybody other than you? Yeah, it's pretty rough. Or you could just pay me for the work that we did that we agreed, like it's crazy. But let's get, Let's get into
24:41 it because I don't think enough people, unless you've really been in the weeds of this, truly get how big of a problem this ends up being, especially on the services side again. It's service
24:56 margins are always narrow unless oil prices are just screaming. And so
25:02 in my mind, this is one of those things I've looked back on a number of times with a number of the companies that I've worked at, historically, I've just been like, Man, that cash flow piece
25:12 literally is the make or break of a lot of this stuff. I told you they were gonna start construction the minute we started this podcast. Yeah, it's okay, but it's
25:21 one of those things where at one of the companies that I worked for, I did a full blown analysis on our DSO and
25:28 we were like I'm making numbers up so that makes it good for confidentiality and all that stuff. But I think the average time from when the job was completed itself was being delivered to the client
25:42 was like 21 days or something like that. And then from there, our average DSO to being paid was like over 120. And it's like, and you know, this was a company that wasn't a very big, it wasn't a
25:56 big operation from a services perspective. So they weren't big tickets. And so you had to make sure those things, you're hitting singles all day long and bunting, you know, just like small ball.
26:07 But it's one of those things where it's like, no one was paying attention to it. So no one really knew, right? Like, if you don't have an accountant really hammering that, you're not going to be
26:18 really, especially on a service side. Everyone's always strapped. They don't have enough resources or time. And so, but, you know, we put some effort into really focusing in on that. And we
26:28 were able to reduce both of those pretty significantly just by like identifying some metrics and be like, hey, these are important things that we need to put into our basically SOPs to get this done.
26:40 you know, like what are you seeing generally, you know, from the market perspective on like what the average DSO is, what they should be, what you guys are able to kind of, you have any kind of
26:51 case study type stuff yet? Yeah, I've got two good examples in my head. I mean, to begin with though, I found that some companies are really hyper-tuned into DSO, and what I would call DIR,
27:03 days and voice received, is the time to get the invoice out, and then DSO is the time after that
27:09 As I say, we don't attempt to say, we can get you paid faster. If your contract says 30 days, then we're not gonna change that. That's not our business. But the reality is, the whole thing can
27:17 be done and dusted in the first day. If the company wants to sit on it for 29 days after that, that's their business, but certainly - But even just ensuring that the invoice is going to be
27:27 approvable, right? Like that is so much of the headache, where it's like, you submit the invoice, and then three months later, they finally get around to it, and they're like, oh yeah, by the
27:37 way, that invoice got rejected because this code was wrong. Yeah, I knew that code on there. And it's like, yeah, that's your code. You did that. Yes, that
27:45 happens all the time. Or it's like, you gave us that code to put on there. That's the only reason it's on there, or it wouldn't be there to begin with, 'cause it's not ours. Yeah, that's 100,
27:53 right? Yeah. So, yeah, as I say, like, some companies seem to be really tuned into that. And other companies, honestly, it's just become this dull pain. That's just, it's just part of the
28:01 course. This is just the nonsense we have to do. I was talking to a diesel vendor the other day He employs three people to just do billing. Three people to just do billing to navigate through all
28:10 the nonsense associated with that. And then, yeah, on the other side with the operators, they're just as acutely aware of this pain. They just, they know how much time their company man is
28:20 sitting inside the shack, stamping tickets when you really should be walking around making sure people are safe. But the thing that I don't feel like they're as aware of are all the, like the
28:29 hordes of accounting folks or, you know, backend, back office people that are having to rectify and fix all of this shit. have to keep hiring more people because they're not solving the problem
28:41 and it's like - It's like a thousand cats, right? Yeah, literally. It's a thousand cats. So yeah, as I say, one of our, so I got two good examples with that. One of our very first customer
28:50 was an offshore drilling company, right? And they had been preparing their
28:57 tickets, their end of month tickets manually, right? Using the excel sheet, right? And there's a lot of money going through these excel sheets. Ivory service company, is the excel sheet The
29:07 excel is the biggest business system in the oil and gas market. And then followed closely by like outlook, right? And then your SMS like, you know, Apple Life, my message is probably after that,
29:17 what's happened stuff? So anyway, they were doing it with the excel sheet and don't get me wrong, it was working, right? They were getting paid, but every time sheet was different, every
29:27 approval process was different. They had very little oversight over, there's a DIR, right? And when you're dealing with tech, it's as big as they were, like.
