Listen to Victoria’s Interview with Dr. Landis Here:
What happens when scientific curiosity collides with entrepreneurial spirit? Dr. Charlie Landis shares his journey from studying geochemistry to becoming the Chief Technology Officer at Integrity Biochem. With over 35 years of experience in the industry, Charlie elaborates on how his unique ability to connect disparate datasets has driven innovations in oilfield chemicals and beyond. This conversation reveals the process behind developing IBC’s first-of-its-kind encapsulation technology, which enhances hydrocarbon production by mitigating reservoir clogging with a unique polymer chemistry.
Host Victoria Meyer and Charlie discuss Integrity Biochem’s strategic expansion into biosurfactants, an area sparked by an emergent young scientist during the COVID-19 pandemic. With insights into navigating new markets and valuing scientific innovation, Charlie reflects on the ‘unseen challenge’ of combining commercialization with scientific inquiry. Their discussion unfolds essential advice for young professionals, emphasizing passion, informed decision-making, and readiness to leap on new opportunities. Tune in to discover how Integrity Biochem continues to set a benchmark in chemical sustainability and innovation.
This week, we explore these topics in detail:
- The journey from scientific curiosity to commercial innovation and what it requires.
- The demands for building a successful startup in the chemical industry.
- Decisive leadership during uncertainty and balancing long-term vision with immediate challenges.
- What it takes to transition from familiar markets to entirely new ones.
- Scientific career success: reliable expertise, passionate dedication, and informed decision-making.
Killer Quote: “You have to have some level of passion that makes your commitment insoluble over time… and then you must have a fear of failure that is less than your joy for success.” – Dr. Charlie Landis
Watch Victoria and Charlie Discuss Integrity Biochem’s Journey Here:
How Dr. Charlie Landis Bridges Science and Market in Chemical Innovations
Welcome back to The Chemical Show, where chemical means business. Today, we are continuing on our theme of sustainability and innovation, green and bio, as we continue throughout the the month of April. Today, I am really excited to welcome Dr. Charlie Landis, who literally just retired as the chief technology officer of Integrity Biochem. Charlie has a wealth of experience in the industry, 35 years in energy and chemicals, including at Halliburton.
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Before joining and really being part of the startup team for Integrity Biochem, developing the first generation technology and the second generation and commercializing it. As we know, this whole journey towards sustainability and innovation is not easy. Charlie’s gonna share some of those insights, some of the biggest questions and decisions that he and the team have to make, and that may be great advice for you guys that are listening. So, Charlie, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Thank you, Victoria. Thank you for your interest in IBC as well.
Absolutely, so excited to have you here today. Let’s just start talking about you. What is your origin story? How did you get interested in the space of geochemistry and more? I mean, you’ve been doing this for a long time.
Yeah, geochemistry in itself was a new field in the last century, and I studied an uncommon mineral and realized quickly that it had to interact with water. And that became an entire field called aqueous geochemistry in the late-80s and 90s that exploded into the geosciences. It just interested me that the traditional geologic studies could be expanded to more dynamic applications in real time at the surface where civilization interacts with the natural materials. And it just fascinated me from the day I took my first test in the class. I was able to pass the test, which also helped with motivation, but it was a career driven by passion trying to understand how these seemingly inert things react with something as dynamic as water.
Love it. So geochemistry, I mean, how did you even think about getting into this field? Is it really that you were interested in geology and rocks? I’ve yet to figure out how somebody does it, and obviously, we need geologists. We need people that understand rocks and water and all this this formation.
Well, I’ll give you the solidifying story. It was in the mid-1980s, and I was watching American media, and president Reagan announced his plans for the Star Wars defense initiative. I was there as a graduate student trying to understand how we could use laser technology to characterize rocks. That’s what a scientist is supposed to do is think of these seemingly disparate ideas and try to make value of them. And I drafted a proposal for my adviser, and he turned that into a multimillion dollar 4 year dissertation project that utilized some of the lasers that were common at the time for the first time to understand how the organic and inorganic chemistry of the rock changes when you have a laser impinge upon that rock. That sounds incredibly nerdy, and I’m sorry if it does, but those are the types of things that fascinate a scientifically curious mind. I certainly have that.
