#297 Disrupting the Energy Industry: The Digital Journey with Workrise's CTO Praveen Kalamegham

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0:00:02 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to any episode of the City of Show with Mehmet Today. I'm very pleased joining me, praveen. Praveen, thank you very much for joining me on the show. The reason I don't introduce people and the people keep asking me because I have very belief that no one can introduce someone else other than themselves. So the floor is yours, praveen. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do. 

0:00:25 - Praveen
Sure. Well, first of all, mehmet, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to chat today with you. My name is Praveen Kalamegham. I'm the CTO here at Workrise. We are a technology company focused on building the supply chain platform for energy. 

I have been in technology for my entire career, so the past couple decades and a half of time it feels less when you say it that way, instead of like 20, 30 years and I started my career at I like to describe it as I've kind of come up the stack. 

So I started my career in kind of embedded systems and an operating systems that worked on the Unix kernel as part of Solaris for Sun and AIX for IBM and Linux for a time and kind of slowly moved up my stack to up the stack to like software as a service eventually, and that's really where now I find myself. In the past several jobs that I've been in Like, I started very much hands on as an engineer, as a software engineer, and that's, I think, still where my passion lies is tinkering with software and it's such a wonderful time to be in that space because of how rapidly it's moving and evolving. But I did find a passion for leading organizations of brilliant software engineers and product folks and designers and researchers and that's what brought me into more of the leadership track as VP's of engineering and CTO's and things of that nature. 

And here I have been at work rise for the past four years and it's been a wonderful ride here. Every single one of these jobs or roles that you take, I feel, is like kind of a chapter in a long story which becomes your career, and I think probably halfway through I became far more intentional about what role I picked and what place I chose to spend my time at, and with work rise, it was specifically about I wanted to. I had come from companies that had done really amazing and quite global scale, challenging technical things, but maybe not as tangible about how is this impacting the world at large and all of us. And with work rise, I was keen to join a mission that was attempting to do something rather large like that, and it certainly has fit the bill since then. 

0:03:02 - Mehmet
That's cool. I thank you again, praveen, for being with me today on this episode. Now, usually out of curiosity, I ask this question sometime. As you describe it, you've been on the full stack. 

But I think there should be something that motivated you later to focus on this innovative approach, because for me, coming from also a technical background, so always I was exposed to many things, but at some stage in my career I went and focused, for example, on infrastructure, right? So rather than a little bit security, and then I left the networking, I left the software development, because I found myself, there's something that attached me to that and this is kind of out of curiosity. I love to ask my guests what attracted you to the software development and focusing on innovation, actually, and the embedded systems and SAS platform. Was there something special that attracted you to take this path? Rather than, for example, being on, you mentioned you work on the corridors of the Linux systems and Linux systems, right? So, just out of curiosity, what drove you to take this path? 

0:04:17 - Praveen
Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's probably one I don't think nearly enough about. So I have to give it to my dad and my father who from a very young age always had computers present. We weren't like of significant means growing up we're an immigrant family but somehow he scrounged together the dollars to get like a Commodore 64 and then an Apple II I recently learned not an actual Apple II because I would have been too expensive, so it was a clone of an Apple II, but still I was able to learn from that and computers all throughout my life and so from a young age kind of dabbling in like very basic software development I wouldn't even call it that at that point, but it kind of planted that seed and then so I give a tremendous amount of credit to him for kind of surrounding me in that environment. So it was very natural for me to like just kind of have that bug. 

All the way through school I did computer and electrical engineering at the University of Texas here in Austin. I did a couple degrees here at Bachelors and Masters in that program and that's a really interesting. It wasn't the computer science, which is a different department there, it was the ECE department which was in the engineering college and it had sort of a different approach some overlap certainly, but a different approach to problem solving. A lot of respect for the computer science program as well, but this was more for me. It was far more applied and it gave me a much more broad sense of like, almost like from like. How does any of this work? How are we talking on video? And you can go like layer by layer by layer by layer, all the way down to like the transistor, and that was foundational for me. It gave me a great palette to choose from when I was entering my career. So when I went into it like, the first job was actually also in energy. There's a startup doing these remote telemetric devices that you could position strategically around power lines around the nation and they would measure the magnetic field coming emanating from those power lines and be able to predict power flow and power as a commodity. You can trade on that and so when you have some large understanding of that it can give you potentially an advantage on trying to invest and plan for energy needs. So I got to kind of scratch both itches there. I was very much on the bare metal. I really had to understand the circuitry of that device, but it was certainly a software role and I was working much more on the software side and responsible for that side. The Ant Pit eureka closed with a giant. 

I think what ended up drawing me more towards the software side is. For me anyways, I spent a good deal of my career probably half my career always very closely tied to hardware. So even when you're working in a like on Solaris or AIX for UNIX and after that I was working on Linux as part of like some IO virtualization company all of that is pretty well tied to the hardware that you are trying to support and there's a speed with which you can go in that space and I think that when you evolve to pure software man it goes way faster and I think I was attracted to that. So it drew me towards more pure software plays. Interestingly enough, I find myself now evolving further. 

