Oil and Gas Startups Podcast

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0:57 What's going on, walk-out is welcome back to another episode of The Willing guest service podcast, I'm here with Eric Rambeko. Did I know that? You got that. Rambeko? Okay, I don't know if

1:06 there was any. That was perfect. Norwegian way to just pronounce that. Co-founder over at Endravo. Deanna Zang, shout out, has connected us. Thanks, Deanna. And so this is our first time

1:17 meeting. Having on the podcast, what is it that you guys do? You're in from Norway. Wow. That's a good intro. Thanks for being here So my name is Eric, co-founder out in Java, and mostly in

1:28 charge of the commercial side of things at in Java. I'm a mechanical engineer by trade, and I started in Java together with

1:41 a colleague about seven years ago now. We used to work with upstream oil and gas, and came into in Java wanting to help others to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So the high level of what we do,

1:46 we are a Norwegian climatic scale up, and we deliver a platform for finding industrial emitters across the world, stationary big point source And the reason why we do that is because lots of

1:60 companies have products and services to sell to help decarbonize and they need a way to find their new project. We make it easier for them to find decarbonization projects. That's what we do.

2:10 That's a project that we're probably going to talk more about today. It's called Capture Map. Okay. Capture. So I'm imagining this is like a, I don't know if you're, are you familiar with like

2:19 Inverus? Used to be drilling info. I heard of it. Yeah. I think so, yeah. Okay. So like market intelligence platform, right? Production data and like permits and

2:28 everybody uses that, like you have to have it in an oil and gas company here in the States. Yeah. Like you can't operate really without it. So I would imagine that this is probably similar, but

2:37 just for the large industrial emitters, for those companies that are either in the, I'll probably imagine it would be the detection, probably the quantification, obviously remediation, things

2:52 like that, any, anything, is all kinds It's only CO2 emissions, so not methane, not nitrous oxides, not other GHGs, pure CO2 emissions. And

3:05 really, we thought first, when we were making this, we thought perhaps this is gonna be a very good tool for all the emitters out there to help them compare and benchmark their own emitters. But

3:12 it turns out that really what it is, it's a business development tool. It helps all those companies that have either a product or service to sell to try to figure out what is the market potential

3:21 out there for the types of things that I wanna sell and what are the companies that I should go after to help me sell those. So it's company specific, right? So I log in, right? And I've got some

3:31 amazing technology, right? And I'm like, but these are my clients. Yep. And it's like, Ed, is it like, hey, at a company level, at this particular site, they're emitting X? Exactly, yeah.

3:41 Okay. So think of it a little bit as a Google Maps but for industrial emitters. So let's say you're looking at, you have an amazing captured technology for cement plants across the world. And you

3:51 know the two or three cement plants that are in your backyard, most companies do. But then you're saying, okay, what's the potential in the US? What's the potential in Canada, if I include that?

3:59 What about Europe? What about the rest of the world? So in our database, we have now more than 15, 000 different industrial emitters and about 2, 200 of them are cement plants. That's worldwide,

4:10 156 different countries. Okay. So it's a way for them to say, how do I take the best parts of the different regions of the world for cement plants and try to figure out how can I approach those to

4:21 really sell the products that I have or service that I have? It's difficult, is it to consolidate and probably normalize all of this information and then put it into this database. I don't want you

4:32 to give away the secret sauce, but it just sounds like that's an incredibly challenging task. I think the secret sauce we have is the other co-founder in the company whose name is Valentine

4:40 Wannabush, now called Wannabuldink, he just got married. Okay. Shout out to Valentine. And so I'm more in charge of the commercial side and he's more in charge of the technical side. And what we

4:49 ended up doing was we came across lots and lots and lots of different public data I'll get back to this public data in a second. And the challenge with it is that it comes in a host of different

4:58 formats. And a lot of it is available, but not accessible. So there's Excel spreadsheets, there's access databases, there are websites where you have to scrape info. So we build a big backbone

5:09 in Python that's able to automate, pick up all these different sources, streamline it, harmonize it, 'cause the databases don't look the same, the CO2 information doesn't look the same, the

5:18 segmentation doesn't look the same, and then we quality assure it, and it's the result of that that we put out on a Microsoft platform that's called Power BI. So there's a lot of work that goes on

5:27 behind the scenes from raw data to our finished product, and that maybe is one of the challenges that we have in the industry, is trying to make them understand the value of high quality information.

5:37 This is a lot more than just a scrape of public information out there, 'cause if that's all you're selling, lots of these big companies that we have as users can do that themselves. Yeah. So

5:45 there's a bit of a transformation that happens, and that's where we add value. I think Inverse is gonna learn about you guys, I think they're gonna come by you immediately. Not for sale, not just

5:55 yet, but we're always interested in talking to smart people. Yeah, absolutely. I want to know your backstory. So you said you come from upstream-willing gas, did your co-founder come from

6:05 upstream-willing gas as well? Exactly. So we met at DMV. So DMV is a Norwegian outfit. It's been doing a lot of stuff in energy and the maritime segments across the world, about 150 years of

6:14 history. And we were working there together in upstream-willing gas, working on decarbonizing and region assets on the Norwegian continental shelf, lots of offshore assets. And

6:24 big energy efficiency requirements were coming in in Norway. And so Valentine, we were working on trying to figure out how do we develop a best practice guideline for implementing energy efficiency

6:33 on board all of these assets offshore in Norway. That's how we met. Wow. Okay. So you came into DMV, essentially, that was your job out the gate. It wasn't like you were, you transitioned from

6:45 being just a mechanical engineer into - No, so that was my that was my very first commercial wall and I learned ton in that company, both being in a, it was a very technical environment, lots of

6:56 engineers, but they were, I was in the consulting arm of that. So we were trying to leverage and harness kind of the technical expertise and domain knowledge of DV into consulting assignments. So

7:06 what was, so what was like the day to day there like for you? Was it, was it you, you trying to, hey, we, we have this asset, we want to essentially decarbonize that, was it you going out

7:16 into the market and just trying to understand who the startups and who the technologies were and then how you can ultimately accomplish what you were looking to accomplish there? I think that could

7:27 have been one angle. And maybe if we had done this project again, I think that's an angle we should have explored. But ultimately, when I'm happening was that big companies play with big

7:34 organizations in Norway. I guess that's the way it is many places elsewhere. So DNV had a consulting assignment that we won with the Norwegian Oil and Gas Association, and that unites all the

7:45 operators on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. So it was a joint industry project where all these different operators come together and we managed and led the project. project. And then a lot of our

7:54 role was trying to harness the best of the expertise of all the different companies and practices on a region continental shelf and put that into a common best practice. Wow. Yeah, so that was fun.

