Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road • Hacker News Board

Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road

#51

Post by tinkerteller » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 6:53 AM UTC

testb wrote: post #3

Animats wrote: post #2

It has already committed $65 billion to acquire big stakes in Uber, WeWork, Slack, and GM Cruise. Uber and WeWork[1] are money drains buying market share. GM Cruise is a "fake it til you make it" operation. Is Softbank the biggest dumb money operation of all time? (WeWork is strange. Most real estate businesses buy property and rent it out. WeWork rents property long term and rents it out short term.) [1] https://new…

What makes you say Cruise is faking? The disengagement data would suggest they're the most viable self-driving car venture behind Waymo.

Cruise has made admirable progress but with 1/3rd miles and infrastructure they are way behind Waymo. Other players have basically existed the endeavour more or less so they do get to be at #2.

Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road

#52

Post by sytelus » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 7:14 AM UTC

I have a feeling that SoftBank would be $1 trillion organization by the end of 2030. Let me explain why. The entire magic here lies in the ability to through lots and lots of arrows and this ability is gained only when you have reached a critical mass in terms of fund size. As an example, here is YC facts:

YC started in: 2005

Number of companies funded (2017): 1,450

Approximate investment: $200M

Valuation of all companies: $80B

People here will be quick to point out that there is a difference between valuation and realized cash. Also that there is pg magic that is missing in other funds. For the first objection, let’s cut down valuation to just 25%of what they claim, ie, $20B. For the second objection, I had say there have been couple of semi-scientific studies that pointed out that YC is doing just 10-20% better than other funds of same size and that predicting startup success if futile and that your only real recourse is to have lots of arrows.

So timided down YC data suggests that if you have fund of certain critical size you can ignite the chain reaction and watch the magic of compounded growth. YC has showed approximately 100X return over 10 years. There is no other financial vehicle that does this.

Re: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100B Blitz on Sand Hill Road

#53

Post by sytelus » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 7:36 AM UTC

rockinghigh wrote: post #48

adventured wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further to that point, Saudi Arabia's population is expanding very rapidly, putting immense strain on those limited resources (which have to be used to continually pacify the population). From 10m people in 1980, to 33m today.

That's only 3% growth per year.

Population growth in India/China when govt didn’t do any restrictions was ~2.5%. These days it has reduced to around 1.5%. USA is at 0.7%.

In other words 3% is very likely among the highest rate human population can grow with real-world constraints.