So I was in pure software for some time and now evolving back to not the marriage between software and hardware but the marriage between software and people in the real world doing real world problems. That's ultimately what we try and tackle here at Workrise. A lot of companies are really in this space. That's kind of like the phase of technology enablement. I think we are with software, and so there is a slowdown from that, but it's a valuable one because it's about ultimately meeting people where they are and enabling their lives and what they're trying to do, and so I think that's kind of what's guided me through the different roles and companies that I've worked for. Hopefully that kind of touches on what you're asking about. 

0:08:49 - Mehmet
Oh, indeed, definitely, Definitely it did. And to your point, and I loved the last part when you said about not marriage of hardware and software, but, again, like solving real business problems. And this is why, personally, I get passionate about technology, of course, at a younger age, yeah, because I was fascinated of seeing all these cool things, but then later on you start to understand, oh, like, with software or even hardware, I can actually solve real world problems. And here this will bring me to talk a little bit about your current role and about Workrise specifically, and the thing that also excited me, honestly, because this is one of the few areas that I think I didn't have a lot of guests to talk about it. So it's something related to supply chain, something related to energy. So, if you can a little bit tell me, praveen, about Workrise mission and how your platform is helping the energy sectors, label provision and do the operations management services, so like a little bit more details, if you want, about the company. 

0:10:07 - Praveen
Yeah, sure, I talked about how we're trying to build a platform for energy, for supply chain. We attempt to make it easier for energy companies and energy service companies, energy workers, which are kind of like the three nodes of the triangle involved here. We try and make it easier for them to work together to deliver the projects that power our world right. So it's a deceptively simple mission that involves a great deal of challenging problems to overcome. And so when we look at that problem space of like, how do we help energy companies as you know, service providers, energy service providers and energy workers how do we help them be more productive? How do we help them be safer? How do we help them save money? Right, how to be more efficient? In other words, how do we do that when we look at the problems and challenges they face in that space and what I call like kind of ask, kind of figure out what the five Y problem is, right, the one Y problem might be some acute problem somewhere along the list litany of things that you do in a day and a week, but the five Y problem is. It gets into like, why is all of this so hard for all of us? Like we're probably causing many of the problems ourselves in hopes of solving some other problem that we've found to be causing friction for us. So when we dig down and when we ask that five Y problem, I think we come to this is a very low trust ecosystem. Now I don't mean the participants in this ecosystem are untrustworthy, far from it's that because of the dynamics with which these participants energy companies, suppliers, workers have to interact, because of how the dynamics within which they have to interact, and because of the high stakes of safety and quality in regards to this and cost right, these are massively expensive projects. There's just, you know, there's a high bar there and that high bar has resulted in friction points. A lot of people like so, for example. 

Let me kind of just paint a more concrete picture from the energy company's standpoint. So, like any, it could be a small operator. You know a small operator who just kind of works in one base in one region. It could be, you know, one of the super majors. You know Chevron, exxon, etc. It like they face very similar challenges, which is like we have energy projects to do. 

We know that we can't do those entirely alone. We lean and depend upon a network of vendors, like suppliers that provide like hundreds of different services that we need for this particular project. We need to make sure that we like have a like a pool that's deep enough that we're not like stuck because we're waiting on someone. We have to make sure that every single one of those hundreds of vendors is vetted to the you know the work requirements that we have. That could be aspects of like safety, like you know safety scores, and then think, like incident rates and things of that nature. It's about insurance, like how much insurance you have, like various characteristics that we need to, or work requirements that we need to. They would need to vet on hundreds of vendors, right? And it's not just enough to do that once. You kind of have to have a real time sense of who is still above that line. Then you have to figure out, like what rates should be charged for this and finally, like you pass that like sheet of and oftentimes it is a sheet of the vendors to your various field ops managers so that they can use it, the supervisors in the field, so they can use this list, right? Okay, this is the list of folks that I can work with, and then they start using and they're like these people aren't available or they're not answering, or now I need to, like reach out to my network, and then you start to see the challenge right. 

It's like the supply chain kind of represents the centralized, the decentralized motivations from that company, whether small or large, and at a Chevron it could be like you know, a huge department of that company At a small mom and pop operator. It could be one person, it could be a part of one person's time, right. But regardless their concerns are, I need to make sure I'm working with people for the right rates, who are compliant with safety standards and are readily available for the projects I need and the regions I need it, for the services I need, right. So that's the problem space that they have. So you know, when the large operators and the super majors, they face that problem, what they do is they say, okay, we're going to defend ourselves against this by creating our own like kind of micro ecosystem of vendors. And then it becomes this big thing. 