I think it’s actually fascinating because we all get sparked by something. Right? And I do think this idea of kinda two ideas mashing together, that’s where some of the greatest innovations come from. So you studied this, and then you went off and you worked for Halliburton, is that right?
I have three degrees in the geosciences. I have a PhD from Texas Tech, and my first job was with an oil exploration company called Oracle Oil and Gas in their research facility. I was there for five years studying the same rocks that are currently being exploited around The United States for unconventional oil and gas. Then I was approached to take a job with a minerals company in Chicago looking at bentonite deposits around the world. Shortly thereafter, took a job in Australia trying to use that expertise to take that material and turn it into a water treatment chemical. And when 9/11 occurred, my parents wanted me to come home, and I landed at Halliburton.
I was there for 14 years, gratefully working in their laboratory, understanding how drilling fluids interact downhole primarily in the normal oilfield applications, but understanding those properties and realizing the value of taking a natural material and turning into an efficient material used for economic benefit in drilling. Whether it was improved or recovery, more water production from a water well, higher geothermal properties when you had shallow geothermal heat loops, whatever the range of opportunities were. They just basically asked us to design a fluid to to solve that problem.
Yeah. How’d you get to Integrity Biochem?
The best thing in life is you get that shoulder tap by a friend. Our CEO had the original dream of having a vertically integrated chemical company. There was something that he could control from the inception of the molecular design to the retail sale to a customer, and we spoke on the phone one day after work. We got on the phone and decided that we would do something like this if the opportunity ever presented itself. I don’t know if you’ve interviewed Jimmy Jeff, but he’s our CEO, and he was very good at explaining his original vision for the company. It just struck me as a great opportunity at my stage in my career to try something like that. It was absolutely a wonderful opportunity that I would not wanna pass up. I would advise anyone if they ever get that shoulder tapped, at least take the phone call. It changed my life with respect to being able to take everything you’ve learned along the way and turn it into a vertically integrated service oriented technical product supply company, which is what we have at IBC.
Awesome. I love that. And, that tap on the shoulder, what I always like to say as well is when opportunity knocks open the door. See what’s there and get ready to walk through. It sounds like you did.
So tell us a little bit about Integrity Biochem because I’ve had actually, Mike Suver on the show a couple times and Chad Hall, but I always love to hear your point of view, and not everybody’s necessarily familiar with the company.
Great story, even in cliff note form. It’s a deep and rich story of technical excellence, commercial bravery, and persistence, the building blocks for success where we’ve taken our raw material that’s been overlooked or undiscovered or poorly considered or not considered and turned it into a commercially viable product for a range of applications. We control everything from the chemical synthesis of the molecules, manufacturing the molecule, to the packaging and delivery and use of the molecule through our channel partners in the marketplace. It’s a fantastic little story of literally starting from an idea around a fundamental understanding of the chemistry, determining it, and understanding how it can be used in the marketplace to create value for our customers.
Got it. So tell me more about this chemistry because I gotta be honest, I still don’t really understand what it is. It’s a biosurfactant, is that right?
Well, that’s one of our two core platforms. We identified a molecule that has unique capabilities in the sense that it’s a polymer, but it’s not as big as the other polymers that were used in the industry. In other words, it’s literally a thousand times smaller. Most of the polymers that are used are large, heavier, long linear molecules.
So physically, like, molecularly, it’s a small molecule.
Right.
Okay.
Jimmy asked me to evaluate the technology, and there was a body of literature that came out that said that in the twenty years while I was doing something else, the rest of the chemical world taught themselves how to change those molecules to make them perform even better. And when we put those pieces together and Jimmy and I realized from our collective experience in the industry that there was a need for what that molecule could be, we decided to pursue the first platform and that is encapsulation. We were able to make it like minerals or attract two minerals that would damage oil field production. And if we could use that molecule correctly, we could minimize that damage and unlock value for our customers that they wouldn’t be expecting otherwise.
