YouSaid · the spoken record

Roger McNamee

lines on the record: 143
first: 2019-02-11
most recent: 2019-02-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We're not going to do it. I mean, it costs our investors an opportunity over $100 billion in profits. That was a little frustrating. Then Bono calls up. I literally get a phone call”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They said, You can't make any assumption of growth for any period greater than 7%. And I'm looking at him going, hang on, the company has as much cash on the balance sheet as stock price. You're taking no risk. And 7% still works. The math at 7% says this is a great investment. Why wouldn't you do it?”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That says that Apple is going to focus on consumers, it's going to do iPods, and it's going to do iMacs, and then it'll do other things for the digital life. But it's going to create a new world for PCs, one that's away from the office and towards consumers. And it probably growed 12, 14%, and it'll gain some market share, and everybody will be happy will make a ton of money, and the Apple guys will do great things. My partner said no.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He goes, Yeah, I go, but your stock is at $12. You got $12 in cash, and your options are at $40. That's not going to work. Steve goes, yeah. But I don't want to do an LPL. Plus, I don't like your partners. I go, Steve, come on. We got to find a way to do this. Anyway, he thinks bad comes back and says, why don't you buy 18% of the company in the public market? And we'll do this thing. You go on the board and we'll do it. So I come into Silverleg. We work for two months, come up with...”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, mine was actually a little bit more severe than yours because I had two scarring strokes and a TIA in my brain stem. And then I had to have open heart surgery in order to keep from having more strokes. And so the problem with all of that was that... I missed more than six months. And while I was gone, my partners realized, hey, wait a minute, we've got these three amazing investments. We've already got all the money. We don't need this guy anymore. And I was really different. And I'm not, and I got to be honest with you, I don't play office politics well. And I wasn't well suited. I mean, let's face this, I'm not a deal guy. I'm really idealistic. I'm not motivated by money. Anyway, I come back and I talk to Steve Jobs and I go, Steve, you've just introduced this great new thing called the iPod.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The end of the cycle. Again, just dumb luck. And we put the money in Seagate and this company called DayTech, which was an online trading business, now known as Ameritrade or TD Ameritrade. And Gartner Group. And we do them all in 2000, right as the market is in free fall. And of course, all three of them were magnificently successful. I mean, Seagate totally changed the disk drive business. And our investors, as a consequence, wind up going up while the market was collapsing. And that made people very popular. But then I had a health crisis and I missed.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we basically take in the money and I cash out the rest of the integral fund in March of 2000, which turned out coincidentally to be.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Steve Luzo, who at that time was the president of Seagate, was completely into this idea. And he'd worked in investment banking, and I had known each other before he went into disk drives. I would go to the integral investors in the fall of 1998 and I go, we think the cycle's coming to an end. We think you ought to do this. And they sign up for a billion dollars of this new fund site unseen. And I got to go out and find other people to work with. I have one guy and we go and get two more and wind up raising, I don't know, two and a half billion dollars, which at the time was. It was ludicrous. I mean, it was so far the biggest function. Is this elevation?”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, forget. No, the opposite of cut costs. We were the opposite of a traditional LBO fund. We were actually going to increase R&D dramatically and try to change the slope of the long-term cycle.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The problem with the old guys is they stop growing, then they try to get the stock stops going up and all the people leave and then you go into this progressive cycle of decline. And I wanted to do it with Seagate because the distrive industry had been going through this hot and cold cycle up and down. And so we wanted to do Seagate and we wanted to do the motherboard business of Intel. And those were the two examples we gave in. So you're going to go in.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Roger? Yes, but it's not the end of'97, and I'm going, oh my God, we're in a bubble when this ends, integral is toast. So I go to Kleiner and go, When this ends, integral is toast and they look at me and go, what do you mean end? This is never going to end. This is the beginning of everything. Yes, he did, John. So I go to our other partner, which was Morgan Stanley, which owned a small piece of integral. I go, guys, this is the end. And they looked at me and went, really? And I go, yeah. And they said, okay, here's some money. Go figure out what the next big thing is. So I went out and we spent two years and came up with this thing called Silverlake. And the idea was to go into older tech companies and give them all the benefits of a startup.