Like vendors are like okay, like I really need to get to the bar where I can work with Chevron, I want that what's called an MSA with them so I can work with them and that's, that's a big boon for them, but it's also a big pain for them, right? Because every time I work for a new big company, I got to do everything their way. So I got to do. I got to do like the the tracking their way, I got to do the vettings their way, I got to submit invoices their way, and then that's fine. Okay, you know, for all the business I get for Chevron, I'm willing to do that. But now I work for a net new company as well. I'm trying to build my business and I add yet another super major and they have completely different ways to do it. Now I have to grow my back office to help handle all of that variations and complexity across the way, and so that's just kind of like a sliver of what's the like, the pain that develops over time, the salute like when people are trying, when operators in good faith are trying to solve these problems, they actually end up exacerbating the problems. They'll buy systems that help rationalize their space but make it harder for the ecosystem at large, because it's just yet another, you know, variation that needs to be handled by all the vendors that that work with them. So that's, that's the problem space that we have, and the one thing I'll layer on here which is really important is that it doesn't work right. Everything that they're doing doesn't work. 

The dispute rate meaning, like how often an invoice is submitted from one of these suppliers to a vendor, how often is that disputed? And it's between like 20 and 50%, depending on the part of the type of service provided right, but between 20 and 50% of those disputes are invoices are disputed. Now, disputed might be like you're missing. You're missing a cost code or something small, a well name here, whatever else that helps us like file things off in our back office, but it could be large. It could be like you charged the wrong rate or this is not the right price. I'm not going to pay for this. Right, you weren't compliant. There's various other things that could could be in that bucket as well, but when you're talking about a 20 to 50% dispute rate, no wonder there's all this friction here. Right, and I just I think about. 

I think about this in a different example is a little bit more tangible for me as a human is like my credit card, right, so like we all have a credit card. And if our credit card disputes were like one in five Right, which is like 20%. If one in five of the times I swipe that card, there's a dispute I have to deal with, I'm never using that card, right? That would be crazy and, and, to be honest, keep going order of magnitude. If it was one and fifty, I would never use that card. It was one in five hundred, I would never use that car. It was one in five thousand, maybe I'd use it, but I'd check weekly to make sure there's no, you know no weird things happening. 

But at some point, at one in fifty thousand and one of you know five million right at some point I let go and say, oh yeah, like this is, this is of course I'm gonna use this, there's like very, very low risk that this is going to be problematic for me, and so I take it for granted. Not only that, but like, as we all know, like the banks won't even Ding us for when there is a dispute, when there is a problem, they'll, because it's such a low risk that they can basically quantify that, ensure against it and and take that risk entirely off of us. So that's kind of like what we are attempting to do. Right, it's not just tackling that dispute rate, but that's one of the main symptoms that we we follow and and look at in this industry. And when we can ensure that, like we're kind of making more consistent tools for everyone to benefit from, we're building it out here in the ecosystem, not in the back office of one operator. And when we can kind of ensure that the structural Components of these jobs is recorded well in advance, it streamlines the way in which all of these folks work together. 

It just again, no one is Like, or very, very rarely is someone trying to intentionally put a mistake in. Very rarely is someone trying to charge the wrong rate or miss the cost code or don't have the signature, like these are very rare circumstances where someone's actually trying to do that. Most likely it's that they didn't know they had to do that or they fat-fingered the wrong thing and in a you know, in a disparate systems across the way, and paper here and you know, rolodex there, excel sheet in some places, like that's that's Rife with with problems, rife with errors along the way. So that's that's the problem space we're trying to tackle. That's kind of the philosophy of how we try and tackle it and we're making great progress against that and people are excited about it. You know they want to see it right and and, and I respect them for that. But this is this is where we're playing. 

0:20:05 - Mehmet
You know I can relate to many things you mentioned because when I was working as a consultant, of course I covered a lot of Verticals and of course, like, energy is one of them and just you know the amount of. You know just the people who are in the building, and I'm talking here Like I'm based in Dubai. You know the Middle East also has one of the large, large oil producers and so on. So just you know when you see all these force going in, going out, and you know Different departments. So I started to relate few things. And even you know, when we're talking to the IT department, let's say, and even there, like you can see the complexities behind and you know, because there are contractors, subcontractors, you know like a lot of things that goes there, and when they have a new project All together it's like you are having a new entity within the big entity itself. 

So all what you said, maybe, maybe I get it, but just for the audience, you know, like really it's a big problem and because I didn't live it myself, but I've seen, you know these Giants, I would say they have it. And of course, to your point, the subcontractors. And then you have the subcontractors Sometimes that they need to to do this. So, absolutely, you know, I let's say huge and tremendous. I would say you know things that happens in the background, that us, you know as people who just consume, let's say, that product, we don't see it maybe. But now you know, praveen, I think and you, maybe you would agree with me or not, I will see now, like this is a very also dynamic Space, the energy sector, right, so it's a fast-moving and innovation is key. So how do you think you, you are able to drive this innovation, you know, while having this complexity at the same time? And Like, what are the technological investments that you know, you try, you know, to implement to streamline these traditionally complex processes? 

