But McNamee is the firm’s spiritual leader, macro thinker, and recruiter in chief. Lorna Borenstein, a former Yahoo executive and chief of eBay Canada, recalls being invited to give a presentation at Elevation’s weekly partners meeting one Monday morning in November 2006. Seated at the head of the table in the company conference room near a large framed poster from U2’s 10th album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Borenstein talked for two hours. Bono asked her the most questions. McNamee seemed to be ignoring her.

“Roger was sitting to my left, on his laptop the whole time,” she recalls. But as she rose to leave, “Roger took my hand and said, ‘We need to talk.’  He wouldn’t let go of my hand.”

McNamee pulled Borenstein next door to Elevation’s game room—which houses an arcade console stocked with 5,000 titles—and began to grill her, ignoring his partners’ entreaties to please return to the meeting. It was then, Borenstein says, that she realized “not only had he been paying attention, I’m guessing he was doing research on me.” Over the next seven days, at McNamee’s insistence, Borenstein met with him four more times. He quizzed her on consumer technology and on how she believed online companies could best engage and retain users. She describes his approach as intense—“kind of   ‘I’ve looked into your soul.’ ”

By week’s end, he informed her that she needed to run one of Elevation’s companies: Move. The fact that she’d already turned down a recruiter for the job didn’t faze McNamee. “He’s reeling me in, going, ‘Now you’re interested. Now you’re interested,’ ” Borenstein says. She relented because her talks with McNamee let her see his imagined future, she says. “He’s the greatest optimist I’ve ever met.”

Pearlman agrees, admitting that, for a traditional transaction guy like himself, that took some getting used to. “Roger flies around at 30,000 feet,” Pearlman says, laughing. “Most private equity shops focus first on what could potentially go wrong. Elevation forces you to look at the upside of every transaction first—to ask, Is there a real potential breakout home run here?”

The breakout home run has a precedent, and everybody knows its name: Seagate Technology. Back in the late ’90s, the 20-year-old disk-drive maker was foundering. McNamee’s previous firm, Silver Lake Partners, assisted it in retooling. The deal was unusually complex. After arranging a stock swap with a software company in which Seagate had a 33 percent interest, Silver Lake helped take Seagate private and then public again two years later. But what the firm accomplished—growing an established brand while providing a sevenfold return to investors in its first $2.3 billion fund—is considered a landmark deal by private equity analysts.

No wonder, then, that for all of Elevation’s lofty rhetoric about transforming culture, for all of its talk of “natural rhythms” and “top-line melodies,” its investors are focused on the answer to these questions: Where’s the next Seagate, and will we get a piece of it?

A few minutes before taking the stage in Denver, the members of Moonalice reminisce about their earliest musical stirrings. Jimmy Sanchez, who’s played with everyone from Boz Scaggs to Bonnie Raitt, opens his laptop and displays a photo of himself as a small boy, drumsticks flying. G.E. Smith, the former leader of the Saturday Night Live band, recalls how his mother bought him his first used Fender guitar 44 years ago, when he was 11. Casady says he was 12 when, exploring in the attic, he stumbled across his dad’s old Washburn guitar and fell in love.

McNamee waits a beat. “When I was 11, I went up to the attic and found my father’s stock tables,” he jokes, and everyone laughs.

McNamee’s father founded a successful regional brokerage firm, First Albany, in Albany, New York. As the second-youngest of nine children (six McNamee kids and three adopted cousins), Roger was anything but an extrovert. He says the closest thing he had to a guitar-in-the-attic moment was when he visited his father’s office and played with the Bunker Ramo quote machine.

“I just thought it was the most amazing thing,” says McNamee, who now wears up to seven gadgets on his belt at a time. “You’d press things, and all of a sudden, something would come up on the screen.”

He went to Yale University. After two years as an undergraduate, he took a break, following a girlfriend to San Francisco, where he sold display ads and tried to master a new hobby—playing guitar. When he returned to Yale, he studied history and joined a band called Guff. The group played Hot Tuna and Grateful Dead covers as well as original stuff, including a Frank Zappa parody called “The Club Foot.”

Asked what McNamee contributed, Guff’s viola player, Geoff Holdridge, answers, “A huge amount of enthusiasm and energy. He is really good now, but back then, he took a long time to tune.”

McNamee met his wife, Ann, in a music-theory class (she was the graduate student leading his section). After Yale, he went to Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business. Ann headed for Swarthmore, near Philadelphia, where she would eventually chair the music department. They were married in 1983 but for nearly two decades lived mostly apart, following what McNamee calls a “deferred-enjoyment model.”

In 1982, McNamee had become an analyst at the Baltimore-based investment firm T. Rowe Price. Then as now, his best work was done not behind a desk, but up in people’s faces. He spent 100 days a year in Silicon Valley, dropping in on companies, playing with their products, and picking their brains. These trips gave him insights that often paid off: He was one of the original investors, for example, in Electronic Arts, the videogame behemoth.

From late 1987 to 1991, a period when technology stocks were far from stable, T. Rowe Price’s science-and-tech fund, which McNamee ran, returned about 17 percent annually to investors. While still at the company, McNamee became a ski instructor at Killington, in Vermont. By optimizing his life “across multiple dimensions”—a concept he wrote about in his 2004 book The New Normal—he seemed to excel in all of them. (Ed Mathias, McNamee’s boss at the time and now a managing director of the Carlyle Group, says he always believed McNamee had a less lofty motive: “He became a ski instructor so he could get to the head of the line.”)

In 1991, McNamee and John Powell—a colleague McNamee describes as so complementary to him that “it’s like Bono and the Edge”—broke away to launch Integral Capital Partners, which invested in both public and private companies, making it the first “crossover” fund. Integral, formed as a partnership with the big Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, scored big with early bets on Intuit, among other firms, delivering a net annual return of 24 percent between 1991 and 2003.

