I’ve been wanting to start my blog for about five years now.
I can find every excuse in the book for why I haven’t started it.
I’m too busy building a company. I’m too busy being a dad. I’m too busy training jiu jitsu. etc.
But I got put on the spot by a 16 year-old-last week at our Fuze event in Houston.
We had a group of high school students from Houston ISD’s STEM program come to Fuze to see what’s happening in the future of the energy industry where I gave them a talk on the opportunities that they have in energy and AI.
Afterward, one of the kids came up to me to ask a question about entrepreneurship. Then two more came up, then all-of-a-sudden it was all thirty kids.
They were extremely intelligent and asked very detailed questions about leadership, raising capital, building teams, and other topics.
At the end, one of them asked me “Do you have a website or blog where we can go to read more advice from you?”
I felt stupid saying “No, I don’t.”
I’ve created content for almost a decade now, and I don’t have a place for people to find my content? Looks kind of dumb and lazy, to be honest.
So I’m ending the excuses today.
This is what the blog will be:
It will be the place where I go deep into the topics and ideas that are interesting to me in energy, technology, and entrepreneurship.
I’m not going to tell you to “expect a post from me every Monday.” I will be treating this like my personal diary—sharing my unfiltered thoughts and I will only write when I feel like I have something interesting to say.
I don’t have clarity on the intention or where this goes, but I never do when I start anything.
I was actually telling one of the high school kids this when he asked “What’s the first step when starting a business?”
My answer was that I don’t think the best businesses in the world are started intentionally, but more so as an idea that’s driven by curiosity and evolves into a company over time.
At Digital Wildcatters, we are on the leading edge of AI applications in the energy industry, but this company started with a podcast five years ago.
When we started the “Oil and Gas Startups” podcast in 2018, do you think we had some grand vision of turning it into a professional network with an AI-driven search engine?
Absolutely not.
I will tell you how simple our thinking was, we said this verbatim:
“I don’t know if anyone is going to listen to this podcast since it is so niche, but at least we will get some cool people on the show and we can build our network.”
We didn’t even know if people would listen to our show, much less that we would build a company on the back of it.
I’m not sure if this is a coincidence or what, but I saw Paul Graham tweet out the same message the next day.
Then I went and listened to a podcast with Mark Zuckerberg and he said the same thing about the best companies always starting off as a project and morphing overtime.
I mean look at Facebook— It started off as a pet project to rate the attractiveness of students at Harvard and now it’s one of the largest tech companies in the world pushing the bounds of AI and virtual reality.
Do you think that was Zuck’s intention back in the Harvard days?
So what I told these kids was to let their curiosity drive them. When they find something interesting, work on it and run a series of experiments to test ideas and see what gains traction.
This is the only way to build innovative products and companies, in my opinion.
So what comes from this blog?
I don’t know and I don’t care.
I’m just shipping things that are fun and interesting to me and I appreciate that you’re along for the ride!