0:22:15 - Praveen
Yeah, that's a that's a great question. I One of the things that I think is amazing to me is that we, like our clients, are some of the most innovative companies on the planet. They, they are like operating in some you know large room in Houston and controlling Like machinery that's halfway across the world Live, and that that is like astounding the kind of innovation that's required to do that safely, and and so it's remarkable that those are the same clients that Really struggled with the innovation of their actual workflow and their supply chain and really how all of those things work. And, to be honest, I don't put that necessarily on them. This is not something that I think one entity can solve for themselves in isolation, and that's that's, you know, ultimately, our, our philosophy is that this has to be, you know, a systemic solution and it has to be done for the ecosystem at large, and that that actually takes a lot of participation and partnership with, with both sides, like all sides of that, of that ecosystem. You know, so, like when, when we think about, like how do we innovate our way through Some, some of these problems? 

Many of the things that we're trying to do are not new, Right, they might be new for the energy space, a particular, challengingly challenging, an entrenched area when disruption has not necessarily occurred. 

Like there's been many attempts to try and kind of create Like some variation of uber for the oil field right, like we've even had our own attempts at that and part of part of that vision of like, kind of like whatever I need, whenever I need it, call it on my phone and it shows up, ultimately, that I think will happen if we're succeeding right in what we're trying to do. 

But you can't jump straight to that because, again, all of the things I talked about, the stakes are too high for this to be as simple as the, the first order, you know, the first order ride share or apartment share types, tech technology companies astounding as they are, really amazing what they've been able to accomplish, but the barriers to entry here are much higher, and so the way in which we think about innovating is certainly inspiration from industries that have been able to successfully do this, but also really like we've been in this space for 10 years now and we are. 

We have a lot of really Brilliant folks from oil and gas, like their careers have been spent there and now they're spending it with us here at work Rise to try and solve these, some of these, some of these pain points that they've felt viscerally and directly. And so listening to our clients is a big part of this the domain expertise to understand the nuances, being able to map that to solutions that have worked in other spaces and bring those To bear here, and so we don't have to reinvent the wheel in all cases. Now that I'll you know, I'll put that there, but then I'll also talk about kind of the elephant in the room, which is how, how rapidly technology is moving, specifically in the space of AI, and I guess you should have a timer on all your podcasts about how long it takes to talk about AI. 

0:25:39 - Mehmet
We're like 25, that's it. 

0:25:40 - Praveen
So how does, how does that play into it? And you know, for us in specifically I, I again look at like, look, ai is not new and there are a tremendous number of like, like, well trodden paths around how we can leverage both AI and ML type Solutions to solve problems in our space. A lot of this, a lot of the challenges in this space, are about everything being completely unstructured. You so the challenge of unstructured to structure is a wonderful problem space for AI, and so we look for for that. In many, in many places that we're In our platform, we are trying to apply that type of technology to that problem. But I think that in a lot of other ways, especially in the more like nascent advancements in large language models, those, those provide potentially the ability for a leapfrog of, for solutioning right, and so what we try and do there is have at least some capacity stored, stored away for or applied towards Moonshots right where it's like. 

Okay, let's look at these traditional problems that we face, but let's look at non-traditional ways in which we might leapfrog what we would have otherwise done. And it's okay if we fail. We have a contained amount of investment in this. We'll learn a lot even if we fail. But let's let's ensure that we are trying to stay on kind of the crest of the wave as it moves so quickly here and and trying to apply those to our problems because you know, one in a hundred times that's actually going to come through, that's going to be this leapfrog solution where it's like you wouldn't have iterated your way to that right, you really needed like there's there's evolution, there's revolution, and sometimes we really need to make sure that we are looking for those. You know, the, the, the secular opportunities there. 

0:27:38 - Mehmet
Again, I can relate to many things you mentioned, praveen, and you know, especially about the adoption, and I think this vertical is special. I mean they are open to adopting new technologies. But I think you know, again, from my humble experience I'm not saying that I'm the most experienced guy here you know the Kind of, you know the way they do things. You know like I mean you mentioned some of it Like the way that they have like specific standards or, for example, they're very strict procedures you need to follow. So any any change that needs to happen, sometimes it need to go, you know, for four or five, six, maybe sometime tell approvals just to maybe do a small shift. So, yeah, I think you know like, but but again, I think they started to feel the heat. 

I would say that you know we need also to change this and we need to to move fast and I think it's gonna happen from my humble experience again, because if also a very regulated Vertical which is like and you gave an example from banks actually like banks, can you know people didn't expect that they will, they will move that fast, especially when they saw, like FinTech, what's the way, again they would be left behind. So I think you know, maybe something similar could, could happen With, with, with this vertical. But I know you know, like you mentioned a little bit previously, this concept of having, you know, like you call it, digital system of record right. It's like a capturing each step for every project, and I think this is something you know it's, it's a revolutionary by itself. 