Got it. So your first product and your first chemistry and first target market was really oil field chemicals. And this product, does it let you produce more oil? I mean, what does it let you do?
It has two or three functions at once. It keeps the reservoir from clogging up itself. If you can imagine, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a dam and you would see twigs come through the front of the dam before they go out the drainage pipe. As you drain a reservoir, those twigs pile up unless water goes out the drainage pipe. Right? So we keep those twigs from ever reaching the drain point of that particular dam and allow more oil or liquids to be produced from that reservoir. So that’s a form of what they call fines control, and that was an undertreated need in the oil field that certainly adds value if you can control that over a period of time to allow more hydrocarbons to be produced.
And that’s the primary use. Obviously, that has application in everything from cat litter dust control to fines migration on highway or on dirt roads. Those types of things all are equally applicable in different environments, but the founding application was in the oil field trying to keep those fines from clogging the poor throats in unconventional resin.
That’s crazy. When I talk to your colleagues at IBC, in fact, Mike Suver introduced me to you, and he was just like, you’ve gotta talk to Charlie. He’s the most amazing guy. And it is such a credit when you’ve got people around you that love you, that laud you, that really appreciate you. So, kudos to you.
And to the IBC team because I do think you guys have developed a great team there. You and Jimmy, you were there from the origins. Mike and others credit you with identifying and developing this core chemistry. And you kinda talked a little bit about how that comes about, but you make it sound a little bit easy, to be honest. Well, we saw this idea and it worked. It’s more difficult than that. I know it’s more than difficult than that. So what have you found to be really critical in creating that success and helping to develop that technology?
Well, there are some peculiar attributes of a good mind that are required to take something like that and turn it into something that works, and I qualify as having those peculiar attributes. You have to be able to connect disparate datasets and understand things that are not in the same ZIP code, but certainly could be a wonderful vacation if you experienced it all at once within two or three adjacent ZIP codes, if that makes sense to you. So there was clearly the ability to understand that there was a market need. Jimmy and I have been in the industry for over fifty years. We understood that was a problem. We made a judgment that it was not being addressed adequately with the existing chemistry. So there was that obvious commercial need, and we understood that there’d be customers interested in solving that problem.
Then there was the unique chemical structure. You have to be able to recognize uniquenesses in everything that you do or the results that you produce from your scientific work, and this chemical had a unique chemical structure. It was a lower molecular weight linear column. And then lastly, I had the access to one of the best minds. I don’t know if you’ve met one of our research fellows, Dr. Ashoka Maduri. I could trust him to understand. He explained to me how well they can manufacture this molecule in the 21st century. And then it came to the final step, does IBC have the manufacturing expertise and capital to make the product at scale? So those four things all had to be entered and agreed upon to be readily available to move ahead because we were putting our hard earned capital and time and effort into the project.
Once we came to that, it was a Harry Truman decision. I don’t know if you’ve read about Harry Truman.
No I haven’t. What does that mean?
When he made a decision, he goes to bed, and when he wakes up and he feels good about it, that was the decision. You never look back. So that’s the final key is once you make a decision on all the information you think you need, you don’t look back. So we just went about our business to do those things and get the job done.
To me, it makes sense to a certain degree that where IBC started was really the oil field because I do feel like there’s a whole lot of cowboy risk-taking that takes place. Right? And so sometimes it’s whether it’s in your DNA or whether it’s in just the experience that you’ve got around risk and reward and the ability just to identify and take that risk.
That’s half the story. So in the oil field, we are a risk-taking group. But in this particular case, it was combined with Warren Buffett’s belief that you only invest in things you know. I read Warren Buffett’s newsletter every spring, and one of the first articles was about how he only invests in stuff that he understands. And, yeah, if you’re gonna take a chance in this world, you might as well start with something you think you understand. So we put those two things together, and Jimmy and I and a couple other of the original founders, mister Bryce Parker, we all got together. And we said this is something we can do.
