0:20 Okay, so like, like I've gotten into the lane because I think it makes me look skinnier just for the audience sake we're like looking up at our TV screen we're all on here and
0:34 nobody wore black that's good always tell guests don't wear black because then you look kind of like the floating head. That's a good something we should have in our podcast guidance guidance yeah
0:44 but okay I think this I shouldn't be sitting here more often I feel like I look better in the camera we got some like my microphone but the mic issue is a problem. Okay we got a technical do it like
0:55 we're three minutes to work it so the three of us are professional podcasters and we can't get a mic fixed. I do kind of look fat although I'm having an art here day.
1:08 Oh Jacob's gonna reach out from the sky and exactly man you're not your you're not your fist away.
1:16 Look at this audience. This is behind the scenes at digital walk. What's else podcasting energy tech startups energy tech startups. That's really kind of close. We got oil and gas startups. We
1:27 got energy tech startups. Yeah. I think the market research was what's not oiling gas. That was there. We need to fit something in here. That's a little different. So pretty sure that's how the
1:38 call. So how long have you been doing your podcast? We've been on this like what 18 months now and then I started it with another co-host Laura. Do you fire Laura? What happened? I think she
1:48 decided to graduate graduate. No, she she fired like Houston. She left and went to Hawaii. She was done. Oh, that's awesome. I haven't figured out how to do that yet. So you'll be fine. I
2:02 think I'll be OK. I'll speak loud. There you go. There you go. Now we know. So she she up and left. She up and left. Yeah, just got tired of Houston. There you go. Well, I kind of get that
2:14 Probably during the summer. the weather was particularly bad. She was born and raised here, but I'm not gonna get into that. I don't have to do it. You know, some people, they just decided it's
2:23 time. Okay, so how long you been doing it now? The podcast. Podcast? About a year and a half. Yeah, but
2:32 you joined later. Yeah, so he said 18 months that we've been doing it and then like, I think it's like two years. I've been on it for two years. Oh, got it, okay. I was confused, cool. So
2:42 like, what's the podcast about? Yeah, so we work to find startups who are doing interesting things in energy tech. Usually we're asking people about their journey becoming a founder in energy tech.
2:56 It's hard compared to software because you're not always building something where it's easy and fast to do product market fit. You sometimes have like a physics widget that needs to work in order to
3:07 commercialize your business and they got to go off and raise money and it's hard And everyone's journey is interesting and different. And the fun thing about Houston is most entrepreneurs here have
3:18 like 15 years of experience before they even decide to become an entrepreneur. So it's not like your classic Mark Zuckerberg story of, I'm gonna go off and create something cool. It's just a
3:27 different path for a lot of people. And that's important about the oil industry. So we're focused on that side of technology that is in a silly traditional petroleum products. But we love companies
3:38 that work in all facets of energy
3:43 'Cause I would think sort of number one on the list of, I'll call it gripes or thoughts from energy tech startups is customer acceptance and the process you gotta go through. 'Cause it just feels
3:60 like energy companies are huge laggards in terms of just adopting technology. And there's always this mantra let's invent it here, let's build it in house, you know? So, yeah. I mean, you
4:18 actually did that. Yeah, and I think that's true, but at the same time, what I'm hearing in the past couple of years as we're also helping a lot of startups from abroad come to Houston, is that
4:30 Houston's a little bit less of a laggard, still a laggard. But like, if you want to test new technology, you bring it to Houston, take it to the premium basin and test it there People more
4:41 willing to do that here than in Canada, for example.
4:46 I think the thing that really opened me up to this was I was coming from New England, developing technology, and I landed in Houston and went to OTC, which is ridiculous. But you get to see a ton
4:57 of technology. And then I would go to these SPE conferences, and you had all these engineers getting up, kind of teaching each other what they do And it's all, you know, new stuff. I learned way
5:09 more about practicing than I ever wanted to learn.
5:12 What was amazing to me was how much those kind of exchange of knowledge about how stuff works, like does this technology work, does that work? So there was a lot of sharing of techniques that I
5:21 thought was interesting. And I had the benefit of kind of having a front row seat during the shale revolution, right? Everyone's been fracking for years. We kind of understood lateral drilling,
5:30 but there was like this magic that came together in the 2012 to 2016 era where like everyone picked it up. And so when the industry does - You know what drove that? Well, 125 or what? There was a
5:43 lot of that. That's what enabled it. But there was a lot of exploration of the technology well before the125 oil.
5:53 It did become anyone can make money kind of situation when that price went up. But the
5:56 fact that people were willing to try told me that there was a willingness to look at the technology, look at the technical data. And everyone understood, there will be a market if we figure out how
6:05 to extract this stuff below 50 or60 a barrel. So everyone understood the economics.
6:12 Can we grab the land? Can we figure out how to improve yield? I mean, I remember for a while there, it was anything anyone could ever talk about was like energy ROI, like energy in versus energy
6:22 out. And how much we're going to be able to manage this process to produce wells. And what's the reality? We develop a drilling process that pays back in nine months. I mean, that's amazing for
6:33 the industry as a, as a technology innovation. And, you know, the alternative at the time was doing big, you know, offshore oil We had a plan for four years and it cost billions of dollars. Um,
6:43 it was amazing to see that kind of reinvigoration happen and those all technology driven. So I would, I would go against the argument that that the energy industry is afraid of technology, just
6:52 that the technology has to work financially and think is equally important. Yeah. You know, the way I've always talked about it on the podcast is because the price of oil So dominates the oil and
7:07 gas business and and back in my Damn old enough to remember that we really cared about what mood the Saudis were in when they woke up in a good mood alright well have a good day and that I feel like
7:21 you know it was in effect a lottery ticket business is how I describe it like when you get three D seismic and it allows you to suddenly see a structure that you couldn't see before now that's a
7:34 lottery ticket because all of a sudden you find a ten million barrel field or whatever and if for instance you know you can drill horizontally and frack and all of a sudden the shallot wasn't able to
7:48 produce can produce and make money to your point those are lottery tickets and I do think when the industry can get a lottery ticket it does things really well but then when you compared to nickels
8:01 and dimes like let's go digitize our our landfalls That's nickels and dimes, that's not a lottery ticket, you know? I can do all that and oil prices get on 20 bucks and it doesn't matter and so I
8:15 feel like When I say we're a laggard, it's a laggard on the five the the nickels and dimes type stuff That's the nature innovation like the innovation has to matter right and it needs to drive the
8:27 economics or someone Otherwise, honestly, it's not important And I think then the thing people forget about innovation is innovation is the combination of technology Plus some benefit and if the
