Who is Chamath Palihapitiya?
From creating SPACS that bring innovative companies public to owning the Golden State Warriors, Chamath Palihapitiya is the embodiment of a Silicon Valley apex predator. The disruptive investor’s roots in Silicon Valley began in AOL where he became the company’s youngest Vice President, thereafter he went on to become one of the original Facebook executives, and after his departure, he started his venture capital firm Social Capital to disrupt innovation and technology in every field.
Beginnings
Palihapitiya went to Lisgar Collegiate Institute in Ottawa for high school and then went on to study electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo. After a brief stint in the banking and finance industry, Palihapitiya moved to California to pursue a career in the newborn Silicon Valley wave. Although he held many significant positions in other companies, his most remarkable position was being the vice president of operations at Facebook. The company’s growth had plateaued at 90 million people, and Palihapitiya decided to help his friend Mark Zuckerburg. Palihapitiya came forward with a project called Growth which essentially focused on specific parts of Facebook to make the experience significantly better for users, and attract more people to the platform. The famous “People You May Know” aspect of Facebook was one of the many ideas born out of Growth.
Venture Capital
Palihapitiya’s entrepreneurial ventures have been revolutionary investments that have changed Silicon Valley drastically. While still at Facebook, Palihapitiya invested in Peter Thiel’s big data analytics company Palantir which recently went public. Palantir is a significant ally of the American Government, and Palantir is soon going to be implementing game-changing services for the public as a whole. Many of his other early ventures were bought out by the Walt Disney Company and Google, which shows the powerful eye for innovation Palihapitiya has.
Social Capital was the venture capital firm founded by Palihapitiya shortly after he left Facebook. Dompe Group and Peter Thiel were significant investors in the fund, and the last recorded AUM were $1.1 billion in 2015. The fund has to have grown immensely in value by then through innovative investments spanning many industries. Slack received funding through Social Capital, and the workplace communication app was recently acquired by tech giant Salesforce. Social Capital also has invested in cloud management giant Box, which boasts revenue of more than $500 million a year.
Cryptocurrencies are the future of the banking system, as they democratize the financial industry. Palihapitiya was not late to this party, and his vision for innovation knew that cryptocurrencies would be the future. He invested $5 million into Bitcoin back in 2013, so his investment would be currently worth a little over $1 billion, and that is if he never continued to purchase more which is highly unlikely, so the $1 billion is a conservative estimate. Palihapitiya recently put a price target of $200,000 on Bitcoin following its massive surge in price.
SPACs and the Future
Over the past couple of months, Palihapitiya has introduced a SPAC known as Social Capital Hedosophia. He already brought Richard Branson’s space travel messiah Virgin Galatic public through a SPAC, and he plans on bringing more innovative companies public in the coming future. Social Capital Hedosophia trades under ticker symbol IPOE, and popularity in SPACs has grown massively amongst retail and institutional investors as many of the companies taken public are disruptive companies in their respective fields.
Chamath Palihapitiya has shown time and time again that he has a vision for the future that he will not stop at accomplishing. Chamath’s story to the top seems almost out of a movie, as who can expect a low-income immigrant boy from Ottawa to turn into one of the most revolutionary technological leaders in the world. Palihapitiya is a true inspiration and one can only guess how impactful his ventures for the future will be.
