0:00 All right, well, welcome to another episode of Energy Bites. Super excited to be here. Bobby Nealon got the rad dad, John Calfan. How's it going? And super excited to have. And is it Matthias
0:09 or Matthias? I'm going to call him much worse. You can just I think I'm perhaps going to be Matthias. Matthias. OK, Matt is my starwatch name, if you. OK. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So you
0:18 can't go wrong with Matt. I'm a TT. MAT. Yeah. I'll get us it up already. And so
0:25 Matthias Carlson. That's perfect. Perfect. Yeah CEO of Whitson, the most, you know, famous RTA platform in the history of oil and gas. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Is he available for hire for
0:38 marketing as a matter of fact? Yeah. But we can, we can talk about it. We can talk about it as well. So I knew a new tagline there to change from affordable and cutting edge. But here we are.
0:48 It's, uh, no, thank you for inviting me. It's been, uh, it's been fun to watch how the podcast is growing and getting more and more, uh, uh, people and content on the pot Sure appreciate it
1:00 We're excited to have you. I think you're, is he our first Norwegian? I believe so. Yeah. I'm excited about that, too. Do you actually have like a map or something where you? We should. Yeah,
1:11 don't give me a test on it. Exactly which country is Norway, but. Well, if it's labeled, I'm good. It's over there. I guess I'm in Scandinavia. Yeah, every time I say that in the Uber, they
1:20 always ask me, that's that country and in Germany, right?
1:28 Could've been. Country in Germany, I don't think that's how it works It could've been about 80 years ago. Yeah, that was an ultra reactive point. Okay, yeah, anyways, it's, it's, I've been
1:40 here in Houston for seven, seven, eight years, working here and
1:45 kind of become more textileized than I think I thought and to begin with, I thought I was gonna move here and stay a couple of years and move back to Europe and then, you know, all your plans that
1:56 you have when you come to a new place You know, they just take two or three times more longer and you just get so much more respect for people who try to do stuff like yourself now and you know,
2:08 maybe a new role there, like building stuff from scratch. So that was kind of my story coming. Moving to Houston, thought it was gonna take a couple of years to be really successful and then, you
2:20 know, took way longer time than that and now I, you know, become very Estonianized, I'd say. You think you're gonna stay? Like, I feel like Houston has a weird way 'cause like, I was born here
2:32 and then 20 years later ended up back here and it's got this weird kind of gravity that pulls you back in and kind of like - Like it's oil and gas. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I mean, it's like very
2:43 high quality of life, convenient, of course, great for work and like the community, like that you guys are a part of as well as, you know, you don't find that anywhere else on the planet. I
2:53 think for me, if I was ever gonna move back, it would be kind of a family reasons more than anything else, Every time I go to Norway, it's like, oh, there's some things that I always miss in
3:01 Houston, like food, wise, culture. But when I'm there for too long, I start to miss like Houston stuff. So it's like, I'm in this weird. If there's a country in the middle of Houston in Norway,
3:11 I don't know, is that Canada? Not in the United States, Alberta. I shouldn't tell my Canadian colleagues that. I always give them a little bit of trash from Bing Canadian. As you should. Yeah,
3:20 as they should for sure. One of my colleagues, James Mcdonald, he's from a place called New Brunswick. And he introduces himself as a, I'm not a Canadian, I saw a new John Swicker. And I was
3:31 like, you can't say that three times. It's like a terrible, terrible song. So I always introduced him, and asked that when we were doing courses and traveling together, but always fun to make
3:42 fun of the Canadians. And Swedes, for that matter. So we can do that today if you wanna double down on anything. You probably know better how to insult a Swede than I do, but 100. Yeah, is that
3:55 like a pollock joke? Yeah, well, you know, James is actually like Canadian. He has a favorite saying that, you know, I like my Swedes best when they're dead. And I was like, that's a little
4:04 too far, James. So you can take lawyer jokes and make them in the Swede jokes? Yeah, exactly.
4:12 I don't know what it is. We were talking about lawyers before we got on too. Yeah, it's fine to work for a leading company, but you know, you have to remind him sometimes that he is actually
4:19 Canadian
4:22 and live near in Texas, but it's all good. And so let's talk about what Widson is. Yeah, Widson is a web-based software company, basically. So we try, the way I always try to explain it, if I
4:37 try to explain it to my parents, for instance, is like in the '90s, there was this huge platform shift in the industry going from mainframe and DOS to Windows. and all the first software tools
4:50 that was like developed in these different niches, whether it was like Petrelle, which was all the Petex tools, so it's like the Peloton suite, whether it was, you know, Kappa with well-testing
4:59 and stuff, like they became the industry standard because they were like the first movers in that, call it form factor or whatever. And then what we've seen is like, there's a similar shift going
5:10 on right now and you see with companies like Combo Curve or Olia Soft on the drilling side, et cetera, where there was these, you know, there's a platform shift right now kind of, you know, plus
5:20 minus five years from now where, you know, if you're the first mover in those niches, there's a very high chance if you do it right, that you will kind of win and maybe become the industry
5:30 standard for the next 20, 30 years. So that's kind of been our playbook a little bit, trying to find these niches where we can come in and create, we started with one product that's very shale
5:40 focused, then we started with the second one that's a more conventional product and we're just launching our third product now. kind of wits in pitch in a nutshell. So just trying to bring the
5:47 patrol and engineering software products to a modern web-based world. Yeah, that's 'cause funny,
5:57 you talk about some of those platforms you mentioned and some of them now are cloud. They have cloud options and you open it up and it looks like you're looking at Windows 95 but you're VPN into
6:07 another desktop. Or a C-Trix, I don't know if you've seen a screen share or something using C-Trix on there. I'm gonna show you my amazing software and just like takes 20 minutes to load a well So
6:17 it's a terrible experience for sure. But I think that you mentioned something that's interesting because people talk about those word cloud all the time. And they think that, okay, if you have a
6:27 desktop-based application that runs some calculations on the cloud, it's the same as cloud. Like, or that's why every time people talk to me and they mention the word cloud, I get a little annoyed
6:39 because I'm like, what we're actually the actual benefit been have could compute done the on - all if, Honestly piece cloud the not is
6:48 the local computer, it would still be great, honestly. But the big differentiator is that you're actually running it on the web. And on the web, if there's a bug fix, if you're in new releases,
7:00 I can push new code every single day, multiple times a day. Yeah, the updates, it's not like you have to go download the most recent update and it's this huge IT. And IT needs to be involved.
7:10 And every time, there's a lot of great IT guys out there in oil and gas, but it's a whole process If you have to then install on 150, 200, 300 computers, this new version of something, just to
7:21 fix one bug, you would never do it. So that's why we, you know, a lot of the competitor tools that we deal with that's on desktop. You know, the companies are working on a two, three,
7:29 sometimes four-year-old version of the product. Yeah, because it's not worth their time to change everything. To update it, because it's so much pain. And then, you know, they have to do the
7:38 database, the migrations themselves, et cetera. So, you know, those are things that, if you have a cloud-based, you know, form factor, or like a web-based form factor like we do. everything
7:47 when it comes to their database upgrades. We host their data, we do all the compute, all these things. So I think that's just a competitive advantage in itself to be on the web for that purpose.
