Vision Fund

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The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

He also lost the support of his other big cheerleader at SoftBank. Colin Fan, the former Deutsche Bank executive, had been Greensill’s main point of contact at the Vision Fund from the outset. He represented the Vision Fund at Greensill Board meetings and was well known to Greensill’s senior management team. But his star was falling too. In addition to Greensill, he had overseen the Vision Fund’s investments in Fair and Chehaoduo, both of which Greensill had loaned money to. He was also the main Vision Fund executive responsible for Zume, an automated food delivery business that had pitched Masayoshi Son on the idea of using robots to make pizzas.

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But what I didn’t know was that Greensill was already deep into talks with the SoftBank Vision Fund, a mammoth $100 billion pool of investor cash tied to Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group. The Vision Fund was shaking up the rules when it came to investing in new tech companies. Its sheer size meant it could outbid just about anyone. And its core approach was to buy huge stakes in lots of fast-growing companies, knowing that some would be duds and some would pay off big time. Typically, they made decisions fast, and in poured the money. Vision Fund analysts had identified Greensill as a potential investment in early March and were already quickly moving towards a decision on whether to invest.

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The real celebrations were in Greensill’s offices across London on the Strand. In truth, I’d lost the race I didn’t know I had entered. SoftBank’s Vision Fund had wrapped up its incredibly fast due diligence process only a few days earlier. My victory lasted barely a week before Greensill announced it had secured a gargantuan $800 million investment from the Vision Fund. Later, Doran told colleagues that he was the most valuable employee at the firm because he had held back my story until after the Vision Fund was committed to Greensill. He compared himself to Hodor, a character in the HBO TV series Game of Thrones, who holds back a massive wooden door to prevent demons from getting through.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Masa himself had long dreamed of taking SoftBank private, freeing himself from the restrictions that came with being a public company. By lavishing the Vision Fund’s largesse upon start-ups, Masa believed that he was giving young companies “the gift of being private.” Because the Vision Fund’s investments often included large secondary share purchases, such as the $1.3 billion worth of WeWork stock that SoftBank and the Vision Fund bought from existing shareholders in 2017, early investors began describing the Vision Fund’s investments as a new kind of exit strategy: the “Masa-PO.” Over the summer of 2018, Masa began talking with Adam about bestowing such a gift. WeWork was already among the Vision Fund’s largest investments, but part of the fund’s conception was to pursue “blockbuster” deals that would pour not just billions but tens of billions of dollars into individual companies.

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In October, he had announced the launch of the Vision Fund, a $100 billion venture capital vehicle that was eighty times bigger than the record-setting $1.2 billion Masa had raised in 2000 and four times larger than any other fund in history. The Vision Fund’s limited partners included Foxconn, the government of Abu Dhabi, and Apple, which had so much cash on hand that there weren’t enough productive places to put it. Masa and SoftBank would choose the fund’s investments, and each of the limited partners would receive returns relative to the amount it had put in. The bulk of the Vision Fund was coming from the Saudi Arabian government.

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When an interviewer asked Masa whether it was true that he had persuaded bin Salman to invest $45 billion into the Vision Fund after a single hourlong meeting in Tokyo, Masa objected to the idea it would take him that long: “Forty-five minutes, $45 billion—one billion dollars per minute.” The Vision Fund, which initially had the code name Project Crystal Ball, was meant to supercharge the work of Masa’s three-hundred-year plan. He believed society was approaching the singularity, when artificial intelligence would become so advanced that humans and machines would be indistinguishable. This shift could be accelerated, and monetized, with enough capital, and the Vision Fund had more money than most venture capitalists would be trusted to invest in their lifetimes.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Son and Rajeev Misra—head of the Vision Fund—wouldn’t show much in the way of specific figures, and PIF’s head, Yasir al-Rumayyan, would rarely ask follow-up questions. Because most of SoftBank’s investments were private, it was hard for PIF’s team to do its own work. The new employees quickly inferred that al-Rumayyan wasn’t interested in pointed questions from them about the Vision Fund. Further raising eyebrows at the fund was a move by SoftBank to pour much of the Vision Fund into ride-hailing companies around the world. PIF had already put $3.5 billion into Uber and didn’t want the Vision Fund to dive further into the same industry.

