Oil and Gas Startups Podcast

0:00 What's going on, Wildcatters? Welcome back to another episode of the Wildcat Source Podcasts. We've got a return guest. We've got the guys from Rivet. We've got Clay and Miles. Clay, we were

0:09 catching up after ET in Houston. Miles, I'll give you a little pass and she weren't there. And you were talking about all the cool things that you guys are working on, all the success that you

0:17 guys have had over the years. It's been two years since you okay with the podcast. It's totally different studio. This is much more high speed, low drag than back then. But I was like, we have

0:26 to get you guys back on. Tell us some of these stories You guys have a new product you're about to drop. So where do we want to begin? Like what has happened in the last two years? We've had

0:37 massive growth and so when we came on, brand new, anchoring in at one client and since then, we've deployed a completely wireless system. First of its kind, never been done before. Real-time

0:51 automated delivery to end different consumers, end different clients. Automated logistics, we've seen automated well actions, automated pump controls, all built on our infrastructure. It is

1:02 purely completion space, right? Yeah, I mean, the product right now is absolutely focused, frack, drill out. We can do production. We also support, support drilling sign. Yeah. And we also

1:14 integrated heavily with Bardash. So we were the first ones to successfully real-time capture all the data on completion pads and then have it structured, labeled, transformed into real-time

1:26 consumable bits and mail. And so there's been a huge amount of stuff that we've accomplished in. So for those who didn't listen to the first episode, how do you guys describe, and maybe this has

1:34 changed since the first episode, how do you guys describe what you do at a high level? Okay, at a high level, we're a streaming application. So just like you log into a LinkedIn or a Twitter and

1:46 you subscribe to people and you're pulling that feed in and you're watching it in real time, we do that for completions, for drill outs We deploy our hardware out to sites. And then we stream all

1:57 of that data both on site so vendors can build and automate. And then we deliver that real time to our clients clouds, vendor clouds, wherever they need it. Yeah, kind of like the plumbers,

2:08 right? Just do all the dirty work. Like we set up the pipelines and things like that. Everything that goes along with it. You know, guys in the field, trucks, boots on the ground, you know,

2:17 all those kinds of things. So we don't drop ship or anything like that. So we stay due to that So service company first, just really cool technology second. And you guys had both worked in the

2:28 space. We're going to kind of touch on those back on just once again for those who did listen to the first episode. You guys worked in the space. What was the opportunity that you saw? What was

2:37 the need that was not being met? Sure. As far as working in the space, Clay was on frack for years, right? Almost 10 years. And then I was wireline and tubing conveyed perforating for years. So

2:49 we had a really good understanding of just the functional operation and all the aspects. The need we saw was that companies, all the standard companies today that you know, the brand names, Corvas,

2:59 ColdBores,

3:01 they all consumed data into their platform and then you as the client had to come to them. You had to serve yourself on whatever they basically had on their menu for you. So what Rivet did is we

3:12 reversed that. We capture all the data and then we send it all to them, 100 stream directly into their cloud. So we remove the breach potential, we don't persist that data unless requested to So

3:23 it really empowered their teams to begin building something that they'd always wanted, but now have the ability. Is there any massaging of this data? Or is it you should give it to them raw and

3:33 then they take it from there and run with it? There's a little bit, and it's really optional, but we always deliver 100 of the raw data in each payload, but then we also parse it and make it clean

3:43 so it's easily sent. So whether they're sending it to one data store or another,

3:51 We're collecting from you and from Clay and from me and we're different vendors, different protocols. We standardize them onto the same shape. So it's really easy, it's really fast and it makes it

4:01 very quick for data science teams and business teams to pick it up and shove it into Power BI, SpotFire, build their own custom thing. So you unlock all of this new visibility into the entire

4:12 completions process. What's the business case? What does it allow you to do? Is it you're more effective or are you saving more money or are you a quicker? The business case is, I'll use an

4:23 example, right? So what are the biggest costs and consumables and fracturing or stimulation, right? So sand is probably one of the biggest ones, you know? Of course, running the pumps, all

4:33 that stuff, right? You pay for the time. But one thing you can have direct control over is logistics, right? And then if you have multiple operations across a large base or something like that,

4:45 you need to be able to reduce or prevent downtime or mitigate downtime, things like that. One advantage is, is knowing, think of it,

4:56 somebody who I kind of look up to a bit in the industry, share this with me. And he said, you have to look at it at an operation as a mass balance equation. What goes in has to equal what goes out,

