The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 73 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Claure: I Invested $150M Into FTX at SoftBank Due to FOMO
“So I invested hundred and fifty million dollars on FTX, which I mean, apologies to SoftBank, because I should have never made that investment, but it's probably one decision that has changed my life forever. I'm never going to invest in something that I don't …”
US government owns 10% of Intel, Nvidia and SoftBank 5% each
“American government owns 10% of Intel. Nvidia and SoftBank own five percent each.”
O'Driscoll: Tiger Global and SoftBank are shadows of their former selves
“Tiger's the obvious example. Now, they're still around, but a shadow of their former selves. Their quote unquote relevance in 2021 meant that they saw every deal that year, but they picked badly, so they got sent home. Same thing with SoftBank.”
Lessin: Venture fund paper markups are irrelevant and often negative signals
“I know full well, I know this is an investor. That the marks that you made up or the marks of SoftBank listed something somewhere are completely irrelevant. In fact, the negative signal in a lot of cases. So like the marks are irrelevant and stupid.”
O'Driscoll: Tiger Global and SoftBank are out of the venture game
“I mean, the big, I mean, the big momentum, the two biggest momentum players Of the last decade, Tiger and SoftBank are already out of the game.”
Blomfield: SoftBank's London team is arrogant and unwelcome on cap tables
“Probably SoftBank. I had a very unpleasant experience with the SoftBank London team. Just a bunch of pretty arrogant, like, Deutsche Bank traders turned venture capital investors. They were not fun at all.”
Suster: SoftBank, Tiger, Coatue, and Insight marked 60% of 2021-2022 unicorns
“Of the 1260% were marked by four firms, ok? SoftBank, Tiger, Coachu, and Insight.”
Wagner: SoftBank and mega-funds pollute good startup opportunities with excess capital
“There's certainly lots of otherwise good opportunities that have been polluted or dragged down by, you know, whatever soft bank showing up, and, you know, or any other number of people that, that we can name”
Gerstner: Venture capital funds of $10B or more cannot generate alpha
“Deploying a ten billion dollar fund or, God forbid, a fifty billion or a hundred billion dollar fund like Masa tried to do, right? You already know you will not generate alpha in that. You are getting the beta of the global tech industry when you're investing …”
Chris Sacca calls SoftBank "value destructive" in the venture capital industry
“But I think SoftBank is just value destructive, and it drives me fucking crazy.”
Sacca calls SoftBank value destructive
“I think SoftBank is just value destructive, and it drives me fucking crazy.”
Claure: SoftBank disrupted venture capital just like Uber disrupted taxi drivers
“The same way Uber disrupted the taxi drivers, we disrupted the venture capital industry. While people used to write these small checks, we suddenly showed up with a hundred billion dollars, and we disrupted the way venture capital works today, and therefore, w…”
Claure: Tiger Global replicated SoftBank's model, forcing faster dealmaking
“Tiger basically has replicated the SoftBank model, and there's nothing magical about what they're doing, and it's great, because what Tiger does, it forces my teams to make quicker decisions now.”
Petersen: SoftBank led Flexport's $1B round and urged undercutting rivals by 10%
“Yeah, well, they led the round of a billion, yeah. And he was like, whatever the price of freight is, you'd just be 10% cheaper than everybody, and then if someone matches you, you'd just be 10% cheaper than that, which is like a terrible strategy. I did not d…”
O'Driscoll: SoftBank is 1.5x to 2x levered, threatening equity in downturn
“It's around two X levered, right? One and a half to two X levered in terms of equity, right? What that means is a 30, 40% decline, you know, wipes them out.”
O'Driscoll: SoftBank proved money alone cannot make market winners
“You know, soft bank proved to everyone's complete satisfaction, right? That money alone cannot make winners, right? And which is very kind of them to run that economic experiment and, you know, prove the negative.”
O'Driscoll: Sequoia was right on Klarna at $6B; SoftBank wrong at $45B
“The guys who priced it at six billion were right. And the guys, which is Sequoia and the guys who priced it at forty five billion were wrong, which is SoftBank.”
O'Driscoll: SoftBank's Klarna shares will trade at 30-40 cents on dollar
“They just overpaid and they're going to get converted and they're going to trade at 30, 40 cents of what they originally paid.”
Airwallex rejected SoftBank's proposal for an $8B valuation round in 2021
“Like, then you raise, like, three rounds, and end of the twenty-twenty-one, SoftBank was talking to me about, you know, leading an eight billion dollar round, and obviously we didn't, you know, entertain that conversation.”
Pishevar: Kalanick and Michael initiated SoftBank's $12B Uber deal
“So the SoftBank conversations, ironically, Travis and Emil started those conversations, the ultimate twelve billion dollar investment from SoftBank Vision Fund.”
Lemkin: Inside VC Funds Are Flooding High-Growth Portfolio Companies With Unprecedented Capital
“Anyone in my portfolio that is growing quickly, the insiders flood it with capital, flood it with flood it with capital in a way I've never seen in my whole career flood. Everyone used to be a risk averse and then they wanted tiger to do it and they wanted sof…”
Arora: SoftBank's Masayoshi Son is a Genius Whose Risk Appetite Hasn't Aged
“I mean, if you look at Masa, he's one of the geniuses of our times, where he's one of the very few people in the world. His risk appetite hasn't changed as he ages.”
