The more I hear about this the more it looks like this entire scheme has turned into a pyramid scheme. Pouring more money into investments to try and boost the valuation. Using previous investments to invest and boost the value of new investments, guaranteeing massive loans in order to get others to invest at huge valuations. It just looks more and more like laundering money through all sorts of different mechanisms to create paper gains that don't reflect reality.
The interesting point though is that this is basically all being done using money that private investors have given, so really there's no public accountability or outrage. The question is whether the investors in the vision fund start asking to open the books and check the valuations themselves. If they don't then this will just continue until Masayoshi finds a way of getting his hands on and even bigger pile of money in order to continue to cover up the dodgy valuations - because that's what you'd have to do right? You'd have to do another massive fund to have enough cash to continue driving up these valuations? You would want another massive fund raised quickly before the existing investments start fallling apart.
> Pouring more money into investments to try and boost the valuation. Using previous investments to invest and boost the value of new investments, guaranteeing massive loans in order to get others to invest at huge valuations. It just looks more and more like laundering money through all sorts of different mechanisms to create paper gains that don't reflect reality.
Is this uncommon? E.g. I don't have any inside information as to what went on with the Coinbase acquisition of Earn.com, but from an outsider perspective it certainly looks like:
1) A16Z invests tens of millions of dollars in Earn.com, which fails.
2) A16Z has their other portfolio company Coinbase buy Earn.com to shift some of their profits from Coinbase back into their earlier fund. (Which as far as I can tell is not only completely useless to Coinbase, but is also a huge legal liability.)
3) A16Z uses the "success" of their fund with Earn.com to raise more money.
4) A16Z then compensates Coinbase by investing in them at a higher paper valuation.
I could easily be 100% off base so I don't want to libel anyone, all I'm saying is that that's just what it looks like as someone who wasn't privy to the actual details.
I think that you’re correct and what is happening is that, in our era of extreme inequality, pyramid schemes are being forced farther up the food chain.
It used to be that you could make a pretty penny soaking the lower classes directly with things like MLMs. But as their wealth was hollowed out by globalization and the Great Recession, you have to shift your predation upward to things like their pension funds, sovereign wealth, etc. While the people managing these resources can sometimes be more savvy than your average sucker signing up to a pyramid scheme, it’s very easy to pull one over on them with stories about “technological innovation” (counter to logic or evidence of profitability) because this is the grand, wishful story of our era.
Agreed, and I also found it extremely hilarious that Softbank styled itself as the "300-year company", but their biggest investments are ridesharing companies, a real estate subleasing company, several eCommerce stores and so on.
I mean, if you're going all-in on the future where is the biotech, pharmacology and the robots? It's not just softbank that to me looks fishy, the entire industry looks like it has drunk its own kool-aid.
SoftBank bonds account for half of the bonds sold to Japanese retail investors. Ordinary Japanese savers are going to bet burned if SoftBank collapses.
Thankfully the regulations saved the public before WeWork could enter the stock exchanges. As long as it stays this way, I really don't care if Saudi Arabia sinks billions of dollars into a turkey like I will sink my teeth into one tonight.
They started with YzerProperty(2014 or so). Then YzerMotors (2016). Now YzerChat. These startups all involves billionaires from Dubai. Btw YzerProperty and Motors do not exist anymore.
Smart Slumlord™ junk rated deals in preparation for its Softbank Fire Sale: "SoftBank will utilize its technology deployment insights to introduce advanced technologies to shopping malls and other commercial facilities, hospitals, and the entire Lippo Village area," Hidebumi Kitahara, SoftBank's vice president and head of global business strategy, said at a signing ceremony. "Through this, we aim to develop Lippo Village as a smart city model case in Southeast Asia."[0]
Could it be that Vision Fund is a grand scheme to vacuum global liquidity, especially from the Middle East? In the absence of war these days, Weapons of Financial Mass Destruction might exactly be what is needed.
I want to point out that a lot of these valuations are signed off by well-known accounting firms, valuation firms, and consulting firms. If it's really one big conspiracy to prop up valuations via recent financing, loans, or market comparables, then wouldn't one of these parties call it out (well, inherently a lot of these are paid by organizations to do their valuations, so true independence is a question here).
