The Scoop
Michael Dell avoided investing in tech for years, figuring he had enough exposure through the company with his name on it. That’s changing.
BDT & MSD, which manages much of the billionaire’s fortune, has hired Goldman Sachs partner Darren Cohen, who oversaw the bank’s bets on Anthropic and Databricks, to invest and raise a new tech fund, according to people familiar with the matter. BDT & MSD raised a smaller tech pool last year, the people said.
The hire is also a tell on where BDT & MSD is headed: Byron Trott’s merchant bank for old-line industrial families — the Waltons, the Pritzkers, the Wrigleys — merged in 2023 with MSD, the Dell vehicle that spent years staying out of software. (It is separate from DFO, the billionaire’s family office, but Dell is a large investor in many of its funds.)
“When I first got to MSD, we really didn’t have a growth equity business, which struck me as a little bit crazy because it’s Michael Dell’s family office,” Gregg Lemkau, co-CEO of BDT & MSD alongside Trott, said in 2022. “The mindset for a long time had been… diversify away from technology.”
But the pull of AI riches is proving hard to resist, even for BDT & MSD’s old-economy, industrial client list. The firm’s core business of advising rich families is well positioned to add to its roster the billionaires being minted almost daily in Silicon Valley.
It has already done so at a small scale. Its first technology fund raised $832 million last year, and owns stakes in OpenAI, Waymo, Helsing, Revolut, and the Jeff Bezos-backed Project Prometheus.
Cohen spent 23 years at Goldman, first putting the bank’s own money into companies that became key parts of market giants like NYSE, IHS, and Thomson Reuters. More recently, he was overseeing investments in Anthropic and Helsing. He’ll lead BDT & MSD’s tech investing business alongside Ryan Nolan and work closely with Juliet de Baubigny, who is separately being promoted to co-president of the firm, one of five such positions.
Goldman recently closed on its second growth-tech fund, following a $5.2 billion raise in 2023, people familiar with the matter said. Christian Resch and Hillel Moerman will take over for Cohen.
Notable
- Dell’s family office, FDO Management, hired the portfolio manager of Fidelity’s $55 billion semiconductor mutual fund, The Information reported last week.