Energy Tech Startups

0:00 Welcome back to the show today. We're here with Samir Salija. Samir is

0:04 the CEO and founder of Molecule and ETRM platform. And he's going to tell me what ETRM means.

0:12 So the acronym is not quite as important as what it does. And ETRM, CTRM platform is essentially a system of record for companies that trade really any volume of energy or commodities. So it's a

0:26 lot like an ERP system in terms of its breadth. But the big thing that it does at an ERP doesn't typically do is model forward exposure. So like if you are going to buy and sell natural gas and

0:41 you're going to buy it in April and sell it in October, there's an ARB there. And that's natively what an ETRM helps you model. Okay. And for those who don't know, I just assume energy companies

0:52 produce oil, but it sounds like they do a little more than that. And that's why they need this. That's right. They typically typically any energy company. uses more than one commodity on the

1:02 platform. And it's really fun to think about modeling each of these, like a natural gas-fired power plant, buys gas,

1:12 sells electricity, a wind farm, sells electricity, and sells renewable credits. Pretty much everybody has more than one commodity. Hmm, okay. And go ahead. Yeah, and you mentioned earlier on

1:27 that there are about 50 commodities So could you talk about like the diversity of commodities that you were able to process within the platform? And

1:37 yeah, and kind of the differences between them. Yeah, sure. So when we started the company 12 years ago, we started with what we believed to be the hardest first, which was electricity.

1:48 Electricity moves in 15 minute increments, as opposed to maybe monthly for crude. And what's cool about it is it's mostly digitally traded. more standardization around it. And so it was a good

2:02 place to start. However, since then we've added everything from oil and gas to refined products, chemicals, agricultural commodities, soft metals, precious metals, and crypto. All of which

2:16 sort of act in fundamentally the same way, but power still hard. Yeah, okay. So what made you decide to then address, I guess there was probably a need for this in the market That's right, so

2:29 there were about 100 vendors in the market, all of them selling on-premise difficult to use, single tenant software with long implementation cycles, and I thought there had to be a better way using

2:42 modern tech. That was a genesis of molecule. All right, you said a couple of words there, and us who don't know software don't know what those means. Oh, but what is single tenant? What is

2:51 on-premise, and how old are we that this is the technology that it was 12 years ago? So, on-premise software is typically used at big companies. Sorry, yeah, we got a share of them. They got

3:04 mechanical issues with that, the shares here. On-premise software is typically used at big companies. And basically, they have their own servers. And, you know, back in the old days that you

3:15 get a floppy and install the software on those servers. It's not that fundamentally different now, except that you download the software and put it on the servers. As you can imagine, for a

3:25 software company, that means updating the darn things very hard. It's not as simple as hitting the update button on a word or something like that. It's far more complicated 'cause this software

3:37 does like a million and one different things and is hooked up to a bunch of different other systems and things like that. So that's on-premise software. Cloud software is obviously run on a cloud

3:47 server somewhere, but the distinction between single and multi-tenant is important. Single-tenant is just like on-premise software, except that it's run on a - cloud server instead of your own data

3:57 center. But there's still one install, you got to update it, it's wired to a bunch of things. Multi-tenant software is more like Gmail. Sign up for an account, boom, it's there. The provider

4:09 takes care of all of the infrastructure and it's all shared infrastructure that's logically isolated from other customer data. And so am I hearing some molecules different in that it's multi-tenant?

4:21 Or is everything with single-tenant implying highly customized? Right. And in here you're able to leverage the fact that there's commonalities in the infrastructure. That's right, and that sort of

4:30 leads into why we are strong at power because

4:36 power requires so much more data. We're able to throw cloud servers at it and ramp them up when it makes sense and ramp them back down when it doesn't. Got it, interesting, okay. And you've been

4:48 around since 2012, so doing this for about more than a decade So tell us about your journey. from when you started and where you are now. Yeah.

5:02 When we started, this was in the first class of surge accelerator back in 2012, I envisioned where we are today is where we would be maybe the next year. So

5:16 it has been a slog, but things really picked up over the last couple of years. And I think the reason it took so long is there was a lot of low volatility in the energy industry for a decade. So

5:28 people weren't trading as much and interesting in new ways.