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Martha comes in, and she's a total tour to force. John says, We're going to slap the Kleiner name on. We're going to call it Omnimedia, and we're going to take it public in a couple months. And they got a multi-billion dollar valuation for a home decorating company. I'm going, oh my God.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We get to 97 and Martha Stewart brings Martha Stewart living into the company. Yeah, well, it wasn't yet Omnimedia. That they stuck on the end. It was, you know, basically a home decorating company.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a way that, yeah, and he was just one of a kind, right? And so, you know, going through all that period, being inside Kleiner.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He would exhaust me when I visited. But he was also funny, okay? Yeah, in a way that the other guys just plainly weren't, okay? He was very different.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was there when Mark came in. I actually got to be in the meeting when Andrewson brought in Netscape. And I was there when Jeff Bezos brought in and got to send in on the first Amazon meeting. What did you think? So with Netscape, Bill Joy had been talking up that whole thing. And so we all were true believers. Nobody knew what that meant. But Bill had convinced us this was the next big thing. And so that part we were on to. Bezos, he himself was the story. I mean, you looked at books and people have been trying similar things using Ingram as a buffer. And it hadn't really worked. Jeff Bezos was arguably the most compelling entrepreneur I have ever seen. And he's really unlike, I mean, you know, there are a lot of great entrepreneurs and there are a lot of brilliant people.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We decided to raise the money from the only people in America who thought tech was a good place to invest, which were basically the CEOs of the tech industry. And so we had this little vertical integrated thing, but it created this real weirdness because you basically couldn't own any of the portfolio stocks of those people. So a ton of money from Microsoft and Intel and all these other things, and you're trying to invest a tech fund without owning those stocks. But it worked out incredibly well. The timing.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of our investors wants us to do this. What do you think? And I said, When do we start? I actually was working on a business plan to do exactly that with him. What I didn't realize is he had never given even one second of thought except for this one conversation. So he leaves the thing and doesn't think about it again. Meanwhile, that night, I stay up all night long finishing the plan, which I send him the next day. Nothing happens. But anyway, long story short, a series of miracles occur. And I wind up persuading Kleiner Perkins that I have this idea. And they run it through a ringer because we're going to create a fund inside Kleiner, the first time they've ever had a subsidiary. And we call it integral capital partners. And I brought a guy from who was my partner at T-Road, John Powell.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any long story short, in fall 1991 of their partners, one of their investors said, you guys ought to start a crossover fund. You ought to get that guy McNamede to run it. So he comes up to me at ComDex, which was the big trade show. Was the big trade show? And Sheldon Edelson, the casino magnate owner. That's how he made his evil. That's how he made his first money. And John comes up to me and says.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There'd be like 10 IPOs a year, one of which would become a monster company. But John was the hot young guy he'd done compact, he'd done Lotus, he'd done sun microsystems. And we hit it off.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pile into Microsoft and things like that. Long story short, between September of 1990 and the end of March of 1991. So over six months, the fund was up over 100%. Right. And all of a sudden, having had great years before that, I suddenly had the top fund of any kind. At which point I'm going through the goal. Well, actually, it wasn't Microsoft. I was betting on everybody but Microsoft for a weird reason. But anyway, long story short, in parallel, I'd been doing venture investors. T-Rose started a late stage fund. So I put money into electronic arts and cybays and radius and a few other things. But they were all kind of Perkins companies. And I got to know John Doran. The fall of 1990, right at the bottom of that.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In May, and that Windows was going to be the first time tech had a bull market. You know, it went through the 80s, lagging terribly because the big guys were all getting killed. But I said, Microsoft is changing everything. I'm going to load up. I'm going to just get rid of the things that had killed me.