Jerry Smith

Jerry Smith is a Managing Director at EnCap Investments L.P. in Houston, where he leads the firm’s engineering and geoscience efforts across the platform. EnCap is an energy-focused investment firm founded in 1988 that has raised 25 institutional funds and more than $47 billion in capital commitments.

Before EnCap, Smith was a Managing Director and Co-Founder of Evercore’s Acquisitions and Divestitures practice. Over more than four years at Evercore, he led a technical team advising on dozens of energy transactions totaling more than $50 billion.

Smith began his career in 2002 with ExxonMobil’s U.S. West division, spending five years leading conventional and unconventional oil and gas development programs across major U.S. basins. In 2007, he joined Citation Oil & Gas, where he coordinated acquisitions and divestitures and reserves work until 2010, then joined Scotia Waterous as an Associate Director.

He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee in 2002 with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and earned an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008.

• EnCap’s strategy is to partner with experienced management teams in the energy industry and provide growth capital and strategic support.
• The firm says its investment decisions are “driven by economics” and informed by hard data, technical analysis, and proprietary historical information.
• EnCap emphasizes risk management through rigorous assessment, diversification, limited capital exposure before de-risking, board control over capital allocation, limited leverage, joint ventures where useful, and opportunistic exits.
• For upstream, EnCap has backed more than 240 companies across 18 upstream funds and has invested approximately $28 billion in more than 240 upstream companies.
• EnCap looks for seasoned teams with strong technical and operational skills, a history of value creation, a clear business plan, and shared understanding of risk.
• Smith’s specific angle appears technical: he leads engineering and geoscience efforts, so upstream pitches should be ready for detailed asset, reservoir, development, reserves, and basin-level scrutiny.