Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

> Run by Masa who many consider an oracle because his placed massive bets years before other people and those bets have paid of big.

I'm not sure how many folks these days would consider him an "oracle". He clearly did fabulously well with some early Internet investments, but he also was famous for folly after folly of overpriced investments in the 2010s (the Softbank "Vision Funds").

I'd be curious if there is a simple accounting list of Softbank's major investments ranked from biggest winners to biggest losers. I guess it pretty much highlights the dynamics of the VC business model - you only need a few giant winners to offset the boatload of losers. In Softbank's case, I'm guessing their biggest winners are Yahoo Japan (which was the dominate site in Japan for a long time, and long after the US Yahoo fell into irrelevance) and Alibaba, which saw their early $20 million investment balloon into billions.

But did Softbank have any winners from their 2010s spending spree (along the time where they shoveled good money after bad into WeWork)?

They've made close to $100B on ARM (which they acquired in 2016). This dwarfs the $14B they lost on WeWork. Of course WeWork gets far more attention because it's a such an entertaining story.

Thanks very much, I had forgotten about ARM.

The Vision Fund lost on tons more companies than just WeWork though. But your overall point is correct - there were a couple outsized winners (also just found another article that they made a huge gain on DoorDash) that I'm guessing took care of the majority of their losses.

These aren't realized gains though, I think only 10% of shares actually float, it's not clear that the demand would sustain in a selloff

VCs are indeed partly about giant winners offsetting the losers. But according to Taleb, the main part is to convince other people to put money in your fund and get rich from the management fees. So from that perspective, VC is mostly about pretending your fund does well and getting people to buy in. That's probably why VCs love to buy companies in overhyped industries.

It realized $5.6B in gains on Uber. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/08/softbank-sells-entire-stake-...

Arguably this is classic VC maths, bet on many companies and the few that succeed will succeed enough that the rest don't matter.

YC does the same thing at the very early stage, A16Z and Sequoia do the same at later stages, and arguably Softbank made their money doing the same thing at a later stage again, although all the lines are a little blurred.

His Alibaba/Arm bets are legendary. Both made $100B+

He made a big bet on NVIDIA when no one else did.

(Though he sold too soon and missed out)

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