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Robert DeSantis on Oil and Gas Industry Leaders | Ep 193

38m 27s

Robert DeSantis on Oil and Gas Industry Leaders | Ep 193

In this podcast episode, Rob DeSantis shares his career journey from a mechanical engineer at ExxonMobil to co-founding Ariba, a procurement software giant, and serving as an early LinkedIn angel investor and board member. He now leads Arquestro, a company that applies data science and AI to revolutionize procurement, enabling oil and gas firms to competitively price every transaction and achieve 20-30% savings within weeks. DeSantis emphasizes leadership principles such as checking ego, staying curious, and inspiring teams to exceed their potential. He explains angel investing as a crucial bridge for startups lacking revenue, filling the gap left by venture capitalists who now demand traction. He recommends *Crossing the Chasm* for market strategy and *Good Profit* for fostering innovation. DeSantis highlights Arquestro’s unique value—combining data and human science for multi-supplier, multi-item optimization—contrasting it with older digitization tools like SAP’s Ariba. He notes that while agent AI is hyped, it cannot yet handle Arquestro’s complex, multi-dimensional procurement challenges, allowing the company to deliver tangible results rapidly.

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6400 Words, 34417 Characters

English
[MUSIC] Check your ego at the door. Be willing to play musical chairs. No ideas have done my idea. Inspire greatness. Inspire people to do 150% and even they're capable of doing. Not in time but in what they can accomplish. [MUSIC] The oil and gas industry. The driving engine of the world economy. Delivering prosperity, innovation, and abundance across the globe. Here are the stories of its key players, directly from the leaders themselves. This is Oil and Gas Industry Leaders podcast, where real experiences are passed on from the leaders of today to the leaders of tomorrow. Here is your host, Paige Wilson. [MUSIC] Welcome back to another episode of Oil and Gas Industry Leaders podcast sponsored by IFS. Every area of the oil and gas industry has its turning point. Right now that shift is industrial AI. IFS focuses on applying AI to complex asset heavy operations, helping operators reduce downtime, improve productivity, and make more informed decisions across our portfolios. Discover what's next at IFS.com. All right, let's introduce this week's guys. I have Robert DeSantis, founder and chief executive officer of our Castro. Welcome to show Rob. Let's talk about your career. >> Great, thank you, fun to be here. Funny enough, my career, fresh out of college as a mechanical engineer was at, my first interview was at Exxon mobile. After that interview, they recommended that maybe I go to the aerospace community based on my interview. I started my career as a mechanical structural engineer in the aerospace community before converting that into selling engineering structural analysis software, which then pulled me up into the world of Silicon Valley. My life then became all about software. I co-founded a company in 1996 called Arriba Technologies, and we became the 800 pound gorilla and procurement. There we built an organization that went from zero to almost 3,000 people in four years. Then post Arriba, I became a founding angel investor and board member of a social network called LinkedIn. I thought that was a very powerful way to, especially in sales, to learn how to talk to people that you want to get to. So that became a very powerful tool. >> Yeah, your age is showing. >> Yeah, I know. >> I'm a huge show. >> Funny enough, I left LinkedIn as board. I'm super excited about a company in the energy space again, a company called Bloom Energy, which made solid-oxized fuel cell and this thing called the Bloom Box. The Bloom Box could make a megawatt of power and fit inside of a parking lot, parking space. That company's been on fire over the past year, as the need for data centers need power. So I've been a shareholder in that company for 18 years. But I suppose to maybe be involved with Bloom, I then became a strategic advisor to one or two software companies along the way. But five years ago, my world had turned upside down. When I met a 34 year old data scientist who was reimagining procurement and supply chain. The things he told me that day got me so excited. I did something I thought I'd never do. I called the original Arriba Go to Market Team. I combined them with his data science team. He asked me to join them as a co-founder. Together, we co-founded a company which I'm now CEO of called Arquestro. That's my career in a nutshell. Yeah, moving and shaking. Yeah, I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to speak in a moving and shaking to move twice to Europe. In the mid-90s or early 90s, I moved for one company that I was at to Europe and opened up our European operations throughout 31 countries. I didn't even know there were 31 countries throughout your time. I was pretty young. Then with Arriba, once we got things going in North America, I backfilled myself with a head of sales from SAP. Then I moved to Europe a second time and this had my belt worldwide operations based out of Hope Dorp and the Netherlands. Where are you now? Where I'm calling you from right now. I'm calling you from California. That's home for me and that's the corporate base of Joe. But I'm only here a couple days a week because I'm usually out in the field with customers, employees, or soon to be customers. Yeah, I think I went to your conference a couple months ago. Probably maybe was it last year? The last one you had here in Houston? Yeah, it was in October. It's called Optimal. We'd weather our customers and our prospects and our partners and entire ecosystem. Yes. We'll be doing it again this October as well in Houston. That's awesome. That's awesome. It's