SoftBank’s $100B fund is in a league of its own | Hacker News Reader

SoftBank’s $100B fund is in a league of its own

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132 pointsrahulshiv56 comments

There are some very rich people out there deciding to move their money into tech. I wonder what's prompting that decision.

Random theories:

1. Big Oil is done. Battery prices have hit the tipping point and all cars will soon be electric. The traditional car companies are risky too, at least until the disruption ends and we can see who'll survive.

2. Banks haven't fixed anything, so the smart money is avoiding them.

3. They see no growth in consumer retail now that the cheap Chinese goods boom is over.

A couple more for you:

4. Interest rates have been effectively zero for nearly a decade, making borrowing money cheap and also making getting a decent guaranteed return on your money hard. The net result is more speculation in riskier markets like tech VC.

5. If you're looking for outsized returns, there are few industries outside tech where this is a real possibility these days, compared to in the past.

The interest rate in Japan, in particular, is literally zero.

Also 5B - to the extent there is innovation outside "pure tech," it is probably being sold as a tech play. Ag-Tech, Fin-Tech, etc ... Consumer-tech is already just tech, as is enterprise-tech, industrial-tech. With the disintermediation of vertical supply chains, any supplier of technical innovation is a "tech" company. Tech companies operate in nearly all industries.

Personal Theory: The boom of tech in the "knowledge work" era has pretty much stagnated, but we're deep in the very promising world of merging digital and physical world via sensors, drones, self driving/autonomous vehicles, and AR/VR. A lot of the business that gets most effected by the physical world stuff has been the least touched by the knowledge worker focused stuff (Cloud, apps, etc.)

...you mean the Internet of Things?

4. Facebook, Apple, Google, have proven to the world of finance that big returns are possible and happen regularly in the tech world. It has high risk and high return.

5. People like Elon Musk or Masayoshi Son in Japan are leaders of opinion and, being very rich, they manage to convince other rich people that the future is into the tech they focus on. And thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is a simple one. It's hype, halo and what the press is talking about.

Was watching a repeat of the Windows 95 launch last night. The publicity machine was in such high gear people were lining up (as they did for iphone) over shrink wrapped software as if it was the fountain of youth. That is the power of hype (and that has carried things to this point).

I thought that Masayoshi Son's Wikipedia intro was interesting:

> Masayoshi Son (Japanese: 孫正義 Hepburn: Son Masayoshi, Korean: 손정의 Son Jeong-ui; born August 11, 1957) is a Korean-descendant (Zainichi Korean) Japanese businessman and the founder and current chief executive officer of SoftBank, the chief executive officer of SoftBank Mobile, and current chairman of Sprint Corporation. According to Forbes magazine, Son's estimated net worth is US $20.4 billion and he is the richest man in Japan,[2] despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).[3]

If you found the part that he's Zainichi interesting, there is a whole history to Koreans in Japan that I didn't know much about until a couple years into living in Tokyo. More here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans_in_Japan

I found this gem in the source for the $70bn loss figure:

By the way, the chance of AOL buying Yahoo is next to never.

It is kind of ironic given the Verizon deal which merged it with AOL.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/a-key-figure-in-the-...

The $70bn appears to have been in the value of SoftBank stock he held during the crash. I'm not sure when SoftBank IPO'd but if it was after the crash then it truly is paper losses. Otherwise, he had the opportunity to cash out.

> despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).[3]

He didn't lose $70B. His net worth dropped $70B because of short term stock fluctuations during the dotcom collapse.

He never had $70B to lose. It was all paper wealth tied to the market valuations of his companies.

A subtle but important distinction.

> paper wealth

What wealth is not paper wealth?

Truck full of bananas

> in the interest of furthering his 300-year plan to build the largest company on the planet

At least they are not just looking for short-term and short-sighted profits, but that's a looong time.

Read "Pioneering Portfolio Management" by David Swenson, the guy who runs the Yale endowment. Fascinating book on investing; one of his "super powers" as an investor is the fact that the Yale Endowment is immortal, and can invest on 100 year timelines. The rest of us who need to retire can't afford to think like that.

