Chamath Palihapitiya, who is sometimes called the "unconventional venture capitalist," helped kick off the
TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York today with a bit of a reality check for the entrepreneurs in the room. He called out the startup culture in the U.S. for being too frivolous—focusing on “1 percent problems" in a world facing serious challenges.
Society as we define it right now is, I think, breaking at the seams. And it's because none of us trust the things that we were supposed to trust to help make the world a better, more useful, interesting place. And so the best thing we should be doing is spending our money and our time to basically destroy that, and to rebuild things in a more interesting, equitable way.
You know, people are dying left and right; people are frustrated with all of this inopportunely and inequity; and then now there's actually legislative change and all this other change, which is reallocating trillions of dollars. Which to me says, everyone should be focused on those big ideas.
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In 2011, Palihapitiya left Facebook to found the
The Social+Capital Partnership, which brings together philanthropists and technologists to invest in businesses creating change and value on a global scale.
He's also a cofounder of
FWD.us, a political advocacy group lobbying for immigration reform, to make it easier to recruit international talent to Silicon Valley.
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