great to hear that. All right, so let's get into the meat of it and talk about your current role or Kestrick does. Yeah, so our Kestrick, what we do is we do all of the thing. I like to say we're the science of procurement. All the things that people think procurement do and the procurement knows how to do but can't do because of time and scale. For example, any company, especially the area of oil and gas, they're lucky if they can negotiate 10, 20, 25% of the items that they buy. And then the rest of the items that they buy, oftentimes don't even get any type of competitive pricing. Sometimes you'd like to say three bits in a buy but oftentimes that's not even the case. In fact, one oil and gas major, they gave one thing, gave a contract to a supplier. They gave the supplier that corporate badge of theirs and the supply was in charge of ordering their own stuff. So totally price unchecked. So that's the opportunity for what our Kestrick does. Our Kestrick uses data science and human behavioral science to provide the optimal outcome on every transaction. Every line item gets competitively priced and delivers the best value. And the best price is not always the cheapest because you're going to make sure you can do on time and full, you can handle the geography, you can handle all the other elements, the risk, and associated with being able to deliver the product when you need it. So our Kestrick has designed a solution that allows that to happen at scale and mass leveraging AI and data science. That's great. That's great. All right, let's pop over to the leadership portion of the show. What is leadership to you, Rob? To me, leadership, I like to put it into different buckets. There's a leadership of people. There's the leadership of a market and there's a leadership of, of, I'll call it, for lack of matter words, the ecosystem, all constituencies, leadership, whether it's investors, employees, product, sales, customer success, and how you lead really can determine the velocity of market penetration. And we discovered that at a Reba when we became the fastest growing software company ever. And now, 30 years later, I believe we're going to see that happen here with our Kestrick. That's great. That's great. What is an example of a difficult situation or experience that you've had as a leader? I think the most difficult examples as a leader are the ones around people. It's impossible to higher right all the time. And no matter how much due diligence you do, no matter how much you try and get it right, and how much sometimes even the person being brought on broad is trying to make the right decision for them. There is that percentage in your hope relatively small that you've got a square peg in a round hole. And having to be brave enough to make that decision fast enough is a very challenging one. And those are the things that when I have to make changes, especially in leadership, or in management, it becomes a very important decision because it has impacts throughout an organization. Yeah, absolutely. I understand. You do all this dereligence to find out who this person is and then you find out what their true colors are and who they really are as a person once you get to know them and as they work out with you. So yeah, I understand that. Absolutely. What would you say is the most rewarding part though of being a leader? The most rewarding, hard being a leader is seeing the team come together and execute on a vision and on a plan. We just had some tremendous results this past quarter where we're approaching 300% of our plan for a variety of reasons. And nothing made me feel better than my weekly update that I do to the team. To congratulate every team member and the work that they did to achieve those results. And those results were achieved not just based on sales or customer success or every element of the company I could point to of all the things that the company did as a team and aligned correctly to win. And that always feels very good. Yeah, yeah, I understand. If you had a piece of advice to give the audience, what would that be? my advice, especially in the area of leadership, is I was at, I learned this rule, the other day. my age, check your ego at the door, be willing to play musical chairs, no ideas of dumb idea, inspire greatness, inspire people to do 150 percent than even they're capable of doing. Not in time, but in what they can accomplish. And when you can do those things and you can not be the smartest person in the room, but you can ask maybe some of the best questions and when you can inspire people to do their best, it becomes an incredibly rewarding thing to do. And that's my general advice when I talk to young leaders or shouldn't be leaders. Yeah. Oh, and I meant to ask you this earlier and just came back to me because squirrel. But what is an angel investor and why is that important? In the world of startups, there used to be I think a lot less angels, but what happened is venture capital typically is money that invests in a startup company. He says an idea and venture capital puts money to work. And once that gets going, typically takes two or three or four or five rounds of money to get that company off the ground and into a productive way before the company goes on. A couple of things have happened over the past 20, 30 years. One, there's been this incredible amount of money that's been moved into private equity and private equity has they invest purely based on financial metrics. Really do they do invest on anything other than financial metrics it, purely financially driven. And there's some value to that. And then but the crack in the door of our investing has been left with venture capitalists where they invest maybe not based on the metrics and the numbers, but the promise of the numbers. What they believe in, do they believe in the vision? They believe in, are there two or three proof points in a startup company that