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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

This is objectively not true. Alibaba, DoorDash, ARM, Slack, etc. were all SoftBank deals. Alibaba alone is considered one of the highest ROI's in the history of investing.

Does SoftBank have some absolute blunders on large bets? Totally. Do they make some super weird billion dollar bets? Absolutely. Can you scrutinize them for making some terribly and laughably large bets go to complete zero returns? Sure. But this would be like saying Michael Jordan had a "bad track record" for scoring points because he had games playing for the Wizards where he had like 5 or 10 pts in a game.

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Michael Jordan has skill.

When you can throw billions around for investments then on balance you will make a lot of money because you can take a lot of risk. But it does not say anything about any particular investment and if you look at the ratio of good bets to bad bets then SoftBank is terrible. That does not mean they won't make money or that they won't be able to keep doing this. Capital - especially at this level - begets more capital.

> When you can throw billions around for investments then on balance you will make a lot of money because you can take a lot of risk.

How does this explain a $20M bet on Alibaba that netted $60B?

> if you look at the ratio of good bets to bad bets then SoftBank is terrible.

So does a16z, Sequioa, etc...

This is venture investing 101 - they have power law returns. Don't let your survivorship bias cloud your vision.

> How does this explain a $20M bet on Alibaba that netted $60B?

It's a 26-year-old investment. The advisors who suggested it are long gone from SoftBank, and the stake in Alibaba was sold to provide liquidity for bagholder investments like WeWork.

SoftBank was lucky, and now their luck is gone. Son had an investment in Nvidia that would have been worth $100+ billion, but sold it in 2019 for only $3.6 billion. Uber is struggling, Arm is a laughingstock of a business, their stake in OpenAI is comically overleveraged, and Softbank Vision Fund is one of the most heavily ridiculed and mocked international VC funds anywhere in the world.

We have to move past a decades-old bet, SoftBank's current state is not reminiscent of their prior investments.

> The advisors who suggested it are long gone from SoftBank

You mean Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of SoftBank? lol wut.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/s...

> Softbank Vision Fund is one of the most heavily ridiculed and mocked international VC funds anywhere in the world.

Y'all need to stop reading TechCrunch headlines.

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