Social Capital has hired Tony Bates to run its new growth unit

Social Capital has hired longtime tech executive Tony Bates as CEO of a new growth unit.

The venture company is expanding its offerings, including adding a growth arm that will be aimed at investing in later-stage companies and could even do buyouts. Social Capital declined to comment on fundraising activities, but such investing would require a large amount of capital.

Social Capital, the Silicon Valley investment firm founded by Chamath Palihapitiya, had also recently hired Marc Mezvinsky as its vice chairman. The hiring of the investment banker and hedge fund founder is part of a wider effort by Social Capital to morph itself well beyond its venture roots.

Next up, growth. In an interview Bates — who most recently was president of GoPro and has previous worked at Cisco, Skype and Microsoft — said he decided to join to next focus on helping operators.

“I loved the idea of helping transform many companies, not just one,” he said. “Social Capital is trying to be much more like a company, one that applies technology to investing. We want to become stage agnostic, from incubation through public investing, helping entrepreneurs across the lifecycle.”

Bates added that “growth is just a part of a strategy that’s really end-to-end ... We’re not thinking about these things in the traditional buckets.”

Currently, Social Capital has been making venture and seed investments, as well as some public ones, and also has a unit devoted to incubating startups. It has also been developing a software-based product-market fit platform called 8-ball, to do the quantitative part of due diligence for possible investments. But, as part of a longer-term master plan, it has been exploring a wide range of other financial products to support its companies.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via