they can go on beyond the fact? Because at the end of the day, if you have no revenue early on a great idea like LinkedIn, we didn't have any revenue for the first few years, but yet we grew and we raised venture capital at huge valuations. But the other challenge is since private equity has come into play, a lot of venture capitalists have taken more of a PE type of approach to investing. They always baffles me nowadays when I talk with VCs even for serious investments. They want to see some traction on revenue. They want to see it as an install, customer base. They want to see a three or four year plan of getting to a certain revenue target. They want to see all the things that really that's not a startup company. They used to be maybe a series B or series C investment, but now just to get series A money, I'm involved as a venture advisor to another company. The company is going to crush it, but series A money wants it more from an advisor standpoint, more from like a PE company. So what does that mean? It means there's a new gap as VC firms move up closer to private equity type of investments. There's a gap between the people who are in the garage and they just start to have an idea and then getting to revenue and getting an initial customer base that need a quarter million dollars or a half a million dollars or a million dollars. And there's been enough wealth creation in Silicon Valley and in the world of startups and in private equity to where there are a lot of what we call angels. These are individuals who have made money by investing in a startup company to some way shape or form. And they're typically willing to put anywhere from $25,000 to a million dollars into an idea of company. And there are small little funds that consider themselves angel investors, where they may raise $5 million, but they're going to take that $5 million and invest it in $50,000 increments across a handful of companies. So that's angel investing is really investing in a pre-series a venture capital background. Okay. Yeah. That was very well explained. Thank you so much because it's been a minute since I've touched any startups. And how many of these startups are well in gas based? Oh, I'll say noodles of the world. There are growth funds like one of our investors out of a cluster of a firm called Altera. And there's seven or nine LPs, they're all oil and gas companies. And they invest in strictly in companies that can fuel the growth of oil and gas companies. Whether it's a new drill bit or whether it is a new way to do geographographic analysis or topography analysis or if it's technology such as supply chain, which is what we do. But these these are so much in the air of oil and gas and honestly probably in all the industries, they're always able to leverage technology, be it materials, be it software, be it something else to allow companies to do their job better, faster cheaper. Got it. Got it. With all of your experience in your life, what would you say as far as books influenced you the most? Well, I would say there's two books that really have impacted me. The one that impacted me for many years in my career, especially during the Arriba in LinkedIn years, and even the Blue Energy was the cross in the castle by Jeff Remor and how you go into a paradigm shift and you get emerging product in an emerging market. And how do you penetrate that market? There's the lunatic fringe that will I willing to try anything early on and then you get your early adopters and your early majority, then your late majority and then your lagrads. And that book is almost like a Bible for startup companies and I've had probably the most influence on my life. But more recently, especially since I got in the world of oil and gas with our Kestro, is a book Good Profit by Charles Koch. That book was so compelling to me. I listened to it on audio tape twice. I read it once and then and I referenced it oftentimes when I'm meeting people, especially in the area in the market of oil and gas these days. So what would you say is your most used business tool? We're in a world of technology constantly evolving. This one might be a little non-standard, I'll say. But my most used business tool is curiosity. Ooh, I like that. People, leaders, organizations that remain curious and stay curious and demonstrate curious curiosity. To me, we always have the edge. The organizations and people that feel like they got all the answers, they know everything and they approach new things in a cynical way, oftentimes sub-optimized. And so whether I'm on the as a CEO, I have to look at every opportunity that comes to me from inside running the organization of the company and rather than having preconceived notions or closed notions, I have to make sure that I say curious and open-minded to the stuff that's in Charles Koch's book on Good Profit, disruptive innovation and creative destruction. You've got to be willing to creatively destruct old processes and ways of new business and do disruptive innovation. And those two things have been very valuable for me and my career, both as I work with on the commercial side and on the operational side. Fantastic. Who would you say if this is a applicable at all? Is your most respected competitor? Yeah, this is kind of a fun one here. Of course, I wouldn't be CEO of this company. I haven't had the success that I've had. I wouldn't be working 80 hours a week if I felt we had any real competitions. I don't feel anyone does what we do and we've got the IP and we've got the outcomes associated with that. We deliver between 20 and 30 percent tangible savings to every oil and gas company and in a matter of weeks, we go live in five days and within a matter of weeks, our saving millions of dollars. One of the big oil and gas companies they put over 50 million dollars in our system in the first three days of using our software and they saved about 30 percent or 21 million dollars