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 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Wolfe: SoftBank-funded unicorn capital is 'dead' and trapped under their control
“Many of these businesses either have commercial deals that are tied to them, or economic terms that are tied to them where the VCs or the entrepreneurs that might be celebrating, they just became a unicorn and are valued over a billion dollars and SoftBank jus…”
SoftBank threatened to fund Lyft if Uber rejected its investment offer
“And so it was negotiating a deal with SoftBank, who in classic SoftBank fashion was saying, either you take all of our money or we're going to go invest it in Lyft and kill you.”
Housenbold: SoftBank made roughly $12 billion in profit on DoorDash
“So for example, I put roughly six hundred million dollars into DoorDash and got a 17 or 18 X. My dear friend Pagemon at Pear put two million in and got like a 300 X. But the quantum of dollars, we made about twelve billion dollars in profit today on that inves…”
Inker: SoftBank's Vision Fund proved capital alone cannot buy market dominance
“I think one of the things we have seen in the, in some of the trials of what's gone on with the Vision Fund is this basic idea that, well, we can determine who is going to be the winner here by throwing a ton of money at one of the competitors. And assuming th…”
Hamed in 2018: The SoftBank Vision Fund has replaced the IPO
“And now we have the soft bank vision fund, which is like the replacement of the IPO, right? Like the goal used to be, I want to IPO my company. And now they're like, the goal is I want Masasan to like, give me more money than anyone could ever imagine.”
Carlyle, Hg Capital, and SoftBank Used NAV Loans for Distributions
“Carlyle, HG Capital, and SoftBank reportedly used NAV loans to distribute capital this year.”
Gilbert: Masayoshi Son realized private late-stage startups genuinely wanted billions
“That was a brilliant insight at the time that these people really do want billions of dollars while they're still private, and there's effective ways to deploy that.”
Housenbold: SoftBank passed on investing in Zoom at a $6 billion valuation
“I could tell you how I passed on Zoom at six billion dollars because I thought that was too expensive, or I passed on Procore.”
Housenbold: SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is funded entirely by SoftBank Group
“And in fact, that led Masa to decide that fund two is a sole LP fund. It's just SoftBank's money.”
Nubank Has 50M Customers and a $45B Valuation
“Nubank is the largest digital bank in the world with almost 50 million customers. It's now trading at a forty five billion dollar valuation. Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway actually invested in a private round and in the IPO. Sequoia, SoftBank are investors.”
Gilbert: Venture fund scaling follows a four-minute mile dynamic
“It is taken as the canonical wisdom that you couldn't possibly do this strategy, and then when someone does, all other strategies feel really tenuous and obsolete quickly.”
Housenbold: SoftBank Vision Fund 1 averaged $900 million per investment
“For us as late stage investors, where in fund one, our average investment was nine hundred million dollars.”
Housenbold in 2021: SPACs will replace late-stage growth venture rounds
“Over the intermediate term, my anticipation is that companies will now have greater choice if they want to raise a late stage growth round with someone like a soft bank or they want to tap the public markets. So it is in some way a form of substitution Of capi…”
Conflicting Incentives Severely Hinder Corporate Venture Capital Programs
“Institutionally it's hard from an incentives perspective to make these corporate venture capital firms work because you always have this tension between are we a strategic investor, are we a financial investor, and can we attract the right kinds of people inte…”
Housenbold: SoftBank Vision Fund 1 was backed by six limited partners
“In the Vision Fund one, we had six limited partners. One was SoftBank itself, so SoftBank's a big operating company, spits off a lot of free cash flow. The second was the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Saudi Arabia called PIF. The third was the Sovereign Wealth Fund…”
Housenbold: 13 of his 18 SoftBank investments were not actively fundraising
“And of the 18 investments I did, I think 13 of them were not fundraising when I put the money in.”
Housenbold: SoftBank was the largest shareholder in 17 of his 18 investments
“So at the vision fund, I've had the pleasure to take, I've done 18 investments, 17 of which we were the largest shareholder.”
Housenbold: SoftBank deployed $88 billion of Vision Fund 1's $100 billion
“We raised a hundred billion dollars and we deployed about eighty eight billion of that in fund one, held back some for follow ons.”
Housenbold: SoftBank met 600 global unicorns and invested in about 90
“When we got started, there was a stock of what I'll call pre-unicorn and unicorn companies, i.e., companies that are going through hyper growth that can use a hundred million dollars to three billion dollars of growth capital. And there were 600 of those aroun…”