Social+Capital, the League of Extraordinarily Rich Gentlemen

Chamath Palihapitiya couldn’t wait to show off one of his startups. On a Friday afternoon in April, he headed from his office in Palo Alto over to Redwood Shores, Calif., a tract of suburban cul-de-sacs built on marshland by the San Francisco Bay. Palihapitiya is a former Facebook executive who quit a year ago to found a venture capital fund, and his enthusiasm is a physical force. He’s an elbow-toucher and raconteur whose favorite interjection is “Dude!” When he’s in full rhetorical flight, his heavy-lidded eyes open as wide as a Marx brother’s. One of his closest friends, Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, describes him as “the type of person you fall in love with. You trust him right away.”

As he drove, Palihapitiya raved about Integrated Plasmonics, founded early last year by three scientists in their mid-30s to make an ultracheap, all-purpose medical diagnostic device. “The idea would be: You have this little strip, you could lick it, you could pee on it, or you could put a microdrop of blood on it, stick it into this little machine, and it’ll do a full characterization,” Palihapitiya explained. The chip would measure cholesterol levels, glucose levels, blood counts, kidney function, and the like. “You can basically know every day, every week, every month, everything that’s happening in your body.”