But if you can afford to think like that, new opportunities open up that no one else can compete with you on.

And that time perspective makes issues like the dot-com crash or the 2009 financial crisis look laughably irrelevant. If you zoom out the performance graph to the entire history of the US stock market, the great depression looks a bit more like a temporary downturn, whose total value is a small percentage relative to today's current level.

> the Yale Endowment is immortal

This reminds me of a book I've just read, Ernst Kantorowicz's "The King's Two Bodies", where he describes how the concept of "fiscus" (what later would be called the "royal purse", or the "royal domain") became "immortal" somewhere around the 1200s in Britain. This also reminded me that I wanted to check if anyone had made a connection or had written a book/study about the possible relation between today's big corporations (think Google, Apple) and what people in the Middle Ages had called in Latin as "corporatio" (or "corporate body", in the English translation).

> new opportunities open up that no one else can compete with you on.

Would appreciate a couple of examples.

Not a particularly _safe_ example, but Venezuela recently released 100 year treasury bonds. I'd imagine this is not a retail investment vehicle; traditionally.

If they pay a coupon every year, and you can resell them on a market at any time, then the fact that they won't mature for a hundred years doesn't make them unsuitable for ordinary investors.

Now, a hundred year term deposit, with interest payable at maturity ...

Argentina is not particularly a glowing example of an entity with such a long investment horizon given how frequently they've defaulted on their debt.

Argentina; not Venezuela.

If you have children and expect they will as well , you can assume at least a financial legacy 60+ years beyond your death and plan accordingly. Wealthy families assume immortality in that manner, e.g. Vanderbilts, Mellons, etc.

It seems the Japanese tend to have some kind of horizon that's longer than the average. It's not an accident that they dominate the list of the world's oldest companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

when you invest with a 300 year plan, it means it will be sustainable. Potentially a better way to invest than profit every quarter anyway...

I find it amazing and absurd to see how so much money is invested in such a short amount of time.

Sadly from what I understand most of it will go towards later stages.

I would like to see this kind of money made available to early stage new ideas that need a lot of capital to get of the ground.

Later stage ideas always get more money, this is rational and should stay that way. Later stage companies are bigger and more complex, and having de-risked the basics, are more apt to build huge things like new factories. They'll have hundreds or thousands of employees, and the need to acquire much larger scale in order to continue growing.

By contrast, small companies can do really well with much less capital, because they're trying to do smaller things (hire 12 people, not 1,200) and they need to do more basic things to de-risk their ideas.

Consider: $100 million could more than adequately seed 100 early stage companies, but it wouldn't be enough to build a single factory in some places.

This is a good point, but I wonder if the parent wasn't talking specifically of making $100 million available to one startup, but $1 million per startup. One could fund a lot more ideas that way, and odds are that one of them would be a unicorn.

The only reason why that's not really happening seems to me that we either don't have that many ideas or that much people willing to work on those ideas.

I think a bigger reason is that the administrative burden of dealing with 100 startups is incredibly difficult and also would likely eat into returns.

You also get far less dilution if you take 1 million > grow > 9 million > grow > 90 million. Vs just taking 100 million when your company is wort ~.5 to 5 million.

Always ask, did they invest hard cash or did they invest with crypto and that has the value of 100B?

"It’s neither soft nor, technically, a bank"

Jesus christ.

Author of the article here. I am legitimately surprised my editor let that one slide.

I thought it was cute and not-at-all distracting from the substance of the article.

Good work!

Jason I wanted to request you for your source for saying that 50 companies in the US raised more than $250M in 2016.

$60B of the $100B number is from countries (Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi) where human rights issues are still a big thing these days.

Maybe we can think about that whenever we see where SoftBanks new fund is invested in - it's 60% money from folks which do not care much about some basic human rights.

Same goes for Uber [1]. Something to think about next time one orders one.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/technology/uber-investmen...

http://www.kingdom.com.sa/investments

My personal favorite is Fox News.