5:33 And these systems have hundreds of features in them in order to make them usable by anybody. At last count, I think we have about 250 features on the platform. And we're still behind some of our

5:47 legacy competitors in terms of what we can offer. Not as far behind as we were, but they're building 250. enterprise grade features that are required to have, you know, five, nine percentage

6:00 correctness is not an easy thing. And it took nine years to get there before you raised a series A and then everything's gone fast since then. You said something interesting. There was not a lot of

6:10 volatility in the energy market. And on the one hand, I'm thinking the shale industry had stuff going up and down a lot. And the way you're caught is like there can be points where we hit the

6:22 maximum price, but you're talking about a different type of volatility I'm talking about periods of extended volatility long enough for people to want to start new trading desks or close down new

6:33 trading desks or start new companies. Like the 2014 to

6:39 2016 shale volatility, right? For example, I mean, that was just straight

6:44 down. OK, so volatility in many ways means up and down. Correct, correct. Correct. And what drove that or drives that volatility itself? I mean, interesting things in the world drive

6:58 volatility. So the Russia invasion of Ukraine, horrible and interesting at the same time. But that drove gas prices to spike in Europe and then their response to it drove them back down, among

7:12 other things. Similarly, Yuri, which showed up in Houston a couple of years ago, the freeze that we had. There were only a few days of

7:23 volatility, but it was extremely high enough that new companies being formed afterwards in the power markets are structurally a little bit different than they were before. So, do you, go ahead.

7:37 No, so, you know, it's a global operation. So how do you trade commodities that are maybe produced here and then sold in Europe or other parts of the world?

7:51 People do them on electronic platforms And in a lot of cases, they'll do them. directly with each other, with emails and instant messages, and then ultimately, a PDF sent back and forth. But

8:05 is molecule the trading platform, or is more of just the record for internal use? It's the record for internal use.

8:17 And if customers are on both sides of the transaction, well, then the record can be a little bit stronger. Yeah. Oh, okay, so it's a record. So is it used by both parties buying and selling?

8:25 Does it have to be used by both parties? Or is it just anyone can use it? It's usually just used by one party, either the buyer or the seller. Some day when we're a lot bigger, it'll be used by

8:34 both. Got it, got it, okay. So not eBay for molecules. That's right. That's right. One of the things I wanted to go back to is you were also talking about how you could have the record, you

8:45 could look at the forward exposure of risk, and that begs the question, do you provide a risk model or a forward price model, or is that something or customer get somewhere else.

8:57 That's a really great question. So for options, we have built standard industry models into the software. There's, I mean, you can invent new option models, but fundamentally, you're still

9:06 using black shows in these cases, or some derivative of it, like a Kirk's approximation or something like that. So those are built into the platform for the purpose of making marks. But in a lot

9:20 of cases, other than options, people provide their own. So we, they'll either source them from somewhere and upload them to the platform, ask us to scrape it from somewhere that's authorized to

9:30 do so, that's authorized us to do so, or have us do what's called a curve build where they give us instructions and then we

9:41 build out a forward view based on the instructions they've given us. And we're actually getting ready to launch a user-facing curve build feature this month.

9:50 You wanna tell us more about that? Yeah, so if you think, for example,

9:59 that your Katie power is some function of the natural gas prices at Henry Hub and

10:09 maybe some weather data we have will give us a formula or you can program the formula yourself into the system and it'll produce prices that you can compare to your trade so you can see how you're

10:19 doing compared to the market that you believe exists Got it, and so this is a new feature that didn't exist before, I assume it's sophisticated and complicated to

10:34 ensure it produces the right outputs. Yeah, I mean, I think everything in our system has been built from the ground up using like CI and CD, for example, so continuous integration, continuous

10:46 delivery, automated testing, et cetera So I think we get the stability and accuracy out of that. Um, and certainly our customers expect a very high degree of accuracy. So, um, you know,

10:60 probably 99999 accuracy. Um, and so it has that built in. My team is going to kill me because, uh, I like to say it's just not that hard. The math doesn't seem that hard. There's not even any

11:15 calculus in curve building usually. So, um, I don't know. I don't think it's all that complex, but it's a really cool feature. Yeah And it's, it's that accuracy that matters. And people want

11:25 to know it works every time without bugs, especially when they're trading large amounts of dollars. Yeah. So, um, do people use the software who don't produce the molecules or the commodities?