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One after another—the dog-walking app Wag, the car rental company Fair, the hotel company OYO—quickly fell under the microscope of a press that had grown far more skeptical of vision-heavy startups than a few years earlier. The original $100 billion Vision Fund had so far found few standout stars, but had a roster of duds. The biggest investments went into ride hailing—where valuations were far lower than a year earlier—and autonomous driving, where a frenzy had cooled. The onetime dream of turning the fund into a $1 trillion home run now seemed a distant memory. WeWork and the Vision Fund’s promise were unraveling at the very time that Son was trying to raise a second, even larger Vision Fund. This was to be Son’s future—a whole fleet of Vision Funds that would put him in charge of the largest sums ever raised—to be the kingmaker for all of tech.

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Actually converting those pledges into real money was proving harder than expected. The first Vision Fund had no obvious breakout successes so far, despite investing almost $80 billion. Meanwhile, numerous other high-profile companies in the fund like Uber and the semiconductor company Arm Holdings were significantly lagging behind expectations. Still, Son decided to forge ahead with the second fund. To drum up interest from others, he began crisscrossing the globe trying to persuade his existing investors in the first Vision Fund to kick in even more for Vision Fund 2. He once again turned to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Abu Dhabi fund Mubadala, which together had given him $60 billion for the first fund, asking if they would put in money again.

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

Son would comment that the most important thing with these advances was their capacity for making major contributions to the future of humankind. Elsewhere in his comments he would state that the seeds sown with the SoftBank Vision Fund were starting to sprout and bear fruit. As much as Son had previously stated the SoftBank Group was his goose laying golden eggs, by December 2020 this was undoubtedly the case. The SoftBank Vision Fund 1 counted 92 companies in its portfolio (inclusive of companies disposed of), the SoftBank Vision Fund 2 counted 39 companies in its portfolio (including companies where investments were in the pipeline but had not been completed) and the Latin American Fund counted 33 companies in its portfolio (including limited partnership investments), giving a total of 164 companies.

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And I know Rajeev Misra has been criticised in some quarters, but were it not for him I do not think the SoftBank Vision Fund would have ever been set up. I appreciate his hard work.’ SoftBank family companies such as Vir Biotechnology (in the US), Coupang (a Korean e-commerce company), Grab (a delivery app company based out of Singapore) and Uber are all showing signs of growth and none of them would be where they are now had it not been for Vision Fund investment during the early stages of their existence. ‘I think the reason why Vision Fund companies have grown as much as they have done is because of the shift Rajeev has put in; furthermore, with respect to raising investment funds and any other number of aspects Vision Fund employees and management have done a good job.’

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Furthermore, with its ‘Beyond Carrier’ scheme launching, SoftBank were creating even more synergy. PayPay, a smartphone payment service and SoftBank Vision Fund portfolio company, entered into a partnership with Paytm, the largest payment service in India, for the purposes of using its technology to help develop its own smartphone payment services in Japan and expand its service offering. There was only one thought in Son’s mind, however: ‘AI is the most incredible thing humans have ever made and I am fully prepared to throw everything I’ve got behind it.’ Chapter 36 Vision Fund The SoftBank Group announced their settlement of accounts for March 2017 on 10 May of the same year; operating profit had increased by 12.9 per cent compared to the previous period to 1.26 trillion yen.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Whether you are one of those people, or have already caught the “longevity virus,” The Science and Technology of Growing Young is going to open your mind to just how real and close at hand the possibility of defeating death really is! Most other books on longevity look at this field through the lens of a technologist, a scientist, or a medical doctor. This is the first book written for a broad audience by an investor-author in touch with so many companies on the edge of longevity science. Through his Longevity Vision Fund, Sergey has unique access to hundreds of start-ups on the verge of the latest longevity breakthroughs. In this book, Sergey now shares this firsthand knowledge of these companies with you. This includes the personal stories of brilliant pioneers driving innovation forward, and those of the patients benefiting from these amazing new technologies.

