Sohail Prasad

Texas Christian University’s Neeley Entrepreneurship Center hosts TCU Young Entrepreneur Days every year. The university’s news item of March 1, 2010 states that the winners of the 2010 TCU Texas Youth Entrepreneur of the Year competition were chosen on February 20 from 24 high school finalists, who were interviewed by a panel of judges, and that the scholarships were sponsored by BBVA Compass; the grand prize was a $5,000 scholarship and the other winners received $1,000 scholarships each. He is listed among the $1,000 scholarship winners as a student at the Texas Academy of Mathematics & Science in Denton, TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

On his about.me page he writes that he received TCU’s Texas Youth Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2010.⁠[2]

The Next Web writes that Hiptype was founded in early 2012 by James Levy and Sohail Prasad, who had previously built data-driven products at Chartboost and Turntable.fm. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry gives James Levy as chief executive and Sohail Prasad as chief technology officer; it writes that the two had been working on their own e-book about big data when they found that the major e-book stores offered only download and sales figures, user ratings and reviews, and James Levy said they had planned to take a week or two off from writing the e-book to build the product, which instead took months of development.⁠[3][4]

Y Combinator’s company page lists Hiptype as a San Francisco company with a team of two that is now inactive, and lists him as “Founder/CTO.”⁠[5]

Hiptype joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 batch in May 2012. Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s 2026 proxy statement states that at eighteen he was among the youngest founders to go through Y Combinator; his about.me page says the same.⁠[3][5][6][2]

TechCrunch wrote in 2021 that he and Samvit Ramadurgam met during Y Combinator’s summer 2012 batch.⁠[7]

TechCrunch’s report of August 21, 2012 on the batch’s Demo Day lists Hiptype among the companies presenting in the fourth batch.⁠[8]

On July 31, 2012, TechCrunch and The Next Web covered the launch of Hiptype’s e-book analytics service, which its two founders described as “Google Analytics for e-books.” TechCrunch writes that it gave publishers readers’ age, income and location, how many people bought after reading a sample, how many finished the book and average reading progress, and a heatmap of where readers highlighted, annotated or stopped reading, and that publishers could use the data to build targeted Facebook ad campaigns; The Next Web writes that it tracked reading chapter by chapter, including pages read per sitting, how often a reader put the book down and time spent on each page.⁠[4][3]

TechCrunch writes that the service ran on any device supporting HTML5 but not on e-ink readers such as the standard Kindle, which James Levy called a significant limitation; The Next Web writes that it worked on Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iBooks but not on web-based readers. Both articles write that the data was anonymized and that readers could opt out. The Next Web writes that Hiptype was then working with education publishers. James Levy said at the time: “We believe that data will save the book publishing industry.”⁠[4][3]

D/XYZ’s 2021 press release states that Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam founded Forge, originally named Equidate, in 2014, when Sohail Prasad was twenty. Forge Global’s 2019 press release states that the company was established in 2014 as Equidate Inc. and was founded by Y Combinator alumni. The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry wrote in 2016 that Equidate was founded in 2013.⁠[9][10][11]

TechCrunch wrote in 2018 that the company’s early small seed and Series A rounds came from Scott Banister, Tim DraperTim DraperTim Draper (full name Timothy Cook Draper) is an American venture capitalist who founded Draper Associates in 1985 and, after John Fisher and Steve Jurvetson joined, built it into Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). He is also the founder of Draper University and a public advocate of Bitcoin.Open the full entry and Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry; Forge Global’s press release likewise states that the company was initially funded by investors including Peter Thiel and Tim Draper.⁠[12][10]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s proxy statements give different years for his role at the company: the 2024 proxy states that he was chief executive of Forge from 2014 to 2018, while the 2025 and 2026 proxies give him as founder, chief executive and president of Forge Global, Inc. from 2014 to 2020.⁠[13][14][6]

On January 30, 2014, TechCrunch covered the launch of Equidate, a secondary market for early startup employees to sell their shares. The article names Sohail Prasad, Samvit Ramadurgam and Gil Silberman as co-founders; it states that Sohail Prasad had been a product manager at Zynga and an early employee at Chartboost, that Gil Silberman, who had worked as a lawyer for LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry, Craigslist and OpenTable, created Equidate’s contracts, and that Andrea Lamari worked in business development, in a team of four.⁠[15]

