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Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

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mrkramer·

>Son invested $300 million in Wag! (Uber, but for dog walking)

Holy shit wtf

No wonder he is losing billions left and right. It seems like dot-com bubble mentality didn't leave his head.

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He seems to be (intentionally or not) applying the angel investing mentality on a larger scale. Not expecting each of these companies to work out, but having an outlier or two that covers the whole $100B+ fund. In that case these early losses would be expected, as companies that implode tend to do so quickly, with the winners only emerging many years later (it's only been 5 years).

Sure one colossal gain on investment can recoup all bad investments but if you are responsible investor you don't throw $300 million at pets.com like ideas. If idea sounds cool on the paper it doesn't mean it will work in the real life necessarily.

Yeah, Son is pushing the limit of diversifying. 300m in Wag and billions in Wework?

Maybe it doesn't matter because it is the stupid money from Saudi.

But he is destroying his reputation and Softbank's. But then again the reputation might not matter since they have stupidly huge money.

Was it a long game of repatriating Saudi's money back to the west?

Kind of like Neom's contractors but a few orders of magnitude bigger gravy-train.

I like to believe it too, thinking about Saud's getting fleeced is very satisfying.

> as companies that implode tend to do so quickly,

Isn't the point that the financed companies are able to burn cash for years?

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