Roger McNamee: Tech investor, musician, activist

Roger McNamee has been a successful Silicon Valley investor for thirty five years.  He co-founded Silver Lake and Elevation Partners, two very successful private equity funds.  He also plays bass and guitar in the bands Moonalice and Doobie Decibel System.  He holds a BA from Yale and an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School. He has written 4 books, the latest one titled Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

Some interesting insights from this episode: 

• Roger had a very unusual approach to tech investing which allowed him to be highly successful. 

• Learn why he started Elevation Partners with U2’s Bono. 

• Hear how one pivotal meeting with Mark Zuckerberg would forever alter the course of Facebook. 

• It was Facebook’s lack of anonymity that Roger felt was key to bridging the gap to a much larger mainstream audience that prior social media companies had failed to reach. 

• While they are technically a platform, Facebook acts more like a media company by using sophisticated algorithms to control the content that users see on the site. 

• Social media manipulates us by exploiting the weakness in human psychology. 

• Learn what filter bubbles are and why they’ve contributed to our accepting and spreading false information. 

• “Technology has changed the way we engage with society, substituting passive consumption of content and ideas for civic engagement, digital communications for conversation.” 

• “Excellence is an outcome that reflects mastery of an activity in a time and in a place.”