The article writes that Equidate let employees sell vested shares with or without their company’s consent, although it preferred to work with employers; it offered contracts tied to the value of the shares, so that an investor bought the economic upside of a share without the legal steps of being added to the company’s cap table, and employees holding stock options or restricted stock units could not take part. Sohail Prasad said: “It’s difficult if you want to sell shares as an individual,” and described the contracts as “similar to a collateralized loan. No shares are trading hands.” The article writes that Equidate regarded SecondMarket’s model as requiring employees to sell through their company.⁠[15]

Equidate launched with four companies, Dropbox, BitTorrent, Chartboost and BuzzFeed, and hoped to add companies at the Series B stage; only accredited investors could take part, meaning people with a net worth above $1 million or an annual income of at least $200,000.⁠[15]

The New York Times wrote in July 2016 that Equidate had been working with regulators since 2014 and in January of that year had bought a regulated broker-dealer, so that its deals had to follow securities rules, including investor protection and disclosure requirements.⁠[11]

On June 21, 2016, the Thiel Foundation announced its 2016 class of 29 Thiel Fellows, and he was among them. The announcement states that the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry gives young people $100,000 to learn by doing instead of following conventional paths such as college, and that the class was chosen from more than 6,000 applications from around the world. The list gives him as from Plano, Texas / San Francisco, in the field of financial technology, and describes him: “Sohail is the founder and co-CEO of Equidate, a secondary marketplace for shares in private companies.” It adds that Equidate had helped thousands of employees of private companies sell part of their stock to accredited investors in the absence of an IPO or a sale of the company.⁠[16][16]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s proxy statement states that he was later named a Thiel Fellow; his about.me page states that he was later named a Thiel Fellow by the Thiel Foundation, and his biography on Y Combinator’s company page also reads “Thiel Fellow.”⁠[6][2][5]

The New York Times wrote in July 2016 that Equidate planned to release, free of charge, private-company data compiled from corporate filings, including the prices investors had paid, together with tools that let shareholders estimate the value of their private-company stock; about $750 million of private shares were then listed for sale on its marketplace. Co-founder Sohail Prasad said: “We’re giving away this data to help create a more robust market.”⁠[11]

TechCrunch wrote in July 2018 that Equidate had worked with SpotifySpotifySpotify is an audio streaming subscription service offering on-demand music, podcasts, and audiobooks through a free ad-supported service and a paid Premium subscription. Its parent company, Spotify Technology S.A., is incorporated in Luxembourg, has its principal operations in Stockholm, Sweden, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SPOT). It helped move the recorded-music business from buying and owning music to on-demand streaming and is one of the largest audio streaming subscription services by users.Open the full entry ahead of its April 2018 direct listing; co-founder and co-CEO Sohail Prasad said that an active secondary market had given Spotify the volume and price data it needed to set a fair public share price, and that “Equidate handled 40 percent of those trades.” Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry wrote that Equidate privately placed $150 million of Spotify shares about four months before the direct listing.⁠[12][17]

TechCrunch wrote on July 25, 2018 that Equidate had raised a $50 million Series B led by Financial Technology Partners, Panorama Point Partners and Operative Capital. It wrote that the San Francisco-based marketplace, about four and a half years old, served only accredited and institutional investors, had 26 employees, typically required a minimum investment of $20,000 to $50,000, kept 5% of each transaction as commission with exceptions and expected to transact $1 billion in shares that year; companies such as Didi, Meituan Dianping, Tencent’s music service and Xiaomi had either worked with Equidate or had not stopped it from selling their privately held shares. The photo caption gives Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam as co-founders and co-CEOs.⁠[12]

Business Insider put the valuation implied by the round at $220 million, based on PitchBookPitchBookPitchBook is a private capital market data, research and software company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded by John Gabbert in 2007, it was fully acquired by Morningstar in 2016 at a valuation of $225 million and operates as a Morningstar subsidiary. The PitchBook segment’s revenue was $671.8 million in 2025.Open the full entry data; the company’s transaction volume had grown 300% year over year, it was profitable and it had a $1 billion transaction run rate, 40% of it sourced internationally; Kelly Rodriques named EquityZen, which mainly served employees selling stock in smaller startups, as its biggest competitor, while Equidate focused on the 200 largest private companies.⁠[17]

