History
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and venture capital |
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Early history |
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Silver Lake was founded in 1999, at the height of the late 1990s technology boom to make private equity investments in mature technology companies as opposed to the startups pursued actively by venture capitalists. Among the firm's founders were Glenn Hutchins, who came from The Blackstone Group and served as a Special Advisor on economic and healthcare policy in the early Clinton Administration and previously worked at Thomas H. Lee Partners; David Roux who had an operational and entrepreneurial background having served as Chairman and CEO of Liberate Technologies, executive vice president at Oracle Corporation and senior vice president at Lotus Development; Jim Davidson who had led the Technology Investment Banking business at Hambrecht & Quist and Roger McNamee, who had previously co-founded Integral Capital Partners, a hybrid investment fund that made investments in publicly traded companies and venture capital investments in early stage startups.
The firm raised its first fund, Silver Lake Partners, with $2.3 billion of investor commitments. Silver Lake's first fund was among the best performing funds of its vintage.
The firm's second fund, Silver Lake Partners II was raised in 2004 with $3.6 billion of commitments.
In 2004, McNamee left Silver Lake to found Elevation Partners, an entertainment and media focused private equity firm, together with Bono.
In November 2006, Silver Lake began fundraising for its third fund Silver Lake Partners III, which ultimately collected $9.6 billion of capital from investors, completing fundraising in late 2007. Also in 2007, the firm launched its middle-market investment business, Silver Lake Sumeru, hiring Ajay Shah and the former investment team of Shah Capital Partners. Sumeru completed fundraising for its debut fund in 2008 with $1.1 billion of capital. Silver Lake also launched its credit focused business, Silver Lake Financial in 2007. Silver Lake Financial is headed by Roger Wittlin, who joined the firm together with a group of staff from Sutter Credit Strategies, a division of Wells Fargo.
On December 20, 2007 Cisco Systems Inc.'s Development Chief, Charles Giancarlo, announced his departure from Cisco and his new position as partner and managing director at Silver Lake.
In January 2008, as the mid-2000s buyout boom was coming to an end, Silver Lake sold a 9.9% stake in its management company to CalPERS for $275 million, implying a valuation of approximately $2.8 billion for the firm.
Read more about this topic: Silver Lake Partners
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