Chuck Yates Got A Job

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:27:16
Unknown
That's great. It starts with an earthquake. Birds and snakes and airplanes. Lenny Bruce is not afraid. Sing along. Eye of the hurricane. Let's see yourself turn well. Turns out blah blah blah blah. It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine. How are we eye on. We're about to have free drinks that I'll be paid for.

00:00:27:18 - 00:00:37:12
Unknown
It's a Thursday night. Charles just crossed it. Ian, how are we doing?

00:00:37:14 - 00:01:02:12
Unknown
All right, everybody. And as the first half of that. Right, it's the end of the world. Pro con doesn't matter. The world's ending, right? I'm not that guy. I just feel fine. Although I will open up since we become so close. I'll go ahead and share therapy. Yesterday. Therapist is like, how are we doing? Chuck and I go, well, next week I will be 58 years old.

00:01:02:14 - 00:01:30:00
Unknown
I remember going to Gene Shepard's birthday party, his 40th birthday party. I was 30 years old. I looked across the room and saw the oldest motherfucker I'd ever seen in my life. It doesn't feel that old anymore. I got publicly fired a few years ago. It did make the Wall Street Journal, so I got that going for me.

00:01:30:02 - 00:02:03:04
Unknown
My daughter, my baby, Kelly, my my third left to go to college last week. The first two left, whatever their pains in the asses. But, Kelly, it's getting to me. And I have spent the last ten years trying to get a Victoria's Secret model to be the second Mrs. Yates so far, very unsuccessfully. So a few years ago, I was sitting there in that state going, what would a reasonable man in my position do?

00:02:03:06 - 00:02:36:04
Unknown
Join a couple of boards, maybe buy a boat, go to the country club, get a scotch, tell the same three stories every night, but nope. I decided to co-found an AI software company about two and a half, three years ago in the energy business. While every single energy company on the planet was banning AI from their existence. I told my daughter, Charlie, that I'm like, Charlie, we're going to start a software company.

00:02:36:05 - 00:03:00:07
Unknown
She goes, oh my God, that's the worst thing I've ever heard. You're doing it with your ego and my inheritance. But I am having tons of fun. And if I may be so bold, since we're all friends, can I go ahead and share a few lessons that I've learned along the way? We're going to harken back to 1982.

00:03:00:09 - 00:03:29:00
Unknown
The Elders at Saint John's United Methodist Church decided that the way to protect the kids, the junior high kids of Richmond, Texas, from the gritty streets, was to sponsor a dance. So there I am on a Saturday night at the dance. Seventh grader. I know the rules, right? You go up during a slow song and you ask a girl to dance right?

00:03:29:02 - 00:04:02:00
Unknown
To the greatest slow build, slow song on the planet. In the air tonight, Phil Collins comes on and I strode confidently across the dance floor to Bobby Joe. Bobby Joe was blond, blue eyes. And let's just say she hit puberty way before anybody else did. Right. Look during the eyes and said, would you like to dance? And she looked back at me and said, I need to talk to my friends.

00:04:02:02 - 00:04:28:09
Unknown
Turned around. This is a true story. Thanks for laughing at my trauma. Turns around, goes and caucuses with her friends right? And I'm sitting there and y'all all know the moment. That song. Right? Three minutes and 40s in, like, the greatest drum intro of all time. Right, right. That happened. And I'm sitting there in the middle of the dance floor by myself.

00:04:28:11 - 00:04:51:18
Unknown
Do I air drum it like I normally would, or do I sit there and look pathetic? I went with pathetic. And so I'm sitting there and the song slowly getting over. And Bobby Joe walks back and she looks me in the eyes and says, I can't dance with you. Like it was a permitting issue or something, I don't.

00:04:51:18 - 00:05:15:06
Unknown
I. So I went back, hung out on the wall with two other losers and watched the events unfold unfold for the rest of the night. Now, I learned the lesson. If one junior high girl will dance with you, they'll all dance with you. If not one junior high girl will dance with you. None of them will dance with you.