and or I'll say over 20 million dollars and that was so compelling that they said we wouldn't let us shut it off. And the same thing we've done this now a bunch of times and our ability to go live in five, deliver millions of dollars of value of tangible value, not to mention the operational value, the transformational value and the long-term value. There's been very compelling for us and especially the air of oil and gas. But to try and answer that question, I'll say that it's a funny thing for me being the co-founder of the 800 pound gorilla with Ariba where Ariba has a we got bought by SAP in 2012 so it's owned by SAP but Ariba has 73 percent market share in the Fortune 10,000. So that's pretty compelling for Ariba. I'm pretty proud of that. That said it is 30-year-old technology and where Ariba was really designed to be a procured a pay solution to taking manual paper-based ways of doing things and digitizing them but not changing the process but just digitizing them. It had a great value proposition but that value proposition has been realized now over the past 30 years. What we do is so much different than that, but because what we do is still relatively new or in this paradigm AI and data science and so people don't really understand that there's unbelievable value to be unlocked until we get into to educate. So it's an educational sale right now, but fortunately we've penetrated 12 different industries and we have unbelievable customer success stories across all industries. And 30 to 40% of our success stories are in oil and gas. We're very excited. In fact, I'm going to be out in Houston next week for our oil and gas council dinner and we've got the who's who a while and gas company dinner with us and sharing stories of the success. Oh, I wasn't invited. I'm just kidding. I'm totally just kidding. We'll look at the come, but we try to jump into the oil and gas customers. Oh, no, I was totally just joking. No worries. Just pulling your leg. I guess you've already answered my next question which makes your company better than the competition. Well, it makes us better. It is, first of all, you got to keep in mind that when Edmund came to me, my co-founder came to me that day, that data science kid and said, and I said, Edmund, what makes your product so special? He said, Rob, we combine data science and human science. But he then said, do you know the top three technologies that I use in procurement today? I said, no, I don't. He said, it's the telephone, it's email, and it's spreadsheets. And he said, 80% of a person's time is spent doing that and I've eliminated all that by working, by being a person who's doing that and learning the nuances of how to change that. And so that ability to handle speed and scale of capturing all I-nitems is something that's untouched by any other company. And it's funny in this world of agent AI, you get companies like Microsoft and Amazon and everyone else say, oh, agent AI can do everything, you'll be able to build your own. And for us, that's not really the case because first of all, we have a crack-object data science team with members that have come from Microsoft, Amazon and a re-bite and all sorts of folks. But the thing is, we do multi-line items to multi-support, multiple suppliers on multiple reasons why and because we have this multi-to-multi connection, a agent AI does not work for that. And we don't think it's gonna work for that for years, it's certainly several years to come, but more importantly, we deliver the value today in five days. So any company that wants to go try and build their own, they're gonna run into a couple of roadblocks. They're not gonna be able to use RIP around combined human game theory. They're going to have to figure out how to become a software organization and support and maintain it and learn from all the lessons that we learned over the past seven years. And then the other thing, one of the things that makes our product sing the way it is, the fact that we have historical data of every event, every change in price, every discount, every strategy across millions of suppliers and billions of spend. So the best indicator of what a supplier will give for a discount isn't necessarily what you paid last time or how the part is made. It could be from a different industry in the discounts that are given at a different industry of the same type of a similar type part. No industry that builds their own is gonna have all that data of multiple industries that really do the predictive procurement that we do. - Got it, got it. So throughout your entire life, what would you say your most important lesson learned is better? - I think my most important lesson that I've learned is keep an open mind and remain a student of life. And I'll give you three experiences. I am five foot six inches tall and I moved to Southern California right from my homeland of Rhode Island and I fell in love with two man beach volleyball. And when I first moved out there, everyone made fun of me. They said no, because I wanted to play competitively and people were like, no one's gonna play with you. First of all, it's a tall man's sport, your five foot six, you don't know anybody. And you're never gonna be able to play that competitive level. And I thought to myself, but I want to, how am I gonna have that make that happen? So what I did is I said, you know what? I don't think I'm gonna be able to today, but I'm gonna go work hard. I'm gonna try and start a company. I'm gonna try and retire by the time I'm 40. And maybe these professional volleyball players, they'll be retiring at 40. And maybe I'll be able to mentor them in business and they'll play volleyball with me. So when you know, I retired at 37 from Arabia. I built a tremendously nice house on the beach and Manhattan beach, the ground is zero for beach volleyball in the United States. And I met all these retired pro beach volleyball players and they