In Part 1, George Mitchell unlocked shale gas. In Part 2, Aubrey McClendon fueled the boom with a capital and land machine at Chesapeake. In Part 3, we tell the story of one of the operators who makes shale production stick. EOG Resources led by CEO Mark Papa cultivates a unique (and uniquely secretive) culture of rigorous capital allocation and constant technical experimentation.

We follow Papa and his lieutenants Bill Thomas and Gary Thomas as they see what others miss: shale’s success in natural gas will eventually create a glut that will crash prices. EOG must pivot to oil or stall. From a dramatic 2007 offsite where Mark tells his team to stop looking for natural gas, to early experiments in the Bakken, to a quietly assembled position in the Eagle Ford, EOG’s edge leads it to become a top US oil producer.

But before they can enjoy their success, the market turns again. On Thanksgiving day 2014, Saudi petroleum minister Ali Al-Naimi announces to the world that OPEC won’t cut production to balance global oil markets. Oil prices collapse by 60% over the next 12 months and the shale boom faces its first true stress test. We unpack why so many companies break—and why EOG doesn’t—ending with the playbook that helped shale survive: low cost operations, productivity gains from technology, focus on premium wells, and operating discipline built to survive boom-bust cycles.

Chapters

(04:56) Two questions: will shale oil work and can shale production be profitable?

(07:28) The operators: Mark Papa, Bill Thomas, and Gary Thomas at EOG

(08:16) The history of EOG

(11:32) The 1990s oil & gas market

(13:34) Two forces converge at Enron in the 1990s

(20:03) Being the low cost operator in commodity businesses

(21:55) Four things that define EOG

(29:32) The commodity supercycle of the 2000s

(33:03) EOG pivots from natural gas to oil

(45:55) EOG announces the Eagle Ford discovery

(55:25) The commodity supercycle and the zero interest rate environment

(57:21) OPEC surprise on thanksgiving 2014

(1:08:04) Lessons learned

References

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World by Bethany McLean (Link)

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices by Robert McNally (Link)

The Accidental Oilman by Lawrence Strauss, Barron’s, October 2011 (Link)

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of The New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman (Link)

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Perez (Link)

At the end of Part 1, Devon had just bought Mitchell Energy for $3.5B and locked in the technological innovation behind the shale revolution. But the real boom in drilling, debt, and production doesn’t kick off until a worldclass landman and dealmaker from Oklahoma City—Aubrey McClendon—decides to bet his career and wealth on natural gas being the defining fuel of the 21st century.

In this episode, we tell Aubrey’s story: from deep family roots in oil & gas to hustling as an independent landman in the brutal 1980s bust, to co-founding Chesapeake, taking it public in 1993, and doubling production year after year even as gas prices went nowhere. We follow the moment he and partner Tom Ward fly to San Jose to sit across the table from Calpine executives and realize just how much gas-fired power demand is coming—and why that meeting gives Aubrey the conviction to pivot Chesapeake almost entirely to gas in the late 1990s, just before Alan Greenspan warns Congress about tight natural gas supplies in the US.

We walk through how he uses every financing tool available—bank lines, high-yield bonds, converts, joint ventures, volumetric production payments, and massive midstream commitments—to plug billions in capital needs and amass premier shale positions in the Barnett, Marcellus, Permian and beyond.

We draw lessons on effective fundraising, capital cycles, commodity cycles and technological revolutions—and why going to the source for real market signals is still the best way to build conviction.

Chapters

(02:35) Alan Greenspan on natural gas as a headwind for US growth

(04:05) Aubrey McClendon’s early life

(07:02) Aubrey graduates from Duke and joins Jaytex

(09:48) Setting out on his own as a landman

(16:07) Chesapeake goes public in 1993

(22:55) 1998 natural gas inflection point for Chesapeake

(26:30) Chesapeake gets into shale

(32:55) How big capex gets financed

(44:38) Aubrey loses substantially all of his Chesapeake stock from a margin call

(49:29) Aubrey gets pushed out of Chesapeake & starts AEP

(52:47) Lessons learned

References

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of The New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman (Link)

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World by Bethany McLean (Link)

Chesapeake’s 1993 Annual Report (Link)

Imagine starting a company to change the world of finance right before an epic stock market crash.

Elon Musk famously said that PayPal wasn’t a hard company to create. It was a hard company to keep alive.

In 1999, three future titans of technology—Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk—charge straight into the blaze to bring payments and finance into the internet age. This is the story of how a handful of brilliant founders and their team navigate from crisis to crisis, face constant near-failure, and create the first successful internet payments solution. From the wreckage of the dot com bubble, they emerged refined—the founders, investors, and builders who would go on to shape the next two decades of Silicon Valley—and a lot of the world we live in today.