On August 8, 2018, Equidate announced that Kelly Rodriques would be chief executive and chairman and would lead the company together with the co-founders Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam. The release gives Sohail Prasad’s title as founder and co-president of Equidate and quotes him: “Kelly’s extensive expertise in the space will be invaluable as we continue to grow Equidate”; he added that he and Samvit Ramadurgam had known Kelly Rodriques for over two years.⁠[18]

Business Insider wrote that the two founders had held the chief executive role and would stay on as co-presidents; Kelly Rodriques, a general partner at Operative Capital and an investor in Equidate, had met the founders during the Series B and had previously led the investment custodian PENSCO for more than six years. TechCrunch wrote in 2021 that the two helped hire Kelly Rodriques and spent 18 months as co-presidents at the start of his tenure.⁠[17][7]

On January 29, 2019, Equidate Inc. announced that it had been renamed Forge Global, Inc. (Forge) and had expanded its Series B to $85 million, in a round led by Munich Re, which had first partnered with the company in 2015; the company said it had completed more than $1 billion in transactions and listed offices in San Francisco, New York, London and Berlin. Crowdfund Insider wrote that in the six months before the renaming the company had hired a seasoned chief executive and chief financial officer and launched the Forge Tech30 Capped Index and a fund based on it.⁠[10][19]

TechCrunch wrote in June 2021 that Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam left Forge early in 2020 but still owned a stake in the company and remained nonvoting board members; in 2020 Forge acquired its rival SharesPost for $160 million in cash and stock.⁠[7]

D/XYZ’s 2021 press release states that the company was founded in 2020 by Sohail Prasad, its chief executive, together with Samvit Ramadurgam. Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s proxy statements state that he has been a director of the company since November 2020 and, since 2020, founder, chairman and chief executive of Destiny XYZ Inc. and chief executive of Destiny Advisors LLC.⁠[9][13][14]

Accounts of when the fund began differ: BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry wrote in 2024 that he started the fund in late 2020 to buy stakes in privately held technology firms, while ReutersReutersReuters is an international news agency founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter and is now the news business of Thomson Reuters. It provides text, photo, video, and graphics coverage to media and institutional clients and distributes it through channels such as Reuters Connect.Open the full entry wrote in 2024 that he founded Destiny Tech100 in late 2021.⁠[20][21]

The registration statement that Destiny Tech100 Inc. filed in 2023 states that its private SAFE offering began in January 2021 and by January 2022 had raised about $94 million from 232 investors, who were granted warrants to buy up to 3,673,858 shares at $11.50 per share.⁠[22]

TechCrunch wrote on June 22, 2021 that D/XYZ (pronounced “Destiny”), the new company of Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam, had raised $5 million in seed funding from numerous founders, including CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry co-founder Fred EhrsamFred EhrsamFred Ehrsam, whose full name is Frederick Ernest Ehrsam III, is a technology entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Coinbase, Paradigm and Nudge. Formerly Coinbase’s President, he later expanded from crypto investing into fields including brain-computer interfaces. Media coverage in 2026 linked him to Primavera Infinita, a company pursuing oil projects in Venezuela.Open the full entry, PlaidPlaidPlaid is a financial technology company co-founded by Zach Perret and William Hockey and headquartered in San Francisco. It provides infrastructure connecting financial accounts with applications, with products spanning account verification, payments, lending and fraud prevention, and develops AI models for financial transactions. A planned acquisition by Visa was terminated in 2021.Open the full entry co-founder and chief executive Zach PerretZach PerretZach Perret is a fintech entrepreneur who co-founded the financial data network company Plaid with William Hockey in 2013 and serves as its chief executive; Visa agreed to acquire Plaid for $5.3 billion in 2020, but the deal was terminated in January 2021 after the US Department of Justice sued to block it.Open the full entry, QuoraQuoraQuora is an American question-and-answer and knowledge-sharing website and the company that operates it, Quora, Inc., whose core product centers on users asking, answering, and voting to rank content; since 2022, the company has also offered Poe, a chat platform that aggregates AI models from multiple companies.Open the full entry co-founder Charlie Cheever, Superhuman founder and chief executive Rahul VohraRahul VohraRahul Vohra is a software entrepreneur and angel investor, co-founder and head of Superhuman Mail, and co-founder of Rapportive. He studied computer science at the University of Cambridge, moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with Rapportive in 2010, and saw the company acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. In 2014, he began building Superhuman, developing a set of startup practices around email efficiency, user onboarding, and product-market fit. His email business was acquired by Grammarly in 2025 and later renamed Superhuman Mail; he also co-manages Todd & Rahul Capital with Todd Goldberg.Open the full entry and the serial entrepreneur Siqi ChenSiqi ChenSiqi Chen is an entrepreneur, product manager, and angel investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of the financial planning software company Runway Financial. He founded Serious Business and Hey and held product and management roles at Zynga, Postmates, and Sandbox VR. His public commentary covers product growth, financial collaboration, and applications of artificial intelligence.Open the full entry.⁠[7]

