OST – E0 : Welcome to Oil Sand Tech Podcast episode 0

Oil Sand Tech Podcast

Thank you for listening to the Oil Sand Tech podcast. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher radio.

This is an introduction to the Oil Sand Tech podcast.

During this episode it’s an introduction to the Oil Sand Tech podcast and upcoming Meetup.

Resources mentioned during the episode.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Startupweekend

Calgary Maker Space

This is the Oil Sand Tech podcast with Aaron Tschirhart. The oil sand industry is the largest unconventional oil business in Canada and on this podcast, we’ll be interviewing people who are building products and building services that can improve the oil sands. We tell the story of how to build products and brings them to market. The Oil Sand Tech podcast. And now, Aaron Tschirhart:

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining me on Episode Zero. Episode Zero is partly a trial to make sure everything is working properly, and secondly, I’m also going to talk about the philosophy for this podcast, why I’m doing it, what the future is of it, and what I hope to eventually accomplish.

The Oil Sand Tech podcast is meant to be a place where ideas can come and kind of be shared. I’m hoping to highlight many different companies, individuals, working on innovative solutions to Oilsands problems. I believe that there are a lot of people out there that have ideas, and in order to put ideas into action, it’s very difficult. I know that from my own personal experience, trying to build products is a very big challenge. Trying to get funding for that, trying to build a team, and I’m hoping during this podcast to break down the steps of actually building products that can help improve the oil sands into actionable steps, steps that each one of us can take. If you start that journey of working toward building something, day by day, if you take one step, eventually you just won’t even realize what you’ve achieved.

For this episode, I’m going to talk about my experience in China and my experience working, organizing, within the startup community. Some of the methodologies that, I guess, Silicon Valley start-ups use are applicable to us in the oil sands, and then I’m also going to talk about the community. My hope that the Oil Sand Tech podcast, along with the Oil Sand Tech meetup, will become kind of a place where ideas can come and thrive and companies can be built out of that.

First of all, I’m going to talk about my experience here in China and my experience within the startup community. I moved to China in September of 2012. That was two years ago now. While I’ve been here in China, I spent a year studying Chinese as well as kind of getting things ready to launch a business, and then I spent the last year actually working on launching that business and building it. I haven’t actually been successful with my business, the business that I built over here, or tried to build, but as we all learn as time goes on, failure is just the other side of the coin that is success, and as long as you’re learning and moving forward and building your skill set, it can really lead to a positive thing.

So I came over here to China and I studied Chinese for a year. In the fall, or in the spring, of 2013 we had a local meetup, just kind of an ad hoc meeting, to talk about Bitcoins and the future of that krypto-currency. It was really enlightening discussion. We just had six people kind of sitting around having a chat. We talked about geopolitics, we talked about I guess the financial system. Being a finance geek, I found it really interesting. A really nice afternoon. I thought, “Great, it’s such a nice afternoon, let’s see about organizing one for entrepreneurship.” I put out notices and said let’s sit down and talk about disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation is the opposite of incremental innovation. Incremental innovation is moving from—I guess, making a car faster. Disruptive innovation is moving from horses to cars, and so the disruptive that’s happening within the tech industry, within many different other industries as well, is what really kind of excites me. So we set up to have this chat. I thought it would just be five or six people, but then twenty people showed up. Suddenly the same format where we were all sitting around having a chat wouldn’t really work because in larger groups the dynamics change. So that was the start of the Chengdu Entrepreneurship Meetup.

Over the next year and a half I hosted a monthly meetup in order to connect with other entrepreneurs and learn about the tech community. It really ended up becoming kind of a meeting place for technology, entrepreneurs here in Chengdu. We had many different guest speakers ranging from people that are running nonprofits to people that have successful businesses with millions of users coming and talking about building products. Essentially the Chengdu Entrepreneurship Meetup ended up becoming a place where you could come and find resources.

Through the Chengdu Entrepreneurship Meetup we had a number of other events and courses that kind of sprung off of it. We hosted a human-centered design course teaching the methodologies of designing a product with the end user in mind and we also hosted the first Startup Weekend, or I guess I should say we helped to organize people around the first Startup Weekend in western China. I’ll talk about those a little bit later.

This is a good transition point to talk about some of the methodologies about building companies and building startups within the startup community that’s really applicable to designing products in the oil sands as well. The first one I’m going to talk about is The Lean Startup. The Lean Startup is a book by Eric Ries, who’s a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. It kind of goes conventional idea of: “I’m going to build a product. So how am I going to build that product?” A lot of people have the idea that how successful products are built is you raise some money, and then you go into your garage and work for six months, a year, on your product, and then you have a big, fancy product launch with champagne and maybe celebrities. In our minds, we think that, “Okay, great. We’re going to get lots of users, and then we’re just going to go walk across the street and buy the Ferrari.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t really happen like that. Building products in a vacuum, while it can work, quite often the ideas that you have aren’t quite as good as you think, or the assumptions that you make in making your business or product aren’t completely correct.