7:58 And also, you guys as in throughout your work is also the other partners when it comes to sharing the data. But it's much nicer to be able to just share a web link than sending you megabytes and
8:10 megabytes of files, which is also the, that's the way a lot of these desktop based tools are very file driven, which, yeah, so big benefits of that. Like he said, even like, I think you got a
8:22 really good point because when people say cloud, then it's like, well, are you actually utilizing it or are you realizing the benefit? I mean, so like, you know, name names, but we had an ERP
8:31 at Grayson Mill, that was cloud, which was basically they took a lift and shift of all their things and put SQL Server and everything in AWS and probably paid way too much for it, they would have
8:40 been better off self-hosting, probably. Yeah. But the biggest problem that they actually had a cloud or on-prem problem, it was that they had, we were on one code branch, and then this other
8:51 company was on their own code branch. And like, so we were like, well, why doesn't this table have primary keys? And they're like, well, you don't, but this branch, you know, that these
9:00 people have, that's a step ahead of you, they have primary keys on it. So maybe we can migrate you to that, but then it was just, is that gonna break your - And it's terrible. And it's what I
9:09 call the spot fire problem. So like many companies coming to me, and you know, friends in the industry that has either companies or they're pitching me ideas like companies are gonna build, and
9:19 they're gonna build it on top of spot fire. And the exact same thing happens there where every single company has a different version of spot fire. So if,
9:28 you know, you can't build a scalable solution that's gonna be used by hundreds and hundreds of operators if every single operator has a different version of your tool. It's just not gonna work. And
9:37 we actually have one client in the Middle East that we run stuff on prem so we actually install it on the compute locally and every update. it needs to be done every quarter or whatever, when we get
9:49 their IT on the phone to do the update. And that's just the way they do business over the last few weeks. Because of the sovereignty stuff. Yeah, and it's like, but we see the huge differences in
9:60 terms of like the benefit for the user. One thing is like, gay, them being able to access the newest bug fixes and features and all this stuff. But all the things, it's like the support piece
10:12 because okay, if you run something on prem, you can't send a link to someone that does support and they can come and help you on a quick team's call. It just becomes like, oh, I need to set up a
10:22 meeting. I need to share my screen. Or do they need access to the VPN? Yeah, so it just adds upon all these steps, which we've been probably very lucky with our timing that we were like, or
10:33 maybe lucky on slash good, a little bit that we realized how lucky we were and we just doubled down on like, okay, this is the form factor.
10:43 you know, if you're a desktop tool in oil and gas now, and you're not going, going on the web, you're going to be outcompeted by some company that's going on the web, as at least kind of my take.
10:54 And that's the playbook we are kind of, so we are trying to isolate products that are, you know, ripe for disruption and then trying to, to create product teams around those products and just
10:60 modernize it, basically. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to see the shift, right?
11:09 Like Houston has all these ridiculous HPC data centers that were built 30 years ago, 20 years ago. And now because everyone was running everything and on-prem or they needed scalable compute for
11:24 certain reservoir models or different calculations or different workflows and stuff. And now it's like, because we had that infrastructure, they're all kind of stuck in it and at least the software
11:36 is generally or stuck in it when moving to the cloud, you look at like combo curve, right? a lot of the power of combo curve came from the fact that they could spin up compute very quickly without
11:47 having to deal with going and actually owning any of the compute, right? Like serverless functions are really nice in that aspect. And so just the compute piece is such a big thing 'cause there are,
11:57 like, I worked for a base in modeling company for like six months. And I mean, they would literally, for like, I don't even know what version of patrol it was at that time, but like for some of
12:08 these patrol models, they were limited to how many cores they could run on. And so like, our software had unlimited cores. And so, but it would take these patrol models weeks of running to finish.
12:20 And then it's like, oh, well, shit, this thing was wrong. It was wrong at all. Yeah, or it, yeah, had an error in the middle of it. And it had to run all the way through it. And then
12:28 they've got to go back and redo it. And it's like, that's insane. When you think about the power that the cloud has from just the compute horsepower piece of like, Oh, well, I need a bunch of
12:35 CPUs right now.
12:41 use it and then spin them right back down. And now you've got your answer. And so I kind of pivoting because I do think this is something that some people know, but a lot of people don't until they
12:52 work internationally. How is, how is dealing with the data sovereignty thing been from a software perspective? Because that's - That's a vendor. Most, yeah. Interesting. Most software companies
13:05 don't, especially if they're coming in outside of the industry, trying to get into oil and gas They, you know, the typical MO is I'm gonna go after a super major or an IOC because they have all
13:15 the money. And if, once I can get in with air, I'll get in with everybody else. But it's like, that ends up being a three-year journey of SOC 2 audits and all of this stuff. No carrots, a line
13:25 of way. Right. So, you know, so I'm in the, you know, we learn it the hard way that, you know, if you can get a little decent business from like a small operator that's never heard about in
13:34 Oklahoma or Denver or something, then you know you're onto something and you can cater for those guys That's the least been our model. and you kind of get product market fit with those guys, you
13:44 will eventually get up into the big boys, and when you get to the big boys, you'll then have kind of a company and an infrastructure around it that makes it easier a little bit. But just before
13:53 answering your question, just your comment on kind of, you know, on-prem compute versus cloud compute, is actually very interesting, because I don't think that it makes sense to move everything,
14:04 especially like seismic data and stuff, and processing on the cloud, because some people, you know, of course, AWS and GCP and all these guys would love that, but I think there's probably, you
14:15 know, every time there's like, you know, a real swing, like when the pendulum swings in one direction, you see that with everything, with politics or anything, it's like it overcorrects the
14:25 other way. And I think there's probably gonna be this, this maybe niche space where you can kind of provide cloud-based compute for people where you basically just like, you just buy the hardware,
14:36 and you just power this thing with electricity. And you can connect it to all snowflake and all these other things you can do also web-based tools, but it's actually, you're just paying for the
14:47 electricity and for maybe some basic maintenance or something on in your office, because some of the bills that I'm seeing, the AWS GCP and stuff charging some of these operators, I'm like, that
14:60 compute, you can go to like Best Buy and buy this for like 2, 000 bucks and it can run all the time So there's like this trade off a little bit where some of the other processes that I think we are
15:13 involved with are not very compute-intensive. So
15:19 like, if I compared our compute and everything that goes into like hosting our solution, it's like 1 of our revenue goes to that, including GCP, that like Auth0, like everything that's really
15:34 required to stand up the solution for all our clients. which I think is very different from a seismic company where it's like terabytes and terabytes of data and it probably would bankrupt even the
15:47 biggest company. So if you had to move that, don't AWS. But anyways, back to your Middle East, like how, I was very naive. Luckily in the beginning, we had some traction in the US, but you
15:58 know this period before product market fit, you were kind of desperate to try to find. And I thought, it's young, I had like surfer here down here I thought I'd go into the Middle East, landing
16:09 some deals, you know, totally naive guy. So there was an
16:14 IPTC just before COVID happened that was in Saudi Arabia and Iran. So that was the first time I went to Saudi, I was like, here I need to submit papers and I need to like do the whole nine yards.
16:25 I did that, I actually got in contact with a couple of Aramco guys that worked in unconventional basin there. And that started kind of our journey with the unconventional part of Aramco. And then
16:36 the founder of Wesson Curtis Wesson has also had like very, you know, multi-decade long relationship with like a company like Aramco, which has been very, very nice to tap into. Of course, a
16:47 very big and professional organization, but they have, you know, they have their technical requirements of like, okay, the computer needs to be inside of the kingdom. It needs to be done on
16:56 certain like technology stacks. And to do that, you can't, you know, that can't be your first rodeo because then you're back to the three, four year thing. And also like when you're young and
17:07 you want to innovate, you don't want to spend time on SOC and ISO and all these things you want to innovate, which is another funny thing of how we, we actually just are doing our SOC 2 now. And
17:19 we've been like selling for five years. So we've been able to get through that without timing to do the whole SOC 2 thing and just being very, you know, very good at documenting our processes and
17:29 whatnot So that's another thing that you've got. you can't get around that if you work in the Middle East and overseas versus the US, yeah. You have any advice for people in the software space that
17:42 might be looking to get into
17:46 the international markets around like here's just a heads up on the things that these IOCs kind of require from a data or software perspective? Yeah, no, that's a general perspective. I remember
17:60 my first trip down there, I was like, you were bust from the hotel to the conference, it was another Norwegian guy who worked for a kind of tools company and he told me with like English American
18:10 or English Norwegian accent that here, you need to know the three piece. And that was like presence, persistence, and I think persistence, and patience. Like, so it was like, okay, you need
18:23 to be close to where the client is, you need to never give up, but you also need to be very patient.
18:32 And it makes a little sense like here in North America, it's a lot of shale development. You can talk to an engineer and he's like, I have 26 wells coming online this quarter. And over there,
18:41 there's also offshore too, like the planning site, so just way longer. You might be working on something that comes online in 2026. So maybe there are no rush. So on a general note, there'll be
18:53 those three piece. But from an IT perspective, don't underestimate it and definitely not make it your first market And I think for a lot of companies, when they grow up, they get opportunities to
19:06 work with also bigger organizations, either organically or inorganically, to get distribution through a landmark or a slumbege or something like that, to not that we did that. But at some scale,
19:18 that would start to make sense.
