Breaking: I’m told that Kevin Albert is leaving Elevation Partners, where he was in charge of fundraising and investor relations. He previously ran fund placement for Merrill Lynch.
He’s joining Pantheon Ventures, as global head of corporate development (new position). More soon…
Update: Pantheon has now made the news official via press release. So what does this tell us about Elevation, the private equity firm whose co-founding partners include Roger McNamee (co-founder of Silver Lake Partners), Fred Anderson (ex-CFO of Apple) and Bono (if you have to ask…). In short, it tells us that Elevation is in deep, deep trouble.
The bi-coastal firm’s travails have been well-chronicled, including by Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky and yours truly before I was Fortune’s Dan Primack. The largest concerns were about how Elevation kept reinvesting in Palm, in what some investors viewed as a suicidal knife-catching experiment. There also were gripes about style drift, particularly a $300 million play for a minority stake in the digital media operations of Forbes.
Each of those deals — plus a recent investment in Facebook — came out of Elevation’s debut fund, a $1.8 billion vehicle raised in 2004/2005. The only public performance numbers for the fund come from the Washington State Investment Board, which puts the internal rate of return at -2.3% as of Dec. 31, 2009. This compares to a positive 12.7% IRR through the end of Q3 2009. Things certainly could have changed since then — particularly considering that PE firms now are required to mark portfolio companies to public market comps — but that’s a hell of a quarterly swing.
Making matters worse, TechCrunch reported last week that Elevation asked for, and was denied, an extension to the fund’s investment life (PE funds typically can only add portfolio companies for five years). It still will be able to do a reported deal for Pandora, but that’s just about it.
All of this brings us back to Kevin Albert, who had helped raise Elevation’s debut fund while still at Merrill Lynch. Albert joined Elevation in late 2005, in order to manage investor relations and (eventually) raise a successor fund. Over those five years, however, Albert’s job had mostly boiled down to: (a) Organizing annual meetings for limited partners, and (b) Fielding calls from angry/frustrated/confused/bored limited partners.
Up until around 7:45am this morning, I still assumed that Albert was laying the groundwork for a new Elevation fund. After all, the firm last year hired a handful of new partners whose personal economics are directly tied to that future capital pool. But now… well, I’m not so sure.
I assume Albert left of his own volition, given that he already has a new job. If so, it suggests that he didn’t see fundraising in Elevation’s near-term future. If he was pushed — and I have no evidence that he was — then perhaps Elevation doesn’t have faith in its own fund-raising future. It’s also possible that Elevation blames Albert for the investment extension defeat, but the timing wouldn’t seem to work (given how close that vote was to today’s announcement).
The firm still could urn things around, given its penchant for downside protection and an intriguing/pending investment in Pandora.
But the next signposts are the LinkedIn profiles of those aforementioned new partners, including ex-eBay CFO Rajiv Dutta and former Apple exec Avie Tevanian. If there’s no second fund, then those guys don’t have much reason to stick around. And if they leave, then we know that Elevation isn’t sticking around much longer either.