That’s how it happened. And you’re right, I make it sound much simpler. There were decades of scientific research. You have to be able to synthesize and understand the key parts of the results of those research efforts and put it together and bring those disparate datasets together and then decide what to do with it.
What I think is interesting, Charlie, and this is just an observation as you talk about your origin story in combining lasers and rocks and figuring out that there’s money there. And what you’re doing here with IBC, I actually think there’s a unique aspect to your ability to not just do the science, but match the science up with money and customer value because that often does not exist in the same person. That’s what creates conflict across organizations. When the researchers say, but this is the best molecule. Yeah, but nobody’s gonna buy it. And so figuring out how to bridge the science and the market can be really challenging.
How did you guys do that? Obviously, it sounds like you kind of inherently understand that. But I don’t believe in the field of dreams. If you build it, there is no guarantee that they will come. You have to figure out how to identify or how to create that market. How did that play out for you guys?
Jimmy, Bryce, and I and some of the other officers in the company, had decades of experience understanding how to manufacture and mix chemicals. One of the best untold stories of our company is our chief operating officer who would never admit it otherwise is one of the more talented people to blend water based products, and this is a water based product. Not that it was singularly the most important thing, but everywhere you turned in IBC, we went down a checklist of things we needed to do, and Jimmy was a master at this. And I always say to people that he would struggle without us and we would fail without him. This is where it really showed up. He was able to understand and put these pieces together. He had two or three pieces of information for me. He had his vast experience from the marketplace to understand the customer needs, and we clearlyhave some of the highest quality people in product manufacturing who could give him the confidence to know that we could scale up this scientific phenomenon into a scalable product.
From the idea through the manufacturer to the supply chain and delivering product is one of the skills that is frankly beyond science. It’s about your ability to understand commercial potential, and this is where the credit really goes to Jimmy and the team he has around him. Yeah. For me, I was shocked how easy it was gonna be for me, Victoria. I’m gonna be honest. Now this is something perhaps I shouldn’t confess.
I like confessions. We can almost call this truth confessions of The Chemical Show. How’s that?
It makes it so easy when you believe and know certain facts around the general nature of what’s needed to complete a process. We knew we needed to be able to keep these fines from migrating in the reservoir. And encapsulation, which is our primary tool, is a known solution to do that. Encapsulating things controls the movement and timing of movement of particles. In our case, we had something that was in water. We knew we were gonna be injecting makeup water into the reservoir, and we knew that we had a molecule that was likely to perform in that circumstance. Then we ran tests that the industry uses as indicators of that performance and proved it to ourselves and proved it to the industry.
So from my point of view, I had a world class synthetic biochemist, doctor Masoka Midori. I had a known commercial need. I had a primary understanding of what the minerals were that were causing the problem. So my checklist for success was shorter than Jimmy’s, but it did allow Jimmy to say, okay. If I get that under control, we can go do this. It sounds easier than it was, but it really draws from the experience we all had collectively around sizing up an opportunity.
Was this technology or these products and the encapsulation, was that already taking place? So I know you said that you guys recognized and the market knew there was an opportunity because there was a problem, and so you could solve it. Were others already doing this? Were you able to kind of piggyback or follow the lead of somebody that was already doing it, or is this completely new?
We were able to translate it from other areas of the industry. So encapsulation is used for other drilling app aids and other different types of drilling applications, but not in the category of what is known as clay control. So we basically injected this in a way that was unique. People have tried it in the past, but I think in this particular case, they didn’t have the right ingredients. They didn’t have the right size molecule. They didn’t have the ability to engineer the molecule to perform the way we did. So we had some differences that allowed us to do that. But, yes, we were clever enough to draw from the history of other applications and bring it into our particular application.
How much of this is luck versus deliberate choices? I ask that in a way because it’s really easy a lot of times to identify new chemistries and to identify new products. Right? Humans and scientists and people across the industry, we’re creative. We can identify new things. And in isolation, in a lab, in a notebook as you’re sketching out this idea, you talked about crashing two ideas together. When you crash two ideas together, in theory, you can come up with something. And yet we know it is not easy to implement, and it’s not easy to scale and take them to market. So I asked that luck versus not question, but maybe more importantly, what advice do you have? How could others be taking this approach and applying it successfully elsewhere?