29:38 a five-day DIR is a serious amount of money, right? And so the first thing we were able to do is automate that process for them so these tickets were prepared. And there was an automated approval
29:50 process that was as simple as possible that it actually leveraged DocuSign in that case, where the stakeholder from both sides of the equation could come in and approve this as easily as possible.
29:59 And the operator loved it as well. I mean, the operator saved time. Like all of a sudden the process was standardized, everybody could see it, there was full visibility The ticket was getting
30:08 approved the day of the end of the month, right? At month ended, 1 am, your tickets approved, and then now the accounting team has the information they need so they can push it out. So we were
30:20 able to take that company's DIR down from like several weeks to several days at most. So that was a big one for us straight off the bat. And now we're doing some really cool stuff with them.
30:30 They're actually the best example of, we did the baseline work. And now they're coming back to us saying, cooperate with our operator on an even deeper level to establish the single source of truth.
30:42 Like what is the NPT at the end of the day? What point are we at the AFE? That sort of thing, which hasn't been number four. And then on the other side, our first operator customer, big outfit,
30:54 they had a performance contract, right? They
30:58 wanted to reward the drilling crews. And it was taking something like 130 days to calculate these bonuses 'cause they were so complex No better way to incentivize a drilling crew than to take six
31:09 months later. Yeah, that's where we were, yeah, exactly. And so we said, guys, like, this isn't gonna work. So we worked with them to help digitize their contract, to take out the more sort
31:20 of soft terms, right? So there was this part of it was,
31:24 where did the lateral land, right? Where did the lateral start? And I was like, okay, cool, where's the definition for start lateral? And they say, oh, we talk to
31:33 the drilling contractor for that So I go over the drilling contract and I say, Hey.
31:37 where's the lateral start? And they say, oh, we talked to the directional guy. So I'm like, okay, cool. So I have to go over and talk to three or four different directional companies. And
31:44 they've got all got different ways of calculating the landing point. I'm thinking, you've got a guy from Phoenix directional, making decisions that are impacting a complete, something that's
31:55 completely irrelevant
31:58 to them, right? So first thing we did was get the contract to a point where it was digitizable, right? So we've got, we said, right, at this point, survey X, that's the start of the lateral,
32:08 right? And that, that got rid of a lot of the aggravations just straight off the bat by having some, let the math tell you where it is. I know it's glorious, isn't it? And so all of that
32:18 evaporated. And then we worked through a couple of other things, we ended up digitizing the whole workflow. And we took the process of, rather than 130 days, we took it down to a really couple of
32:28 hours, right, that we could push it through. I mean, there's limitations because it's, you know, Greg, Greg Abbott wants to take his cut, but like, um, yeah, it we were able to
32:38 significantly reduce the processing time. And this leads into my story about trying to create better contracts. With contract automation, we were able to improve the incentive power of that
32:47 contract without creating any cost. In fact, we actually eliminated quite a lot of leakage from that as well. So it got cheaper and they got a better service because we were able to execute it in a
32:57 timely way. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was up. No, even just like the transparency side of it too Like, you know, especially, you know, in
33:09 2025 where a large majority of things are already instrumented, like the data is being collected. Yeah, man. And instead of just having a person do it, you let the computers do it because it's
33:19 instant and it's accurate. And if everybody trusts it, then all of a sudden you can start, you can start, yeah. When you have the agreed upon transparency in how the data flows and where it's
33:29 coming from and how it gets approved and all that stuff, right? So there's never any kind of question on one side or the other. I would say at the very, very root of it, maybe this is a no for
33:38 simplification, but all the contractors is just a feedback loop, right? It's about saying you do this and I will give you this and we'll go around and circle. It's like I'll be happy and so if you
33:48 can execute that feedback loop as fast as possible, people know what they need to do and they'll do more of it, you know what I mean? And you'll get a better outcome at arguably a lower price. But
33:57 it's funny you mentioned the data, we came to market with those three points that I mentioned earlier, but point number four is one that sort of came about by accident. We've realized when you
34:07 start tying data like the IADC drawing report, when you start tying that to people's contracts, people's to their contract execution, all of a sudden people start paying a lot more attention to
34:19 that data in real time. So when we first start, we always see errors and we have quite an extensive workflow for spotting problems with data But every single time we've deployed a smart contract,
34:30 we've watched the root data improve organically just because more people are paying more attention to it in a timely manner. So we've been able to come to the data scientists and the IT departments
34:43 and say, hey, you want us to be here. Because we're going to incentivize people to get that rigorly state right. So in three months time when you're trying to use it on a large scale model, all
34:52 of a sudden you're not feeding garbage into your system. Yeah. Right, so yeah, the more you can bubble these problems up to your company man or your driller and incentivize them to get it right.
