Co-founder and Senior Advisor
Madison Dearborn Partners
James N. Perry, Jr., 59, is a co-founder and Senior Advisor to Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity firm based in Chicago. Jim joined First Chicago Venture Capital, MDP’s predecessor firm, in 1984, as a First National Bank of Chicago First Scholar intern while also attending the Booth School in the evenings. Later that year, he joined the firm permanently and was among a dozen founding partners of MDP when the firm spun out of First Chicago in 1993. Jim spent his entire career at MDP investing in venture capital, growth equity and management buyout stage companies in the telecommunications, media and technology services industries. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Jim was considered among the leading venture capital investors in the TMT sector, having been ranked by Forbes magazine as among the top 15 “Midas Touch” venture capitalists in the country.
Much of Jim’s early investment activity was in the emerging mobile services sector. In 1988, Jim led FCVC’s early stage investment in Fleet Call, a specialized mobile radio operator later renamed Nextel Communications, acquired by Sprint in 2005. The firm’s investment in Nextel led to several other investments in the wireless communications industry including Dispatch Communications, later sold to Nextel, Omnipoint, later merged with Voicestream and sold to Deutsche Telecom’s T-Mobile, Nextel Partners, subsequently sold to Sprint, Clearnet in Canada, later sold to Telus, MetroPCS, acquired by T-Mobile, and Weather Holdings, an international wireless operator acquired by Vimpelcom. The MDP communications team has also invested in several companies that serve wireless service providers, including Asurion, the leading provider of mobile handset insurance and security services, and NextG, the leading distributed antenna service provider later acquired by Crown Castle.
Mr. Perry has also overseen investments in numerous other telecommunications enterprises including Allegiance Telecom, Cbeyond Communications and Paetec Communications. Mr. Perry led MDP’s investment in the 2005 buyout of Intelsat which, with the acquisition of Panamsat in 2006, became the largest fixed satellite services company in the world.
The MDP TMT team has been an active investor in the media industries, having invested in Univision Communications, Telemundo, Reiman Publications and other broadcasting, publishing and cable television enterprises. Mr. Perry currently sits on the boards of directors of Asurion, The Topps Company, Univision, Centennial Towers, Intermedia.net and LiquidWeb. In late 2019, Jim relinquished his leadership duties for MDP’s TMT investing efforts and became Senior Advisor to the firm.
Mr. Perry is currently chairman of Empower Illinois, a statewide scholarship granting organization whose mission is to expand quality education opportunities for low-income and working-class families, a board member of Sunshine Enterprises, which helps under-resourced entrepreneurs in Chicago inner city neighborhoods build their businesses, and a member of the finance council of the Archdiocese of Chicago. He is also a board member of the University of Chicago affiliated Lumen Christi Institute and a member of the Booth School Private Equity Council. Jim was the founding investor in two pioneering search fund models, NexGen Growth Partners, based in Chicago, and Search Fund Accelerator, based in Boston, which work with entrepreneurs-in-residence to acquire lower middle market companies.
Mr. Perry is a 1982 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and received an MBA from the University of Chicago in 1985.