8:05 It was, I mean, a lot of arms and legs, right? A lot of running around and trying to understand what are the best pieces and it gets political, you know, with energy efficiency. What were like

8:14 the biggest challenges or maybe the biggest surprises, like during that time? I think a big surprise for me was that I thought this was maybe deeper implemented into the companies at that point than

8:23 what it was and it turns out that energy efficiency, at least at that time, maybe it's changed now, was still very much a one or two or three person outfit in many of these different companies.

8:32 People were really passionate about it, but also very lonely in their job. And so I think a big value of the project was just being able to connect the different energy efficiency advisors of the

8:42 different operators together. So they had a fora to experience and explain different sort of problems, but that were very common. So a good example that kind of made me open my eyes was in. So a

8:55 lot of this is offshore assets and they use gas turbines to operate to power. And typically they'll have several gas turbines because if one trips, you're in trouble. So they'll run two or three

9:04 turbines at a part load where the energy efficiency is quite bad. The higher the load on a turbine, the better the efficiency is. And so the practice is we run lots of turbines so that in case one

9:14 trips, we can still operate because if you have a shutdown on an asset out there, it's gonna cost you the big money But for energy efficiency, it's awful. So the biggest operator in Norway called

9:26 Ekwynood, they said, you know what, here's what we're gonna do. We are gonna implement a practice that says, we are gonna run as few turbines as possible at as high load as possible. And we're

9:37 gonna take our offshore asset managers and we're gonna tell them, if you have a trip, we'll take responsibility for that. You just start back up again, we'll take that economic hit. This is the

9:49 way we wanna do energy efficiency And I thought that was pretty powerful, just to say, you know what, energy efficiency, that has a priority, let's do this the right way. And energy efficiency

9:58 with the end goal being, that's like a kind of a means to an end to lowering emissions. Lowering emissions, plus it comes with a good other advantage as well. One being save energy, meaning you

10:10 save money. So lots of different advantages as well. So how did you come up with this concept for in Java? Was this like you trying to scratch your own itch?

10:23 I think I got to scratch part of the itch at DV and I wanted to scratch it more than what I had the opportunity to do there. And I was very taken away with the technical talents of Valentine, the

10:32 other co-founder. So we got together one late night and we said, How could we work more with decarbonization going forwards? And we ran a point of our life where we were both married, we had

10:42 control over our mortgages and there was time to do something dumb. So we left a very stable and good paying job and we said, We have a year to try to figure What is it that we're going to do next?

10:52 So we started in Java, the only goal being we wanted to help others to decarbonize. And not really knowing what that would mean and who our clients were gonna be, but we figured out we were

11:01 consultants from before, so until we had a product or idea, that's what we wanted to do. So we started out with consulting. And our very first consulting gig came the day after with the city of

11:11 Oslo that has a climate agency, and they're very much at the forefront of figuring out how do we cut emissions in the city portfolio. So that was our first consulting assignment I was hired in-house,

11:20 100, and Valentine got into projects very quickly after, and then kind of the consulting train started going in Java. So this was like, through consulting, you're able to, you had identified

11:33 that, hey, we want to help people kind of like decarbonize, right? And then through the consulting, I'm assuming you saw a lot of different projects. You saw a lot of different problems,

11:41 challenges, and therefore I think you saw this opportunity, which I'm guessing is now kind of becoming a Java walk me, walk me through that like when was the moment you guys like realized that this

11:53 was going to be. Yes, great question. So you're right. So we did lots of different consulting assignments, mapping out emissions, scope one, two and three, coming up with reduction measures,

12:02 public and private sector, big companies, small sectors across lots of different stuff. And we grew the company to, we were seven employees at the most when we were doing this. And one of the

12:11 consulting assignments we had turned into a prototype of a tool that's now capture map. And so this was a project for the Norwegian oil and gas association. And they wanted to understand what's the

12:23 potential for carbon capture and storage in Europe. Should I talk a little bit about carbon capture and storage? Or is that reasonably well familiar for us? Yeah, let's give it over. If

12:31 somebody's tuning in for the first time and they're not familiar with that, let's just kind of give a high low over here. Okay, so big picture is you have industrial emitters that emit CO2 from the

12:40 processes, either from power plants, from making iron and steel, from cement plants. And that CO2 can be abated in lots of different ways to reduce it. But one of them is actually capturing that

12:52 comes out of the industrial plants, and then you transport it somewhere, and then you store it in the ground, typically in the ground, either onshore or offshore reservoirs. Sometimes it can be

13:01 used, sometimes it's used for enhanced oil recovery, where you use that CO2 to kind of push more oil and gas out of the reservoirs, but sometimes you just put it permanently in the ground, and

13:10 that's a good way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That was the very overview on CCS, yeah.

13:17 So this project for the regional oil and gas association turns into a prototype of the tool. And in that very same meeting we're having with our client, where we show this prototype, sits the very

13:26 early beginnings of a joint venture in Europe that's called the Northern Lights. And the Northern Lights project was a joint venture between equinuit, shell, and total energies. And they wanna

13:37 build a transport and storage infrastructure for CO2 from Europe, shipping it up to the coast of Norway and storing it underground offshore the coast of Norway. They needed to find CO2 emitters in

13:48 Europe, and they had no idea how to do it. So they're sitting there in this room. They just thought about, we need to find CO2 out there. How do we do that? And they come into this meeting and

13:56 they're looking at this tool and they're saying, we want that.

