Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road | Hacker News Reader

Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road

bloomberg.com

103 pointspdog49 comments

"Son tells Bloomberg Businessweek that he plans to raise a new $100 billion fund every two or three years and will spend around $50 billion a year. For perspective, in 2016, the entire U.S. venture capital industry invested $75.3 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association."

This is an absurd statistic. If that's actually true, startups have a long and potentially exhilarating road ahead of them.

I wonder what this would do to the startup landscape in the long term though. Will this make startups look more like big incumbents more than a sprawling landscape?

> I wonder what this would do to the startup landscape in the long term though. Will this make startups look more like big incumbents more than a sprawling landscape?

I think it will support the trend for later stage startups to stay private and raise capital through the private rather than public markets. A $100B fund is unlikely to be a player in seed and early stage deals. There the existing seed-stage and VC ecosystem will likely remain dominant. If you're just starting out, it's not obvious to me that monster funds like these will affect your life very much.

I'm a fan of Masayoshi Son's audacity. However, the outlandish premise floated in the article (raising $100b funds every few years) is all premised on the back of the freak Alibaba return being repeatable over and over again. That's not going to happen, there's one China and its boom phase is mostly over. The last China-like outcome, was a century prior to that (the US).

I watched Masayoshi Son make the same mistake of incorrect extrapolation, 20 years ago.[1] The pitch - the same one he made 20 years ago - only works while the tide is high, when the tide goes out it's ugly. There were countless articles touting his 300 year plan for the future back then, while he was riding very high on the epic Yahoo returns (at one point his investment into Yahoo was worth something like $44b, a particularly huge return to generate in a short amount of time back then). Alibaba will have legitimate staying power, unlike Yahoo's bubble valuation circa 1999/2000, however it won't change the fact that there aren't going to be endless lines of Alibabas to generate vast returns off of to justify raising $100 billion every few years. Alibaba will prove as rare in China as Microsoft or Google are in the US.

[1] http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2053732,00...

There is India around the corner with Japan having excellent ties with it.

Next Alibaba will be in India and Mayoshi probably knows it.

That's definitely not a sure thing. For example here are the GDP comparisons between China and India going back to 1975.

GDP, five year increments

India $100b (1975) | $190b | $236b | $326b | $366b | $474b | $834b | $1.68t | $2.1t (2015)

China $163b (1975) | $191b | $309b | $360b | $734b | $1.2t | $2.3t | $6.1t | $11t (2015)

They started out in close proximity, were identical by 1980, and they ended up 35 years later with a 5x difference between them. Why? Poor choices that India made along the way. The point being, the sort of growth China has seen is not automatic, it isn't a given at all that India will make the right choices that lead to it becoming another economic superpower. It may make the right choices. China was only able to generate that expansion through very aggressive focus on traditional industry and manufacturing. India isn't following anything like the path that China did, I don't see where they're going to generate the extraordinary foreign investment that China did by using old-style manufacturing as a magnet for capital that they could then reinvest into domestic expansion. To say nothing of the fact that that style of industrial empire and manufacturing is disappearing, and that disappearance is going to accelerate with leaps in automation that are happening now. It's being discussed as an advancement trap for developing nations, where the ladder of advancement gets wiped out for developing nations by AI, robotics, etc (eliminating jobs that otherwise could employ hundreds of millions of people in places like India and China).

Yes this was and remains my thoughts since the fund was first announced - this whole thing very much echoes the previous strategy in certain respects.

Two key differences:

1. Stage of investment

Last go round Son was writing a vast number of (relatively) small checks in early stage companies before stumbling into late stage investments like Webvan. Standard VC stuff - playing the averages and buying a lot of lottery tickets. Alibaba was only $20MM investment as I recall

This time around he seems to be making massive investments in much later stage companies. What is the rosiest possible outcome for his $7BB Uber investment? and how does this compare to the alternatives for an investment of this size?

2. Makeup of the fund

This article touches on it but important to note that this is not a $100BB pile of equity from the partners. The fund is structured with a substantial debt component - ie the fund needs to pay out a coupon every year so very different structure than typical VC funds. I understand the reasoning behind this but things could get difficult in a hurry should the market take a big turn at the wrong time in the funds cycle.

Will be fascinating to follow

I wonder if innovation, if any from startups, has any place in this landscape, especially when the atmosphere looks so aggressive! It makes me feel extremely belittled! Is it just money vs. innovation?

It has already committed $65 billion to acquire big stakes in Uber, WeWork, Slack, and GM Cruise.

Uber and WeWork[1] are money drains buying market share. GM Cruise is a "fake it til you make it" operation. Is Softbank the biggest dumb money operation of all time?