Claure: Three of Uber's Top Five Global Cities Were in LatAm
“When we were investors in Uber, you know, we had to keep it a secret that after New York, three of the top five cities were Latin American cities.”
Nyatta: SoftBank Evaluated OpenAI Around 2017 but Passed on Investing
“So when we were at SoftBank in 2017, I think thereabouts, MASA, correctly, was all over AI, and the team was small enough that we were all focused on the topic and looking around at what was interesting and being built in the world of AI, and we came across Op…”
Mohnot: SoftBank made incredibly poor decisions pouring capital into unready companies
“SoftBank, I think, is just really tough. Like, they made just a ton of incredibly poor decisions, poured a ton of money into bad companies, and they really sort of, like, We talked about five on 25. For them, it's more like 500 on 2.5 for a company that was no…”
Sacca: Uber's IPO would have gone differently without SoftBank's DoorDash funding
“Uber's IPO would have gone very differently if they hadn't funded DoorDash.”
Claure: SoftBank constructs Chinese walls when portfolio companies become direct competitors
“What we do at that point in time is we basically split the responsibilities within investment partners. We build these Chinese walls to make sure nobody except me can see what they're doing, and we're very careful in information sharing.”
Claure: SoftBank tests founder execution, not business models, in LATAM
“And to be fair, we have a competitive advantage. And that's the fact that we have seen these business models being deployed in China and India and the US. So when companies shop in Latin America with a similar business model, we don't need to test whether the …”
Claure: SoftBank produced 22 Latin American unicorns in one year
“We have produced, I think, a total of 22 unicorns last year, where before that, there were like one, so it's been amazing what I'm seeing in Latin America.”
Claure: SoftBank Will Take 8 LATAM Fund Companies Public by 2022
“My expectation is that we take at least eight of our companies public between this year and next year of the Latin American fund.”
Claure: VCs should provide full capital upfront to avoid continuous fundraising
“We're believers in you have to provide an entrepreneur the right amount of capital on day one. Entrepreneurs should not be focused half their time trying to raise money and half the time trying to run a business. So why not provide the right amount of capital …”
Mega-Checks Fail in Enterprise Cloud Because Growth Isn't Paid Acquisition
“They haven't done much in the enterprise cloud world, but I think there's a reason why, which is it's hard to put hundreds of millions of dollars into mid-stage companies. You run the risk of overfunding them, and it's not a paid acquisition game in the way th…”
DFJ's Total Dot-Com Losses Were Less Than SoftBank's Buy.com Loss
“If you aggregate all of our losses from every loser that we did in the internet, it was much less than soft bank lost in a single investment with buy.com.”
Elad Gil: SoftBank's impaired portfolio is delaying Vision Fund 2
“SoftBank would be an example of that, where they invested a very large amount of money In a number of companies, a number of those companies are now below where SoftBank has invested. A number are well above, like Gardent. And it looks like the Second Vision F…”
Elad Gil: SoftBank Has Had the Greatest Impact of All VC Mega Funds
“I think that the sort of mega fund that's mattered the most in terms of impact is probably SoftBank, Simply because at a hundred billion dollars, SoftBank is the equivalent of a hundred general catalysts or 12 Sequoia funds. So just the sheer scale of capital …”
O'Driscoll: SoftBank is funding OpenAI at $300B and $500B valuations simultaneously
“SoftBank is closing two separate deals right now. They're closing their roughly three hundred billion pre direct investment, and they're also doing a share buyback from exist from some existing employees of five hundred billion.”
Johannes Reck sold secondary equity during GetYourGuide's 2019 SoftBank round
“I did sell secondaries, thankfully in 2019 as part of the soft bank round which actually was very helpful.”
Lemkin: Momentum funds like Tiger and SoftBank will return when multiples spike
“I just think when those things are going to die and then when Multiples get insane again. They'll all reappear. They're just high multiple vehicles, right?”
Claure: Passing on Nubank early due to valuation was a mistake
“I passed on Nubank because of the price at the beginning when we started the fund, and it was the wrong decision because the opportunity was huge. Now I made that mistake. I said, oh my God, it's too expensive. But I didn't realize that the size of the pie was…”
Claure: SoftBank aims to deploy $5B annually in Latin America
“Well, you know, if we can continue to do this, my goal would be to invest five billion dollars a year in the foreseeable future.”
Claure: SoftBank deploys $40B to $50B annually
“We're investing 40 to fifty billion dollars a year.”
Claure regrets SoftBank missing major MercadoLibre investment in 2018
“So MercadoLibre, in July, 2018, the value was significantly less, and I didn't push mass enough for us to make an enormous play with MercadoLibre, because I didn't truly understand investing back then.”
Claure: SoftBank uses Univision TV ads to accelerate fintech portfolio growth
“We're using that company to put ads in traditional TV to help people to download the app of our fintech companies and making our fintech companies explode.”
Claure: SoftBank Passed on Nubank Early On Due to High Price
“I passed on Nubank because of the price at the beginning when we started the fund, and it was the wrong decision because the opportunity was huge.”
Claure: SoftBank backs over 84% of Latin American unicorns
“I was looking at the market share of unicorns that we have in Latin America. It's over 84% of companies”
Masayoshi Son meets every founder before SoftBank makes an investment
“Masa meets with every single entrepreneur and management team before we make an investment.”