Silicon Valley and Oil and Gas Are Playing the Same Game

And the story I tell people is I had this idea back in October of 2024, right? I'm born and raised in Houston.

I'm going to live here my whole life.

I had this idea.

How do I meet more of these like legit AI people? Not just like people like tangentially interested, but like really good, talented people.

And I go, okay, math.

I'm pretty good at breaking problems back down into the basic math.

Houston's got a handful of million people.

It's got to be a hundred like really legit AI people, right? That's just basic math, right? And so I was like, okay, we'll all start this community and try to get people to show up.

And at the time there wasn't really anything like that for general purpose AI.

And I looked at the different meetup groups, how many people would attend.

And I felt like a successful meetup group in Houston would be about 30 people on a regular basis, right? Once a month.

So I said, okay, I'll fund this myself for the first three months.

It's out of my own pocket.

Cause I was adamant.

You had to have food and drinks for people.

You had to try to get them free parking.

Like there, there are things you have to do, right.

To make it successful.

And so I was like, okay, I'll pay for this myself.

And then if I can't get 30 people to end at three months, you know, probably just ditch it.

And we had like 60 people come to the first one.

Oh, cool.

And I was like, whoa, that's crazy.

And then I was like, okay, I guess I'm doing the next one.

Scramble over three weeks to find speakers.