Charlie Shufeldt
With a background in investment banking and energy investments, Shufeldt visualizes the long- term life of IOG.
“We are still in the early innings of establishing IOG [est. 2014] as a multifaceted investor and industry partner in the upstream space. I look forward to continuing to build our growing team as the business matures,” he says. “I also believe we can expand our investment spectrum at IOG; For example, we have identified several additional strategies that should deliver value to our operators and accretive returns to our investors. I look forward to executing this expansion into other synergistic lines of business that both improve what we are doing today and broaden the scope of what we do going forward.”
IOG was formed by Shufeldt and his business partners, Marc Rowland and Noam Berk. Rowland, who was an executive at Chesapeake Energy Corp. for 18 years, had “decades of industry experience” and great ideas, Shufeldt says. “We wanted to develop a platform that could complement existing capital structures, private-equity-backed, public companies or family- owned companies, and help them drill more wells, while also staying out of their day-to-day business.”
Shufeldt remarks that after starting IOG when oil prices were high, “people told us the business wouldn’t work” because there wasn’t a need for capital. He and his partners knew they were wrong. “It was an interesting time for a first-time team to launch a fund, but we had conviction in the strategy, and were willing to take a risk with our own capital.”
Look at me now: At press time, IOG had closed almost 30 transactions in four states and 22 counties—and had invested in about 500 wells since inception. The firm backs Lower 48 operators in all major basins.
Career path: Shufeldt worked in large investment institutions for the first 10 years of his career, but he loves the fact that IOG was an entrepreneurial challenge for him, Rowland and Berk.
“Early on, some investors had trouble seeing the fit of the strategy and how three founders with a diverse set of backgrounds would execute on establishing a new firm. To us, that diversity was our greatest asset--Marc’s decades of experience in the industry, Noam’s project finance experience and my principle investing experience combined with a focus on data analytics were a powerful combination that would make us successful.”