11:36 Yeah. Um, so sometimes it's people trading for fun and profit. Um, sometimes it's marketers, so people who match buyers and sellers and sometimes it's buyers. Um, so for example, there's, uh,

11:50 there's a number of, like, retailers that use our software, they need to buy electricity in advance against the exposure that comes from their customers so they don't get blown out in something

12:05 like Yuri.

12:08 So I'm asking on behalf of our listeners who are usually startups, you said there were hundreds of other vendors out there, how did you break into that market, how did you start getting some of

12:21 your first customers, and then how has that changed now 10 years down the line? One foot in front of the other for years.

12:33 I remember one month into surge lying down on the ground at surge accelerator thinking, what am I doing? This is never going to work. I've made a horrible mistake. And that was 12 years minus one

12:44 month ago.

12:47 Was this before, after Kirk told you weren't trying hard enough? Probably both, yeah.

12:55 And so, yeah, I mean, I think it was really funny. We built this cool whiz bang feature. It was a natural language processing based trade capture tool. And what I had heard in the market prior

13:11 to this was that trade capture was the hardest part. And I was like, well, darn it, we're going to go solve that So we built this really fancy natural language parser that's still in the platform

13:20 today. And

13:23 we rolled it out, showed it to people. And they're like, cool, so you can capture my transaction. And now what?

13:30 It's a feature. Not a problem. Yeah. I built a fancy input mechanism. I guess that was it. Yeah. And so, I mean, it was probably 18 months before we closed our first customer, before we add

13:44 sufficient. critical mass or even merely sufficient critical mass to get there. Oddly enough, that one came because somebody read a front page business section article about us in the newspaper.

13:56 Yeah. Use a chronicle. Oh, wow. And, you know, again, it was probably a

14:03 slog for the next nine years to build up a customer base of people who trusted us, people who we served well, and a product that could broadly address the industry. So yeah, nine years and 30

14:17 pounds, that'll do it. Is that customer still with you? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Good. I mean, I love it. Yeah. In fact, I'm meeting them for lunch today. Good. Good. And has it gotten

14:29 easier now to get customers or actually customers coming to you versus you going and trying to sell them the software? Yeah. Something like something between two thirds and three quarters of our

14:40 deals are inbound at this time.

14:44 good and not good. Is that a matter, well, I guess there are a lot of reasons why you would have been bound, but what are the top reasons someone doesn't buy? Let's ask that question, after they

14:55 come to you.

14:58 Yeah.

15:01 I know it's always budget, but usually budget is the excuse. No, it's almost never budget. Okay. Although we are typically the premium price offering by

15:11 a little bit, as a rule, our TCO, the total cost of ownership of molecule is significantly less than any of our competitors, even if the sticker price seems a little bit

15:21 higher.

15:23 It's usually a feature that we don't have.

15:27 And some of our biggest competitors have a thousand features in the product. That's the moat, that's what makes it hard to get into this market We believe we have the 250 that matter.

15:41 probably another hundred or two that we could build that would make a difference as well. So it's usually features. Mm-hmm, interesting. And I imagine, yeah, it's such a highly technical buyer.

15:52 They know that's the feature thing. Yeah, and trying to draw a line between the feature that everybody needs is really hard. It's a real jagged pinball looking thing. We've already done the 80

16:03 features for the most part.

16:06 Yeah, and I think that's the hardest part, right? Like as a startup, you're told minimum viable product And for something like this, where maybe the moat is having those 250 features, the

16:15 minimum viable product might not have enough to even get your customers on board. But balancing that customization that every customer is gonna want something different to actually building something

16:27 that you can then scale.

