Silver Lake

Private equity's Yahoo interest

Will Yahoo be taken private?

Yahoo (YHOO) still doesn't have a CEO, but it does seem to have a lot of private equity interest. Reports this week suggest that both The Blackstone Group (BX) and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) are sniffing around the digital media company, which already has received some interest from Silver Lake Partners (in coordination with DST Group and Alibaba Group).

So I spoke to someone familiar with the situation MORE

What Silver Lake deal means for Alibaba and Yahoo

Today's deal decreases the chances of an Alibaba Group IPO, but may boost the odds of a Yahoo takeover.

Silver Lake Partners announced today that it is leading a $1.6 billion investment in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, alongside DST Capital, Yunfeng Capital and existing Alibaba shareholder Temasek. The deal is designed as a tender offer to provide liquidity for Alibaba employees, and values the company at approximately $32 billion.

More importantly, MORE

Can Silver Lake afford Yahoo?

Private equity is circling Yahoo. Does it have enough money?

There have been several reports this week that private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz may offer to buy Yahoo (YHOO), the oft-troubled Internet company that has been particularly rudderless since firing its CEO last week.

The two firms most recently teamed up to buy a majority stake in Skype from eBay (EBAY), and then quickly turned around and sold MORE

Defending Skype and private equity

I've spilt a lot of digital ink on the saga of Yee Lee, a former Skype employee who lost his vested options upon leaving the company voluntarily. My initial post argued that the Skype arrangement was intentionally confusing, while a follow-up suggested that private equity and Silicon Valley work together but speak separate languages.

Throughout, I've been engaged in an email conversation with an attorney not engaged by either Skype or MORE

Skype: See no vesting, hear no vesting

Last week, Skype took heat for firing three executives just weeks before the company's $8.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft (MSFT) is expected to close. That was bad, albeit more optical than unethical. What we learned today, however, might have crossed that line.

Yee Lee, a former Skype employee, charged the company and its private equity investors with effectively cheating him out of vested options. Not in court papers, but via his blog.

Lee MORE

David Roux: On Skype and bubbles

David Roux, co-founder and chairman of private equity firm Silver Lake, just finished up his morning keynote at the SuperReturn U.S. conference in Boston. Kind of an odd talk, in that he spoke a lot about portfolio management from the perspective of limited partners rather than from the perspective of general partners. Maybe he was just looking to get in good with prospective investors.

No "news" made, but two quotes of MORE

Why was Skype's debt guaranteed?

Skype is being hailed as one of the decade's best private equity deals, following Microsoft's agreement to buy the company for $8.5 billion. But that doesn't mean that the PE firms didn't take an unnecessary risk.

It may sound counterintuitive, but private equity is all about debt. Private equity firms typically borrow more than 30% of a deal's value from banks, and then use that leverage to juice returns. And when MORE

Exclusive: Silver Lake poaches cleantech star from DFJ

Raj Atluru has stepped down as a managing director with VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, where he has led cleantech investments since 2001 and its India investment operations since 2005. He will move on to Silver Lake Kraftwerk, the energy-focused growth equity platform formed earlier this year by Silver Lake Partners and Soros Fund Management.

Atluru becomes the third Kraftwerk partner, alongside ex-Foundation Capital investor Adam Grosser and Cathy Zoi, who MORE

Roger McNamee inscribes Silver Lake in the 'Failure Chronicles'

Success, it seems, is all in the eye of the beholder.

For most of us, Silver Lake Partners would fit the bill. Since being founded in 1999, the tech-focused private equity firm has amassed $14 billion in assets under management, opened offices around the globe, produced strong returns for investors and diversified its investment strategy. For Silver Lake co-founder Roger McNamee, however, Silver Lake is about opportunity lost.

McNamee was one of MORE