8:36 benefits isn't there you just got a cool widget, right? I mean everyone remembers that first segue coming out very cool. No one buys it. Is it truly innovative? And I think that's the question
8:45 you change the world. I remember the drudger port Remember just when they had the drawing of it. Yeah, and the drudger port and you know, it's it's become kind of a funny Memory in history, but
8:57 it hasn't changed the way we live. I think that's that's the line that sometimes is easy to forget all the hype is innovation has to create value. And that's kind of the difference. between like an
9:06 invention, which could be like we've invented something new, but then to actually turn it into an innovation is putting it into the market and seeing that it scales and creates business. Yeah, and
9:16 the fact is the way you tell us, people give you money. Yeah, the people give you money. There's like a business model aspect of it too, right? Like how does it drive value and its monetary
9:25 value that they look at? And I mean, and I think, you know, just stressing a bit more on what Jason was talking about, I spent about 11 years working in the Nord Sea. And when you look at like
9:37 these platforms that are huge, like deep sea and like freezing conditions and like, how are they able to survive there? And also in the Gulf of Mexico, like these structures that we put up are
9:48 able to survive like hurricane five type of winds. It's pretty impressive. And you know, that's all innovation, basically. And it's because you, that the oil that you produce from these
10:01 platforms is really, really valuable Yeah, you did that. i do think that's a good and under appreciated point that at the at the end of the day the greatest technologies haven't necessarily won out
10:14 and you know it's been the technologies that people actually buy Yeah I mean VHS was way less sophisticated and oH a quote unquote worse technology than Betamax Betamax was far spear the porn industry
10:31 adopted VHS and everybody bought porn knowing all citizens I'm not going to find your niche market that classic like how do we get started use case and there was a really great research report by
10:46 somebody from first boston so that was credit suisse before it was credit Suisse and I forget who the research person was but it was like seventy five page report that said you want to understand the
11:00 evolution of technology and where it's going follow the porn industry I mean We have VHS as so you didn't have to go to a porn movie theater and be embarrassed by other people were going to have
11:11 streaming services yeah the internet is going to be driven by porn and as weird as that sounds I mean it actually is a pretty good describe her and to your point it's what are people willing to pay
11:23 for and to go on the threatened in a slightly different direction wherein the Lucky generally want it and you want to leave foreign Affair know like I threw my Dirty Jacob Jacob Let's cut that You're
11:34 You're You're writing my first experiences on the Internet the Hour where I was doing a a research trip this is a family show so be careful that my first our research report for my civics class and of
11:44 Course I my first stumble lies to go to the notorious White House dot com and that was my first experience with Adult Entertainment on the Internet so there I Don't i forgot this story whitehouse dot
11:54 com site in the the correct one was White House Dot Gov but as a kit like and so people had bought up this real estate oh Yeah knowing where people would click through when I was we were doing this
12:04 research report with like Four of My Guy friends from life you know were in middle school at the time we don't know my mom's not paying attention because we're doing civics homework and we're often
12:13 the this is back when the family room computer is in the living room brightly have one computer in the entire house Yeah Yeah we grew up with the Internet it was a crazy time and it's funny to see how
12:24 different it is today Yeah Kids Kids these days don't Yeah they all have the internet they don't know how it was back like half my love the drop in that you sell way more boomers I do and I'm Gen X by
12:38 three years I am Gen X I'm not a boomer so like how does a podcast tie into what you'll do for a living yeah what where cause I dunno Yeah we're well happy to explain it I think there's a real gap in
12:53 the Houston ecosystem around supporting entrepreneurs who want to come out of Atrial shaw Energy participate in energy innovation and and specifically driven by the energy transition it's hard Like
13:05 you Gotta have you got a really good job working in energy it's it's very profitable and how do you make that leap and and we saw this challenge in places like detroit where the automotive industry
13:16 was so dominant it was hard to go out and and and build a separate business so the more we can kind of cultivate a dynamic vibrant energy ecosystem the more innovations can happen and and I think a
13:28 very traditional energy startup in houston is one that's driven by equity like you can go to a private equity firm put together a business plan you can build a team of of landman to say let's go off
13:37 and build an oil development company you can build a a lease rental business that will pull together gensets or or drilling rigs you can build a nice services business those on a technology business
13:49 and there's so much good technology in and around Houston and so much good talent but it's hard to kind of get that start so by by opening up kind of this tech community we're hoping to just make the
14:01 barriers for people lower so they can get involved and put their skills to work. And importantly, it's about helping people outside of Houston realize that Houston's open for business. And there's
14:14 a certain point where they're big enough and they wanna do like a10 or20 million investment. Houston, they should go to the greater Houston partnership. When they're coming in and they're just
14:22 exploring and they wanna even decide if Houston's a market they should come to us. And we will help them get set up with their first team of one to three people. And we got a community of
14:32 entrepreneurs There's a hundred and three of us now, kind of in the ecosystem, like in our little group. And we meet regularly. We have like a CEO circle. We do investor meet and greets. We're
14:42 doing a low carbon investment summit that is invite only. But if you ask me, I can get you an invite. Wow. We're doing that in March. So like we're trying to create these places for capital
14:52 customers and technologists engaged together. And the more we kind of lubricate the flywheel the faster it will spin. So that's kind of the high level of what we're doing What's a business model on
15:03 that, dude? companies pay to participate in the incubator or switch we call ourselves a hub and because they don't do like the Big Fancy Acceleration Programs I think when you might remember a surge
15:15 which was based off the Techstars model we don't do that that's a lot of Kirk Cobra Herc Kirk is awesome doing golf now we Haven't seen him on BT in quite a while he is he's back to his roots in some
15:27 ways yeah exactly but I think offer for us as a hub we we do charge the individuals so we actually attach ourselves to the individual founder we found in houston founders have like two or three gigs
15:39 and sometimes are waiting for the right startup to pick up and sometimes they're just there for a few years and they hand the reins off to someone else so we want to stick with that entrepreneur but
15:48 honestly as a as a small part of our business model our our biggest part of our business model is developing partnerships with industry and a lot of times they're looking to cultivate the ecosystem
15:59 and also finding ecologies and imagine the real challenge for someone in Industries a lot of times will be a technology scout or a a VC group he got really mature ones like shell and chevron they have
16:11 been doing it a long time they do a great job but when you're kind of starting out you're kind of CVC a career I usually you're someone who's internal to an organization you might be the expert and