16:30 Yeah, that was really hard. And that's what we heard a lot about early on. The way our competitors, the big ones were built.

16:40 It was consultancies, essentially. It was custom software built for somebody and then things were tacked on on the sides and we decidedly did not want to do that. We wanted to make what was a

16:51 platform from day one and that has definitely made things hard. It means saying no to features sometimes. That probably most of the time. And it means figuring out how to give the customization

17:05 without customizing the core platform itself So we had a couple of tricks that we found for that. One was embedded reporting that was fully customizable and another was providing our API, which

17:17 allows users to do anything they want. We're getting ready to launch our sort of third trick for that, which is a data lake for customers that where they can go mind the data themselves. Oh my gosh.

17:30 'Cause I'm stupid. What's a data lake? I hear it all

17:36 the time. I don't want it to be So it is a database. where you pull in data from different systems, but you do nothing to it on the way in. Okay, so it's raw. It's not necessarily structured,

17:46 categorized, it's just there. Yeah. And what makes a data like new or different from the way it was like data was managed before? So a data warehouse is

17:58 a cleaned, structured version of all that data coming in from different systems, which makes it easier to use, but the problem is to get to minimum viable product on a data warehouse is a huge lift.

18:10 Where's the data lakes? Like, put a lot of new water. It's literally, yeah. Yeah, got it, interesting. Okay, good.

18:19 I wanted to ask a little bit about other products you work on and really how that relates to the energy transition that we're seeing here. And I know when we're talking before the show, you're

18:28 seeing a lot of uptake in recs and interest in carbon Tell us a little bit about the future that's coming Yeah Um, you know, I think it seems like everybody is starting a carbon or renewables desk

18:45 these days. This goes, this, you know, from oil companies to, um,

18:52 to commodities companies like metals companies, maybe, um, to even large businesses that buy large amounts of energy For example, Google, um, who want to produce clean, uh, want to use clean

19:08 energy for their ESG commitments. And in some cases, even regulatory commitments. So a lot of people are using credits and certificates as an interim solution before there's like sufficient

19:24 capacity available easily everywhere It's an okay solution. It's not great, but everybody's doing it and it's it's something. I'm a big believer in like, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the

19:35 good, let us put one foot in front of the other to get towards the energy transition. Um, and if that's certificates and credits for now, then that's totally fine. And, and a certificate is, is

19:44 more on the renewable generation side. Or are there other types of certificates? Oh my gosh, tell me, yeah. So for example, in the US, there's a wreck, which is an electricity retail

19:55 electricity, I'm sorry, renewable energy certificate. It's really electricity issued by the grids. Um, there is a RIN, which is a certificate for renewable fuel The RIN is issued by the EPA.

20:09 There's an LCFS, which is like a RIN, but issued by a state of California. Okay. Uh, there's, uh, in Europe, there's goos in EUA. So guarantees of origin and certificate tells you about where

20:23 something came from. It is typically, yeah, it's, it tells you either about what the provenance of something was, or it's something issued by a government that you're required to have that

20:35 represents what you can do.

20:38 Okay, and so in lieu of having like a carbon credit, which I guess is more, I don't know, well-defined, like that's why we're kind of leaning on these like proxies, be it energy or alternative

20:51 fuels.

20:55 Obviously people are buying like carbon offsets, like what do you think we're waiting for to kind of be able to turn on that spigot is there's definitively not a standard in the US, right?

21:08 Who's gonna develop that? This is really trying to guess the future, right? If it's not government, like where would that kind of thing come from? If clearly industry's looking to buy it, right?