Additionally, corporate management theoretically exercise due diligence, along with the valuation committees and the board looking into the reasonableness of the models and associated inputs and outputs. It would be awkward to say that these valuations are wrong with so many people having their inputs.
[1] (from Wikipedia) Chamath Palihapitiya an is a venture capitalist and the founder and CEO of Social Capital. Palihapitiya was an early senior executive at Facebook, joining the company in 2007 and leaving in 2011. He is a minority stakeholder and board member of the Golden State Warriors.
I'm deeply concerned about the direction that the tech world is going. I had hoped that early successes like eBay and PayPal would lead to democratization and egalitarianism, but sadly that's not the case. Where I had hoped to see something like a gig economy where anyone could jump in and out of work when they needed money, and multiple sources of ~$100,000 funding for startups, today I see a doubling down on race-to-the-bottom competition and austerity.
There is less money available now for independent work than there was in the 80s and 90s because we have to work so hard at consulting just to survive. There have been few raises in any industry (the starting wage for an engineer in 2000 was $60,000 per year) but housing and medical costs are many times higher than they were. Millions (yes millions) of the brightest minds of a generation are underemployed in sweatshops, call centers and IT. Even working full time, it can take several years to even save $10,000. Much less reach a level of spirituality that allows one to rise above the waste of life that is the working world today, and build inventions that could substantially raise the quality of life for everyone. Work is now the opposite of progress, not its source.
Meanwhile banks give millions or even billions of dollars to corporations making nebulous claims about how to turn the most promising technologies into profitable returns. When a couple of people in a garage somewhere could do the same thing for 1/1,000 or 1/1,000,000 of the money. Imagining what tens of thousands of those teams with $100,000 could do in medicine, alternative energy, sustainability.. the list goes on and on.
Concerns like this are beginning to dominate my psyche to the point where I'm not sure I want to be in tech anymore. I have serious doubts about where all of this is going. Where are the examples of cooperation? Of steadily increasing personal wealth with simultaneous reduction in work (also known as real technology)? Where are the examples of tech billionaires making it and working to make that possible for all the rest who failed?
My greatest concern today is that speaking the truth is now viewed as being negative.
So just be mindful in these times and don't dwell too much on the truth. I think it's more useful to imagine a new truth that transcends the boundaries placed in front of us. That's how technology began.
> Where are the examples of tech billionaires making it and working to make that possible for all the rest who failed?
> Concerns like this are beginning to dominate my psyche to the point where I'm not sure I want to be in tech anymore.
That’s a part of the problem. People, like you, that consider these questions and would like to make positive a difference, give up.
Because the proposition is an ambiguous long-term play where you could spend a lifetime trying to solve it with little to no results at the end. If these issues are important to you, then wouldn’t it be worth it though?
You’ll have no better opportunity to fix this than by being in the position you’re in now. Which is, an “insider”, that can easily command $100-300K salary+stock that can readily be invested in many of your own ideas and businesses in a bid to ratchet your liquid capital up to >$10M. This capital can then be used to propel you on to >$100M or >$1B or wherever you think is the best point to make a difference in the problems you’re seeing.
You’re only two hops away from making a difference. As opposed to people that are scraping by on $20-60K a year with little to no savings and thus no resources or time to dedicate to more self-actualized pursuits. They’re four to five hops away.
Each hop probably carries 5-7 years worth of effort plus potential risk of ruin.
Point being: don’t give up. Go make a difference in the problems you’re seeing.
This is my favorite comment in this thread. We keep pouring billions into ride sharing, scooters, co-working to prop up crap business models that have no path to profitability to benefit a few.
This is absolutely, unquestionably, spot on. It's a societal level change that's required to unpick what we have right now. It's incredibly complicated and there's issues everywhere.. but I think we can (mostly) agree that our current system doesn't benefit the many. And that can't be the way we want to be forever.
I feel you, but bankers do not owe lone developers anything. If you want to see something exist in this world, you need to figure a way to make it happen. There have been many new technologies that have been brought into this world by people with close to nothing. In fact, not having the funding (initially) may be a good first test. If you really think it should exist, then it is on you to find the time to make it happen.
