Disruptive Technology Advisers Hires Two Veterans of Finance ... - New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — A little-known investment bank catering to some of Silicon Valley’s top private companies has hired some big names as it seeks to challenge more established competitors.

The firm, Disruptive Technology Advisers, plans to announce on Wednesday that it has hired two veteran financial executives — Greg Kennedy, most recently of UBS, and Robert J. Williams Jr., a onetime president of Washington Mutual — as senior executives.

The hires are meant to help the five-year-old firm grow as it competes in the business of buying and selling stock in privately held companies. As a merchant bank, Disruptive Technology Advisers helps companies find buyers for their shares and often invests as well.

Among the companies it has worked for, according to news reports, are the data analysis provider Palantir Technologies, the file-sharing giant Dropbox and the genetic testing service 23andMe. The firm declined to comment on any of its clients, citing confidentiality.

Little else can be gleaned publicly about Disruptive Technology Advisers: Its website says only that the firm “focuses on private investment funds exclusively for qualified investors,” and otherwise directs people seeking more information to outside public relations professionals.

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The firm — founded by Alexander Davis, a grandson of the oil billionaire Marvin Davis, who died in 2004 — has big ambitions. It wants to compete with the likes of Goldman Sachs and Allen & Company.

The roughly 20-employee investment bank characterizes itself as better aligned with its clients than the firms that dominate the industry.

In an interview, Mr. Davis declined to discuss the firm’s volume of deals, though he said that it had raised more than $1 billion for clients over roughly the last three years.

Mr. Kennedy will serve as the firm’s chief operating officer and Mr. Williams as chief revenue officer.

“We think that this is a huge opportunity to create the standard-bearer for a merchant bank serving the private markets,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Davis and Mr. Kennedy met while Mr. Kennedy was still the head of UBS’s private solutions business, where he focused on helping private companies with investment banking and wealth management.

Mr. Kennedy brought along Mr. Williams, a former client who worked at Washington Mutual while the bank was in bankruptcy and then at an affiliate of the Fortress Investment Group and at an environmentally focused start-up.

“They’ll help us to scale the opportunity that we have in servicing private companies in the most exciting time for a business such as ours,” Mr. Davis said.

Though 2017 is shaping up to be a big year for initial public offerings of unicorns, or billion-dollar start-ups — the parent company of Snapchat, for example, is already moving toward a market debut — Mr. Davis said he expected money to keep flowing back to the private markets.

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“The more that the I.P.O. market opens up from our perspective, the more recycled capital that will flow back into the private markets,” he said.

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