21:19 Yep,

21:21 I think carbon offsets are a sort of a loaded concept because I think they're actually the weakest of the types of certificates that we described I'm sure they are. acquired from a regulatory

21:36 perspective in some parts of the world, but in a lot of places they're voluntary. And so because there's many different registries and registry of registries that certify and issue them, there's

21:50 really no quality standard there. And if you think about what a carbon credit means,

22:01 it's very difficult to imagine how it could certifiably mean something. Like for example, if you get a carbon credit for planting a tree, how do you know that tree wasn't going to be planted

22:13 already? Yeah. So why should you get the credit for it unless the credit incentivized you to do something different? That's an impossible challenge. Yeah. I think there's a structure around

22:28 emissions that is emerging internationally around what are called Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. I think that is a more measurable output where one of them is the emissions that, let me see if I got

22:41 it right, but the emissions that were produced in making the thing that you have versus the emissions that you will produce versus scope three being the emissions that ultimately in the entire life

22:54 cycle of your thing your customer may produce. Scope three emissions are the hardest to calculate, but one and two are a little bit more defined And I think like, for example, California has

23:05 headed in the direction of mandating scope, one and two emissions reporting. And I think that's a direction that seems to make more sense. Yeah, yeah. And that will drive people wanting to, well,

23:16 if they're reporting them, they're managing and then they're gonna want to buy offsets. Offset, yeah, exactly. Okay.

23:24 Okay, I don't know how to further question there. Well, you did ask about, oh, sorry, go ahead. You did ask about who's certifying these things There's a couple of, there's some big certifying

23:32 bodies. The two big ones that I know about are Vera and gold standard. And Vera, I think, had some scandal last year where people were upset with them for certifying things they probably shouldn't

23:47 have certified. And then people lost faith in it. And then the whole market collapsed.

23:53 So like I said, the job is hard. Yeah. Yeah, because you mentioned Google earlier. And then there are lots of these big corporates, like Microsoft also who are making these

24:06 zero emission goals.

24:10 And then they need to be able to buy carbon credits for the emissions that they're producing. So then they would use something like your platform to manage those carbon credits.

24:24 And so

24:26 do your customers then use that one platform to manage all types of trading that they do? or could they be using multiple platforms? But also like the thing they're buying might be a little

24:36 different 'cause I imagine for like a lot of the carbon offsets, it's more about reporting. Yeah, it's about - No? No, okay, you're giving me a face. No, no, yeah, so imagine if you're a

24:46 wind farm, for example. Mm, okay. So you build a wind farm, and typically these wind farms are built on 10 year models, maybe 15 year models. You

24:57 have a model that says I'm going to sell this much electricity from it over this period of time because I think this is what the 10 year forecast is roughly likely to be. And also as a function of

25:08 that electricity, here's how many carbon, or renewable units that will sell. Yep. And in some cases the rex may bring in more money than the power. Mm, and also we're entering a period where

25:19 they have like marginal carbon offset on, or some people are talking about cutting credits based on if my wind turbine's on and it shuts down. Oh interesting. A fossil fuel. You can also mint a

25:30 credit off of that spread. I think they're people measuring it today with the hopes of certifying a credit in the future. And so there'll be more of these coming. That's right. It could be

25:40 interesting. And interestingly, like you said, the rec might be more valuable than the power. That's right. That's, that is what it is. That's why we need these things, yeah. We are

25:51 definitely in the Wild West. Yeah. Well, I'm looking at the clock a little bit. Let's jump back to the fundraising journey, especially here in Houston If I remember 12 years ago, there was no

26:03 money in venture capital in Houston outside of maybe Mercury and Surge,

26:08 what did you raise that first seat round? Did you have to go to like Han and like Houston Angel Network and hold out like the cap? Say, please give me money, like how did that work? I did, and I

26:16 didn't get me money.

26:20 No, Mercury was actually the first company that believed in us. Okay.

26:25 And them entering and joining our cap table opened the door for a lot of other people So it's like they were the vote of confidence. And they've been a great partner this whole sort of 12 years since

26:40 then. There were a lot of angels that entered not through Houston Angel Network. There were people who were LPs in Surgeon or other sort of venture funds in town. I did do the circuit of the, you

26:53 know, count on one hand venture funds in town and didn't really get anywhere because we had a long way to go So there were a bunch of angels that really helped us along the way. And then I was very

27:07 fortunate and that my family was able to finance a lot of it as well. So, you know, I like to say that it was one foot in front of the other for nine years,

27:19 but it wouldn't have been possible but for all of these people. Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever try to like go to California and do the Sand Hill Road? What was the response there? What's energy?