19:22 I think an IT process there to get everything up and rolling, at least our experience has in probably like 12 months to 18 months to. to get it rolling, and as far as I know, of all my friends
19:33 that are trying to do it similarly, they're still waiting to kind of get it on it. I was gonna say that's pretty quick, in all honesty. Yeah, I think honestly, it was a little quick, and we
19:45 probably were a
19:48 little lucky as well, just in terms of like, you know, priorities and managers and staff. But, you know, if that's your good case, then you can imagine how it is for everybody. Well, I think
19:59 it, another side of that too, is like how you design your software in the back end. Like, 'cause if you make it very tightly coupled with say GCP or AWS, like John said like, some of these
20:09 Lambdows or Cloud Functions are great, but then like they're not super portable necessarily if you wanna maybe do some things say within the kingdom, or if you wanna do an on-prem deployment, if
20:18 someone required that. So I mean, like, can you speak to that a little bit? I mean, do you guys utilize like a lot of like the cloud, like serverless type stuff, or using a lot of like kind of
20:27 containerized things the back end that makes it easy to. switch between cloud vendors andor, you know, different environments. Yeah, that's been, so we were a GCP shop and that was like, we
20:38 have a very good friend of mine on our CTO, Marcus, Marcus Blitt on the software side. He is also, even though he grew up in like one of the wealthiest streets in Norway, he's the most frugal guy
20:49 I've ever met in my whole life. So he is, you know, every penny that goes through the cloud compute door, he like, you know, flips it and flips it around again So we've been very intentional,
20:59 kind of saying that like a lot of the custom stuff that's very cloud specific. Well, if you start to get addicted to that, then you get like this locking factor, then probably, you know, you
21:09 understand it from their business model perspective, but from us, those times where there's been something where we think, okay, you know, we're nice to maybe use something out of the box, or
21:19 should we just maybe build something here or do it differently? We've always done it either differently or build something, ourselves with a very lean team, so I'm sure everybody can kind of. kind
21:30 of do that, so that would be in like a little, I don't know if it's the right way to do it, but at least that's how we've been able to keep the cloud costs so low, because when I talk to some of
21:40 the other SaaS providers in the space, and I say, we have 130
21:47 operators using the tool, and we have like thousands and thousands of users, active users logging in every week, and our total cloud cost with also Auth0, SOC, et cetera, is less than100, 000 a
22:01 year. People, and that's like, oh, you're playing like 20 X of that. Yeah, so I don't know. So I mean, I have an ad, like, yeah, of course, I don't like to waste money, but that's just
22:12 been the architecture of like Marcus and the team on the software side. I think it's important to highlight that because, like when you're starting out, you've got these services and it's like, oh,
22:22 well, I could write that, or I could just let Lambda functions do it, or I could let, you know, Azure.
22:31 this Azure service or this GCP service do it, and then I don't have to write it. But it's like, to me, any of these services end up being tech debt in the long-term, because at some point,
22:42 you'll run into somebody who either doesn't want to work on that platform or it's all got to be on-prem. So we can't use this proprietary service. It has to be some kind of open source version. And
22:54 so it's, yeah, it's just such a double-edged sword when you're building at least early on the startup side, because it's like, of course, you don't have the resources to maintain and manage this
23:03 stuff. But at some point, you need to at least keep the architecture piece in the back of your head so that like, hey, this is what we're going to work towards, so that when that does happen,
23:12 we're not nuking everything and rebuilding it over a 12-month period. No, for sure. And the funny thing there, which I think was good from our timing perspective, is like, if you go back 10
23:22 years and you mentioned over the cloud or web that people were like, oh, my lord, that's like, I'm never going to touch that But then, you know, COVID had probably got like. accelerated. But
23:31 since we started thinking about it like early there, we were like, because there was a lot of companies we would talk to. And it was fine to do it on the cloud, but it had to be Azure or it had to
23:40 be AWS, it had to be GCP. So we were like, ah, you know, that's going to happen. So it would be nice like if we try to design around that. And then, you know, since COVID happened, and then,
23:49 you know, a couple of cycles go and they become like, actually, it's fine if you just sell folks everything, you know, like, we don't care what you use for compute unless we need to, because I
23:58 think the oil companies are realized, oh, if we need to host it on our Asher, then we are paying the cloud cost, and we are, you know, so our pricing doesn't, like, scale with how much you
24:07 compute or anything like that, either. So, yeah, anyway, it's funny, though, too, because, like, some people would say, well, I'm gonna design my app on Azure, because all my customers
24:16 use it, like, at the end of the day, who cares? Like, because they're just gonna log into it and use it. So if you use AWS better, use AWS, or if you're better with GCP, use that as long as
24:26 you're securing it the right way, and your app works you know, as, you know, as we're done or resilient and is always on, then who cares? Like, yeah, no, exactly. And, you know, I don't
24:37 even know how we ended up on GCP, but, you know, we were thinking, okay, these are tree equally good, probably choices. And we probably just happened out of random. I mean, I know a lot. I
24:46 mean, a lot of developers love like GCP, like it's just very easy to develop on. It's easy to get started on. Yeah. Yeah. That was probably the reason maybe that we started back in the days.
24:56 Like our CTO is a physicist by background So we kind of made him into a really rock star developer. But, you know, we all were petroleum engineers and what not without any coding skills. And now
25:09 we have more coders than petroleum engineers. So, you know, kind of got back at you. But for sure. So I think there's definitely a couple of things I want to hit on. I think I want to hit on
25:19 maybe the use cases and your products first. And then maybe I would do want to give you like some of the data integration side that you guys do as well because I think you're kind of on the forefront
25:28 of some of that as well. You mentioned all two or three products, you kind of separate product lines that you have now. Can you get into what each of those is? Yeah, no for sure. So we have like
25:37 our biggest product is a product called Whits and Plus. And it's a web-based all-in-one petroleum engineering platform, which that means is like if you worked as a petroleum engineer and know
25:50 someone, you know a petroleum engineer, they have one tool that does their PBT, they have one tool that does their bottom of pressures, one that does their declines, one that does their RTA, one
25:58 that does their bottom of pressure calculations, one that does their well tests, and like they have so many tools. So where this idea came from is we did a project, my first thing in oil and gas
26:08 with our CEO, Mo, and Curtis, the founder of Whitson, and we were like, okay, to do this project, we had to have six, seven different licenses from different companies. All in, you know,
26:18 coming in dungals, you know, everything does stuff. Yeah, these dungals, yeah. And we were like, okay, first of all, this is like a ridiculous cost. Like nobody can afford this. you know,
26:27 paid for all the licenses, they were like, moved to100, 000 for like one user. And none of these things were like seamless. So like, okay, it must be, at least, you know, make an only one
26:37 solution for this. And that's what Witsim Plus is. It's like, all, everything is relevant for a petroleum engineer. Primarily onshore shale right now has been our main focus, but we're extending
26:48 the feature set to be also relevant for commercials. You know, we would like Witsim Plus to be the super app for that So, yeah, and for
26:56 a lot of people that's been in that space, like, you know, kind of a main competitor of us would typically be like a product like SP, Global's Harmony product. Harmony, okay. Yeah, so a
27:11 lot of the users that do that kind of RTA, decline curve work, fundamental pressures, you know, typically those are the two tools. Or that's like the incumbent that we were like, competing with,
27:22 trying to like identify a niche. And now we're, you know, competing with notal products and well-tested products and like it's getting broader over time, of course. And then we have a second
27:30 product called with some PBT that we launched 18 months ago, or we didn't launch it. We started to develop it. And our idea there was like, okay, we did this thing very successfully with with
27:41 some plus. So like at least for us, like where we took a niche and we identified it was like an incumbent there. And could we come in and try to displace it? So we wanted to see, can we like kind
27:50 of develop a playbook where we could do this with other call it, you know, niches in the space. And, you know, a lot of people always ask us, why do we start like RTA into client curves?
28:02 Because Curtis Witson is like, he wrote the SBE monograph on PBT. It's like, why don't you guys have a PBT software? It doesn't make any sense. And that space has very similar dynamics as to kind
28:14 of the Witson Plus market, or the market that Witson Plus operates in, where there was like one very, very very strong player that had like most of the market. and that is on desktop and it's been
28:24 around for a very long time. And people kind of complain about, you know, prices and whatnot too. And that would be like a direct competitor to, to, to, to, like a PBT SIM product. And
28:34 there's multiple, multiple other products in that, in that space. So that's been fun. It's like 18 months. Every time you do something for the second time, you know, you, you remove a lot of
28:44 mistakes and you're able to, to kind of get there faster So already 15, 16 clients already signed up to that product. So that's been fun to see how we can go like shorter from like inception of
28:58 coding and like getting a team around an excitement and go to market. And now, you know, we haven't really launched it yet. Maybe it's like now we're launching it. I don't know. But
29:08 we, we hired a gentleman from a patch called Braden Bowie, a brilliant mind in like our space, very known in the RTA space, actually, to lead our third product.
