In thirty years of building energy and industrial companies, I have rarely seen hard technology fail on the science. It fails on the build, so that is where we put our people.
Dave Lee is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Flathead Forge, a Houston-based fund investing in the infrastructure of the Industrial Supercycle. He has spent three decades building and running companies in energy and industrial services, and he invests where he has already operated.
With his brother Doug, Dave co-founded Azoto Energy Services in 2015 and led it as President. Azoto delivered engineered nitrogen pumping to industrial process and pipeline operators across Western Canada, supporting commissioning, turnaround, and maintenance work where an outage is measured in days of lost plant throughput. Dave built it into the largest fleet of its kind in Canada and sold the business in December 2023. That exit seeded Flathead Forge.
Before Azoto, Dave co-founded Inception Oilfield Technologies and led it as CEO, a channel business representing global OEMs from offices in Houston, Calgary, Muscat, and Monterrey, profitable in every year it operated. He began his career in the geology department at Archer Resources, a Calgary natural gas producer, then founded Profile Search International, an executive search firm he led for many years. The firm places senior executives across North America and is now in its thirtieth year.
At Flathead Forge, Dave leads due diligence and recruiting. He runs the diligence on new investments and builds the management teams and boards for the portfolio and the fund, drawing on thirty years of placing senior executives and then running the businesses they were placed into. He works with founders on organization design and commercialization, on the view that hard technology in these markets rarely fails on the science and frequently fails on the build. He is also a co-founder of Resin8.ai.
Dave lives in Calgary with his wife of 33 years and their three sons. He is a skier, a fly fisherman, and a long-distance gravel racer.