So how do you think this system can, you know, foster the trust and transparency, especially because of all the things you mentioned also, like they have a lot of things that sometimes not like trusting on a personal level, but again I mean as a Company. When you come to me as a contractor, I need to make sure that, hey, like, if I give you this project to build a new I don't know Parillel, or I will give you to build a new rig, or you know, whatever the project is, I need to make sure that you are doing to me in the in, in plusful way. But how do you think you know what you mentioned can help also to you know impact, or it can help them in to do an impact on the operational efficiency overall? Because at the end that this is back to the thing you mentioned we're trying to use technology to solve a real business problem. 

0:30:05 - Praveen
Yeah, we call it like the unbroken digital chain, right? Meaning, lee, like the connected, connecting all the way from, you know, procurement to payment, which, like, if you want to start a company and supply chain in any industry, at some point on your website You're gonna say we saw procure to pay. So, like, I'm not trying to Say we're somewhat unique in that regard, but that's ultimately the challenge, right, it's like I need to. How do you help me find who I need and build a like a connective relationship all the way through to when I've utilized their services and I'm now transacting to pay for those services? How do you ensure that your platform takes me from a to z there and that I can see this Connection all the way through and to us? That's the unbroken digital chain and so, like when, when? 

I think, let me, let me do it in two steps. One is like status quo today, what can go wrong? And so sometimes it'll be that you know the relationship between an op, like a, like an energy company, and a supply service provider that's made by the supply chain team. They get their you know their contract, sign their MSAs. They even establish you know some sort of, some sort of work order saying okay, well, these are the types of things that you can do for us and these are the rates I'm expecting you to charge and we put you through onboarding so we've made sure that you're you know you're compliant and from a safety and financial standpoint They've done all that. That's kind of the supply chain side. Now this is this this Service providers consider part of their, their approved vendor list, and so the field can start using that. And I'll forgo the, the challenge in the field knowing who they can call. Let's assume they do have that and they call. They call this vendor up and they have them come to work. The vendor sends some folks to do the work on site. You know it could be as simple as cutting the grass. It could be, you know, far more complicated or high-risk. Downhole Work could be, water hauling could be any number of things that they have to have done on the on the project. 

And Then you know they write some things down on a piece of paper which is their field ticket. They go back, they put it in some, some bull in the in the home office for that for that service provider. Maybe a week later Someone in that back office for that service provider collects all the tickets, puts them into an invoice, sends it to that original Company, and at that point they say wait a minute. Oh, by the way, like this is all of these companies because, because they're like, they're the buyers, they they've they've Been able to kind of make the standard, like these net, net, net 60 terms right now, meaning like 60 days to pay these, these things, sometimes longer than that even so, like it might be that this, this invoice gets sent Now we're already like a week and a half after the work was done, and then there might be a delay in them actually looking at it because it's a net 60. Then they finally say, oh, you know what you're missing. This, this AFE, this, you know, authorized for expenditure code, basically a cost code and energy. So, you know, dispute gets sent back. 

And then the vendor goes and says, oh crap, let me look up that field ticket, maybe that can you call them and figure it out. And so then they go back and they say, okay, we found it. Here you go, and finally it gets paid. This is not helping anyone, right? Like you could naively say, oh, look at that. Like the, the energy company got Kind of like, let's say, 90 days, where they have to pay for the services rendered. Right, it was like a 90 days zero interest loan. But that doesn't help because the the supplier is basically charging more to overcome the fact that it takes them a long time to get paid. Right, because disputes are high and because there are these net 60s and whatever else, right? So that's the status quo of this whole thing and the, the mistake made, was an honest one, which is like oh shoot, I forgot to enter that number. I didn't have that number or it wasn't on the field ticket, so I didn't put it in. This is the same thing we did last week. Why isn't, why didn't you just look at that so that you know honest, honest folks work and trying to make this, make this happen and mistakes can be made and it can result in large delays and large inefficiency. 

So when we talk about the unbroken digital chain, we let's rewind that whole thing all the way back to that procurement stage where they locked in these contracts. Well, those contracts are digital objects in our platform and they stipulate structurally what they represent, saying you're allowed to do these certain things. By the way, these certain things, you can only do them in these locations and, by the way, you need to be able to charge these rates for the activities within those right. So now that's all locked in, whether users or not. That's that's kind of locked in in a structured way. Now, when the the field needs to use their AVL, they have a real-time list of all of the vendors who have, you know, have these contracts in place. Not only that, but we ensure that they are Compliant, and they are currently compliant, not one. You know three. Three months ago I checked and they were compliant. Like today, are they compliant, right? So, like that's what we provide. 

That field is like I don't have to call supply chain, I don't have to deal with the, the internal dynamics and complexity and friction there. I just log in and say, like I need someone to do this in this location. You're telling me these three are my options, I'm good to go with any of them. I'll call the first one great. So so that that part simplified. 

