Private Equity Firm Silver Lake Got Rich Off Tech. Now It’s Moving Beyond It.

At the height of the dot-com bubble, Silver Lake Partners arrived in Silicon Valley with a radical thesis. Technology companies, it hypothesized, finally had sufficient physical assets and cash flows to benefit from the type of private-equity financial engineering that previously had applied mostly to the industrial economy.

Before Silver Lake, the assumption was that a tech company’s most valuable assets walked out the door each night. As such, loading up on debt wasn’t an option. Tech companies were either fabulously overvalued by traditional metrics—because their promise was so great—or relegated to zombie valuations and considered unsalvageable.

Silver Lake, and later a bevy of competitors, changed all that by winning bets on the likes of Seagate, a disk drive maker, Skype, Nasdaq, and more recently, Dell. The firm took off when the dot-com bust wrecked the businesses, but not the prospects, of legitimate technology companies.

The Menlo Park, Calif., and New York firm is in the news because it has named two co-CEOs from its second-generation leadership team, Egon Durban and Greg Mondre. It is also raising yet more money. It didn’t give interviews Monday, but gave generous behind-the-scenes assistance for an authoritative Wall Street Journal article. The firm manages an astounding $43 billion. Not bad for a niche fund that started with $2.3 billion.

The line in the Journal article that caught my eye: Silver Lake is investing in “growing companies that either focus on technology or are going through a technology-related evolution.” The emphasis on the last bit is mine, and it’s the crucial part because technology-related evolutions are highly subjective. Silver Lake is a major investor in Endeavor, an amalgamation of the William Morris and IMG talent and sports agencies, and a large collection of acquisitions and other investments. Endeavor called off an IPO earlier this year and its debt exceeds its annual revenues. Last week, Silver Lake bought into the parent of Manchester City, the English football club. Tech may be a component of both of these companies. But they are in the talent and soccer businesses, respectively. Full stop.

The point is that while all private-equity firms have themes, Silver Lake is creeping beyond the mission that served it well for its first 20 years. Tech used to be special. Now it’s integral to the economy. Which makes it just a little less special.

Adam Lashinsky

Source: Fortune

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