16:21 drilling at your oil company you might be the expert in and you know pipelines but that isn't a smooth sailing mean you know where all the startups are that's where we come in and help we get to
16:31 engage with about twenty five hundred startups a year startup founders a year and so we can kind of provide that breadth of insight for industry but when they come to us and say well Jason I really
16:41 want to understand who's doing desalination technologies Trait I can open up my database and I can pick out the dozen or so different membrane companies we've come across and even identify which ones
16:53 are probably at the right maturity where they actually want to invest the time in engaging with them and the reality is most people in industry they want to engage with something when it's either
17:03 deployed in a field operation or six months out anything or earlier than that it's really it there's not enough risk to risk alignment on with the with a larger company so we try to help navigate that
17:15 and and you know we don't we don't have insight into what goes on inside the companies we just kind of handed off to them and they get to be that gatekeeper who knows where to find the right buyer
17:24 inside give me an example of like a deal he made a CEO gimme what walked me through kind of a a real life example of like something that We'd Yeah something you have Done Yeah OK cool like and
17:39 something that we are really excited about that we are doing right now and this is something that we won earlier on when we establish energy Tech Nexus was that there were some people in the eastern
17:51 part of Canada they call Atlantic Canada that you know I didn't really know much about people from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland they were like looking for Program to bring some of their tech companies
18:04 to Houston because they had these companies where scale -ups they'd been around in Atlantic Canada for about ten years they had like the customers within that region like Exxon Chevron Whoever's
18:17 operating there were like a million in revenue that a million in revenue so they have been around but now there were like okay how do we the municipalities the cities the provinces were thinking about
18:26 okay how do we help these tech companies these energy tech companies go beyond this ecosystem and so they said you know Houston's a great place for them to expand into so they were actually talking to
18:37 a lot of people in Houston about you know who would be a good consultant to do business development and that's kind of when we were always or we were just about to be born and so it came up it just
18:51 happened to fall on our table because we were talking to one of the startups who was going to be part of this program or or had a good relationship with this company called a tech canal and then we
19:00 got in touch they sent us their RFP We applied for it and and we got it and what we're really doing is we're helping ten scale -ups from Canada get access to the Houston market so it's a one year
19:13 assignment where we are doing business development we bring them down here two times in that and in that year and we do in market events and we've had great success doing that so they came down during
19:25 climate week we set a B to B meetings with them with industries that we're just used to seeing senior leaders from like you know chevron we know their CB sees in Saudi Saudi Aramco and in these
19:39 companies don't come down here and they came to our grand opening and we had this expo and they were just like their mouths were just dropping open and how many use it up like thirty meetings we set
19:49 up in that week thirty meetings and that week like each company was able to meet with five of or six different industry leaders and they were just saying so grateful for that experience because coming
19:60 from this remote area in Canada, you don't get access to the kind of people that we kind of become used to being here in Houston. So I think - Yeah, no, I was watching the Super Bowl and I saw
20:12 Kendrick Lamar dissing all on Drake's, Drake's the Canadian from Toronto, right? There we go. Yeah. And it's like good technology. It's just kind of locked away. I think that's kind of like
20:24 what we're trying to help in terms of bringing things here And I think the reality is, 10 years ago, people wouldn't have thought of Houston as an innovation city, which is why like Amazon passed
20:35 up being here. And part of the development of the ecosystem here has allowed, you imagine like digital wildcatters, like would this have existed if there wasn't like an ecosystem to support what
20:46 Colin and Jake were doing at that time? Like it's - Certainly not our AI software. Yeah. I mean, you kind of had, if you will, We could have been a media company back in the day 'cause you had
20:59 hard energy, you had oil and gas investor and you had the Doug conference and. Yeah, but not technology. But not, yeah, we couldn't have collide. We couldn't have collide A. And power and any
21:11 of that stuff. Like there's something in the ecosystem here that has changed fundamentally, where people raise their hand and say, yes, like we are gonna look at technology in a different way and
21:20 open it up. And I think part of convincing the rest of the world that that's true, 'cause I think when people think of Houston, they think of, I don't know, wildcatters with cowboy hats. I don't
21:30 think any of us have cowboy. I don't even know. The greatest story early in my career, I was working on a deal and some investment bankers were flying in from New York 'cause we were all gonna
21:41 negotiate and they showed up on go-texting day of the rodeo and you got horses going through, down, down. Everybody, cowboy hats. This is a good one. And they were like, shit, it's true. We
21:52 had no idea, but you know. Yeah, it only takes one day to create a stereotype, so. Yeah, so I think a lot of what we're doing is kind of redefine Houston, because yeah, I think even today
22:03 people don't see Houston as an entrepreneurial city, as an innovation hub. You know, we talk about Silicon Valley, we talk about Boston, New York. But importantly, we're not gonna do like
22:13 Silicon Valley of Texas, no frickin' way. We're doing the Texas way of doing things, 'cause we have our own style, we have our own expertise here. We don't need, we're not gonna replicate what
22:21 happens in the Valley. Yeah, we're gonna create our own playbook. Yeah, yeah, we don't wanna do that. The, no offense, California. We're gonna try to do a series A before the end of the year,
22:33 so I'll suck up. Okay. The Valley is wonderful. Yeah. But, no, so give me the Houston pitch. Yeah. What is the Houston pitch on this in terms CEO a or source funding a still it's whether of?
22:48 Yeah, I think, you know, so. I'll be honest with you, the seed venture capital like early stage ecosystem here is absolutely terrible. I'll go out and say that. I think we got good groups, the
22:60 Houston angel network, we got folks like Mercury who are really carrying the torch. The reality is there's not the deal flow that you would have. So I wouldn't invite people to come to Houston to
23:10 raise their seed round. And you know why that is, I'm going to give you my take on it.
23:16 I'll even go first Yeah, you can. So the reason is, at the end of the day, seeds are high net worth individuals, right? You know, the three F's, friends, families, and fools, right?
23:29 Ultimately, whether it's a little fund, whether it's direct investment in the companies, all the rich folks around here, energy type folks, and they have milk and all energy is done,
23:43 particularly oil and gas, is done after payout. A third for a quarter, back in the after payout, yeah. Yeah, it's all back in stuff. So when you walk in to a rich oil person and you say, hey,
23:58 we're valuing this company at 10 million bucks and you're like, well, what do they got? And you cut through the math and you look through it, they realize they're getting an upfront. CEO is
24:10 getting an upfront promote. It just turns off rich oil and gas folks. So they gravitate back towards doing energy stuff they know and the deal structure. And they know how to make money there.
