Oil and Gas Startups Podcast

0:00 Yeah, so we went to Austin yesterday to visit with the green light guys with Matt Gallagher and Rob and rest of the team. And dude, I

0:13 was actually really impressed with Green Lake and one, what they've built on their data side. Super impressive to how they're forward thinking, trying to learn about Bitcoin mining, especially in

0:27 a low price environment And then, you know, just, they're fun people to hang out with. And also extremely tall too. They're extremely tall. I mean, shit, dude. Matt, in six, five, six,

0:38 six, is like the average amount of Green Lake. That's what I asked them. I said, is there a minimum height requirement to work at Green Lake? And am I welcome here? Because I'm clearly under the

0:47 threshold. And you get to stack a press release. So you get to add another one to your belt. Yeah, so it's funny because we went to lunch before we went to their office and we're sitting there and

0:58 like we have something for you and they hand over. I was for sure, I was like, this has got to be like, oh, this is like first access to some big acquisition. That's what I

1:21 thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought.

1:22 That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That's

1:22 what I thought was like, let's go. I thought they're moving forward with Bitcoin and then I start reading the paragraph

1:28 and it's talking about how they partnered up with us and it's like CEO, Colin McClellan had this to say and it's like, I am the source and so what I appreciate about this was like, this was like

1:40 real-time meanage that was happening, you know, because this was evolving over on Twitter. You know, I made this video that was like, I am the source and Rob, I guess, I guess Matt was headed

1:51 out of the office to go to a doctor's appointment before our lunch and he told Rob to get this press release spun up and so Rob made it in like 10 minutes and. You know, it had their green lake

2:04 energy letterhead and it was from the IR department and had like a phone number for the call-in. So I don't know if like people on Twitter are like, Oh yeah, I'm gonna call in.

2:15 But I just had so much appreciation for their sense of humor and like they took time to go create that. So let's give some context for those who are not familiar. So, Matt Gallagher worked his way

2:27 up and it partially to becoming CEO of Parsley, right? No, he was that pioneer before Parsley, right? Yeah. That's what, I don't know if you, did you see at Green Lakes on their desk, they

2:40 had the lease signs of Green Lake and it had the employees' names on it? I thought that was cool. And I was at my mom and stepdad's ranch a couple weeks ago and I saw my stepdad had one of those

2:49 lease signs from Pioneer in it that said Dave on it. I'm not gonna say his last name. And I took a picture of it 'cause I was like, I wanna get some of those made for digital walk out here. And we

2:59 walked into Green Lakes office and I saw that. And somebody's desk had one on it. Yeah, I pulled out that picture of my stepdad and I showed it to Matt. And Matt's like, You're dad's dad, you're

3:08 stepdad's dad. And I was like, Yeah. And he knew Dave. And then I was like, You know, Jeff James as well. And Jeff is my uncle. And

3:16 I think Jeff kind of trained up, helped train up Matt when he was young over at Pioneer. So, went from Pioneer to Parsley.

3:25 Sold Parsley to Pioneer Became CEO of Parsley and then sold Parsley to Pioneer. Then he joined their board. What did they sell for? It was like, was it not like5 billion? I don't remember the

3:37 exact dollar amount. Let me look real quick so that we can get some context here. Parsley acquisition. I want to say it was like four and a half. Yeah, four and a half billion. Yeah, so four

3:48 and a half billion to Pioneer. Join Pioneer's board. He's still on the board of Chesapeake as well. Oh yeah, it was that 2021 January 2021 one. Um. always on the board for Chesapeake. Yeah,

4:01 and then I think he was doing some work with NGP. He told us that he sat in with Halliburton Labs and we're investing in some of the companies alongside. No, I thought it was funny 'cause he made a

4:15 comment. He's like, Yeah, it's hard for me to wrap my head aroundyou know, some of this deep energy tech. Because it's like, Oh yeah, in 10 years, we may be able to monetize. And Matt's a

4:24 true oil and gas guy he's looking at free cashflow and bottom line I mean, it was like part of the original thesis that they wanted to dedicate a certain percentage of their capital to potentially

4:32 make some of these investments. So I thought it was interesting but that is like, Hey, I want to go like sitwith NGP and

4:37 sit with Halberton Labsand just get like, get smored on this for like six months. And so he was like embedded with those groups. That was pretty cool. Yeah, and then, yeah, that's what I asked

4:46 him when we were sitting there. I was like, What is y'all's strategy now? Because I know you want to do this energy tech fund. And it sounds like they've gone pure play, EMP.