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This latest XPRIZE will attract the best and brightest entrepreneurs and help bring forth the scientific breakthroughs necessary to forge longer, healthier, more equal, and more progressive lives. Sergey is a good friend, thought partner, and a welcome addition to the ever-growing community of longevity visionaries. With his contributions to the Age Reversal XPRIZE, his Longevity Vision Fund, his Longevity @ Work initiative, and now this book, Sergey joins us in our mission to make this world a better place. The future is faster—and better—than you ever thought it was. Whether you are new to the longevity universe or an old hand looking for the groundbreaking innovations, we are super-excited to introduce you to The Science and Technology of Growing Young.

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Instead, we will see people in the not-very-distant future living to 100, 150, or 200 years of age, and even longer than that, while staying healthy, vigorous, and mentally adept. If that sounds crazy, read on. Entrepreneur David Gobel, together with the father of biogerontology (and scientific advisor to my Longevity Vision Fund), Aubrey de Grey, are founders of the not-for-profit Methuselah Foundation, whose goal is to “make ninety the new fifty by 2030.” David and Aubrey came up with the longevity escape velocity model of life expectancy, which predicts that humans will be able to live indefinitely when advances in medicine and technology outpace the passage of time.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

Now he had more financial firepower than just about anyone on earth and a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants boss who was happy to make multi-billion-dollar investments with a quick meeting and a “gut instinct.” The only problem was that the Vision Fund had about twenty employees and no investment procedures or compliance apparatus. Even worse, though it had already started investing money, it had to temporarily hold money on SoftBank’s balance sheet while the fund’s team was getting built up. The team members at PIF were skeptical of the Vision Fund their boss had signed on to, but they were in no position to oppose it. Instead, they started pushing for details and proof the firm was ready to accept so much cash. The official closing for the Vision Fund was still months away, but on another visit by Masayoshi, Nizar, and Rajeev to Riyadh, the prince appeared concerned.

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Rumayyan said the sovereign wealth fund aimed to have $2 trillion in investments, many of them overseas, by 2030. Branson got a $1 billion commitment for the parent of his space tourism company Virgin Galactic. Blackstone already had a commitment of $20 billion for an investment fund, and the Vision Fund was already off the ground with $40 billion from Saudi Arabia. Rajeev Misra, head of the Vision Fund, strutted around the Ritz-Carlton, holding meetings in Masayoshi Son’s huge suite and vaping nonstop. Some international investors pledged to invest money in the kingdom, though they were mainly affiliated with countries or companies looking to build favor with the crown prince.

