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Comment by purpleblue | Hacker News Reader

How does Softbank still keep standing? They keep losing on the vast majority investment they've made, and yet they haven't come up against any financial issues? I feel like Softbank going bankrupt is going to be the Black Swan that affects Silicon Valley the most.

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They got a couple wins recently with the ARM IPO, Coupang IPO, and ByteDance (aka TikTok). WeWork (and Uber) has been a massive hole, but SoftBank is diversified enough that they can withstand it.

They have historically been one of the biggest movers in Chinese and Indian Growth VC, and have a significant presence in American Growth VC too.

They made oodles of money off Slack and DoorDash for example, and their 2010s investment phase was thanks to them being flush with profits from Alibaba and Tencent.

At the end of the day, compared to most other Growth Funds, they tend to hire some solid investors who know how to find capable operators.

Though, lapses of judgement do happen a la Neumann, but that's like saying anyone who invested in Pivotal or Joyent is dumb. This is VC. It's not guaranteed returns. There's a reason why it's called VENTURE capital.

Also did well of NVIDIA for a while. Exited around crypto boom if memory serves

Yep! That was just one of several successes!

Alibaba, ARM, Bytedance, Coupang, Oyo, Xiaomi, Didi, Slack, Doordash...Softbank has plenty of hits to make up for its losses. That's how the VC industry works.

They aren't afraid of risk and they've been around long enough that they appear to be at least an averagely competent investment firm which just takes way more risk than most would consider reasonable. Softbank was also founded in pretty much the perfect time in history for a firm like themselves to succeed, a highly speculative low interest rate environment.

Their hits have more than made up for their misses.

Saudi oil money.

The Saudis pulled out. Vision Fund 2 (aka SoftBank today) is primarily Softbank's own money [0]

[0] - https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/softbank-earnings-vision...

Do you also base that on something more reliable than that vague article?

Abu Dhabi and Saudi pulled out https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-group-results-vi...

Thanks.

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