14:00 And our client in the Regional and Gas Association are saying, cool, we can make that happen. So for a couple of years, we were developing this together with the association and we got lots of

14:10 good feedback early on from the Northern Lights Project. And then at some point we start getting requests from others outside of the association and they say, we would like access to this tool too.

14:18 What could we do? And this is, I think this is really a success story for this oil and gas association. And 'cause they own the IP, has a consulting assignment, the client takes all the IP. So

14:29 they were sitting there owning capture map and saying, what do we do now? And so they come back to us and they said, you know what, we've been thinking, we're gonna give you all the IP back to

14:37 you free of charge. The only thing we ask you in return is that you guys try to commercialize this. Go play.

14:45 That's crazy. Wow, that's a great partner.

14:49 So, a blower hats off. I don't think I've heard of anything similar. And I thought that was very grand gesture for them. Yes, they weren't set up to be a software as a service company, fair

14:57 enough, but to say this can have potential outside of our members on a global scale, that was pretty cool. So that was in 2020.

15:06 And that's when we started - Great timing. Great timing. Yeah, thanks for a bit quiet, a little pandemic going on in the background. So we continued to develop and drive out partly as a

15:17 consultancy, but partly also then trying to build clients for our tool, those are - It's a great, like historically it's very hard to kind of, I think, unmerry, at least in some part, the

15:29 consulting from like early stage software development for a product. Reason being, as you go back to exactly what we just talked about is that there's that feedback loop, right? And then for one,

15:39 being able to just see a lot of them projects, 'cause I mean, I can count on at least two hands, the number of companies that have sat in here a podcast with me. That's how it started. start off

15:48 with consulting and it was like, either we built a tool for ourselves to help our clients and then realize, oh, wow, we could just commercialize this and become a tech company, or it was just

15:57 through working with them, we realized there was a massive hole in this market. Exactly. Yeah, I think it's something that gets discounted a lot, but it's something that's extremely valuable. I

16:10 think it's a safe way to dip your toes into different kind of project ideas, 'cause a very good early test for these types of ideas do you have companies out there willing to pay you hour by hour to

16:22 try to develop something? And if they say, yeah. Well, that means that there's a need. Exactly. There's a problem around this. There's obviously a need. They're paying you to solve it.

16:31 They're essentially paying you to build the tool, and I'm gonna go ahead and guess, you guys haven't raised any money. You're correct. So you're totally bootstrapped. So it's like it's - It

16:39 checks off a lot of boxes at the same time. Yeah, so if you can find that way for us, at least it was a very good way to ease into it instead of starting out with an idea. not having any customers,

16:48 not knowing anything about testing the idea at all. It kind of came out in from, we have a consulting assignment to solve. It turned out to be a tool. Okay, how do we take that tool in a very

16:57 early prototype stage and how do we commercialize that? It's much better to do it the way that you guys have done it because so many founders get so caught up on, I love this idea, I know it's

17:09 brilliant. A few people close to me say it's a brilliant idea. I'm gonna put together a deck. I'm gonna go raise 10 million. I'm gonna build this huge team and they don't want to necessarily go

17:19 out and see is their product market fit? Yes. You know, is there somebody willing to pay for this? Are you talking, before you hit the money, are you talking to your potential customers and

17:28 saying, would you pay for this? Yeah. Is this valuable? And a lot of people think that that's gonna like kill the sale but you don't realize that you're building up significantly more rapport with

17:38 these companies by saying it's not just me going out and making money, it's I wanna help you solve this problem is this valuable. And through that process, most likely, your product will become

17:49 immensely better early on by go talk to, I mean, a minimum 10 companies who would be your ideal customers, and if not 20, and just take pages and pages and pages and pages of notes, and then

18:02 you're going to be on the right path, whether you should move forward with it, whether you should pivot into something totally different, or whether you should just avoid the idea altogether.

18:10 Exactly, yep, no, I think you're spot on. It's clear that you have some wisdom in this field already, and it's hard, right? It's hard. And it's hard, there's nothing easy about startups. No,

18:22 and it's a very honest kind of introspection, and also dealing with the customers, because you're putting everything on the line and saying, Look, this is what we're building.

18:32 And then you get to the question of, is this something that's actually gonna provide you value? And it's a very honest question, and the ramifications of that answer that you're gonna get back is

18:41 very much shaping your future. but by putting it on the table early on, at least you can kind of avoid, I'm gonna build this in my basement for the next five years, come out with it and hope that

18:50 I'll find a client in the other end. Oh, that's - And I'm sure a lot of people have done that and maybe that's what we would have done if we would have started this from scratch, but we kind of

18:58 fell into it backwards. So that's maybe my recommendation, try to fall into those backwards. 'Cause when you, if you take it the other way around, it's daunting, right? Yeah. Yeah. No,

19:07 absolutely. Okay, so 2020,

19:12 you commercialize in 2020 officially. Yeah. Right? Yeah. What's next for you guys? You're going out there just hitting the pavement, so you're knocking on doors. There's, I mean, there's both

19:21 commercial and technical tasks that we're working with a lot. So we have a roadmap for both. Now we have about 30 organizations altogether that are paying customers of the tool. Congrats, that's a

19:30 great number. It's fantastic, yeah, we love it. And I'm

19:35 kudos to the other co-founder for giving me a product that's good to sell out there and it's good. to go knocking on doors with a product that you believe in. Let's talk about this, the slight

19:45 detour, and I want to pick right back up where we left off, where you said products that I can sell, and this was something that we've talked about a lot, so we just did an energy tech night in

19:55 Midland, and the guy that we had on stage, his name's Duke, and he'd been on the podcast, and they just had a successful exit, right? And one of the things that Colin called out in the interview,

20:03 because before we had the presentations, we like to have one interview of like, hopefully somebody who's like recently got acquired, a good success story for the community, right? And one of the

20:13 things that he had said on the podcast was just like, he was a guy of a hard stop. He was like, I have to go to a sales class. Right. And in doing, he was just like wanting to, he was like,

