Chamath Palihapitiya@chamath
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.