Even in Silicon Valley, the home of the ever-present origin story, Chamath Palihapitiya has a pretty incredible narrative. The Sri Lankan immigrant escaped a civil war in his homeland before eventually landing a job at a new company called Facebook. Then he started a venture-capital firm that is now among the most formidable in the Valley. He is also an owner of the Golden State Warriors, the defending N.B.A. champions, who are on pace to the achieve the greatest season in league history.

Palihapitiya’s firm, Social Capital, has backed numerous tech companies with valuations in the billions, such as Slack, Box, and SurveyMonkey. But that doesn’t mean that he is bullish on unicorn culture. Here, Palihapitiya speaks about Mark Zuckerberg’s secret sauce, which start-ups are going to make it, and the saga between Apple and the F.B.I., among other topics.

Vanity Fair: You were at Facebook early on in the company’s history. What’s the best advice you learned from Mark Zuckerberg?

Chamath Palihapitiya: The most amazing thing about working with him is how even-keeled he is. He’s very happy to just be the last person to talk in a room. So he’ll just sit there, and you’ll tell he’s actually actively listening and thinking about everything people are saying. He had this amazing ability to unpack what was anecdote and what was fact.

Back then there was a very turbulent phase in our company. We had a lot of ups and downs. We had a lot of scrutiny. One day we’d be getting sued by the F.T.C., the other day we were celebrated for being the next great company. In all of that tumult, it was really important to stay as calm as possible and think as far out as possible. I think that’s what allowed him to ultimately turn down the acquisition offer from Yahoo. It’s what allowed us to negotiate really important financing from Microsoft. It’s what allowed us to invest and take a bunch of shots on some random things, like our online advertising, that has turned out to be a huge business.

Funding is slowing down, both in seed rounds and mega-rounds. There have been fewer tech I.P.O.s recently, more companies are raising down rounds. Are we in a downturn?

I think we’re in a phase where we’re realizing that the people who have been allocating capital thus far have done a horrendous job. Most people’s inherent reaction is to make sure they never lose their job, and so they become risk-averse. I think what we’ve had is a handful of investors who have extreme vision who make great investments in things that are amazing businesses: Facebook, Google, Uber. And then everybody else reacts to that success by trying to do the thing that most approximates the thing that’s working. As a result, most of those businesses are fundamentally not good, they’re poorly run, and they never should have been invested in in the first place. But the capital came in because the person who had control of the capital was able to justify it intellectually to themselves versus something else that could have become the next Facebook or Google.

The reality is, great companies can go public in any market. When we talk about the I.P.O. slowdowns what we’re really saying is that there really just aren’t that many good companies being built. We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious. Right now we haven’t done enough of that, and the result is that most of the things we’ve funded are mostly crap and largely worthless.