24:21 They know how to make money there and the deal structure makes sense. And I truly think that's the big, big delta. If tech companies in Houston were willing to, hey, CEO gets 25 of the profits,
24:36 a lot more seed would get done. But that's not how Silicon Valley started it, you know, 60 years ago when they started doing it. And that's what I was talking about before like we're equity you
24:47 can you can go off and build a private equity company where capital kind of dominates. And that's what I would consider a capital dominating round where capital kind of owns everything at the
24:55 beginning. And at the end, you can be promoted if you're successful. And I agree with you, I think it's the oil, like there's this oil mentality, and then there's real estate. And they both
25:03 kind of use this promote structure. Right. Is this more like a private equity? Is that what you're thinking? Well, so the idea is like the entrepreneur really only gets upside or participation if
25:14 they knock it out of the park. You need to return your 20 to the investors or more. And I think that's very different from like a traditional East Coast, West Coast, Seed Round, where you might
25:24 only sell 20 of the company. So the founders retain 80. So it's just opposite spectrums. And in every increasing values, like if you value the company at 200 million and the CEO still owns 30 of
25:40 it, there were 60 million on paper. Even though the company hasn't generated a profit yet, hadn't returned any capital to investors. The, the, I mean, it got ridiculous in oil and gas private
25:53 equity where the management team would literally get as much as 50 of the profits above a two X. So I mean, you could go take a hundred million of capital, turn it into 500 million. There's 400
26:06 million of profit. There was CEOs walking away with 200, you know, 150, 200 million dollars in cash, but they delivered, but it was that. Yeah. It was, it was after a, after a payout type
26:17 stuff. And that, that I think, that I think just is what stops so many kind of rich oil and gas people from doing, doing venture capital. Yeah. But if it's more like they're used to funding
26:32 projects, right? Then like companies. There's also a difference like at the end of the day, an oil, like you got, you got to do some development work, you got to prove reserves, but an oil
26:41 that well has intrinsic value. Like there's, there's resources down there. If you have an like a real estate asset, there's a block of land, you have rights There's a building on it. There's
26:51 real value and the reality is a technology company. It's just ideas, it's hope, it's a dream. You're asking people to take a bet. And so I think fundamentally they are different things and it
27:03 makes entirely a lot of sense to me that real assets have a different way to fund them. And then this kind of soft IP thing, it's just different. And the reality is you kind of have to trust the
27:14 founder to deliver. And the thing is when we have real assets, you can fire the management team if they're not working, and you still got most of the value. But with a founding team, you're kind
27:23 of stuck with a person who knows how the thing works. And if you get rid of them,
27:29 you can't hire enough people to replace that IP, unfortunately. Don't get too comfortable, Colin, but okay, yeah. But I mean, it depends, it's what these high net worth individuals are also
27:41 comfortable with. They're comfortable with taking risks within oil and gas 'cause they are experts there, they have knowledge there, they have experience there. you know, these other companies,
27:50 these new technologies that are being built, and they're being built in a different way with the more kind of venture capital type of model, it's just we don't have experience in doing that. Yeah.
28:00 And it's, and so, and you know, I like to say, it's not like an oil and gas, we don't take risks. We take a lot of risks when you, when you do projects. Yeah, Collins, so funny, Collins
28:11 always dismisses me. Chuck, you're just private equity. You don't know how to go. You go buy200 million of wolf camp acreage that has no production. That's VC, baby. Yeah. I don't care what an
28:22 E one says. Yeah, and that's the thing. If you do well in energy you, can do really well. So you just, I think that something we like to repeat is, you know, the way you make money is
28:36 sometimes you have to go against the grain and you have to be right. And I think the energy industry is really good at that. You know, the oil's there. You know, you bet the farm and you go make
28:44 money, right?
28:46 and then the sawdings wake up and you're good, and you're rich, you're good at it. You're a little too rich, yeah, no. But to bring it back to your original question, like why Houston? So I
28:55 wouldn't come for the sea financing, like always go to the coast, as much as I love kind of our small series A community here. If you're gonna do a road show, like, that's not why you're here.
29:05 Why you come here is because this is where the energy deals happen, this is where the talent is, and the - The most highly trained workforce on the planet and energy Yeah, and way under appreciated.
29:17 And the engineers here are not like nerds who turn a screw, they understand finance. They understand that the project needs to make money. They understand, you know, multiple disciplines from,
29:27 you know, is my thing gonna corrode in the ground? To is it structurally strong enough? To how does all the, like, electrochemical things interact? It's all very multidisciplinary here. And in
29:37 that combination of financial prudence, I think is unique amongst our engineers here in Houston And so you get all this talent realize all the talent is the best people in the world coming together.
29:50 It kind of doesn't matter what university you went to. I think on the east coast, very much matters if you went to, you know, a big H or the school down the river. And here, some people come
30:00 from Nigeria, they're coming from Pakistan. They don't even know what those schools are called. But you know, they got here because they were really good at what they do. Yeah, no, I mean, I
30:08 always used to say that I was sitting there at arguably the most competitive business on the planet, private equity and oil and gas and none of my partners went to Harvard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And
30:19 I think I'll take that back. Bob's and I did get a did go to Harvard. Yeah, but we don't know about it, right? Yeah, but a bunch of state school guys, you know, and gals. Yeah. But I mean,
30:33 I'll also add to like the talent part is also we have like the infrastructure. So this is Houston's where we're going to get a lot of the pilots done. We're seeing that happen today. And I think
30:43 it's going to happen more and more is because you have fact. here, you have like infrastructure where you can test new technology, especially connected to energy, connected to like CCUS, to
30:54 hydrogen, you have like all these refineries here, you have these chemical plants. And you have the talent that can evaluate the risk properly, right? Yeah. That's a lot of times where people
31:03 shoot themselves in the foot is you kind of hope everything works out. And one of the things that frustrates me a bit about entrepreneurs here is we'll get to an entrepreneur who's been in the oil
31:12 industry and he goes, well, here's my P90 plan and here's my P50 plan and I go to my founder and go, look, guys, all the other entrepreneurs in the valley are selling their P10 plan. Like I know
31:22 I love you for doing all the work and you understand this, but you are literally pitching against people who are like pitching where the stars line up and the money starts to flow. And it's just a
31:31 very different mindset. But I would bet the execution on the guy who knows the kind of all the risk factors. You know, I used to always say in a lot of those situations because my dad's a doctor
31:42 and people would always come and say. What are my chances of living, Doc? And my dad would always say, well, it's either 100 or zero. You either will or you won, you know? And
31:54 I think that gets lost. 'Cause I don't know how many times in an engineer in the energy business would build me a P60 case. And I'd say, does that case even happen? 'Cause technically P60 means 60
32:06 of the
32:13 time will hit at least this. And they would totally underappreciate the fact that, well, no, it's really the average of stuff. We're either, you know, these wells, if they hit their type curve,
32:26 we're gonna do this, or if they don't, we'll do this. It's way more binary. I think he has to understand that drive. I think that's the whole point of the exercise is really understanding what
32:37 really matters. It's really making sure that type curve 'cause it drives everything else. Yeah, totally And I think, I do, so I hate. the coast arrogance on stuff. And I want to hear your take
32:48 on that, so long as we're not going to piss off people. We'd love a series A, but
32:54 no, I think that coasts understand that a lot better in terms of it's much more binary in outcome. And so let's go get the P10 case. And if we don't get the P10 case, we're going to fail anyway.
