Paul Booth

Privately held private equity (PE) firm Silver Lake is a major player when it comes to investing in technology companies. The list of current and past investees reads like the industry’s Who’s Who, from the likes of Broadcom, Dell, Alibaba Group and Motorola Solutions, to SolarWinds, Twitter, Stripe and UiPath. It currently has $95 billion worth of assets under management, and the combined annual revenues of its portfolio companies are $282 billion, with an aggregate portfolio value of over $1 trillion. Its portfolio companies’ employees number over 700 000. Not bad for a company started less than 25 years ago.

Founded in 1999, its current co-CEOs – Greg Mondre and Egon Durban – have both been with the firm since the early days. Prior to joining Silver Lake, Mondre was a principal at the Texas Pacific Group (now TPG), where he mainly focused on PE in the technology sector. Durban worked in Morgan Stanley's investment banking division before joining Silver Lake. As well as their roles at the firm, both also serve as board members for several tech firms: for Mondre, those include GoDaddy, Avaya, and Sabre, and for Durban, it’s VMware, Dell and Motorola Solutions.