5:08 but there always has to be the balance. You can't be too low on one side, too high on the other, so to maintain optimum efficiency, you have to know exactly where you are, what's going in the

5:20 hole, but by getting this data and making it available, sometimes we even will skip send it to the cloud and we'll send it straight to a logistics company. So it's a sandy application, or a vorta,

5:32 I can't remember who it is, but we would send data real time to them, and they would just automate these truck rolls. So it was kind of like McDonald's, there's no inventory. Nobody's strapping

5:42 sand, nobody's taking physical measurements. So as they're consuming tons and tons and tons of sand, you're able to pipe this over to the logistics company are able to anticipate how much to bring

5:52 in the first place. That's correct. So it's just truck rolls and they're just there. So that operator was never waiting on sand unless a bridge went out or something like that or the plan or where

6:05 a train was behind or something. But what they could control, they did a great job mitigating it. So it's more about being,

6:17 like the name implies, rivet. It's a small piece, but it's integral, it holds together a larger structure, just little things like that, connecting between operations for the operator and the

6:25 dispatch company, and independent contractors, only soon. So walk me through, we've got a lot of history to cover here. So two years ago, still early on, walk me through like how the reception

6:39 has changed from like the early days. And maybe this is 'cause maybe else pitches changed as well, or maybe people sort of noticed a problem and then noticed that other things weren't really

6:46 offering what you guys were How has that evolved? over the last couple of years. You know, a lot of it

6:54 was about data ownership in the beginning. Let's prevent breach. We know that's a problem if data is the new oil and that's the gold standard, then you wanna control that. So originally we really

7:03 came out hitting hard about ownership.

7:07 What we've seen with the brokering of data on location is we facilitate safety a lot more than anything. Like we can automate and we can prevent a lot of things, but if we know where the valves are

7:19 and frat knows where the valves are, then they have digital locks in place. They don't allow them to pump on closed valves. They don't allow a wire line to drop on pressure that don't start

7:29 transfer until the actual valves have opened. And so we've switched a lot more to safety and basically layering on different events that can occur. And so that's been a big win. So if this is

7:42 valves open, don't do this or if this valves closed, do this Yeah, you don't a deadhead100, 000 wellhead piece

7:52 Yeah, I mean, I think it's also we've done a better job of translating kind of like a novel idea or something that is really

8:04 just intangible, a product that you can't see, you really can't. You just kind of have to take a word for it, right? And then taking that and then getting better at translating that into solving

8:19 a problem for they might be facing, you know, whether it be their understaffed, or they just too much or too little, right? It just, all the things that they would wanna do that they thought

8:31 about in meetings that would be great if we could do this, but only if this vendor could connect to this vendor, you know. But by going slowly and then seeing a lot of the value of ourselves,

8:43 we're seeing just being out there on locations and stuff like that, just kind of putting things together, where like a lot of it came from. You know, I make a phone call to miles. Hey, I'm out

8:52 here in such a state. What would you think lift on something like this would be? Here's kind of the issue that this guy was telling me about. It'll be great if we could do this, but I think we

9:01 could replicate it and then just start doing it. And there were some ones that really worked out well and then that's just kind of how we went. We just never talked about the product itself More so

9:18 examples of what people are doing with it. You know, a lot of our success, Jake, has really come from the oil field itself is beginning to transition. We originally founded the business on the

9:28 thesis that we're moving toward a real-time application that everybody's gonna be connected. And we've seen that a lot of the vendors on location are maturing technologically. A lot of the, while

9:39 there's still the good old boy network, the oil world's been known for, we've also seen a lot of the younger 30 and 40-year-olds who've risen with technology. Now they're in decision-making

9:51 positions. They're the ones that want to write code. They're the ones that want to integrate. And so we've had a lot of success because the companies themselves, the paradigm for what's acceptable

10:01 and what's anticipated is beginning to shift. And so it's been a very easy thing to integrate with those that are willing. So it's given

10:16 us a lot more, it's facilitated our success. And there's. Yeah. Sometimes you can't say the wrong thing to the right person, right? You know, it's just we've grown organically, right? We have

10:24 put nearly zero dollars into marketing, brand awareness and things like that. It's just been kind of bored of mouth. And then that right person gets one of you that call you, they see you're not

10:38 full of shit. And they're like, let's try this. And then we do it and just hit it out of the park. And then it's just on from there. That's how it's really happened So is that how this new

10:47 product came to be?

