A quick update. It has been a while.
Things have been progressing really well. Many of you will have seen that I’ve taken on the role of Chief Technology Officer and Founder at Waters Worldwide. This was, in hindsight, suspiciously good timing.
David, my partner in the venture, reached out to me on the recommendation of his father. He was looking for some advice on getting things off the ground. Very reasonable. Very normal. Very “let’s have a quick chat.”
Fortunately, or depending on your appetite for risk, by the time we connected, I had just been laid off from Cenovus. Which meant that when he asked his next question, it went something like, “Do you just want to build this thing together?”
I went with, yes.
Since then, we’ve been busy doing all the things that people confidently describe in one sentence and then quietly spend 14 hours a day actually doing. David has been driving the business side, building out the case, chasing funding, connecting with clients and partners, and putting real structure around what this thing is going to be.
Last week, I signed the Founders agreement, so it is now official, legally binding, and far too late to pretend this was all a misunderstanding.
On my side, I’ve been deep in the technical build. Data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, Git environments, website redesigns, and the very important process of confirming that what we are building does, in fact, exist and is not just a collection of very confident diagrams.
https://www.watersworldwide.net
We call the product CiCi. Command Infrastructure for Corridor Intelligence. If that sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, that’s because we made it up, and we stand by it.
At a slightly less mysterious level, CiCi is about taking a fragmented view of how things move, pipelines, rail, trucking, ports, borders, all the pieces that tend to live in separate worlds, and stitching them into a single, living picture. The goal is to understand not just where things are, but how the system behaves under pressure. Where capacity tightens, where bottlenecks form, where decisions ripple across the network in ways that are usually only obvious after the fact.
We are building an application around that idea so clients can actually see those patterns early enough to do something useful with them. That might mean protecting egress options, getting ahead of pricing shifts, repositioning assets, or simply not being the last person to discover that something important has gone sideways three provinces away.
Early responses have been encouraging, which is either a great sign or a very polite way for people to say, “We are intrigued and slightly concerned.” We’re aiming to demonstrate the product in the next couple of weeks, which is exciting in the way that standing at the top of a roller coaster is exciting.
Meanwhile, I’ve been fully embracing the unexpected perks of this whole situation. I get to take the kids to school, make lunches, run them to dance and soccer, and generally exist as a functional human being. I’m sleeping better, which feels like a feature I had previously forgotten to enable.
I’m also learning a ridiculous number of new things. For example, I set up an organizational GitHub account. I’ve used GitHub for years, but building the whole thing from scratch makes you realize how much invisible scaffolding you’ve been taking for granted. It’s like discovering that your house was previously being held together by polite assumptions.
Next up is migrating into a proper enterprise Databricks environment, which I assume will be smooth, seamless, and completely free of any kind of unexpected behaviour. I will report back when reality disagrees.
I’ve also been reconnecting with former colleagues, and the support has been incredible. Messages, calls, encouragement from all over the place. It has genuinely meant a lot, and it has made this transition far more enjoyable than it has any right to be.
And, because apparently I don’t believe in idle time, I’ve written about 80 pages of a novel. It has a very different voice than anything I’ve done before, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I’ve been trying to carve out an hour most evenings, and it is starting to build some real momentum. At this rate, I will either finish a book or develop a very strong relationship with late night snacks.
Either way, progress.
Thank you to everyone who has made this transition so enjoyable. I’m genuinely excited about where this is heading, and I’m always happy to share more as we slowly pull back the curtain on what we’re building.
Brett Wiens 