My Failed Startup (or How I Nearly Become a 3D Animator)

Building awesome software and having the right business contacts is not sufficient to convince the latter to hand over money for the former.

There was a time in 2004/05 when, for several minutes, I thought my future lay not in compilers and debuggers, but in modelers and animation. As you can see, it turns out I don't have the skill, patience, or eye for detail required to transition from "enthusiast" to "someone who gets paid".

The journey that led me to consider adding "animator" to my resume is more interesting than my non-existent animation career. After 6 years writing oil & gas inspection software, I teamed up with a good friend and very smart guy - Big Stu - in a quixotic attempt to extract some serious coin from the bottomless money-pit that is the Western Australian oil & gas industry.

Step 1: Combine his electrical / mechanical engineering knowledge and business contacts with my ninja coding and amateur 3D animation skills to forge a killer app.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!

Here's our Pièce de résistance:

Our output wasn't Avatar, but the cinematic eye-candy was a side-effect of the tools we used rather than the goal.

We built a system to visualize and simulate anything in a sub-sea installation. Each scene was fully interactive, and the models were based on engineering diagrams and were perfectly accurate. The field layouts were created from sub-sea survey data to perfectly depict every twist and turn of the flow-lines and anchor chains. I've still never heard of a system that provides that level of detail and accuracy for sub sea environments.

Despite the power of the tool and the shiny eye-candy it produced, our venture never gained critical mass and eventually fizzled as Stu and I went our separate ways - Stu as the admiral of a veritable navy of ROVs, and me to London.

What follows is a look back at why a great idea generated zero profit.

Some companies are born of technology, some achieve technological greatness and some have technology thrust upon them

Technology is at the very heart of Google. Any chance to advance the technology of which it was born is seized upon as an opportunity for greater success. It's the philosophy behind our endeavor to "drive the web forward".

Like Google, the oil & gas industry has an absolute dependence on technology. It simply could not exist without an army of technologists creating oil-field prediction engines and well flow models.

Like super-heroes, you can learn a lot about industries from their origin stories

The Social Network and There Will Be Blood both include generous helpings of greed and betrayal, but while getting gypped out of half a billion dollars is a pretty bad day, it's still a significantly better outcome than having your head caved in.

Don't get me wrong, in the 6 years I worked in oil & gas I never once saw anyone beaten to death, so things have progressed significantly in the past hundred years or so. But in it's soul oil & gas isn't about technology; it's a business of hard bastards drilling absurdly deep holes into the earth's crust, praying to f**k it doesn't explode, all in the hope of wringing a few more drops out of the bottom of a rapidly emptying cup.

I drink your milkshake. I drink it up.

(Value of a resource * quantity of resource extracted) - cost of extraction = profit

Finding more of a scarce resource makes it, by definition, less valuable. It's nearly impossible to increase the quality of a natural resource, so the best way to increase profits is to decrease the costs of pulling it out of the ground.

As resources become scarcer, the difficulty (and cost) of locating and extracting said resources increases. At this point your dependence on technology increases, and that technology costs money.

At Google, technology is the product. Our success has come from search and advertising, but technologies like Android, Chrome, and cloud computing offer an opportunity for more success.

In oil & gas, oil & gas is the product - and technology is simply a tool necessary to extract it. This is fundamental, and it affects the way technologists are regarded within each industry.

What they want is fancier tools - not a new cost center.

Stu and I quickly discovered that while there is a bottomless pit of cash, it is allocated almost exclusively to parts of the business that generate revenue.

They will happily pay stupid money for is a shiny box that helps you find oil reserves, or one that lets you extract said nectar from Mother Earth. What they do not want is to pay the salary of a dozen engineers (software or otherwise) that build shiny boxes.

The significant supporting industries - everything from field inspections and environmental surveys to intervention engineering and remedial work - is all just costs. Most have been outsourced and the associated budgets minimized, allocated, and fixed. Entire companies are created through such outsourcing and their goals are to lower costs as far below the allocated budget as possible.

Our technology was about lowering costs - so we should have been golden, right?

The best technology in the world isn't valuable without a customer to sell it to.

The oil companies loved our technology. The shiny graphics are like catnip to executives, and our pitch was compelling:

Using this software, we can increase efficiency by shortening each job by up to 20%. We only charge 5% for using the software, giving you a net saving of 15%.

Big smiles and firm handshakes all 'round.

You need to go speak to Our Contractor. They should definitely be using this!

Next week we bring our roadshow to the Contractor. These guys wear coveralls for a living and recognize the smell of bullshit as it pulls up in the parking lot. They know the animated movies for the smoke and mirrors they are, but they're also engineers - so we switch our focus to the accuracy of our models. So far so good, until we get to the pitch:

Using this software, we can increase efficiency by shortening each job by up to 20%. We only charge 5% for using the software, giving you a net saving of 15%."

The smiles are gone and people are starting to fidget.