27:31 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why should we care? Why should we care? Oh, that's a niche market. Are you kidding me? It's the biggest niche market. Yeah. Yeah. Do you ever felt like they gave you a

27:43 discount not having a team in California? I wonder about that. No, I would say the discount was probably not having a team with Stanford and Harvard on the background.

27:58 And you went to UT Austin for the back I went to UT and I went to Michigan. Yeah. What do you think was the advantage of being in Houston?

28:08 Or was there any? I don't know the customers are here. Yeah, I mean, the customers are here. Our first customer was in Houston, the second one was in Austin. So we were closer to the ultimate

28:18 customers. And sort of the ecosystem of people who could provide advice for better or for worse was here in energy Mm-hmm.

28:30 there were even a couple of ex-enron folks who had, you know, come in through surge and provided advice on what not to do. Yep. That was actually one of the best talks at surge. It was amazing.

28:41 Always, yeah.

28:44 But anyways, not for the radio. That's right. That's right. I mean, but it was a very kind and well-received talk and a self-reflective talk. Yeah

28:57 So that ecosystem was

29:01 really the advantage. You know, we have a strong team, but it is scattered across the US. Our tech stack is not a tech stack that is super commonly used in Houston. So it's, you know, it's not

29:15 like we could find a huge ton of developers here who work using our tech. Yeah, this is really the customer. So you've worked kind of remote from the beginning, hard hybrid Yeah. With people

29:28 spread out.

29:32 Yeah. Do you think things are changing in Houston on the fundraising side?

29:40 And I know you're not in a seed round stage anymore, so maybe it's a different world. So just sort of subjectively, I hear of a lot of seed funds getting started. So I'm really hopeful that they

29:53 will actually be able to deploy cash. But then last year was one of the worst years ever for venture companies to raise cash. So

30:07 I don't know if that's the case. I guess I hope that that is changing. I love what the entrepreneurial community has done in

30:10 Houston to at least put the

30:12 vestiges of entrepreneurship into play. But

30:25 you could invest100 million into a building that's beautiful. or you could invest a million dollars into a hundred startups, and it seems like we're always making the first choice. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm,

30:36 mm-hmm. That's, yeah, Texas for you. Yeah, I was gonna say, since you're doing finance, sometimes portfolio theory is hard for people, and they like the real thing.

30:47 And I think that's especially true in Houston where people like the real asset, they like the oil well, and you show up with a software business with a J-curve that goes down for a while And the

30:59 question is where's cash flow, right? So I definitely understand that mindset. I understand it's origins, but it doesn't necessarily mean it jives with the forward prediction curve that we need to

31:10 have for energy, right? That's right, and so as a startup in Houston, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place where if you're not doing physical assets and Silicon Valley doesn't love you,

31:22 you go. Yeah, so what do we need to do to convince Silicon Valley to love us? We need some more success stories. There we go. So, yeah. Or do we need Silicon Valley, right? Like, can we

31:34 build our own VC system here or an ecosystem that can fund startups? Because, I mean, you did go to Silicon Valley and they don't get it, right? So it's because their success has been based out

31:47 of software technologies and not so much heart tech or like industry or energy So it's also kind of leveraging the industry that we have here, but then building an ecosystem around that that allows

32:02 for startups to thrive. I mean, clean tech is the place for it, right? Houston has the absolute right to be the world leader in clean tech. We have everybody who knows anything about energy. We

32:16 have a whole ecosystem of potential buyers and suppliers. And yeah, maybe we don't have certain types of programmers, But, ultimately, if we want to invest our in. our city's future and in our

32:28 state's future, we have the right at this moment and we have the ability at the moment to do it. If we let the opportunity pass, it will be tragic.

32:39 Yeah, and perhaps it requires a little bit of a change of mindset from investors, right? Because they have options on where they can put their money, but it's prioritizing, building this

32:49 ecosystem. That means taking some risks Yeah, absolutely. And I think it means taking risks likely in places that are sort of unfortunately politically charged here. Like, okay, well, we can go

33:03 fight about whether climate change is real while California runs off with the energy ecosystem. Like, yeah, that would be silly. So what are some of the places you would specifically think we

33:16 should allocate capital in here? Anybody around electricity and

33:22 renewables? I think it's stuff. that we understand extremely well, especially like the big hardcore tech around it, like turbines and panels and the batteries and also the thermal gen, like all

33:37 of that together.