10:50 Yeah, what about what it is it? Pulse, pulse. Pulse, okay. So it's Pulse by Rivet and it's gonna be the visual aspect. Okay. I am cautious to say dashboards, right? 'Cause y'all went pretty

11:04 gung-ho about no dashboards, no visualizations two years ago. And we obviously think chips. I mean, we've cloned to that, man. We've clung to it. Hey, there's needs that are out there. Yeah.

11:13 And you have to address market needs. So let's just talk about the elephant in the room. Sure. What all the other people that you mentioned earlier have dashboards and visualizations and stuff.

11:22 Sure. So what is that need in the market today? Right, so the way we see it is that we have this large data stream, and essentially it's like a glass bottom boat floating across the reef. We're

11:33 gonna allow a pane of glass to configure and see. Now how do we do that? When we have all this data, so what we do is we've built this tool that allows them to come in and build their own

11:44 configurations and charts and their own layouts Instead of us saying this is rivets. treatment plot, and this is all the value we're adding, we make it configurable right from the beginning. So

11:54 just like we take a general solution approach to the hardware, now we're taking a general solution approach here. If you're a superintendent, you wanna see an aggregation of different things.

12:04 That's fine, you don't need to wait on a dev cycle, you just come in, click, click, click, save it off. Now it's available, public or private, if you wanna share it to your team. You want

12:13 third party viewers, so everybody on location has access to real time data Wanna facilitate that communication without burdening the company, man, that's fine. We've got a QR code they can scan

12:23 and it allows them a limited access to that particular data on their mobile, on their laptop, and now they can facilitate it. So we're really trying to shift the whole idea of, hey, we're gonna

12:34 build you this one thing. Instead, you can choose what to build. You don't have to wait on us. You can share it how you wanna share it. There's restrictions. We don't allow as much flexibility

12:44 as if we built it, but you can iterate much faster. Well, there's the visual piece, and then we're beginning to layer on the secondary aspects. We're centralizing chat. You'll be able to come in,

12:56 and whether you're on pad, in the office, anywhere in the world, you'll be able to interact with those people. You have a centralized location, at least to facilitate communication. And then the

13:06 next piece after that is, we're building essentially a rules engine. Event detection, everybody has. Stage start, stage stop. But company A is different than company B. So what we're layering

13:17 on top of that is, you can come in and define simple no code rules. This stream, this channel greater or less than equal to for some duration. It's

13:28 kind of like a Zapier. Sort of, yeah. I mean, it's very much a maker, Zapier or anything like that. It's essentially a no cold, easy tool where they'll be able to come in and define their own

13:35 events. So if you wanna test events, that's fine. Push 'em into your dev instance. Push 'em into production. See who made those events. See which one you wanna capture. It'll allow for a lot.

13:46 more flexibility and a lot faster iteration to actually define what they want to define versus waiting on companies to develop new algorithms. 'Cause what we've seen over these years is for the most

13:55 part, it's simple rules. You don't need the complex. It helps to have some of the deep learning, but most of

14:01 it is valve open, pressure up, rate above.

14:06 Yeah,

14:10 and that's, I mean, so Miles and his way had met was working in this building for a company or a, and a lot of, so I was more customer facing. And I remember that the biggest frustration there

14:23 was waiting for something to change. And with the customer, so the customer is requesting something to change on, say, one of the dashboards and just waiting on that. Well, the thing was that it

14:34 was a rigid structure at that time, you know, it was, the dashboard is what it is, what it is you get what you get and, well, one operator, one engineer, or. You know, one DNC manager may

14:47 say the stage isn't over until five minutes after the shut in the ICIP. All that stuff, right? Okay. But the other company is like, we just want to call the stage after we cut profit and go to

14:58 flush. Okay. So they're never happy. So the definitions are always different. Right. So why not allow them to create and control their own definitions at any time? And one functional group, you

15:12 know, a larger operators may not care about a shut in on them as much, you know, or they may be more interested because maybe they're shallower or pressure wells, 25 stages. But someone up north

15:26 that's fighting 12, five for 260 stages, you know, they're going to want to see different things, right? So even in the same company, different completion groups for different business units

15:37 want different event detection, they want different rules with other platforms that's just not possibility Now I understand some of them, I think one of them. or has a dev center and stuff allows

15:47 you to like code up something or whatever. But it requires, it's just another barrier. But with ours, it's like, if you know oil and gas and you know the parameters that you're looking for on a

15:58 treatment plot already, you know, the equations arithmetic behind it that you learned as a PE or that's available to you at work. Why not just simply say when this channel is here, because this is

16:11 why measured when it crosses it on this graph or whatever the equation ends up being translates to, you know, the lines on the graph, let them do it. Nobody knows the roles better than they do.

