Chamath Palihapitiya is most well-known for his tenure at Facebook, where he was the VP of Growth, Mobile and International and led the company on the path to one billion users.
But lately, Palihapitiya is working on a different kind of “social”. After leaving Facebook in June of 2011, Palihapitiya started his own venture capital firm Social+Capital Partnership (the “+” is silent).
Unlike conventional venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Palihapitiya’s fund is more of an impact investing-type firm that gathers a bunch of wealthy philanthropists and technologists to invest in healthcare, education, and the financial sectors with a focus on technology.
These individuals include billionaire philanthropists such as Brazil’s Jorge Paulo Lemann and Germany’s Nicolas Berggruen, venture capitalists such as Peter Thiel and John Doerr, and tech entrepreneurs such as Reid Hoffman and Sean Parker.
Palihapitiya once told Businessweek that his family had come to Canada from Sri Lanka as his father was an official with the Sri Lankan High Commission and was posted in Ottawa. When the time came to return, his father applied for refugee status, partly because “all public figures were targeted by Tamil terrorists”, but also because he wanted his children to have a good education.
After graduating from the University of Waterloo with a degree in electrical engineering and a short stint trading derivatives at BMO Nesbitt Burns which turned out not to be his ideal job, Palihapitiya applied for positions in Silicon Valley and landed a position with Winamp.
In 2007, he joined Facebook and eventually became one of the longest serving executives of the company. But rather than thinking about social products like games, he was wondering what the Internet could do to fix critical problems in healthcare, education, or finance. So moving on to Social+Capital Partnership seemed to be a logical decision for Palihapitiya, whose family struggled financially when he was growing up and desires to create change.
“I’m not interested in a bunch of social good. I’m interested in change. I’m basically convinced that people right now who are in the positions of power are there for completely the wrong reasons and shouldn’t be. And so the question is, how do you change the dynamics and the cycle of power and the balance of power,” Palihapitiya said in an interview with investee Treehouse, an online education company offering web design and programming courses at $30 to $50 per month.
“I feel like technology and smart people can creatively solve these problems in ways that policy and other things can’t.”
In healthcare, Social+Capital Partnership has made investments in companies such as Syapse, a cloud-based semantic data platform that can generate and use “omics” profiles to diagnose and treat patients, Flatiron Health, an oncology data platform looking to bring big data to cancer care providers, and Integrated Plasmonics, which is developing a low-cost home medical diagnostic device using nanotechnology, for things like cholesterol or blood cell count, that can be hooked up to a cell phone.
Among investments in financial services are Neo, which makes loans not based on credit scores but on the borrower’s ability to cover payments, and Ezetap, a Bangalore-based startup that developed a low-cost technology to turn smartphones into credit card readers.
Although investments primarily focus on education, healthcare, and financial services, Social+Capital Partnership has made conventional money-making investments as well.
For its inception, Social+Capital Partnership is a small $275 million fund – small by venture capital standards in the Valley – but according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, they are looking to raise an additional $325 million as well as a $60 million principals fund.
“To invest in a bunch of PhDs that’s building a biosensor is not that sexy, until you actually realize what it can do,” Palihapitiya told AllThingsD.