33:08 And so there's a difference between execution and selling the wind. And I think in venture math, like your portfolio of 30 companies, you only really need four exits, right? And so the four that
33:18 knock out of the part are the only ones that matter. It's only the ones where the stars align and where everything goes right, that really generates enough value for the rest of the portfolio. So
33:26 what I would go back to the entrepreneurs here in Houston is it's great you did all the math, but the reality is you're only a win if you're in the P10 case. So you might as well only worry about
33:35 making sure that succeeds. Yeah. But from an execution standpoint, you want to pitch the P10 and then go hire all the people and take care of the risk and build the team with people who really
33:45 worry about risk mitigation getting the system belt making sure commissions and and runs right and there's that distinction between the person who sells the vision and the team that executes so here's
33:57 here's my coast story here so twenty one years ago my father or mother out in San Francisco there had a bar Mitzvah Something and I get a phone call from my mom and it's Hey I don't mean to Alarm you
34:15 I'm in the back of an ambulance with your father he's having a heart attack he's being rushed to the hospital turns out dad wound up being fine Dad's still alive today and but when they figured out
34:26 dad wasn't going to die that night dad just said to mom look go to the Brunch tomorrow morning with the bar Mitzvah you know you don't need to sit around here with Me so my Mom goes to this branch San
34:37 Francisco it's very prominent family that sevens Bar Mitzvah so out of the elites of San Francisco are there. And this nice lady, and she truly was a nice lady and means very well, came up to my
34:51 mom 'cause, oh, how is your husband? Oh, well, he's fine. And she goes, aren't you glad that this heart attack happened in San Francisco and not that backwater Houston where you could get good
35:02 medical care? AM, my mom, of course, is sitting there going, Dr. Cooley, Dr. DeBakey invented this stuff They're kind of Houstonians, but it went huge arrogance on the coast. And the reason
35:18 I kind of set that as a backdrop is one I thought that was a funny story. But to talk to me about the coast, will they even back a company in Houston? Tell me the struggles of that, or am I just
35:34 making that up? Yeah, I think, so the reality is, investors will, there's a large class of investors you want to be able to drive to their investments. And that's more true, like when you
35:43 become angel, but even Series A investors, if you're outside the valley, if they have to take a flight to inspect, you or meet you or come for board meeting off the table. So there is a challenge
35:54 there. I think that was very true before COVID. Now that we have Zoom everywhere, those walls are coming down. I think the reality is, if you wanna have a successful financing, you gotta do a
36:04 road show. You need to queue up investors. Going one at a time is very challenging 'cause you're just burning a lot of time waiting for people to come back And the most successful way to raise money
36:13 is to go to San Hill Road and just beat on every door, talk to 200 people, you will get a term sheet. Now the reality is, when you're in Houston, you got kids and you got a wife and you got
36:22 obligations and you gotta take kids to soccer practice, it's very hard for an entrepreneur to wanna pick up and do that.
36:29 But if you look at all the startups who've been able to raise, they've done that, right? Yeah, like that's just kinda what it takes and be it a hard tech company or otherwise or a company out of
36:38 Houston. I think if you do the grind and do the work, First of all, pitching 200 people, you're gonna get really freaking good at pitching. But second, you're gonna find like if there's always a
36:47 marginal investor who will take the deal, if you know, if the tier one company passes on it, there's always a tier two or tier three investment firm, and you kind of have that density. I mean,
36:58 you're in Houston, you got six VCs who might do a series of. I mean, if you look at like the famous unicorn in Houston right now within energy Fervo Yeah, Tim went to Stanford. He did his MBA
37:12 from there. That's where he built a lot of his connections. The company is then still kind of formed here, but he has that network there. Also, he spends some time in New York. And that's where
37:21 he ended up getting most of his money from. Yeah, and he did the grind. Like specifically, he went out and he just got a pitch people you're at. He just raised a 600 million, 600 million. A lot
37:33 of it's going to a project, but yeah, I mean, that's the reality of it 600 million, still 600 million, yeah. I Guess I'm trying to say it's different from building a software business near what
37:43 about cart dot com they've done right or it was Houston born I think Mercury was in them early and and I Dunno thousand Investor Challenge did they really leave cause I mean the city came back they
37:55 came back again cause the CEOS got the private parking spot also won't that's when I going to know I've succeed in life is when I get my own parking spot Yeah Yeah and and I will say this as an
38:08 investor I don't want to see my CEO having twelve different cars that are all that nice until we have liquidity there is a rental service for that so maybe it's that it's not all purchases I've
38:20 already put colin on lockdown on that dude the second you show up in a Lambo buy me out
38:29 of but I so the answer is yes it's just you have to do the work and between the like the seed investors kind of having Low expectations are having a hard time with investing kind of these hard tech
38:42 companies. You kind of, if you want to be successful, you kind of have to commit and you've got to play to win. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs who want to go off and raise five to 10 million
38:52 dollars
38:54 think they can do it from the armchair or from Houston. And yes, you do have deals like I know Verritin is investing and they supported Helix Energy over the summer. We have folks who are pulling
39:06 together some smaller rounds. But the reality is there's not much deal flow happening here. Like even Neil Dykman doesn't invest in Houston companies, even though he's here at Energy Transition
39:16 Ventures. So it's. Yeah, come on, Neil. What's the problem? Well, because there's not enough good deals. That's what he'll tell you. You know, and so funny is Neil came on the podcast and
39:26 Neil told me he has a strategy. He's like, you know, I go really long on a podcast so that they have to drop it in two parts. So in effect, I get two podcasts. I'm like, Three and a half i
39:38 guess just chat keep going I like new feels good there so what else are you telling a CEO in terms of you know Ham chuck gates and start a great company what else are you telling him
39:53 so one of the things that we're doing as we've said from day one is that we're found our focus we were really focused on the founder and we want to help you on your leadership journey as a founder
40:05 because whether you're going to succeed in this company or not maybe there's another business that you are going to spin off off of this idea so we invest in a coach and we do founder circles where we
40:19 bring these founders together and really have these conversations on like okay what are we struggling with right now that we need help with and that's kind of you know I think Jason inspired by y
40:30 combinator and things that happen in Silicon Valley is the reason why you accelerate innovation, is because you share with each other and learn like, okay, who's fundraising right now? Who is
40:45 deploying capital right now? What grants can I apply for? When I face this kind of challenge, how do I deal with it? And so that's the space that we're also creating so that they can create that
40:57 camaraderie amongst other founders and be able to help and support each other on their journey. I think half the time I'm down here I'm playing therapist to call Yeah,
41:07 and I don't know, it's very valuable. No, I don't say that bragging message or anything, I mean, it's - And those founder circles are basically therapy, you know, and that's what we tell our
41:15 founders and they're many founders who haven't tried it and when they come, they're like, I didn't know this existed. Why didn't you know about the service? I mean, that was the hardest thing I
41:23 had when I was at Caine sitting there is I could never get the truth out of anyone except my assistant Stacey, you know, and my business partner Mike, you know, And that was the craziest thing.
41:37 And so it is hard to kind of know who you can talk to, who you can share with, cause you know, to some degree, people are either fighting against you or they're sucking up to you. And so it's
41:50 just, yeah, it's just really tough. And so Colin's going to raise this day round. I have no doubt. And when he does, what's going to happen? You're going to grow the team. You're going to hire
41:60 a larger sales team And
42:04 the company of digital wildcatters is going to grow. And you think about what's going on here. It's not just the technologies being developed. It's not just like you introduce a new marketing plan.
42:14 Like the way the team works together functionally changes.