33:39 Yeah, I think we could run off with it very easily. And like I said, if we don't, it will be California or weirdly New Jersey, I think that runs off with it. There's a bunch of electric

33:49 companies in New Jersey. Yeah, interesting. Well, I think the original Edison Electric's out there And they have Princeton right next door, right? So.

33:59 This is maybe a little bit of a tangent, but I was curious, I mean, since you work with energy and like the energy prices and being able to provide energy where it's needed, how do you think, you

34:13 know, this transition now to a lot of EV vehicles, electric cars is gonna impact the market? I mean, I think it'll only increase electricity that's needed, and because grids and traditional

34:29 generation are so expensive,

34:33 we'll see a lot more distributed gen, which means a lot more people playing in these markets. So it may not be a city size utility anymore. It could be a 12 block size utility that plays in these

34:47 markets. So I suspect what we'll see is retail contracts for some of the things are wholesale only becoming available.

34:54 Interesting. So I guess, when you think about the Houston innovation ecosystem, is there something you're most proud of?

35:06 I'm most proud of the people who fought through. And that's Kirk, by the way. Anyone who's asking Kirk's over

35:15 For the people who fought through and made something on the other side. And, you know, some really scored funding round. Like the dudes at cart, for example, whatever they would ever like pixie

35:28 to us they put together has really made a lot of people believe in them and Kudos to them. Yeah. Yeah, and and I think In a very huge stoning fashion sometimes those folks don't like ring the Or

35:42 they don't blow their own horn that much like broad reach like did a massive Outcome for them gosh six months ago. Yeah, and I don't think they've done a victory lap around Even on the website

35:53 exactly right and in some ways To the credit of like how do we convince people in so like a valley that they need to pay attention the challenges? We don't we don't market those and wins and I would

36:06 love to bring the guys on the card on the show But I don't do energy. So yeah, it's like not relevant It's

36:12 good to hear them coming back The other thing I'm starting to hear a lot of so if you if you run a startup of of our sort of size you'll start getting in bounds from private equity firms from around

36:25 the country. They've gotten a lot more frequently and they have gotten a lot more informed about energy lately. And I think, and I'm not exactly sure why. I think that some other companies in our

36:39 market are getting ready to transact, but I also think that energy is an interesting place all of a sudden for private equity and venture companies around the country So it may be that we have a

36:52 moment and that money is coming inbound from elsewhere. Thinking about Houston generally, are there any hidden gems that people need to know about? Company wise. Or lifestyle wise. I mean, every

37:09 Houston is the best place to live.

37:13 We have, probably the biggest thing for me about Houston is that it's diversity.

37:23 I grew up in a small town and I went back for my reunion a couple of years ago and I had, I guess I had forgotten that I live in one of the most diverse places on earth. I went back and, you know,

37:39 people are kind and generous, but they still thought I was a little weird. Like, you know, aren't you one of those people from,

37:49 friends would be like, well, aren't you one of those people from that side of the world?

37:56 Sure.

37:59 And it doesn't mean we're better than anybody else, but it does mean we're used to being around people of different shapes and sizes and colors and creeds and stuff like that. And I love that so

38:09 much about Houston. I'm probably the only other place I've been in the world that has that level of diversity would be London. And so when people from London ask me about what I like about Houston

38:18 and I say that it's like London, they look at me with like, New wildered eyes, like are you kidding me? I was gonna say that the chicken was - Where's the culture? Better.

38:27 Deshume, man, Deshume. No matter what, as he said - That's the best place. My gosh, I think I did make a trip once to London to stop in for Deshume on my way to France before that - Absolutely,

38:40 yeah, I remember. It's so good, they have - Anyways, we're not talking about London, we're talking about Houston. You know what, our food is equally as good. Yes. What's your favorite

38:48 restaurant? In Houston? Yeah. Gosh, there's so many to choose.