20:21 you know, I'm not naturally a salesperson, like I don't have any experience here, but it's just, it's so important, I think, and I think it's something that's very under-appreciated, that

20:32 especially in these early stages that you have founder led sales one of the founders should be. rolling up their sleeves and getting in there. And if you're not good at sales, you should learn

20:44 sales. And there's tons of resources, turns methodologies, tons of books, YouTube, all that kind of stuff, classes, all of that. And the number one reason he is here is why, right? As a

20:54 founder, you control the destiny of the company and the strategy and particularly when you're building products and you need once again, that feedback loop, right? And so if you're going and

21:05 pitching something, right? And you're realizing that it's not landing or there's something else, like you can take that conversation where you want and then that can materialize into you changing

21:15 the product, right? And you get it directly in your face. Exactly as opposed to, and I've seen this, the founders who avoid founder-led sales and they immediately hire sales team, right? And

21:27 the sales team is going out and pitching this founder's baby, okay? And then they take this baby to the company and the company goes, we don't like your baby, this is an ugly baby. Now, the

21:38 salesman comes back and says, they don't like your baby. And then the founder says, it's impossible. How would you not like my baby? My baby's beautiful, right? And that results in one of two

21:47 things. Either they're growing tensions between the sales team and the founder. The sales team just getting completely fired and then replace it with somebody else and then we'll repeat the process

21:55 again. And then also continuing on a path of either continuing to build a product that is not going to sell or continuing to raise money to build a product that once again is not going to sell Yeah,

22:06 so I say all this to say for those of you who are the early founders or you want to go out and do your own thing, learn sales. One of you got to learn sales. You have to learn sales. You have to.

22:17 And it's at least half of the equation in terms of getting, for us at least a climate tech company with software as a service, it's at least half of the equation. 'Cause one of them is building a

22:26 great product, but we spoke to an early startup in Norway now who's gotten a lot further than us And they said, don't underestimate the need to build a powerful sales approach. This selling

22:39 software is not trivial. It's not, it's a very complex sale. Yeah, I would say it's much harder to sell software than what it is to sell consulting. I've tried both, software is much more

22:50 difficult. And the silver lining is if you learn software sales and your startup goes belly up, well guess what, you can sell just about anything in the world if you can sell software. It's the

22:59 longest sale cycles. There's a billion champions you have to win over. You could have one person in IT that just kills the entire thing. There's just so much that goes into that. So yeah. Okay,

23:11 later I feel software sales. I'm sure somebody's written that again and again and time over. And if there are books like that out there, please give a shout out to me. I'd love to read some 'cause

23:19 I'm sure I've made most of the mistakes in that book already and I'm sure there's more to come. Hey, that's part of it though. Yeah. I mean, start up life in general, right? It's like the path

23:28 to success is paved with the failures of, it's literally no way around it. the path forward is not linear either. It's all over the place, you know, and just being able to survive. Sometimes

23:44 it's just like wrestling a bear, you know? You just got to hold on for dear life and. Hope it ends up. Yeah, hope it ends up well. You know what I mean? So, all right, so back to your story.

23:54 I just wanted to take a little detour there for some. There's a brilliant detour, and I think it makes sense for the others who are listening to this also to try to find clients early on who are

24:02 willing to test with you for sure. And then we're getting back to, you know, putting your face on the line and putting your head on the chopping block and being part of the founders team that tries

24:09 to sell. So from the Northern Lights Project, this joint venture with Equinor and total energies and Shell. The reason why it was important to have them on board in the European context was that

24:20 they were one of the very early ones on to really try to build a big carbon capture and storage value chain. So they had huge value in the whole industry, but they were also super demanding clients.

24:31 So if you can find early clients to test with that are demanding, they were running us like hell. And that was great for us, because they said we need this, and this needs to be as good as it

24:41 possibly can be. It's a good stress test early on. Yeah, so we were sweating a lot with them, but it also made us then, once it was working for them, then it made it, we could have a reference

24:51 client say, these guys, they have built their whole sales pipeline of European emitters using our tool. Aren't you interested in doing the same thing? And that's a pretty powerful pitch. So then

25:01 the next thing we did was saying, okay, how do we expand this? So these were upstream oil and gas majors. And then, so that's one of the verticals that we're going after, upstream oil and gas

25:09 majors. I was just visiting with a major one that's headquartered here in Houston this morning. And the European low carbon solutions team is using our tool, CaptureMap. And now it's pitching it

25:20 also to the North American side. So lots of oil and gas upstream majors that could be potential clients for this. And the way they wanna make money is to say, we're gonna build a transport and

25:31 storage infrastructure We need to find emitters that can fill that CO2. make this transport and storage infrastructure work to make money on that. So they will basically charge money to transport

25:41 and store that CO2 for the companies. Brilliant. They've been making money getting oil and gas out of the ground first. And now they're also going to make money on putting it back into the ground.

25:49 And it's fantastic. I think it's a real success story. Is this good at it? Is this applicable for. Okay. So imagine I'm an

25:58 EMP, right, who is now There's a number of them who are building large carbon capture utilization sequestration projects, right? And so whether that be post combustion or whether it be direct air

26:12 capture, this works for both of those, correct, right? Mostly for the post combustion stuff. Okay. The direct air capture, I think their benefits is trying to understand where could we

26:21 co-locate our sites? Alongside a super remitter. Exactly. So they could benefit on synergies of scale for the transport and storage infrastructure, which would be the same. Yeah. Okay. So, but

26:32 for them, it's also more about, for their siding, it has a lot to do also with energy availability, right? Hugely energy intensive, these direct air capture facilities, if they can find low

26:43 carbon, big energy megawatt hours available for them. I think that becomes a driver as well, in addition to where we're actually going to take this CO2 and store it. Okay. Yeah. Go back to your

26:52 story. Sorry. So that was upstream oil and gas. The next one is equipment suppliers. Okay. Either very specialized, like arcade carbon capture that specializes in making capture equipment. So