29:20 that we're starting to develop, actually start developing it in the past few weeks. And that's more of a product dealing with well-spacing and depletion. And so that will, the short, long story
29:33 short there is that it's going to be like a development, call it engine. So how many wells per section, what should the completion assign be? How much profit and fluid should you pump in the
29:44 well-bores and tie that to economics? So should you have all of that in one tool? Because that problem statement cannot be solved with the reservoir simulation too slow. You can't do it without the
29:54 economics piece. And you also need to have a product owner that wakes up every single day. I'm going to build this. This is my baby. And if someone says anything bad about this product, it's
30:05 going to hurt my feelings. So I need to work harder this weekend to fix it. And that's what we found in Braden and also the team around there. So that's going to be very exciting to see if we could
30:14 move it out Can we move it even, you know, can we get to 15 clients even? sooner than 18 months, and do we find product market fit too? Because I don't know you guys, but when you don't have
30:25 product market fit, it's like you want to kill yourself.
30:29 It's terrible. And then you find it, and you say, Oh, I'm a genius. I'm a genius. So this is great, but it's something in between where you have to iterate until you find it. And once you find
30:40 it, you should drop everything else and just go 200 to double down on what you're building that people like, I guess. Yeah, no, that'd be cool. I mean, I think I was probably when I was at
30:51 Grayson, no, when I first started to realize, because I think until then, when I worked at Conoco, I've worked, a lot of my work as a reservoir tech was actually kind of on the frack hit and
30:59 spacing, kind of things where I was identifying frack hits and capturing a lot of that. And then at Reservoir Data Systems, where John and I worked together, we were capturing a lot of the
31:09 high resolution pressure data for offset frack and defects and everything. But again, everything was very more like the physical engineering or like. a reservoir engineering, but not focus on the
31:20 economic side of it. But then, you know, then you start to realize that spacing
31:26 is, it is a, you know, physical engineering problem, but it is also economic engineering, right? It's like, when all of a sudden prices go to 200 bucks a barrel, let's pack those puppies in
31:35 and go to town. Yeah. Um, but, you know, but then like some people might space them out a lot further when they're 60, 50 environment, but then you have to pay for that later on, you know,
31:45 for a, um, you know, the overall payout or recovery of that acreage. So yeah, I'm no for sure. And that's the, you know, and there's so many complicated dynamics there. You can't do it single
31:57 well either because like, okay, if you deplete, uh, it draw down a well, it's super hard. And okay, that becomes a precious, precious thing. So if there's like, actually fractures connected,
32:05 uh, you know, those offset wells will basically lose some of their production. And that's what we saw in the Eagleford, you know, because, you know, conoco and a private bunch of other ones
32:13 drilled single well units to capture acreage so you had to do that. maybe the land side, but now when they were coming back in to drill 3, 4, 5, whatever well pads, like that's what exactly what
32:24 they saw. I mean, we talk a lot about what was the
32:29 kind of the rock star engineer there. The thing where they were talking about the fracks bleeding over. Oh, that was the first paper I saw. And that was Dave Kramer talking about talking about
32:39 that and like the Barnett. Yeah. And that was like shit. That was as when he started getting the plus, you know, a lot of the refracts, like kind of the defensive refracts, you know, so that
32:48 you pressure up the zone and it improves the, you know, other wells, but even people start to pump into parent, just pumping water into the parent well, just to pressure it up. Yeah, no, for
32:59 sure. And it's, yeah. So there's a lot of those dynamics that I think from the, you know, it's the problem on everybody's mind, obviously, like, especially going forward, most of the place
33:08 have kind of been identified. Of course, there's some new like you have like the Cherokee play up in Oklahoma. You I have like, you know, the Persil. down there in Texas, maybe like Midland
33:17 Barnette and you went done some of these - Western Hanesville? Western Hanesville, like you have some of the oilier part of the Utica, it's been kind of buzzing. But like, so you have some of
33:25 those new plays, but at the same time, like most of the work we're gonna do the next 20, 30 years is gonna be, you know, infilled drilling, it's gonna be leases where we already, you know, we
33:34 know there's oil air, just like, how can we get this optimally out, where, you know, many times there is a lot of depletion, and maybe there will be cases where we've done a full development,
33:43 and then in 20 years we're like, okay, we actually want to try these zones, you know, two, three wells above there. It's going to be a very interesting period, but I feel, at least I haven't
33:52 been convinced to like, okay, there's a tool out there that are like in a very quick, fast way where like that's engineering sound and linked to economics that you can answer those questions
34:03 quickly. And RTA is not the answer, PBT is definitely not the answer, because it doesn't have a lot of that data, full physics, rest of our simulation that we have and that was in bus software,
34:12 for even multi-wall is not the answer. The models are just way too slow and you need to run a ridiculous amount of permutations to be able to capture all the different things you would like to study.
34:24 And then you get into like economic sensitivities in that whole line yard. So it's going to be exciting. And of course, we like a little new frontier for us too, but it's going to be a fun problem
34:34 to try to address here. And it's been a little bothering for me for many years because it's like as a reservoir engineer by background, you kind of want to, of course, simulation, you should go
34:46 and simulate this. And then you realize, ah, OK, it's a tool in a toolbox, but it's not the answer to everything. Yeah, well, to your point too.
34:55 And I don't know if it's because I'm a mechanical engineer and not a petroleum engineer or what. But like, it has always driven me nuts that for the last 15 years that I've been in the industry,
35:07 everyone looks at it on a well-by-well basis. And it's like, that is part of a system. like they're not isolated, they're not independent nodes that don't have any interaction with anything else
35:18 that's happening. And it's like, and we've seen those for at least the last decade, probably longer. And yet we still treat them like that. It's like all the software is based off individual
35:27 wells or the, even all the way down to the individual engineers incentives, right? Like completion engineers, most of them are incentivized on how far under AFE can you get and how many wells can
35:37 you bring online? It's that directly conflicts with what a reservoir engineer is trying to do Exactly, exactly. So like, and they're on the same team? Yeah. And so it's like, what are we doing?
35:48 It's so funny. And it's like, you know, you would develop a software like with some plus and it has all these fancy math and like the numerical simulators and stuff. And you realize, oh, a lot
35:57 of these engineers, they love the aggregation function and the comparison plot, okay? They just want to like add wells together and look at the whole pad or the whole system together the lease or
36:05 the DSC or whatever you want to call it for that reason. And it's just such an important point Yeah, you see all the EOR things and all the IOR things where they just like look at a well pre and
36:17 post and there are no context. So what's gone on with the offset walls here? Were they producing or were they shut in at the same time or were they even shut in when you brought it back online?
36:27 It's like a lot of questions that you probably should study as a system for sure. Yeah. But anyways, this, I don't know if you guys have done a lot of rest of the simulation, but like coming out
36:37 of school at least as a, are you a resident general? No, I'm a math degree background Okay, so you were really smart and you were a real engineer and not a petroleum engineer like myself, but you
36:46 know, you go to school, right? You know, a little naive, thinking everything you learn in school, you're gonna apply. So I, you know, I
36:54 was, so Curtis Witsen, the founder of Witsen, he introduced me very early to a guy called Parker Reese. He's the founder of Emeridiv. They, and got back to the company. And they had just like,
37:04 I met him for the first time for a pizza with his management team up in Oklahoma City. And I was like, yeah, you know, straight out of school and I was like. Yeah, guys, you know, are you
37:12 doing some simulation? And they're like, they looked at me
37:16 all the way up. What was this guy talking about? Like, we got one well online and we packed it together with some pipeline and we proved off some so-and-so stuff. And, you know, we sold it. And,
37:24 you know, if we did anything, it was DCA. And it's, you know, funny. Like all the things you learn in school that come into the real life. And,
37:33 you know, sometimes it's a very different tool that you apply and becomes the most efficient thing to it. Yeah, even like the parent well stuff, right? Like talking about like so many of the
37:42 first wells on a pad were HBP wells. They were just there to hold the lease. And then, but no one gave any thought about like, oh, we're going to come back at some point and put four to six or
37:54 eight more wells on this pad. I'm a super stoked person. Like how fast are these right back? And so it's like, it's just so much of these little things where it's like, you know, and I, I'm
38:05 part of it. So I'm partly talking about myself, but it's one of those things where it's just like not think far enough ahead to think about like, yeah, if there's going to be one while there,
38:16 there's probably going to be more than one at some point in the future. And therefore, we should think about these things, but no one ever did. Yeah, I mean, this is directly related to Whitson
38:27 and it's no shade at Whitson, but like, you know, Grayson Mill got bought by Devon. And so as you know, Devon's kind of got this three-headed monster, like on some of this, you know, with like
38:37 DCA, there's kind of a couple, where there's some overlap over some of these tools. But, you know, we had tried and true areas at Grayson Mill and our restaurant owners loved areas, you know,
38:47 because it looks so nice.
