Roger McNamee: Tech investor, musician, activist

Roger McNamee has been a successful Silicon Valley investor for thirty five years.  He co-founded Silver Lake and Elevation Partners, two very successful private equity funds.  He also plays bass and guitar in the bands Moonalice and Doobie Decibel System.  He holds a BA from Yale and an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School. He has written 4 books, the latest one titled Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe.   Some interesting insights from this episode:  Roger had a very unusual approach to tech investing which allowed him to be highly successful.  Learn why he started Elevation Partners with U2's Bono.  Hear how one pivotal meeting with Mark Zuckerberg would forever alter the course of Facebook.  It was Facebook's lack of anonymity that Roger felt was key to bridging the gap to a much larger mainstream audience that prior social media companies had failed to reach.  While they are technically a platform, Facebook acts more like a media company by using sophisticated algorithms to control the content that users see on the site.  Social media manipulates us by exploiting the weakness in human psychology.  Learn what filter bubbles are and why they've contributed to our accepting and spreading false information.  "Technology has changed the way we engage with society, substituting passive consumption of content and ideas for civic engagement, digital communications for conversation."  "Excellence is an outcome that reflects mastery of an activity in a time and in a place."