The New Normal

Welcome to the First year of the rest of our lives.

After 36 months of corrections, recession, and scandal, we're ready for a break. The good news is that the worst is over (war and its aftermath notwithstanding). The bad news is that the end of the bear doesn't signal the start of the next bull. "Sometime between January 1, 2002 and January 1, 2003, the world figured out that this downturn isn't a blip in an otherwise unfettered march to untold prosperity," says veteran technology investor Roger McNamee, who has seen his share of booms and busts (and managed to extract stellar returns during both). "People faced up to the fact that we're never going back. The '90s are over."

McNamee has a message for businesspeople mesmerized by the recent past (mooning over the boom and tallying up their losses from the bust) or frozen by fear of the future (terror, war, double-dip recession). "Forget about the Next Big Thing," he says. "The next thing has started. It's called the New Normal, and 2003 will be the first full year of it. The New Normal isn't where you wait for the next boom. It's about the rest of your life."

McNamee has spent nearly all of his professional life as a tech investor, and he has produced a shining record over his 21-year career. He has not only been ahead of the curve on an array of investments (including venture deals with such tech superstars as Electronic Arts, Flextronics, and Intuit), he has also pioneered new modes of investing. After a stint as a portfolio fund manager at T. Rowe Price Associates (where his Science & Technology Fund delivered eye-popping returns during his three-year tenure), McNamee cofounded Integral Capital Partners around the new category of "crossover investing": a combination of public-market investing and late-stage venture capital. Integral, which is backed by legendary venture-capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and shares Menlo Park, California offices with that firm, outperformed the venture-capital category throughout the early 1990s. The firm's first $85 million fund delivered a 168% return in a period when the S&P went up 43.5%.

Even more impressive than Integral's return is the restraint that McNamee and his partners showed when they gave back $1.5 billion to investors at the height of the Net boom. In the month that the Nasdaq peaked and Cisco Systems was briefly the most valuable company on earth, McNamee returned 60% of his fund's capital, "because we saw rampant speculation and prepared ourselves with our version of duct tape and plastic wrap."

As early as 1997, he says, "I realized that we had escaped the earth's gravitational pull -- that we were in the midst of a true mania. The next question was, What do you do after you crash and burn? You need a strategy for investing in a long-term bear market." So, along with a set of superstar partners, McNamee assembled the first large-scale private-equity fund focused on tech. Silver Lake Partners, which launched in May 1999, raised $2.3 billion in a matter of months, attracting a who's who of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, including Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, major investment banks, and big institutions such as CalPERS and the World Bank. In the four years since its launch, Silver Lake has invested approximately $1.6 billion of the fund in nine megatransactions -- which included involvement in a landmark $20 billion leveraged buyout of legendary disk-drive maker Seagate in late 2000 and that company's IPO two years later.

To say that Roger McNamee's career is a triumph of smart money is to say that Jerry Garcia (to invoke one of his heroes) had a decent following. While the world makes excuses, McNamee names the moment -- and maps out a productive path forward. In the case of the New Normal, that means unlearning most of the principles of the past decade. Forget everything that you've learned about time (faster is better), money (capital is free), and leadership (no experience required). "Everything takes longer in the New Normal," says McNamee. "Longer is better than never, but it requires a different frame of reference. Wealth is no longer an entitlement. Vision isn't a template in PowerPoint. Patience will once again be a virtue of great consequence."

In the New Normal, the trick is to get real about the new set of challenges we face and what it takes to win in an environment where there are no shortcuts. "You have two choices," says McNamee. "You can say, 'I'm out. I'm never going to do this again.' Or, if you're a lifer, you say, 'Okay, what lessons have I learned? Because I have to do it again, whatever the circumstances in the marketplace. I'm just going to be a lot smarter this time.' If you're willing to do some homework, and if you're willing to be a little different from everyone else, there are countless opportunities worth pursuing. That's what the New Normal is all about."

In a series of conversations with Fast Company, McNamee explained how the New Normal redefines our relationship with time, our grasp of money, and the practice of leadership -- and what it takes to invest, compete, and win in that environment.