38:50 But,
38:53 but they were pushing for it. And like, I was trying to talk to one of the managers there, and he's like, well, what do they use for RTA? I was like, we didn't do RTA. Yeah, but you're the
39:04 company who bought us for5 billion. You know, but I mean, it's just like, it's is my matters to that company at the time. I mean, there's enough of it's proven out enough. It's like, do you
39:14 need to do that in certain parts of this or not, you know, like, or is it just a science experiment or is it, you know, where's the real value? And it's like, no, for sure. And that's why I
39:24 like, I think in the beginning, we kind of branded with some pluses, like an RTA package. And then, you know, I, you know, actually before that, we only had one feature, did PBT, and I was
39:32 like, this is not a big space. So we added on functionality where, you know, now I think the modern users are looking at the holistic offering, where, okay, you know, bottom of pressure, you
39:42 need for a lot of things. You can do declines, type walls, auto forecasts, nodal analysis, gasses optimization, things that's not only RTA based, because there are situations where like RTA is
39:53 great, it's a great tool, but it's, it's not, you know, like you, or maybe thought it's a ton in school that is the answer to everything. Or you believe it's like, what do you say, like, if
40:03 you're a carpenter, you don't have a hammer, everything is a nail or something. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of the same thing that you just have learned a hard way, and we were the first one to
40:13 kind of
40:16 let people know where the good uses for something like RTIS or where there's no whatever, and it's probably another tool here that you should use instead, whether that's a software product or just a
40:28 different type of technology. And people, I think, appreciate that, honestly. Yeah. I mean, I think when I joined Conoco Phillips, I think there was a similar deal earlier on in the shale side
40:40 of it. But by the time I got there, they were already using more statistical type wells or type curves. But I think early on, they were sending it off and they had the technology center that they
40:50 have these super smart PhD folks and they were probably doing all their RTA and this and that and coming up with simulations and this is the type one that didn't match production at all. And then it
40:59 was like, in that grant, they had to get enough production probably to generate these sort of type errors But it was like, well, now if we just do the P50. Yeah, I should be good. And yeah, I
41:11 know it's like Conoco Phillips Office though. Amazing company with a lot of rich history with Fedkovich and all in the rest of our engineering space and
41:20 you see that all the time with time. I don't know when you were there. It was like 10, 2014 when I started. Yeah, okay, yeah. And that was a super engineering time too. It's probably before
41:28 the Kevin Rademan papers from Conoco Phillips to where they like quart up the evil for it and actually, okay, the stuff is way more complicated than any other spot. It's about the time because we
41:37 got to see some of the chords and they had the horizontal chords and it was pretty interesting. Yeah. I wish more people would do and then publish that stuff because it is incredibly fascinating to
41:47 me. It was like, I've just coined it to the30 million paper and
41:52 I think it was Kevin and Helen Farrell, that was the one that was co-authors on the main paper. And I think Helen, she was like characterizing the whole echo-fisk field in Addison and Norway, like
42:02 one of the biggest fields in the North Sea. So I kind of can guarantee that she knows looks like and like you count all these fractures and it's just way more fractures than perforation clusters is
42:12 like oh this it's a different different mental model than what I what I thought to begin with which again it's like back to you know the way we think about the subsurface whether it's simulation or
42:22 frack models or whatever you know you know models is is it's a model at the end of the day and it can be very useful but it's probably not a realistic representation of they're all wrong but some are
42:33 useful exactly that's heard up before yeah I know I might be this spot but y'all bring up it's a valid point though because like Conoco's MO is different than I'm a private equity back company that
42:47 just got funded and I just bought my acreage and I'm going to drill my first well yeah like their MO is very different it's a don't f this yeah and keep the money coming make it good strong well we
42:60 don't have to spend a bunch on RD and science, we just have to hit a single. get on base land as puppies in zone and yeah now exactly oh it's uh it's beautiful while it's somewhat bigger like onacle
43:11 but like oh we have so much acreage and like we need you know 30 million bucks in the in the grand scale of things nothing for for us to like invest in the science piece and and they were very
43:20 generous I think with the whole community there where yeah you know I think the rest of the crew they they did these consortiums where they kind of you know one or two million bucks each and they got
43:28 some data they've done it I think in both the midland out we're based on I think maybe in the Bakken 2 and and very similar results there so that's been it's been fun to to look at so on let's get
43:39 into like more of the data integration like between say Witson and the operators side yep so I mean I've had the honestly the pleasure in that's not usually the case with like APIs and stuff
43:49 especially on gas I've got an interacting with Witson at a couple stops now recently probably the last six months but you guys have obviously you have a REST API that people can interact with and they
43:60 can push and pull data. You know, from, from with, but I think what sets you apart and I've always wondered why people don't do this or it's something I would like to maybe get into as a
44:07 consultant is working with the software vendors of like, you guys have Python scripts that are pre-written to help people get started with how to, like, you know, I think both times what I've
44:18 interacted, it's been, how do I get data out of Aries and into Whitson and like you have like a starting point. And then it's just like, I need to tweak these fields because they're different in
44:26 my areas versus the one that you were pulling it from, but it works So you don't have to rewrite Python script or whatever to interact with the API. Like the API script we had at RDS. Oh yeah,
44:39 we had, when we were working together, we deployed a API so our users could dump their PTA or fragment interference, whatever data. And we just thought having an API would be like a great way to
44:51 do that. And so we roll it out to the first couple clients and none of them understand how it works or how it's structured. And I'm like, okay, here's my script. Yeah, just use this and it's
45:03 just to answer that quickly like we we support like out of the box You know, of course, we have a generalized API with Python abstraction on top Which is very you know user friendly if you're like
45:14 even an oil and gas Person that just done a little bit of Python or now with why becoding you you can you know do way more stuff than what we even provide Out of the box, but so that that's their
45:25 direct snowflake connections direct Databricks connections We have direct like prodman connections as well and a few like niche products on the production side But you know, I know that's in addition
45:38 to like a direct like sequel connection to and I think there is just like your job as a As a software providing oil and gas like all the companies will have a different system And you need to be the
45:49 company that has and supports every single interface Yeah, because if people are not putting their data into your software the software is useless. Yeah, and I think Yeah, there was a, there was
45:58 a, one of a very good. friend and also kind of an industry colleague friend at Devon actually, Sarah Leems, she is amazing. She
46:07 attended a conference where she did kind of a roundtable or fireside chat or whatever. And she was hammering on this point that engineers used the tools that are data ISN. So like, you know, you
46:21 like either us or like the IT group internally to make sure that the data comes in, it's updated every day, you know, calculations are made every day and you just open it and it works. That tool,
46:30 the engineers will use you need to make sure you're that tool, because these companies, some will be on Databricks, some will be on Snowflake, some will be, you know, you'll have to log in
46:38 through a virtual machine and actually, you know, write the script for them and put it on a Windows task scheduler. So that's kind of like the spectrum, what you need to need to address. And
46:49 that's been our approach, like we need to support all interfaces in the front end, you need to be able to drag and drop, you know, all the standard files from all the different vendors, and you
46:57 you need to be able to out the most. flexible way to get data in on the on the back end or pull data database or data back. And now that's just like a never-ending Job, and I'm sure you guys can
47:08 appreciate that from your I didn't know you guys were actually at door DS before but like you guys had API's and stuff there too as well. Yeah, well, we we built a new in the avid interface forever
47:18 and then with that, you know, APIs were becoming a thing and like well, let's offer an API to it. Yeah, no, that's amazing. And I was like you know, it's one of those things that just like
47:29 makes all these tools talk together. And now, as you know, the more and more, I talked like executives in these different companies, we work with the latest is like, okay, you know, let's say
47:37 even they were excited about the new product, we launched what's next. But we would told this tool for some reason, we want to do on desktop. It will be like, yeah, that's a no go for us. Like,
47:47 we don't talk with vendors. That comes in that is not on the web. And there's more and more of those discussions and it comes back to, you know, these tools are just much easier to integrate.
