Softbank
I keep hearing about ridiculous investments made by Softbank. Its gotten to the point where i am wary of a startup in which Softbank is the majority investor. What do you guys think?
Isn't this the main idea of this kind of investment - assume most investments fail, but hope for the minority to pay off many X?
That is right, but fueling a bubble is bad. Also as an employee you would not want to join companies where the valuation are crazy as it leads to your loss eventually
Bubble is bad, but I am not sure there is anything unique to SoftBank here. I am afraid there's an "everything" bubble right now, not just venture capital.
Masa Son basically is the SoftBank vision fund. He made a few critically good investments early on, Alibaba is the only one I remember atm but there’s at least 3-5 other major winners. Son made an ungodly amount on that deal, and then went off the deep end on risk aversion. He still owns a quarter of Alibaba, which is basically the most influential Chinese tech company (as far as software goes). That’s ~$120b and larger than the entire vision fund. Since the vision fund is basically just Son investing in companies he wants to (not really so much of a firm or group - he personally meets every founder he invests in), it’s pretty crazy. There are some other vision fund companies are solid too (Oyo Didi Nvidia flexport Doordash Grab etc.) He first became famous by losing the most money in history ($70b on Yahoo & dot com crash). If you believe investors overpaying during the dot com boom was a bad thing, this is basically the same guy doing the same damage again. I wouldn’t be surprised if he holds on to the record on losses either :)
Oyo isn't solid. You should read some of the takedowns on The Ken (though it's paywalled)
Agreed. The vision fund seems to give insane amounts of money to startups with half baked ideas.