35:05 I mean, the better all your operational decision-making gets. Now, there's a really good book calledMeasure What Matters and that's literally what it's all about. Yeah, I agree. 'Cause it's like,
35:14 if you can't measure it, how do you know what it's doing and what's happening? Yeah. And so it's like, we have, again, this is one of the weird nuanced things of the oil field is you've got all
35:24 this data, but pretty much none of it is generated by the operator who owns the data at the end of the day. And so it's coming in in all these formats from all these sources at different times and
35:35 in different styles and all this stuff. And so it's, I don't envy them in having to manage all of that. But at the same time, it's like, it's coming in. So let's use it, let's make sure it's
35:48 good data because that's like, I have thought about this a number of times about how many, machine learning models are out there probably that were based off of all this shit field data. It's like,
36:00 yeah It's like, you know, K factors, right? And in a frack fan, it's like, I can make the readings, say whatever the hell I want, even though what's actually happening is very different. And
36:10 it's like, I guarantee there's a million data scientists that don't even realize that there's this opportunity for human injection into the data piece of it from the field side that actually messes
36:23 with all of their stuff on the back end. Exactly, they're making absolute decisions of data that was fact-finged six months ago, right? It's crazy. when the guy's in the field, they don't - They
36:34 don't care. They don't give a shit. They don't give a shit. Okay, maybe that's a bit mean. They do care, but they've got a lot of other stuff that we're in. That's why I'm saying, like, it's
36:40 not, they have no incentives to make, their incentive is to make it okay with the company man. Yeah, to get the precious signature. And then you're off to the races, yeah. Your point about the
36:51 operators consuming a lot of data from a lot of service vendors is really on point, right? So if you can make sure that those guys are appropriately incentivized to make sure the data's good before
37:02 it gets delivered to the operator. The operator stands to benefit, so. For sure. It's interesting, we haven't released this, we haven't released this contract yet, 'cause we tend to release
37:12 things in templates based on standard workflows, right? So, red contracts, bonuses or diesel, CNG, that kind of thing. But we've got one that we're excited to talk about, which is about a
37:24 lot of directional companies and a lot of other companies produce these recorded mode datasets that are not necessarily. critical to the real-time operation, right? And right now, these data sets
37:35 are just being left on the cutting room floor 'cause they're typically several gigabytes and what are you gonna do? Email it to the drilling engineer and he's gonna be like, well, what are we
37:41 supposed to do with this thing? But if you can put in place an automated workflow that essentially monetizes those deliverables, right?
37:50 At a price point that the operators willing to pay and you make it so easy that all of a sudden the service vendor is able to actually work with that. It's free money to them, right? Yeah, it's
37:59 free money to them 'cause they've got it already, they don't have to go through the rigmarole associated with putting it on a USB stick and mailing it over, right? Which is what we used to do. I
38:09 know, I do think the whole data transfer thing in the industry is wild. Yeah, but yeah, if you can automate the data process and then put a monetary value to that data and then transfer it into
38:19 the operator, but put it in the operator in a way that they don't have to deal with it, eliminate all the manual handling. All of a sudden you've just got this fantastic data set that you never had
38:28 access to, right? We're really hoping to expand the amount of data available to the operators and to the vendors by being able to facilitate the monetization of that data at a reasonable price point.