42:18 And what's going to have to happen? Colin's going to have to change the way he leads the team. And not everyone knows that at first, if they haven't seen it before. And so what you talk about a
42:29 lot of times in the valley is like these people who are called operators, folks who know how to scale all the team. And, and I would want to put that question back to Houston and say, well, who
42:38 in Houston is the operator? Cause you can build an oil and gas company that's100 million with a team of 10 people cause all the values in the rock, right? They're not that many companies that have
42:48 kind of gone from, you know, zero to 20 to 50 to 150 and done it without exploding. And that is the biggest risk for a lot of high growth companies. And who do you, who do you turn to for that
43:00 kind of guidance? It's, it's having those skilled advisors, but it's also just having other founders who are going through it in real time. So that's the real goal of pulling together. The
43:09 founder's circle is when you have people who are doubling head count over the course of a year and struggling through that growing pain, they're going to be different strategies to manage it. Manage
43:19 at every team is going to have a, a different, you know, process they develop, but sharing that kind of experiences and valuable. And there's no organization in Houston that's able to do it. And
43:29 there's honestly no, you know, sometimes you choose, if you're in a, a place like the value. You go to your venture capital. partner and say, well, introduce me to the other founders. Well,
43:37 there's no central kind of venture group here to even be that, that kind of central group. Um, and so that's part of what we're trying to create with our very strong network. We saw that in
43:46 private equity because, you know, early days, like literally you could lease acreage, drill one well, get a log, not even drill a well and produce it. Yep. And Chesapeake, XTO, whoever would,
44:01 you know, you paid a thousand an acre. They're paying you five. You're out and that's that is a skill set of being able to look at old logs for your things out, which is totally different to where
44:14 we evolved with. Now you got to have, you know, 150, 000 barrels a day of production. That's you got to run a rig. You can have a drilling program and that totally different skill set. And so
44:27 you saw the same thing in private equity is maybe finding the acreage, different than actually executing on the acreage. And it was rare the CEO that can do both. Yep. And you've kind of seen that
44:41 now 'cause all the private equity firms literally are just backing their CEOs that they've vetted. They can do it. We call them the Roman numeral CEOs 'cause they always just had a Roman numeral.
44:52 We're Silver Hill three. Oh, yeah. We're Silver Hill four. Yeah. Yeah. The Roman numbers. The other thing, and give me your take on this 'cause this is kind of like one of my important lessons.
45:05 And what I tell Colin is Colin you hang on to the
45:10 hiring function as long as you can. Everybody that comes here knows that they are here, but for the grace of Colin McClellan. I think that's really important because one of the things that happened
45:24 to me is I sort of inherited the team at Caine. We were kind of this three-headed monster
45:31 We wound up splitting and Danny raised his own fine and me and mike kind of had a team that some of the guys we hired some of the guys we didn't and that was just that was a shit show trying to
45:43 navigate that bunch of type a personalities as a mass Yeah I think and you think about like a founder coming into this and I don't think collins or silly like this but a lot of them are engineers and
45:55 technical people and they have a challenge thinking that they are going to be this leader this person that people are going to follow just that it's a lot of work to get people to follow you and
46:06 follow your vision and that's that part of fundraising that's part of team building and and over time if you don't kind of control the culture of a company and it's going to control you and you can
46:19 kind of dilute how the company will start to control you but importantly like a very strong culture is equally about kind of creating an environment that's fun but like cultural is also like the
46:28 instruction set of how we interact with each other, help you work together. And ultimately, culture is how we decide to make decisions that the CEO will blast or will like, right? Are we coming
46:39 together? And the culture of digital wildcatters in some ways is set by Colin. And when you hire people that fit in that culture, you're kind of telling people this is the right kind of people that
46:51 will work well with me, right? That's kind of what you have to do as a founder. And that's why you want to control that hiring process because you want to make sure people fit in with the decision
47:00 matrix of what you want. And I'll just reflect on it myself. Like when we're growing, I'm one of these people who just like details, like I'm just a detailed person and someone who's
47:12 sloppy with details, like gets on my nerves. And I know it's like a personal like whatever. But the reality is like as leaders within this team, we need to work efficiently. And when you build a
47:24 team, a team is kind of there to amplify everything you're building. It's not the other way around and and.
47:31 And so I would applaud like, yeah, keeping control of hiring, keeping control of the culture is the crux you kind of use to make sure you go from 20 to 150 people. It's necessary. And I'll kind
47:41 of add to that 'cause, you know, when we, most of us, whether we're working in corporate, but especially when we become founders, like the first year is like, we're doing everything. We're
47:50 like that individual contributor. We're doing everything. And like you, if you're detail-oriented, like you become, you get into the details of everything, you set up your systems, you make
47:60 your marketing, you do everything, and then comes a time when you have to hand it over to somebody else. And they do it differently. Yeah. Anyone you hire is gonna do it differently. So how do
48:09 you kind of enable them instead of just delegating it and saying, okay, do it, this is how I do it exactly. Do it exactly like me. It's also about how do you empower the team? And I think
48:18 Jason's very good at this, is how do you give them the guidance that they need, like the frame around which, they're supposed to perform, but then also be creative within that and bring in their
48:30 strengths. And that's, that's really hard. Like you don't learn by just hiring someone how to delegate, like delegation is actually very hard. I don't know how you've dealt with that. Yeah, no,
48:40 and
48:44 the one other thing I'll kind of throw into that is I think you're right and create culture, all that, but at the same time, if you're a CEO and I kind of tell Colin this, everything you're weak
48:56 at, go higher, and Colin's kind of figured this out, but for about a year and a half, I argued with him on everything. Even if I agreed with him, I just did it. Well, I did it for two reasons.
49:08 One, I wanted to make sure he had thought it through. And two, I want everybody in the office to see that you can argue with Colin, you know? 'Cause I mean, one of the worries I have about Colin
49:20 is he's such a strong personality and, you know, we're We're at the point where if you're a CEO of a startup that's raised, call it going on 12 and a half million dollars, your greatest strengths,
49:32 your greatest weakness. You don't have an obvious weakness that's just bad. And his strength is being a very strong personality and driving things that also can be your biggest weakness if people
49:44 don't think they can talk back to him. So I talk back to him just all the time, every chance I get, just so other people can see that And I think the important thing is culture is the
49:54 decision-making process. Like, it's a framework for decision-making. And it isn't just what's gone, you know, what do you think this money won't drink in coffee. There is all rationale, there
50:03 is a logic behind it. And I think pulling that out is what's important. And pushing back is finding, you know, figuring out how things work and how you need to push it down. And, you know, I
50:12 totally recognize, like, what are you good at? What are you bad at? Like, I am terrible at social media. I think I did social media for one week and we found someone to take that over. And so
50:20 we have this fantastic woman. sauna who just does all of our social, all of our comms. And I am so thankful every day when I see a social media post and I did not have to touch it and it looks
50:31 great. Yeah. 'Cause I just know, I just, I don't have the patience and I'm not good at it. Yeah, and then also like being okay with like, because you're delegating it, sometimes it's going to
50:41 be wrong and we're gonna make mistakes, right? Yeah. But just being okay with that and letting like giving, you know, some of that feedback. And having that feedback loop. But then, but then
50:49 saying like, it's not a big deal. Like you're not gonna be fired because of this 'cause that is the job is like, we are enabling you to do this on your own so that we are not the bottleneck that
50:58 you don't have to come back to us to confirm if everything is okay. So we want you to continue going out there and posting this thing. And that's how you get scale. Like the only way, like the
51:07 founder can't be everywhere all the time. And that's always the challenge. Yeah, that's exactly right. And we used to
51:17 think about that in terms of If people aren't making a mistake. then you're probably also not getting the benefit of the thinking outside the box, trying something different, et cetera. You're not
51:31 taking risks. You're not like taking full advantage. Yeah, that's exactly right. Do we see an Andreessen Horowitz office in Houston over?
