The Eccentric, Relentless Deal-Making of Masayoshi Son
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Masayoshi Son broke his promise to our startup. He signed an agreement with us for a deal somewhere south of $100M and never delivered. After he signed, the terms changed, and changed again, and it was as though his team was not listening to him and did not follow his orders.
Be careful trusting too much in the impulsive decisions of Masa and the follow-through of his team. He's too rich to need to care about his reputation, but to me, his word does not count for much.
He will insist that you take too much money, and he does that because he wants more control. Which, fine. That's like half the VCs in the world.
He will also make similar promises to your competitors and occasionally invest in them instead of you.
Like so many others before and since, Tan took Son’s money.
He sounds like The Godfather of VC investing.
The question is, how many of his investments worked out? If the ratio is less than most, then it's mostly sheer luck with the really good ones.
> Even as his allies describe it, Son's vision seems like garden-variety optimism about a technological future that has been enunciated by many industry leaders: a trillion connected devices, generating data that will be analyzed by artificial intelligence to supposedly make the world a better place.
This almost sounds like a Silicon Valley TV show parody, where Hooli’s CEO tries to articulate his vision of fixing the human condition in a series of awkward TV ads and speeches.
I watched the video, it is a bit trite and generic but not really baffling.