This sounds mildly interesting, but you make a lot of grand claims and support none of them. I would love to read about your concerns more deeply in a longform, where all these ideas can actually be related to one another, and with support for your claims based in data and real world examples. I would suggest you do this for your own mental health, because it's not at all clear to me why the world of (let's call it) 'socialized investing' is a better world than our current one. And I think you should at least have a well research model to base your concerns in before they "dominate your psyche."
When SoftBank buys shares in a startup and then invests again at a higher valuation, Son says he has made a profit. That is legal under accounting standards, but SoftBank receives no money. The only change is that SoftBank has boosted the value of its original stake from, say, $1 billion to $2 billion by raising the value of the startup. In SoftBank’s income statements and return calculations, at least some of the additional $1 billion can be counted as profit.
That's known as unrealized capital gains, which is a totally normal thing to measure. But what's important is how the value is determined. With a company on the public market you theoretically have millions of actors constantly evaluating the price of something using the same information (10K, etc.). If it's a house you have an appraiser from the government to tell you what it's worth. These two examples are considered securities in the US and so everything is federally regulated. But when it comes to valuation of a private company you can pretty much do what you want (see: "community adjusted EBIDTA"). So it's totally possible for a company to be irresponsible and overvalue itself, to the extent where it might be considered fraud if the company ever went public.
Everyone is really doing this. GAAP allows for this. Making value out of hot air. Generating paper profits through re-valuation of assets, especially intangible assets or where there is no mark-to-market.
Softbank had been a little bit more creative then usual (arranging large loans to founders to lead another round of financing) I must admit.
At some point the music stops and then you have a quarter or two of really funny quarterly reports where everyone is taking all skeletons in the closet and repricing them down "due to unpredictable external factors like recession in Botswana or extreme solar activity". And then the game continues.
"We have talked about this strategy before, and actually reading the article mostly assuaged my concerns about SoftBank’s bookkeeping. In fact, SoftBank says that it doesn’t aggressively mark up its unicorn portfolio (and take accounting profits) every time it pumps in more money on its own. When it invests in later rounds alongside other investors, providing some external validation for the new valuation, it will mark up its stakes (but “only after taking into account future cash flows and public market proxies, as well as private market funding prices”). But, for instance, SoftBank and its associated Vision Fund “never took profits from WeWork by marking it all the way up to $47 billion,” since it was the only investor in at those levels; instead it marked WeWork at levels that other investors also paid." from Matt Levine newsletter
Journalists exaggerate as always - it is hard to get real info from mainstream press.
Not only is it legal, it's essentially legally required for companies to track the changes in the value of their assets.
It matters more in the downward direction, a company has to know when they are insolvent (owe more money than assets they hold) because they are required to file for bankruptcy. Value of an asset goes down, they need to update the books and make sure they don't have too much debt.
The only real issue, are the valuations accurate? If they're not, then it might be accounting fraud.
this is why venture funds leading consecutive up-priced rounds is rare. their LPs do not like them to price their own shares and would prefer if there was external validation.
(when you see the previous lead do another round it can be at the same valuation which isn’t quite the same thing)
> In early 2018, the founders of Chinese artificial intelligence startup SenseTime Group Ltd. flew to Tokyo to see billionaire investor Masayoshi Son. As they entered the offices, Chief Executive Officer Xu Li was hoping to persuade the head of SoftBank Group to invest $200 million in his three-year-old startup.
> A third of the way into the presentation, Son interrupted to say he wanted to put in $1 billion. A few minutes later, Son suggested $2 billion. Turning to the roomful of SoftBank managers, Son said this was the kind of AI company he’d been looking for. “Why are you only telling me about them now?” he asked, according to one person in the room.
This sounds more like an episode of Dragon's Den than a firm responsible for billions of dollars of investors' money. Doesn't quite inspire confidence...
There's a similar anecdote about WeWork, where as Masayoshi Son and Adam Neumann are leaving the WeWork offices in a car to see Masayoshi Son off to the airport, Masayoshi Son says "forget the $1B we talked about in there, find a way to spend $5B."
Sounds like Son is trying to get rid of money? Reminds me of Brewster's Millions ( excellent film - can't go wrong with Pryor and Candy ). Maybe Son has to get rid of $100 billion to get $1 trillion?
The press’s thoughtless repetition of headline valuations didn’t help.
Even in this article, WeWork’s $7.8bn expected valuation is quoted unadorned. It’s a number that was derived by the same people and processes as the $47bn, yet one is ridiculed and the other presented as fact.