38:42 Does that make sense? No, for sure. Well, and it's, you know, I've always thought of it from the services side, but I've never thought about the fact that, yeah, the operator is willing to
38:50 pay something for it. Something, yeah. Generally speaking. And so it's like, hey, the service companies want to make money as anywhere they can, so And with the way that AI is going, all of a
39:00 sudden, these, so that was the problem with these giant data sets, right? You don't ever open them up when there was a colossal backup, right? You know what I mean? That's when you had the time
39:09 to get into it. But there's a lot of value in there, and especially if you've got an AI machine that's capable of waiting through all that crap, all of a sudden that data that was originally just
39:19 too hard to deal with, right? It was that awful stuff. All of a sudden it becomes super valuable. You've got a lot of insights in that and for the most part, it's untouched by the human hand.
39:30 Yeah. Which makes it arguably better. Yeah, that's true. That's huge. We're not necessarily there yet, but we're excited to move into that space. That's awesome.
39:40 So one of the questions I wrote down was, what are some of the kind of objections or pushback that you've kind of encountered in the industry on this side of things? Because, you know, there's,
39:51 if you zoom out, there's like, I've done a lot of research. I almost started a company in this realm at a point in time So because directly due to that company I was working at and just seeing how
40:03 ridiculous, like, oh, your invoice process is me dropping a piece of paper off into a slot and some random field office and hoping that y'all submit it to your corporate office. Like, that's
40:15 insane. And the money will just show up. Right, and it just shows up magically or in like - It checks the mail. It doesn't even encompass the main pain point, which is as a service company, I
40:25 have to integrate and work with everything from literally mailing. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Invoices with physical mail, all the way to, you know, Areba SAP, insert your giant enterprise ERP system
40:38 here that, you know, 90 of them run off of. And then it's like, so I have to like me, small 20 30, 50 service company have to manage figuring out how to deal with all of those different things.
40:52 Yeah, that's a fine point. It's like, but like the operators don't care because on their end, all their shits and whatever platform they're using and their clients have to use it if they want to
41:00 work with it. You know, like there's not a lot of incentive on the operator side, specifically around that point of it, but what you guys are doing where it's mutually incentivized, I think makes
41:10 a lot more sense. I think that's one of the reasons people have struggled to penetrate that space. The key for us is certainly to start by working with the operators and making it clear that they
41:20 stand to gain from the benefits that I've already explained. But there's also clear benefits as a service company to using it as well Exactly, but the value to that. the vendor is normally
41:31 self-evident, right? And we do not promise your DSO is gonna go down. But certainly we'll simplify all the process and we'll give you a lot more visibility in the operation. I mean, that alone.
41:42 Yeah, and more often than not, we actually make your life easier 'cause we're helping you process this. And if you know that you're able to validate that what you're doing is making your
41:55 customer happier, then that's huge, right? So we typically do make a stronger play to the operator. That's where we tend to lead it to. And that's where we make the arguments around reduced
42:05 administration simplified leakage, make sure you're actually not getting ripped off, right? Ripped off, we have not, I've yet to see anyone submit a nefarious invoice, although they're certainly
42:15 out there, but leakage, fat fingers, all the time, right? That happens a lot and then improve visibility and then fundamentally, once you really get on the contract automation chain, making
42:24 your
42:27 performance contracts better, right? bringing more performance contracts to the market, 'cause the operators really have to be the ones leading the charge, right? Even just the visibility though,
42:35 right? Like, I have no visibility in dropping it off in a folder in MonaHands, Texas at a field office. Yeah, man. Just like in that, you know, like, that's still how people do stuff, and
42:46 it's like, once it's there, you know, my guy in the field tells me he drops it off. What am I supposed to, now I just sit and wait. Yeah, yeah. I have to hope to remember in six months to
42:55 check to see if - Did the money show up? Yeah, that came, you know, it's - So I was talking to an operator yesterday about, again, about his diesel span. And
43:08 with a click of a button, he saw all the invoices that were all associated to each one of his AFEs. We were able to say, you're burning 1, 800 gallons per day on this particular well. You spiked
43:17 over here for some reason. 1, 800 gallons a day translates to what, 6, 000? 6, 000 a day, and that's to the minute, right? And then the next day, he can see how much his AFEs So that level
43:29 of visibility is, he was staggered. And the idea is, and we have to emphasize this, like there's enough stuff out there in the oil and gas market right now. We don't wanna be another thing.
