Zucked

When I first arrived in San Francisco, I had four hundred dollars in my pocket. My dream of being a reporter in the mold of Woodward and Bernstein lasted for about half a day. Three phone calls were all it took to discover that there were no reporter jobs available for a college dropout like me, but every paper needed people in advertising sales. I was way too introverted for traditional sales, but that did not stop me. I discovered a biweekly French-language newspaper where I would be the entire advertising department, which meant not only selling ads but also collecting receivables from advertisers. When you only get paid based on what you collect, you learn to judge the people you sell to. If the ads didn’t work, they wouldn’t pay. I discovered that by focusing on multi-issue advertising commitments from big accounts, such as car dealerships, airlines, and the phone company, I could leverage my time and earn a lot more money per issue. I had no social life, but I started to build savings. In the two and a half years I was in San Francisco, I earned enough money to go back to Yale, which cost no more than 10 percent of what it costs today.

Every weekday morning in San Francisco I watched a locally produced stock market show hosted by Stuart Varney, who went on to a long career in broadcasting at CNN and Fox Business Network. After watching the show for six months and reading Barron’s and stacks of annual reports, I finally summoned the courage to buy one hundred shares of Beech Aircraft. It went up 30 percent in the first week. I was hooked. I discovered that investing was a game, like Monopoly, but with real money. The battle of wits appealed to me. I never imagined then that investing would be my career. In the fall of 1978, I reapplied to Yale. They accepted me again, just weeks before two heartbreaking events chased me from San Francisco: the mass suicide of hundreds of San Franciscans at Jonestown and the murder of San Francisco’s mayor and supervisor Harvey Milk by another member of the city’s board of supervisors.

Celebrating my first Christmas at home since 1975, I received a gift that would change my life. My older brother George, ten years my senior, gave me a Texas Instruments Speak & Spell. Introduced just months earlier, the Speak & Spell combined a keyboard, a one-line alphanumeric display, a voice processor, and some memory to teach elementary school children to pronounce and spell words. But to my brother, it was the future of computing. “This means that in a few years, it will be possible to create a handheld device that holds all your personal information,” he said.

He told me this in 1978. The Apple II had been introduced only a year earlier. The IBM PC was nearly three years in the future. The PalmPilot was more than eighteen years away. But my brother saw the future, and I took it to heart. I went back to college as a history major but was determined to take enough electrical engineering courses that I could design the first personal organizer. I soon discovered that electrical engineering requires calculus, and I had never taken calculus. I persuaded the professor to let me take the entry-level course anyway. He said if I did everything right except the math, he would give me a B (“for bravery”). I accepted. He tutored me every week. I took a second, easier engineering survey course, in which I learned concepts related to acoustics and mechanical engineering. I got catalogues and manuals and tried to design an oversized proof of concept. I could not make it work.

A real highlight of my second swing through Yale was playing in a band called Guff. Three guys in my dorm had started the band, but they needed a guitar player. Guff wrote its own songs and occupied a musical space somewhere near the intersection of the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, and punk rock. We played a ton of gigs, but college ended before the band was sufficiently established to justify making a career of it.

The band got paid a little money, but I needed to earn tuition-scale money. Selling ads paid far better than most student jobs, so I persuaded the Yale Law School Film Society to let me create a magazine-style program for their film series. I created a program for both semesters of senior year and earned almost enough money to pay for a year of graduate school.

But before that, in the fall of my senior year, I enrolled in Introduction to Music Theory, a brutal two-semester course for music majors. I was convinced that a basic knowledge of music theory would enable me to write better songs for my band. They randomly assigned me to one of a dozen sections, each with fifteen students, all taught by graduate students. The first class session was the best hour of classroom time I had ever experienced, so I told my roommate to switch from his section to mine. Apparently many others did the same thing, as forty people showed up the second day. That class was my favorite at Yale. The grad student who taught the class, Ann Kosakowski, did not teach the second semester, but early in the new semester, I ran into her as she exited the gymnasium, across the street from my dorm. She was disappointed because she had narrowly lost a squash match in the fifth game to the chair of the music department, so I volunteered to play her the next day. We played squash three days in a row, and I did not win a single point. Not one. But it didn’t matter. I had never played squash and did not care about the score. Ann was amazing. I wanted to get to know her. I invited her on a date to see the Jerry Garcia Band right after Valentine’s Day. A PhD candidate in music theory, Ann asked, “What instrument does Mr. Garcia play?” thinking perhaps it might be the cello. Ann and I are about to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of that first date.

Ann and I graduated together, she a very young PhD, me an old undergraduate. She received a coveted tenure-track position at Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia. I could not find a job in Philadelphia, so I enrolled at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, in Hanover, New Hampshire. So began a twenty-one-year interstate commute.

