The Ledger
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Travis Kalanick reveals he rejected Masa Son's money for funding competitors
“I did not take money from Masa. So he begged me to take money for years, and we did not take it because he is a, he's a, what's the word I'm looking for? He's a promiscuous investor. So once he invests in you should probably count on him and using your informa…”
Sacks criticizes SoftBank for $500M seed checks into overvalued companies
“SoftBank is engaged in a style of investing that we would never engage in. It's absolutely Pathetical to the way that we invest, right? They're making five hundred million dollar seed investments in massively overvalued companies.”
Masa Son: Investors should scale fast-growing winners rather than fix mistakes
“Nikesh, you're spending too much time with the mistake. He said, if you go spend that time with a company that's growing it three times, they can grow it six times. We'll make our money up six times in that company instead of you trying to fix that from half b…”
David Friedberg: Startups where capital becomes the primary asset will fail
“And the problem in that model is that by giving you so much money, capital becomes your primary asset as a business. And capital needs to be the fuel that enables your assets as a business to accelerate. But as soon as capital itself becomes your primary asset…”
Rabois: Capital as the main tech driver has failed for 50 years
“Powering money into companies and hoping that money is the key asset and the key ingredient for success has been false in, in the history of technology for 50 years.”
Sacks: Tiger Global was the biggest VC winner by productizing late-stage funding
“In our world, the biggest winner was Tiger Global. They basically productize growth stage capital by far the biggest deployer of late stage funding. They productized it. So pretty much founders can just send their metrics on like a single sheet of paper and th…”
Friedberg: Zymergen raised $400M from SoftBank before disclosing zero revenue post-IPO
“Raised a four hundred million dollar round from SoftBank, took the company public. Then they go public, and a few weeks later, they're like, oh, wait, sorry, we don't actually have any product or any revenue.”
Friedberg: Climate infrastructure requires government funding, not venture capital
“And those infrastructure solutions, aren't going to get funded by SoftBank. And they're not going to get funded by Chamath. They're going to need to get funded by government type of dollars.”
Chamath: OpenAI funding rounds prior to $300B round included put options
“All of the rounds before the three hundred billion dollar round from SoftBank had essentially a feature where there was like a hard rate of return and the ability to put the stock back if they weren't able to do the conversion To a for-profit company, et ceter…”
Sacks: SoftBank Vision Fund writing $500M seed checks was bad strategy
“I don't think it was a great strategy to be pumping five hundred million dollar checks into what were effectively seed companies, like they were doing with the Vision Fund.”
Chamath: Over half of Vision Fund's Middle East capital is preferred equity
“More than half their investment is in preferred equity, which is effectively debt that pays a coupon.”
Masayoshi Son: SoftBank lost six trillion yen over two consecutive quarters
“So previous quarter, and this time quarter, consecutively, we made three trillion yen level of the loss. So in total, six trillion yen was made in the past six months.”
Friedberg: Zymergen sold for $300M after raising $1.5B
“Zymergen being acquired for three hundred million dollars comes off of them having raised a total of one and a half billion dollars of capital from many investors, including SoftBank and in their IPO, since they were founded in 2013.”
David Friedberg argues SoftBank incentivizes unnatural startup growth leading to subsequent shocks.
“SoftBank, as you guys, as we all know, creates a very strong incentive and capitalizes businesses to go after kind of ultra perhaps unnatural growth. And there's almost always shocks that occur after they do that.”
Arora: Masayoshi Son's risk appetite grew larger as he aged
“Masa is one of those people whose risk appetite grew as he grew older.”
Calacanis: SoftBank selling Uber stake to cover Didi losses
“SoftBank is clearing a bunch of its Uber position to cover their losses in DD.”
Travis Kalanick says Saudi Arabia invested $3.5B before the Vision Fund existed
“We did stuff with the Saudis, Before even Vision Fund existed, they stroked a three and a half billion dollar check when that was like the biggest thing that ever happened.”
Friedberg: SoftBank invested $16.9 billion total into WeWork in equity and debt
“SoftBank put in a total of 16.9 billion dollars in equity and debt.”
David Friedberg notes the SoftBank Vision Fund took a $32B write-down
“And in the fiscal year ending March, the Vision Fund alone took a thirty two billion dollar write down”