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Elevation Partners managing director and co-founder Roger McNamee doesn't exactly fit the mold of the typical buyout shop MD. Then again he began his business life as a venture capitalist, which might be where he gets it from - "it," of course, can be either his unique approach to investing or even his penchant for rock music, which may or may not be related.
Elevation was launched in 2004 by McNamee, Marc Bodnick, U2 lead singer Bono, Bret Pearlman, and John Riccitiello. McNamee was a co-founder and general partner at Integral Capital Partners. His venture investments for Integral included Intuit, Flextronics, Rambus and Cerent. Prior to that, he was a co-founder and general partner of Silver Lake Partners.
McNamee got his start at T. Rowe Price Associates, where he managed its science and technology fund and initiated venture investments in Electronic Arts and Sybase.
These days McNamee is a director at Palm, Move and Forbes Media.
IDD caught up with McNamee in Montreal, Canada, where his new band Moonalice played in front of a packed house. In a follow-up conversation, McNamee discussed his music, his investment strategy and how the two are intertwined.
IDD: You've mentioned that there are a lot of similarities between launching a band and building a company.
McNamee: That's how we look at it. The reason is that the music industry has been disrupted by technology and its own [changing] business model. It became dependent on the model of selling a very large quantity of recorded music on records and CDs at a very small profit. When new technologies pushed the industry to change its business model, their reaction instead was to resist.
We now have a situation where the unit value of recorded music is extremely low because there's so much free music moving around. So the old model of selling recorded music doesn't work anymore. Now the challenge is to build a brand without a record label. Even if you...