There are a lot of VC backed companies that are likely very upside down. You know the types with tons of money raised with very little revenue and little to no profit and an unclear vision on how the entity becomes a real business with a solid profit steam that justifies its valuation. The old model of “it doesn’t matter because we’ll always be able to offload this thing to others and cash out” is dead now.
What we’re seeing unfolding now in the market isn’t a bubble per say but it is the market asserting that revenue matters. Profit matters. Real business plans based on reality matter. Ultimately that’s a very good thing for the innovation industry but things are going to get real ugly for these upside down companies.
It's good for tech that the public market's response to WeWork has brought some well deserved scrutiny to SoftBank. Their investing behavior over the last several years has pushed up VC valuations to unhealthy levels and contributed to this "Unicorn or die" startup culture.
A high private valuation alone is not an accomplishment. While revenue growth, happy customers and a clear path to profitability are accomplishments worth celebrating. Hopefully after this SoftBank fiasco more startups and VCs will focus on fundamentals more than jaw dropping valuations.
"Yet it turned out that Agarwal [founder and CEO of a SoftBank-backed startup] had borrowed $2 billion to finance his share of the purchase"
According to a recent article in the Economist, SoftBank encourages its own employees to do the same with SoftBank shares. There is a chance that things go well and they will look like geniusses (like Michael Dell who took his company private in 2013 and returned to markets last year). If things don’t go well, however, they’ll become a case study for Business Schools on business practices to avoid.
Easy dumb money like SoftBank is the greatest enemy of innovation and progress. Just take a look at the first deck. Companies like Uber, Softbank, WeWork all having trouble with funding is an important step in our economy
Wow...finally. This is happening in public companies too btw. Draper Esprit, Scottish Mortgage Trust, Woodford (he was marking up his "genius" cold fusion play all the way...this is real life, 2019, amazing)...the way positions are marked is very suspect, and the general public just doesn't understand (they see NAV as cash in the bank).
I am wondering, if Saudis really wanted to flush $100bn down the drain, wouldn’t it have been better spent to uplift poverty and reduce hunger ? At least that will give them positive news coverage to offset all the bad news.
[+] [-] Traster|6 years ago|reply
The interesting point though is that this is basically all being done using money that private investors have given, so really there's no public accountability or outrage. The question is whether the investors in the vision fund start asking to open the books and check the valuations themselves. If they don't then this will just continue until Masayoshi finds a way of getting his hands on and even bigger pile of money in order to continue to cover up the dodgy valuations - because that's what you'd have to do right? You'd have to do another massive fund to have enough cash to continue driving up these valuations? You would want another massive fund raised quickly before the existing investments start fallling apart.
I wonder what Masayoshi is doing these days.
[+] [-] Alex3917|6 years ago|reply
Is this uncommon? E.g. I don't have any inside information as to what went on with the Coinbase acquisition of Earn.com, but from an outsider perspective it certainly looks like:
1) A16Z invests tens of millions of dollars in Earn.com, which fails.
2) A16Z has their other portfolio company Coinbase buy Earn.com to shift some of their profits from Coinbase back into their earlier fund. (Which as far as I can tell is not only completely useless to Coinbase, but is also a huge legal liability.)
3) A16Z uses the "success" of their fund with Earn.com to raise more money.
4) A16Z then compensates Coinbase by investing in them at a higher paper valuation.
I could easily be 100% off base so I don't want to libel anyone, all I'm saying is that that's just what it looks like as someone who wasn't privy to the actual details.
[+] [-] claudeganon|6 years ago|reply
It used to be that you could make a pretty penny soaking the lower classes directly with things like MLMs. But as their wealth was hollowed out by globalization and the Great Recession, you have to shift your predation upward to things like their pension funds, sovereign wealth, etc. While the people managing these resources can sometimes be more savvy than your average sucker signing up to a pyramid scheme, it’s very easy to pull one over on them with stories about “technological innovation” (counter to logic or evidence of profitability) because this is the grand, wishful story of our era.
[+] [-] Barrin92|6 years ago|reply
I mean, if you're going all-in on the future where is the biotech, pharmacology and the robots? It's not just softbank that to me looks fishy, the entire industry looks like it has drunk its own kool-aid.
