By: Sophie Lambert
Austin Williams grew up in Midland, Texas, a city that measures itself in barrels. His grandfather was a landman. His father was a maintenance man, his mother an executive assistant. At school, he sat beside the children of oil executives and watched the booms and busts move through their families like weather. Ask him about the industry today, as the founder of Upstream, an Oil & Gas Accounting service provider and the creator of Upstream+, and he rarely starts with technology or economics. He starts with the people.
“Oil and gas was never an industry to me,” Williams says. “It was a family.”
What he means is specific. In Williams’ telling, oil and gas is the rare business where competitors will still pick up the phone for one another. Fort Worth, Dallas, Midland, Odessa, Houston, Oklahoma, Denver: different towns, same family. When somebody is in trouble, somebody else helps, and when somebody figures something out, the word travels. It is a community first and a business second, he says, and the sense that he owes that community something is, by his own account, the reason he never left it.
It is the kind of line that could sound like branding, except that his biography keeps backing it up. Williams arrived at Texas Tech University planning to become a dentist. Organic chemistry ended that plan, and he switched to a dual degree in accounting and energy commerce. It was there, in a lease law class, that he absorbed the lesson that would quietly organize his career: a two-hundred-dollar delay rental payment, missed by thirty days, can forfeit a lease worth a million dollars and twenty years of production with it.
“That is when I understood what oil and gas accounting actually is,” he says. “The accountant is the last line of defense on the asset. In this business, the boring details are the asset.”
The career that followed reads like a tour of the industry’s back offices. He started as a revenue accountant at Pioneer Natural Resources in 2009, where the reports produced by an aging AS400 system were so hard to read that he built a small spreadsheet on the side just to check his own work. That spreadsheet never stopped evolving, with each role adding another layer. At Trey Resources, he learned to slice operating data down to the individual pumper. At Wagner, under the guidance of an experienced controller, he refined advanced reporting techniques that transformed the workbook into a different animal. At Overton Park, he developed his first complete lease operating statement package. At Strawn he strengthened it with audit-grade standards, and at the consulting firm Embark he expanded the model across dozens of companies, adapting it to a wide range of operating environments.
Sixteen years, six employers, one workbook, each version a little smarter than the last. When Williams founded his own firm in 2024, the workbook came with him, handed to clients as a free benefit of the engagement. Engineers and executives who had spent careers squinting at rigid system reports would open his interactive statement and ask what they were looking at, realizing it was far more than another accounting report. Clients hired the firm for outsourced accounting, but they stayed because his approach challenged a long-held assumption: that the Lease Operating Statement could be far more than a report.
Then came the month that nearly ended the story. In August 2025, three clients gave notice in quick succession due to either divestitures or internalizing the role for future growth. The firm had just hired its third employee, and the pipeline was drying up. Williams worked the Permian Basin Oil Show in Midland hoping for signatures and came home with handshakes. That night, in a hotel bed, he stared at the ceiling and weighed shutting the company down against finding a different path forward.
Back home, he sat at the kitchen table running through ideas to diversify revenue: a patent, a technology partnership, a capital raise. The person who finally said it out loud was his wife, Megan. She listened, then told him it was time to commercialize his product. He asked which product she meant. “Your clients value your experience and your team,” she told him, “but the statement tool is what they can’t get anywhere else.”
“She was right, and I genuinely had not seen it,” Williams says. The following week, Williams met Anthony Piccolo, founder of Performance Scoring, for lunch at a local restaurant in Argyle. Over lunch, he sketched out his vision for Upstream+, and Piccolo agreed to build the platform that would transform years of industry experience into a scalable product.
He chose the rebuild. A working product existed within about four months. Paying users arrived within five. Six months out, the platform, named Upstream+, had earned him a ten-page cover feature in CIO Views magazine, and the firm now serves more than forty independent producers, non-operators, and private-equity-backed operators.
For Williams, the technology was never the end goal. Throughout his career, he had come to believe the Lease Operating Statement had never reached its full potential. For decades it had been viewed primarily as an accounting report, while he believed it could become one of the industry’s most valuable decision-making tools. That philosophy became the foundation of Upstream+, redefining the LOS into an interactive platform that gives operators, executives, engineers, investors, and mineral owners the visibility they need to make better decisions.
The product itself is pointedly unglamorous, which is part of its charm to the people who use it. Rather than replacing existing accounting software, Upstream+ builds on it, transforming the traditional lease operating statement into an interactive decision platform. It connects financial and operational data that an owner, executive, or field manager can explore without waiting on a custom report. The stated purpose is plain: put clarity in the hands of the people making decisions, in real time, shaped around what matters most to their operation.
Williams has a phrase for the sixteen-year runway that made the six-month sprint possible. The long way, he likes to say, is the short way. “There is no version of success that skips the part where you show up, do the work, and earn it over time,” he says. “It just does not feel like the short way while you are on it.”
It is advice aimed at founders, but it lands like a Midland sensibility: keep your word, mind the details, take care of your people, and let the work compound quietly until one day it does not look quiet at all. The kid who watched the oil family from the edge of the room now builds the tools that family runs on. He would tell you the two facts are the same fact.
More about Upstream+ can be found at upstreamreporting.com, and Williams shares the ongoing story on LinkedIn.
