Why Should You Care That Collin McLelland Defrauds His Investors And Clients?

Getting the oilfield to adopt new technology and especially new software is hard. We’re not an industry of first adopters. We like to see tried and true solutions and we’re Conservatives at heart, so we don’t rush in to change. We build relationships over time based on trust and we expect people to keep their word.

This is not Silicon Valley, where it’s okay to sell vaporware, software that doesn’t really exist and is “in the process of being built” for years on end in order to raise some money and have a good time.

That doesn’t work in Texas. We actually want and need our software to work.

McLelland has never built anything that’s worked or that people use. He raised more than $7mm over 5 ½ years and has produced nothing to show for it. No one watches their YouTube channel, the conferences are now mainly defunct and collide.io, the “Stack Overflow for the oilfield” has almost no MAU and no activity.

The flavor of the month for fundraising - “enterprise collide AI is the basis of our financing” according to McLelland himself - is putting a RAG on a general LLM and calling it an “enterprise-grade solution for the oilfield.” Of course this is nonsense and there’s no indiciation that there is any capability inside Digital Wildcatters, Inc. to produce anything working of value.

McLelland raising money for vaporware will make it much harder for the next team to come in and raise money. It’ll weaken the trust that producers need to put into young vendors. It’ll make the few investors willing to back oilfield software startups even more skittish.

When this fails, as undoubtedly it will, future EFT investors will be even less inclined to fund innovation in the oilfield.

And that’s why we should all care. Because his fraud hurts us all.