Education
McNamee joined T. Rowe Price as an analyst in 1982, after receiving his Master of Business Administration from the Tuck School of Business.
McNamee joined T. Rowe Price as an analyst in 1982, after receiving his Master of Business Administration from the Tuck School of Business.
He is the founding partner of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. Between the two groups, McNamee estimated in April 2009 that he has played 800 shows., in an April 13, 2009 article from the San Francisco Chronicle. 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 investments in Electronic Arts (which went public in 1989) and Sybase (which had its IPO in 1991).
McNamee is also a musician.
He played in the band Flying Other Brothers from 1997 to 2006, and now plays with the band Moonalice, using the stage persona of "Chubby Wombat Moonalice." In 2014 he formed a duo with Jason Crosby called the Doobie Decibel System. In 2015, The Doobie Brothers sued the band over the name.
He became expert on Facebook by using it to promote. Moonalice, and now is focusing on video by live-streaming its concerts.
He says musicians and top professionals share “the almost desperate need to dive deep.” This capacity to obsess seems to unite top performers in music and other fields.
McNamee is the co-writer of the Moonalice song "lieutenant"s 4:20 Somewhere". In August 2012 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced that the digital logs for "lieutenant’s 4:20 Somewhere" had been acquired for its library and archives, describing the Moonalice logs as helping to "..tell the story of music’s digital revolution. Specifically the rise of direct-from-artist (Doctor of Fine Arts) distribution.
“lieutenant’s 4:20 Somewhere” has been downloaded over 4.6 million times".
According to The New York Times, McNamee has been instrumental in arranging at least two $500,000 donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. Bill Gates wrote in his book The Road Ahead: "Roger was a great sounding board for many of the ideas I wrote about".
Mark Zuckerberg (who met McNamee in summer 2006 at a time when Facebook 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.
Moonalice is the first band without a label to achieve one million downloads of a song from its own servers, direct-from-artist. McNamee has been married to the musical theorist and singer/songwriter Ann McNamee since 1983, and with her is a co-founder of the Ndovo Foundation now known as Tembo Preserve.
McNamee is also a touring musician, first as a founding member of the Flying Other Brothers, and more recently in that group"s follow-on band, Moonalice. 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.".