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Cast of Characters The Al Saud King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the kingdom’s founder and father of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, Mohammed’s younger brother and former ambassador to the United States Sultana bint Turki Al Sudairi, King Salman’s first wife Fahdah bint Falah al-Hithlain, King Salman’s third wife and mother of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and briefly heir apparent Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Al Saud, King Salman’s nephew and a longtime antiterrorism official close to the US government King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and predecessor Prince Miteb bin Abdullah Al Saud, King Abdullah’s son and former chief of the Saudi Arabia National Guard Prince Turki bin Abdullah Al Saud, the seventh son of King Abdullah Prince Badr bin Farhan Al Saud, a prince from a distant branch of the family, minister of culture, and a longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman Prince Abdullah bin Bandar Al Saud, another prince and longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman and head of the National Guard Prince Sultan bin Turki Al Saud, the son of one of King Salman’s brothers, and an outspoken prince whose criticisms got him into trouble with more powerful members of the family The Palace Khalid al-Tuwaijri, the head of King Abdullah’s Royal Court Mohammed al-Tobaishi, King Abdullah’s chief of protocol Rakan bin Mohammed al-Tobaishi, Mohammed bin Salman’s protocol chief and the son of Mohammed al-Tobaishi The MBS Entourage Bader al-Asaker, a longtime associate of Mohammed who runs his private foundation Saud al-Qahtani, an advisor to Mohammed who specializes in quashing dissent Turki Al Sheikh, a longtime companion of Mohammed who has brought foreign sports and entertainment events to Saudi Arabia The Region Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi Tahnoon bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi national security advisor Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, former emir of Qatar Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of Egypt Saad Hariri, prime minister of Lebanon Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president of Turkey Residents of the Ritz Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, a cousin of Mohammed and Saudi Arabia’s most prominent international businessman Adel Fakeih, a Saudi businessman who became minister of economy and planning Hani Khoja, a Saudi management consultant Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, a Saudi businessman with holdings in Ethiopia Ali al-Qahtani, a general Bakr bin Laden, scion of the bin Laden construction family The Critics Jamal Khashoggi, newspaper columnist with a long history of working for and sometimes criticizing the Saudi government Omar Abdulaziz, Canada-based dissident who criticizes Saudi leadership in online videos Loujain al-Hathloul, women’s rights activist who violated Saudi law by trying to drive into the kingdom from the United Arab Emirates The US Government President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an advisor to the president Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil, later US secretary of state The Businessmen Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com David Pecker, CEO of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer Ari Emanuel, Hollywood agent and cofounder of Endeavor talent agency Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese tech investor SoftBank Rajeev Misra, head of SoftBank’s Vision Fund Nizar al-Bassam, Saudi deal maker and a former international banker Kacy Grine, independent banker and confidant of Alwaleed bin Talal A note on naming: In the Saudi convention, a man is identified through a patrilineal naming system. Mohammed bin Salman means Mohammed, son of Salman. His father is Salman bin Abdulaziz, since his father is Abdulaziz bin Saud (known as Ibn Saud), the founder of the current Al Saud dynasty.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia 1880–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 1. 175companies merely joined forces: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 172. 175the most powerful, reviled traction monopoly: Walt Crowley, “City Light’s Birth and Seattle’s Early Power Struggles, 1886–1950,” History Link, April 26, 2000, https://www.historylink.org/File/2318. 175enjoyed decades of unrivaled power: Owain James, “We Miss Streetcars’ Frequent and Reliable Service, Not Streetcars Themselves,” Mobility Lab, April 17, 2019, https://mobilitylab.org/2019/04/17/we-miss-streetcars-frequent-and-reliable-service-not-streetcars-themselves/; combination of technological change and federal intervention: “Jersey Trolley Merger,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 1905, 2. 176$100 billion Vision Fund: Katrina Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person in Silicon Valley,” Fast Company, January 14, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90285552/the-most-powerful-person-in-silicon-valley. 176its total commitment to some $9 billion: Pavel Alpeyev, Jie Ma, and Won Jae Ko, “Taxi-Hailing Apps Take Root in Japan as SoftBank, Didi Join Fray,” Bloomberg, July 19, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/softbank-didi-to-roll-out-taxi-hailing-business-in-japan. 