43:39 We've actually got this ridiculous situation where we say, look, we don't wanna have a lot of eyeballs on our dashboard. The dashboard's there because black boxes are bad. But we typically tend to
43:48 deliver most of the information that we need through a text message or through just a well timed email. And then just get on your day So in terms of like the training load or anything like that,
44:00 zero a man. Like we're trying to take stuff off your operators plate. The last thing I wanted to show up and say here, have more stuff. Learn this new platform. No, no, that's the opposite. Oh
44:09 my God, yeah, that's the opposite of what we want to do. And yeah, some of my previous roles have been about, hey, what you've got there, take that away and here's my all. Let's forget the
44:18 last 20 years of what you've been doing. No, even if what you're selling is better, the operators don't want that, right? So we really, really lean into business integration And I guess the last
44:27 sticking point that we've got, and we really do feel strongly about being independent, as I say, contracts, what's the limit, right? So to that end, we've taken no corporate venture capital,
44:39 we're not beholden to any oil company, any directional company, anything like that, we're on the low foot, right? We take that integrity really seriously. So we spent a lot of money getting ISO
44:49 certified, getting SOC 1 certified to handle financials. So we really do try to come in and be like, we're a trusted partner. If the operator's doing something sketchy, we'll tell them, you know,
45:01 like, you can't do this, right? And so we do have to go to bat for the vendor as much as we go to bat for the operator. And I mean, that's the last part of it is that we, the temptation in this
45:11 is to start saying, hey, we'll take a percentage of the ticket, right? But as soon as you start - What other people do? It's what other people do, yeah, it's what other people do. Take a nice,
45:19 fat percentage. The last thing you can do is take - That's the best part though. I'm sorry to interrupt you. That's the best part from the services side by an operator that I have to use this
45:27 system. And then the first thing that I get when I go into use that system is I'm now being charged because the operator is not paying to use it, right? I get to pay for the privilege of building
45:38 them in a new system that I have to learn and integrate into my workflow, yeah. That was my blood. Yeah, exactly, you're the benefit of it. And so, yeah, as I say, like the way we charge this
45:47 is just is flat right, like that. We believe that if we were taking a percentage of the ticket, then all of a sudden we're in same device to block the ticket, right? So, we just say, no, like
45:56 very much flat, right? You do whatever you wanna do, the bill can be a buck, the bill can be 10 million bucks. Like, we're just gonna sit here and we're gonna arbitrate and we're gonna execute
46:04 on our platform. So like all those things combined to establish that level of trust and really show how we can benefit the operators has been our most successful part of the market. Does that
46:16 actually? No, that's really cool. And even just the way that you are approaching it, right? Like I think over the next five years, the way that, the way that. what we consider traditional
46:26 software is going to change tremendously with language models and a bunch of other stuff. And just the need for direct integrations for things, right? And so there's gonna be a lot less, you know,
46:38 tab switching to this platform for this and that platform for that and this one for that. And it's gonna be way more back in driven where everything is integrating into databases or notifications
46:50 that you just get fed when you need it. Yeah, man, absolutely And so that's cool, that's
46:56 been, in my opinion, part of one of the biggest problems as to why we're in the position we're in as an industry is that because people didn't want to integrate or they had such a monopoly on
47:05 something that there's, well, I'm not gonna give you an API to it 'cause I don't have to. Yeah. Who else are you gonna go use? Now that's changing, finally. But I mean, that incumbents for
47:15 decades did that, right? And became these monopolistic things that - These old garden - These very, very big walled gardens that held up a lot of potential progress. for a long time just because
47:26 they wanted to sit on the data. Yeah, man, yeah, exactly. And people were trying to trade off that in the sense of just trying to give more and more insights, right? And after a while, you
47:35 just get sick of insights. You know what I mean? Like I've seen just, there's enough charts. We're done. We're done with charts. Okay, exactly. Your point that things will become more
