SoftBank Vision funds post record $39B annual loss | Hacker News Reader

SoftBank Vision funds post record $39B annual loss

ft.com

155 pointsJumpCrisscross143 comments

Their massive early investment in Uber distorted their reality and they expected ride sharing to be incredibly successful in other markets when it's not even successful in the USA - it's a fraud that pays below minimum wage off the backs of people who cannot do math. It has never made money anywhere ...

ARM has had a laziness problem ever since the Apple A1 chip - there's a reason why nobody uses their 6-yr old layouts. ARM almost killed Qualcomm when they adopted A57 for the snapdragon 808 using the 64-bit arm design - that chip melted quite a few phones and this gave Exymos it's start!

Ironically the one good thing the rideshades did was to get taxis to install credit card readers. Taxis are often half the price of an Uber these days.

> Ironically the one good thing the rideshades did was to get taxis to install credit card readers. Taxis are often half the price of an Uber these days.

And they made taxi summoning apps better and more commonplace. They basically dragged taxis into the 21st century, which was pretty much never happening without some actual competition.

In fact they're so innovative that Transport for London is now looking at taking the same sort of technology and using it to charge drivers for driving in London, with surge charging and allsorts.

Which location?

Taxis in NYC are often (always?) way cheaper than Uber now.

Not OP but it is often the case around London, UK. Half price isn't an exaggeration! Better cars usually too.

The difference in London is pretty staggering. Cabs in Manhattan are pretty nice now too. Otherwise I find that ride shares are more available and nicer as an experience.

When I was in London a few weeks ago the taxi prices were 2-3x the uber prices. Also they'd tell you to fuck off if they didn't want to take you to that location.

I used to love riding taxis because the drivers had such great personalities. I remember when a Jamaican guy in NYC told me all about the OTHER drug users driving around. He didn't have to worry about the rating system, so he was free to share all the dirt. It was a much better time. I wish more cab drivers and uber could tell me to fuck off.

Taxis are generally far more expensive than Ubers, and they don't quote up front, and they try and trick you with extra charges, and you can only summon them with an app because of Uber forcing them to engage in competition.

Most Taxi companies I’ve dealt with quote if ask them. Generally you get a few bucks off if you do so at least a day in advance.

I’d rather give a call than install an app anyways.

My experience taught me that taxis are usually around the same price as Ubers in densely populated areas and wildly more expensive outside of those. I’m not very experienced as an Uber user though since I generally prefer public transport.

Did you ask to go South of The River?

Why would you ever do that? There is nothing south of the river. If there were anything worthwhile, they would have a tube station around.

(I kid, I live in Peckham).

Is it illegal to visit that half of the city?

Must have been a black cab. I just checked and I can book a regular cab for £30-40 depending on the company, while Uber charges £48-55 between 19:30 and 00:30 for the same trip.

What kind of taxi? Do you mean black cabs?

Not being incredibly successful doesn't make it a fraud. I don't think anybody invested in it because Uber misrepresented the market.

Design and implement over engineered solutions to avoid paying minimum wage across dozens of countries seems at least a little sketchy.

One thing uber did well is it helped break a market distortion in markets where you had to buy a badge, but they were supply limited and could sometimes fetch $1M which IMO makes no sense, if someone can do the job they should be allowed to.

I'm not saying everything Uber did was great or right, but breaking that insanity is IMO a step of progress. Next we need to ensure gig workers make at least minimum wage after legitimate expenses.

> supply limited and could sometimes fetch $1M which IMO makes no sense, if someone can do the job they should be allowed to.

I mean, it's new york city, there is not enough room for everyone to drive around all day looking for fares. It's also a unionization thing -- a supply cap ensures a good wage for everyone in the club.

Still not fraud though. And it's not exactly like the existing taxicab industry wasn't already sketchy/exploitative. The whole point of Uber is that it's a massive improvement over what came before.

tell that to FTX stockholders and clients.

In loose IRS terms an engineered loss every year starts look like a hobby mis-telling the world that it is a business.

How many years did Amazon show losses and were allowed to continue without being called a hobby mis-telling the world?

Amazon was doing stuff though? Like getting books delivered to people’s homes.

Uber is getting people from point A to point B just as advertised

I think GP was talking about FTX in this case.