177$2 billion into Singapore-based Grab: Yoolim Lee, “Grab Vanquishes Uber with Local Strategy, Billions from SoftBank,” Bloomberg, March 26, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/grab-vanquishes-uber-with-local-strategy-billions-from-softbank. 177Ola downloaded $2 billion: Saritha Rai, “India’s Ola Raises $2 Billion from SoftBank, Tencent,” Bloomberg, October 2, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/india-s-ola-is-said-to-raise-2-billion-from-softbank-tencent. 17715 percent stake in Uber: Alison Griswold, “SoftBank—not Uber—Is the Real King of Ride-Hailing,” Quartz, January 23, 2018, https://qz.com/1187144/softbank-not-uber-is-the-real-king-of-ride-hailing/. 177Uber picked off Dubai-based Careem: Adam Satariano, “This Estonian Start-Up Has Become a Thorn in Uber’s Side,” New York Times, April 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/technology/bolt-taxify-uber-lyft.html. 177The damage to consumers: Justina Lee, “Singapore Fine Is ‘Minor Bump’ in Grab’s Ride-Hailing Dominance,” Nikkei Asian Review, September 25, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Sharing-Economy/Singapore-fine-is-minor-bump-in-Grab-s-ride-hailing-dominance. 177Grab cornered more than 80 percent: Ardhana Aravindan, “Singapore Fines Grab and Uber, Imposes Measures to Open Up Market,” Reuters, September 23, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-singapore/singapore-fines-grab-and-uber-imposes-measures-to-open-up-market-idUSKCN1M406J. 177all launched antitrust investigations: Mai Nguyen, “Vietnam Says Eyeing Formal Antitrust Probe into Uber-Grab Deal,” Reuters, May 16, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-vietnam-idUSKCN1IH0XNiAikaRey, “Antitrust Watchdog Fines Grab P16 Million over Uber Deal,” Rappler, October 17, 2018, https://www.rappler.com/business/214502-philippine-competition-commission-fines-grab-philippines-over-uber-deal; Yoolim Lee, “Singapore Watchdog Fines Uber, Grab $9.5 Million over Merger,” Bloomberg, September 24, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/singapore-fines-uber-grab-s-13-million-for-merger-infringement. 177another fare-slashing battle with Ola: “Steering Group: A Bold Scheme to Dominate Ride-Hailing,” The Economist, May 10, 2018, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/10/a-bold-scheme-to-dominate-ride-hailing. 177“SoftBank is playing the ride-hailing”: Alison Griswold, “Softbank Has Spread Its Ride-Hailing Bets and Didi Looks Like an Early Win,” Quartz, April 24, 2018, https://qz.com/1261177/softbanks-winner-in-ride-hailing-is-chinas-didi-chuxing-not-uber/. 177“driver incentives, passenger discounts”: Tim O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem with Silicon Valley’s Favorite Growth Strategy,” Quartz, February 5, 2019, https://qz.com/1540608/the-problem-with-silicon-valleys-obsession-with-blitzscaling-growth/. 178“locked in a capital-fueled deathmatch”: O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem.” 178The Vision Fund’s biggest investor: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178the proceeds of an earlier liquidation: Catherine Shu, “Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Fund Will Also Invest $45B in SoftBank’s Second Vision Fund,” Tech-Crunch, October 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/07/saudi-arabias-sovereign-fund-will-also-invest-45b-in-softbanks-second-vision-fund/. 178Uber’s multi-billion-dollar quarterly losses: “Aramco Value to Top $2 Trillion, Less Than 5 Percent to Be Sold, Says Prince,” Reuters, April 25, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-plan-aramco-idUSKCN0XM16M. 178the House of Saud: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178thwart municipal officials’ attempts at enforcement: Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 179“Even if that means paying money”: Dara Khosrowshahi, “The Campaign for Sustainable Mobility,” Uber, September 26, 2018, https://www.uber.com/newsroom/campaign-sustainable-mobility/. 180Five-cent nickel fares: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 174–75. 180cities . . . grant a ride-hail monopoly: “Free Exchange: The Market for Driverless Cars Will Head towards Monopoly,” The Economist, June 7, 2018, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/06/07/the-market-for-driverless-cars-will-head-towards-monopoly. 180“corrupt and contented”: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 177. 180Jay Gould’s Manhattan Railway Company: Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Live-right, 2014), 135. 180took over Puget Sound’s streetcar: Crowley, “City Light’s Birth.” 181Public transit was the competition: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement under the Securities Act of 1933: Uber Technologies, April 11, 2019, 25, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm#toc. 181deploy predatory pricing: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement. 182“have been created based on cash flows”: “Asset-Backed Security,” Investo-pedia, accessed December 7, 2018, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset-backedsecurity.asp. 183Amazon’s body-tracking technology: “The Learning Machine: Amazon’s Empire Rests on its Low-Key Approach to AI,” The Economist, April 11, 2019, https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/13/amazons-empire-rests-on-its-low-key-approach-to-ai. 8.