47:46 automated on the back end and we'll just be executed. I mean, that's just an inevitability that's happening already, right? So we've got to get on that bandwagon rather than trying to give
47:54 somebody another day. Yeah, well, I mean, meet the user where they're at. Like if they're working out of Excel, meet them in Excel. If
48:03 they're running around and they're in the field, send them a text, understand the end user and what their workflows are. So you don't have to be that new needle in their side, other tab to open,
48:16 new software to learn. And to that end, from a service perspective, literally meet them in the field, right? If that's where they want to go, like these guys don't have a lot of time and they
48:25 don't really want to like know what you've got to tell them. They just want to make that, they just, they're willing to pay if you make their life easier. And so you go out to the field and you
48:34 shape the company man's hand and you install that sensor yourself and you say, right, you're good to go, man, I'll call you tomorrow, make sure you're happy and then I'll leave you alone. That's
48:41 much more important. And I think that's, that's something that, and I'm going to throw a, throw a bone to all the oil and gas company, oil and gas startup trade out there So we're actually
48:51 creating a nice little gang of, a nice little group of, of these oil and gas startups. So I mean, I'll throw at least one, when I add a boy to breaker 19. Oh, Rodney. Yeah, yeah, well, I'm
48:60 dealing with with Tyler, but yeah, Rodney and,
49:05 and then you've got Andrew over, sorry, Alex over at Ridconciage, right? So we're, there's a little gang of guys. I think they're all doing it right. When you come from the oil and gas industry
49:15 and you're starting your own operation, you're able to go and talk the talk. these operators and talk to all these vendors, you can go to their offices, you know where not to put your hand, you
49:23 know what I mean? Stuff like that. Whereas if you're dealing with these software companies from outside the oil and gas industry, you're starting from miles behind the April, because you've just
49:33 got to explain to them what ROP means, you know what I mean? Like this is what we're doing here. Like the oil and gas industry is like the military, right? Just so many acronyms and so many like
49:41 highly specialized things. So I love working in the oil and gas industry, working with these people is fantastic. They're a unique breed, but
49:59 I imagine it would be extremely difficult to be an outside player to come in and try to offer a sort of a service. It's been tried many, many times. It doesn't ever really tend to stick, it seems.
50:02 No, yeah, and that's actually really cool, right? You get all these players and actually you guys are exactly the same, right? You come from the roots and then you're able to develop your own
50:09 little spot. I say that's my favourite thing about the industry. It's also a benefit because it means that we're all growing from what they're not supposed. Does that make sense? Yeah. No,
50:18 absolutely, it's,
50:21 well, it's, you know, you don't have, the impostors get, get weeded out very quickly. Yeah, man, yeah, if you're full of shit, you get splattered. You get really fast. You're not gonna
50:29 have a long career. And so that is a very nice thing, for sure. Yeah, this has been good. Let's talk a little bit, I know this isn't y'all selling point, but being a crypto guy, I have got to
50:44 ask the question about the blockchain side of it Is there a
50:48 blockchain that y'all are actually operating off of? Is it? Yeah, so we balanced around on that. I mean, as I said, when we first started into it, we were really leaning into it. We started
50:58 off with R3 quarter, right? We liked them because they've got a lot of fingers in the banking industry and they're ultra secure. Unfortunately, they're also ultra expensive, right? Everything
51:09 needs to be run on these Kubernetes clusters and it just ended up costing us too much money. So we said, like, we can't do this We figured that out pretty quickly.
51:18 Yeah, we moved away from them simply because
51:23 having them or not having that simply did not justify the value proposition. So after that, we took a look at ourself and said, look, we're not gonna be settling these contracts in Bitcoin anytime
51:35 soon. So we moved to have the blockchain based solely as an indisputable ledger, right? So to date, we've been putting it on basically just a private chain, just more is just a way to do it. No,
51:49 I mean, I think that that was always my hangup on crypto, blockchain, getting into the enterprise was it's like, okay, well, which one are you gonna pick? Yeah. Like there's literally millions
52:03 of them. Yeah. And then what happens if that one fails or goes under or is a repo like you don't know. Yeah. And so like it's an interesting thing Bobby, it's really funny. Bobby and I went to a.
