Social Capital was founded in 2011 by Chamath Palihapitiya, who left a senior growth leadership role at Facebook with $60 million of his own capital and a specific ambition: back generational technology and healthcare companies pursuing deeply transformative ideas rather than incremental improvements. The firm's most consequential structural decision came in 2018, when it stopped accepting outside limited partner capital entirely and restructured into a single-GP model funded from Palihapitiya's own balance sheet - a 'technology Berkshire Hathaway' approach he continues to run alone as the firm's sole investing partner. That model has weathered multiple market cycles, backing Slack, Box, Yammer, and Virgin Galactic in its earlier venture-fund era, and more recently AI, blockchain, and climate technology, with Palihapitiya reporting $2.147 billion in assets under management in his 2025 annual letter.
Slack's 2019 NYSE IPO under ticker WORK, followed by Salesforce's more than $27 billion acquisition of the company in 2021 - one of Chamath Palihapitiya's earliest and most defining bets