The article writes that the company was still in stealth and aimed to let a broad range of people, not only the wealthy, invest in the startups whose products they use; it was neither a new fund nor a crowdfunding vehicle and was not selling tokens. Sohail Prasad said the company was limiting public details until it had “the go-ahead from regulators” and “a clear path to market”; he said the new company was not competitive with Forge but was “picking up the mantle,” continuing the work Forge had started, and regarded Carta as a direct competitor of Forge because both mainly served companies rather than individuals; he described SPACs as a reflection of demand for late-stage access to private technology and called them a “layer of abstraction.” The article also states that Forge had raised $250 million in total from investors including Deutsche Börse, Temasek, Wells FargoWells FargoWells Fargo & Company is an American bank whose employees opened millions of unauthorized accounts, leading to regulatory penalties and a $1.95 trillion asset cap from the Federal Reserve that was lifted in June 2025.Open the full entry, BNP ParibasBNP ParibasBNP Paribas is a banking and financial services group headquartered in Paris, France. It was formed by the 2000 merger of BNP and Paribas, with predecessor institutions dating to the nineteenth century. The group provides corporate and institutional banking, commercial and personal banking, investment management and insurance, with major commercial banking networks in France, Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg.Open the full entry and Munich Re, had raised $150 million in May 2021 and had more than $14 billion in assets under custody.⁠[7]

On October 14, 2021, D/XYZ issued a press release datelined Austin, Texas, announcing a family of exchange-traded products that, once publicly listed, would let anyone with a brokerage account, regardless of net worth, invest in portfolios of private technology companies, the first being the Destiny Tech100, a portfolio of the top 100 venture-backed private technology companies; the company had closed a $100 million fundraise. The early backers of the Destiny Tech100 named in the release include the founders of Dropbox and Coinbase, current and former partners at Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, Greylock Partners and Y Combinator, and Nas, Keisuke Honda and Heather Hasson; the release also states that D/XYZ was working with investors including founders and chief executives of companies such as Plaid, Quora, FIGS and Caviar. Sohail Prasad says in the release: “This is the opposite of equal opportunity and we want to change that.”⁠[9]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s proxy statements state that from 2022 to 2024 he was founder and executive chairman of XPV Group Inc.⁠[14][6]

D/XYZ’s October 2021 press release states that Forge transacted billions of dollars of pre-IPO stock a year, was projected to have more than $120 million in revenue in 2021 and had agreed to go public through a $2 billion merger with the special-purpose acquisition company Motive Capital Corp; his about.me page states that the deal was announced in September 2021. Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s 2026 proxy statement states that in March 2022 Forge became the first dedicated trading platform for private shares to become a public company. Bloomberg wrote that Forge went public roughly eight years after its founding through a merger with a blank-check company led by Blythe Masters.⁠[9][2][6][20]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s registration statement states that on April 27, 2022 a majority of the SAFE holders approved amending the SAFE agreement to provide for mandatory conversion at $10.00 per share; the company carried out a reverse stock split before the conversion, which took place on May 11, 2022, after which 10,879,905 shares of common stock were issued and outstanding.⁠[22]

