Roger McNamee
Encyclopedia
Roger McNamee is a founding partner of the venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 firm Elevation Partners
Elevation Partners
Elevation Partners is an American private equity firm that invests in intellectual property and media and entertainment companies. The firm has $1.9 billion of assets under management....

. Prior to co-founding the firm McNamee co-founded private equity
Private equity
Private equity, in finance, is an asset class consisting of equity securities in operating companies that are not publicly traded on a stock exchange....

 firm Silver Lake Partners
Silver Lake Partners
Silver Lake is a US-based private equity firm focused on leveraged buyout and growth capital investments in technology, technology-enabled and related industries...

 and headed the T. Rowe Price
T. Rowe Price
T. Rowe Price is a publicly owned Investment firm, headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. It was founded in 1937 by Thomas Rowe Price, Jr.. The company offers mutual funds, subadvisory services, and separate account management for individuals, institutions, retirement plans, and financial...

 Science and Technology Fund.

McNamee is also a touring musician, first as a founding member of the Flying Other Brothers
Flying Other Brothers
The Flying Other Brothers were an American rock band from 1997-2006 in San Francisco. The band played original tunes and covers.- History :The band started at an Electronic Frontier Foundation benefit at The Fillmore Auditorium in 1997...

, and more recently in that group's follow-on band, Moonalice
Moonalice
Moonalice is the band that formed from previous members of the Flying Other Brothers. The band has been touring since May, 2007, and has come to the attention of music critics. The band is made up of five musicians, and led by businessman Roger McNamee. Their eponymous debut album recorded and...

. Between the two groups, McNamee estimated in April 2009 that he has played 800 shows.

Career at T. Rowe Price

McNamee joined T. Rowe Price
T. Rowe Price
T. Rowe Price is a publicly owned Investment firm, headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. It was founded in 1937 by Thomas Rowe Price, Jr.. The company offers mutual funds, subadvisory services, and separate account management for individuals, institutions, retirement plans, and financial...

 as an analyst in 1982, after receiving his M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business
Tuck School of Business
The Amos Tuck School of Business Administration is the graduate business school of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States...

.

By 1989 he was leading the firm's Science & Technology Fund, a period when the fund returned about 17% annually to investors and, in a move atypical for mutual funds, he made venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 investments in Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...

 (which went public in 1989) and Sybase
Sybase
Sybase, an SAP company, is an enterprise software and services company offering software to manage, analyze, and mobilize information, using relational databases, analytics and data warehousing solutions and mobile applications development platforms....

 (which had its IPO
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...

 in 1991).

Music career

McNamee is also a musician. He played in the band Flying Other Brothers
Flying Other Brothers
The Flying Other Brothers were an American rock band from 1997-2006 in San Francisco. The band played original tunes and covers.- History :The band started at an Electronic Frontier Foundation benefit at The Fillmore Auditorium in 1997...

 from 1997 to 2006 and now plays with the band Moonalice
Moonalice
Moonalice is the band that formed from previous members of the Flying Other Brothers. The band has been touring since May, 2007, and has come to the attention of music critics. The band is made up of five musicians, and led by businessman Roger McNamee. Their eponymous debut album recorded and...

, using the stage persona
Persona
A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek πρόσωπον...

 of "Chubby Wombat Moonalice".

Relationship with Wikipedia

According to the New York Times, McNamee has been instrumental in arranging at least two $500,000 donations to the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based...

. Roger McNamee is a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board, and acts "as a special advisor to the Executive Director on business and strategy issues."

Influence

Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...

 wrote in his book The Road Ahead
The Road Ahead
The Road Ahead, a book written by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson and published in November 1995, summarized the implications of the personal computing revolution and described a future profoundly changed by the arrival of a global information superhighway.Gates received a $2.5...

: "Roger was a great sounding board for many of the ideas I wrote about". Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...

 (who met McNamee in summer 2006 at a time when Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 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.
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