51:42 I wouldn't know. I'm not as close to the ground on - But you know what I mean. But in terms of having a company like that. Yeah, are we gonna pick one of 'em? Are we gonna wind up with Draper
51:52 opening? Well, I guess Mercury wears Draper. Mercury's kind of a part of the FJ. Not a good example, but you know. Are we gonna see some of the big VC funds open offices here ever? Yeah, I
52:04 don't, like, because of the weird Zoom world we're in today, I wouldn't be surprised if you had someone from that office who's just here, but it's not like there's a formal like office you go into,
52:14 but they're still doing deal sourcing. Yeah. Right? The thing is like, do they need to is the question, right? because a lot of good companies from all around the world. end up going to Silicon
52:23 Valley. Like
52:25 they end up either establishing an officer, just be there for the road show, go to one of the incubators. Like in some way you get to interact with them. So the barricades for the reason it
52:34 wouldn't happen is if you're doing hard tech, like something where you need a patent that comes out of a university, then it does make sense to send someone to the various schools that might be
52:45 producing IP and kind of grabbing or funding the founders, even before they spin out a university And so you could find really good technologies at those Irritite schools on the East Coast, like
52:55 Princeton and Harvard and Yale. And if you, it might make sense to camp someone in the periphery to kind of keep a beat on what's the latest in battery chemistry technology or what's the latest in
53:06 advanced performance materials, very deep tech kind of technology. And as much as I love Houston, it's not clear to me that there's a lot of labs producing students who want to start a company I
53:20 think we're very lucky that rice. is two to three startups a year who might go off and raise5 million.
53:28 U of H, I think they're trying with TechBridge. They got a few that are coming out. UT is obviously not here. AM has like a good program for research, but a lot of the AM research is actually
53:38 funded by industry and the people who have first rights are industry. So there's not a lot of like students who are raising their hand saying, I wanna take this widget I've inventedand go off and
53:46 start a company. Luckily in a place like MIT, it's like expected. Like you have a hundred students doing that It's almost like you should try this first before you get a real job. You know what
53:55 doesn't happen? You know what the irony of all that is, is if you look
54:02 back kind of in the '50s and early '60s, Sylvania in effect founded Silicon Valley, 'cause they had a program where you come out there, you work for Sylvania and you can get a PhD at Stanford. And
54:15 so Sylvania actually wound up recruiting Barton McMurtry, Adderyce.
54:21 And Burton was TVI ventures, only
54:26 venture capitalists give Microsoft money, et cetera. I mean, arguably the
54:33 OG of VC is Burton McMurtry. And so he came back to Rice and recruited, and he recruited Jimmy Trebig, he recruited Ken Oshman, and you tick on down the list. And there was this pipeline of Rice
54:47 going to Silicon Valley, doing really well, you know, F. Martin ran the Goldman Sachs office, they did all the tech IPOs, he was a Rice guy. So you had this and something happened to Rice
55:01 probably in the 80s and 90s, where it turned into what I will call a middle management factory. I mean, think of all the big banks, the big management consultants, they all wanted to come recruit
55:17 Rice, and people are taking the safe career. And we just somehow lost our entrepreneurial spirit, Rice. And I, you know, the Yates family has more Rice degrees than any other family, I think,
55:29 on the planet. I think we've got 15, 15, you know, mom, dad, grandfather, two of my three brothers, both sister-in-law's, ex-wife, me. And we have, and some of us have multiple Rice
55:42 degrees, great aunt went there, uncle went there. So I've got this good vantage point, but I can't tell what happened. There was definitely an element of Rice was always smaller, which hampered
55:57 it, but we used to have that culture, and if we could have been Austin, potentially if Rice had maintained that culture. Yeah, but also, I mean, I guess maybe it speaks to Houston having that
56:09 big corporate environment where people would go to these big BP shell jobs instead of starting their own companies, right? Like Austin maybe didn't have that There's a culture change. There's a
56:19 part of me that wonders, and I don't have enough context to know, but it feels like there was a big shift in that era in like the '90s and 2000s, where a lot of the shift in universities was to
56:30 become research institutions. And so a lot of the research dollars kind of concentrated, and we saw a lot of that concentration in Texas at AM and UT. Like I remember when I was at over at Duke,
56:41 like it was, they really wanted to make sure they were a tier one research organization, 'cause then you can tap into those dollars. And I wonder if Rice was too small, like you said, to kind of
56:50 attract that. So you lost the technology pipeline. And then the very real challenge of a UT and an AM is their land-grant organizations. It is not in their mission to start technology companies.
57:01 Its mission is to like educate people and conduct research, but not like commercialize it. And I think that's very different from like a Stanford art and MIT where the mission is to go off and take
57:12 all this knowledge and return it to society. And I think that shows up in the culture of those two schools My trick is to try to mean. put it into a company. Is there anything to the energy
57:23 business being so specific that you ultimately have to be trained in an energy company for a while before you can create something for them vis-a-vis consumer type stuff? Zuckerberg
57:42 can start this in college because at the end of the day, social media site, the customers are his classmates, right? So he can vibe, he can start it, he knows how to write code, etc. I've
57:55 always kind of wondered that, I mean, if you're 18 years old, do you truly know what someone offshore needs in terms of a special widget? You know, I wonder if that's an element to it too. I do
58:08 see business plans that come our way from students where they are very naive in in what people need, and it's almost comical. I have to withhold my. um, amusement, um, because of how superficial
58:23 the, like assessment of the market is. But I think there is a little bit of that, that barrier, um, to knowledge. However, I think there's been really good programs, um, that have come out.
58:33 Um, there's a program, uh, run by the NSF called iCorps. And step number one is to go off and interview 40 customers, not have an idea and throw it on a board and you're right. No, it actually
58:43 talked to the people in the field and make that step one before you even put a business plan together And so because we kind of understand customer development and customer discovery better just as a
58:54 society, I think that isn't the same barrier if you are serious about doing the work and actually talking to that many people. And honestly, like having done this a lot, you only needed to talk to
59:05 like 15 customers to really get a coherent story. The reason they say 40 is because you're going to talk to the wrong 20 the first time. And so there is that that solution to it.