In an article of February 1, 2023, The Generalist called him a “serial founder” and wrote that he had raised $100 million to build the “Tech100,” a public index of 100 high-growth private technology businesses expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange later that year, comparing it to a version of SPY or QQQInvesco QQQ TrustInvesco QQQ Trust, Series 1 (ticker QQQ) is an exchange-traded fund that tracks the Nasdaq-100 Index. It incepted on March 10, 1999, and has a total expense ratio of 0.18%.Open the full entry for the private markets.⁠[23]

In its Form N-2/A registration statement (Pre-Effective Amendment No. 5) of June 29, 2023, Destiny Tech100 Inc. described itself as a recently formed MarylandMarylandMaryland is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States, deeply indented by Chesapeake Bay and bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and West Virginia; its capital is Annapolis and its largest city is Baltimore. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, as the seventh state to do so, and had a population of 6,177,224 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry corporation registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 as a closed-end management investment company, with the cover marking it as a registered closed-end fund rather than a business development company; the filing states that its investment adviser, Destiny Advisors LLC, was controlled by Destiny XYZ Inc., which Sohail Prasad owned a majority of, and that he was the company’s president and chief executive and, with Samvit Ramadurgam and Christine Healey, a member of the adviser’s investment committee.⁠[22]

On February 13, 2024, Fintech Leaders, hosted by Miguel Armaza, published an interview with him, introducing him as chief executive and co-founder of D/XYZ and co-founder of Forge; the page states that the Destiny Tech100 had recently received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal securities regulator of the United States. Created during the Great Depression by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and led by five commissioners, it has a three-part mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.Open the full entry and would list on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2024, with holdings including SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry, Stripe, OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, ChimeChimeU.S. financial technology company offering accounts, payments and related services through partner banks, founded in 2012 by Chris Britt and Ryan King.Open the full entry, Klarna and Brex.⁠[24]

In the interview, on private technology investing for everyday investors, he said: “This definitely wasn’t possible, five or 10 years ago”; on the company’s origins he said, “The goal behind Destiny and the genesis was really taking it from the top”; and he said, “I think being capital efficient is super important.”⁠[24]

Destiny XYZ Inc. announced on March 21, 2024 that the Destiny Tech100 would list on the New York Stock Exchange on March 26 under the ticker DXYZ; the holdings it named included SpaceX, OpenAI, Epic GamesEpic GamesEpic Games is a video game and software company headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, founded by Tim Sweeney in 1991, known for the Unreal Engine game engine, Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, and widely noted for its antitrust lawsuits against Apple and Google.Open the full entry, Discord, Superhuman and Stripe. Chief executive Sohail Prasad said in the announcement: “Our mission at D/XYZ is about more than just financial returns,” and that listing on the New York Stock Exchange “represents a significant step towards leveling the playing field.”⁠[25]

A subsequent Destiny XYZ Inc. release states that the Destiny Tech100 began trading on March 26, 2024, opening at $8.25, 70.5% above its reference price of $4.84, trading between $8.25 and $30.48 during the day and closing at $9.00 on volume of about 540,000 shares. Reuters gives the fund’s launch as March 27, with a debut price of $8.25.⁠[26][21]

Bloomberg wrote on April 11, 2024 that meme-stock buying had briefly pushed the Destiny Tech100’s market value past $1 billion, against net assets of $54.3 million in its most recent regulatory filing, which listed stakes in 23 companies valued at $4.84 a share; at 11:53 a.m. New York time that day the shares traded at $52.02, a gain of almost 500% since the late-March listing. The article writes that the fund bought most of its assets in 2021, spending $77.4 million on US investments, which were valued at $50.8 million as of December, a 34% loss, and that the fund fell 7.3% in 2023 while the Nasdaq Composite gained 43%.⁠[20]

The article describes Sohail Prasad as having left Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry without a degree and as having spent most of his career in private investing. He attributed the fund’s earlier shortfall to limited liquidity, wide bid-ask spreads and higher interest rates, which kept private firms from benefiting from the repricing of assets; he called the surge a “discovery process” among investors, said the fund had been trading for only two weeks and expected more participants and “more stability over time”; he also said that many founders of unicorn companies had contacted him about being added to the fund, that he aimed to grow the portfolio to 100 holdings, and that he saw potential demand both from retail investors and from institutions seeking liquid access to private markets.⁠[20]

