Soma was founded ten years ago by Aneel Ranadive. Our mission is to be day‑one partners to the next generation of superhuman builders—the next Jobs, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, etc.

Aneel grew up in Silicon Valley and watched his father, Vivek Ranadive, scale TIBCO from zero to billions in revenue as a profitable public company. TIBCO digitized Wall Street in the 1990s and went on to power 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies and numerous governments with integration services, big data, and analytics. Along the way, Vivek forged deep friendships with legendary CEOs and even presidents of nations. His philosophy, which Aneel absorbed, was to surround yourself with people “way smarter than you.” That mindset led Vivek to seed and mentor tech greats at Google, Yahoo, Salesforce, eBay, and even Steve Jobs. For example, Vivek helped Jobs pivot NeXT from a workstation to an operating‑system company and land its first customers; he helped Larry Page and Sergey Brin raise Google’s seed round (a famous story from Vivek’s annual holiday party); and he helped Marc Benioff launch Salesforce and secure early customers. Aneel literally had a front‑row seat as trillion‑dollar companies like Google and Apple were built from the ground up.

Hungry to forge his own path, Aneel launched an anonymous social network while at Columbia in 2004 called “BoredAt,” aiming to compete with Facebook. He raised venture capital in 2006 led by Redpoint and Benchmark’s Andy Rachleff, along with SV Angel and the Drapers. The network ultimately didn’t succeed, but Aneel spent the next decade building startups in San Francisco. In 2015 he launched Soma, realizing that—although he hadn’t yet hit product‑market‑fit escape velocity with his own companies—what he loved most was spotting other, even more talented founders and helping them scale by leveraging his unique network and knack for connecting the dots.

Beyond access to top executives and Fortune 500 CEOs, the Ranadive family has owned multiple sports teams, including the Golden State Warriors and the Sacramento Kings, and simply being NBA owners opens many doors. Throughout his startup years Aneel befriended the co‑founders of Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, Box, Sam Altman, and many others, forging deep, lifelong relationships.

Soma’s mission remains the same: find the next Fortune 500 company builders at ground zero and be their most uniquely connected, hardest‑hustling ally for decades to come. Let’s make a huge dent in the universe together!