Neil Mehta, the VC behind the acquisition of a string of properties on San Francisco’s tony Fillmore Street, made waves earlier this week for reportedly throwing long-established native eating places to the curb to usher in extra high-end retailers. The San Francisco Chronicle talked, for instance, to the proprietor of Ten-Ichi, a neighborhood sushi restaurant for nearly 50 years that now has to vacate its house subsequent month. “This is the opposite of what San Francisco does to long-term, legacy business tenants,” the restaurant proprietor informed the outlet. “This guy [Mehta] is displacing us.”
Sources near the low-flying Mehta paint a really completely different image, nonetheless. They say that Mehta’s very focus is on bringing a wealth of eating places to the realm, and that he’s even planning a form of “Y Combinator for restaurants,” says one supply.
According to this particular person, Mehta has a fairly grand imaginative and prescient for turning the roughly four-plus blocks he has quietly acquired during the last yr into an oasis the place bold restaurant homeowners can afford to arrange store, San Franciscans can discover a wealth of eating and purchasing decisions, and a 111-year-old movie show on the road is restored to its former glory and “not turned into an Equinox.”
Reached for remark earlier this week, Mehta – who reportedly bought a $17.6 million, 117-year-old, 9,000-square-foot house in 2022 simply blocks from his newly acquired industrial properties – declined to speak on the file, saying he doesn’t converse with reporters besides on behalf of his portfolio firms.
Up and to the suitable
Some of Mehta’s plans had been first reported by The Information earlier this yr in a chunk that largely delved into how Mehta, who is way much less well-known than many VCs, has a lot cash to spend money on the primary place.
It’s been a quick however regular rise for the 40-year-old. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Mehta was reportedly a star investor for an offshoot of the quantitative hedge fund D.E. Shaw earlier than utilizing his popularity and community to co-found his enterprise agency, Greenoaks Capital, again in 2010.
The San Francisco outfit, which raised its first institutional capital in 2015, has since invested in among the tech business’s buzziest privately held firms, together with Stripe, Databricks, Rippling, and Canva – all of them now valued within the many billions of {dollars} by their backers.
Greenoaks can be an early investor in Wiz, a lesser-known cybersecurity startup till not too long ago, when it reportedly turned down a $23 billion acquisition supply from Google. (Wiz, it’s value noting, was based simply 4 years in the past.)
Now Mehta is pouring a few of these income into Pacific Heights, the San Francisco neighborhood the place he largely grew up, by way of a $100 million nonprofit that he has established to gas his purchasing spree. The obvious plan isn’t solely to remake Fillmore as a go-to eating vacation spot however, as a part of that course of, deal with among the crimson tape that many aspiring restaurant homeowners face, in addition to supply them decrease hire – and even cost them a proportion of income as a substitute of hire in some circumstances – in order that it’s simpler for these companies to thrive.
Mehta, in keeping with mates, doesn’t see his rising property empire as yet one more monetary wager. They insist that his main curiosity is in guaranteeing that his San Francisco neighborhood totally rebounds from the pandemic, when in keeping with the industrial actual property companies firm CBRE, roughly half the retailers on Fillmore Street completely closed. He’s a “big believer in cities,” says one supply.
The strikes are prone to cement his fortune both manner.
For one factor, Mehta is generally avoiding what are known as “formula retailers,” that means firms which have 11 or extra places around the globe. While some are already within the strategy of acquiring conditional use permits, these take as much as 12 months, which is why many shops on the tree-lined road…