A Reuters article of April 23, 2024 (later corrected to give the date of the share sale in paragraph 8 as April 12 instead of April 16) states that Sohail Prasad sold 200,000 Destiny Tech100 shares at $24.65 on April 12, the same day the fund filed for a secondary offering, and that the SEC filing showed him still owning 1.08 million shares. The article writes that the month before he had said he would like the fund eventually to hold “100 companies.”⁠[21]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s proxy statement released on August 19, 2024 gives his age as 30 and lists him as director, chairman and chief executive and as a Class III director whose term expired at the 2025 annual meeting; as of August 9, 2024 he beneficially owned 1,119,565 shares, 10.29% of the 10,879,905 outstanding, of which 37,500 were held directly and 1,082,065 by Destiny XYZ Inc., an entity he controls.⁠[13]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s proxy statement released on October 17, 2025 gives his age as 31 and nominates him as a Class III director for a term ending at the 2028 annual meeting; as of October 13, 2025 he beneficially owned 711,190 shares, shown in the table as 5% of the 14,427,988 outstanding, of which 8,000 were held directly, 1,125 by his spouse and 702,065 by Destiny XYZ Inc., an entity he controls.⁠[14]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s proxy statement released on October 23, 2026 gives his age as 33 and lists him as director, chairman and chief executive, with a term expiring in 2028, and as founder and chief executive since 2026 of DX Advisors LLC, the company’s investment adviser; because of his controlling interest in the adviser he is an “interested person” and receives no director compensation from the company. As of October 9, 2026 he beneficially owned 767,190 shares, 1.6% of the 47,657,338 outstanding, of which 64,000 were held directly, 1,125 by his spouse and 702,065 by Manifest Destiny LLC, an entity he controls. The proxy also states that his Form 4 for transactions on September 1, 2 and 3, 2026 could not be filed on time because of technical issues and was filed on September 8.⁠[6]

In the education list of his about.me page he names St. Mark’s School of Texas, the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS), Carnegie Mellon University, Y Combinator and the Thiel Fellowship.⁠[2]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s proxy statements state that he attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied electrical and computer engineering before dropping out.⁠[6][13]

His about.me page states that he managed mobile product at Zynga, was the second engineering hire at Chartboost and worked at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry and the MIT Media Lab. Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s 2024 proxy statement states that he held product management roles at Zynga, was an early engineer at the mobile advertising firm Chartboost and held various roles at Google and the MIT Media Lab.⁠[2][13]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.’s proxy statements state that he has been founding partner of S2 Capital since 2012, through which he continues to invest in early-stage technology companies, and that he has advised and invested in more than 200 start-ups; the seed investments they name include Rippling, Rappi, Notion, Retool, Vise, Mercury and Superhuman. His about.me page gives the number as more than 150, including seed investments in more than a dozen unicorns such as Rappi, Rippling, Notion, Retool, Astranis, Superhuman and MercuryMercury (fintech company)Mercury is an American fintech company founded in 2017 by Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher; it launched account services for businesses in 2019. Its platform combines financial services provided by partner banks with software for bills, invoices and expense management. Mercury itself remains a fintech company; the proposed Mercury Bank, N.A. should be distinguished from the current partner-bank model.Open the full entry; his biography on Y Combinator’s company page reads “Seed Investor in 150+ startups, 10+ unicorns.”⁠[6][14][2][5]

His about.me page gives his location as Austin, Texas, and introduces him as “Founder, CEO, and Investor in Austin, TX.”⁠[2]

Forge Global: Official website: https://forgeglobal.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[27]

Destiny Tech100 Inc.: Official website: https://destiny.xyz/ (opens in a new window).⁠[28]

Personal website: https://sohailprasad.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[29][30]

X: Public account: https://x.com/sohailprasad (opens in a new window).⁠[2][29]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sohailprasad/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][29]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/sohailprasad (opens in a new window).⁠[30]