52:17 We went to this blockchain conference. This was probably seven years ago, seven, eight years ago. And there was a guy that got up and asked the question and he was like, so what's he's just
52:27 asking to be snark? Like, what's the difference in a blockchain and just a shared database? And it's like, it's actually not, there's not a lot of difference there, especially if both sides
52:38 agree on the database. And so it's like, but to me, that's, that is the, the, the most promising, you know, reasonable enterprise solution as well. Everyone has databases. They have people
52:50 that know how to manage them. They understand how they work. It's not a new thing that's mysterious. That's constantly changing, right? Like, and so I think that's a, you know, you're, you're,
53:00 again, you're providing the value, which is, you know, an indisputable record. Yeah, indisputable, unchangeable record. That's completely documented all the way through and is transparent to
53:11 both sides, right? And that's all you've got right now, but it's a great place to dip your toe. I mean, lots of customers are like, no, we don't need that. I'm like, okay, cool, we'll just
53:18 automate your contracts, but we need to make sure that we're building our architecture such that as the markets appetite for blockchain
53:27 increases, we're there. Like there's some really cool stuff. I mean, we're talking to blockchain for energy right now. There's some really cool stuff there, the industry consortium. I actually
53:36 really buy that method rather than having a number of these little private chains, which are essentially shared accelerates, right? Or heaven forbid going out there and building yet another
53:46 blockchain, which costs a fortune and is obsolete, the instant you release it. So we're not doing that. Having this consortium that can operate as a medium ground between private chains, which
53:59 have limited utility and heaven forbid going on sort of a public chain, which comes with a whole world of risks, right? I think having that consortium is a really good place to start. I think
54:09 they're starting to gain some traction, Yep, talking to Rebecca over there, that's cool. I agree with you though, like there's obviously a very obvious solution, especially as all this stuff
54:20 gets automated or not, there's not an obvious solution, but there's an obvious need that this would fill in the industry where there's just so much IOT-type stuff that is built based off of
54:33 consumption. And it's like, well, you've got a sensor there and you've screwed up the data and it's done Yeah, we're not counting sex a Barrett quite yet, but we'll end up with a robot out there
54:43 doing that eventually, you know what I mean? But yeah, as I say, I have yet to encounter an operator or vendor that's interested in doing any of the more advanced stuff. And that's just the
54:58 nature of the market and I'm happy to work with that for the time being, right? When stable queens come along, sure we'll do that. But right now, no, we're not going anywhere near that. I did
55:06 hear of a really cool use case and we're not doing this and if someone wants to do it, I'd love to see it. I love to see certifications and things starting to get saved to a chain. That makes a ton
55:16 of sense. Yeah, if there's
55:20 a solution out there that's managing HSE certifications, because I mean, it's been a while since I've gone out to a rig site and had to show them my tickets, but certainly in Canada, this is what
55:29 we did all the time. You had the little stack of cards. And I mean, that was such a laborious process and there's no way of tracking it. But I mean, that seems like a really obvious low risk
55:39 application And we would love that because you could tie that into a term in your contract. All your fellas need to have active HSE training, right? And if they're missing it, then we're going to
55:49 - Right. And then on the backside is the service company. You can only deploy people based off of that, you know. Yeah, and so you have this - a mutable record that's maintained by a third party,
55:59 or maybe it's maintained on the consortium. That players like me, independent players, can come along, access those records, and then execute on them. Does that make sense? Yeah I think that
56:09 that sounds like a. fantastic idea, because I think currently, there's a very, very monopolistic type set up where one or two companies basically control that for everyone. Yeah, we, I know,
56:21 yeah. And so it's like, oh, well, hey, yeah, no, that's, yeah, there's so much of that, right? And it's, yeah, that should, that should be your permanent record. So to speak, right,
56:31 they're, they shouldn't be controlled by someone who gets to make money off of that. Yeah, exactly. And that it needs to be, you need to make sure there's an incentive mechanism to make sure that
56:41 it's, how do I say, sustained, right? You need to have sort of, it needs to be almost a public private kind of thing, right? If it's all private, then you end up with these war gardens, if
56:50 it's all public, nothing happens, right? So it needs to be the sort of beautiful marriage of the two. And I think that's certainly the way things are going, but it's moving at oil and gas speed.
56:58 So yeah.
57:02 Getting, getting faster by the decade. Yeah, as I say, like the name of the gay man is to just, just focus on someone making someone's life easier, be real cheap. and then just start
57:11 establishing trust. And then you can do some really cool stuff. But if you go in there, like guns blazing, blockchain, AI, everyone's like, either people sniff bullshit, right? Or they're
57:22 like, this is too much for me. I don't want to have anything to do with this. They tune you out immediately. Yeah. It's just noise. Yeah, and to that, and we've actually had some, with that
57:30 mentality, we've had some really good success working with operators that you were classes, late adopters, right? Because we're just going with something really basic, really affordable,
57:39 everyone's happy Yeah, it's been good. That's awesome. All right, well, we are - Right, time? Already at an hour or so. Sorry, yeah. This was a long one. No, that's how this is perfect.