wanted help in their life after volleyball business. And I wanted to play beach volleyball. And so for 20 years, I played early morning because I never didn't want to interfere with my work. But I would play three or four times a week. I would play an hour and a half for two hours of beach volleyball with some of the world's best. - That's so awesome. - Yeah. And I kept an open mind. I didn't take the critics. The same thing happened for me with golf. I didn't learn how to golf as a kid, but I got the golf bug because all these volleyball players were scrap golfers. Someone said to me, one time, that was a good golfer. He was a five-handy cap. He said to me, I said, hey, how long would it take for me to get the scratch? And he goes, Rob, you're 42 years old. You don't know how to golf. You're like a 27-handy cap. Now the best you're going to get to is maybe 15. And that's going to take you 15 years. You're never going to do it. Rather than me getting mad at you, I thought to myself, huh, I wonder if there's another way. So I kept an open mind. I met this pro golfer and he said, Rob, you could probably do anything you set your mind to. But enjoy every shot. Enjoy the journey and see what happens. So I enjoy the journey. I found someone who had a belief in me that if you kept an open mind, anything was possible. And today I bounced between a three and a five-handy cap and I love my golf game. That's awesome. I wish I knew what that meant. I am not a golfer. So yeah, what it means is yeah, the golfer's will know what that means. But my point down that was keeping an open mind on anything in life, whether it's children, whether it's personal endeavors, or whether it's business, has really served me well. And as a result, I've kept an open mind when opportunities have come knocking. Yeah. I'll give you an example of when I did not have an open mind. So here I am, on the board of LinkedIn, where a year and a half into it, LinkedIn is growing like a weed. We're adding 80 to 120,000 new users per week. I was working with a corporate strategy person that was the vice president corporate strategy, which cracked me up because he was 22 years all the time. And I was a whopping 39, but I thought I'm just as a kid. And I went in one day for a board meeting, and he came up to me and he said, hey, Rob, I won't let you know that I gave my notice this week, and I'm going to be leaving. And I said, you're going to be leaving. How can you leave this company? It's going to be a rocket ship. This is a great company. And he said, yeah, I know. But I have this opportunity to go work with my friends, who I went to school with. And I feel like it's just going to do that. And they're doing pretty well. They're doing pretty good as well. So I'd like to-- I think I'm just going to do it over there. So I said, all right, but what's the name of this company? And he says, he said, well, it's higher. But before I tell you, I spoke to the CEO and founder. I told them all the value you're giving us over here. And he said, hey, bring them on over here. We could use them. So come on over. I'll be right back. I'll be in a board member, possibly an advisor, doing all sorts of stuff for the company, same as I was doing for LinkedIn. And so I said, what's the name of the company? He says it's called the Facebook. And-- That's awesome. I said to him, this is my close-minded. I said, oh, another social network. I go, one social network is fine for me. So I don't need to do another social network. Oh, no. I passed. I passed on the opportunity to see what was available. And I learned after that, I go, you know what? Don't ever think of all the answers. So I always try and stay curious and keep an open mind. But-- Yeah, especially after that. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Wow. Wow. Why wasn't expecting that? Rob, how is your role now in the industry important to the future of the industry? Can you-- is it my role as CEO or my role as a petriot? What are you going to do for the oil and gas industry that's going to be important? I believe my role is to build a company that can deliver true transformational value to the oil and gas industry, as well as some other industries. But oil and gas, specifically because they are so ripe, for transformation. Yes. And there is this incredible opportunity. I'll tell you something. Yesterday, just yesterday, I was on the phone with the CEO of one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world. And he is all about transformation. And they've got many different initiatives. But they do not have many initiatives. to go impact their earnings per share as impactful as we can. You take a company that has 30, 40, 50 billion in spend and if we can go do what we're doing with all the gas customers and deliver, let's call it north of 20% savings, 20% savings on 40 billion dollars. Eight billion, can you imagine adding eight billion to earnings per share? So Jeff Femmeltz on our board of directors for CEO GE. And being the CEO of GE, he said, "Grab, he said this is so compelling. It is one of the true industrial AI solutions that unlocks so much value for a company." He said, "Quite honestly, I don't know how this can't be one of the top five or eight items on a CEO's desk." Definitely a CFO. That, and I tell you, for the first three or four years, we were slugging it away inside of procurement and supply chain organizations because there's a big amount of skepticism associated with AI and the value of each deliver. And of course, I don't, I never blame the supply chain and procurement people because there are 750 procurement solutions out in the market available today. And there's not an every procurement professional, a supply chain professional, probably gets one to five phone calls a week, either from a board member, a C level executive, a person out in the field, a really operator, you name it, trying to tell the procurement, how to