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From its humble beginnings as a computer parts store, SoftBank has grown into the world’s largest technology investor. The group’s $100 billion Vision Fund, launched in 2017, wields a purse that is itself bigger than the entire venture-capital industry, which invests a mere $70 billion annually worldwide. Staking this purse on young companies that are exploiting artificial intelligence to reorganize big chunks of the physical world, SoftBank’s investments span the gamut of city-building sectors—real estate, hospitality, food, and retail. But the first target for world domination—and the key to it all—is transportation. Rarely has so much money moved so fast. The Vision Fund launched in May 2017, a few days after SoftBank announced its second infusion of cash into Chinese ride-hail giant Didi.

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.,” Robotics Business Review, accessed February 26, 2019, https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/listing/starship-technologies/. 125deskside delivery allowed workers to skip: “Starship Technologies Launches Commercial Rollout of Autonomous Delivery,” Starship, April 30, 2018, https://www.starship.xyz/press_releases/2708/. 125replacing a swarm of dirty, noisy, and often dangerous delivery trucks: “The Future of Moving Things,” IDEO, accessed June 11, 2018, https://automobility.ideo.com/moving-things/a-new-familiar-sight. 125raised $940 million in venture funding: Mary Ann Azevedo, “Nuro Raises $940M from SoftBank Vision Fund for Robot Delivery,” Crunchbase, February 11, 2019, https://news.crunchbase.com/news/nuro-raises-940m-from-softbank-vision-fund-for-robot-delivery/. 125Toyota’s mule, the e-Palette: Andrew J. Hawkins, “Toyota’s ‘e-Palette’ Is a Weird, Self-Driving Modular Store on Wheels,” The Verge, January 8, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/8/16863092/toyota-e-palette-self-driving-car-ev-ces-2018. 125The Puppy 1, made in China, even balances: Greg Nichols, “Behold, the Self-Driving Suitcase,” ZDNet, February 7, 2018, https://www.zdnet.com/article/behold-the-self-driving-suitcase/. 125a future for its Sprinter delivery vans: “Mercedes-Benz Vans Invests in Starship Technologies, the World’s Leading Manufacturer of Delivery Robots,” Daimler, January 13, 2017, https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/ko/en/15274799. 126Roadie, for instance, brokers shipments of bulky, slightly: Adele Peters, “This Package Rideshare App Pays to Use Your Empty Trunk,” Fast Company, February 5, 2015, https://www.fastcompany.com/3041884/this-package-rideshare-app-pays-to-use-your-empty-trunk. 127claims to have a footprint larger than Amazon Prime: “Roadie: About Us,” Roadie, accessed June 12, 2018, https://www.roadie.com/about. 127a cheaper, better, and bigger alternative: “Lockers: Deliveries and Returns Made Easy,” Amazon, accessed June 12, 2018, https://www.amazon.com/b?

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

There had always been some ambiguity about which part of the conglomerate was making the investment; was it for the benefit of the group, or for clients of the Vision Fund? As it would turn out (revealed by Paul Davies at the Wall Street Journal) it was neither. The SoftBank group and the Vision Fund both declined to invest. So instead it was offered to SoftBank senior staff, and an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund called Mubadala that was deeply enmeshed in the Vision Fund. To them the easy money was as tempting as a Louis Vuitton bag left by the side of the road, and they snapped it up. SoftBank’s involvement was to manage the juicy Wirecard investment on their behalf, earning a share of the profits.

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Everything was up for grabs and no industry was safe from reimagination. The sums available to start-ups had been transformed, along with the language. Private companies valued at a billion dollars or more were now ‘Unicorns’, and chasing these magical creatures was an industry. SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate, announced the launch of a $100bn Vision Fund to throw at private companies like the taxi group Uber and the office space provider WeWork based on fantasies of world domination. In the stock market, Wirecard caught the eye. Its numbers were great, but more than that it was global, it was at the forefront of payments processing. In March it had announced a second deal with Citigroup designed to make Wirecard a household name across Asia.

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At headquarters Braun focused on public relations, judging by his email traffic, tweaking press releases and demanding fresh material for his Twitter feed. That April, however, he had a much more important task: convincing some of the world’s most powerful investors that he didn’t want or need their money. He had been approached by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate whose €100bn Vision Fund had transformed technology investing mainly by raising the table stakes for everyone involved. It doled out billions to chosen companies like WeWork, encouraging them to use the money to smash the competition. A former Deutsche Bank trader called Akshay Naheta, now an investor at SoftBank, smelled an opportunity at Wirecard.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

“Forty-five minutes, $45 billion,” Son later said on The David Rubenstein Show. “One billion dollars per minute.” Quickly thereafter, companies like Apple, Foxconn, and Qualcomm joined in. And that only brings us to today. According to Son, the $100 billion Vision Fund is just “the first step.” He’s already announced that he’s working to establish a second Vision Fund in the next few years. “We will briskly expand the scale. Vision Funds 2, 3 and 4 will be established every two to three years. We are creating a mechanism to increase our funding ability from 10 trillion yen to 20 trillion yen to 100 trillion yen.” Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of yen.