47:59 with any system and, you know, it's not the we are brilliant or anything. Like a lot of the stuff comes out of the box. Like you put up a swagger page, you, you make a external facing API and
48:09 you write some, some abstraction on top of it to make it easy for people if they want to use Python. But that's about what we've, what we've done. I mean, even like with Postgres, I'm pretty
48:18 sure there's like a,
48:20 or Postgres rest or, you know, PG rest or whatever, like package that basically takes every table and turns it into an API endpoint. Like there's, there's ways to do that now And now, like I
48:28 said, with vibe coding, it's like, here's my database schema. Greater S API or GraphQL interface or whatever it is. Yeah, exactly. And it's not to over trivialize it. No, but it's getting to
48:39 that point. Like, you know, it's getting to that point and it's, it's very, very powerful. But back again, like, you know, think about how you were integrating with like, or talking to
48:49 desktop based tools, and especially a lot of the, a lot of the incumbents, honestly, and the monopolies in the space. I'm not gonna mention what names there are, but you guys can guess, like,
49:00 we all know their names. They're extremely, like, they're like the apple of the, they want to keep everything in their ecosystem and you need to pay for an additional button. If you want to
49:10 integrate with them, that's a different thing. And that's not a slick API. That's like a Frankenstein. Yeah. Well, that's just getting the data. I'm still dealing with some couple of my
49:18 customers. I mean, one of them,
49:20 again, won't name names, but most people can figure it out Like, one of these reserve tools, at least, has a pretty good SQL Server interface. The other one is still mainly running off access.
49:33 And it's like, their big move is that they're gonna be offering or they offer a SQL option? A SQL Server option. You know, like. That's pretty big. 2025, baby. Yeah, but it's funny that, you
49:47 know, that you upgrade from access to SQL
49:52 But it's also this like, you know, I. If I was an operator of a certain size, and I only needed my daily data, because there is this push, like, oh, you guys are only on access with SQL,
50:05 let's say SQL. You should go on the cloud and you should do all these things. But honestly, I don't know what the well trust rolled is, but you should have a lot of wells before I would recommend
50:15 someone to do a full push. A SQL database can be amazing for sure. Yeah, I don't want to totally crap on it. You can run a lot and Jeff Hughes will come attack me if I shut up
50:27 I mean, I mean, I think there's a lot of merit to it, but yeah, I think access is one where it's like, All right, we should probably be off that. Yeah, I'm off access. Yeah, and it's funny
50:37 because I have like a love-hate relationship to it because like, you know, it's easy to kind of share small data sets and stuff like, and of course you can do that with SQL. Well, that's how a
50:45 lot of people learn SQL too. I've done a lot of people like that graphical interface that generated the SQL was like, people's first introduction to it So I mean, definitely pass.
50:56 It's just funny, like, you know, you go from, like, you guys are interacting with Databricks and Snowflake and all this stuff and then, like, some people, like, oh, we might have the SQL
51:03 server option this year. Yeah, and to get into that, we need to connect through a Citrix and then through a virtual. It's just a part of it is a part of it. And like, and, you know, maybe that
51:14 solution that I just talked about is a more cost effective evolution solution and it makes sense for that operator. And that's like, in the end of the day, okay, if it gets the job done And, you
51:23 know, even that IT infrastructure can connect with like a modern web tool. Right. So, you know, for us - Because I think your Python script has the access, like, connection in it, you know,
51:25 like - Yeah, access. If you want to connect with like the ARRI's access-based, you get back in. And it's like the lingua franca for deals, right? I mean, when people are passing around ARRI's
51:43 databases, it's usually an access database. Yeah, no, exactly. And, you know, a lot of people hate on ARRI's. I'm going to just shout out a love for Aries because, you know, there's
51:53 something beautiful with something that's standardized, where, okay, if someone sends you an Aries database, you know there's going to be an AC products table, an AC economics table, an AC
52:01 property table, an AC daily table. And for with some plus, that's the tables we need. So like if someone sent us that and, you know, that's, if that's where they do the reserves, we know that
52:13 that data is going to be updated and like kept clean and okay And people, okay, I would like to use the same data from engineering that people actually do their accounting on because that those
52:23 numbers matter or the reserves on. So you know, from that perspective, even though I never seen the front end of areas, but always, you know, the access database piece and how it's possible to
52:34 intuit with different systems is very powerful. I think go ahead. I was just going to say the big point here is that, you know, integration like
52:45 there are so many specific tools in the industry that People are, they're tired of the multi-tab problem. Bobby and the rest of my company make fun of me for how many tabs I keep up in on my Chrome
52:58 browser, but it's the same reality for, you know, the consumer on the flip side of it, right? It's like, do my PBT here, do my
53:06 decline curves here. And of course, they both all, they all need the data from the other one and none of them integrate with each other, but it's like the tech industry has been doing integrations
53:15 for over a decade now. And like, that's the beauty of the cloud And that's why it's so sexy from a data side is that like, hey, instead of me having to export and then import or copy and paste or
53:28 do all this stuff, it just is there, right? Like, and so I think that's a big thing just in general that people need to make sure they understand is that the future of software isn't standalone
53:40 thing that does one thing really, really, really well. It's a very hyper niche thing to do that, a big like scale enterprise type thing, you have to have, you know, that culmination of enough
53:55 individual pieces all built in to make that, you know, the crossing the chasm leap, that's kind of where all that stuff comes from anyway. But it's, I hope to see more and more people, you know,
54:06 leveraging APIs, leveraging integrations because you will gain way more traction that way instead of just leaving it the way it is. Yeah, I know like the one in gas industry has been like, you
54:15 know, I mean, it serves companies there too It's been like very like, oh, we don't collaborate and like to keep it locked. It's all ended, blame it, don't like it's confidential or whatever
54:23 else, but you know, now in the industry, at least North America and Canada and stuff, where I do the most of my works, I don't know the rest of the world, but they're very collaborative now to a
54:31 bigger degree. And also the companies themselves, they're not stupid, they know that I don't give, I get in bed with one of these service providers and they lock me in to only use their stuff.
54:41 It's not, you know, I need to have alternatives and that's where the nice thing with, okay, if you have tools that communicate with the show, at least can do, it's great. And kind of our
54:51 approach has been, okay, our tool can communicate with other tools, but we can't be like dependent on another tool to do the workflow in the software. So like, you know, if we, let's say we
55:02 didn't have like a basic PBT thing and it wasn't plus, where, okay, you need that info to do everything else. So if we had to, oh, for that, we would have to go to like, you know, one or
55:14 slumager tools or something like this, you know, that wouldn't make any sense, I think, from a business perspective. So we built a lot of that critical workflow functionality into the toolkit,
55:23 but still keeping it very in and out, open on the data flow side. Yeah, so one last thing on that data integration side, and then we'll probably get into the speed round. But, so I know it's
55:37 very public. Like your work with Devin, with the Snowflake stuff, like, can you speak to that? Like, is it, was that purely just the fact Snowflake to push and pull data in and out of Whitson,
55:46 or were you offloading like calculations into Snowflake to be able to do it faster? I'm just kind of curious about that. Yeah, so the, our first Snowflake kind of partnership or whatever you want
55:56 to call it was with Devon. They were very, coming out of COVID, they were very clear. John the Wyton led kind of leadership group at the, in their, I guess, data integration team was like,
56:08 okay, you know, if you want to work with us, we were becoming a Snowflake shop and very important for us too, that you guys are compliant with that because that's where our business is going. And
56:20 we took that to heart, especially as a, you know, kind of a back to being a slow nimble, you know, Snowflake, you know, I was like, never heard of, you know, Norwegian, you know, no snow
56:28 by now. But, so we just went to work immediately and we actually had like our first version of like the data share in less than 14 days. And at that time, like Snowflake wasn't what it is today
56:42 Sure And. what happened was like with every single company that we work with, we became almost like they're either their first snowflake integration or their first Databricks integration. So we
56:55 could be like this mutually beneficial partnership where we can like learn from each other through that journey was very, very powerful. And Devin was the first example of that and just been a huge
57:04 success. But on the snowflake side, it's just been a regular snowflake data share where they have some of the key data going in and out of what's in plus being updated daily. And we were just
57:17 trying to get more and more data and they're making it more rich, more available for the people. But - So they're sharing the data easily into what's in and then you're churning it through the
57:27 what's in engine and then returning those things just back out. Yeah, no, exactly. So there's a bunch of calculations that being pushed back so they can consume in different dashboards for other
57:35 softwares as well. So that's been very powerful. And that's kind of been the template that we've done. 20, 30, 40 companies on Snowflake and Databricks and the rest of it, but that was kind of
57:47 the first one. Good to know about Databricks. Let me just chat on that. Yeah. No, Databricks is,
57:52 you know, except from that they have a Swedish CEO, I think, nothing against them. Oh, come this will say. Yeah. It comes first and second. I was like, I was kind of fan of them and then I
58:01 was like, a Swede. Okay. We need to think a little bit. But now I joke. I like Swedes. But, you know, it's like your little brother, you can make fun of them, but none of your friends can
58:10 One of those
58:12 things. But no, I mean, that's an amazing company as well. And like, you know, they're all part of the data liberation stuff. And you know, the Asher has some kind of equivalence to it as well.