Well, that is a challenging question. I will tell you that I personally never thought it was lucky that we were able to scale it up because I have great faith in the people who run our manufacturing process. They are phenomenally good at manufacturing water-based chemicals. And I, as an investor and as a founder of the company, think that’s one of our strongest pieces. So I will tell you there’s no luck in that. For scientists to have invincible value, they have to have a passion that’s fueled by curiosity to constantly be on the lookout for unusual molecules that provide unusually or rarely obtained results.
And that is a key thing. Then you have to be able to turn that into a direct understanding of how it may be applied for an industrial benefit. Those are the two things. If you’re at a red light and someone doesn’t beep their horn for you to turn left, that means you’re not distracted in your subconscious enough to be thinking about the some of the weird, unique, uncommon results of science that allows for an opportunity to be discovered. And there’s a certain element of that which some people will call luck. I’ll probably say it was more about persistence, but Jimmy and Charlie came across this molecule that no one had yet observed or examined for an oil field application. We just got to first base first with this molecule for this application. I would grant some degree of luck on that, but I also know that luck was driven by a passion and a curiosity.
Just look for a new molecule that’s been bypassed that had properties that people would recognize once you were able to confirm it for them, recognize as valuable. So on the scaling side, IBC’s manufacturing capacity is second to none, and I’m very proud to work with our customer service and manufacturing folks because of it. And on the scientific side, I think we’re driven by a passion around our intent to explore a molecule, to go where no man has gone before with this molecule. So there’s a lot of that, that I think would be ascribed to luck, but the reality is it’s a luck driven by passion and curiosity.
I love that, and I think that’s right. I mean, the other thing is that luck is when preparedness meets opportunity, which is one way of saying it. In your case, it’s curiosity and readiness. Just being being ready to do more. So IBC, so we talked about, kind of this discovery of the first generation technology, and you guys are now working on second generation technology. Tell us more about that and what that is and how they build on each other, and where it’s going.
So that is the second of the two strategic decisions I thought I was able to work with Jimmy to proceed and develop. It’s the toughest decision of my professional life. I mean, achievement in the first days is a very lonely moment. And when you discover something, whether you do it collectively or by yourself, you have to have the professional confidence to recognize what you’ve done. And in February, during your the first days of COVID, I had a great young scientific mind come into my laboratory and propose an idea to synthesize a new category of biosurfactants. He’s a wonderful young fellow who was able to recognize opportunity in a molecule that hasn’t been seen and put together or assembled in a way to make a product that has not yet been developed in the industry. And that was during the COVID period when we were focused on other things like company survival and product changes in our product mix. And we had to sequester him scientifically to synthesize and commit to the focus during those unsettling times to develop this molecule.
And that became our surfactant technology, and that scientist now spawned an entire generation, probably two or three decades worth of basic scientific research that allowed us to assemble the team that Jimmy’s assembled today to diversify our company into this biosafety backend space. That was a 3-6 month period of securing the focus of a great young scientific mind to synthesize this molecule in a way that we could present back to the company in a time when they probably wanted to talk about almost anything else other than COVID. So it was an opportunity. It was a challenge. When you are a geologist and you are being asked to make decisions around a new chemical species, you must draw from every resource available to you. That’s why I reached out to a fellow like Mike. And I hope you’ve had a chance to talk with Dr. Dan Durr. He’s a world renowned surfactant chemist.
Then I had the folks in our laboratory, all trained chemists who gave me assurances that I could speak to Jimmy about something that we had discovered and now it serves as the platform of opportunity for our company for decades to come. It was very gratifying, but it’s also among the most stressful things I’ve ever had to do.
What made it stressful for you?