4:55 which brings up, they're letting us play around with their dashboards and showing us up on the screen. Matt's like, I sit down every morning and these are the things I look through and dude, I was

5:07 super impressed with their real time analytics that they had on their oil and gas production. I will say

5:17 that it seemed to me to be the most advanced that I've ever seen in an EP at first glance. I mean, we're walking through that I mean, those who've listened followed what I've done historically was

5:28 playing the dimension space. And they figured it out. I mean, it was like, the Rob just like passed me an iPad at lunch while everybody was talking. Imagine that like back in 2016, like the idea

5:40 of passing across an iPad at lunch and having all of this data. Of company information. Anything you possibly imagine was in there. Yeah. It was clean. You were sitting next to me, I looked over

5:50 at you. All I was talking, I was like, I could see you're like, Fuck to go, there's so much data in here, but it was like, I mean, just dashboard after dashboard, but the way that they put a

6:01 lot of thought into it. I think what I appreciate about that is that it was through a learning experience of like all the scar tissue from Rob's time at Chesapeake. Yeah, and then partially in

6:10 Pioneer. Yeah, it was a huge learning experience. So they wanted to set, they wanted to set GreenLake up for success and scalability, you know, so that they can do GreenLake One, GreenLake Two,

6:20 GreenLake Three, and so on, right? But have the data architecture in place to be able to do that. And I think so many times that's an afterthought for some of these like PE backed operators.

6:32 They're an exception because, I mean, Rob is a technology guy who comes from oil and gas, but he is one of the managing partners of GreenLake, right? You don't see that many times where one of

6:42 the managing directors. Yeah, you know, I thought also what was cool is they were talking about other technologies that they've integrated like combo curve. And so, you know, they were able to

6:50 test their actual production against their type curves that they generated. with combo curve and now, you know, that's going to, you know, give all types of insight to new drills or acquisitions

7:01 and things of that nature. And also thought it was funny, you know, I always like using when I'm showing, so we ran them through the, the collide demo and always like showing barrel hubs profile

7:10 on collide because it's fully built out, you know, they got demos, podcasts, screenshots, customers listed to always use barrel hub as our example, along with a pod to I use them to And, um,

7:22 usually though, when I asked, I'm like, have you heard of barrel hub? The answer is no. And like, yeah, we have heard, we use barrel hub and we used it and it helped them make a, but it

7:32 sounded like a really good. After it is paid for itself in a new month. Yeah. And so I thought that was cool. Like, he was like, don't tell anybody else about barrel hub, the razor prices. So

7:41 here we are talking about it on the bike. But shout out to barrel hub. I thought that was cool to hear it, but, you know, I thought it was cool How green like is not only focusing on their

7:50 internal tech and data, but also. uh, integrating this, this new software. And you know, Rob had brought that up. He was like, yeah, you know, people see our dashboard and like, man, you

7:59 should productize this and sell it. And what I appreciated about them was like building like servicing software is, is hard. Like that's standing up an entire company. So, you know, maybe we can

8:09 get them on sometime, I get Rob and I'm mad on some time and just kind of talk, talk about how, how they think about that type of stuff. I think one of the things that was cool with, you know,

8:19 Rob's like, you know, the ecosystem's large, there's lots of different software that you can connect with us, but we were very basic listening test. If you want to integrate, if I'm like, how

8:27 quickly can we do this and you're like, oh, it's going to be like a month or two, he was like, you're obviously not the right partner for us. So like, you have to have your architecture set up

8:34 in a way that where we can plug in almost immediately. Plug in weeks or days, yeah, to be able to do it. I love that because that's a great litmus test. You know, he was at lunch talking about

8:43 like SAP integrations and he said at Chesapeake, you know, they had 200 SAP consultants for a three year implementation. That's crazy, man. That's what legend has in the implementation still not

8:53 that. Yeah, that's - That could be.

8:57 It's like 20 times the employees we have at DW. Just on one project, on implementations. What he said was that Aubrey at one time had 600 people in IT. Yeah. That's mind-blowing. Yeah, I wish I

9:12 could have been a Chesapeake during the heyday of Aubrey. Just blowing and going out of an

9:16 awesome butt. It's cool to see the, kind of the culmination of learnings from the entire team at their pass EMPs and now building an EMP from scratch and saying hey, we're gonna do it, you know,

9:33 data first, data oriented and be a tech company. So anyways, wanted to get on and just kind of download from our trip on that. I like this format, so. It's a cool format. We get to talk about

9:45 doing vlogs, but it's like, it's kind of high barrier, it's video. You have to think we're all the editing and stuff. It's much easier to just come in here. And like debrief. And rob a kodgy

9:53 out 'cause, so Rob, Rob's this big old dude, you know? He's gotta be, you know, six four or something like that. And then just big dude. And he drives this town car. We're laughing about it.

10:05 It's like a 2006 town car. And on the back window, it's got Green Lake in Old English font. And anyway, so we're laughing about that. And he drives back and forth from Oklahoma City and Austin

10:20 And so he has lots of windshield time and listens to our podcast. And he called you out on one of the podcasts. I won't say who the guest was, but the guest was kind of like bashing on smaller EMPs

10:32 and just not having their shit together when it came to data. And Rob's like, yeah, Green Lake kind of blows that out of the water. I mean, it's uncommon. It really is uncommon. But the fact

10:44 that they have it all together, I think it just speaks to the experience that they have in the space. It's remarkable. That's like the golden standard, in my opinion, kind of moving forward. And

10:54 if every company around like that, the space would look wildly different.