social-capital
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Mentor Collective and the art of starting before September
A mentor is useful only if the conversation begins. Mentor Collective helps colleges turn introductions into relationships - and relationships into clues about what students need.
Kamir Kothari
Kamir Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Inspira Education, an admissions platform pairing students with top-tier consultants for medical, legal, and business school applications. Before starting Inspira in 2020 with Arush Chandna, he held investing and operating roles at Social Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, LendingHome, and The Parthenon Group, after studying finance and economics at Oxford.
Braven
Braven is a national nonprofit career accelerator that partners with large public universities and employers to help first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented college students land strong first jobs. Through a semester-long, cohort-based course followed by post-graduation support, Braven equips Fellows with the skills, confidence, experiences, and professional networks they need to translate a college degree into economic mobility. Founded in 2013 by former Teach For America executive Aimée Eubanks Davis, Braven has reached more than 15,000 Fellows across cities including Chicago, Newark, New York, Atlanta, the Bay Area, and beyond.
Mamoon Hamid
Mamoon Hamid is a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley VC firm he helped resurrect from near-irrelevance after joining in 2017. A Pakistani-born, Frankfurt-raised engineer turned investor, he was the first outside investor in Slack, wrote the first Kleiner check into Figma (his first deal at the firm, before it had revenue), and led the Series A into Rippling - the largest early-stage check KP had ever written. His quiet, measured style belies an extraordinary track record: under his tenure, Kleiner has returned approximately $13 billion to LPs and raised over $6 billion in fresh capital, including a $3.5B fund announced in March 2026.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-Canadian-American venture capitalist, founder of Social Capital, and co-host of the All-In Podcast. A former VP of User Growth at Facebook who helped scale the platform from 50M to 700M+ users, he left to build one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive investment firms. Known for contrarian takes, a welfare-to-billionaire origin story, and pioneering the 'growth hacking' playbook, he now manages $2.147B in AUM while running a top-ranked Substack newsletter and co-hosting one of tech's most listened-to podcasts.
Alex Danco
Alex Danco is a Canadian writer, thinker, and now Editor-at-Large at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he shapes the firm's editorial voice. A former neuroscientist turned ska musician turned VC associate turned Shopify product director, Danco spent five years at Shopify leading merchant financing and blockchain initiatives before joining a16z in August 2025. He is best known for his newsletter Dancoland and foundational essays including 'Debt Is Coming,' 'The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class,' and the 'Emergent Layers' framework - works that apply Carlota Perez, René Girard, and Jane Jacobs to the inner workings of Silicon Valley. He writes approximately 5,000 words per week and is a descendant of Belgian polar explorer Émile Danco, after whom Danco Island in Antarctica is named.