Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, says that Jonathan M. Nelson is known by many colorful monikers, but the one she likes best is “stealth mogul.”

It fits.

Nelson, chief executive officer of Providence Equity Partners, has developed an international reputation for delivering above-market returns to investors by buying well-known companies, such as Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and maximizing their profits.

In Rhode Island, however, he is largely unknown outside of the East Side of Providence, where he lives, serves as a trustee of Brown University and has been a generous benefactor to the school.

That’s the way he wants it. He guards his privacy, declines requests for interviews and is seldom quoted in the national media about the big deals he puts together.

But Nelson, 52, provided a glimpse of his background and values in a lecture during the recent Parents Weekend at Brown. He came across as modest, serious and thoughtful. There was a touch of self-deprecating humor and references to the Red Sox quest for a World Series title.

Nelson, a Providence native, went to Brown to study physics and graduated with a degree in economics. At Brown and soon after, Nelson said he learned three lessons, which he described with anecdotes.

One of his freshman classes was on Beethoven. When the professor asked the students to identify two notes of a piece, one-quarter of them did. Nelson said he realized they had perfect pitch. He did not, and knew he never would.

“I recognized the power of relative skill differences,” he said. A diverse group of people with different talents could be melded into powerful collaborations.

Nelson also said he hosted an early morning radio show on WBRU, where he played jazz and explored his love for musicians such as John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Charlie “Bird” Parker.

“Find your passion,” Nelson told the parents and students, and follow it. Work your way through the drudgery involved in every job to find the fulfillment. Making money early isn’t important. During his first job after getting an MBA, he said, his salary was less than half of what his classmates were making in annual bonuses on Wall Street.

The third lesson came in 1977, after he graduated from Brown.

“Don’t be afraid of uncertainty,” he said. “By today’s standards, it’s important to know where you are headed and how to get there as fast as possible … [but] I really didn’t have a plan all along. The dots of my career are not perfectly aligned.”

After graduation, he went to work for a company in Boston that was setting up a trade office in China, where he visited clients. He did that for three years in the late 1970s, before the United States had diplomatic relations, often attending meetings accompanied by a soldier with a rifle and bayonet.

“I learned patience waiting for a bureaucrat to make a decision,” he said, “Three years was enough.”

He moved to Sweden, his girlfriend’s native country, and lived outside Stockholm where he planned to write a screenplay. After he got married, he applied to and was accepted at Harvard Business School, where he received his MBA in 1983.

He came back to Providence to work for Narragansett Capital Corp., a publicly traded company started by industrialist Royal Little, the Textron founder, and one of the first that did leveraged buyouts. Nelson learned how to buy, reorganize and sell cable television companies, radio stations, newspapers and broadcast stations, including local station Channel 12 (WPRI).

He liked the work, made friends, and learned the business and the networks of people who ran it.

“I got to a place of fulfillment that took patience and a little luck,” he said.

When Narragansett Capital liquidated in 1986 after selling its assets, Nelson and four other top executives from the company formed a closely held private equity company by the same name, Narragansett Capital, that specialized in buying and selling media companies.

By the end of the decade, Nelson decided to break off and organize his own investment fund. He visited Drexel, Burnham, Lambert’s Los Angeles office and the investment bankers offered him $2 million, but he turned it down so he could keep control.

“It took two years to raise a fund on my own,” he said. “It was a tough slog.”

In 1989, he formed Providence Equity Partners, based in Providence, with Glenn M. Creamer, a colleague at Narragansett Capital. Later, they were joined by Paul J. Salem. Salem and Creamer, also Brown graduates, became senior managing directors.

They concentrated on entertainment, communications, media and information businesses.

Their company joined a wave of private equity firms, including giants such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the Blackstone Group, and the Carlyle Group, that developed during the last decade into powerhouses that shook up the corporate landscape. They raised pools of capital from investors, identified undervalued opportunities and then bought ownership stakes in the companies to drive bigger returns. While the acquisitions make big news, what happens later doesn’t get much coverage.

“My own mother doesn’t know what I do,” Nelson joked.

Private equity firms are largely unregulated. Providence Equity doesn’t disclose how it makes money from each company it buys. But in general, private equity firms work this way: After buying a company, the new owners set higher margins to be reached by newly hired managers. They squeeze expenses by consolidating operations, laying off workers or closing plants. Sometimes the companies are split into pieces, with some sold to pay down the debt. Sometimes new global markets are targeted to boost sales. Sometimes the company, after it has been reorganized, is resold quickly at a huge profit.

Critics call private equity companies “strippers and flippers.” Advocates call them the purest form of capitalism, wresting the most value from each asset.

Of all the private equity companies that have been formed, Providence Equity has been among the most successful at attracting money from investors.

It has raised seven pools of capital since its founding and now has $21 billion in equity capital under management. Some of it has come from the Rhode Island’s state pension fund, which has invested $75 million in four installments since 1996.

The investors seem satisfied. Nelson told The New York Times in 2003 that the returns to investors were 70 percent a year, on average, since the company’s founding. The returns may not be so high now because credit has tightened in the aftermath of the subprime lending mess, the economy is uneven and the most obvious undervalued companies have already been bought, reorganized and sold.

Providence Equity has invested in 100 companies that include some of the biggest names in their sectors, such as CDW, Freedom Communications, TDC, Warner Music Group and the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network. The company has about 100 employees. Outside of Providence, the company has offices in London, New York, Hong Kong and New Delhi, which Nelson reportedly visits by private jet.

His wealth is unknown, but during the early part of this decade, private equity fund owners and managers were among the best-compensated executives in corporate America.

Nelson says he likes having a headquarters at 50 Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence. In fact, he uses the Providence location to promote his firm to investors as more low-key, common sense and different from the ones run by the sharks on Wall Street.

He likes being close to Brown, where he has served as a trustee since 2000. With two colleagues, he committed $20 million as the lead contribution for the Nelson Fitness Center, nicknamed the Nellie, being built on campus. He also serves as a trustee for Trinity Repertory Company and has dabbled in politics, cohosting a fundraiser for former U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee.

Mostly, however, he remains the “stealth mogul.”

His lecture at Brown showed that his background gives him a lot to say and a lot to offer. At a time when Rhode Island needs new thinkers to engage in the public debate about where the state is headed, it’s time for him to come out of the shadows.

jkostrze@projo.com