58:24 And at the end of the day, like, we just let the companies pick whatever they want. And but just for us, it's through its way easier if there are on snowflake or Databricks. So we don't have to
58:34 like either come in person and set up the schedulers and like all those kind of on our infrastructure, which is important. But anyways, I don't know if I had that answer you a question. Yeah, and
58:46 I was great. But anyways, I think those tools are the future. And those are cool businesses too. Just very different from what you're dealing with, which is very niche oil and gas, but
58:59 definitely, they probably have years and years and years of growth out of them. For sure, yeah, data's not going anywhere. No, for sure. I was like, oh, if we could do this all over again,
59:08 I'd love to create a snowflake competitor 10 years ago. Yeah, right. I was like, ah, unlimited Tam, oh, that sounds good. So I was like, yeah, I can't think like that in our space, but it's
59:21 very fun to see people succeed with that for sure. I'm gonna jump in the speed round. Sure, I've got, all mine are gonna be about you being Norwegian, so it really is fun. Yeah, the first one.
59:33 Yeah, I joke with people like my accent. You're definitely not from Texas and I just say, I'm from Galvus now,
59:41 it's just like
59:43 it's so windy down there as you get this like, you know. That's incredible, actually. I used to work for a company called RYSTOT Energy and they were really proud of being a Norwegian company. I
59:54 don't know have you heard about it, RYSTOT? Yes. And, you know, I love those guys to death, but they were really famous for their RYSTOT Energy English,
1:00:03 which was basically a super Norwegian English And it was like, you know,
1:00:10 It was like, basically they were speaking Norwegian and just like the words were English. Yeah. So hopefully I'm a little bit closer to Texan than maybe that or let's say Galveston. But yeah, so
1:00:22 anyways, yeah, the Norway questions, keep them coming. I love that. Like you should just switch out a different random Texas city every time. Like I'm from Quero.
1:00:31 Yeah, Tyler Texas Tyler Tyler Texas. Yeah, okay
1:00:36 Let's see, what is something that you would, that Americans going to Norway should try, that they can't experience either food or just like activity, cultural thing, whatever. Yeah, I don't
1:00:50 know, it's, you know, food-wise, I think Americans would be surprised how much taco and pizza Norwegians eat. And people ask me like, what's Norwegian food? And the truth is, you know, I
1:01:02 don't think I really ate any Norwegian food, like what they ate like 100 years ago, but every Friday was like a Norwegian taco Friday with their family, like that's like very social thing to eat.
1:01:11 Like tacos like I'm thinking about in my head, right? Well, it's an Norwegian taco, way better than Mexican tacos. No, but it's, you've seen
1:01:22 like a Mexican taco and a burrito and they got like a child, that's a Norwegian taco, it's like a burrito without like beans and rice, but it's like, you know, lettuce and corn and ground beef
1:01:31 and like a, it's honestly one of my favorite meals. So, you know, so that would be, and that would be probably more of a surprise. I don't think you'll be like, Oh my God,
1:01:42 so that's the best thing I've ever had. That was not my biggest thing, I would have guessed. Yeah. And what is that call? Is there a Norwegian? I just call it Norwegian. Like everybody's like,
1:01:49 Oh, it's talk of Friday. But like if you have that taco, you'll be like, this is not a taco. So, but, you know, a lot of people are probably a little surprised by that piece
1:02:01 But honestly, to be honest, go over there and just smell the air and drink the water out of the faucet. Like it's going to be the best water you've ever tasted in your whole life. And those are
1:02:13 probably the two things together with a couple of like cloud berry jam. I don't know if you guys have had like the orange cloud berry. Oh my Lord, it's like you can die for it. Can't smuggle it
1:02:21 back into the US because you can't bring food and stuff. So I'm always having to eat it there, but that's Can you get it on Amazon? Well, maybe, but I have like my grandmother's recipe. Yeah,
1:02:33 that's one of those. Not quite the same. So yeah, maybe Cloudberry, that's on the food scene. Of course, like all the standards, like the fjords. And if any of you ever go to Norway, I have a
1:02:41 little note that I can send you with what I would kind of recommend. But of course, the fjords are very unique for people who visit. But I grew up in a fjord. So for me, it was like, it's not
1:02:53 the same as a bio. One more time? It's not the same as a bio. Well, I lived by the Buffalo bio for a while. And at least there was a little curvature in the terrain here, but it's like every
1:03:03 Norwegian I've moved to, like one of the flat states in
1:03:07 the US, they're like, where are the curves? Like, no curvature in the terrain. And it actually makes them depressed. It's a weird thing. So I get a little bit of curvature where I live now,
1:03:18 but you know, technically if I was gonna stay in Texas for the long run, I would have to move over to the hill country or something. Austin or something, probably just to see a little bit of hills.
1:03:26 Yeah, I hear something with me. My wife's from Pennsylvania near the Appalachians. Oh yeah. She's like, just wants to see something Honestly, Pennsylvania is like, it's - I don't know why I
1:03:35 want to go there for work sometimes, but I think I realize like the drive between like Pittsburgh and in Canisburg, have you been there? Like it looks like you're in the local rings stuff playing.
1:03:44 It's like, I've never seen anything like it. And I just want to see it again, which, you know, probably shouldn't say that too. And of course, I want to see all the clients over there.