00:05:15:08 - 00:05:41:06
Unknown
So obviously that has a lot of lessons for an AI software startup. The obvious. The obvious one is you got to do anything to get your first client right, customer, whatever it is. But there's another, more important lesson there. What I did was I went up and I asked Bobby Joe to dance. Right. And she went and talked to her friends.

00:05:41:08 - 00:06:05:15
Unknown
Now, she didn't need her friends to tell her whether she could dance or not. She needed their permission. Right. So do I have any old white guys in the room? That's the running joke at Clyde. I have to go talk to the old white guy. You know, send Chuck in. Old white guy. If you're running a company, your employees don't need training.

00:06:05:17 - 00:06:33:21
Unknown
They don't need instruction. They need permission. That be. Don't be Bobby Joe. Give them permission. There's also a little deeper part of the story here that I should have learned. That was really important. When you go and you talk to Bobby Joe, I just said you want to dance. I needed to feed her the story to tell her friends.

00:06:33:23 - 00:07:00:18
Unknown
Do you want a dance, Bobby Joe? I have HBO unscrambled. They're like 12 people that got that. That was a major flux back in 1982. I could have thrown out. I have an Atari with paddles. I could have, like, thrown out my mom. Lots of strength tab. I mean, I could have gone all out. But that's incredibly important when you're talking to your champion.

00:07:00:19 - 00:07:20:18
Unknown
You've got to arm your champion with the story they're going to tell their stakeholders. And believe it or not, you know who the best person on the planet is at doing that. It's stand up comedian Jay Leno. Do you ever watch Jay Leno when he does a standup bit? He always does this to the audience. Hey, we get it, right.

00:07:20:23 - 00:07:46:04
Unknown
They don't. And that's the whole key. And by the way, do we have any founders in the room? Who founders. All right. When you go and approach venture capitalist, you think junior high girls are bad. Oh my God. They are like them on steroids. Like 100 acts that you talk to a VC. Have you found a lead yet?

00:07:46:05 - 00:08:13:23
Unknown
Who else are you talking to? What did they say? I swear to God. In an investor committee meeting. When one venture capitalist gets up to go to the bathroom, they all do. Okay. Lesson number two. Labels actually matter. So when I got fired, I had to update my LinkedIn page. Right. And LinkedIn makes you have a title, right?

00:08:14:00 - 00:08:39:18
Unknown
And I'm sitting there going unemployed dude. Now, that doesn't sound right. You know, I didn't I wasn't homeless. I thought about evacuee and just kind of being a snarky dude. I was like, Galactic Viceroy. So I put that in as my title. I kid you not, I got, like, 100. Congratulations. Congratulations on the new gig, Chuck. And I just started going back and forth with some people.

00:08:39:18 - 00:09:03:02
Unknown
I went back and forth with Allen Gaines. I'm like, well, you know, I'm just chasing my dreams. Allen. He's like, Chuck, I know you'll crush it. In fairness, Allen might think I'm batshit crazy enough to be going to space, so we'll give Allen a break on that. So anyway, I got booted. I started a podcast because, as you can tell, I love to hear myself speak.

00:09:03:04 - 00:09:24:14
Unknown
I'd be doing this if y'all weren't here. And I had digital wildcatters published. And anyway, Colin McClellan was running Digital Wildcatters. And after about six months of him publishing my podcast, I just called one day and I said, hey, Colin, I'm going to start showing up at the office. And he goes, man, that'd be really cool. Why?

00:09:24:16 - 00:09:45:06
Unknown
And I go, I don't want to start day drinking because I'd be really good at that. I'm sure I will crush that. And so let's kind of fast forward to where I am with collide. Here's some fun facts. Every share I own in the company I have cut a check for. I have never been given a share for anything I've done.

00:09:45:08 - 00:10:17:03
Unknown
I've never taken a dollar out. I don't draw a salary, although that may not actually be true. I do think they have to pay me minimum wage for ten hours a week, so that I qualify for the health care insurance plan. But let's face it, that's not even going to cover my wine bill tonight at Pappas. So I still don't feel like I've taken anything out in about a year and change ago when we were going out and looking for a venture capital.

