A few minutes before taking the stage in Denver, the members of Moonalice reminisce about their earliest musical stirrings. Jimmy Sanchez, who’s played with everyone from Boz Scaggs to Bonnie Raitt, opens his laptop and displays a photo of himself as a small boy, drumsticks flying. G.E. Smith, the former leader of the Saturday Night Live band, recalls how his mother bought him his first used Fender guitar 44 years ago, when he was 11. Casady says he was 12 when, exploring in the attic, he stumbled across his dad’s old Washburn guitar and fell in love.
McNamee waits a beat. “When I was 11, I went up to the attic and found my father’s stock tables,” he jokes, and everyone laughs.
McNamee’s father founded a successful regional brokerage firm, First Albany, in Albany, New York. As the second-youngest of nine children (six McNamee kids and three adopted cousins), Roger was anything but an extrovert. He says the closest thing he had to a guitar-in-the-attic moment was when he visited his father’s office and played with the Bunker Ramo quote machine.
“I just thought it was the most amazing thing,” says McNamee, who now wears up to seven gadgets on his belt at a time. “You’d press things, and all of a sudden, something would come up on the screen.”
He went to Yale University. After two years as an undergraduate, he took a break, following a girlfriend to San Francisco, where he sold display ads and tried to master a new hobby—playing guitar. When he returned to Yale, he studied history and joined a band called Guff. The group played Hot Tuna and Grateful Dead covers as well as original stuff, including a Frank Zappa parody called “The Club Foot.”
Asked what McNamee contributed, Guff’s viola player, Geoff Holdridge, answers, “A huge amount of enthusiasm and energy. He is really good now, but back then, he took a long time to tune.”
McNamee met his wife, Ann, in a music-theory class (she was the graduate student leading his section). After Yale, he went to Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business. Ann headed for Swarthmore, near Philadelphia, where she would eventually chair the music department. They were married in 1983 but for nearly two decades lived mostly apart, following what McNamee calls a “deferred-enjoyment model.”
In 1982, McNamee had become an analyst at the Baltimore-based investment firm T. Rowe Price. Then as now, his best work was done not behind a desk, but up in people’s faces. He spent 100 days a year in Silicon Valley, dropping in on companies, playing with their products, and picking their brains. These trips gave him insights that often paid off: He was one of the original investors, for example, in Electronic Arts, the videogame behemoth.
From late 1987 to 1991, a period when technology stocks were far from stable, T. Rowe Price’s science-and-tech fund, which McNamee ran, returned about 17 percent annually to investors. While still at the company, McNamee became a ski instructor at Killington, in Vermont. By optimizing his life “across multiple dimensions”—a concept he wrote about in his 2004 book The New Normal—he seemed to excel in all of them. (Ed Mathias, McNamee’s boss at the time and now a managing director of the Carlyle Group, says he always believed McNamee had a less lofty motive: “He became a ski instructor so he could get to the head of the line.”)
In 1991, McNamee and John Powell—a colleague McNamee describes as so complementary to him that “it’s like Bono and the Edge”—broke away to launch Integral Capital Partners, which invested in both public and private companies, making it the first “crossover” fund. Integral, formed as a partnership with the big Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, scored big with early bets on Intuit, among other firms, delivering a net annual return of 24 percent between 1991 and 2003.
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