Founder, GreaseBook · Oklahoma City
Investor. Perpetual student of the oilfield. Founder of GreaseBook. I spend most of my time trying to replace overcomplicated legacy systems with something an operator can actually use on a Tuesday afternoon in the patch.
I grew up around oil and gas software. My dad ran SSI, Oklahoma's leading accounting software company serving more than 300 operators, producers, and service companies. I went to the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma for Energy Management and Finance, graduated in 2005, and spent the next five years in and out of operator offices watching people do extraordinary work on ordinary problems with expensive tools nobody liked.
In 2010, I headed to Barcelona on scholarship for ESADE's Global MBA program, where I met some of the best mobile designers and developers in Europe. Putting their thinking next to what I had seen at my dad's shop flipped a switch for me. Operators were chasing production numbers on paper tickets. Pumpers were hand-writing gauges and faxing them in. Accounting was reconstructing months of production at deadline. The problem was not that the industry lacked software. The problem was that the software was too expensive, too complicated, and too far removed from the people who actually had to enter the data.
I came back to Oklahoma and started GreaseBook to solve exactly that.
Most software built for this industry got bigger and more expensive every year while the operator's real job stayed the same: pump more oil, waste less time, make more money. Somewhere along the way, vendors started selling platforms instead of answers. I spend a lot of my time picking those platforms apart and asking the same question I keep hearing in the field: "Why does this have to be this complicated?"
The answer, almost always, is that it does not. A pumper with a phone, a clean capture flow, and a daily feedback loop beats a six-figure SCADA install on a 40-well lease. A $500 license that somebody actually opens beats a $50,000 license that collects dust. Simple, cheap, and used wins every time over sophisticated, expensive, and ignored.
Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least. I apply that to software design the same way I apply it to life.
The best feedback I have ever gotten on the product came from a pumper in the Permian who told me our app was "the first thing anybody in the office ever gave me that made my day easier." That is the bar. Every feature decision we make, I ask: does this make the field guy's day easier, or does this make the vendor's demo slide better? If it is the second one, we do not ship it.
The other thing I have learned: independent operators do not want to be sold a digital transformation. They want to know where their barrels are, whether their pumper showed up, and what the tank battery is going to do this afternoon. If the software does that, and does it well, they will pay for it. If it tries to be an ERP on the way, they will walk.
My dad, who ran SSI, is the giant whose shoulders I stand on. I lured him out of his post as SSI's president to consult part-time on GreaseBook's operations when we got started. Watching him run a successful oil and gas software company for decades, I learned that the patient thing and the right thing are usually the same thing in this industry. Operators remember who treated them well in a down cycle. They also remember who oversold them in an up cycle. Both matter.
Nearly every lesson that has held up for me in business — "hire smart or manage tough," "get a great job, find what's broken, go fix it" — came from him or from the people he put me around. I am grateful for it, and it is the reason I am able to do this work.
Read Greg's articles on the GreaseBook blog, or see the product itself at greasebook.com.