Not only that, but when that person is doing the work, that that that service provider is doing the work, they're not working off paper, they're working through the app. The app is connected to the request that was made from the field, that that request that was made was Connected to the original work order, and so they now you're starting to see the connected dots, right? These unbroken digital chain prevents Problems from occurring. So now the field, the field ticket, the digital field ticket, that's being submitted. It can't, you can't submit the wrong rate because you know the rate. The rate is already connected and provided for you, right. So by virtue of these things being connected and collected, like collected at the right time up front and provided at the right time of use, you prevent errors and you prevent them from skipping the step of entering that AFE that was required. And so now it gets submitted and we have and it's, it's it's approved digitally as well from the person from the field who requested it. So now we have this entire chain. 

So think about a dispute. Now, the, the, the energy company is the one that set up this relationship. The energy company is the one that agreed to these structured rates. The energy company's field is the one who called in this work. The energy company's field is the one who approved this work. 

At that point, what are you disputing, right? So that's, that's what trust looks like. Trust does not look like Opacity and just saying, trust me right, trust looks like complete transparency. Trust looks like it's transparent. It's there, just like my credit card. If I log in right now, I can see every single transaction. But I tell you I never do that right, because that's what trust looks like it's transparency. 

And so what we're trying to do with the unbroken digital chain is provide that transparency so everyone has that trust. And when everyone has that trust, I believe and this, you can put this in the two cents bucket, because probably who knows if it's true, but I believe the dispute rates will fall. And I believe, if dispute rates fall, those net 60s that I was talking about I think those start to go away. I think this starts to look more like a clearinghouse where money flows independent, like based on that approval, immediate instant, between these two entities, because there's nothing else to question. Right? That's the gold standard of this. That's what we should be striving for and there's ways in which we can iterate towards it. Right now, the key is to show the transparent chain, and that's where we're focused. 

0:38:08 - Mehmet
Again, I can relate to many points, and it's like being proactive and then having you call it a centralized source of trust. So if I'm doing a contact, I'm trying to simplify it a little bit. So I do a contact with you, praveen, and I'm your provider, you're like the company who's giving me the contact, so we know how much I can charge you per task, right, and I have a catalog of tasks. And then you say, okay, I need to go today, do this task in this location. I go there, I clear it out and then, because it's everything documented and it's within the workflow, let's call it that you have. 

So you cannot come and say, hey, mehmet, like you didn't do this because we didn't agree that this is the scope of all, but the scope of all was pre-approved first and I think, majority of the time and this is not only in the energy sector. I think this happens a lot even in our technology sector as well. So, because I deal a lot with VARs and service providers and I think maybe even they need something like this, because when they get awarded the project, majority of the time and I hear the stories from both sides because I was working with the vendor, so I'm the supplier, yes, but I mean I don't do the implementation. And then A like yeah, the customer didn't put this in the scope of work. Or the customer would say, hey, but I was expecting you by default to do this. So you see these frictions and again to the payment, and I come from a pain, again not related to energy maybe, but I believe on energy on a larger scale, because also the amount of money we're talking about, the amount of the size of the contract, is larger. But even I can relate on a smaller scale. I can imagine how big the problem is actually and the solution you're putting in place is fantastic. 

Now, out of curiosity, because when I was on the website, I've seen something related to sustainability and COP, which was here, by the way, in Dubai. So how do you think, if I can go and look to the bigger picture? So how do you think what you're doing at Workrise, from this innovation perspective, would help these global energy companies to do the transition and what do you think, in general, the technology role would be in shaping in a more sustainable and efficient future, especially for the energy sector, knowing that all the companies in that sector, whether in the US and in Europe and here in the Middle East, they have on their agenda how we can become more efficient, sustainable and remove a little bit all the attention from us as a carbon footprint companies to something else. So what's your vision on this, praveen? 

0:40:53 - Praveen
Yeah, I think our philosophy and this is certainly something I personally believe is that we should avoid thinking about energy in some sort of like there's good energy and there's bad energy sort of way. I think we can look at the problem far more objectively than that and in that objective view of the problem, you can go around the world and look at the distribution of where energy's coming from. There's no such thing as a world without oil and gas today, and if we want that to be something that's true in 50 years or 100 years, then we should be having a far more objective conversation of what that diversification looks like, and it's going to be steps, and I guarantee we don't know what all those steps need to be. We can make a statement about what we think they are today, and let's take those first steps together. So, with that view in mind, our firm conviction is where the change and diversification needs to come from and will most likely come from is from energy companies today. These are the entities in the position to actually make the largest impact, in an objective sense, of what we are trying to do, and many of them actually do Now. Maybe they don't do it in the ways that everyone wants right, and so there's certainly views that say I won't accept any energy transition that continues to produce like, emit carbon into the atmosphere. But again, if we take this back to the objective goals that we seek, there's only a few that will actually happen. So let's take those steps and let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. 

