• John Masters
• Margo Crawford

 

John Masters

 

Maxport was founded by John Masters in July 2008 to provide high level resource in a flexible way to private equity and venture capital backed growth companies.

 

John leverages his 20 years of experience in this sector and the extensive contact network that he has built to bring together the right resources to help companies in a manner that is consistent with their growth capital funded heritage.

 

John’s background

 

• An investor representative of Nomura and JP Morgan's Wirefree fund
• CEO of mobile handset developer and manufacturer, Tellit Communications Ltd
• A corporate financier with Lehman Brothers and Enskilda Securities

 

John left the corporate finance world to start his technology private equity career 11 years ago when recruited to be Senior Fund Manager at JP Morgan's newly formed "Wirefree" private equity fund (John had been a corporate financier at Lehman Brothers and Enskilda Securities and had mainly been involved with capital raising projects for technology companies).  At Wirefree John went on to undertake three operational secondments, culminating in the highly successful turnaround of wireless handset developer and manufacturer, Tellit Communications Ltd, as CEO in 1999.  John oversaw Tellit's first shipments and led the sales initiative with new customers in Russia and Bulgaria.  John also instigated and nurtured an R&D relationship with US industry leader, Qualcomm, which eventually led to Qualcomm's acquisition of Tellit for $21m (a valuation of more than 4 times the buy-in price).

 

After the sale of Tellit to Qualcomm, John was recruited by Nomura's Technology Private Equity Group (April 2001) and spent the majority of his time engaged in "portfolio management" duties, representing Nomura's interests on numerous boards, especially in Israel.  In 2004, Nomura began making new technology investments once more and John was asked to source investment opportunities in North America (e.g. Compellent, which is now listed on NASDAQ and valued at approximately $400m).  In 2007 John was redirected to focus on the buyout sector. In total, while at Nomura, John led over $56m of new investments, including Nomura's participation in the $8.2bn take private acquisition of Avaya, led by Silver Lake and TPG.