SoftBank President Nikesh Arora to Step Down | Hacker News Reader

SoftBank President Nikesh Arora to Step Down

wsj.com

33 pointsghosh22 comments

Typical case for botched leadership transition.

Arora held executive positions at Google, Deutsche Telecom, and in a fund mgmt group, is the poster boy of a leader Softbank could wish for. Don't think he would have come over without a clearly defined date for taking over the helm.

Interesting to see which self-respecting exec would be willing to follow into Arora's footsteps. I guess we see a B-player puppet so Masayoshi can continue to hold on.

I have a different takeaway - Leaders from Google like Nikesh Arora, Marissa Mayer, Vic Gundotra don't succeed outside of Google because Google has a very unique culture and team environment, and success does not come from individual leaders at Google - it comes from teams.

A counterexample is Sheryl Sandberg, who was Google's Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations from 2001 to 2008.

That is an excellent counterexample. She seems to have been instrumental at Facebook in building up revenue and transitioning to mobile.

I like this counter example. I also think Sheryl knows that she can be the kingmaker and not the king to be successful. She is a driving force behind Mark Zuckerberg's success. Of all the folks mentioned, I put Sheryl in the rare breed category who has very high emotional intelligence.

> I also think Sheryl knows that she can be the kingmaker and not the king to be successful.

Another example of this is Uber's Ryan Graves. He was Uber's original CEO, but was replaced in December 2010 by Travis Kalanick[0]. At that point, Uber's success was by no means ensured, but Graves stuck with it, and now he's a billionaire anyway[1].

0: https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/uber-ceo-super-pumped-abou...

1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/03/02/uber-billio...

I wouldn't agree with that. Vic was not successful inside Google -- he was successful at getting promotions but not at delivering a successful product (or revenue for that matter.) He had a short tenure at Google, and I don't consider him part of the culture -- he was always more of an outsider.

Marissa had a lot of impact, but not as an executive. Contrary to popular belief, she never reported to the CEO. She was always 2 or more levels "down". She basically made the jump from non-senior-VP to CEO by changing jobs. She just didn't have that much experience at the CEO level, and that showed.

He had a bit of bad PR, but Tim Armstrong seems to have had some success as CEO of AOL, at least by the metric of investment return (I became an AOL shareholder and the stock did modestly well under his tenure).

I think if there's any criticism you can make, it's that Google's ad technology gushes revenue, and that may be taken for granted by executives until they don't have it at another job. Huge amounts of revenue solves a lot of problems.

Vic did create a sticky product - so hard to get rid of Google Plus.

Nikesh was a very different kind of leader inside Google and many would disagree about him being a Google culture fit very well. Sales at Google is run almost arms length from core eng

Or they aren't any smarter or dumber than anyone else but just got lucky to hitch a ride on a rocket. Success is more about being at the right place at the right time rather then being the right person.

It wasn't nikesh, marissa, vic, larry or sergey that was important. It was the idea of google.

> - it comes from teams.

Even if you moved the entire team to softbank, it's not going to change much. Google was the right idea at the right time. Has nothing to do with "culture,people,etc". Lots of tech companies have the culture of google.

In other words, somebody has to be google, somebody has to be facebook, apple, microsoft, etc. We just think that some people have some magical secret or some magical talent. But it's just a simple matter of somebody having to win and everyone else having to lose.

Good point.

> Success is more about being at the right place at the right time rather then being the right person.

Interesting. He seemed uniquely suited to do the job, with a commercial background in both old telecom and new cloud. Perhaps this just didn't translate to picking companies to buy.

This is still behind a paywall. You can search for the WSJ title and follow a search engine link to bypass this.

Thanks. That's what I copy/pasted, but I guess the link refreshes.

There is a web link under the article that achieves the same result.

Which link? I am curious.

Can we really judge his investments just yet? There haven't been any exits/bankruptcies just yet (apart from Housing.com) , so it's too early to judge. And it looks like he left over disagreements with how soon he would takeover from Masayoshi Son.

My (uninformed) read was that was allowing him to save face. You are right, though. It can take a while to determine effectiveness of acquisitions. Perhaps it was performance on the large ones?

It could also be cultural. It's very hard for foreigners to run Japanese companies, even iconoclastic ones.

Let us not forget about the allegations of malpractice, even though he has been given a clean chit by an "internal" investigation. There might be more to it than meets the eye.

http://qz.com/711829/softbank-says-an-internal-investigation...

Yes. At the very least it's an angry investor. Even if you're in the right, it's hard to stave off angry owners. (They are after all, the owners)

On Twitter, Nikesh is spinning it as a positive, no big deal. He says: I still love Masa, etc. So maybe it worked out well for him. Softbanks stock has declined somewhat since he is reported to have bought $487 million worth to become Softbanks 2nd largest shareholder. If he managed to unwind that transaction and somehow break even then he has done very well. That would mean he would have essentially freerolled any upside in the company's share price over the last 2 years, if it had rised. Pretty interesting because on the face of it, it would look like Softbank had him over a barrel.

http://www.vccircle.com/news/finance/2016/04/22/nikesh-arora...

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