Silver Lake Alpine provides structured equity and debt investments in technology and technology-enabled companies.
Silver Lake Waterman provides growth capital, via a proprietary growth debt product, to later-stage growth companies in technology and technology-enabled industries.
History
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 Jim Davidson who had led the Technology Investment Banking business at Hambrecht & Quist; 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; Roger McNamee, as the representative of Integral Capital Partners, a hybrid investment fund that made investments in publicly traded companies and venture capital investments in early stage startups; and Glenn Hutchins, who came from 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. 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. The firm's third fund, Silver Lake Partners III was raised in 2007 with $9.6 billion of commitments. Also in 2007, the firm launched a 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 a credit focused business, Silver Lake Financial in 2007. Silver Lake Financial is headed by Roger Wittlin from Sutter Credit Strategies, a division of Wells Fargo. In 2011, Silver Lake Kraftwerk was launched to provide growth capital to later-stage companies in technology and tech-enabled businesses across the operations,energy, and resources industries. In 2013, the firm raised its fourth fund, Silver Lake Partners IV, which closed in 2013 with $10.3 billion in committed capital. In 2017, the firm raised its fifth fund, Silver Lake Partners V, which closed at $15 billion of commitments. With the launching of this fund, Jim Davidson retired from the Managing Partner committee. In December 2019, Silver Lake appointed Egon Durban and Greg Mondre as Co-CEOs of Silver Lake and promoted Joe Osnoss to Managing Partner. Silver Lake also announced that Ken Hao will serve as Chairman and Mike Bingle is transitioning to Vice Chairman and Managing Partner Emeritus, with the launch of Silver Lake Partners VI.
Key personnel
The firm is led by Managing Partners and Co-CEOs Egon Durban and Greg Mondre, Chairman Ken Hao, Managing Partner Joe Osnoss, and Mike Bingle, who has announced that he is transitioning to Vice Chairman and Managing Partner Emeritus, with the launch of Silver Lake Partners VI.
After the sale of Skype to Microsoft in 2011, Silver Lake was accused of unfairly depriving an employee of an options windfall. At issue was a clause in the Skype employee stock option grant agreement. The repurchase right gave Skype the authority to buy back shares at the grant price, when an employee left the company, even when those shares were vested.
