A company I used to work for was recently acquired because they were supposedly working on some kind of block chain technology. After the acquisition, all ‘work’ on the block chain was stopped and everyone reassigned to other, more mundane projects. Word is, the ex-CEO somehow sweet talked the acquirers with some fancy PowerPoint slides. He spends most of his time coming up with these proposals and shops them around to unsuspecting VCs and acquirers. Took him a few years but seems like he finally got one to bite.

I suspect many smaller tech firms are similar.

The Softbank Vision fund is a very interesting and strange beast.

Created by a risk junkie, funded mostly by governments hoping to mix profit with prestige, and ultimately likely to implode as part of the next tech bust.

Great marketing and lot of suckers who bought into the Hype.

Lol, I thought the same, here I am bootstrapping - the things I could do with 1 percent or even 0.1 percent of that money.

> How did they ever raise such capital?

Access to a good network. It's not like cash isn't available these days. It's just that you have to treat networking as a full time job and hone the craft just as you would anything technical.

Its called hype - hype around VR/AR specifically.