“I’ve not been famously profit-oriented. Roger’s also not motivated by profit,” he continues, laughing at how this must sound. “Isn’t profit what this is all about? But Roger believes, like I believe, that brilliance brings a better bottom line. Always.”
McNamee has always offset such abstract thinking by deliberately teaming up with people completely unlike him. “I’m most effective,” he says, “as a foil to others.” At Elevation, whose sleek, low-rise headquarters occupy a corner of an office complex in Menlo Park, California, each partner has a distinct role. Marc Bodnick, formerly a founding principal at Silver Lake, takes the lead on due diligence. Fred Anderson, the former chief financial officer of Apple Computer, is an operations expert. Bono, who says he spends about 15 percent of his time on Elevation, is both a door opener and a deal closer. And Bret Pearlman, previously a senior managing director of the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity firm in the world, is Elevation’s designated pragmatist and number cruncher. Elevation’s five general partners make investment decisions unanimously—a rare structure that Pearlman says was “absolutely critical” to his decision to join the firm.
But McNamee is the firm’s spiritual leader, macro thinker, and recruiter in chief. Lorna Borenstein, a former Yahoo executive and chief of eBay Canada, recalls being invited to give a presentation at Elevation’s weekly partners meeting one Monday morning in November 2006. Seated at the head of the table in the company conference room near a large framed poster from U2’s 10th album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Borenstein talked for two hours. Bono asked her the most questions. McNamee seemed to be ignoring her.
“Roger was sitting to my left, on his laptop the whole time,” she recalls. But as she rose to leave, “Roger took my hand and said, ‘We need to talk.’ He wouldn’t let go of my hand.”
McNamee pulled Borenstein next door to Elevation’s game room—which houses an arcade console stocked with 5,000 titles—and began to grill her, ignoring his partners’ entreaties to please return to the meeting. It was then, Borenstein says, that she realized “not only had he been paying attention, I’m guessing he was doing research on me.” Over the next seven days, at McNamee’s insistence, Borenstein met with him four more times. He quizzed her on consumer technology and on how she believed online companies could best engage and retain users. She describes his approach as intense—“kind of ‘I’ve looked into your soul.’ ”
By week’s end, he informed her that she needed to run one of Elevation’s companies: Move. The fact that she’d already turned down a recruiter for the job didn’t faze McNamee. “He’s reeling me in, going, ‘Now you’re interested. Now you’re interested,’ ” Borenstein says. She relented because her talks with McNamee let her see his imagined future, she says. “He’s the greatest optimist I’ve ever met.”
Pearlman agrees, admitting that, for a traditional transaction guy like himself, that took some getting used to. “Roger flies around at 30,000 feet,” Pearlman says, laughing. “Most private equity shops focus first on what could potentially go wrong. Elevation forces you to look at the upside of every transaction first—to ask, Is there a real potential breakout home run here?”
The breakout home run has a precedent, and everybody knows its name: Seagate Technology. Back in the late ’90s, the 20-year-old disk-drive maker was foundering. McNamee’s previous firm, Silver Lake Partners, assisted it in retooling. The deal was unusually complex. After arranging a stock swap with a software company in which Seagate had a 33 percent interest, Silver Lake helped take Seagate private and then public again two years later. But what the firm accomplished—growing an established brand while providing a sevenfold return to investors in its first $2.3 billion fund—is considered a landmark deal by private equity analysts.
No wonder, then, that for all of Elevation’s lofty rhetoric about transforming culture, for all of its talk of “natural rhythms” and “top-line melodies,” its investors are focused on the answer to these questions: Where’s the next Seagate, and will we get a piece of it?
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