00:10:17:05 - 00:10:39:07
Unknown
It was the craziest thing on the planet. VCs were sitting there looking, going, who is this guy? That's like the largest shareholder. Why is he showing up at the office? What does he do? And Colin's like going, are you kidding me? Dude has the best Rolodex and energy. He's down there earning his keep every day. He's cutting checks to support us.

00:10:39:09 - 00:11:02:14
Unknown
True story. Jacob was there. We were not going to make payroll back in 21. And in about a month. And we were kind of looking out and we were trying to go, how can we make some money? So we decided to throw a crawfish boil and get sponsors and we did it. We couldn't find a bar that would extend us credit so that we could have the event there.

00:11:02:14 - 00:11:26:11
Unknown
So we had the crawfish boil at my house. This is what I was doing for Clyde, right? And all the VCs just. Oh, this is so horrible. Who is this guy? And then we came upon this incredible idea. You know what? We're going to list everything the same about Chuck Yates, except we're going to call him a co-founder.

00:11:26:13 - 00:11:54:19
Unknown
And literally now it's the greatest part of the story. Hey, look at this. You got a former private equity bro who's co-founder. He's working hard. Not taking a salary. Same dude, same Rolodex, same work ethic. Simply a label changed. And if you think that's just a people problem, it's really not. I got news for you. It's also why half your clawed prompts come back wrong.

00:11:54:21 - 00:12:23:22
Unknown
You're looking at the label. You gave it the title, but you skipped the story. Labels matter. All right. Lesson number three. Marketing. And let's call it what it is. Marketing is just storytelling, right? In the energy business, we suck at it. We are the worst at it. Now we come by that honestly, right? I mean, if you think about it, oil and gas, we produce a barrel of oil.

00:12:23:23 - 00:12:42:23
Unknown
We're a price taker, right? We just sell it into the market. And the price we get is based on our crude quality and our crude quality. God put it underneath the ground before we dug it up. Right. So we can't do anything about that. It has to do with transportation costs. How close are we to the refinery? And that's the price we get, right?

00:12:43:01 - 00:13:05:07
Unknown
It's not like Nike versus Adidas. Hey, man, Jordan's better than Kobe. And I'm going to fess up to this. So I use Claude a lot to write things. And I've downloaded all my podcast in there, and I do a, I do a, I call it a weekly blog, but it's whenever I want to called Old Man Coffee.

00:13:05:07 - 00:13:30:05
Unknown
So I write a lot. If you're a co-founder and you have to do a blog. So I'm writing a whole bunch. I use Claude a lot and it I I'm very hands on with it, but it still writes 1 or 2 lines a blog. Then I'm like, damn, I wish I had written that. So I'm it wrote one line in this speech, then I'm like, damn, I wish I would have written this is the line and it's a killer line.

00:13:30:07 - 00:13:55:13
Unknown
We suck so bad in oil and gas marketing. Our most famous brand is West Texas Intermediate. We named our flagship product a C-Plus. That's so good. How are y'all not laughing? That's hysterical. What is wrong with y'all? That's funny. All right, so we. So we're a price taker, so we don't have a marketing culture. We're run by a bunch of engineers.

00:13:55:13 - 00:14:20:19
Unknown
I love my engineers, but engineers are the worst. They think a story is something you have to tell a car. I mean, oh, you laugh at that. That's where this audiences of sexual abuse jokes. Okay. All right. Level set. Nice party you guys are throwing. No, no, no, but they use facts, figures and reason, right? And storytelling is about connecting on an emotional level.

00:14:20:21 - 00:14:41:01
Unknown
The other thing I think that really hurts us when it comes to marketing, when we really have something cool to crow about, like, oh my gosh, this success story, that success story. Oil prices are usually really high and that's usually causing a recession. We're countercyclical to that degree, so we kind of have to keep our mouth shut about things.

00:14:41:03 - 00:15:09:16
Unknown
But anyway, we come by our sucky ness legitimately. That being said, it makes distribution just brutal for energy software, right? We came at it a different way. We started off life as a media company. We were basically publishing ten podcast. We were doing live events. We used to do these things called Energy Tech Night to think Shark Tank meets WWE, and we'd fuel it all with beer and pizza.