Offshore jobs tend to operate on a "daily rate". So our pitch translated into something like this:

Using this software we can shorten your billable days by up to 20% and increase your operational costs by 5%, giving you a net profit reduction of 25%."

Oil Companies outsource technology for a reason, and they're not going to force their contractors to use one particular piece of new, untried technology. The aforementioned contractors have every incentive they need not to use it.

The week-to-week possibility of Croesus wealth punctuated by imminent doom were good practice for later years.

That said, it was a great idea that would likely have succeeded given more time and effort. If I hadn't been in such a hurry to move to London, we could have worked the right deals to get the Oil Companies to convince their contractors to use our tools. It would have continued to be challenging, but it had a good chance. I believe it's inevitable that others will succeed where Stu and I left-off, but in startups - like much in life - timing is everything.

The lessons I learned about business, entrepreneurship, and opportunity have proven invaluable. The pressure and excitement of seemingly imminent success parallel to equally imminent crushing failure was a brutal introduction into the Real World after years spent hiding in the dark corner of my own coding universe. It's strange, but seeing something you pour your heart and soul into fail, can be better incentive to strive than unmitigated success.

I never did persue a career in animation. After taking half a year off to travel Europe I settled in London with my passion for coding reignited. Some four years later, I found a job that offers the perfect mix of business development, technology evangelism, and hardcore coding that plays to my strengths. Oh, and did I mention we're hiring?

When Offshoring Your Development Team Means Buying a Boat

Play word association with most developers and the response to 'offshore' will most likely be a city in India. Starting my career in the oil and gas game meant offshore development has an entirely different connotation. Let me share my first experience as an offshore developer.

Offshore -- meaning 'out at sea'

Lesson 1: The sole developer of untested, mission-critical software, should expect to be going wherever the aforementioned software goes.

Sure you chose the oil and gas industry, but you joined as 'the lynch pin of a new technical department'. Sick of relying on external resources for their software, you were hired to write some for them.

By the time you realise their office isn't exactly in Portland, you're sitting in a 10' sea container floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean pressing a button every 108 minutes.

What three things would you bring to a desert island?

You're going 150km (95mi) offshore for 3-6 weeks where there's no broadcast TV, no radio, no phones, and absolutely no internet. There is a satellite phone, so if you're ready to pony up $1 / second you can reach out and touch somebody.

If the boat's orientation is right (and the stars are aligned) there might be a nightly email uplink when you can send / receive today's emails on a public, unsecured PC running Outlook Express. Nothing larger than 50kb and absolutely no attachments.

What to bring? The following are verboten : alcohol, women, drugs, explosives. The challenge? Your total allowance is 10Kg (22lbs) which includes a hardhat and steel-capped boots.

Note: If it's a decent sized job they'll do your laundry nightly, so a few clothes go a long way; just remember they wash them at around 150C, so don't bring any delicates. Or nylon. Or dark colours.

3 pair coveralls (pre-washed and worn to avoid that n00b look), hard hat, steel tipped safety boots, sandals, underwear, socks, t-shirts, and toiletries (the latter will last longer than you expect. Don't think about why).

Then the essentials:

• Notebook computer, iPod, PSP.
• Three weeks supply of candy.
• Large collection of TV episodes and movies.

You mobilise from Karratha, a remote but booming resources town, and no-one but fellow but oil & gas workers are flying there at 6am on a Monday morning. Most smoke, and some look like they've prepared for 6 alcohol free weeks by drinking for the last 24 solid hours.

Three hours on the plane, then straight for the heliport. You catch a chopper out -- with any luck this won't be opportunity to put your HUET to the test -- and so far things are pretty sweet - even if the music piped in through your headset is less 'Flight of the Valkyries' and more 'Best of Tracy Chapman'.

No - that's not a fire exit. Questions? No, there is no fire exit.

You're in a part of the world where there are two seasons, hot / wet and hot / dry. Today it is definitely hot, and the humidity must be 150%. Perfect beach weather, but you're changing in to full length coveralls, boots, and a hardhat ready for your vessel safety induction.

Years of StarTrek means when you're told to 'report to the bridge' you have a brief Wesley Crusher moment. You're shown your muster station and which alarm means to head there -- and which one means you're better off going straight over the side.


You also get assigned a room about the size of a smallish walk-in wardrobe that you'll share with 7 others, each group of 4 on opposing shifts. You learn that your communal death trap room adjoins the engine room and there's only one entrance / exit -- up the stairs. If the stairs are burning you have no chance to survive make your time.

You glance sidelong at the DVD case when you hear the bridge crew talking about the scourge of piracy, but relax when you realise they're talking about actual pirates... until you realise they're talking about actual pirates.

Your induction moves on to the mess (where posters like this do little to quell concerns), the galley, the smoking room, and the rec room. More often than not, these are all the same room. The rec room has the TV and DVD player and houses the ship's library - filled with all the classics: Playboy, FHM, Barely Legal, People. The DVD selection is more mundane but all have foreign covers and a distinct homemade feel.