(WeWork is strange. Most real estate businesses buy property and rent it out. WeWork rents property long term and rents it out short term.)

[1] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/wework-details-run-rate-rev...

What makes you say Cruise is faking? The disengagement data would suggest they're the most viable self-driving car venture behind Waymo.

The technology isn't there. There will never be self driving cars.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done. - Peter Ustinov, via http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

Cruise seems to operate like it has an unlimited reserve of money. They also have a bit of a broculture. They are hiring like wildfire.

All self driving tech is in its early days to call it “self - driving”. So it will be interesting to see how the future pans out.

May be you can indeed keep on throwing ridiculous amounts of money and something and make it work. May be not.

Cruise has made admirable progress but with 1/3rd miles and infrastructure they are way behind Waymo. Other players have basically existed the endeavour more or less so they do get to be at #2.

How is Cruise BS?

Smart operations in the co-working space manage property, they don't rent it. Source: GGV interview with founder of Naked Hub @ https://soundcloud.com/ggvcapital/grant-horsfield-of-naked-h...

That said, I tend to agree Softbank news has suggsted some very weird pending or closed investments, notable eg. in our space = Zume.

Maybe Softbank wants to sell it to a bigger fool? They invested in Flipkart, a competitor of Amazon, and then sold it to Walmart. But I gotta admit, they'll need to find extraordinarily dumb money to buy their stake in Uber.

> Maybe Softbank wants to sell it to a bigger fool?

How is Walmart a bigger fool incase of flipkart, they wanted to gain an entry into Indian ecom and prevent Amazon to capture the entire market.

Walmart could've started out on their own. They wouldn't have been far behind because e-commerce is still new in India. But no, they spent billions buying a glorified smartphone shop that people will desert the moment they stop offering deep discounts.

> Walmart could've started out on their own.

They could have and it would have taken years to build a brandname or they could buy an established player and get the brandname from day one. Walmart went with the other option.

That is how big companies operate, nothing to do with India.

Is Google a fool to buy youtube when they had Google Video?

Fair point. I'd argue that youtube has way higher network effects than an ecommerce shop and that Google paid a comparatively smaller 1B$ for a richer global market than the 16B$ that Walmart paid to grab a bite of the Indian market, especially with the political risk involved. I'll also wager that Walmart could've spent a lot less by getting exclusive deals on new smartphones along with deep discounts to quickly grab a huge chunk of the marketshare.

I could be wrong. With the absurd amounts of QE that went on for so long, maybe valuations that price in earnings decades away are justifiable.

1. Time and cost of building and growing a new e-commerce platform, especially for a giant like Walmart is non-trivial. I bet the requirement design alone would take a year to be approved.

2. Big companies often fail in new and unfamiliar markets.

3. Consider acquisition price inflation. If YouTube was created in this period, its selling price would be near $20B just like WhatsApp.

This is only going to fuel (accelerate) the tech bubble helping already bloated unicorns burn more cash.

Masayoshi is unquestionably a smart guy, but he's making some pretty big bets on an uncertain future.

Uber has raised $22.2B so far and made a $891M Net Loss in its second quarter ending June 30. It's difficult for a mere mortal to see how Uber will ever be profitable considering the cumulative losses.

My only hope and concern is whether these companies produce actual technology and benefit for society, or if their plan is to dump all of the risk at an unreasonable valuation onto the public markets to make their returns. Uber is an example, where yes, they along with others highlighted a market exists - and helping disrupt the status quo (shifting less efficient, more expensive systems, with modernized and potentially less expensive) - however they're not dealing with the indirect costs associated with less expense in this case, such as are drivers earning enough now to survive in the current structure of the economy - and what happens to drivers, as well as other workers, once we get closer to fullest autonomy possible?

Saudi Arabia invested 45% of the 100B. It’s rare for a state to make such risky investments.

Either they have a lot of available capital, and the 45B is nothing but a line item, or they’re trying to dig themselves out of a hole and they need to take on big, risky investments to do that.

I don't know if $45B is a line item to them, but to give you a sense of scale of how much money the Saudis have, Aramco had a net income of about $34B in the first half of 2017 [0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-13/saudi-a...

That’s insane. That’s more than Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet’s 2017 net income combined.

How does a commodity business (oil and gas) generate so much profit?

Getting oil out of the desert costs very little. A couple of bucks a barrel. Current market price was 80 bucks last I checked. Margin.

Extract and refine it cheaply and then do logistics and shipping better. If you can do that and have enough, everyone will buy.

Oil/energy companies are still some of the most valuable in the world.

EDIT: also, demand is sky high. And OPEC works to manage our prices for economic stability.