00:15:09:16 - 00:15:33:06
Unknown
But we wound up building this community and dare I even say it's a cult. And we've got about 11,000 people a day now on our collide community website. Go check it out. Collide radio and they're talking about energy every day, problems they've got. Hey, what are you seeing in this basin in terms of work overs, etc.. So it's pretty cool.

00:15:33:11 - 00:15:59:03
Unknown
But we wound up building distribution before we even had a product. Now we did it inadvertently, but hey, I'll take it. But the key lesson here that we need to focus on, if you think about it, historically, software was a static piece of technology, right? You got handed software and said, hey, learn how to use it. And today it's dynamic.

00:15:59:05 - 00:16:22:02
Unknown
In fact, the best way to get the most out of software, AI software is to tell it a story, to interact with it, to prompt it, to talk about the art of the possible with it. I'm stealing your line, Leon, because it's a great one. Abundance to talk about abundance. It's great. And I think energy just skipped that part of its life story.

00:16:22:04 - 00:16:57:11
Unknown
So if you can tell a story and energy, it's not table stakes. That's alpha. Lesson for the clock resets. I'm going to harken back to, an investor committee meeting. Gosh, probably 15 years ago, 17 years ago. Silver Hill was coming up and Bob Sinnott, who was the CEO of Kane Anderson on our investment committee, said, how in God's name are we going to back all these kids in their 30s?

00:16:57:13 - 00:17:24:15
Unknown
And I said, well, Bob, my God, Jason, who's 29 years old, he's been a drilling engineer in Canada for the last seven years. He's drilled 400 horizontal wells. He's designed them, executed them, done the completions, got them flowing and he's done more than anyone else in the industry because we've only been in the shale revolution now about 7 or 8 years.

00:17:24:17 - 00:17:47:06
Unknown
You sent me a management team last week to talk to. They were in their 50s. They were smart, experienced, had a history of building successful companies. When I asked them, when's the last time you drilled a horizontal well, they said they'd never done it. I go, who are we really going to back these days, Bob? Looking at these plays, to his credit, Bob said, fair enough.

00:17:47:08 - 00:18:07:11
Unknown
And if you spent more than 30s with me, you know that the Silver Hill deal was bad ass. We sold for $2.5 billion to RSP. Front page of the Wall Street Journal. So that was like the good way to appear in the Wall Street Journal. But I think the key takeaway from that was you don't hire years of experience.

00:18:07:12 - 00:18:36:10
Unknown
You hire reps at the frontier. And so Jim and I is what, three years old. Everybody's clock reset on that day. Right. Everybody's. And so youngsters out there, you have never been positioned better to make a contribution to your organization, to start your own company. Because you guys have been doing this and a lot of us haven't. So take that to heart.

00:18:36:12 - 00:18:58:19
Unknown
And the aforementioned old white guys in the room, that 22 year old who spends all weekend Claude coding is way more valuable to your organization right now than that 30 year old veteran who chisels things on a tablet and hopes they don't get automated out of work.

00:18:58:21 - 00:19:34:03
Unknown
And I'm a tear up here. Lesson number five. 13 years ago, last week, the closest thing I'll ever have to a son passed away, James Broach. He died of after three years struggle, a brain cancer. I hired him right out of school. So for in his 15 years, his professional career, he. Aside from him going to business school, he worked for me at Stevens and then worked for me at Kane Anderson.

00:19:34:05 - 00:20:00:12
Unknown
And it was the most horrific thing I've ever seen him struggling through it. But he handled it was such grace and class and dignity that it truly was an inspiration to me. It was pretty amazing because, I mean, let's face it, had that been me? I have blown it all on blow and hookers. Right? That's supposed to get a bigger laugh.

00:20:00:13 - 00:20:25:15
Unknown
It's worse. It's called a release valve. I went serious on you, and I released you so you could laugh to it. And the reason I bring up James is one. He's amazing. And I, I thought about him a lot last week, but one of the things that's going to be easy to do in this AI euphoria is to get so caught up in status.