1:03:53 Yeah, but also the nature is just. Yeah, that was the first thing I told my wife. The first time I came back, I was like, I was so shocked how beautiful it was. Like I was expecting a coal,
1:04:01 like a steel town, right? Which like it was, but is no longer. Like it's not, I was expecting, you know, coal stacks and just like dirty and not very pretty. And it's like, oh, it's on a,
1:04:12 you got all these rivers and mountains are beautiful. And it's all this beautiful outdoor stuff. But yeah, no, it's, it is honestly amazing over there. Like very sports friendly city to like
1:04:22 tree sports teams. If you have dinner at the hight there and everything, well, we were gonna talk about Norway and not Pittsburgh. That's all good. Well, no I, was expecting some kind of like
1:04:30 fermented fish dish or something like that. that you would recommend. If it only grows you out, but I want to impress you. Yes. It's like, I want to show you the best parts, but there are some
1:04:40 parts like, there are fermented fish that my granddad would bring to like Christmas dinner. But I realized why he does it, because he always bring like a kiwits, like the Norwegian Vodka, for
1:04:51 like a shot at the same time. And I think it's like, okay, the reason why you have the shot is so you can't taste any of the fish. It just burns the fish a lot. Like around like Christmas, my
1:05:01 brother-in-law's, they're, he's got a very Italian family. We do this like feast of the seven fishes. And like most of it, we do some gumbo and some, you know, things are actually pretty good
1:05:09 and no offense act. If you're like bacala, but I won't touch it. It's like cod, like cold, like, and it's like, but he makes it just 'cause that's like the traditional dish. You know, that's
1:05:18 one of the fishes, but yeah, that's the one I'm not, you know. Yeah, we have some pretty crazy Christmas food that I really like, one of those like pork belly, but it's just a weight crispier,
1:05:29 like the fat part. That's awesome. It's actually, you guys would love that. Then the other thing that people eat over there is something called, I guess, meat on a stick, like Pinochet does the
1:05:38 Norwegian work. And it's like, it's so salty. I've seen Americans try to eat it before. They dry up, like they go straight back to the hotel room and just like, I have to like, you know, a
1:05:48 double fist by a show in Norwegian water. It's pretty brutal. So probably stay away from that list if you're, if it's your first Christmas and stick to the pork belly. All right, well, let's
1:05:60 just pivot and do a last question about Houston food You know, so what's your, what's your go-to here in Houston or what's one of your favorite restaurants? Or you recommend people that
1:06:12 are visiting? Well, you know, for people who are flying in and out of the Houston airport, just kind of open an imitation because our office is just there. So if you, if you either land early or
1:06:21 you have to want to go early to the airport, you can have lunch at dinner with us at Witsen, at Lupe, or Tia up there. They start on new Lupe there, which is really good. You know, if you've
1:06:32 been to the OG loop here in town, it's, you know, this one is a little kind of like this office, honestly, extremely beautiful and like up up scale and away. So it's a different feeling. But
1:06:42 that's, that's kind of our company go to place. We do a lot of, a lot of things there. So I guess that would be my, my go to. But of course, I'm very weak for, for good solution stuff, which
1:06:52 we certainly have here in town with either Katarabata or Uchi, I guess. But if anybody hasn't tried the beef skewers at Katarabata, you have lost out on life. They're amazing. Take a direct shot
1:07:07 from here to there then. Yeah, probably. They're just melting in your mouth. And you go there, people think you're going to have sushi and you're just like sitting there, like double fisting
1:07:16 there. Yeah, they're amazing. But then they go well with carnivore, you know, for people like me, that's on a diet right now So it's probably good for the keto boys or bros out there too.
1:07:28 This has been awesome, man. We appreciate you coming on. No, appreciate you guys. I mean, some people it's like, I asked you, you're like, yes, start the invite, boom, it's scheduled. And
1:07:37 then I forgot about it.
1:07:39 But I mean, then other people it's like, we're still trying to get them on, but yeah, appreciate your willingness and hope and your worth. And it's maybe in five years we can come back and we can
1:07:48 do like a revamp and we can talk about, you know, what actually happened with all the AI and all the data integration stuff, was it, was he right? Yeah, maybe they actually ended back with one
1:07:57 product. The products were just a failure. One product's still around and it's got hundreds of companies using it, then there's nothing wrong with that. Now, as a good point, that would be my
1:08:08 mantra in the next few years. Where can people find Widsen if they want to reach out or get in touch with you guys? Yeah, so you can always reach out to me at Carlson at Widsencom, that's Carlson
1:08:17 with a C and not an O and a lot of people like to put that in there but I think the Eases would probably just define us on LinkedIn or on our webpage. we're extremely LinkedIn active. Yeah, you are.
1:08:28 And it's on purpose because we talked a little bit about it before we started here that for some reason this industry just loves to be on LinkedIn for some reason and we just realized that early. So
1:08:38 we're like, oh, we probably should double down here. So that to our web pitch would probably be our ECs. Yeah, I'm gonna have to get you on Collide. Oh yeah, if you're not already in - Yeah, I
1:08:47 mean, they're really active. I applied, they rejected me.
1:08:52 They brought that your Swedish. Yeah, they brought us Swedish out They have an auto filter on Swede, you know? Swedish in French are completely kind of - And Geos.
1:09:03 Don't tell them. Yeah, no, anyways, we're joking. Yeah, I mean, you, Graham, there's a lot of you guys out there pretty active on LinkedIn, so. Yeah, we're trying to be, trying to be,
1:09:13 stay active and I think it's just come from like, I don't know how I'm the customer calls without it, but they started with it. We just heard so much stuff from you guys on LinkedIn. We just want
1:09:21 to check out what you guys think about. Yeah, yep,
1:09:24 yep. I hope, maybe, you know, in five years it's gonna be a collide instead. I like to, I mean, you guys don't, you don't take yourself too seriously either. You've had some pretty funny
1:09:31 posts even recently, so. Yeah, yeah, we, you know, we, I don't know. My biggest, like, if you look at the corporate landscape of oil and gas companies, like, you know, nothing against
1:09:42 them, I respect a lot of those guys, like SOVV and - You mean a staged photo of people in suits in front of the company logo or the desk? It gives me a little bit like, you know, we want to be
1:09:52 kind of,
1:09:54 you know, Apple in the 80s fighting IBM, like that's why we picked Curtis as like the name of the company, that's like a five year old kind of thing that we did, we made, because, you know,
1:10:04 there's no personality that you guys have been amazing at that, like with, you know, everybody in the industry knows, okay, collide, that's a lot of you guys that's here, and we try to do the
1:10:13 same thing to just make it very personalized, you know, understanding the business is very much like a belly to belly game, especially in oil and gas, where everything very relationships building.
1:10:23 you know, your wife and the cousin of the wife works and they're like, it's such a small space, you need to respect it. And yeah, so that's kind of been the train that we've been doubling down on
1:10:32 to try to make it very personalized as a contrast. And that's, you know, the humor and not taking us self too serious, because you have these ridiculous LinkedIn posts where people are like, we
1:10:43 applied our software and we increased the oil reserves with3 billion and I was like, sure you did. It's like, just watch TV. Like, if any insurance company came out and like, try to talk about
1:10:58 why they were better or why their actuaries were really, really good. And that's why you should use them. No one would pay attention, but instead of you have the Geico, Geico, and flow and
1:11:05 progressive. It's like, those are the most creative commercials because the insurance is so friggin boring. No, exactly. And you need to have some of that. So that's kind of the, you know, I
1:11:12 don't, I try to be, I try it very hard to be funny sometimes, but sometimes it maybe works, but that's very, It's very hard, but at least we're honest and dorky and we just like, you know, it
1:11:22 is what it is. That's how we are as people learn. Just people just want genuine content, right? Like they hate stage or produced generally speaking stuff, right? Like I don't connect with a
1:11:33 corporate picture posted from the corporate page of a bunch of people interns and suits standing in front of the sign, like, and I guarantee you I can find that on half a dozen major like as
1:11:45 companies page right now The best pictures of people in front of a company headquarters is the Exodus pictures. Right. Yeah. Those are the ones that get all the impressions and all the claims too.
1:11:53 Yeah. I'm leaving for something new. I'm better. Yeah. No, I've seen a few of those.
1:11:60 But yeah, we'll just try to keep it at least as long as I'm in the company like I keep it dorky and real. And we are the ones that writes the posts too, so like a lot of,
1:12:09 you know, we try to, you know, hopefully that hits home and even though my real friends, they make a lot of fun of me from being very spammy on LinkedIn, but well, I'll do anything. We get a
1:12:19 climb. There you go. Now, well, I appreciate that you guys take the time, 'cause it's not trivial to create and produce and put out content and then also make it fun and real. And so it's, as
1:12:35 someone from the, has worked in the industry my whole life, I appreciate what you guys do, 'cause not enough people do it honestly, right? I'm really - Either super corporate or they don't do
1:12:43 anything. Yeah, no real appreciate that. And I think it goes actually back to the industry that we are an industry with a bunch of nerds. It's just like the truth. And I say that in the best way,
1:12:52 you know, call it wizards is probably a better word, but like, you know, that's the truth. And like people love to hear about their old professor or their, you know, this paper or this method
1:13:02 and like all these things that like, you know, I don't know why we care about it, but we love to hear about it. I love to read about it too. It's like, you know, send me more of this stuff. So,
1:13:09 you know, maybe it's an oil and gas-specific thing too. So maybe it works differently in other spaces.
1:13:16 Awesome. Awesome Thanks again for coming in and. Yeah, 'cause if you guys like this, make sure you hit subscribe or follow us on Spotify.
1:13:25 Wherever you're listening. Yeah, for sure, yeah. No thanks again for letting me come in and hopefully you guys will crush it in a meanwhile. Awesome, appreciate it.