London, September 2000 — Sandra Smith, Leggate, Hayward, Browne, and the Z8

Sandra Smith was a VP at Consilient and worked very closely with me on the BP Account. She was with me in London in September of 2000 when we were negotiating our first major deal with BP. I introduced her to the executive team that Sir John Browne assigned to work with us. Our main executive sponsor was John Leggate, who was Group Executive Vice President of Digtal Operations, effectively the CIO, but without an IT background - he had come up on the upstream side of the business if I recall - drilling for oil in the North Sea early in his career, more recently in Baku Azerbijan and Siberia as part of a joint venture. John was absolutely hilarious, and loved to drink and tell stories. He also explained how the corporate executive culture worked at BP, how to navigate it, and who I should get to know. We had a great chat about our mutual love for James Bond, a fellow Scot (one branch of my family was from Scotland, although that late-arriving branch migrated to America in the late 1700s or so. We talked about how Scottish Enlightenment philosophers inspired much of the content of our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and our patent laws. (The Scots regularly rebelled from their English overlords, so I suspect they were rooting for their American cousins in our war of independence.

We also talked about a new car I had recently ordered, a silver BMW Z8 - the prototype of which was driven by James Bond in "The World is Not Enough" before it was cut in half by a helicopter-borne bandsaw while driving in the oil fields in the Caspian Sea just off of Baku. John had actually lived in Baku until the previous year, as chief executive of the division that developed BP's massive Caspian sea operations. As an aside, I had been in London earlier in the year, and had connected with my friend Russ Deleon (still at Evolve Software), who had moved there as VP of International Business Development. We were walking around London near Trafalgar Square when I saw my first BMW Z8, parked on London street. I had seen it in the James Bond movie, and in car magazines, but never seen one in person - they only made about 1,000 of them the first year, and whlle their list price was around $135k (about $250k in today's dollars), they were going for much more. I put in an offer of $250k for one at the Sunnyvale BMW, but the dealership told me they were selling it to Steve Jobs instead, unless I increased my bid to $330k, or the equivalent of $580k. I suspected that they were bluffing about Steve Jobs to drive up the price, but I heard later that he really did buy the exact car I was bidding on - and actually sold it three years later for $330k. My friend Jim Woodhill told me he had a line on buying a European version of the BMW direct from the factory at list, and then pay another $50k or so to fly it to the US ) (which was almost exactly the same, except it had ended up buying a European version of the car (the airfare for a cost was only cost $5k, believe it or not - or at least that is what they showed on the bill of lading, possibly to reduce the import tarrifs.

We had a group dinner, and I tried to signal Sandra from across the table to move over and sit with me and John Leggate, so she had an opportunity to develop a relationship with him, since her job was to term my relationships into a paying deals. Also, Sir Brown said that he personally wanted to remain our executive sponsor, and asked me to meet on this trip with Tony Hayward, then the CFO, and in line to replace him as CEO once he stepped up to Chairman. Sir Browne wanted me to mentor Tony on how to think like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I had a private meeting with Tony Hayward at BP's headquarters (which looked like those of a well-financed tech startup - much cooler than I was expecting, given BPs pedigree and stogy reputation. Tony was actually a PhD in Geology, did his graduate work at the University of Aberdeen, and spent most of his career in the field - especially in Columbia and Venezuela. He was very low-key and down-to-earth. He was very unlike the posh aristocratic Londoners I'd spent much of my time with, but was very good-natured and technocratic - he knew what he was talking about on many topics. We met reguarly either in person or remotely several times over the year on a couple of topics - both our first $1m+ deal with BP that Sandra Smith negotiated, for an application to support tracking safety incidents for off-shore oil rigs, leveraging the ability of our sitelets to work as portable, self-contained asynchronous email agents without online connectivity to record information out on the oil platforms or on helicopters while in transit, and then be routed via email to display in web portals when connectivity was available.

This is very ironic in retrospect, because that off-shore safety incident tracking application was later cancelled after Consilient went bankrupt, which may well have directly contributed to the Horizon Offshore disaster that nearly destroyed BP ten years later, when Tony Hayward replaced Lord John Browne as CEO. The specific intent of the off-shore safety incident tracking system was to ensure reliable tracking and reporting of even minor safety incidents, which are very difficult to record in off-shore environments. the Horizon oil platform had a bunch of relatively minor problems that accumulated over time, but eventually the reached a critical thresshold that to a massive oil spill that costs BP tens of billions of dollars of costs and fines - nearly wiping it out. Seriousy - had Consilient survived and that project not be cancelled, BP could be worth double or more what it is now.

I had a private dinner with Sir John Brown on that trip, which was unexpected because he was supposed to be in Asia at the time. There was a nationwide strike by the union of petroleum truck drivers, causing a nationwide petrol shortage, and Tony Blair called Sir John Brown to turn around his Gulfstream, and return to London to help resolve the strike, or make contingency plans if the strke dragged on. So, I got a private unscheduled dinner aftter things settled down. We talked about sustainability and alternative energy - he had re-branded BP to "Beyond Petroleum", and was the first oil industry CEO to publicly acknowledge that climate change was real, and that we had a responsibiiy to do something about it. Lord John Browne, CEO of one of the biggest oil companies at the time, was actually an environmentalist, investing heavily in wind and solar power, and rebranding with a green flower in the shape of BP. When BPs stock price crashed with everyone else's after the internet bubble burst and 9/11 hit, and the board and investors started complaining, he had to pull back on his vision - Wall Street gave him no choice, and it contributed heavily to him losing his job a few years later. The world and BP are much poorer for losing him.

(he was promoted to Lord John Browne the following June - making him a life peer and member of the House of Lords the following Summer.