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I took over the fund and I basically decided to concentrate. I would have 50-60% of the fund in 10 holdings. And there were some really scary moments like 1990 when the Kuwait invasion happened simultaneously with Oracle missing. Oracle had been growing 100% year over year forever. In the summer of 90 that finally failed, I had 12% of the fund in Oracle. The stock was down thirty some odd percent on one day. Chips and technologies got blown up with the, I mean, I had three positions that were each 10 or percent or more. What did you? Well, I mean, the fund was down. I want to say 35 or 40 percent in a month. And it was like, I had my own personal crash. And what was amazing though was that I realized that the Kuwait thing didn't matter because Windows had come out.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're going to run it. And I said, only if I get to run it my way. And they said, What's your way? And I said, I don't know, but it won't be your way. Right, right. And so the fund was this tiny little thing. They figured it was doom. I think it was 10 million bucks in assets. That's not then. Well, not really. I mean, you know, they went 10 was not, it wasn't ever going to break even at that level. And so”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted fresh. So it meant I basically sold all the old guard guys. Well, if you pick only one decision in the 80s being negative on mainframes and mini computers basically gave you a huge relative invention and industry relative advantage was the only thing it cared about. And so, you know, I got really, really lucky. I mean, I probably made three great decisions that T-Rezon. And the net result was I finished the 80s. They created a science and technology fund in 87. It starts the first of October of 1987. The crash happens 19 days later. I'm not managing the fund, but it's down 31% after one month. And it's like the firm's going, oh my God, we just put our two best guys in this thing. We've doomed them. Six months later, they moved them out and they said, Roger.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what happened is the natural progression is you're an analyst, and then if they think you've got potential, they let you earn some money. In 85, they let me be in charge of the technology portion of the biggest emerging growth fund that they had, which the New Horizons fund. And the key thing was there were no tech funds until I want to say 86 or 87. So it was the biggest pool of tech money out there. I had one insight. I decided I wasn't going to own anything that had been founded after Apple. Or before Apple, excuse me, nothing before Apple. I was only going to own the microprocessor generation company. You wanted all the fresh.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was something I knew how to do. And one thing led to another and I evolved this notion where I just followed the industry around, which in those days, Antlaus sat in an office with a computer and a spreadsheet and read Faxus. And it's like, I'm going, nah, I'm not going to do that. My wife was a professor in Philadelphia. My job was in Baltimore. I figured I'm not going to be home at night. I might as well be traveling. And my boss, Bless his heart, said, you go for it. And so I did. created this model that worked for me and it really worked for me. So you're here being an analyst.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At happy hours forever. I knew hundreds of songs, and everybody else knew one verse or one chorus, but nobody knew a whole song. So I was welcomed in. And that meant that I suddenly was playing music with Paul Allen from Microsoft and Philippe Connor.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did research reports in a bull marker, which meant everything you recommended went up. So if you ever were cautious, that was a mistake. And the key inflection point occurred in, I believe it was 87, I went to a conference, and I was trying to figure out how to do this PC thing. And these guys were unloading amplifiers and guitars from the back of a car. And it turned out they were having a jam session. They invited me to go along. And I'd been playing.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no. Apple was, you know, there was somebody who covered hardware. Hardware was its own category. T-Ro price had a big tech group. And so I had software in the Defense Electronics and the Space Program. And it was...”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the beginning, the very first ones, because it was 82, I covered Defense Electronics and software. And software in those days was computer associates and MSA, and I don't think there was anything else. PCs were still in the future.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, one time I wish your favorite male lesbian for a while until Mark Benioff showed up. Yes, he is. He displaced me. He did. Anyway, I just, I couldn't do that. I worked in this firm where I was the only guy. Everybody else was swimming, and it worked perfectly. And I earned enough money to go back to college. But the key thing is I took all these engineering courses, but I just couldn't figure out how to make even a really large thing to collect all your data. So I decided I need to find a job where I can be around it. And when I went to grad school, I figured out, oh my God, they'll pay me to be a research analyst. I got to go do that. In those days, that was like an academic job. It didn't pay well. You know, there was no chance of becoming wealthy. But I go to T-Ro Price. I get there the first day of the bull market in 1982, and they assign me to tech. And you sit there and realize, wow, for the next 34 years, I had this Gail Force tailwind. You can explain every good thing that ever happened to me based on that starting.