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] papito|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Andromeda88|6 years ago|reply
They started with YzerProperty(2014 or so). Then YzerMotors (2016). Now YzerChat. These startups all involves billionaires from Dubai. Btw YzerProperty and Motors do not exist anymore.
[+] [-] cinquemb|6 years ago|reply
Smart Slumlord™ junk rated deals in preparation for its Softbank Fire Sale: "SoftBank will utilize its technology deployment insights to introduce advanced technologies to shopping malls and other commercial facilities, hospitals, and the entire Lippo Village area," Hidebumi Kitahara, SoftBank's vice president and head of global business strategy, said at a signing ceremony. "Through this, we aim to develop Lippo Village as a smart city model case in Southeast Asia."[0]
[0] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-deals/SoftBank-and...
[+] [-] Iv|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
[+] [-] thkim|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaylorSwift|6 years ago|reply
Additionally, corporate management theoretically exercise due diligence, along with the valuation committees and the board looking into the reasonableness of the models and associated inputs and outputs. It would be awkward to say that these valuations are wrong with so many people having their inputs.
[+] [-] mathattack|6 years ago|reply
It becomes tricky when he mixes Vision Fund business with SoftBank business.
[+] [-] Lucadg|6 years ago|reply
They raised 1.7 B, mostly from Softbank, and are now getting in the vacation rentals space in Europe.
Their approach is unclear. I spoke to their representatives and it seems unclear for them too.
Nothing seems to make sense in what they are doing in this vertical.
The only logical explanation seems that they are trying raise the valuation of the brand.
It could be the next WeWork.
[+] [-] perlgeek|6 years ago|reply
Trying to invest the rest of the Vision Fund v1, so that he can raise Vision Fund v2.
[+] [-] wczekalski|6 years ago|reply
[1] (from Wikipedia) Chamath Palihapitiya an is a venture capitalist and the founder and CEO of Social Capital. Palihapitiya was an early senior executive at Facebook, joining the company in 2007 and leaving in 2011. He is a minority stakeholder and board member of the Golden State Warriors.
[+] [-] dboreham|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackmorris|6 years ago|reply
There is less money available now for independent work than there was in the 80s and 90s because we have to work so hard at consulting just to survive. There have been few raises in any industry (the starting wage for an engineer in 2000 was $60,000 per year) but housing and medical costs are many times higher than they were. Millions (yes millions) of the brightest minds of a generation are underemployed in sweatshops, call centers and IT. Even working full time, it can take several years to even save $10,000. Much less reach a level of spirituality that allows one to rise above the waste of life that is the working world today, and build inventions that could substantially raise the quality of life for everyone. Work is now the opposite of progress, not its source.
Meanwhile banks give millions or even billions of dollars to corporations making nebulous claims about how to turn the most promising technologies into profitable returns. When a couple of people in a garage somewhere could do the same thing for 1/1,000 or 1/1,000,000 of the money. Imagining what tens of thousands of those teams with $100,000 could do in medicine, alternative energy, sustainability.. the list goes on and on.
Concerns like this are beginning to dominate my psyche to the point where I'm not sure I want to be in tech anymore. I have serious doubts about where all of this is going. Where are the examples of cooperation? Of steadily increasing personal wealth with simultaneous reduction in work (also known as real technology)? Where are the examples of tech billionaires making it and working to make that possible for all the rest who failed?
My greatest concern today is that speaking the truth is now viewed as being negative.
So just be mindful in these times and don't dwell too much on the truth. I think it's more useful to imagine a new truth that transcends the boundaries placed in front of us. That's how technology began.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
[+] [-] Denzel|6 years ago|reply
> Concerns like this are beginning to dominate my psyche to the point where I'm not sure I want to be in tech anymore.
That’s a part of the problem. People, like you, that consider these questions and would like to make positive a difference, give up.
Because the proposition is an ambiguous long-term play where you could spend a lifetime trying to solve it with little to no results at the end. If these issues are important to you, then wouldn’t it be worth it though?
You’ll have no better opportunity to fix this than by being in the position you’re in now. Which is, an “insider”, that can easily command $100-300K salary+stock that can readily be invested in many of your own ideas and businesses in a bid to ratchet your liquid capital up to >$10M. This capital can then be used to propel you on to >$100M or >$1B or wherever you think is the best point to make a difference in the problems you’re seeing.