do their job better. And how do you use a new software that they just got taught, talked to by a salesman? So the only way procurement has been able to survive, because keep in mind, there's too much, there's too much spend and too little time for them to go after what they already have to try and do is the top 10, but 20%. For them to take the time to try and evaluate 750 solutions, of course, it's going to create a hard shell on them and they're going to be like, cross their arms and say, "Don't show me another product until I'm going to do my job better." But the true reality is, if we can, now that we've got the data that supports it, and now that we get the number of customers from the majors to the independence using us, to even the investment community in the oil and gas industry investing in us, a ramp go, for example, as an investor with us, I'll tear a growth fund, I'll just saw all the gases and investor in us. They've seen and done their due diligence to know that we are the real deal. And so I see my job is making sure that we're able to penetrate the oil and gas industry as fast as possible, and then also not stop on our laurels. So I'll tell you one more little story. One of my, one of the people that joined Ariba eight years after I had retired, they joined what the company was already a billion dollar company. They had a new CEO at the time, and the CEO made the claim in the late 2000s, 2008, 9/10. They made the claim and said, "There's no more innovation to be had in procurement." So we're going to strip down the development team, strip down the expenses, increase the profits and sell the company. So that was something that was hearsay to me, but a couple years later the company was sold to SAP for five billion. The company probably will be well or well over 100 billion today if they were by themselves because of Ariba Network. But what that showed me was that you can never stop innovating. And I think Bill Gates even said it in the early 90s, he said, "At Microsoft we never believe for more than three months from being put out of business by the nearest competitor." So they can't constantly keep innovating. When they bought LinkedIn, I was a shock that they bought LinkedIn. I didn't know how to fit into the business model, but today I can see how it easily fit into the business model. It is interesting how you're going to keep innovating. So I say that because as CEO, I believe our job is not just to deliver these incredible savings today, but we at our Kestro have a product vision and have a company vision to become the leader in the predictive economy and to amplify the impact of procurement and supply chains influence. And we see a product road map that we can go do that can even that can continue disrupt the industry and the market and deliver this material value for the next 10 years at least. So what are your thoughts about telling someone about the industry that doesn't quite understand it? Well, I can say about the oil and gas industry is it is a family industry to me. Yes, it's amazing. They all work together. So it is the ultimate co-operation. Exxon and Chevron do stuff. Shell and Aramco do stuff. Shell and Exxon do stuff. They all kind of work together in different ways, shapes of forms. And they've learned how to have success individually, but also through partnering with the ecosystem. And they have a very close set of relationships with the entire supply chain of their organizations. And then I think the other thing is I don't think people really realize how clean and green these companies want to be. Yeah, absolutely. They there's huge investments to make the world a better place constantly by these organizations. I am I continue to be impressed, inspired, and excited about working with the oil and gas industry and the leadership that is in these companies because they really are true innovative people that that are constantly trying to do transform themselves and innovate for the better of not just the company, but for mankind. And I know a lot of people think just the opposite. But if you haven't been in it, I can understand why you think that when you think about fossil fuels. But I can tell you these fossil fuel companies are very, what's the right word, thoughtful. I was going to say conscientious, but yeah, it's not full works. Yeah. Do you have a favorite podcast? I can't say I have a favorite podcast. I have a good friend, John McMahon, who he's like the Godfather of heads of sales and go to market strategies. And he has an interesting one called Revenue Builders. And so Revenue Builders, no matter what the company, he gives, he does this podcast and on how to really drive stuff. And he that's it's I listened to that every once in a while and that gives me a I chuckle on my smile when I hear from different go to market commercial leaders and CEOs and examples of what they're doing and how they're doing it. But that's been fun for me to listen to here and there. That's great. That's really great. Thanks for joining me again today Rob. If people want to reach out to you and or get to know more about our Castro, how might they go about doing so? I am simply Rob at our Castro.com. So the spelling of our Kesto is a RKES TRO. Rob at our Kesto.com you can also find me on LinkedIn and Rob DeSantis. And if you put Rob DeSantis is a Reba or Kesto or whatever, I'll pop up there. I'm sure. Yeah, you're pretty easy to find. Yeah, I'd be easy to find. So that's the best way to reach is and I'd be happy to help any one that's interested in our Kesto. Get it's not getting more information about us. Awesome. Perfect. All right, that concludes this episode. So just remember it's up to you to open the next door. Thanks for listening to OGGM, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to OGGM.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. The show has been a production of the oil and gas global network. [Music]