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go back to South America and get those because I was too introverted to work in a large organization. The notion of being a salesperson in a rah-rah, I mean, you know me well enough to know that if a little rah-ra, but go ahead. No, I'm not, but I'm not.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so then I make a call to the community newspaper that's sort of the mid size thing, The Bay Guardian, the guy laughs at me and says we have job selling display ads south of market. I'm starting to connect the dots. Finally, I realize the only jobs in newspapers are going to be selling. I did not have a selling personnel. I had no idea. I was very introverted then Shocking. I finally went to work for a French language newspaper because I'd lived in France and so I was fluent. I went to work for them, and I was the entire ad department. And it was my first entrepreneurial experience, the staff of three, and I had to learn not only how to sell ads, I had to learn how to trust people because I realized the collection.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I lived in San Francisco and I thought it was going to be a journalist. I've been this hot shot on the school newspaper. I come out, I call the San Francisco Chronicle, I say, I'm here. I'm here. I want to be a reporter. And the guy literally bursts out laughing and says, look, kid, you're a college dropout with no degree. We do have jobs.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the mid 70s, you know, that's the era of Pong, right? I mean, we're talking Apple got incorporated while I was in California, but I wasn't aware of it until the last year when the Apple II shipped. It's all of a sudden I'm looking at this thing going, wow, what are you going to use that for? It wasn't obvious to me at all. I'm not a natural engineer. But the speak and spell changed everything that same year, and all of a sudden I go, okay, now I get it.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I dropped out, I moved to San Francisco. Right, dropped out. I dropped out after my sophomore year and moved to San Francisco, spent two and a half years. What made you drop out? Well, I had a girlfriend at Chester to California, and then my father died, and so I was stuck. Right. And I had to earn enough money to go back to school. And so it took me a while. And the key thing was...”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We weren't even making PCs yet. We were totally focused on the government. Then the PC industry comes, it takes off. I wind up spending entire life just living and breathing and totally believing in the Steve Jobs notion of bicycles for the mind, technology making the world a better place.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know he said, because you can do this thing today, very soon you're going to be able to make a handheld device that holds all your personal information. This is 19 years old. Is this your brother? This is my brother 19 years before the POM pilot. This is one year after the Apple II. It's still three years from the IBM PC, right? I mean, it is an astonishing insight. So I literally spend the next whatever number of years trying to figure out how to be part of this thing. Come to Silicon Valley in 1982 and they're not doing anything like that. They're still working on the space shuttle. That was a brand new program. I mean”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I first came to the tech industry in 1982. I grew up in Albany, New York. I had to drop out of college for a while. My father died. I had to earn some money coming back. When I came back, so I'd finished two years. My brother gave me a speak and spell. Christmas of 1978. Speak and spell is Texas instruments. It really matters. Texas Instruments thing that basically teaches kids how to spell.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I certainly blame myself. And so I had this moment of epiphany where I realized I had to stop doing what I was doing and commit myself to seeing I couldn't help repair some of the damage.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, it's a funny thing when you spend 34 years being a tech optimist, and all of a sudden you wake up one morning, you realize that.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor-at-large of Recode. You may know me as the basis in the band Moon Alice, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Reco Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the Red Chair is someone I know very, very well I've known for a very long time, Roger McNamee, the founding partner of the Venture Capital firm, Elevation Partners. He was an early investor in Facebook before the company went public and is now speaking out against the company in a new book called Zuckt, Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Roger, why is this surprise that you are out there? I've known Roger Zelling. He's always been the most enthusiastic venture capitalist I know. He's a character. Roger, welcome to Reco.”
2019-02-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Zucked" author Roger McNamee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT