Charlie Rose Talks to Glenn Hutchins

This interview is excerpted from a TabbFORUM Series sponsored by UBS, "Conversations with Charlie Rose: The New Capitalists Shaping Our World."

What was your plan back when you started your firm?
There were three basic strategies. One was to specialize—most people do everything—in technology. Strategy Two was to invest in growth, not leverage—which is serving us very well right now, for a whole bunch of reasons. And Strategy Three was to have a set of skills that allowed us to transform the businesses that we invested in, rather than just be passive, financially oriented investors. Those are the three key strategies, which were at the time highly distinctive.

What was your first breakthrough?
The first deal that most people associate with Silver Lake was a company called Seagate (STX), a disk-drive company that was a big success for us. We also were involved with building a company called Ameritrade (AMTD). We've done a lot in the area at the intersection of financial services and technology, where we use technology in businesses that previously had a human-intermediation model. We helped put together the modern Nasdaq (NDAQ) stock market. And then the Skype transaction, which was announced recently.