Chapters

(01:20) Mr. Buffett on the Stock Market

(02:17) The stock market in 1999

(05:21) Intro to Max and Peter

(09:49) Intro to Elon

(15:45) Why they choose to do startups this late in the cycle

(20:51) Insight of eBay as a perfect market for p2p payments

(22:51) Competition between Confinity and X

(26:55) Confinity and X merge

(34:09) Novel business model & technology innovation

(37:29) The stock market crash dynamics

(43:25) How PayPal navigates post-9/11 slump with an IPO

(48:42) The PayPal Mafia

(50:40) Nature vs. nurture

(54:02) Takeaways on market timing

(55:24) The internet delivered on its promise

References

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni (Link)

The PayPal Wars: Battles with Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson (Link)

PayPal S-1 Filing in 2002 (Link)

Mr. Buffett on the Stock Market, Nov. 22nd 1999 (Link)

Technology waves are easy to see in hindsight, but often hard to see before they arrive. It’s even harder to build enough conviction to take a risk, ride the wave, and build something great.

Jeff Bezos did just that. And while the Amazon story has been told many times, it’s fascinating to think about what he saw that gave him the confidence to leave his comfortable Wall Street job to start Amazon.

How did he see the wave before most people, and what gave him the conviction to go for it? We cover his key relationship with David Shaw, his market research, and his regret minimization framework.

Famously, Amazon focused on books and grew like a rocket ship. How did they navigate the hype cycle and the dot com mania? Was their approach to investing during the boom the right approach? What can we learn from how they navigated the crest at the height of the bubble?

Finally, we ask maybe the most important question of all—how did Amazon survive? What were the market conditions they had to navigate? Did they do anything specific to position themselves or did they just get lucky?

Chapters

(01:20) Increasing return games

(05:38) Jeff Bezos’s background

(10:27) Market backdrop in the late 1980s, early 1990s

(13:54) Jeff Bezos meets David Shaw

(16:47) How Jeff Bezos sees the wave and builds conviction

(32:22) How Amazon navigates the wave

(35:25) Joy Covey hired as CFO

(36:27) Amazon’s investment philosophy during the boom

(42:40) How Amazon survives the crash

(44:25) Amazon’s financings

(49:41) The market crash and Amazon’s reaction

(52:50) Why did Amazon survive?

(57:50) See the wave, ride the crest, survive the crash

References

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

Amazon SEC filings & shareholder letters from 1996-2002

“Riding the Perilous Waters of Amazon.com” by Peter de Jonge, New York Times Magazine, published on March 14, 1999 (link)

Increasing Returns and the New World of Business by W. Brian Arthur (link)

2,300x web growth from ‘93-’94, John Quartermann, Matrix News, Vol. 4, No. 2 (link)

Acquired Episodes (History, Tom Alberg)

In the late 1990s, the internet grew exponentially to become an enormous engine for technological progress and economic disruption.

The existing telecommunications infrastructure was designed to carry voice and television signals—not data packets. The system needed billions of dollars in fiber and copper to support the tidal wave. Telecom entrepreneurs, incumbent executives and capital markets were eager to invest capital and ride the boom.

In this episode, we tell the parallel rise (and unraveling) of two giants who tried to wire the future from opposite ends of the network.

On one side: John Malone, the genius capital allocator behind TCI, stitching together last-mile cable systems and striking the blockbuster sale to AT&T in 1999 as the industry chased an “integrated provider” vision after the ’96 Telecom Act.

On the other: Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, an acquisition machine that vaulted from discount long-distance reseller to national carrier—fueled by a once-accurate-later-obsolete statistic implying “internet traffic doubles every 100 days,” a meme born at UUNet and soon echoed by CEOs, analysts, and even the U.S. Commerce Department.

We follow the capex arms race, Williams’ ingenious move to pull fiber through abandoned pipelines, the strategic missteps at AT&T, and the line-cost KPIs that nudged WorldCom across the line from pressure to fraud.

Along the way, we draw out lessons for investors and operators that resonate in today’s AI boom.