Uber also seemed a bit like a house of cards but I guess it’s pulling out of that.

Yellow cabs for me.

It's basically an inefficient, but effective way to siphon money from the poor and middle class and deposit it into the bank accounts of the wealthy by utilizing the equity the poor and middle class have in their vehicles.

It doesn't get the wealthy especially rich either, looking at the losses.

Who gets rich on Uber and similar apps are all the programmers that visit this website, we make good money on all those schemes. We get paid really well. We are who really gets the best deal in all this.

(Now I need to hide away before the flying shoes hit me.)

as an end user, I got a pretty good deal for quite a while.

I'm always surprised that VCs assume that customers are morons and will keep buying the same product even when its not a good deal anymore. Uber's terms of the deal changed, so I don't buy the product anymore. Simple as.

The goal is to kill all the alternatives so you have no choice. Uber wanted to kill all taxis everywhere, then they'd have a monopoly.

Uber wanted to attack all the things that were bad about legacy taxi service. They did, and it was better for many people. But they were foolish if they thought taxi services would not respond and competitors would not emerge.

Ultimately they wanted their cars to be self-driving. They don't want to pay drivers at all. But there was and is no proof that it is possible in the time frame of their runway.

The wealthy got rich at the IPO stage at the expense of the public, much like most tech IPOs.

No, it's a way I can get a safe and reliable ride anywhere in the world, without getting scammed by a local taxi (not just Uber, but Lyft, Ola, Bolt etc.)

> It's basically an inefficient, but effective way to siphon money from the poor and middle class and deposit it into the bank accounts of the wealthy by utilizing the equity the poor and middle class have in their vehicles.

if you're a thinking like a system, then yes,

> No, it's a way I can get a safe and reliable ride anywhere in the world, without getting scammed by a local taxi (not just Uber, but Lyft, Ola, Bolt etc.)

if you're thinking like a human individual, then yes.

I agree with you both and I told you why

Safety and reliability are not mutually exclusive with exploitative. It can be both.

Sadly, taxis were never both until Uber.

Even in Manhattan, getting a taxi at 2am was a crap shoot. I can an Uber in the suburbs at 2am anywhere in the country.

That’s neat.

> Even in Manhattan, getting a taxi at 2am was a crap shoot. I can an Uber in the suburbs at 2am anywhere in the country.

You certainly can call an uber, yes. Whether they come through or whether they find a suitable reason to cancel on you... that's a crapshoot.

It's just plain bad faith not to acknowledge that the scenario you describe was 10x more likely to happen with taxis.

Anecdata: it's happened more frequently with me and ubers rather than cabs. So no, not bad faith, just my experience.

I apologize that your experience was different. And likewise to all the downvotes who figured my experience was false lol.

And likewise to all the downvotes who figured my experience was false lol.

No one is saying your specific experience was false, but: what happened to the taxicab industry is simply not something that happens to businesses that even bother to go through the motions of customer service. People were so eager to ditch taxis that they flocked to a largely-illegal, unregulated service that literally involved getting into strangers' private cars.

If your business loses out a model like that, you're doing it wrong. The taxi cartel and their captive regulators were doing it wrong.

I’ve never been stranded by Uber. Sometimes drivers cancel, but I’ve never been stranded with no drivers as there’s someone else.

Taxis failed very frequently.

I can reliably plan with Uber. Taxis were a crapshoot.

And I’ve never had the credit card reader broken in Uber and it seemed like every taxi had a busted machine.

Nobody's forced to work for Uber. It's not "siphoning" money from anybody. Drivers are driving for it because it's the best job available -- often because of the flexibility that lets them do it around other scheduled commitments. Take that opportunity away and they become worse off, not better.

Drivers are doing it because they can't do math. Uber pays below minimum wage after accounting for contractor taxes and gas and car maintenance, but workers just see gross income and think it's good.

You're not directly wrong, but many who are against uber/softbank/capitalists would mix in an implicit assumption that the investor class use desperation as a tool to force short term beneficial actions despite long term consequences. You can make $100 today to afford an airbnb and a cheese burger, but you'll have lost money when the repair bill (or purchasing the next car) comes due.

or if you wanna be a much blunter in saying this:

because this society NEEDS that there exists poor people, essentially people unable to refuse a shitty job.

depending on what you mean by Needs, i actually disagree. For example we could all be a lot richer with automation ... it seems the price of goods typically plummet once they're automated and saturated. Eg: food, iirc food production uses like 95% less people than in the past and is cheaper than it's ever been (practically free, and the very poor can get it for free at foodbanks etc).