My first job after business school was at T. Rowe Price, in Baltimore, Maryland. It was a lot closer to Philadelphia than Hanover, but still too far to commute every day. That’s when I got hit by two game-changing pieces of good luck: my start date and my coverage group. My career began on the first day of the bull market of 1982, and they asked me to analyze technology stocks. In those days, there were no tech-only funds. T. Rowe Price was the leader in the emerging growth category of mutual funds, which meant they focused on technology more than anyone. I might not be able to make the first personal organizer, I reasoned, but I would be able to invest in it when it came along.

In investing, they say that timing is everything. By assigning me to cover tech on the first day of an epic bull market, T. Rowe Price basically put me in a position where I had a tailwind for my entire career. I can’t be certain that every good thing in my career resulted from that starting condition, but I can’t rule it out either. It was a bull market, so most stocks were going up. In the early days, I just had to produce reports that gave the portfolio managers confidence in my judgment. I did not have a standard pedigree for an analyst, so I decided to see if I could adapt the job to leverage my strengths.

I became an analyst by training, a nerd who gets paid to understand the technology industry. When my career started, most analysts focused primarily on financial statements, but I changed the formula. I have been successful due to an ability to understand products, financial statements, and trends, as well as to judge people. I think of it as real-time anthropology, the study of how humans and technology evolve and interact. I spend most of my time trying to understand the present so I can imagine what might happen in the future. From any position on the chessboard, there are only a limited number of moves. If you understand that in advance and study the possibilities, you will be better prepared to make good choices each time something happens. Despite what people tell you, the technology world does not actually change that much. It follows relatively predictable patterns. Major waves of technology last at least a decade, so the important thing is to recognize when an old cycle is ending and when a new one is starting. As my partner John Powell likes to say, sometimes you can see which body is tied to the railroad tracks before you can see who is driving the train.

The personal computer business started to take off in 1985, and I noticed two things: everyone was my age, and they convened at least monthly in a different city for a conference or trade show. I persuaded my boss to let me join the caravan. Almost immediately I had a stroke of good luck. I was at a conference in Florida when I noticed two guys unloading guitars and amps from the back of a Ford Taurus. Since all guests at the hotel were part of the conference, I asked if there was a jam session I could join. There was. It turns out that the leaders of the PC industry didn’t go out to bars. They rented instruments and played music. When I got to my first jam session, I discovered I had an indispensable skill. Thanks to many years of gigs in bands and bars, I knew a couple hundred songs from beginning to end. No one else knew more than a handful. This really mattered because the other players included the CEO of a major software company, the head of R&D from Apple, and several other industry big shots. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen played with us from time to time, but only on songs written by Jimi Hendrix. He could shred. Suddenly, I was part of the industry’s social fabric. It is hard to imagine this happening in any other industry, but I was carving my own path.

My next key innovation related to earnings models. Traditional analysts used spreadsheets to forecast earnings, but spreadsheets tend to smooth everything. In tech, where success is binary, hot products always beat the forecast, and products that are not hot always fall short. I didn’t need to worry about earnings models. I just needed to figure out which products were going to be hot. Forecasting products was not easy, but I did not need to be perfect. As with the two guys being chased by a bear, I only needed to do it better than the other guy.

I got my first chance to manage a portfolio in late 1985. I was asked to run the technology sector of one of the firm’s flagship funds; tech represented about 40 percent of the fund. It was the largest tech portfolio in the country at the time, so it was a big promotion and an amazing opportunity. I had been watching portfolio managers for three years, but that did not really prepare me. Portfolio management is a game played with real money. Everyone makes mistakes. What differentiates great portfolio managers is their ability to recognize mistakes early and correct them. Portfolio managers learn by trial and error, with lots of errors. The key is to have more money invested in your good ideas than your bad ones.

T. Rowe launched a pure-play Science & Technology Fund, managed by two of my peers, on September 30, 1987. Nineteen days later, the stock market crashed. Every mutual fund got crushed, and Science & Tech was down 31 percent after only a month in business. While the number was terrible, it was actually better than competitors because the portfolio managers had invested only half their capital when the market collapsed. In the middle of 1988, with the viability of the fund in doubt, the firm reassigned the two managers and asked me to take over. I agreed to do so on one condition: I would run the fund my way. I told my bosses that I intended to be aggressive.

Another piece of amazing luck hit me when T. Rowe Price decided to create a growth-stage venture fund. I was already paying attention to private companies, because in those days, the competition in tech came from startups, not established companies. Over the next few years, I led three key growth-stage venture investments: Electronic Arts, Sybase, and Radius. The lead venture investor in all three companies was Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. All three went public relatively quickly, making me popular both at T. Rowe Price and Kleiner Perkins. My primary contact at Kleiner Perkins was a young venture capitalist named John Doerr, whose biggest successes to that point had been Sun Microsystems, Compaq Computer, and Lotus Development. Later, John would be the lead investor in Netscape, Amazon, and Google.