I have spent a lifetime looking at rocks and particularly shales and the unconventional rocks in the oil field, and I feel like I could talk to almost anyone about those things, those materials. But I’ve never performed a chemical synthesis to manufacture. I might have performed acid base reactions my entire life. But the type of chemistry that led to the discovery of our biocephractic represented a step change upwards in our capabilities beyond our initial technologies that we used to build the company, basically, forming these encapsulated molecules at once. So all of that was an instantaneous challenge. It came to us quickly.
We wanted to manufacture it, and our emphasis is expedited but careful evaluation of our technologies. Then once we began to realize the scale of the market that was available to us outside the oil field, that added intensity. You wanted to succeed. You did not want to fail for the company obviously. So it was all these things combined, the COVID year, the unfamiliar area of the science, the opportunity that could quickly allow for a lack of focus when you have a company that’s performing in a niche in the oil field and suddenly you can see all these other markets in front of you with the opportunities they present. It’s easy to get distracted and you would miss opportunities to quickly capitalize. So all those things. The weight of the world wasn’t on my shoulders alone, but those are the types of things you think about is how do I stay focused, how do we move ahead in the best way forward for the company, and how do we do it in this environment?
That’s so interesting. I hadn’t fully appreciated that because, of course, as you say, you guys were working in some ways in your comfort zone.
And knew how to make that happen and understood the market that it was going into the oilfield and having that unique space and then bringing in the biosurfactants, new technology, new markets, new customers. And in a period of time, during COVID, when I’m not sure anybody really wanted to innovate. In fact, a lot of people I talked to said innovation died for a couple of years. And certainly, when you think about application development. So, yeah, you can develop this product, but then convincing a customer who maybe has to do a new formulation and has to go through the whole process of it can be challenging. And I know many, many people said that type of innovation stalled for a couple of years. So that was a big bet for you guys.
It’s an outstanding example of an organization fulfilling the original mission of the CEO. And he bet on us, and we bet on us at a time when everyone would have been happy just saying, well, we’ll wait a year or two. Well, we didn’t wait. We were all over it. And the other aspect that I didn’t touch on was the specialty chemical markets and the chemicals associated with those bring an obligation for intellectual property protection at a level even higher than what we’ve encountered with our first generation of product.
We had to quickly engage, find patent resources, law firms that could help us quickly protect our discovery all at the same time. I mean, it was all sudden success. And so that made it some of the most inspiring but yet challenging times in my career.
Yeah, wow. So let’s talk about this because I do think when people are in this innovation space, first of all, recognizing what you need to do in a new market is sometimes not obvious. We base most of our decisions based on past history. And, you know, as the financial guys would say, past history is no predictor of future success. By the way, as we record this, the markets are lord, I don’t know what they’re doing today, but this is just past the big tariff announcement of “liberation day”, and markets have been in chaos. So I’m hoping it all comes back. We’ll see.
Anyway, this whole idea of moving into a new market, we often rely on our prior experience, and you weren’t able to do it because it was completely new. So how do you navigate to know that you’re making the right decisions around people, around direction, around making that happen?
It’s usually one of the most challenging aspects of the entire adventure because, normally, my success rate on decisions was well over 80%. And I can tell you, I don’t think I have that high of an average on this one. We didn’t do anything that made the effort fail, but there’s a lot of trial and error learning around each of those decisions. Then, of course, you draw on your network as I’m sure Jimmy and I did to start gathering people and building a team to help you learn and quickly catapult your process. The same building blocks that are used to identify a product for potential commerciality in the oil field apply to other markets.
They just have different context, different customer requirements, different forms of packaging, different cost bases, different environmental and regulatory compliance standards. These are things you must learn within the context of the market, but it is a value of applying templates. I’m not sure how familiar you are with product development models and stage gate evaluation and those types of signals. All that holds true. It’s just for us and for me in particular, gaining that context around the other new markets. That was, again, where Jimmy shined through and where he’s able to help build a team by bringing in folks who had that experience that made it far more a success story than a trial and error story.