I do think if we automate the production of lots of things the price will eventually drop as economics says it will. The hard part is the things we cannot automate but also need.

the real issue is not about what I mean by "Need"

the real difficulties in these arguments come from defining (or trying to) what we mean by "this society", in part because society has many distinct (but intertwined) components

in regards to food, and those things we need but cannot automate, it's not so simple.

because of how capitalism works at dropping costs, in many cases what we actually get is lesser quality things that we absolutely need (like food).

When this gets really really nasty is when applied to education. made cheaper because everybody needs one, but also made shittier, thereby creating people who cannot refuse certain propositions and choices.

shitty education (shitty food) directly contributing to the continued 'availability' of poor people who cannot refuse shitty deals. in this light it could almost be concluded that this system is self-sustaining? ugh.

> to siphon money from the poor and middle class and deposit it into the bank accounts of the wealthy by utilizing the equity the poor and middle class have in their vehicles

What poor and middle class assets does SoftBank manage? (EDIT: Nvm. I misread “vehicle” as an investment vehicle.)

He meant Uber. Uber is siphoning residual equity in people's vehicles into cash for Uber by underpaying for depreciation.

If we translate that from financial to real-world terms, it means that people aren't getting paid enough to cover wear and tear on their cars.

I think that depends on how much you paid for the car and how long it will last (depends on quality, how good the maintenance is, and luck). Also, cash pays the rent and lower depreciation doesn't (unless you sell the car), so some people may prefer this to borrowing money.

Yet they are evidenced by people driving for Uber.

I’ve driven a Prius for Uber and think so fared quite well using the irs mileage deduction rate to offset almost all my revenue and paid nearly no tax, legally and covered actual depreciation.

It’s funny to think 10 years of drivers are somehow idiots.

Wait until you find out how much cars are now when you have to replace your car 10 years earlier.

I think I’m already aware. I’m comfortable with my decision. I haven’t driven in 5 years and I still drive my prius and probably have 100k miles left.

Are you aware if you would have continued to drive and put on 100 more k for Uber you wouldn't be driving that prius today.

I don’t understand your point. You keep asking obvious questions. Of course if I currently have 100k left and I drove 100k miles I would have zero left and a new car. Yes, of course I’m aware.

I have done the math and am comfortable with my decision. I made extra money and it worked out fine. I understand depreciation and it’s the cost of goods.

Are you aware that many jobs have supplies that are used up in the performance of your job?

It’s pretty basic arithmetic that there are many scenarios where driving for Uber is a perfectly fine choice. Not everyone is driving an F150 and sitting in traffic. Lots of people drive efficient cars and are happy.

The reason people drive for Uber for many years isn’t because they are somehow dumber than you and not aware of basic things.

Well said. Would like to see an economic / accountant analysis of this.

Go look it up, it's been done before. Uber basically required you buy a new car in certain circumstances, and don't pay enough to keep up with gas, repairs, and value loss of running a car around.

Uber allows 16 year old cars in my city. If you're driving a paid-off 5+ year old Honda or Toyota, I think Uber's paying enough for you to turn a decent profit from driving for them.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/boston/vehicle-requirements...

It probably isn't paying enough for you to buy a brand new car with a loan and drive that around for them. But they're not making you do that, either...

They are when you have no working car

Where are they making you buy a brand new car? That seems like something I'd have heard rancorous complaints about if it was actually happening.

The poor and middle class don't have investments. Source: all my co-workers and girlfriend's relatives that meet me with blank stares when I ask if they are saving for their retirement or maxing the company match for the 401k.

Not judging that- the reality is somewhere in between they can't afford to do much but stay alive due to inflation and housing costs out of control and that they need to stop getting $7 Dutch Bros. coffee every day, DoorDash every night, and Taylor Swift tickets for $1000.

This is one thing that terrifies me. I'm sacrificing today to save for tomorrow while the masses are doing the opposite. And in a decade or 3 when I have assets they can out vote me and take it all back via taxes or rules that change the game

Some examples are like - I paid off my student debt by not going to coachella or doing optional things (that I observed others doing). They might get it cancelled for free. They got Coachella + Education, I only got Education. Rinse and repeat for all sorts of delayed gratification steps.