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Rob DeSantis transitioned from aerospace engineering to co-founding Ariba, a major procurement software company, and served as an early angel investor and board member for LinkedIn.
  2. He is currently CEO and co-founder of Arquestro, which uses data science and AI to optimize procurement by competitively pricing every transaction, delivering 20-30% savings for oil and gas clients.
  3. Leadership advice includes checking your ego, staying curious, inspiring others to exceed their capabilities, and being open to creative destruction and disruptive innovation.
  4. Angel investing fills a funding gap for early-stage startups, with individual investors providing capital before venture capital firms, which now often require revenue traction.
  5. Key books influencing DeSantis include *Crossing the Chasm* for market penetration and *Good Profit* by Charles Koch for innovation and process disruption.

Summary:

In this podcast episode, Rob DeSantis shares his career journey from a mechanical engineer at ExxonMobil to co-founding Ariba, a procurement software giant, and serving as an early LinkedIn angel investor and board member. He now leads Arquestro, a company that applies data science and AI to revolutionize procurement, enabling oil and gas firms to competitively price every transaction and achieve 20-30% savings within weeks. DeSantis emphasizes leadership principles such as checking ego, staying curious, and inspiring teams to exceed their potential.

He explains angel investing as a crucial bridge for startups lacking revenue, filling the gap left by venture capitalists who now demand traction. He recommends *Crossing the Chasm* for market strategy and *Good Profit* for fostering innovation. DeSantis highlights Arquestro’s unique value—combining data and human science for multi-supplier, multi-item optimization—contrasting it with older digitization tools like SAP’s Ariba.

He notes that while agent AI is hyped, it cannot yet handle Arquestro’s complex, multi-dimensional procurement challenges, allowing the company to deliver tangible results rapidly.

FAQs

Arquestro uses data science and human behavioral science to optimize procurement, ensuring every transaction gets competitively priced and delivers the best value, not just the cheapest price.

The system goes live in five days and can start saving millions of dollars within weeks, with one oil and gas company saving over 20 million dollars in the first three days.

He advises to check your ego at the door, be willing to play musical chairs, consider that no idea is a dumb idea, and inspire people to achieve 150% of what they think they are capable of.

An angel investor is an individual who invests their own money, typically $25,000 to a million dollars, into pre-revenue startup companies, filling a gap left as venture capital firms move toward later-stage investments.

He cites 'Crossing the Chasm' by Jeff Moore for startup strategy and 'Good Profit' by Charles Koch for its insights on disruptive innovation and creative destruction.

Curiosity, as it helps leaders and organizations stay open-minded and avoid the pitfalls of assuming they have all the answers.

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