Happy Birthday Pontem

We are 1 (Today)

As we reach our 1st anniversary - and our 50th Substack post - we wanted to take a minute to say Thank You.

• Thank You to our clients/partners, who have trusted us while we ramped up and got back to doing the difficult technical work that we enjoy. We are, after all, a bunch of science nerds at our core.

• Thank You to our friends/families, who put up with us when we couldn’t always be there for them. They continued to show up for us, often in the smallest, unspoken ways that are so meaningful. Sometimes a simple text is all it takes. Nobody should do this alone.

• Thank You to our staff/colleagues, who have taken their own risks and trusted that we know what we are doing. In many cases, moving their families across the world, with only a handshake as assurance. Those relationships are rare, but so special. Keeping your word matters. Actions matching words matters.

No matter how many times you do this, it is incredibly humbling to have people take a chance on you and trust you. While it is a business, we take that responsibility personally. We have always tried to have the tough conversations, even the ones that started "Uh…we might be going bankrupt” (ironic given Andrew’s comment below…). As a matter of fact, we used to ask our staff “On a scale of 1-10, how honest do you want us to be?” Surprisingly, they stopped saying “10” after awhile. Turns out, too much honesty can be scary to some people. Who knew?

It’s always a team effort. We couldn’t be happier with the team we go to battle with every day.

Tommy’s Personal Goal: Keep pushing co-founder Andrew Yule out of his comfort zone. If establishing a Pontem presence in 9 different locations (on 5 continents) in 2023 didn’t do it…well, then this is truly a “hold my beer” moment for 2024. So much for a slow and steady startup! I can’t thank him enough for the faith and trust he has placed in me, even when it’s not obvious why he should.

Andrew’s Personal Goal: Don’t go bankrupt! Jokes aside, my goal is for Pontem to figure out what we want to be when we grow up. More specifically, let’s take our amazingly talented team and find our unique intersection between passion, skill, and opportunity. I feel so fortunate to be on this journey and to be able to learn from Tommy’s mentorship and all of my colleagues experience along the way.

Top Stories

Getting engineers to showcase themselves is really hard. Introverts don’t often make a great sales team. But, they do love to talk about their work. We managed to channel that into 50 different stories and case studies last year. From gassy lakes to board game theory, mixed with some serious technical accomplishments, the topics ran the gamut. With that, here is a look-back at the Top 10 stories from 2023, as measured by your views.

For the next 50, follow along via our Substack channel or on our website (https://www.pontemanalytics.com).

We have a competitive group, so the race to crack the Top 10 has already begun. We have some great technical content lined up…but we are always at risk of chasing a few squirrels to keep the content fresh/interesting. Stay tuned.