You can still go to Coachella today. Jeff Bezos did, after all.

This is guaranteed to happen. Boomers have been rigging the system as a large voting cohort since coming of age.

Boomers might mostly be dead in 30 yrs, but yeah a concern in 10.

You completely missed the point made here, which was a very good one.

Yeah, it's crazy how much of the end-game of so much tech essentially boils down to something like this.

Then why isn’t it financially successful? If riding sharing costs are much lower than incumbents like taxis shouldn’t it be raking in cash?

"...it's a fraud that pays below minimum wage off the backs of people who cannot do math..."

Oh, the superiority complex of the white collar masses over the poor blue collar morons. I always like to talk with the Uber drivers down here in Brazil, and probably 50% or more aren't even the owners of the cars. They lease from a local version of "Hertz", and after paying for all the expenses, still take home an amount of money that is way above what they were getting on their prior jobs. I have talked to all range of drivers, from ex engineers to ex burger flippers. It infuriates me when I hear this argument that all gig economy workers are "dumb desperate morons that can't do math". People are not as dumb as you think.

I’ve asked my Uber and Lyft drivers over the years about how they feel about their work. They seem generally ok because it’s pretty flexible when they work and many people are doing it for supplemental income. I’ve yet to hear someone complain. I’m fact many of them, in nyc at least, are former taxi drivers that were being exploited mercilessly by the medallion holder. While Uber might be exploiting them just as hard or harder economically, they aren’t forcing them to do 12 hour six days a week shifts over night and renting them the taxi on top.

There might be a selection bias there: the ones doing uber are the ones it works for. I only use taxis and several times I've had drivers who've been uber drivers and gone (back) to taxi for various reasons.

Of course that's got a selection bias in it too...

And likely varies wildly across countries.

where is this whole below minimum wage thing coming from?

Everytime, I take an Uber or Lyft and calculate the hourly earnings of the uber driver minus vehicle miles, uber's take, and x2 the time needed (for the return trip), I come up with 15$-20$ an hour or so.

Yeah I have friends who don't work in tech (the horror I know) and they Uber/Doordash sometimes when they're in between jobs. From everything they've told me you make pretty good money though they recommend doing it to supplement and bridge income rather than trying to do it full time (apparently it can be mentally draining if you do it for hours on end).

I'm guessing posters here either have a view distorted by living in California/NYC or just have the data wrong.

When calculating their hourly wage, you have to factor in the time spent waiting for a passenger too.

Nobody was really talking about this ARM problem when it was happening. At least not on HN. I am always hearing these things after the fact. How do you stay on top of these things?

I do wonder if ARMs business model works long term. Imagination Technologies crashed the exact same way.

They'll have Apple's (likely immense) license fees for at least a decade - Apple won't make another architecture change anytime soon. And the rest of ARM's business... it's not like there are any alternatives. China hasn't managed to create a competitor, and even if they do it may very well be sanctioned and so useless to the US and EU. Intel/AMD's x86 is a dead end for the high-efficiency, low power market that ARM targets. PowerPC, MIPS and SuperH have been dead for years. There's always the possibility that RISC or some other open ecosystem rises, yes, but ARM is decades ahead and it would take absurd amounts of investments that I don't see appearing any time soon given the interest rate hike.

ARMs behavior lately is pushing a lot of riscv investment, my prediction is that Apple will migrate away from ARM 10years from now to something they can self-control, like riscv with some Apple-only extensions

Apple has shifted its processor technology every 11 years for its desktop machines.

But it has kept with ARM on iPhone for the last 15, so...

Anyhow, it is hard to predict with accuracy that far out.

That said, the first indications of a shift would be Apple adopting the RISC-V chip on the low end, things like the Apple Watch and Air Pods. Apple Watch has been using a 7N ARM chip since 2018 at nearly the same speed -- it seems like it doesn't need to be getter faster at each generation like the iPhone or MacBooks do. If adoption happens in this peripheral areas, then it is likely to move upstream to other devices over time.

Apple was an original investor in ARM and used ARM processors for Newton and a bunch of things like, I think, some of the time capsules.