This all comes back to the Lean Startup idea of build, measure, learn. The idea instead is, instead of building a product in your garage over X-period of time and then launching it into the world, is building the MVP; that’s minimum viable products—so, building a prototype of your product that will be able to test the assumptions that you’re making in thinking that the product is going to be successful. Instead of, if you want to build and app and the app is going to help people find Wi-Fi in your neighborhood, or while they’re traveling. You can go to a developer, you can build up the app, and you can follow the traditional development cycle, or you can build as basic of an app as possible to actually do that function and then you can release it. You can go and you can talk to customers. You have to get out of the building and test to see whether or not people will actually pay for your product. Is this a need that somebody actually is willing to, is valuable for them to actually solve? And essentially a lot of the powerful, really valuable parts of building a startup Silicon Valley-style is finding a real-world problem and using technology to solve that problem. The Lean Startup advocates doing that as fast as possible, having that conversation with your customer or with your target market, and figuring out whether your product is actually solving a problem that is valuable enough for people to pay for it, or valuable enough so that you can monetize it in another way. This is really powerful, I guess, if you’ve ever built a product, and then by the time you finish it, you can’t really find a user for it. It’s interesting. I have a friend that has a family business, and the business is having to do with building cell phone receivers. My friend was telling me the story about how they spent a great deal of money building a product for sailboats. They thought, “Oh, sailboats. It’s kind of a higher-end niche so it’s one where people were maybe willing pay money to have a cell phone booster so you can actually use your cell phones off the shore.” They came up with this idea, they spent a decent amount of money actually building a product, and then, by the time they actually brought the product to market, they sold one. A huge amount of money that was actually spent developing a product that they thought everybody would want and would be very marketable at the end of the day there was no customers for it. The Lean Startup, the core of it, in terms of the core of it, is the faster that you can build a prototype or build your product, figure out how effective it is, and then learn from that feedback, is where you need to focus your time: on that build-measure-learn kind of circle. I believe that when you are actually building products this is a very powerful methodology and so I hope to do a further podcast with an experienced entrepreneur deep-dive digging into this concept.

So now I’d like to talk about Startup Weekend and some of the collaborative nature of the startup community. Startup Weekend is an event that I’ve been involved in for a year now. I’ve attended three Startup Weekends as well as being an organizer in one of them. It really is a place where you can turn your ideas into action. That’s really the theme of this podcast, is action. Finding a way of taking your ideas and turning them into products or services and figuring out whether or not they’re actually valuable. Startup Weekend is a weekend event. It starts on the Friday evening. You go and have dinner and then kind of after you have something to eat you try to network with people and then everyone has the opportunity for one minute to pitch your idea. A lot of people think, “Oh, no, you know, I can’t do it in one minute, but I need five minutes” to be able to pitch your idea, but the reality is that if you can’t kind of express your idea in one minute, or the core of the product or service that you would like to build, you don’t have a good enough understanding of what that concept is, or it’s too complicated and you need to get down to the core values of what you’re trying to build and express that in a very short period of time. On the Friday, after people have pitched your ideas, teams are formed based around those ideas and there’s many different people with different skill sets there to actually build the products and ideally continue to pursue this after the Startup Weekend. This is a good introduction into the technology community, it’s a great way to learn a new skill set, it’s also a great way to make new friends. The idea of the Startup Weekend is fundamentally about getting together and actually building a product over a weekend. If you’re looking to get into technology entrepreneurship, if you’re looking to figure out how you can actually turn your idea into a product, Startup Weekend is a great platform to do that. I would recommend, if you’re listening to this podcast and you have an idea that you would like to pursue, go online, startupweekend,org. They’re happening all over the world, and that’s a great starting point as kind of an entranceway into the tech community. You’re thinking to yourself, “Okay great, Startup Weekend is a good event. I can go and I have an idea of a physical product that I want to build. I don’t just want to build an app where you’re going to connect something with something. I want to build something physical with my hands.”

There are other resources within the technology community in order to do that and the one that I would recommend kind of pursuing, we do have one in Calgary, is seeking out maker space and maker communities. Go online and take a look at www.calgarymakerspace.com and there’s a facility in Calgary where you can go and you can become member and when you become a member you get access to different classes and you get access to literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of manufacturing equipment, whether that is laser cutters, whether that’s a 3D printer, computer, nice CAD software for actually building out 3D models of what you would like to build. Essentially the maker communities are all about conceptualizing an idea and finding a way of going and actually building it. If you do have an idea, this is another great resource I’m hoping later on in the podcast I’ll be able to have an interview with one of the leaders in the maker community, because it really is another way of actually conceptualizing, taking an idea, and figuring out how to build it into an actual product. We’ve got one in Calgary, there are very large maker communities out of San Francisco, Houston, many different other tech cups down in the US, and so if that’s something that you’re into or you would like to find out about, please go and check it out.

The oil sand industry is an industry ripe for innovation. I believe that there are many opportunities for people to develop products and services solving real oil sands problems, using these startup tools that are available to us. What I’m really trying to do is I’m looking for people to join a community of problem-solvers that are able to build products and services to solve these needs. Many of the guests that I’ll be interviewing are actively doing that and it’s very enlightening in order of how they actually built their products and services and what they’re doing to improve the oil sands. I believe the oil sands is a huge resource in Canada that we can not only exploit but we need to become the best in the world and the best we can possibly extracting it responsibly, and many of the stories that we’re going to hear on this podcast are of people doing that. On that note, I’d really like to thank you for listening all the way through to the first Oil Tech Sand podcast episode. If you would like to get in touch with me, I want to hear your feedback, both bad and good: [e-mail], or for the show notes for this or any of our other episodes, please head to Oilsandtech.com. Thank you so much and have a great day.

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