48 - Chamath Palihapitiya, Social Capital CEO: The Beauty of a Calculated Risk

Chamath Palihapitiya is one of the most sought-after investors in Silicon Valley. It's because he has a knack for figuring out how things work. At Facebook, he led the team that studied our online behavior and figured out how to grow that service from 50 million users when he joined in 2007, to 700 million users when he left four years later. 

 

Now as the CEO of venture investing firm Social Capital, he's working on something different: cracking the code to understand how tech is changing our world – and maybe make a few billion dollars in the process. It's quite a journey for Palihapitiya. He grew up poor, an immigrant from Sri Lanka, with a knack for numbers, a talent for gambling, and the proverbial deck stacked against him.

 

I visited Chamath at Social Capital's offices in Palo Alto, California to get an up-close look at how he thinks. One of his deepest insights? Getting the right answer is overrated. Real growth happens from examining our wrong answers.