I believe they are using RISC V internally, for some small things that are invisible to the end user. It would make sense, just to get a feel for it in case it matters down the road.

Its crazy to think about where things will be 10 years from now. Will we have beached 1nm? Then what? Is there actually a feasible roadmap for after that?

Yeah, we're already seeing it with SoCs: 3D stacking. The challenge will be getting them cooled.

>but ARM is decades ahead

I do not believe ARM is decades ahead.

RISC-V's software ecosystem really is close already. I'd be hard pressed to name something that doesn't work well on RISC-V yet, besides DotNet, which recently merged RISC-V support and thus is still quite green.

Hardware-wise, SiFive's designs destroy ARM's own in performance/power/area. Tenstorrent Ascalon is to be released 2024, competitive with projected Zen5.

It's quite imminent.

RISC-V is inevitable.

Apple's license fees are a good revenue stream, but that doesn't really mean ARM will do any business. Those fees are baked in, fire all the engineers and just distribute the fees to share holders through dividends. The question is what is ARM designing today that Apple will use tomorrow, I think the answer is likely "not much".

> They'll have Apple's (likely immense) license fees for at least a decade [...]

I thought Apple has a special magic license, as they were one of the founding members of ARM?...

They sold their ARM stake in their near-death phase. They have an architectural license.

At this point I assume their whole ARM portfolio has been designed from scratch and they are paying those license fees for patent licenses and bc they still use the ARM instruction set. Cheaper than switching.

...on around $100B of capital raised.

i.e., -39%. Poof!

So far.

For those here who don't know, Masayoshi Son almost lost everything in the dotcom bust of 2000-2002.

A single investment saved him from ruin back then: Alibaba. Was that luck or skill? In hindsight, it looks a lot like luck to me.

Either way, he's clearly a bet-the-farm-and-actually-can-lose-the-farm kind of guy.

He started from nothing and he's still a billionaire so I wouldn't just dismiss him like that.

He's just a different type of businessman who likes making big risky bets.

People on this forum should be very happy a guy like him exists who can efficiently transfer wealth from rich Middle Easterners to employees of tech companies.

As I've heard it stated elsewhere, startups are an inefficiency between the transfer of wealth from VCs to Bay Area landlords.

Except get this: that middle east money is safe. It is softbank itself which takes the upside and downside to the vision fund. The middle east money earns a fixed and constant return.

I am very glad I sold my softbank shares two years ago. Son is a gambler with horrible bet sizing skills.

What do you mean?

I know what you mean by "bet the farm" but let's remember that he won't ever go hungry or be homeless.

Easy to do when you only have to bet other people's farms.

They will be buying the farm at this rate

Masayoshi Son should really be a mod in r/wallstreetbets

Alongside Bill Hwang, who famously lost $20 billion by excessive leverage.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-08/how-bill-...

Made the $20B through excessive leverage, too.

Tale old as time, they never quit when they're ahead.[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Livermore

Hwang couldn’t have unwound his massive positions without crashing the prices. There was no quitting while you’re ahead for him.

I still really don’t understand what game he was playing.

He definitely could have unwound his positions quietly over time. He'd have moved prices, sure, and his profits would have been less than what was marked to market, but nothing would have crashed. Forced selling from margin calls is what crashes prices.

My impression is it is not at all clear that he could have unwound in a profitable way. If he could have, why did he miss the margin call? He was leveraged to fuck and sunk every little price increase into further leverage.

With the caveat that I am certainly no expert, my understanding is that he blew up when VIAC issued a secondary offering, which flooded the market with new shares at a lower price, triggering a margin call then forced liquidation. So there was an exogenous shock.

Of course, the kind of mindset that would have him take profits is not the kind of mindset that got him to such leveraged paper gains to begin with.

1. Buy lots of stock quickly and loudly.

2. Sell it slowly and quietly.

3. Profit!

I don’t think this is how markets work.

Hwang is the greatest. Most rich people just get comfortable/scared and go to index funds while there was absolutely no reason to stop given the amount of liquidity in the public markets.

Ironically he ran out of liquidity, but it was a great example of what's possible.

https://archive.ph/eOKEr

> Yoshimitsu Goto, the tech conglomerate’s chief financial officer, said on Thursday that the company would not miss opportunities to invest in new technology such as ChatGPT, but cautioned that it was not ready to accelerate its deal activity.