16:22 So let them control it. And on these particular dashboards being seen in the field live, or is these back in the back offices of both? There's a little bit of both. So miles of them to cover the

16:32 operational part a little bit more. So, um, and this, so our big thing a couple of years ago, we're in here was like, uh, democratization of data. I mean, it's so overused now that term, but

16:44 it's true it's like just. give everyone everything. And that's quite literally what we do. So we want to take it step further. So before we go on to do this visual piece, we're going to approach

16:53 it with the same values, the same core values of a right that we built the company on is access for everyone. So what it actually means is in the frack van, there'll be a screen up but the company

17:06 man and the frack supervisor, Twitter operator, what do you even call them? They want to see certain things. They want to see how much they have. They want to see tank levels. Can we complete a

17:16 stage if we start right now? No, because there's only this many inches in the above storage tank, whatever the case is. So they can go to that and see where everyone else is. Now, the waterline

17:27 truck, they want that too because a lot of places have eliminated that radio communication. So, they don't know. They have to wait for someone to come walk in. But if they, what we have it now,

17:38 I wish I had some photos for you, but it's, they're putting in screens now and it's just it's a rivet. You know, pulse and then what it shows, whatever they want to see, right? Now there will

17:49 have a QR code on the top. Now we've done. Implemented like a geo restrictions were fixing the bugs and stuff like that. And also a time to live type deal. So like this QR code here, you say

18:01 you're a hand or if you're on sand or your supervisor, doesn't matter what it is, you walk up with a smartphone, you scan it. And all of a sudden on your phone that dashboard shows up. If you

18:10 have the app, it'll be in the app. If not, it'll be on the browser, but it will update in real time At the same time, everybody else is. So everybody is in the same page. So you guys are taking

18:20 a break or they're in the john or something. You know how much time they have left. It's just that much more available. Everybody's literally on the same page. Everybody knows what's going on.

18:32 And I mean, it's just no one else says this. I've never thought about you mentioned the chat aspect. Like, so with that, like, OK, so you guys are. Is there like a countdown, typically? Like,

18:41 hey, we're about to kick off another state. Everyone needs to be able to. In WhatsApp, you'll see a lot of frack crews. Really? And it's five minutes on flush. Okay. You'll see that. And so,

18:48 yeah. I was thinking about both of us Marines, right? So like, communication is the key to it. Communication is the key to it. Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, frack is, there's still as much as

18:58 they have reduced in general, the employee count on location, the number of bodies, even the skeleton's crews, whatever that means, you want to call it So about 30 people and, you know, well,

19:10 proc has in South Texas, massive dude, massive, and permeate, massive, just, right? And do you mean the trucks is hot? I mean, what are you going to do is something, you know, it's, you're

19:19 just scattered everywhere, but not everybody is radio, you know? How many people are on a pattern average use this? I would say 25 to 30 service company. Yeah, right If you include,

19:35 I'd say 30 is a safe bet, typically. You could have all 30 people on their devices, any device working on desktop apps for DC, desktop apps for Mac, actual proper apps, you know, appcom you

19:50 found, there it is, are just on browser, anything that you could normally view something on, it adjusts, so everybody's on it. Is the, I'm gonna get back in the hardware but real quick I have a

19:60 question. Is this specifically a product, like the person who's actually hang for this is the operator themselves or are you guys doing any interfacing with any of the service companies outside of

20:11 just like giving them the analytics? Operator. Operator. Yeah, that's the model today. It's simplest. We're gonna facilitate everything, enables you, provides more safety. You know, if you

20:22 can communicate more cleanly, you don't have to cross red zones. You don't have to introduce extra RF with lab guns on location. Makes sense. We supply our own Wi-Fi network, we can run this

20:33 locally.

20:37 in far off locations or we're in somewhere where it's easily accessible, we can provide it in both. It's not a big deal. So walk me through the hardware side a little bit more without getting

20:47 hyper-technical, but just walk me through, 'cause I don't know if y'all, did y'all have that in the beginning? No, we started with Rubbermaids from Walmart and some in Amazon, so cheap Amazon

20:57 stuff. Now hundreds of dollars from Walmart. Yeah, so okay, it was walk through the evolution. That's a great starting point, right? So yeah, Rubbermaids, homemade sensors and things and how

21:08 do things evolve and where you guys at today? A necessity and keeping, reducing our time on location.