So, Charlie, this has been a really great story, and I could continue talking to you for a very long time. If you were giving advice to a young Charlie Landis or a young professional who’s looking to have the career success that you’ve had, what advice would you give?
Stephen Covey publishes the seven habits of successful people, and I’m not gonna recite those. But I would say there are three things that, as a scientist, I know I could not have progressed through my 35 years without, and I think of them in hindsight, not at the time, but in hindsight. I call them elements for invincible value as a scientist. Not everyone can be Albert Einstein, and you have to find ways of utilizing your skills. So you have to come up with sort of core tenets that describe you as a professional and would be how you would want to be characterized as a professional. The three that come to mind for me are, you certainly have to have expertise in some area of your scientific field so that people rely on you for at least that narrow or broad window depending on the scope of your study as an expert to help solve problems. You must work with experts in the field, colleagues in the field. You must read the literature. You must do the work, and you must see it in use.
You must have this level of broad expertise. And then you must have a passion expertise. You must have a passion that makes you wake up without an alarm clock, that makes you close a library on a Friday night. I don’t know if people still go to libraries, but in graduate school, I used to get kicked out of the libraries on a Friday night reading about the stuff I was hoping to become employed someday to do. And then, you have to hope somebody beeps their horn behind you because you’re daydreaming at a left turn signal. Thinking about what you’re gonna do at work. So you have to have some level of passion that makes your commitment insoluble over time. And then the one that I think is missing in American science at the moment is you have to know how much information you need to succeed. And I use two examples to help give people that perspective.
The first one is when John F. Kennedy decided that we were gonna go to the moon. The moon sat there for the eons waiting on the certainty of mankind to deliver someone to the moon and return them safely to her, and that required virtual certainty on everything they do. But in the oil field where I grew up, I had a great man who found a lot of oil. Do you know about Puro Bay in Alaska, one of the largest oil fields in America?
I am familiar with it. Yeah. Absolutely.
So that was discovered with a fraction of the information, literally about two thirds of the information that was available at the time to make hold of discovery. So somewhere in the middle, you have to get comfortable understanding, do I need virtual certainty around the work for me to make decisions, or can I live with the probability that you’re gonna fail once in a while? You must have a lower fear of failure than you have joy for success. And so in my world, I feel like I’m prepared to make any decision with at least 80% of the information known to me. And that has worked 80% of the time. So if you can get comfortable with where you need to be to make decisions for exploring your entrepreneurial spirit around your ability to succeed or fail, that’s a key aspect. You must be talented at something. You must have a drive when others are doubting you to proceed. But you also have to know where you are with what you need to do to make a decision.
How much information do you need to be comfortable? You can sleep like Harry Truman did every night he made a decision. And that is, I think, an unspoken secret of how you persist and succeed over decades and decades of your career.
I love it. Thank you, Charlie. This has been great conversation.
Thank you very much for this, Victoria. It’s a wonderful pleasure.
I’ve really enjoyed this, and I’m looking forward to sharing this conversation with others in The Chemical Show network. So thank you everyone for joining us today. Keep listening. Keep following. Keep sharing. And we will talk with you again soon.
About Dr. Charlie Landis:
Dr. Charles “Charlie” Landis recently retired Chief Technology Officer of Integrity BioChem, lead the Integrity Innovations Group (IIG), which is responsible for the ongoing innovation of the Integrity BioChem biopolymer platform. A technically nimble and diverse group, they support Integrity BioChem partners and customers to develop a robust intellectual property portfolio and assure transparent regulatory compliance in commercial markets.
Dr. Landis has over 30 years of experience in Energy, Industrial and Consumer markets. He earned his Ph.D. in Geology from Texas Tech University in 1990 and his dissertation, focused on “Thermal Maturation, Primary Migration and Clay Diagenesis of Selected Permian Basin Shales,” was an early start to the prolific unconventional oil and gas industry. He worked in technical roles for exploration company ARCO Oil & Gas and oilfield services company Halliburton Energy Services. Dr. Landis revels in the daily challenges of the natural resource industry and the people who work to address these challenges.