27:04 they specialize in how do we build the capture plant that takes the flue gas from an industrial site and takes the CO2 out of it and makes it ready for transport and storage. So they have lots of

27:16 leads and lots of interest out there, and they need a way to qualify all of those leads so they don't spend time on the wrong clients. This really is a business development tool. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

27:27 So they're trying to say, okay, we have 100 leads. Which ones of them should we spend our time and money on to see if they would actually materialize. to 800. So you could have a lead reach out

27:39 and you could pull up this and essentially say, I don't even think you're qualified because I know our technology needs a minimum requirement of like X. Exactly. It could be thresholds. It could

27:47 be what kind of other emitters do we have around that would make synergies or scale for a project coming live. There's ways of

27:54 also connecting our information with a CRM system so they can get client info to get with these industrial assets. And then you can say we talked to them in 2016, 2018, 2023. They're still having

28:07 gone into a feasibility study. Maybe we should leave these guys aside for now. Interesting. So you guys would rather integrate with existing CRMs and not compete in the CRM space. Exactly. So we

28:18 want them to do that ourselves. So the way our database works is you have a beautiful visual interface in Power BI, but also way to export all the data into a CSV file. And then you're free to do

28:28 with it as you want, if you want to integrate that with the CRM system, if you want to put it into a graphical information system, a GIS. Yeah. So there's lots of ways to play with the data. So

28:38 equipment manufacturers, okay, carbon capture being one. Another one is iron, clean energy. That is a capture company here in Colorado, shout out to them. That's one of our first North American

28:50 clients. So that's pretty exciting. But there could also be lots of bigger companies like Baker Hughes, Babcock, and Wilcox. And they're trying to figure out how can we sell our decarbonization

28:59 equipment to lots of these different industrial actors. So it's an industry database for them, basically 15, 000 clients across the world that at some point are gonna need their help. Is there, I

29:08 just had this weird idea, 'cause you're mentioning somebody like a Baker Hughes, right? And so traditionally, Willful Services now kind of has rebranded, same with SLB, same with other groups,

29:20 is more of like energy technology groups, right? Yep. Is there anybody out there that is like the equivalent of like that, like a services group, specifically for like decarbonization to wear.

29:34 maybe they're going out and just making a lot of acquisitions of like all these various technologies. And then do like this essentially powerhouse, powerhouse of like, no matter how you've got

29:46 emissions, we can kind of like, is there any groups out there that are like currently doing that or? I think that's something that you and I should look into. I think we should do it. Yeah, I

29:52 think there's gonna be need for that and it'd be kind of offering the whole gamut of decarbonization services and products. Yeah, I would imagine you could couple that with a great consulting

30:03 practice Yeah, right, it's like that's how you start off and you engage and then from that, you've got a portfolio of just companies that you've just kind of bought over time and you start to

30:11 deploy that. Yeah, I'm surprised nobody's done it yet. Ah, an idea for it. With as many technologies as are? I mean, there's gonna be a huge need for that and what I think many of these people

30:20 are understanding in this value chain is that they're so complex that one company cannot solve this alone. Mm-hmm. Again, the likes of total energies, right? We know they're still gonna need a

30:31 capture provider because they don't have capture tech in-house. going to need a transport provider because they haven't built liquefied CO2 ships before. And so it involves a lot of different

30:41 stakeholders across these value chains. And that means it complex. But if you could have one guy who solves everything or girl, that could be a pretty neat idea for a company. Talk about that next

30:50 year. Yeah. So I know you said you met with a group here in Houston. Is that what you were in Houston for? Are you guys in here for someone else? So there's two things going on. One of them is

30:59 trying to understand more of how can we get feet on the ground in the North American market. So most of our clients now, they'll have North American presence, but typically it's their European arms

31:08 that are using us. And so we're trying to figure out what would it take to establish something happening in North America. There's a great CCUS and hydrogen expo happening tomorrow and Thursday. So

31:18 we're going to be there, walk around with lots of our existing, but also new clients, and try to understand, do they have the same need that we see in the European market for our tool? The

31:27 hypothesis is, Yes. Yeah. So, uh, how I'm curious to see this. Two things you said, you were like, for one, is it always this hot in Houston? And I was like, oh, in the summer,

31:36 unfortunately, it's terrible. And so you were like, well, I guess you just have to drive everywhere. And that's just kind of like the nature of like, Texas in particular, like you have to own a

31:45 vehicle. Yes. Unless you absolutely live in the city, but most things really aren't even in the city. It's like, Houston is two hours from Houston. I can drive two hours and I'm still in the

31:54 city. That resonates very well with me. Yeah. So, but I'm curious about in, I've never done business in Norway before And we're really in Europe. We've interfaced with people in the podcast and

32:05 stuff, but like, what has your experience been coming to the states and like how this business done differently? Like, what's surprising, all that kind of stuff? I think, I was talking earlier

32:18 today with a institutional VC from one of the old majors. And

32:24 what struck me after the conversation with her was that,

32:28 I don't know if this is used in particular, whether this is American thing but you are much more open-minded and interested in connecting people than my experiences in an Norwegian space. And it

32:39 could be that I haven't explored the Norwegian space enough, but you need a little bit of a door opener. So we had the good fortune of working with somebody that we met last year and who was able to

32:51 provide us lots of interesting door openings here. And that helps a lot. But that being said, from there on in, I have been positively really blown away about how open people are, you included,

33:02 in fact, how quick it was to say, this is interesting. Let's get together and see if there are areas of mutual interest. Well, it really helped that Deanna sent the email. She was like, hey,

33:10 can I see these guys? I looked at you guys for help really quick. I was like, looks interesting. If you're referring them to me, I know it's like the truth. Even if anybody could need help in

33:19 this space to connect people, then I would put 10 gold stars next to Deanna's name. Yeah, no, she's phenomenal. Deanna, we're just gonna keep singing your praises the rest of this podcast.