Chapters

(01:15) The meme that sparked the boom

(04:00) Market structure for telecom in the 1990s

(10:01) Huge capital expenses

(11:16) Opportunity space for entrepreneurs

(12:59) Introducing Bernie Ebbers and John Malone

(18:02) The invention of EBITDA

(20:18) Everything changes in ‘95 and ‘96

(26:50) LDDS becomes WorldCom—a top long-distance carrier

(31:20) TCI becomes a top cable company

(35:14) Prices down in long-distance telephone & last-mile assets become very valuable

(37:24) TCI acquired by AT&T

(39:10) Contrasting dot com vs telecom financing

(43:23) AT&T-TCI merger challenges & WorldCom earnings down

(52:02) Aftermath for John Malone and Bernie Ebbers

(55:53) Lessons learned and applications to today

References

Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business (link)

Born to Be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the Internet, and Growing Formula One, Discovery, Sirius XM, and the Atlanta Braves by John Malone (link)

Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower by Cynthia Cooper (link)

Boom and Bust in Telecommunications by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (link)

Description

Gold-rush energy meets browser wars.

In mid-1994 Silicon Graphics legend Jim Clark sits down with a 22-year-old programmer Marc Andreessen in the heart of Silicon Valley. Clark, a rebellious hardware icon trying to reinvent himself, and Andreessen, fresh off building the first web browser, bet that the browser will be the operating system to the open web.

Their new company races from zero to market share dominance, forcing Microsoft’s “tidal wave” pivot. They turn their IPO into a marketing weapon on August 5, 1995 when Netscape goes public without profits—and the stock soars—sending a blaring signal to founders, VCs, and retail investors that the internet era (and a historic boom) has begun.

Along the way, we unpack how Clark helped flip Silicon Valley’s power dynamics in favor of founders and engineers, and why Netscape’s triumph—and ultimate fate—should shape how we navigate today’s AI cycle.

Chapters

(00:18) Introduction

(01:13) The Tidal Wave Memo

(03:45) Microsoft’s Dominance in the 1990s

(06:40) The Origin Story of Netscape

(16:55) Who Was Jim Clark?

(18:34) The University of Utah as the Epicenter of Graphics Technology in the 1970s

(29:35) Jim Clark Changes the Game

(34:03) Netscape Shapes the Web

(36:31) Microsoft Responds

(38:20) The Mental Model of Dominating Operating Systems

(41:00) Why Was Netscape the Spark and Not Spyglass?

(42:17) Netscape’s IPO and the Macro Environment

(49:00) The Boom Starts

(50:25) Lessons from the Netscape Era

(52:24) Was Netscape Ultimately Successful?

References

The New New Thing by Michael Lewis (link)

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Perez (link)

Marc Andreessen on Inventing The Internet Browser (link)

A run on the dollar, stagflation, and an election on the line—Part 3 wraps up the series with President Nixon’s shocking announcement to shut the gold window… a move that changed the monetary system forever and signaled the beginning of the end for the perception of gold as money. We meet John Connally, the swaggering Democratic governor of Texas who rode in the car with JFK when he was shot, and later became Nixon’s Treasury Secretary. He was the political closer tasked with averting a global monetary crisis and more importantly, securing Nixon’s re-election in 1972.

In the summer of 1971—with inflation rising, unemployment hovering near 6%, and foreign central banks suggesting they might convert dollars into gold—Connally, only months into the job, worked with Paul Volcker and others on a plan to fix the economy.

During an intense weekend at Camp David, Connally orchestrated consensus around a plan that included wage and price controls, a 10% universal tariff on imports, and most importantly, the suspension of dollar-gold conversion. These policies were sold as temporary and forced a global realignment.

At 8:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, August 15, 1971, Nixon announced the New Economic Policy to the world and kicked off a series of events that led to the monetary system we have today.

Chapters

(00:20) Connally’s 4 No’s Speech

(02:00) Gradualism & Stagflation

(04:26) Whispers of Global Monetary Crisis

(05:52) The Nixon Doctrine

(07:30) Introducing John Connally Jr.

(14:18) How Connally Gets on Nixon’s Radar

(15:47) Moving Away from Gradualism

(17:27) The Potential for a Run on the Dollar

(24:50) Camp David Economic Meetings Coordinated by Connally

(30:05) The British Allegedly Want to Redeem $3 Billion in Gold

(33:07) Policy Change Decisions at Camp David

(39:23) Nixon’s Speech Shutting Gold Window

(40:15) The Immediate Domestic Reaction of the Speech

(42:39) The Foreign Reaction to the Speech

(46:08) Smithsonian Agreement in December 1971

(47:56) By March of 1973 Bretton Woods Is Dead

(49:30) Why Did We Not Have Another Bretton Woods Agreement?

(52:10) Similarities and Differences to What’s Happening Today

References

Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy by Jeffrey E. Garten (link)

Nixon's Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes by Allen J. Matusow (link)

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/