Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…This was a huge wake-up call we all remember vividly. Fortunately, for Virgin and Branson, the deal wasn’t done yet. Sir Richard does what he thinks is right and he pulls out of the deal, even though Virgin is bleeding cash, needs money, they’re not going to do this deal with the Saudis anymore. That is when he meets yet another colorful character, this time in the Silicon Valley tech world, Chamath Palihapitiya, which for anybody who’s a long-time listener of Acquired and certainly anybody in the tech industry, at this point well beyond, is probably familiar with Chamath. Chamath was an early Facebook executive. He was within the first 30 employees, and he was pretty senior there. He was the guy, by all accounts—his own and others—who really figured out Facebook’s viral growth strategy, started the growth team at Facebook, and he particularly also figured out international growth for Facebook. A super, super key executive. He was also the guy at Facebook behind, remember the Facebook Home, I think it was called, the operating system for phones? Oh yeah. I think Facebook won. They partnered with HTC to make a Facebook-specific phone. That’s right. While it was built off of Android. It was like the Fire Phone. Other companies building off of Android, turns out that wasn’t a good idea. Anyway, right after that, he left Facebook. Facebook had already gone public at this point. He had a large equity steak, made hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars from Facebook. He did a pretty audacious thing. He said, I’m going to take most of my money and I’m going to roll it into a venture capital firm. He started a venture capital firm called Social Capital with few partners from USVP, Mamoon, and Ted from USVP. They start Social Capital. I remember, when they were breaking in, this was 2012–2013 timeframe, I think.…

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