33:27 Sending chocolate Yeah, and so, no, no, but that's like the whole nature. I hit this. That's a feature, it's a feature, not a bug. There we go. I like it, I got tested, I got leveled down

33:38 a little bit. That was good. Do you have a button on your side where you could just magically reduce the chair? I wish I could, I wish I could just magically, just continually lower you as you're

33:46 talking. For those who were just listening, his chair just reclined. But I'm back now. We're back to normal. No, that's like the very nature. For one, I think it's a very, is it a culture

33:58 thing? It's a culture thing. I think it's a very Texas thing I think it's probably an American thing, definitely a Texas thing, definitely an oil and gas thing, where the community is fantastic.

34:08 It's fantastic, just very close knit, and obviously that's what we do, is just connecting people, whether it's through podcasts, whether it's through. I can tell you, it's where - Video and

34:16 events. It gives a really, really good positive impressions. If people are looking at, where should I start establishing myself in this world? And they could spin the globe and put their fingers

34:23 in some place, if it's in the industry sector. Energy industry, that combination, and now also with decarbonization, come here. They're absolutely, man. It's the startup scene, generally. I

34:38 would say, let's just speak to Houston specifically. I mean, it's totally transformed. It was like non-existent when I came to Houston. And that was my image as well. As you were typically very

34:48 conservative, kind of closed doors everywhere. But we had like one little co-working space that was in like East downtown, and they would do like pitch days, and you'd have like a few VCs, you're

34:60 like a live shark tank, and there's a lot of people there, but it was like a lot of people was like 100, you know? So what happened? Back then, it just, I think,

35:11 I think our time startups have just become more popular. I think the barriers to entry have become lower. Yeah. Technologically, I think just more resources. I think a lot of people in the places

35:26 like Silicon Valley and New York from a perspective of like,

35:31 being known for innovation, right? And so there's been a lot of initiatives that the city has led, some successful, some not. When government gets involved in anything, they typically run it.

35:44 But

35:47 I think the Rice University, I think has played a huge part in innovation and through an entrepreneurship program. They've done some public event, even if you didn't go to Rice, they have like a

35:58 business plan competition, they have an energy kind of tech event that I pitched that years ago. Wow, cool. Yeah, and then they essentially footed the bill for this new ION district. So there

36:09 was a historical building here that was vacant. It was a Sears building. I don't know if you guys have Sears in Europe or not. It was an old department store No, we don't have Cirrus, but I don't

36:22 have the concept. Yeah, yeah. You don't buy anything. They had everything there, right? They had everything there, right? And it was like the most American thing back in the day. Well, they

36:28 never destroyed the building and it was just like vacant. And so they wanted to turn that into what is now, like the building is the island and then the broader acreage is the island district where

36:38 they're trying to, like Chevron has an office there. So the other groups, like particularly the VC groups, corporate venture capital groups have offices there to interface with a lot of the

36:48 startups Obviously there's co-working,

36:51 there's

36:54 things like that. And obviously like, you know, the early rise of like we work in co-work, like it's just kind of like, there's just more places to work and there's more resources and there's now

37:05 accelerators and then like there's - You feel it's like a snowball that's rolling? It's snowballed, yeah, it's snowballed definitely. Even, I mean, the energy tech community, I think was

37:16 practically non-existent five years ago, six years ago. Wow. Shamelessly I'll say I think we played a pretty big part in like bringing the community together. Yeah But I think it is part of a

37:28 bigger movement that is that is kind of happening with with people wanting to get into People who want to be startup masochist and for and subject themselves coming from a very outside perspective I

37:37 mean it's a long swim from Norway and coming across here But just the two days that I've been here so far. I really feel it. Yeah, so it's working. Yeah, it's it's it's showing a lot How's the

37:46 how's the start up scene in Norway? Um, I think it's grown a lot over the last few years. Um, we never really considered as a startup in the sense that you know We were feet running on the ground

37:56 the first day when we had our consulting the project So we didn't go the round of you know trying to create a product or a service and then trying to find funding for it and having To pitch to a lot

38:04 of different investors. We kind of just let's try to generate some cashflow and take it from there And so we evolved in a slightly different way, but from what I understanding there's there's lots

38:13 of initiatives now There's good funding available and there's smart people And there's people are very connected to what Norway and the Nordics do well, right? Which is nature, understanding how we

38:23 align with the values of the surroundings that we live in.

38:28 And so, and of course, it's a bit of a paradox that Norway now is kind of touting this forefront of being sustainable and cutting greenhouse gas emissions and are racking in a ton of money on

38:39 traditional oil and gas business. Yeah. So that's fun. That comes with the responsibility. I've met, I've met a bunch of Norwegians, just kind of through energetic And I think it was, you'd

38:49 mentioned, you know, everybody kind of works with Ecuador and it's kind of like welcome to the club. Yeah. And it seems like that's great, right? That's a good representation for them to have.

38:55 A same common denominator with everybody that I've met from Norway is like, they was through Ecuador and they kind of brought him here and then kind of did a kind of a dog and pony show and

39:05 introduced them to the other partners. And so yeah, shut up the Ecuador. We've had a good relationship with them for a long time and I think that they've, they're not scared to try things. No.

39:14 That's the number one thing.

39:18 the CVC group is very quick to at least hook you up with a paid pilot and try some things and they're not scared to fail. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but I think that they've brought a lot

39:30 of startups in. I think they feel and they see this ability to also go outside their traditional lots of demand and gas business and say part of us needs to or everything of us needs to transition

39:41 over to some sort of sustainable energy company at some point and we want to take the lead seat in that instead of having the rest of the industry shaping where Equinor goes, I think they say we have

39:51 the responsibility to take the lead on this and they do and part of that is being involved with startups at different stages and trying to understand how that can fit into where Equinor needs to go

39:59 next. So they're doing lots of cool stuff on carbon capture and storage, but also really cool stuff on wind. So really big developer-known floating offshore wind, for example. Really? It's a

40:10 beautiful way to marry their company. What does it float on? Is it a barge or is it it was in the same way that a that a rig offshore is I mean, there's obviously a bunch of different technologies,

40:19 but semi submersibles is one way. So you have like a big spark instruction where a big part of it floats underneath water and it uses that as a writing momentum to actually keep the winter of an

40:28 upright. You can do that then in waters where it's too deep to have bottom fixed foundations and Equinor is done using everything they know about offshore project development, which they know a lot

40:37 about and trying to say, how do we take that over to wind? That's beautiful. That is beautiful. So yeah, so that's Equinor, huge shout out to them I wanted to mention Microsoft, if we can

40:47 continue doing shout outs to people. So last year, this goes back to the story of Endrava and how we developed as a company. Last year, in March, we got a call from Microsoft and we're using a

40:56 Microsoft platform called Power BI to visualize our data. And they had heard about us. We hadn't really talked to them so much before. They'd heard about us. Is this the energy division or not?

