3point Story

My abridged story starts in an undergraduate geology class at the University of Calgary.

Geologists have to take a few observations at the surface, and maybe some drill holes, and invent a full picture of the subsurface. That picture as well as the process of creating it in new areas is nuanced and intricate, and the professors whom I was learning from had it locked away in their heads. They taught us by scrawling equations on blackboards and photocopied black and white diagrams, trying to compress their rich understanding through these tools to get it into our heads. It was frustrating. Many of the students had trouble, especially when three dimensional visualization was required but not provided.

I had just learned to program, and channeled my frustrations into visual modelling applications that taught and showed my peers these processes. I approached the geoscience department and got funding to deploy these prototypes into the intro geology courses. It was, perhaps not too surprisingly, successful: when you let the students use their eyes rather than rely upon blind manipulation of algebraic symbols, things go ... better.

It seemed important, and I was helping people see geology. I didn’t let things die when I graduated. I moved the programs to the web and called it Visible Geology. I posted the link on a single blog with 50 followers, saying “I think this will help”. And I started grad school at UBC in computational geophysics. During my first few courses I watched my site get picked up at multiple schools across the US, and jump over to Europe and South America. A few months later I started getting emails from textbook companies and the occasional oil and gas or mining consultant. After starting conversations about licensing the visualization software with a few different customers I started a company with a professor, Adam Pidlisecky, at UofC (a UBC grad) to help bring these ideas to the next level.

We had an educational application, some momentum and a few bites that we needed to reel in. In the oil and gas industry, we learned that the first year for new-recruits is spent relearning all of undergraduate geology “correctly”, but this time it is not education, it is training. We snuck in the door in a super major oil and gas company and showed our toys to some of the higher-ups. And they asked us if they could use these toys for real things like their presentations, reports, and board room conversations. They didn’t want training tools, they wanted communication tools.

This was when I discovered e@ubc, and started their lean launch-pad program, the LLP. We were starting to be pulled into these companies but were at risk of being pulled apart. We were walking a fine line between a consulting company and funding the product company we wanted to become. Being asked by many customers at once to take on large software projects to help solve their problems, it took a lot to say “no” to some of these contracts and “please hold” to many others to focus on our own vision.

The LLP is a four week sprint that forced me to do two things. First, to paint a picture with my words and props rather than painting it with code. My first demo that worked and had a customer telling me “yes, that is it” was an interactive story in the new york times that I had less than nothing to do with, and had even less to do with geology.

Second, our mentors pushed us hard to explore our network of contacts and to learn as fast as we could by swinging from one interview to the next. By the end of the LLP we were asked to support a workshop for a diamond exploration group at UBC that brought together many people from industry, government and academia. This event combined cutting edge research into integrated geophysical methods with our bleeding edge communication tools that really should not have worked, but they did. We had all sorts of technical people interacting, sketching, and commenting in our 3D platform linking ipads, phones, computers, and the presenter all in real time.

People were impressed and wanted tight integration with their favorite geologic modelling platform, which was called Leapfrog. This company turned out to be the channel that we needed for this product, and what followed was all sorts of scoping, business discussions, strategy, lawyers, and flights that ended in the decision that it was better for everyone involved to launch the product together on the same team. They bought our company two months ago, and are viewing 3point Science as a funded startup with a generous budget and a global sales team. So we are really at the start of our next journey, and at the end of a rather circuitous one that spanned university courses, textbook publishing, oil and gas training, and collaborative mining software. 3point Science is in the business of getting technical 3D ideas out of one person’s head into somebody else’s. Supporting technical communication. I see education, training and collaboration as instances of this communication. What is very different, however, is the business model. Which was focused and crafted here, on those whiteboards with the help of my many mentors and the guidance of the e@ubc team. So thank you. :)