59:17 you are correct, like the barriers to get something out. I mean, Facebook was using the lamp stack. Everything there was free. There was no barrier. Like the biggest barrier was going off and
59:26 getting a server and paying for the server to run back in the day here. You know, if you try to sell, start your own oil company out of school, you're gonna run smack first into all the
59:34 regulations. You have to manage. Probably 'cause it's like, it's so dangerous to
59:42 And also we're talking infrastructure, right? Like
59:45 you need some understanding of the infrastructure and then you need the financing 'cause also we're talking about like more money 'cause we're talking about big development projects. Because at the
59:54 the of end day, the only way a new technology works in energy is if it leverages off the existing energy grid that's already there because that's why I always kind of wonder about hydrogen, you know?
1:00:10 It's if you're not leveraging off existing pipelines, existing infrastructure. It's just tough to do anything from scratch 'cause that infrastructure's already paid for. Yep. A drilling ring,
1:00:21 it's paid for, you know? And so
1:00:26 I think that gets kind of underappreciated that you kind of have to just keep putting band-aids on the patient to some degree, you know, so. I do wanna ask, did you ever find a job? I feel like I
1:00:39 have a job now. Okay, so is the name of the show changing? Is this the job? You know, actually, I do think Colin and I need to record an episode just about client AI, just kind of,
1:00:54 so people can see it and we'll do product demos and all that, and I was jokingly gonna call that Chuck Yates got a job. Because yeah,
1:01:02 I mean, I'm an AI software salesman these days. In fact, I got a meeting at three. Nice, take. Are you gonna go to these AI conferences now be on stage talking about. There's an AI. Yeah.
1:01:14 Yeah. today at the ION. Oh really? Yeah, yeah, we're not doing that. I think our third partner, Julianne, is gonna go there. I'm like walking in with an SOW. this afternoon at three. All
1:01:27 right, sign this, come on. Good. Yeah,
1:01:33 yeah, but I'm not doing this for long. Okay. You know, we'll close our funding round. I think we're closing next week, then hopefully we'll go hire people 'cause I'm the knife and fork guy Like,
1:01:44 I'm the guy you wanna go to dinner. Who do we need to get? I'll go to dinner with 'em. I'll go to lunch with 'em, knife and fork it, then I need to hand off. I'm not good with details. You and
1:01:54 I would kill each other. I don't like details. I don't know, we're gonna team like that from the detail person, so. See, that'd be awesome 'cause my thing is, what are the facts and give me the
1:02:06 30 seconds, and then I got my pitch. And if you go longer than 30 seconds, we're gonna confuse the pitch, you know? It's too much, yeah Needs to be simple. Yeah, go on to the point. Exactly.
1:02:17 All right. How do people find y'all. Yeah. And who do you want finding you? Well, so right now we're focused on mostly working with founders and investors and people interested in the energy
1:02:28 transition in Houston, but also just people who come into Houston. Like if you're an entrepreneur looking for a place to land, like call us up the day of, we usually have an event going on this
1:02:40 week. Like today, we have a group of founders hanging out at the Digital Wildcatters studio just to meet each other and learn about how the sausage gets made. But inevitably, we have something.
1:02:50 If we don't have a big event, then we're running a free launch. So that's the other way we get founders to show up. Yeah, nice. I know what I'm doing tomorrow.
1:02:59 Next week, I think we got a free launch next week over at our other office. Oh, nice. On guests. And then we're doing some really exciting stuff in March. I don't know when this podcast is
1:03:08 coming out. Probably a week or two. So in March, we have a low-carbon investment summit that we already mentioned, invite only, but message us if you want to invite. And then we're doing an
1:03:18 energy tech market event during Sarah Week. So a lot of people are gonna be in town. We're doing four sessions on like what's really trending in the industry, we're gonna have great speakers,
1:03:30 great opportunity to network. So
1:03:34 to find out more about our events, go to, if you use Luma, if you don't use it, start using it, and find energy techniques and just follow us, and you'll see all our events for the year. Yeah,
1:03:45 and what's that, Zuma? Luma, L-UMA, it's that kind of like event bright, but better. Yeah, the better. Yeah. And I would tell you to go to our website, but we also got like three cease and
1:03:58 desist recently. So we're probably gonna change our name. Shortly. And it might be in the next few weeks. So I think if you search us on the various things, search us on LinkedIn, we'll still
1:04:07 come up. but we're in the middle transitioning like the website and things like that. Yeah, so I was on the board of Montrose Lane and we used to be called, I'm on the advisory board there. We
1:04:18 used to be called Cottonwood and got a cease and desist from I think some guy in New Mexico who had a real estate fund and was doing stuff in Eastern Europe and don't know why we get confused on that.
1:04:33 But anyway, the better part of valor was, let's come over the different name Yup. I was like, why don't you challenge them to an armrest? That might be the solution. Did you ever hear that story
1:04:42 about, so Herb Keller who was the president of Southwest Airlines, he was really kind of the founder of the Maverick CEO, you've heard stories of him. They get sued one time because whatever their
1:04:57 frequent flyer program was, somebody else had that name trademarked and somehow a letter or memo got on, ask, any calls up the legal department goes, what's going on? And it's like, yeah, we
1:05:11 just screwed up. We didn't run the search right. We missed this. This guy actually probably is right. But we're, you know, we've got way more money. So we'll fight him and eventually win and
1:05:23 Herb goes, that's screwed up. So Herb picks up the phone and calls this guy. He's like a trucking guy in Tyler or something says, Hey, man, Herb Keller, I totally screwed up. We stole your
1:05:32 name. You sued us rightfully. I just want you to know, I'm sorry. I think I goes, Oh, okay. And he goes, he goes, here's what I want to do about it. Let's have big arm wrestling contest for
1:05:43 it. And hint, hint, you might win, but we'll do a big Bruha a bit. Loser, loser gives, you know, 25, 000 to the winner's charity. And let's do this upright. And the other guy was like,
1:05:58 sure, that sounds great. Big Bruha, Herb comes out wearing a headband, smoking cigarettes like he always does. Big dramatic thing loses and they rebranded and all that free publicity. Earned me.
1:06:14 Yeah, it was totally. So if we ever have to do that, first we're gonna hire the DW team to run our arm wrestling contest and we'll send Nada to go do it. Yeah Nada, you got this. Yeah, I got
1:06:24 this up now. I've got the muscles. Just wink, wink at the other person right before. Yeah. Yeah, it's perfect. You guys were great to come on. This was cool. Come on, thank you. It's nice
1:06:31 to know what y'all actually do. Yeah, finally we got to have this conversation. Yeah. Yeah figured it out for the last year. Perfect. That's it. Thank you.