41:05 Totally. This is energy division. Yeah. Who over there? They're all CTOs, for some reason, yeah. So one of them was, he's no longer with the company, his name is Rana Shassam, and he is a

41:18 Norwegian who's been very instrumental, but over here, it's been a guy named Kadri Ume, who's been very involved.

41:26 And basically, Microsoft was gonna have a stand at Sarah Week last year, and they called us up and they said, we're gonna have a stand at Sarah Week, we want you guys to come. And Valentine are

41:36 looking at each other, and we're very focused on what it is that we do, but also can be a bit narrow-minded sometimes, we looked at each other and said, this is a waste of time. So we said, this

41:45 is a great offer, but thank you no much, we're not interested, hung up. For context, this is like the event that like all of the executives that like every energy can bring the world good to.

41:53 Basically, typically naive Norwegian approach, right? Yeah, we do good at that. So, you know, they were tough, they called us again, and they said, guys, you don't know and actually we

42:02 declined on them a second time until the third time. We played hard to get. We played really hard to get. It's something that I should have learned in high school, I didn't, but I understand now.

42:10 And so the third time they called, we said fine, we're going over. And that became kind of the catalyst and the really defining moment for when we came over to Sarah Week. The amount of feedback

42:21 and stimulating conversations we had around our tool was the drop that we needed to say we need to pivot. So we talked about in Java as a consulting company and we talked about this tool that we had

42:31 Nobody wanted to hear about our consulting stuff and to tell us more about the tool. Where does the data come from? Where are your clients? How do you see the scaling going forwards? What's the

42:39 impact? And then we started looking at, you know, some of the clients were working with the Norway in terms of impact and tons of CO2 and then the 16 gigatons that we have in our tool and we're

42:47 like, yeah, it's a different world. So then we came back and Malantai and I had a hard and long conversation where we stared deep into each other's eyes, it was quite romantic.

42:58 And then we said we need to pivot and then we pivoted basically overnight.

43:04 And sometimes that's, I mean, we've pivoted at least a few times, like hard hard pivots on things.

43:11 But it's like when you know, you know, it's like, you know, yeah, this is, it's never just like, I don't know if it's like, oh, no, it's, it needs to happen. It needs to happen. And this

43:19 is like, we need to totally change the trajectory of the company. And the longer you postpone that, the more it's going to hurt. Yeah. It's like taking that bandaid off. Yeah And even on things

43:29 where we invested ridiculous amounts of time and resources and money into something. Yeah. And you're like, I don't know. I think

43:39 it's one thing that me and Colin have been really good at is just, like, cut our losses. We're pivoting. Like, we were so focused on whatever the opportunity that it's like ahead of us. I don't

43:47 care if I've spent a year building something. And if it's not going to work or whatever, we don't attach to it in the same way. Yeah. It was like literally no emotional attachment to like any of

43:55 that anymore. That's excellent. We could learn that That for us just comes out of just, I don't know.

44:01 decade of startup experience. Is it survival instinct? Yeah, I just don't, I don't get emotionally attached to anything anymore. No. It's purely just based on, yeah, market feedback. And how

44:11 you combine that with not being so emotionally attached, but still very passionate, right? 'Cause you need that passion to be able to build something that's great. But then also having the courage

44:19 and the wisdom to say, You know what? We tried this, doesn't do what we wanted to do. Move on. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people will, I think, Hey, you know, the phone's not ringing All

44:31 right, well, why? Yeah. And over a long period of time, if it's not ringing, it's like, Well, maybe you're marketing and you're messaging and the content that you're putting out is not

44:39 resonating or it could be the product itself. Right, if the product itself is not selling, go back to the drawing board, go talk to the people, take good feedback. You know, there's a lot of

44:50 people who are very, very stubborn that could learn a lot from just asking more questions from potential customers. No, I think it's right on. So that's what we did, we came home and we had a

45:04 very serious conversation with the employees in our company and we said, we want to pivot, we want to do it very quick. We were not the best at selling this idea to them. And so it ended up with

45:15 us agreeing to go different ways in the employees and that was that was brutal as well. And it went quick and at the end of the day, I mean, they were super smart people, maybe not the fit for

45:27 exactly what we wanted to do going forwards And I'm not sure if it would have been financially survival because at the time, we didn't have the cash flow in this tool to be able to survive the

45:34 transition. Yeah. They got, I mean, they were super talented, so they got picked up overnight in other companies. So I'm very happy for them and very much respect them and the way that we came

45:44 to an agreement with the employees. So big shout out to them as well. And that was part of the adventure, right? And say, we need to turn this ship 90 degrees around and we need to do it on time.

45:55 And that's what we did And then now we're back to the founder's team and uh. It's good to have employees and you can do a lot more with employees. It's also good to be a founder's team. Yeah.