During the Integral years, McNamee formed a band, the Flying Other Brothers, with his younger brother, Giles, a Boston banker. The band was so named because no matter where they played, at least one McNamee brother had to get on a plane. But music wasn’t just a pastime; it was a networking tool. At tech conferences, McNamee jammed with the biggest names in the industry. (He once sang Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.) Later, after McNamee co-founded Silver Lake Partners (keeping Integral as a partner) in 1999, visitors to his office came face-to-face with a life-size papier-mâché Jerry Garcia. By that time, McNamee was more than a mere Deadhead: During the late ’90s, he had begun serving as a business adviser to the band.

It was through the Grateful Dead that he met Bono. The Dead had been selling music, concert tickets, and T-shirts directly to fans on the internet and was interested in creating a broader platform that would allow other artists to do the same. McNamee helped devise a business plan. The Dead approached U2 as a potential partner, and McNamee spent months discussing the idea (which would later be shelved) with Bono.

By 2001, Ann had retired from Swarthmore, and the couple were living together full-time in the Bay Area. Then, in June, while returning home from a trip to Dublin and New York, McNamee had a stroke, soon to be followed by a second one. “I’m in the car service headed home at 3:30 in the morning, when all of a sudden, it felt like somebody had poured chocolate sauce on top of my head. It felt really good for 10 or 15 seconds. Then, boom, the lights went out.”

He was 45. Open-heart surgery corrected a defect he’d never known he had. He recuperated for nearly three months. Then, only because his partners were out of the country, he returned to work—on September 11, 2001. After the strokes, he says, things were different at Silver Lake. Sources close to the firm say some there resented how the spotlight always seemed to shine on McNamee, even for deals in which he was less involved. Some also felt he overreached at times, trying to assert expertise in areas where others were more qualified.

Debates over the future of Silver Lake, McNamee says, grew increasingly heated. His desire to stay small, with time to focus on the strategic direction of each company in the firm’s portfolio, was at odds, he says, with the expanding vision of his partners. In 2003, his tenure at Silver Lake came to an end.

“My partners said, ‘You know, we kind of think it’s time for you to move on,’ ” McNamee says, recalling how they surprised him by suggesting he take a more limited role at the firm.

Asked what had led to the rift, he says, “I think the simple answer is, I’m an acquired taste and high maintenance, and culturally speaking, they liked it better without me.”

He admits he could have reacted with less emotion. But so, he says, could his partners. “One of them told the whole world I still had a huge health problem, and all I really wanted to do was play music. Oh, it was really ugly.”

Jim Davidson, a Silver Lake co-founder who remains at the firm, calls McNamee “truly gifted” and “instrumental” to Silver Lake’s early success. McNamee and his wife are godparents to all three of Davidson’s children, and their friendship survived McNamee’s departure. But the end, he acknowledges, was tough.

“Roger’s investment performance stacks up with the best, but he is not willing to compromise, whether in his investment business or his band or his friendships,” Davidson says. “And that can be hard on people.”

In 2003, just as McNamee was starting to wonder what he’d do next, his cell phone rang. It was Bono, calling from the south of France. They hadn’t talked in about two years, but the rock star had an idea about investing in the music business. That idea was the seed that would grow into what Elevation is today.

“The story of my life is bouncing back,” McNamee says, noting that, in the ’90s, he used to say his perfect year included 20 Grateful Dead shows, 20 days of skiing, and 20 baseball games. “Now my goals are much less specific than they were then. And they’re certainly not numerical. I make crisper choices now.” Asked to describe a perfect year today, he says, “Any year I survive.”

Elevation had its first crisis last year, when one of its founding partners, John Riccitiello, left to return to his previous employer, the videogame giant Electronic Arts. The departure of a managing director—a rare and troubling development so early in a fund’s life—heightened some investors’ concerns that the “first-time fund” (with a management team that had never worked together) wouldn’t click. McNamee, whose ties to E.A. go back to his
T. Rowe Price days, had recruited Riccitiello to join Elevation. Although Riccitiello said he left only because his dream job—C.E.O. of E.A.—opened up, others confirm that he and McNamee clashed.

“Roger and John were almost polar opposites,” Fred Anderson says. “They really respect each other, but they saw things very differently. That was probably the biggest challenge in the chemistry. All the rest of us jelled.”

Riccitiello’s exit also set the stage for Elevation’s first investment liquidation, a profitable transaction that nevertheless raised some eyebrows. In October, McNamee and his partners revealed that the firm was selling its controlling stake in the videogame developer BioWare/Pandemic to E.A. The sale would double the value of Elevation’s $300 million investment in less than two years—a respectable, if not blockbuster, return—and was generally viewed as a smart move, since the company needed a cash infusion and, as one investor put it, “the deal went sideways and lost its champion” when Riccitiello quit.

But the news fueled a simmering question: Was Elevation suffering from “strategy drift”? According to a memo circulated to potential investors when the firm was first founded, entertainment assets would be a primary focus. Yet for all Bono’s talk about “artists sitting at the table,” the Bioware/Pandemic sale spelled the end of the only high-profile entertainment play Elevation had made.

Moreover, some Elevation investors were displeased to learn that the sale would mean a windfall of as much as $4.9 million for Riccitiello, who held an indirect interest in Bioware/Pandemic’s parent company, VG Holding, through his continued ties to Elevation.

“He doesn’t deserve to take anything with him when he walked out like that,” says one Elevation investor, who asked not to be named because his employer forbids it. “I take a very dim view of people who ask us to sign up for 10 years and then feel free to jump ship. Someone who chose to do that should leave all their economics behind.”