38:54 The one that I hit every week, it's gonna sound super conventional, but my wife and I hit it almost every week is Barnaby's. It is American Fair, but it is solid American Fair, it is always good,

38:56 and it's

39:10 comforting. But, other favorites include Nymph as a navigation, Mm-hmm.

39:19 Guadalupana, Chapultepec Lapita. Like, a huge fan of Tex-Mex. There's a ton of great stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did not realize Tex-Mex was a thing until I moved to Houston. Yeah. And then I

39:27 had it. Yeah. 'Cause you're in Boston and it's like Tex-Mex is like, not good. Oh, it's like Taco Bell. It's like Taco Bell. It's like Taco Bell. It's like Taco Bell. Yeah. Oh, there's

39:37 actually flavor. Yeah. And there's crispiness and there's, it's not sloppy tacos. Anyways, no, the Tex-Mex, for sure Good.

39:48 We talked a little bit about funding gaps. Are there other gaps in the Houston ecosystem that you've kind of come to realize over your journey over the last 12 years? Definitely some tech gaps. So

39:59 a lot of the developers and engineers that we encounter here are coming from large companies, which is awesome. But those are the people who hire developers here. And that means that the Tex-Tex

40:11 are largely Java andnet. Old school It's cool.

40:16 And what's so weird, and I think you've been long, around long enough to know this, Jason, what's so weird is that back in the day, Java was, you know, the experimental thing that you were the

40:27 new thing that you were doing things with, and now it's used for performance. But, okay, yeah. I remember the JVM back in the day. There's no way that was a performance thing. Yeah, yeah. So

40:38 there's a lot of Donut and Java developers here, and it would be really awesome if we could, if we were able to start finding folks, Python experience, Rails experience, Postgres, things

40:51 that are, that the rest of the tech world is using, 'cause, well, that's what we use. So I wanna ask a slightly different direction.

40:60 It's funny 'cause I learned Donut Java. I learned on C and I learned Donut Java. And that was 20 years ago. So it's like, okay, old school technology. I actually just started picking up Python.

41:10 I'm amazed how easy it is. Oh, it's amazing I don't. Why are we still using those old stuff? It's terrible. Only Python, but part of the reason to be able to pick it up is 'cause chat GBT is

41:19 ridiculous at explaining to you what you need to do. Do you think that could change the game for software development in Houston if people learned how to use GBT to augment themselves? I think it,

41:35 yeah, I think it changes the game in a lot of ways, like

41:40 learning, like you mentioned, but also rewrites, so I saw it. I was probably targeted this ad this morning, but it was from IBM and they have a service a part of their Watson franchise that

41:55 allows you to rewrite your cobalt apps in Java. And you're like, Oh, that's so valuable. Press a button and like, yeah,

42:05 yeah. So, I mean, it obviously needs to be human supervised, probably, but that would be a great transition for people learning a new language And so, people don't know, Colball is like. a

42:14 software language from like 60 years ago, 50 years ago. Something like that. And that was something where a lot of foundational systems worked on it and no one ever upgraded, it couldn't work.

42:25 And still do today. And they still use it. Yes, yeah, yeah. Like your bank. Yes, the banks, yeah, the banking systems. Yeah, that's ridiculous. I mean, it's needed. We gotta get off

42:34 those systems. I can understand where that's translation. Yeah. It's a perfect use case. Yeah, interesting thing I guess as we wind down, is there one thing that the audience could do to help

42:46 support you in what's next? I think obviously we would love referrals to anybody who is trading energy and commodities around the country, around the world.

42:58 I think, you know, remembering us as a Houston tech company and supporting us the way you would any other Houston tech company, that's really all I could ask for We love Houston, we love being

43:12 here. No plans to move anytime soon, and whatever we can do to support the Houston Tech ecosystem, we'll be happy. Good. How can they reach out to you and learn more about your work? Yeah, just

43:25 hit me up on LinkedIn. You can look at my name on LinkedIn, send me a message.