Roger McNamee (born 1956)[1] is an American businessman, investor, venture capitalist and musician. He is the founding partner of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. Prior to co-founding the firm, McNamee co-founded private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and headed the T. Rowe Price Science and Technology Fund.
McNamee is also a touring musician, first as a founding member of the Flying Other Brothers, and more recently in that group's follow-on band, Moonalice. Counting two groups, McNamee estimated that he had played 800 shows as of 2009.[4]
McNamee was born on 2 May, 1956 in Albany, New York.[1] His father, Daniel, was an investment banker. He was the president of the Albany chapter of the Urban League. Barbara, his mother, was a feminist during the 60s. When McNamee was 12 years old, he protested against the Vietnam War, and volunteered for Eugene McCarthy's campaign for president. [5] He has a BA in history from Yale University and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.[6][1]
McNamee joined T. Rowe Price as an analyst in 1982, after receiving his M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business.[3]
By 1989 he was leading the firm's Science & Technology Fund, a period when the fund returned about 17% annually to investors[7] and, in a move atypical for mutual funds, he made venture capital investments in Electronic Arts (which went public in 1989) and Sybase (which had its IPO in 1991).[8]
In 1991 McNamee co-founded Integral Capital Partners with John Powell and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins to invest in expansion stage private companies and growth-stage public companies.[9]
In 1999, McNamee was one of the founding partners of leveraged buyout firm Silver Lake Partners.[10]
In 2004, McNamee co-founded Elevation Partners along with a number of other investors including U2 frontman Bono. He currently serves as its Managing Director.[11] Elevation Partners investments have included Palm, Inc., Forbes, and Facebook.[12]
McNamee is also a musician. He played in the band Flying Other Brothers from 1997 to 2006,[13] and now[when?] plays with the band Moonalice, using the stage persona of "Chubby Wombat Moonalice."[7] In 2014 he formed a duo with Jason Crosby called the Doobie Decibel System.[14] In 2015, The Doobie Brothers sued the band over the name.[15]
With Elevation Partners "perhaps best known for its early investment in Facebook," McNamee said in 2013, for him, music and technology have converged.
He became expert on Facebook by using it to promote ... Moonalice, and now is focusing on video by live-streaming its concerts. He says musicians and top professionals share the almost desperate need to dive deep. This capacity to obsess seems to unite top performers in music and other fields.[16]
McNamee is the co-writer of the Moonalice song "It's 4:20 Somewhere".[17] In August 2012 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced that the digital logs for "Its 4:20 Somewhere" had been acquired for its library and archives, describing the Moonalice logs as helping to "...tell the story of musics digital revolution; specifically the rise of direct-from-artist (DFA) distribution. Moonalice is the first band without a label to achieve one million downloads of a song from its own servers, direct-from-artist. Its 4:20 Somewhere has been downloaded over 4.6 million times".[18][19]
According to The New York Times, McNamee has been instrumental in arranging at least two $500,000 donations to the Wikimedia Foundation.[20][21] Roger McNamee is a member of the Wikipedia Foundation's advisory board, and acts "as a special advisor to the Executive Director on business and strategy issues."[22]
Bill Gates wrote in his book The Road Ahead: "Roger was a great sounding board for many of the ideas I wrote about".[7] Mark Zuckerberg (who met McNamee in summer 2006 at a time when Facebook reportedly had buyout offers of around $750 million) said McNamee was "emphatic" that Facebook not be sold; Zuckerberg stated he "clearly cared about building something long-term and about the impact of the things we build as opposed to just making money in the short term," advice that Portfolio.com called "prescient": in October 2007, Facebook sold just 1.6 percent of the company to Microsoft for $240 million.[7] McNamee himself confirmed that.[23]
In the autumn of 2017 McNamee met with US legislators who were preparing to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections. McNamee had prepared for them a curriculum, stating that the real problem was the divisions social media platforms were creating among Americans, of which Adam Schiff, member of the House Intelligence Committee said, "Roger was really ahead of the curve. Time has borne out his warnings."[5]
McNamee has been heavily involved in the creation of the Haight Street Art Center which celebrates San Francisco's tradition of music-related poster art. He donated $1 million to help fund the Center, and has committed an additional $1 million to help keep it operating.[24]
An early investor in Facebook, McNamee became very critical of its impact on society and US democracy, as expressed in his Op-Eds for USA Today and The Guardian[25][26] Earlier, on CNBC, he said that he had tried to warn Facebook about the impact of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections.[27] He has also been interviewed by NPR on the topic.[28] As part of this effort, McNamee joined Time Well Spent as a Founding Advisor.[29]In May 2019, he appeared before the House of Commons privacy and ethics committee in Ottawa, calling for governments to temporarily shut down Facebook and other social media sites until they reform.[30]
McNamee wrote the book, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, published by Penguin Press February 5, 2019.[31]
McNamee has been married to the musical theorist and singer/songwriter Ann McNamee since 1983. The couple founded an elephant sanctuary in Tehama County, northern California, now known as Tembo Preserve.[32][33][34][35]
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