Unlike (almost) every other business on earth where you have to do work and compete with peers to make a profit on your efforts, all the value of oil is sitting in the ground underneath them. Oil wealth is just luck of being born on top of the right geology.

And being part of an extremist tribe who were useful to the Brits/Americans versus the Ottomans in World War 1, who then continued to provide a “stable source” of oil. Stable because they stamped out any sort of democracy or society with freedoms that would allow anyone to object to their arrangements with the West, in exchange for one family of the tribe to become extremely wealthy.

>That’s insane. That’s more than Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet’s 2017 net income combined.

That's not insane, that's false. Just Apple's 2017 net income was $48.35B [1], more than the $45B in the parent comment.

[1] https://investor.apple.com/investor-relations/sec-filings/se...

The parent comment figure was for the first half of the year. In other words, Aramco had a net income of $34B in just six months of business.

> How does a commodity business (oil and gas) generate so much profit?

OPEC.

$34B is a lot in company scales but not a lot when it is the vast majority of a government budget used to sustain a very plush lifestyle for millions of people.

Saudi has been running huge deficits and have had to dig into their reserves to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain their spending.

In the first five months of '15 they had to draw $65B from reserves just to meet costs[0]

They've introduced a new VAT, excise on fuel, cut health and education spending etc. to prevent the house of cards from collapsing[1].

[0] https://financialtribune.com/articles/world-economy/20960/sa...

[1] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/01/13/...

Further to that point, Saudi Arabia's population is expanding very rapidly, putting immense strain on those limited resources (which have to be used to continually pacify the population).

From 10m people in 1980, to 33m today.

That's only 3% growth per year.

Population growth in India/China when govt didn’t do any restrictions was ~2.5%. These days it has reduced to around 1.5%. USA is at 0.7%.

In other words 3% is very likely among the highest rate human population can grow with real-world constraints.

Gotta do something to make sure you don't get sent to the Ritz Carlton Gulag[1]. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-07/saudi-ara...

[1] Note: not a joke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Saudi_Arabian_purge

they are trying really hard to get away from oil as their only income

You could do a lot of interesting things with a fund of that size. It also changes the landscape of late stage and growth companies because they can now potentially raise at valuations that allow them to utterly dominate their competition. This has always been the dream for entrepreneurs: figure out product market fit, then raise insane amounts of money to pour on growth. If you’re a couple orders of magnitude away from your next closest competitor, it’s going to be tough for them to compete.

I have a feeling that SoftBank would be $1 trillion organization by the end of 2030. Let me explain why. The entire magic here lies in the ability to through lots and lots of arrows and this ability is gained only when you have reached a critical mass in terms of fund size. As an example, here is YC facts:

YC started in: 2005

Number of companies funded (2017): 1,450

Approximate investment: $200M

Valuation of all companies: $80B

People here will be quick to point out that there is a difference between valuation and realized cash. Also that there is pg magic that is missing in other funds. For the first objection, let’s cut down valuation to just 25%of what they claim, ie, $20B. For the second objection, I had say there have been couple of semi-scientific studies that pointed out that YC is doing just 10-20% better than other funds of same size and that predicting startup success if futile and that your only real recourse is to have lots of arrows.

So timided down YC data suggests that if you have fund of certain critical size you can ignite the chain reaction and watch the magic of compounded growth. YC has showed approximately 100X return over 10 years. There is no other financial vehicle that does this.

If that much capital is available without all of the regulatory burden... does this mean the end of traditional IPO's and using something like profit sharing in order to return the capital investment?

Current leader of Saudi Arabia is not a smart man, this is the only reason Son managed to coax them into this.

Remember, the true nature of that fund is floating right under ones nose - it is a nation scale LBO scheme, backed by enormous amount of debt.

They look to buy few other monopoly businesses that they hope will be making money with the same ease as oil, but, obviously, that's not possible.

A very naive assumption on their behalf.

Can huge funds like this run into monopoly issues when they own a significant part of multiple large companies in a space?

> the prospective investors—executives from a state-owned fund in the Middle East

Thanks SEC for ensuring that all the returns from high growth tech companies are accruing to foreign billionaires and corrupt oil princes rather than to american retirement accounts and pension funds!

How is the SEC liable? Is there some regulation preventing US investment houses from investing in the same manner?

Unsophisticated Individuals certainly can’t invest in private equity, but I’m curious if there are similar rules against a pension fund or other such collection of unsophisticated money having high risk assets in their portfolio.

Pension funds probably wanted higher yield for lower capital.

Why should a young founder/company/employee subsidize the lifestyle of the retired ?

Capital is in the same competitive market as labour.

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