21:18 Then the guys, you know, just out of sight, out of mind. So it was more so

21:27 the, okay, the first time we went out then we did it, we were like, all right, we mean I, used,

21:34 you wouldn't believe it if I showed you, but it was a joke. to the operative, but in a good way, the operator came out and they were like, you know, cover their mouth a little bit, like that's

21:45 it. I'm like, yeah, that's it. You want to see inside it? I don't care, say what you want. And they took a picture of it and this. But the point was that we had done something that nobody else

21:53 has done for them than they've been trying to get something like this done for, I don't know, seven, eight years, better part of the decade. And then two guys with a truck and some Harbor Freight

22:03 stuff and some junk computers from Amazon pulled it off And they just couldn't believe it, right? It was the fact that it was so simple. It was so like rudimentary, like they're weeding to have,

22:15 it wasn't even DC wider. It was like,

22:19 I hot wired it off the dome like my truck. No, not really, but like it was, it was very low tech. Like it very, very unexpected, right? So going from that, it was just, it's been a slow

22:32 evolution to problem solving. Yeah, it's problem solving. And then we always try to solve the problem more than one way and then we always look through long term. CPU's are overheating, so let's

22:44 switch to solid state and let's add vents. Hey, we're having power issues, okay, let's do home power and let's add battery backup. Hey, the archables are getting run over, let's switch to

22:56 wireless, okay, this wireless is okay, it's a hub and spoke, can we switch to a kinetic mesh? So each time it was just - It's just iterative, right? Yeah, like we capture the number of times

23:06 we go to location, we capture why we went to location and we don't want to go to location. You shouldn't see us except it rig up and rig down unless there's a major issue and so that's been the case.

23:16 We will typically, on a frack job that runs 60, 90 days, you'll see us twice when we rig up and when we rig down. The network and hardware is all self-healing, so a hardware boots back up,

23:27 everything just powers on its own, the software self-healing is smart. So for the most part, nobody sees us. How many devices are actually on location at a time? Okay, so I'll take this one real

23:40 quick then. So

23:43 the footprint has also shrank a lot in our devices. And we're talking like almost quite literally like, you know, cell phone, right, the 15, but maybe thicker, obviously. I think I had a place

23:55 to put it, but what we sell out is integrating and cooperating, collaborating with the other service companies because in order for us to be successful, everyone has to be successful. So we've

24:08 gotten to point to where we'll take these small devices that will connect directly into their device, right? And then we will run a single cable of egress and it goes to a externally mounted radio.

24:24 And that's it. Like the radio is the size of a regular, you know, as you got his kid, that happy meal was like a little hamburger. It's very small. but it's a single line that goes into, into

24:38 back into the equipment. The point of making is

24:42 there is nothing on the ground, literally nothing on the ground. Like, so we don't have to deal with cable management plans. We don't have to be in those driveovers, all those things. It is from

24:53 HSE or whatever you, whoever it is at the upper, they really like it because a lot of the competitors have thousands of

25:03 feet of

25:06 network cable just strewn everywhere. So is it a local radio network? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a military grade mesh system. Deputies, you can't buy it.

25:19 You can't buy it. You can't buy it. You can't buy it. It's as good as anything you would have ever had in comms school or in the field. And

25:26 you asked how many, it's typically one to one. Okay. So if there's 10 vendors on location,

25:32 is best if we do a one-to-one. Because on our devices, they're individually powered and they connect to that vendor and they'll always consume data and they'll store it there locally. So if the

25:42 radio connection goes down, it's no problem, we'll house it until radio comes back up or reconnects to the mesh. So if a vendor's on site, right? So they're like, I guess like the frack fan,

25:52 right? Were you actually like physically plugging? Is there like, is there just like a plug-in here thing or is there a plug-in to a computer? It just pins, right? So typically we go for where

26:04 the control system is. Okay. The main part, like we get down to, we've gotten really good at doing this in integration. So we get down to like the IO level. Like as close as we can to the

26:16 pulse-eating signals, we still do that. But we'll place, so it's a single, so a vendor will get two devices, they will get the small computation, right? It's a distributed computation network

26:27 in addition to the mesh network. So a small computation device that's about this big, typically like the guys to mount it permanently. Oh, well, in the server rack, right? So you've got, it's

26:42 not in real account, remember what it is? It's a server rack. So we'll have small pieces and custom pieces and it'll literally slide in there and it just sits in there. And then we have the single

26:51 line that comes out. One connection to AC power, clean side, which is available in the server room, but that's placed in a tube because it's PoE And then a single network cable will go outside.