So if we then take the view of like okay, well, these energy companies need to be the ones that help with a huge chunk of this transition, how do we help them diversify? They are way too entrenched and slow because of the problems that we talked about for the first half of this time together. Right, to do that right. There's so much friction for them to find and vet and work with the vendors in their own domain. How are you expecting them to do that effectively and at the speed we need? In new domains, in nascent domains, they will not be able to right. And so what we are trying to provide and ultimately this is kind of like the core of what this is all for right, we have a mission about helping them move easier, faster and safer to power our world, but it's in pursuit of, like, the need that we all have in their diversification to continue to power our world in a way that's sustainable for us. So we don't think that we're not a company that is going to solve sustainability in a direct sense, but we do feel we have a tremendous impact that can be made in an indirect sense by making these companies far more efficient, by giving them far more transparency of the field at play in all of these nascent technologies. 

We have had experience in our 10 years in many of the renewable space mostly on the labor side for solar and wind and we've learned from much of that and many of our clients right now in oil and gas they are tremendously interested in spending some of the most money on diversification and renewable projects. 

Oftentimes the challenge and the friction is I don't know like I don't necessarily know who the players are in the space that I would need to get that done right. One of the companies that we're helping right now is a company called Fervo which I believe is staff with a lot of like exo oil and gas folks but they're working on like geothermal type solutions which such an incredible overlap between the advanced understanding and technology from oil and gas directly related to how they're able to do some of these geothermal solutions, and I think they're even playing with some like long-term battery storage, leveraging spent wells and just some like absolutely fascinating things that they're trying. That's what diversification and evolution looks like. It's not a completely different set of people from our current energy space. It's an evolution of our energy space, and so we need to be part of that evolution. 

0:45:34 - Mehmet
Fantastic. Now, praveen, I want to ask you a question, maybe not related to work, but specifically, but from the discussion that I had with you, and I need this kind of your secret sauce for fellow people who want to become CTOs. You know what I noticed, praveen, really the way that you have not only understood the business case and related to technology, but actually you dive very deep into understanding. You know also how I mean how the whole thing works there. So and you know, I see it, I talk to a lot of people and you know what they tell me. You know what, like, I'm a techie guy. You know, don't talk to me about business, I want to. 

But at the same time, if you ask him or you ask her, like, what's your ambition? Yeah, I want one day to become a CTO, right? Or I want to be an executive. What is the secret sauce, praveen? Maybe grasp these two together and, you know, have both strong understanding, of course, of technology, which we know. Like, I would not ask you how to become a good programmer or how to become a good solution architect. You know plenty of resources out there. But you know, having this merger between the business side and the technology side, which I think this is the main thing why you know the CTO position is very important. So how we can reach that, praveen, like I'm asking this question on behalf of many people who have the ambition to become CTOs. 

0:47:06 - Praveen
Sure, well, I mean, I'm so glad that, like there are shows like yours, right, who interview like technology leaders, and probably I hope you ask each one of them something like this, because it's probably not so much a secret as it is like patterns of success and also failure modes to avoid. I think you touched upon a big one, which is when you're joining. I think a lot of folks just think of CTO as like, oh okay, you're the top of the technology arm for this company, but what that minimizes is the executive part, meaning like you're part of the executive team that is leading this company. Right, that comes with a tremendous change in what your focus should be and you have to care about everything that those other peers of yours care about. I think a lot about first team, right? Who's your first team, first team being the one that you consider like this is my primary team, the one I should prioritize. The focus should be here, where I spend most of my time, should be here, and oftentimes people think of their first team as the people like that report to them. 

In a leadership position, it would be, you know, my head of product and my head of software engineering and head of data and the head of IT and, like all of these great folks, that's my first team. That is not my first team. My first team is the executive team. My first team is my CEO, my CRO, my CFO, all of these folks that I work with and spend a great deal of time with, and so my responsibility in that team, in that room, is not isolated to technology. It's incumbent upon me to really understand the 360 concerns this business faces. It's incumbent upon me to really influence the strategy with which we take. Now, I might not be the expert on how we, you know, put this product in market right and I lean heavily on my peer, josh, our CRO, and his people to help with that, but I certainly need to understand it and I certainly need to have, like you know, my sleeves rolled up and my fingerprints on that. 

And it doesn't stop there. 

It's really all aspects, and one of the things that I really feel like I've gained a tremendous amount of perspective at this company and learned a lot about is, you know, gotten much more deep into the financials of a successful business, and I think we've at times been like not a successful business, and right now we're grateful that we are a successful business. 

It comes with hard work and understanding and alignment of that executive team to say, like this is what we need to do, there are hard decisions to make to get there, but like it's really, really important for us to align on that, to understand that and to then execute against that and hold ourselves accountable to that. So one of the things I don't think it's a secret, but I do think it's sometimes not as spoken about is the I guess the C and the O as opposed to the T in the chief technology officer role, is that your first team is that executive team and as such and you touched upon this in your question is you really need to have a much larger perspective on things and, of course, you are absolutely supposed to be the expert in that conversation around where the technology and the product can be at most impactful for our customers and impactful for our business at large. So I think that's one of the things that I learned along the way that has been most helpful for me, and so maybe I'll leave it with that one. 