My strategy with the Science & Technology Fund was to focus entirely on emerging companies in the personal computer, semiconductor, and database software industries. I ignored all the established companies, a decision that gave the fund a gigantic advantage. From its launch through the middle of 1991, a period that included the 1987 crash and a second mini-crash in the summer of 1990, the fund achieved a 17 percent per annum return, against 9 percent for the S&P 500 and 6 percent for the technology index. That was when I left T. Rowe Price with John Powell to launch Integral Capital Partners, the first institutional fund to combine public market investments with growth-stage venture capital. We created the fund in partnership with Kleiner Perkins—with John Doerr as our venture capitalist—and Morgan Stanley. Our investors were the people who know us best, the founders and executives of the leading tech companies of that era.

Integral had a charmed run. Being inside the offices of Kleiner Perkins during the nineties meant we were at ground zero for the internet revolution. I was there the day that Marc Andreessen made his presentation for the company that became Netscape, when Jeff Bezos did the same for Amazon, and when Larry Page and Sergey Brin pitched Google. I did not imagine then how big the internet would become, but it did not take long to grasp its transformational nature. The internet would democratize access to information, with benefits to all. Idealism ruled. In 1997, Martha Stewart came in with her home-decorating business, which, thanks to an investment by Kleiner Perkins, soon went public as an internet stock, which seemed insane to me. I was convinced that a mania had begun for dot-coms, embodied in the Pets.com sock puppet and the slapping of a little “e” on the front of a company’s name or a “.com” at the end. I knew that when the bubble burst, there would be a crash that would kill Integral if we did not do something radical.

I took my concerns to our other partner, Morgan Stanley, and they gave me some money to figure out the Next Big Thing in tech investing, a fund that could survive a bear market. It took two years, but Integral launched Silver Lake Partners, the first private equity fund focused on technology. Our investors shared our concerns and committed one billion dollars to the new fund.

Silver Lake planned to invest in mature technology companies. Once a tech company matured in those days, it became vulnerable to competition from startups. Mature companies tend to focus on the needs of their existing customers, which often blinds them to new business opportunities or new technologies. In addition, as growth slows, so too does the opportunity for employees to benefit from stock options, which startups exploit to recruit the best and brightest from established companies. My vision for Silver Lake was to reenergize mature companies by recapitalizing them to enable investment in new opportunities, while also replicating the stock compensation opportunities of a startup. The first Silver Lake fund had extraordinary results, thanks to three investments: Seagate Technology, Datek, and Gartner Group.

During the Silver Lake years, I got a call from the business manager of the Grateful Dead, asking for help. The band’s leader, Jerry Garcia, had died a few years before, leaving the band with no tour to support a staff of roughly sixty people. Luckily, one of the band’s roadies had created a website and sold merchandise directly to fans. The site had become a huge success, and by the time I showed up, it was generating almost as much profit as the band had made in its touring days. Unfortunately, the technology was out of date, but there was an opportunity to upgrade the site, federate it to other bands, and prosper as never before. One of the bands that showed an interest was U2. They found me through a friend of Bono’s at the Department of the Treasury, a woman named Sheryl Sandberg. I met Bono and the Edge at Morgan Stanley’s offices in Los Angeles on the morning after the band had won a Grammy for the song “Beautiful Day.” I could not have named a U2 song, but I was blown away by the intelligence and business sophistication of the two Irishmen. They invited me to Dublin to meet their management. I made two trips during the spring of 2001.

On my way home from that second trip, I suffered a stroke. I didn’t realize it at the time, and I tried to soldier on. Shortly thereafter, after some more disturbing symptoms, I found myself at the Mayo Clinic, where I learned that I had in fact suffered two ischemic strokes, in addition to something called a transient ischemic attack in my brain stem. It was a miracle I had survived the strokes and suffered no permanent impairment.

The diagnosis came as a huge shock. I had a reasonably good diet, a vigorous exercise regime, and a good metabolism, yet I had had two strokes. It turned out that I had a birth defect in my heart, a “patent foramen ovale,” basically the mother of all heart murmurs. I had two choices: I could take large doses of blood thinner and live a quiet life, or I could have open-heart surgery and eliminate the risk forever. I chose surgery.