27:04 So you literally, unless you have key access to that server room, you wouldn't see it. And even if you went in there and looked for it, chances are you're not gonna find it. And that's by design.

27:16 We don't want to be in the way, right? It's as less intrusive as possible. So, and then in smaller,

27:26 someone who doesn't have a frack van, tastes like a wire line truck or something like that, We have even smaller devices that will go back behind their - where the cabinet mounting is and some of

27:36 them are hardwired to for power and just rides with them and it's I mean even smaller you literally if you open the door to it and look for it. You could look straight at it and not realize it's it's

27:46 ours. It's pretty cool stuff. Yeah, Clayton his ops team typically do a good job of plug into their network to switch it's a port somewhere tie in. We've connected wirelessly so they'll join our

27:59 network they'll broadcast The beginning was it like oh fuck here's a new format we've got a problem solved and figure out how to do that. I mean it is but it isn't because the way the software is

28:09 built is it's modular. You have this ingress service and then it pulls whatever it is and then I just drop in whatever the transformer So MQTT versions kept differing modbus versions kept differing

28:25 protobuf versions kept differing but it's fine because it doesn't matter we consume anything we transform and standardize it so now we have this. library of transformation tools that takes it from

28:35 any vendor and then quickly transforms it into, it's a dumb JSON. It's as simple as it could be. So if anybody's ever worked with any sort of modern data structure, it is a time series structure.

28:48 It's dumb and it is uniform, but it's boiled down to have everything that you need and nothing that you don't. What's been the hardest part of the last two years? You guys have seen a lot of

28:59 success now

29:02 Yeah, having time for family, having a life. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of, you know, just general challenges that Kevin Lee getting up and knowing that when we came here two years ago, it was

29:18 just Clay and I. And now there's W-2s and contractors and - As the company grows, the problems grow. As the company grows, yeah, the problems grow, they mature, but how do you handle these two

29:28 people that are kind of, we have a lot consultants we lean on and mentors, but a lot of it's been relationship management, structures, are we budgeting properly?

29:42 When do we reinvest, how do we reinvest? When do we get a line, should we continue with coaching? Should we not, like, you know, there's a lot of meta entrepreneurship that didn't end a whole

29:52 lot of books, not in a lot of classes. You just kind of, I mean, y'all have experienced this. Y'all have had a lot of success, but the first few times it was, didn't achieve this. So I think

30:02 we've just been,

30:04 you know, eyes closed, feeling forward. Yeah, it's, especially when it's uncharted territory, you know, for us, like we've never been to this point, at least none of my companies in the past

30:16 that we've been to this point. And so now it's all unfamiliar. Yeah. It's all new problems, but it's good though I mean, it makes more world-rounded, I suppose. There's things, I'll say this,

30:33 like things that used to stress me out two years ago. Like, I'll just like delete that email and worry about it when it actually becomes a problem. You know what I mean? Is it, I've had to adapt

30:44 and I've had to learn how to mitigate my own stresses and my own. You know, what can wait, what needs done now. But you know, then

30:56 one thing that we both have to work on is nobody besides you who owns the business, you know, is going to work at the same pace or the same passion or effort. And you have to accept that, right?

31:15 And not punish or punish, but not reward somebody who works

31:26 super hard over somebody who has, we'll say, a better work-life balance, right? You have to remember that these people don't see the business as you see it. They see this is work and they're off

31:36 work and they're done. I'm done see you, Jack. Like, I'll be back in two weeks, you know? So

31:43 not just not having managing expectations

31:49 and not getting, you know, feeling certain. And, you know, someone's able to just walk away from them, they seemingly don't give a shit. What do you mean, don't give a shit? Oh, wait,

31:58 that's right You didn't put your family at risk of financial ruin and, you know, all the stress on the family, too, on top of it, they don't give the same kind of a shit that you give, because

32:11 you've got all the skin in the game. And that being said, we experienced that in limited amounts. The team we have today is fantastic. They have made sacrifices. They have left better paying

32:25 opportunities because they were interested in what we were building And so when do you sold us house?

32:32 just stay on 'cause we can't pay them shit or ourselves. I mean, so the, we have faced that, but I just wanna make sure that they know that the team we have today, they have been phenomenal. You

32:43 know, one thing that we found that was stressed in the beginning, and I think y'all felt this as well, and I remember this story is y'all were having a really hard time, and then you were able,

32:53 you had the opportunity to buy back some of your time through hiring people, and through scaling, essentially capital scaling And I found that to be one of the greatest tools when you're able to do

33:03 it is offsetting those things that need to be done, but that you're not expert at. I write code, that's great, but I don't keep great books. So, hey, find the right accounting team, find the

33:14 right software consultants, find the right financial platform, find the right debt management system, get good partnerships with banks. We found that buying back our time has probably been the

33:26 greatest lever, getting that time back in droves for the dollars we spent. And that 100 man, absolutely. You have to continue to hire to replace yourself, right? And I think a lot of times

33:39 you've heard this quote a billion times, you know, A players who are not confident higher B players who hire C players and then you just have a shit organization, but you should always be striving

33:49 to find people who are much better at whatever you're hiring them for than you. And I think it's lost on a lot of people. They want to hire people who are, and whether this is a product of being

34:00 insecure or just maybe not be able to afford the right kind of talent. And that's definitely like a place for that at the time. But you want to be able to hire people who can come in and tell you

34:13 where this needs to go, rather than micromanage every single person. Well, yeah. Everyone said their moment too, like the guys up in the Northeast. So, oh, just to say their names. So Brandon,

34:24 he came in. I tried to get Brandon before we even came on the show. two years ago, and he's like, Hey, I love Clay, but piss off. And he's like, Hey, I love Clay, but you don't have enough

34:36 money. I looked, okay. And then he was like, Okay. Well, then finally when he came on, everyone else was over there was like, Oh, thank God. Great. And he has drastically improved the

34:49 quality of my life because one,

34:59 he knows far more about hardware than I do And not only does he know a lot about it, but he's smart about it to become, he does things in ways that I wouldn't have or even thought of. And because

35:07 of that, that's why we have, we know, but, you know, we'll go, I don't know. We've got 90 days, 120 days without having to go to a single pad for a rig up that we already did, but it's like,

35:20 but because of the way that Brandon came in and designed some stuff and set it all up, you know, you don't go with So we made the other guy's life's easier to it is just cutting. I mean, you know

35:31 It adds up the number of miles driven, the number of hours spent on location.

35:37 OSHA exposure hours, it makes a big difference of the insurance man, like it really does. Those are all, right, reducing that, keeping the guys off the road and things like that. It's been huge,

35:46 right? So, you know, let's say that for him, and then now's really in pulse. Jamie, he's a dude's stud, and he's a product supervisor for years and a service supervisor and other things And he

35:60 knows it like the back of his hand, but he also knows what it's like to manage several crews, not just one, not just a shift, but several crews in the basin. And he's been a huge help. He knows

36:13 no code. He doesn't really know much about electronics for brain. It does. But what he does know is how people are gonna use this, because he's seen it all. I mean, he came from there to rivet

36:27 So, you know, he's seen the gambit of everything they've worked for. all the major operators, you know, he, he was at a huge company too, and small. But he's seen the mall and he's like, yeah,

36:36 so you know, that's dog shit. No one cares about it. I don't care about it. He's like, if I was running this cruise, this is what I want to see. So he'll put built this dashboard. You know,

36:42 we just gave him the keys and let him run. And he built something. And then he showed to me, he was like, well, this is really cool. If you're asking about it, he's like, yeah, earn it by so

36:50 and so and so and so and so and so they're like, can I have this? Can we do this now? And so that's been invaluable. I mean, there's other people just, you never know Someone's, you know,

37:00 their value may be even higher than the most unexpected places. It's going to be your point about problem solving. I think it's one of the most important parts about building a business is you're

37:10 really just building a team who could go out and execute. Sure. Right. Yeah. If you got a big technical challenge in front of you and you're like, fuck, I don't know how to solve this. Well, I

37:17 should find somebody who knows how to solve this. Yeah. It seems to be once again lost on so many people thinking that you naturally have to do everything. yourself or you have to learn everything

37:27 yourself and lead the way and then, you know, hire people who are in it. It's actually the inverse. Yeah. And the guys that we do have was real quick. Like, you know, they're all good at

37:40 doing that. Like they are all used to that. Like if they can't find it or they don't know how to do it, they all have really great networks too. Yeah, we really locked out with these guys, but

37:49 they'll lean on their network and then we'll find somebody who can do it and we'll have to pay them Or if we don't have to pay them, we'll just have to hold them in favor of later or something like

37:57 that. It might be something small, but something that is a critical piece before we can even continue. Yeah, this is what I tell them all the time, use your resources. There's a reason why

38:07 here's people like you.

38:10 We try to find the balance between the

38:15 super smart and weird kind of savant and the friends with everybody, but it just doesn't do anything. So we've found healthy media What are you guys most excited about?

38:28 You know, this new product, Pulse is really exciting.

38:32 I think it's gonna open up a lot of opportunity in areas that we don't yet expect. I think that with this foundation that we're building,

38:41 questions that we haven't even thought of are gonna be asked of us. It's

38:47 also, from just a straight nerd point of view, like the code that I'm writing to support some of this and the code Dylan's writing to support some of this,

38:56 it's not something we've ever done. It's

38:60 non-standard, it's atypical, it's got to scale in massive ways, but it has to be healing and it's got all the distributed architecture needs. So it's just, it's fun. The problems that we've been

39:13 solving until recently, not that we haven't had them, but we've reached that sort of an asymptote with our hardware deployments where it's pretty damn good and it's solid and the hardware and the

39:24 software is functioning, It's been invigorating to the whole team 'cause hey, here's this brand new thing where all this new opportunity's coming.

39:34 The devs are excited, the implementation team, the field guys are excited, the customers are given as positive feedback. So it's generated this really cool flywheel effect where while there's a

39:45 lot of pressure each day and the pace is quickened, it's really energized everybody across the board. Yeah, he's exactly right It's, dare I say, kind of fun again.

39:58 I mean, it's been fun. It's more fun now. There are certain days. I mean, anybody that's run a business knows there's some days you just want to pull the plug and crawl head first in your

40:08 sleeping bag. Just like yesterday, I won't get specifics, but I was getting on this flight to come back for the show and I was in Northeast with the team. And I sent, it was a risky click. I

40:21 sent an email It was a risky email.

40:26 Sometimes things don't go your way. And I was just flat and just, I don't know. I can just kind of like, fuck, it just happened. Now I have to get on this plane. And it's just, you know, but

40:42 then this morning I woke up and I almost, it opened down, it's crazy. It's wild, but working together, working, you know, just I would like for other people to be able to see it because it's,

40:57 you know, sometimes you stick a step back and you're saying, Man, these guys are killing it. Like it's just unreal. Everyone's strong in their own way, right? And I don't know. Everyone just

41:05 works really well together. Miles does a really good job. But he's kind of rare actually, very rare is that he knows, you know, coding, developing in software engineering very, very well, more

41:19 than proficient, you know, right? and can write really elegant stuff in a short amount of time. He can also manage people. Those guys that we have, the devs that we have now, but then he is

41:32 also good at translating to the business value as well. Like, to me, I'd be the perfect example. Like,

41:42 we're on these calls, this and that, whatever. I'm just waiting for the part where I have two seconds to say what I think about it, right? And then it's just like miles can lay terms, tell me

41:52 what's going on and exactly what this means in timing He's just like, oh, yeah, sure, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's cool to watch that. And the other guys, too. I mean, it's really on the

42:01 software side right now that they're the ones that are pulling the card right now. And

42:08 it's nice to watch. Well, guys, this has been an exciting update, especially seeing where you guys have been since the very beginning. No one where you were at last time became one of the show.

42:19 It's all this success you've had over the past few years, how things have continued to evolve. how your looks have continued to evolve miles. Every time I see your person, Clay's just over here

42:29 getting older.

42:32 Yeah, I'm blossoming.

42:36 I'm in my golden years.

42:38 This has been awesome, I'm super excited for you guys. Thanks, man. I'm ready to do this again in another year, too. Yeah, sounds good, man. Appreciate you having us. If you wanna find out

42:47 more information about you guys, what's the website? rivercom, search for us on LinkedIn, eat their miles in clay or rivet, and yeah. Direct contact or hit the website?

42:58 Yeah, we'll, I mean, look for stuff on LinkedIn here in the near future, like, well, I don't know what this is gonna be on, so I guess by the time, you know, this airs or stuff, it'll be up

43:06 there, but we'll be putting up, you know, pictures of, you know, everything location, the different things, people using Pulse, we'll have visuals and things like that, probably in the

43:17 website where people can take a look. Let's be honest, this is going to become It is, 'cause you can see it and you can do stuff with it. You can play with it, you can interact with it. It will

43:25 be, you know, despite the brilliant pieces and work that was done to build the backend, but whatever. Love it. Awesome, guys. Thanks for making the time.