0:51:07 - Mehmet
That's great and this is why, praveen, you know, I tell now I'm in an age where I can tell people some advices, you know, and I wish you know, I wish I could advise myself, you know, now, at an earlier age, to not push back on going and understanding the things you just mentioned, Like you touch on, for example, how to position this product from sales marketing perspective, understand the financial part. And I think you know the main reason why I started this podcast because when I was sitting in an IT department, we were, you know, I hope that I would not expose anyone, but I mean, we were always discussing us as colleagues, like why, you know, no one talked to us, you know, as technology department and because I'm talking about like 15 years or 20 years back. And then you know, I was taught to become happy to see like the CTO role itself, you know, coming to the front and being not seen as you know, yeah, he's the guy responsible for the IT or he's the guy responsible for everything tech and no like become actually the CTO is a driver, same as the CEO, as the CRO, as all the other C levels to do these things. And the reason, you know, I wanted to do this show to prove that actually technology is blended, accepted or not, with the business today. And people ask me okay, why you have some time people who are not CTOs? 

I told you like at the beginning I got CMOs, I got CROs, I got like all the C level C and the reason I do this? Because I want, like also tech falls, to understand these things and, at the same time, I'm conveying a message to the, because I focus also honestly in my show about, you know, entrepreneurship and startups. So, fellow founders, to understand this in an early stage, rather than you know, figure out. Oh, I wish I had brought someone who understand sales, but I wish I had brought someone who understand actually people management. You know, like all these things are part from a whole, like mosaic, I would say, and each part is very important. And thank you for sharing this, praveen, today. You know, like there is a lot of things I still can talk to you about today, but if one thing you know you felt that I missed and you want to just, you know, tell us about it before we get to close. 

0:53:30 - Praveen
Well, just to add on to what you were just talking about, I think a lot of different companies can't like. I sometimes tell my folks this is like roles are like roles and levels in a company are sort of our fiction, right, we decide what they mean and they should be useful to us in some way. And of course, there's some convergence in the industry at large about what these roles might mean, especially in the sense of, like these senior roles like CTO. But it's important to like recognize what's the role supposed to be here, right, and you should really recognize that you don't have to be like great at everything. That's the wonderful part of being part of a team is to like be complimentary with each other, and especially when you're in a position of leadership like this, you get to build a team that can supplement where you're strong and where you need help, and if it's a responsibility of your area, you get to build a team that helps to deliver that. And so it's not. 

It's also important to recognize like you don't have to do this all alone. It's not like go become the master of all these things. Follow curiosity, make sure that you like ask the question, like get the answers to the questions that are popping up in your mind when you're hearing things in meetings Never zone out. Never zone out and say like, oh, this isn't my part, don't need to understand that, don't understand it, don't need to understand it Moving on right, like every single one of those times where you're about to zone out, instead say, why don't I understand this? And let me make sure that I do next time. And when you do, you zone out a lot less, because everything becomes interesting and you become way more effective. So that would be the only thing I would add to what we just talked about for a great CTO position. 

0:55:15 - Mehmet
Exactly, Be always curious. I would say, Like, keep asking questions. Of course you don't, maybe okay, Like it's not saying it's not, I don't have to care, but at least I need to understand what's going on, right? So, 100%. So, Praveen, this is a final thing. I asked you know where people can get in touch with you, how we can find more about also a work rise. 

0:55:36 - Praveen
Yeah, it's workrisecom for the company and certainly I'm on there and I'm on not super active more of a reader on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can certainly find me on both of those channels as well. Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions or just wanna riff on something we talked about today. 

0:55:55 - Mehmet
Sure great. And again, I thank you very much, praveen, for the time. I really enjoyed the discussion. A lot of things that, as I was telling you that I didn't live myself, but I've seen people struggling and you talk about what you're doing is very interesting at work, rise and advise everyone to have a look also as well and check. And yeah, as Praveen mentioned, you can check the websites and get in touch with the guys. And again, thank you for the valuable discussion. This is how I end my podcast episodes usually. 

So for the folks who are listening to us and they just discovered this podcast for the first time, thank you for passing by. I hope you enjoyed. I wish, if you liked it, to subscribe and tell your friends and colleagues about it, and, if you are one of the local fans who are always sending me their feedbacks and their encouragement, thank you very much also for your loyalty. I really appreciate that. If you're interested to be on the show, you have an idea. You are working on something special. You don't have to be as a CTO, as I mentioned. You know it's door open for everyone as long as we talk about something related to startups, entrepreneurships and, of course, technology trends. So reach out to me and we can make a time for recording. Thank you very much for tuning in and we'll meet again very soon. Thank you.