From analyst to founder

The career runs to more than 35 years, all of it in energy finance, and it has three distinct parts: training on Wall Street, a decade of private energy finance, and the firm he has led since 2002. The about page covers the rest of the picture.

Education

The degrees came first: political science at Vanderbilt University, then a Juris Doctor at The University of Texas School of Law, the academic credential he carried into finance.

New York, 1987 to 1989

The training ground was Goldman Sachs in New York. From 1987 to 1989 he was an analyst there, assigned to energy banking. Those years gave him the vocabulary of the industry and an early view of how capital decisions look from the banker’s side of the table. He has written about what that apprenticeship taught him in an essay on timing.

The decade that followed

In the years between New York and 2002 he worked on both sides of private energy finance, finding capital for companies and investing alongside it. It was the period in which the working method took shape: stay close to the company, understand how it operates, and expect to be involved for years. The Texas industry he was working in has a long pedigree, one usually dated from the gusher described in the entry on Spindletop.¹

Petro Capital Group, 2002 to the present

In 2002 he founded Petro Capital Group in Dallas to provide growth capital to oil, gas and oilfield services companies, the kind of financing the entry on growth equity explains. He is its founder and managing partner and a member of the investment committee of its funds. What the role involves day to day is set out on the work page.

How the parts connect

The three parts share a habit more than a sector. The analyst years taught him to read a company from its documents, the private decade taught him to stay with a company after the money arrived, and the firm put both habits into a single method. The same habit, reading the original record rather than the summary of it, is what later produced a biography.

Board service

Across the career he has served as chairman or as a director of a number of energy companies. The essays under energy capital are largely drawn from that seat.

References

1. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Spindletop Oilfield. ↩