SoftBank Vision Fund Employees Depict a Culture of Recklessness
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is ridiculous:
> Three months later, Zume has yet to revolutionize food production or to be profitable
I've worked with Jeff Housenbold. They got his intelligence right, but this nonsense sounds like Gawker not Bloomberg
> Jeff Housenbold,... Acquaintances describe him as smart and arrogant and almost entirely lacking in self-awareness
And when did random company gossip become news reported as fact? How does publishing the denial make it OK to report anonymous smears as fact?
> Navneet Govil, told a Mormon employee to “go back to Utah to get more wives.” The employee left the company. Via a spokesman, Govil denies making such a statement. Around that time, Govil also berated a young accountant in front of a group, bringing her to tears. She later quit. And at a work lunch a few months later with several colleagues, Govil remarked that “Chinese people sound stupid,” according to two people who heard the comment. Via a spokesman, Govil denies making such a statement or berating the employee; SoftBank says it has no record of these events.
Make sure you say where someone is from that way you can judge how upset you should be about their comments.
The above suggestion is a shame. It appears to be a victim “woke” mentality.
Is it possible Bloomberg was describing where the individual was from for reasons outside what you suggest?
We have to appreciate that his place of birth it is a fact, whether one thinks it preloads preconceptions or not.
Edit: "whether you think" -> "whether one thinks"
Seriously, if you’re writing a whole article about someone it seems worthwhile to mention if they’re from Zambia, but if you’re writing a single sentence it’s a bit off putting.
>Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group, particularly culturally marginalized groups.
I think the idea of the parents is on point. We never say "An American CFO" or "An American CFO from the Mississippi delta"
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
https://www.wired.com/story/plant-spy-chips-hardware-supermi...
Specifically, they said "A major U.S. telecommunications company discovered manipulated hardware from Super Micro Computer Inc. in its network". And then that manipulated hardware was never produced and verified, Bloomberg provided no evidence for the claim, every outside investigation disagreed with it, and their primary source criticized the story (in favor of an even broader, equally unproven assertion).
It's an interesting theoretical attack, but Bloomberg made specific, concrete assertions which are, according to all available evidence, bogus.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/new-evide...
> After Vision Fund invested $375 million in Zume Pizza Inc., whose mission to use robots to automate pizza making had shades of Silicon Valley frivolity, CEO Alex Garden expanded his mission to include rethinking the entirety of U.S. food production. Employees were unnerved. “Are we the next Theranos?” went one anonymously submitted question at an all-hands meeting over the summer
edit: More info about Zume and the investment: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/11/21/20974979/zume-pizza-so...
So they want to become... a commercial bakery? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UjUWfwWAC4
Once again proving that SV companies do no market research before making their ideas...
I'm not in the food industry. I've talked to a couple of food engineers though, and its apparently a very difficult space to work in, with a variety of safety regulations to prevent disease (and if disease does break out, provide a mechanism to track where it came from).
Ignoring that, the space of commercial kitchens / commercial bakeries already produces tons of bread for a variety of companies. From my understanding, these commercial bakeries are flexible enough to change the recipe and create different breads / doughs for a variety of companies. That is to say: commercial bakeries are already "hub-and-spoke" models that centralize production for McDonalds / Burger King / Grocery Stores / etc. etc.
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If you're entirely focused on logistics / sales of products from a kitchen to a variety of restaurants, that job is called a Food Broker (http://www.foodbrokers.org/). Its kind of the opposite of a commercial kitchen: if a small kitchen makes a particular food that probably has mass-appeal, a food-broker will distribute that food in a wide area. Food broker work for many kitchens, delivering food to many commercial locations.
In effect: the food industry is already filled with "hub-and-spoke" style businesses. Food Brokers, Restaurants, commercial kitchens, etc. etc. Ever think why your cheap chinese food all tastes the same despite coming from 10 different restaurants?
Is Silicon Valley now at the point where they are inventing things that already exist, but they aren't yet aware of because of the bubble they are stuck in?
SV VCs are throwing money at everything they can, even bad ideas or things that already exist. I wasn't around for the dotcom bubble but I heard it was exactly the same way.
It's what Travis Kalanick is up to these days, incidentally. Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has supposedly put 400MM into his new company at a 5B valuation.
Most takeout / delivery places have been reduced to a menu and a handful of recipes by services like GrubHub and Postmates, so I guess this isn't surprising.
And I'm not sure the business model is unsustainable either -- food delivery existed profitably long before GrubHub.
Their initial focus was on incrementally improving the way pizza delivery works. The classic pizza delivery model was that the pizza was prepared somewhere (maybe a pizzeria, maybe some centralized kitchen), baked in a pizzeria near where it was ordered, then loaded onto a car for delivery. Zume combined the baking and delivery: the uncooked pizza would be prepared as usual, then loaded onto delivery trucks with automated ovens. Routes would be calculated, and pizzas would be cooked en route so that they arrived fresh out of the oven. Because the baking happens during delivery they don't need to pay for a fixed number of physical locations; instead they can predict pizza demand and scale capacity up and down by adjusting the number of trucks active in each area at each time of day. The intended result (at scale) is fresher pizza, delivered faster, at lower cost.
Obviously this can apply beyond pizza. There are plenty of other businesses in the food industry that operate the same way as classic pizza delivery. If Zume can provide them with scalable, low-fixed-cost delivery and final cooking, that's potentially worth a lot of money.
with the explosion in popularity of food delivery services, you can probably move into any cuisine in one of these trucks. one of my biggest gripes about delivery services right now is the freshness of the food and also how it impacts the in-person experience at restaurants.
technologically speaking, i'm all for having a solution that brings the kitchen to the (lazy) customer. but i'm definitely having some reservations about the social impact it will have
Every since I heard of WeWork though, I've been fascinated with this SoftBank drama.
It reads like silly the "rome fell because <insert topic i care about>" articles that were semi popular a while ago.
SoftBank might be reckless, but I've no idea what the metoo movement or the random insults have to do with it.
Nonetheless, I will add one perspective from the inimitable Matt Levine:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-18/the-st...
Of course, you could gain infinite karma votes on here just by posting his article every day, but he has some interesting things to add to this article.
Specifically, its not clear if Softbank is doing all that badly and maybe Masa's gift is this meta ability to get people to think bigger.
Levine is always also a little cynical.
> At a portfolio meeting in October, Housenbold defended his performance by arguing he’d been trying to back female CEOs. Then he seemed to blame the #MeToo movement for limiting his ability to maneuver, bewildering at least one attendee.
What? This gives absolutely no specifics, no quotes, even softens the shit sandwich the author is attempting to feed us by saying "seemed to." And it's supposed to matter because it "bewildered" one unnamed attendee. God almighty I need to stop reading shit like this.
What does his staff being male have anything to do with how he runs his fund?
For one, there is research on all-male trading and investment teams taking more risk than mixed-gender teams. For another, we have documented cases of overt sexism among SoftBank-backer founders (most notoriously, Adam).
When I met Lydia Jett I assumed that she is a woman but I did not ask.
On this, I have no information. Was just justifying citing an all-male team, within the context of a group with poor controls and a history of losing money due to taking unchecked risk, as a risk factor.
This article is trash.
Terrible management comes in all forms. Look at Stephanie Korey or Elizabeth Holmes.