Let's also note CNN: http://www.kingdom.com.sa/investments/media-and-publishing/t...

Gotta love hn where human rights concerns get downvoted, top voted comment? look how rich this guy is

The comment implies that investment encourages the abuse. I don't think you can take that at face value. There is an argument that foreign investment tends to liberalize those sorts of countries.

> There is an argument that foreign investment tends to liberalize those sorts of countries.

The way I read, it's investment _from_ those countries, not _to_ them.

If you know that your purchase/use of product X, funded by fund Y with money from country Z will in the end benefit the chiefs of country Z - then no, there is no way that this "liberalizes" those countries. It supports the status quo (rich families/dynasties on top). It cements the status quo.

So?

You are aware that these are "issues" from your "point of reference".

Someone else consider that the US has a bad human rights record. Does that mean that he should boycott US companies/fund?

No no, that is not my point of reference only.

https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/n-africa/saudi-arabia

https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/n-africa/united-arab-emirate...

Also, the US isn't part of this discussion right now. And I am not from the US.

Or yours and that of hrw. I'm pretty sure lots of other people think SA/UAE have bad human rights records too.

USA has a bad human rights record

Compared to which other huge countries?

Don't cut the phrase. That's not what I said.

Why would you boycott an investment based on anything other than potential profit? You don't get an account statement showing karma profit and loss.

That's exactly my point. Morals are relative. A dollar is a dollar, however.

When I invest in something, it's to reap (fast) profits. As the time I have been investing increases, my concern with the relationship between funds/instruments and human rights has inversely decreased. When I talk to other traders/investors, they have the same sentiment. When you step back and analyze that, it comes out to "the trend is not to care about <whatever>-rights at all".

Don't fight the trend. Seriously, don't fight the trend. You're investing to make money. You are not investing to change the world(eg charitable giving).

Ethics and investing/trading should not be married together. If they are, you close many doors that may be profitable, and open 0 new doors. Think about that for a second... by upholding personal values in your investment strategy, you eliminate good investments, and create zero new(good or bad) investments. Why would you do this?

tldr; retail investors make decisions based on all the wrong data points, and are resultantly unprofitable.

This is a narrow view that only looks at the amount of money. It's perfectly valid to choose investment opportunities based on other factors. One can choose to invest in a local enterprise because it'll help the local community. You might have somewhat less money on your bank account, but you'll raise the wellbeing of the people around you. The same goes for any other non-monetary gain. If it makes you sleep better knowing that your money is used to teach kids how to sing instead of building rifle ammunition, then this shouldn't be ignored when choosing where to invest.

There's more to life than money. A lot more. Investment choices can have profound effects on plenty of other things besides your bank account. So, think about that instead -- make sure that you aren't missing out on wonderful non-monetary gains when choosing your investment.

Ethics and investing/trading should not be married together.

I don't say this lightly: this is a disgusting worldview. What keeps you from funding human trafficking, assuming a great rate of return? Or funding terrorism while shorting the stocks of companies affected?

You also realize that there's no real difference between funding the organizations who do bad things, and starting / running those organizations, right?

Honestly, it sounds like maybe you just don't have ethics, period.

>> Honestly, it sounds like maybe you just don't have ethics, period.

I thought that was obvious. I'm speaking about investing, the other things you added don't enter my thought process, they are irrelevant to investing.

Stand on your moral soapboxes if you must, but this is about investing. I'm profitable, and one of the keys to that is not caring about anything other than being profitable. Don't handicap yourself, the sharks you are playing against certainly don't.

>> You also realize that there's no real difference between funding the organizations who do bad things, and starting / running those organizations, right?

I didn't mean to ignore your question in my earlier reply. I realize this entirely. I'm not funding ISIS or trafficking organizations - I'm funding(for minutes at a time) pubicly traded organizations. Those tend to not dabble in the acts you mentioned. Hyperbole is fun, right?

How does an entrepreneur get an introduction to SoftBank and pitch?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com