Was talking to a friend of mine that’s at SoftBank. FWIW he mentioned that internally Son is targeting $880Bn for the three Vision Funds!
The bets they are making are actually pretty predictable, they are all more "sure" wins. Many of these companies will not exit for a long time.
They are making some (in my opinion) questionable bets on more early stage companies though. If the bets are < 100 million, some of these are more traditional R&D bets that might not give proper returns.
Of note here is that "softbank" is actually a massive investment fund though. There are multiple sources of money, not just 1 "vision" fund. Even the way the decision making is done is pretty fragmented.
Edit: wrong press release link
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2017/09/18/skymind-... [2]: https://skymind.ai/press/softbank
That being said, this is a bit of an interesting situation because we are largely seeing an alternative set of vehicles that aren't silicon valley funding tech innovation outside of silicon valley as well as in.
Our personal situation, we are seeing larger innovation outside the valley than in in terms of both AI publishing (China) and alternative use cases. I won't try to predict when a bubble will pop, but there are both tons of capital right now as well as tons of naysayers looking for the chance to say "any minute now" and look to be right.
I really can't say yes or no on whether we will see this pop or just evolve over time. You will see articles online both saying "any minute now" and "the bubble will continue". I'm not sure to what degree we are in a bubble as much as we are seeing money shift outside the valley.
As you say in your other posts - they are making predictable "sure" wins while some, in your opinion, are questionable specially in early stage companies. So that begs question - Do they have enough "sure" wins to bet the house worth 880 billion? Or they might be used to fund the questionable early stage companies? If it's latter, then they might end up creating a bubble.
As for some of these questionable bets, I think the goal there is the traditional unicorn moon shot type return where 1 of those investments will return the whole "pool of smaller investments". I wouldn't be surprised if they put the funding in to pools and divide up the risk like that.
In general, I wouldn't be surprised if they invest in more public companies if they run out of late stage private bets to make.
As for whether they create a bubble, you might be right. Like I said, I can't/won't try to comment on whether it's a bubble or not. It's just strange because we have a large foreign entity making large scale private bets in the valley as well as abroad.