Next, before anyone can even think about heading to bed comes the 24 hour living nightmare known as 'mobilisation'.

Just like a LAN party, but with more water and fewer pizzas

You're building Windows boxes, installing software, and fixing bugs. Then you're stringing CATV and 440V mains leads around the back deck. Telemetry from the ROV has to be fed to survey on the bridge, then back down to you in your inspection shack, so you've got the RS232 breakout box in full effect. Four live video feeds need to be recorded onto four digital video recorder PCs, a frame grabber on the online inspection PC, the bridge, and also backup VCRs.

There's cables everywhere. Access to everything is awkward, and there're always three people trying to occupy the same piece of space, and work with the same piece of hardware. All this is happening on the back deck of a support vessel as it ploughs out to the field at full steam in 2m seas and 24knot winds, with green water coming over the back deck.

They paid for a qualified inspection engineer. Son I am disappoint.

Hourly cost of support vessel and crew: $20,000. Hourly cost of ROV crew and vehicle hire: $10,000. Look on your party chief's face when you tell him the software's crashed and will take 30mins to bring everything back up so everyone can get back to work: Priceless.

Lesson 2: Mission critical means if the software goes down, the job stops. When the job stops the company responsible starts footing the bill. Feel the burn.

You're a programmer, you know this and so does your employer. But the client paid for an Inspection Engineer and expects to get what he paid for.This would be less of a problem if your employer didn't insist on you doing both jobs, or if inspection shifts were less the 12 hours long, or didn't require your full attention.

Now, rather than being the cutting-edge developer on the front lines you're a barely adequate inspection engineer who seems more interested in the software he's using than the job at hand.

Don't try this at home

The job runs 24/7, no weekends, no downtime. You can simulate the daily offshore experience at home:

• Put an uncomfortable plastic chair in your bedroom closet where you've hung 6 LCDs.
• Have 3 video cameras recording the bottom of an aquarium, each at a slightly different angle but looking at the same empty sand.
• Park a big-rig next to the adjoining wall (and leave it idling).
• Turn on a humidifier at least 110% relative humidity. Every 30mins alternate between a heater at 45C with an aircon at 15C.
• Invite five complete strangers into your closet.
• Get in, sit down and watch the screens. You need to give a running voice-over that describes what you're seeing, as well as logging the action in software. Don't worry if nothing's happening, just say 'The seabed continues to be flat and featureless. No sign of debris.'
• Have someone lock the door and don't let anyone out for at least 12 hours.
• This is important, have your friends rock the wardrobe by about 30 degrees side-to-side continuously. Randomly have them drop it.
• Every 2 to 4 hours have something on the camera change slightly for no longer than 3 seconds. If you miss it, you lose.

At 7am the sun's up and you've done the handover to your replacement. After downing a cholesterol loaded deep-fried heart attack, you should be heading to bed. Instead you're front line support for the day-shift, fixing bugs, and implementing features. Around midday you have one last 3 course meal before wedging yourself in to bed so you don't plummet from the top bunk when the boat rolls 30degrees.

You get up at 5pm and head to the mess for breakfast; a quick look at the menu and you opt for the low GI staying power of pork spare ribs and mashed potatoes with gravy. Breakfast of champions. The ROV crew is on midday to midnight shifts, so there's another full dinner put on at 11:30am and another at 12:30pm. Play your cards right and you can get 5hrs sleep a night and still squeeze in 4 full 3-course dinner meals every. Single. Day.

Do I know you from somewhere...?

Three weeks in you realise that this three week job is not likely to finish in the next 24 hours. You email your loved ones explaining that rather than being home by the weekend, you'll be out here for another month.

Time passes.

At 5 weeks the homesickness has replaced seasickness. You're swearing like a sailor and you've not shaved since day three. It's been a month since you've seen your girlfriend (or any other three dimensional woman). There's so much porn being watched that people remark on being genuinely surprised they've never met any of the actors in real life. You've fixed everyone's notebook at least once, have challenged and defeated the entire crew in a series of all-in Quake3 Arena death matches. It's time to go home.

Homecoming

Last night everyone worked 24 hours to get the demobilisation finished, those on night shift (like you) are heading for 36 hours straight. Everyone is barely recognisable having washed, shaved, and put on their 'good' clothes for the first time in over a month. The flight back to Perth is a blur of G&Ts. For the first few days home you're walking with a swagger and when attending to nature you still lean forward and support yourself against the wall (to counter the non-existent swell).

You sit back and reflect. Your bank account certainly enjoyed your trip, and you will never in your life know your code as well as you do now. Was it worth it? No. Will you be going again..? I was back offshore within a month and did almost a dozen stints over 4 years. I've worked with people who went on one job, got choppered off after 3 weeks and quit the second they hit dry land. Your mileage may vary.

[Based on a much earlier submission to Everything2]