I had successful surgery in early July 2001, but my recovery was very slow. It took me nearly a year to recover fully. During that time, Apple shipped the first iPod. I thought it was a sign of good things to come and reached out to Steve Jobs to see if he would be interested in recapitalizing Apple. At the time, Apple’s share price was about twelve dollars per share, which, thanks to stock splits, is equivalent to a bit more than one dollar per share today. The company had more than twelve dollars in cash per share, which meant investors were attributing zero value to Apple’s business. Most of the management options had been issued at forty dollars per share, so they were effectively worthless. If Silver Lake did a recapitalization, we could reset the options and align interests between management and shareholders. Apple had lost most of its market share in PCs, but thanks to the iPod and iMac computers, Apple had an opportunity to reinvent itself in the consumer market. The risk/reward of investing struck me as especially favorable. We had several conversations before Steve told me he had a better idea. He wanted me to buy up to 18 percent of Apple shares in the public market and take a board seat.

After a detailed analysis, I proposed an investment to my partners in the early fall of 2002, but they rejected it out of hand. The decision would cost Silver Lake’s investors the opportunity to earn more than one hundred billion dollars in profits.

In early 2003, Bono called up with an opportunity. He wanted to buy Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music label. It was a complicated transaction and took many months of analysis. A team of us did the work and presented it to my other three partners in Silver Lake in September. They agreed to do the deal with Bono, but they stipulated one condition: I would not be part of the deal team. They explained their intention for Silver Lake to go forward as a trio, rather than as a quartet. There had been signals along the way, but I had missed them. I had partnered with deal guys—people who use power when they have it to gain advantages where they can get them—and had not protected myself.

I have never believed in staying where I’m not wanted, so I quit. If I had been motivated by money, I would have hung in there, as there was no way they could force me out. I had conceived the fund, incubated it, brought in the first billion dollars of assets, and played a decisive role on the three most successful investments. But I’m not wired to fight over money. I just quit and walked out. I happened to be in New York and called Bono. He asked me to come to his apartment. When I got there, he said, “Screw them. We’ll start our own fund.” Elevation Partners was born.

In the long term, my departure from Silver Lake worked out for everyone. The second Silver Lake fund got off to a rocky start, as my cofounders struggled with stock picking, but they figured it out and built the firm into an institution that has delivered good investment returns to its investors.

2

Silicon Valley Before Facebook

I think technology really increased human ability.

But technology cannot produce compassion. —DALAI LAMA

The technology industry that gave birth to Facebook in 2004 bore little resemblance to the one that had existed only half a dozen years earlier. Before Facebook, startups populated by people just out of college were uncommon, and few succeeded. For the fifty years before 2000, Silicon Valley operated in a world of tight engineering constraints. Engineers never had enough processing power, memory, storage, or bandwidth to do what customers wanted, so they had to make trade-offs. Engineering and software programming in that era rewarded skill and experience. The best engineers and programmers were artists. Just as Facebook came along, however, processing power, memory, storage, and bandwidth went from being engineering limits to turbochargers of growth. The technology industry changed dramatically in less than a decade, but in ways few people recognized. What happened with Facebook and the other internet platforms could not have happened in prior generations of technology. The path the tech industry took from its founding to that change helps to explain both Facebook’s success and how it could do so much damage before the world woke up.

The history of Silicon Valley can be summed in two “laws.” Moore’s Law, coined by a cofounder of Intel, stated that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every year. It was later revised to a more useful formulation: the performance of an integrated circuit doubles every eighteen to twenty-four months. Metcalfe’s Law, named for a founder of 3Com, said that the value of any network would increase as the square of the number of nodes. Bigger networks are geometrically more valuable than small ones. Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law reinforced each other. As the price of computers fell, the benefits of connecting them rose. It took fifty years, but we eventually connected every computer. The result was the internet we know today, a global network that connects billions of devices and made Facebook and all other internet platforms possible.

Beginning in the fifties, the technology industry went through several eras. During the Cold War, the most important customer was the government. Mainframe computers, giant machines that were housed in special air-conditioned rooms, supervised by a priesthood of technicians in white lab coats, enabled unprecedented automation of computation. The technicians communicated with mainframes via punch cards connected by the most primitive of networks. In comparison to today’s technology, mainframes could not do much, but they automated large-scale data processing, replacing human calculators and bookkeepers with machines. Any customer who wanted to use a computer in that era had to accept a product designed to meet the needs of government, which invested billions to solve complex problems like moon trajectories for NASA and missile targeting for the Department of Defense. IBM was the dominant player in the mainframe era and made all the components for the machines it sold, as well as most of the software. That business model was called vertical integration. The era of government lasted about thirty years. Data networks as we think of them today did not yet exist. Even so, brilliant people imagined a world where small computers optimized for productivity would be connected on powerful networks. In the sixties, J. C. R. Licklider conceived the network that would become the internet, and he persuaded the government to finance its development. At the same time, Douglas Engelbart invented the field of human-computer interaction, which led to him to create the first computer mouse and to conceive the first graphical interface. It would take nearly two decades before Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law could deliver enough performance to enable their vision of personal computing and an additional decade before the internet took off.