Investor Neil Mehta Answers the Panic Button

The Clay Theatre, a Pacific Heights landmark constructed shortly after the 1906 earthquake, has stood empty for four years on a busy stretch of Fillmore Street, the exterior poster frames as vacant as the adjacent ticket booth. Given the venue’s storied past and the area’s tony reputation as a place filled with Gettys and Haases, the neighborhood has long expected someone would show up to salvage the Clay.

That someone finally showed up last month in the form of a buyer who paid $11 million for the venue and a neighboring retail property. The benefactor, whose identity was unknown until now, was 39-year-old investor Neil Mehta. While Mehta doesn’t belong to the city’s old-money crowd, the longtime San Francisco resident has quietly become a venture capital kingmaker, with stakes in startups including Stripe, Databricks, Discord and Rippling. A rising star in VC is something of a novelty at a time when the industry seems mostly marked by black holes of vanishing capital.