46:04 You're in it in a different way. It, you're out of your in it. When you're in it, you are in it. 100 and so,

46:15 and that's different. And I think there's big advantages to having employees too, but having a founder's team that's very focused, I think Valentine and I spend most of our days figuring out what

46:25 we say no to lots of different things And

46:29 there's a lot of wisdom in that of not

46:35 chasing every rabbit, right? And then there's a lot of power in just no, right? And being focused, I try to say no way more than I say yes to things because it's very easy to find some new shiny

46:52 object, but it takes you away from all the other things You're currently working on it can deviate you from from long-term goals,

47:02 and not to say that you should say no to every opportunity, right? But there's just like, I don't know, naturally. I've seen a lot of things. How do you say yes to the one that comes knocking on

47:10 you? Yeah, yeah, it's - The Sarah Week last year, right? I try to talk myself out of like, any time something new comes up, I'm like, I try to find 20 reasons about it. Why should I not do

47:18 this? Why should I not do this? And if I can't come with 20 reasons why I shouldn't do it, then maybe it's something we should probably think about. And especially if it aligns with the

47:27 long-term, vision, which just kind of leads into my next question. What is the, you're here, you guys are crushing it, you've crushed the pivot. You're obviously here in the States looking to

47:39 expand. Like what is, what's next for you guys?

47:44 That's another deep conversation I need to have with Valentine, but what we're lining up these days is we wanna be very focused on what it is that we do, which is to be the best provider of high

47:55 quality CO2 information on an asset level across the world. So I think one kind of milestone for us is if we can become that industry standard, that common language platform that all the different

48:06 actors in the value chain are using to talk about the same objects. If the equipment providers are talking to the upstream oil and gas providers who are talking to the authorities or talking to the

48:15 policymakers and NGOs, if all of them are saying this asset is in capture map, it looks like this. These are the emissions. This is what's happening to the emissions going down the line.

48:26 Then I think you can check off a dream So how do you become an industry standard, basically? Yeah, absolutely. To be like that single source of truth, because I think that what I've seen is that

48:36 two different organizations spit off

48:40 the same stat, but the stats are very, very different. Exactly. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So it

48:46 kind of undermines all of the stats, because now you're like, Well, I don't know what's true and kind of what's not. And so if you can - How do you build that trust in data? Yeah. Yeah,

48:54 absolutely You even see the same thing like with AI, right? especially like chat GPT. And now it's starting to, with like the web browsing thing, like site. And I know some of the other ones are

49:04 doing the same thing, like citing weirds, pulling. Yes. You know, certain things from, so that you know, it's not just having these hallucinations of what is real. Do I feel like lying today?

49:14 Yeah. Yeah, or statistical representation of the truth. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that's one aspect where we want to figure out how do we become that industry standard. And I think

49:23 these types of companies that we have on board now, I think that's a good first step There's lots more for us to do there. The second is trying to understand how do we go from a historical

49:32 perspective on trying to provide historic CO2 emissions? How can we take that crystal ball approach? How could we engage the emitters to start giving us information into capture map? So that any

49:42 given site can say, Look, my corporate goals say that I need to decarbonize 50 in the next seven years. I need help. How can that be flagged in capture map? So that it kind of says this cement

49:54 site right here the next seven years. And it becomes an urgent call to action for all these solution providers to approach these. They don't necessarily know each other. So it needs to be kind of a

50:05 meeting space. So that's a way to think about it. And the third is really trying to understand, could we make this a marketplace where somehow we could take a cut on the different solutions that

50:20 are provided? Let's say we could monetize the tons of CO2 that are reduced. Let's say we took 01 cent per ton CO2 reduced from these different companies that have connected together. Now I'm

50:33 thinking very out loud. These are just ideas that we have in our head. I think the industry standard is very defined. How to engage emitters is a challenge for us. We're not sure how to make the

50:42 business case for that. But that marketplace is also something that's interesting to me. What over time, let's just play this out. I see in the next five years, you've helped an enormous amount

50:55 of these these technology providers. decarbonize these, like, supermetters with the

51:01 feedback of seeing how that's possibly affected over time, right, and actually worked. Could you, in theory, see the efficiency of different technologies and almost have, like, yeah, like a

51:14 ranking or a leaderboard of, like, this is, like, for this type of thing. This is, and so now you can even go back to, like, it is that marketplace, right? So even if it's a BD tool for the

51:25 technology providers to identify, you go to the super meters themselves. And if they are looking to solve that problem, right, you can say that this is possibly the most efficient technology for

51:36 post-combustion or for direct-check capture or for X, you know what I mean? Yeah. No, it's a great example. So let's say you're a cement plant and you emit a million tons of CO2 per year and you

51:45 have 10 different capture projects happening around the world. And some of them are able to capture maybe 90 of the emissions and some of them are may be able to capture 40. And if I was a cement

51:55 plant, I would be very interested in understanding, what did they do at that site that managed to get a 90 capture rate? And if we can then differentiate by technologies, that could be a very cool

52:06 third party way of showing the consequences of the different types of technologies that I've implemented. I'm simplifying 'cause there's a lot of gifts and butts in that and money definitely comes

52:16 into the equation. But it's a neat idea to sort of stack different technology solutions on top of each other and say, Which one's actually provide the best emission reduction? That could be kind of

52:26 neat. I love it, man. It's obviously something that's extremely top of mind for all companies, particularly in oil and gas. It's something that's talked about across the board. Everybody wants

52:35 to decarbonize operations as much as they possibly can. And it seems like you guys have, as you put it, stumbled upon this problem. And it seems like you guys have built a very great solution for

52:47 that. And so - Thank you. Thanks to Deanna once again for introducing us swinging by doing the podcast and I hope this results in lots of new business and welcome to Houston. I'm sorry, it's hot.

52:59 That's the next step of all of us Houstonians. We hate it too. I'll try to bring some snow and ice over from Norway next time around and thanks again, Diana, for setting us up for this and a

53:08 fantastic experience to be on this podcast. Absolutely. Which website? CapturMapNO, N-O is the Norwegian suffix for Norwegian companies So, CapturMap, in one word, C-A-P-T-U-R-E-M-A-PNO.

53:22 Awesome. We'll put a link in the show notes so you guys can. Go check us out. Free trial. You can get on the website to just start playing around with the tool a little bit of yourselves. And

53:27 then if you're interested in more, don't be shy to reach out to us. Absolutely. You're linked in too. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. So reach out to them on LinkedIn. Guys, if you liked the episode,

53:36 I had a lot of fun on this one. This was great. Take two seconds. Leave us a rating review. Share all your friends, your colleagues, and we'll catch you guys on the next episode.