The Starting Line

We met in a cafeteria line at Montana Tech. I had just gotten on campus, and I was wearing a ranch shirt from a Christian camp I used to go to. I had been thinking for a long time about starting a Bible study at school. I had not figured out how I was going to do it. I was just standing in line for lunch.

Bob walked up behind me, read the words on my shirt, and tapped me on the shoulder. He said we needed to start some Bible studies. I said yes, we do.

That was it. That was the whole conversation.

What started in that lunch line turned into a thirty-year Bible study at Montana Tech that kept running long after both of us had left. It turned into a basketball team we played on together. It turned into me leaving for school, meeting my wife, getting married, and going down to Wichita. It turned into Bob writing software up in North Dakota for his own engineering work. And in 1996 it turned into the two of us sitting in motel rooms near customer sites, building a piece of oil and gas software called Production Access with zero clients and an idea.

That is what I kept thinking about as Bob and I sat down to record this episode of Wisdom at the Wellhead.

Because the thing about a forty-five year partnership is that you cannot engineer one. You can plan a career. You can build a company. You can architect a software platform. You cannot architect the moment you meet the person you are going to do all of that with. That moment usually looks like nothing at the time.

The Things You Cannot Plan

Bob and I did not meet at a conference. We did not meet at an industry event. We did not meet because somebody connected us for business reasons. We met because of a shirt.

I have thought about that more than once over the years, especially when I am talking to younger engineers who are trying to figure out how to build the kind of career and life they actually want. Most of what they ask about is the planned part. School. Specialty. Company. Title. Path.

The honest answer, the one that is harder to give and harder to hear, is that the most important things in my professional life were not on a path. They were in a cafeteria line. They were in a hospital bed. They were in a garage. They were not strategic. They were not optimized. They just happened, and I had the sense, by the grace of God, to recognize what was happening and not let go of it.

I cannot tell a younger engineer how to plan for a forty-five year partnership. I can only tell them to pay attention when somebody taps them on the shoulder.

What 1996 Actually Looked Like

By the time Bob and I started Production Access in 1996, we had known each other for sixteen years. We had played basketball together at Montana Tech. He was racking up points for the team. I was keeping the stat sheet. I went two for two in varsity basketball, and that was the entire output of my career on the floor. I think he agreed to be my business partner out of pity.

The 1996 part is not a glamorous story. We had no clients. We had an idea about how an integrated production system ought to work for an oil and gas operator, and that was about it. So we went out to the customers we wanted to serve, and we sat in motel rooms near their offices, and we wrote software with the people who would have to use it sitting there with us.

That is something Bob said on the show that I think is worth pulling out:

"Production access back in 1996, we started that. We spent a lot of time in motels where we just isolated ourselves and just started writing it."

What he did not say, but what was true, is that we were in those motels because we were on customer sites all day. We were getting insights about what made sense for them. We were listening to what they actually did and reacting to their needs. The motel was just where we wrote down what we had learned that day.

I have watched plenty of software companies in this industry over the years that did not work that way. They built the product first and then went looking for somebody to sell it to. They did not start in the customer's parking lot. They started in a conference room. The result was usually a product the customer did not actually need, sold by people who had never spent a day doing the customer's job.

Production Access ended up with around fifteen percent of the wells in the United States in our system at its peak. Energen. Denbury. Petro Hunt. Hunt Petroleum. Equitable, who alone had twenty thousand wells. That number did not happen because we were brilliant. It happened because we were sitting in the right motel rooms.

What Outlasts the Software

Production Access got sold to Petrus eventually. The technology of that era is gone. The integrated platform we wrote then would not run on a modern system without being completely rebuilt, and the way operators consume software now bears almost no resemblance to how they consumed it in the late nineties. Hosted environments. One-click upgrades. Cloud-based scripting. Bob and I used to have to physically upgrade every customer at every site, one machine at a time, every time we shipped a release. Now you push a change and everybody has it the next morning.

The technology dated. The customers we built it for, in many cases, are doing different things now. The product itself has been retired and replaced.

What has not dated is the partnership.

Bob and I are still working on the same kinds of problems we were working on in 1996. He is the lead architect on Operation Scheduler, the rig scheduling product we represent through Total Stream. We are still solving the same root problem we were solving thirty years ago, which is helping an operator see what is actually happening in their business so they can run it on purpose instead of by reaction. The product is different. The customers are different. The work is the same.

The technology is what we built. The partnership is what built us.

The Christian Camp Shirt

I am not going to make this blog into something it is not. Bob and I did not meet because we were planning to. We met because I happened to be wearing a shirt I happened to wear, in a cafeteria line, on a campus where Bob happened to be in line behind me.

But I will say this. That shirt was from a Christian camp I used to go to. It said something on it. It said enough that Bob, who had been thinking about the same thing I had been thinking about, recognized something in me before either of us had said a word. And what he said when he tapped me on the shoulder was not a polite hello. It was a request to do real work together.

I think about that whenever I hear people say the small stuff does not matter. The shirt you wear. The verse you keep on your desk. The way you talk about your work in front of people who are not officially your customer. None of it looks consequential in the moment. All of it is the stuff that gets recognized later by people who matter.

You never know what God is building in your life through what looks like nothing.

Final Thought

A lot of what I have built in this industry came out of decisions I made on purpose. Petroleum engineering school. Total Stream. The hours in customer offices. The years on the road. Those are the parts I can take credit for, to the extent any of it is mine to take credit for at all.

But the partnership with Bob is not in that category. I did not earn that one. I was given it.

Forty-five years later, two software companies in, somewhere on the order of fifteen percent of the wells in this country once running through a system we wrote in motel rooms, and Bob and I are still in the same conversation we started in a cafeteria line in Montana. That is not a planning win. That is a gift.

You meet a Bob, or you do not. And if you do, you do not let go of it.

Bob Baldwin is a petroleum operations engineer and data architect who has co-developed two industry-leading data management platforms. He started Production Access with Jeff Dyk in 1996, which at its peak had roughly fifteen percent of U.S. wells running through it. Today he is the lead architect on Operation Scheduler and is also building out compressed natural gas infrastructure stations across the country. On Wisdom at the Wellhead, Kevin Fischer sits down with Bob and Jeff to talk about how their forty-five year friendship became a software company, what they learned writing Production Access from motel rooms in 1996, and the work they are still doing together today.