You’re only two hops away from making a difference. As opposed to people that are scraping by on $20-60K a year with little to no savings and thus no resources or time to dedicate to more self-actualized pursuits. They’re four to five hops away.
Each hop probably carries 5-7 years worth of effort plus potential risk of ruin.
Point being: don’t give up. Go make a difference in the problems you’re seeing.
[+] [-] jimiray|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sekasi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syndacks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kolbe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carrozo|6 years ago|reply
Hmmm.
[+] [-] castratikron|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chewz|6 years ago|reply
Softbank had been a little bit more creative then usual (arranging large loans to founders to lead another round of financing) I must admit.
At some point the music stops and then you have a quarter or two of really funny quarterly reports where everyone is taking all skeletons in the closet and repricing them down "due to unpredictable external factors like recession in Botswana or extreme solar activity". And then the game continues.
[+] [-] zby|6 years ago|reply
Journalists exaggerate as always - it is hard to get real info from mainstream press.
[+] [-] phire|6 years ago|reply
Not only is it legal, it's essentially legally required for companies to track the changes in the value of their assets.
It matters more in the downward direction, a company has to know when they are insolvent (owe more money than assets they hold) because they are required to file for bankruptcy. Value of an asset goes down, they need to update the books and make sure they don't have too much debt.
The only real issue, are the valuations accurate? If they're not, then it might be accounting fraud.
[+] [-] FBISurveillance|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|6 years ago|reply
(when you see the previous lead do another round it can be at the same valuation which isn’t quite the same thing)
[+] [-] Akababa|6 years ago|reply
> A third of the way into the presentation, Son interrupted to say he wanted to put in $1 billion. A few minutes later, Son suggested $2 billion. Turning to the roomful of SoftBank managers, Son said this was the kind of AI company he’d been looking for. “Why are you only telling me about them now?” he asked, according to one person in the room.
This sounds more like an episode of Dragon's Den than a firm responsible for billions of dollars of investors' money. Doesn't quite inspire confidence...
[+] [-] chance_state|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brightrooms|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|6 years ago|reply
Even in this article, WeWork’s $7.8bn expected valuation is quoted unadorned. It’s a number that was derived by the same people and processes as the $47bn, yet one is ridiculed and the other presented as fact.
[+] [-] code4tee|6 years ago|reply
What we’re seeing unfolding now in the market isn’t a bubble per say but it is the market asserting that revenue matters. Profit matters. Real business plans based on reality matter. Ultimately that’s a very good thing for the innovation industry but things are going to get real ugly for these upside down companies.
[+] [-] hughpeters|6 years ago|reply
A high private valuation alone is not an accomplishment. While revenue growth, happy customers and a clear path to profitability are accomplishments worth celebrating. Hopefully after this SoftBank fiasco more startups and VCs will focus on fundamentals more than jaw dropping valuations.
[+] [-] t_mann|6 years ago|reply
According to a recent article in the Economist, SoftBank encourages its own employees to do the same with SoftBank shares. There is a chance that things go well and they will look like geniusses (like Michael Dell who took his company private in 2013 and returned to markets last year). If things don’t go well, however, they’ll become a case study for Business Schools on business practices to avoid.
[+] [-] alexnewman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hogFeast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chewz|6 years ago|reply
Startup: Sure.
SoftBank: Here you go. Would you like some more at a $20 billion valuation?
Startup: Sure.
SoftBank: Here you go. How about a $40 billion valuation?
Startup: This is dumb but it’s not like we’re going to say no.
SoftBank: Here you go.
Startup: Thanks brb buying a yacht.
SoftBank: Our mark-to-market investment returns are tremendous, we must be good at this.
If SoftBank keeps throwing cash at startups like WeWork, the numbers will start to lose their meaning. [June 14, 2018] - Matt Levine
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-14/softba...
[+] [-] helltone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fogetti|6 years ago|reply
Seriously??? Who, even with half a brain could not understand that that's how venture capital works by definition???
[+] [-] etblg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bvda|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dmode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|6 years ago|reply
You know what really offsets bad news? Having your hooks deep into the economies of powerful countries to buy their tacit approval of whatever you do.
[+] [-] claudeganon|6 years ago|reply