Comment by EFreethought
3 months ago
Son made most of his money with Alibaba. I think he made 500x or 1,000x his original investment. Absolutely crazy.
Almost everything he has done since then has lost money. When I read that he is investing in something, I just assume it will end badly.
Isn't that basically the venture capital model, though? Your winners go many times X, and the losers become worthless.
Mayoshi has made a lot of bets since Alibaba. Almost all of them have tanked. Over this amount of time and bets, he should have more winners.
About 7 or 8 years ago I worked at a startup which got money from Softbank / Masayoshi Son. Our founder and our CTO went to meet him in LA IIRC to pitch.
They came back telling us he was basically asleep during the pitch meeting which was scheduled for only 10 minutes anyway.
Our business/product really had no chance of succeeding at this point and most knew it. We got some money from Softbank anyway - forgot how much. Our management was basically laughing about how easy it was to get funding from Softbank.
I jumped ship a year later or so and that was good timing.
At some point, a good VC would have a second winner.
And if that is the VC model, then are the VCs smarter than everybody else?
This is one of my arguments that startups are mostly about luck - because smart people who are highly incentivised to pick wimmers, with all the data they need to pick winners, all the people and compute they need to pick winners, can't pick winners.
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VC is just gambling with some status and ecosystem participation.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/charlie-mung...
> At some point, a good VC would have a second winner.
but you don't make the same type of deduction for lottery winners - surely a good lottery number picker should get a second win sooner or later!
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