00:20:25:17 - 00:20:54:02
Unknown
What job do I have? Did I get promoted? How much money I make, all the prestige and all that. And I just kind of harken back to literally just grabbing a cup of coffee with James at the end of it. You just wanted to be a better person. None of that stuff mattered. And so the one ask, I'm going to have this group tonight because I think we've got 500 people here, 400 people or something like that.

00:20:54:04 - 00:21:17:22
Unknown
The one ask and this is serious on my part while we go through our AI journey, while we do all this. Can we all just look at it through the lens and the commitment of let's just be better people while we do it? And I mean, thank you. I mean, that series of.

00:21:18:00 - 00:21:35:21
Unknown
So anyway, my head of, engineering. Sam, I made a deal with him. I said I need to learn to cloud code because I'm not going to be that guy. I'm not going to go out and try to sell people AI, and not ever having done it wouldn't put it past me to do that. But I need to learn to cloud code.

00:21:35:23 - 00:21:58:20
Unknown
He goes, great. I said, let's go away for the weekend. As weird as that sounds. We did it. And what we did is we went to Battle Creek, Michigan, and here was my pitch. We were going to go to Battle Creek, Michigan. We're going to fly into Detroit. We're going to eat a Detroit style pizza. We're going to get up the next morning, drive to Battle Creek.

00:21:58:22 - 00:22:18:04
Unknown
That night, we're going to eat a big steak, nice bottle of wine, and we're going to go see David Lee Roth in concert. But on all the moments, we're not eating Detroit style pizza, eating that state, drinking that wine, watching David Lee Roth. You're going to teach me to call it kid. And we sat there and we clawed code it all weekend.

00:22:18:04 - 00:22:37:09
Unknown
We actually built a blackjack game, because Sam's whole take is, let's not automate a workflow that sucks. Let's do something fun. I know how to play blackjack. I'm actually really good at it. So we built a game and we did all any and his whole thing was, let's break the game, let's do this. And so we added wild cards to the game.

00:22:37:11 - 00:22:58:16
Unknown
We made the, the dealer speak in Dennis Miller isms. We put my picture on every card. It was actually a lot of fun, but we spent the whole time card coding. It's a lot more of the type engineering issues we have at collide. I swear to God, if there's a client out in the audience. Ryan, we will never use my code.

00:22:58:16 - 00:23:27:08
Unknown
I swear I'm not coding, but it helps me to, to understand it. But I got to circle back to David Lee Roth because 13 year old Chuck would have been really pissed at 57 year old Chuck for not going. So we went and it was awesome. He sat there and embarrassed himself all night long. I mean, every gyration that you could imagine that you could be mortified that a 71 year old man, he did in spades.

00:23:27:10 - 00:23:48:11
Unknown
But it was just glorious. I mean, he was up there. He basically said, hey, I know the music business should show. I know that this is whatever it is, but hey, man, I'm here for it. And he gave it his all. That's the second act I want to have in life. There. All right. Houston, Texas. Coolest place on the planet, right?

00:23:48:11 - 00:24:08:12
Unknown
We've got no zoning? Nope. Yes. No, but nobody can tell us what to do with our land, right? We're the most diverse city in America. And, look, we have racial problems here. I don't want to, like, try to gloss over it, but if you really think about it, we skipped the major race riots of the 60s and 70s.

00:24:08:12 - 00:24:30:01
Unknown
For the most part, we all get along. I think the city has always taken the position of, hey guys, let's just do a lot of business together and eat each other's food. My favorite story about race relations in Houston is when Charles Barkley got traded here, he went to join River Oaks Country Club and somebody asked him, hey man, what was that like?

00:24:30:01 - 00:24:48:19
Unknown
He said, well, it was kind of cool. They didn't care that I was black. They just wanted to know I was rich. So we all generally get along really well. We're the energy capital, which means what do we do? We spend a millions of dollars drilling a well, and then we turn it on and see what we got.

00:24:48:19 - 00:25:08:12
Unknown
So were these wild eyed optimists. So literally, there is no better place on the planet to implement AI than Houston. Freaking Texas. And I believe that with all my heart. And cool.

00:25:08:14 - 00:25:18:17
Unknown
All right. And by the way, if there's a Victoria's Secret model in the audience, I will be at the bar in ten minutes. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.