Apparently Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman didn't read the classic essay: "Goto considered harmful" before making massive investments in SoftBank.

My favourite conspiracy theory lately is that the Saudis needed to increase the oil price to recover losses from their VC investments.

I am not sophisticated investor or commodities trader -- but I do not think Oil prices work that way. The problem for Saudis always has been whatever cuts to production they make were fulfilled by others who exceed the quota. There are many oil rich but cash desperate parties out there. It's much easy for Saudis to create a panic than delicately reach a target price.

May be I am wrong, but experienced commodity traders can respond and correct me.

That’s why it was so helpful to them when Biden was elected, he immediately implemented policies that futures traders felt spelled decrease in supply both short and long term, that along w the war in Ukraine made for a very successful year.

And yet crude oil prices are now lower than they were prior to the breakout of the war in February 2022. Funny things, these markets!

Crude of course isn’t the whole story. Gas in my region is again over $4/gal

What better way to do that than to pay a couple hundred million a year to each washed up soccer player they can recruit to play in the desert?

And like most conspiracy theories, it makes no sense. As if businesses choose to sell at a lower price than they could be selling at, and then switch to selling at a higher price if they feel like earning more money. Especially with a fungible commodity like oil.

He was probably thinking of Goto Dengo, who would have been a great investment.

SoftBank is a meme at this point but I'd imagine most VCs are down on paper as well, rising interest rates crushed the valuation of pretty much every startup

It's almost like none of them had any actual value, and the vast majority of them were just attempts to crush and take over existing markets using outside war chests.

I think a very large percent of them had a nonzero value, but the issue is if you can get 4% guaranteed return on cash, vs risky 1% return on cash suddenly the asset is worth less than before.

But if you can get unlimited money at 0% you might as well invest it on 1% return bets. You're still making money on others' money.

I would have thought the issue was the lack of net income.

The idea is so long as you have an expectation of future ROI you can amortize that future value into the present and sell off the present equity for current capital.

People are incentivized to put in capital so long as the risk adjusted rate of return exceeds marginal alternatives (including just sitting on the cash in a 2-10% inflation rate environment)

> I'd imagine most VCs are down on paper as well

No need to imagine. Early stage is doing quite well, series 'A' and onwards not so good, with some variation due to the various industries.

Has anyone seen an analysis of what percentage of economic activity is just redistribution of wealth more adjacent to gambling, compared to economic activity that is more tightly coupled to cost of delivering goods and services?

And just in case it’s not obvious: This question comes to mind as I would categorize SoftBank pretty firmly in the gambling niche - at least compared to a local plumber or Uber driver.

I have benefited greatly from the proliferation of internet and app based taxi services.

>compared to economic activity that is more tightly coupled to cost of delivering goods and services?

How do you measure this? Was it possible that the size of Softbank’s investments is what can lead to the possibility of creating two sided markets like Uber?

Should've just invested in public cloud providers :D

Or go to a casino. Would have more chances.

https://archive.ph/eOKEr

they got lucky with alibaba and everyone though they had a midas touch. all they did was huff and puff every startup they touched giving them inflated ego. ironically alibaba grew without their influence and did well for themselves

Was SoftBank and Masayoshi Son a zero interest rate phenomenon?

I think a lot of things in the past ~10 years were a zero interest rate phenomenon. VC driven start-up culture is definitely included in that. Growth for the sake of growth, rather than business fundamentals.

From Uber to "Uber of dog walking".

They _lost_ basically the GDP of Estonia...

I like to send these articles to my team to put our small mistakes in to scale.

Seems like someone could use some corrective lenses.

It's not "loss". The money of SBV (Saudis?) has changed hands and now belongs to whatever startups or funds they had invested in.

Come on man seriously. I KNOW you know what "loss" means in this context. Please stop

Loss for some is gain for others. SBV could be a charity disguised as a predatory trust fund.

That’s what “loss” means. They gave it away and didn’t get it back.

What else would it mean in this context?

That's not a loss, that's an investment in an asset. It's a loss because the assets have devalued.

A lot of startup employees got paid...a lot of customers got to enjoy below market prices in the quest for growth for a few years...

And from there a lot of it presumably has flowed into cloud and advertising spend.

Which basically means most of it went into rents paid to SV land holders.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com