57:51 This is where we get into the fun random questions. So at the end, we just pepper you with some kind of ridiculous random things, but
58:01 who is your favorite rugby team? Oh, that one's easy. Oh, actually, I'll say the old X, but the Canterbury Crusaders, there you go, the local New Zealand rugby team. Um, you have any books
58:13 that you, you know, really enjoyed or would recommend for anybody? Um, yeah, I've got a couple of good ones. I mean, zero to one is kind of a Bible, right? That one's fantastic. I love that
58:23 one. Um, but there was a, I forget the name of the author, but there's a book called team of rivals. It's an absolute marathon, but it's about, um, how Lincoln navigated his cabinet during the
58:36 civil war. Um, man, I bet that's wild It's really, really good, man. That's, um, it's dance. It's, it's the book that was based on that movie, Lincoln, right? But read the book because
58:46 it's completely different, but it's, um, that one's spectacular. But yeah, you're going to be in it for the long haul. Yeah. That's cool. Um, all right. I wrote this down because we were,
58:56 of course, we're talking blockchain. So outside of Bitcoin, do you have a, a fun or favorite speculative crypto? This is not advice. Yeah, this is not financial advice, just for fun. I have a
59:11 colleague who started a cryptocurrency called TAS Hub, which, yeah, we've thrown a bit of money into that one, that one's a lot of fun. He's exploring doing some pretty interesting stuff there,
59:18 but yeah, you won't find that on Coinbase, that's pretty speculative for sure. I love that the concept of the Helium network was pretty cool, I really like that. I almost bought a Helium miner,
59:30 and I'm really kind of glad I didn't. Yeah, I got one in my house, it paid itself off, but not by much Right, now that was generally the consensus, but it - Great concept, Brian. I mean, I
59:41 was thinking about that for the oil field, right, like think about all those SCADA systems, all those remote areas that are running off that - Yeah, it's all Laura went, like it's - Off that
59:50 frequency, it's not like it's introducing something new, it's just you're making money by hosting the infrastructure. Yeah, you know what, like if Smart Chain doesn't work out, I might actually
59:60 see if we can reignite some version of the Helium network, for oil and gas for those remote locations to leverage all the way. Well, it's just like, we have all these other consortiums where we
1:00:08 share shit. Why would we duplicate infrastructure or let a third party come in and monopolize it? Yeah, there's a lot of different antennas going out in Midland, right? Like trying to push out
1:00:18 the same network. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're giving me ideas. Okay. No, I love it. There's, it's pretty interesting. I've done a little bit of work in that space and it's just wild how much
1:00:30 duplication there truly is, right? Yeah, all right, we'll turn the microphone. Yeah, we'll be our closed door convo. Okay, so favorite vacation spot and just sounds like you're fairly well
1:00:43 traveled, but what's your favorite place that you've ever traveled to? Okay, cool. Well, I mean, I got to say my favorite vacation spot would be a place called Cook's Beach on the Carmanderland,
1:00:51 New Zealand. That's where my heart is. I absolutely love that. It's been a lot of time they're growing up. It's just a beautiful beach. Yeah, I go for that one. And then favorite place to visit
1:01:00 that I've gone to, That's not New Zealand Man, I love Berlin. I think Berlin's the coolest town. So I'd go there many times. I'd love to go back That's awesome. Have you been during October
1:01:12 first or anything? Well, yeah, but I don't know if that's Berlin But no, I haven't actually been for up there for October first and I don't know if I'm allowed to go there anymore
1:01:21 But I know I mean just the richness that cool thing about that town is you you're really in history You know what I mean? It's been around for a thousand years and everything's just so current. It's
1:01:31 a cool place Yes, it's also about it. Yeah, cool man. Well, where can where can people find you how they get in touch if they want to reach out? A base place to find me is on on LinkedIn. Just
1:01:39 switch camera in sync there. You'll find me there or Smart chain services calm. Yeah, awesome. Well, I really appreciate it man. Thank you very much Thanks for coming on everybody. We will see
1:01:48 y'all next time. Appreciate it