What happened at Social Capital was several things:
1) Personally, I was going through a divorce. It was a very hard time.
2) My ostensible “cofounders” spent more time jostling for board seats and credit for deals with outsiders vs doing good work and mentoring a team. They made the place a political snake pit - something that I had unfortunately allowed to happen. So I killed the snake.
3) It was increasingly clear that my returns were sporadic but gargantuan and didn’t fit in a classic fund with LPs. I was a home run hitter in a business where raising new funds invariably led you to hitting singles and doubles. In other words, I was making suboptimal portfolio decisions so I would return capital in order to keep raising funds. This was important to stack the compensation of my team who had far less capital than I did.
I’m in a much better place now personally and professionally. We invest only my capital and so far, so good.
Long live Social Capital.
Quoted context
These are the quoted author’s words.
Most tech podcasts are so fucking boring.
The host is either some person who couldn't hack it in a operating role (VC, engineer, founder, etc.) or some VC who is just doing it to get deal flow.
No one cares what Bill Gurley thinks about AI, they want to hear about why he fucked over TK at Uber.
No one cares what Chamath thinks about politics, they want to hear about what happened at Social Capital and why he closed the fund.
No one cares what Keith Rabois has to say about Miami, they want to hear about what happened at OpenDoor.
No one cares what Sam Altman thinks about AGI, they want to hear about why he was fired from YC and (initially) OpenAI.
But instead we get these boring, sanitized conversations about why SaaS companies are or are not dead.
Topics no one gives us a shit about.
evisdrenova ↗