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And this pales beside Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son’s mega-fund, the “Vision Fund.” Driven by his belief in the “Singularity”—Ray Kurzweil’s idea that developments in AI will lead to unprecedented technological growth and unfathomable changes for civilization—Son decided to try to accelerate this process. “I totally believe [in] this concept,” he said in a recent speech. “In next thirty years, this will become a reality. I truly believe it’s coming, that’s why I’m in a hurry—to aggregate the cash, to invest.” And aggregate cash is what he did. The Vision Fund got started in September 2016, when Mohammed bin Salman, then the deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, flew to Tokyo in search of ways to diversify his country’s oil-dominated investment portfolio.

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“I totally believe [in] this concept,”: Sam Shead, “The Japanese Tech Billionaire Behind Softbank Thinks the ‘Singularity’ Will Occur Within 30 Years,” Business Insider, February 27, 2017. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/softbank-ceo-masayoshi-son-thinks-singularity-will-occur-within-30-years-2017-2. The Vision Fund got started: “Masayoshi Son Prepares to Unleash His Second $100bn Tech Fund,” Economist, March 23, 2019. See: https://www.economist.com/business/2019/03/23/masayoshi-son-prepares-to-unleash-his-second-100bn-tech-fund. Force #3: Demonetization Ilumina’s latest generation sequencer: Sarah Buhr, “Illumina Wants to Sequence Your Whole Genome for $100,” TechCrunch, January 10, 2017.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

SoftBank is based in Tokyo. I log into my computer and see the Rabbi is already online. He loves these calls. Wow. Earnings are a disaster. Vision Fund lost close to $18 billion in the most recent fiscal year, triggering the worst loss ever for the Japanese company. SoftBank had to write down the valuations of the big unicorns it owned. WeWork’s value has fallen by 95% this year. Masa Son concedes he’s unlikely to draw outside investors for another Vision Fund, an initiative he once proclaimed as the future of SoftBank as it moved away from the telecom business. About fifteen of the fund’s start-ups will likely go bankrupt, he says.

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This is labelled “The Valley of Coronavirus.” Only one unicorn looks as if it has made it out of the valley and back up the mountain. “If I were to describe it,” Masa Son tells his online audience, “unicorns that had been climbing uphill hard are suddenly faced with a coronavirus valley, and they are falling into that valley.” “Vision Fund’s results are not something to be proud of,” he says. “If the results are bad, you can’t raise money from investors. Things aren’t good.” Neumann, the WeWork CEO whom Jerry liked to stalk, will be keeping busy with his lawsuit against SoftBank. He sued the bank for scrapping the bailout, which had included a plan to buy $3 billion worth of stock from Neumann and other shareholders.

…

He sued the bank for scrapping the bailout, which had included a plan to buy $3 billion worth of stock from Neumann and other shareholders. But the bank scrapped the deal, claiming WeWork hadn’t met the conditions of the contract and citing legal inquiries by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the SEC. According to The Guardian newspaper, reporting on this latest lawsuit, “Mr. Neumann put his trust in [SoftBank and SoftBank’s Vision Fund] to be stewards of WeWork, which he and thousands of others had worked so hard to build,” only to be met with “brazen” abuses. It just goes to show that lots of things end really badly when a bubble starts to pop. I close down my computer and go back to bed for a few hours. * Lifecoach says she wants to play beer pong.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

It was ironic that Filo’s professional mission was to bring order to cyberspace.[17] Embarrassed by the state of their office, Yang and Filo offered to take their visitor out to a French restaurant. Son waved the idea away. He wanted to get down to business. In his later career, Son acquired a reputation for raising and committing funds extraordinarily quickly. In 2016, when he was plotting an investment vehicle called the Vision Fund, he talked $45 billion out of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince in the space of forty-five minutes.[18] Now, as he encountered Yahoo, his approach was similarly direct. He wanted a piece of Yahoo. His hosts wanted his capital. There was no need to complicate the conversation. Son invited Filo and Yang to say what they thought Yahoo might be worth.

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Indeed, far from kowtowing to Benchmark, Neumann was about to link arms with the ultimate enabler. The enabler was Masayoshi Son, now busy with his second charge into a U.S. technology bull market. In 2016, in a burst of inspired salesmanship, Son had talked $60 billion out of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi; the following year he launched what he called his Vision Fund and went out to hunt for unicorns. Son’s war chest, which ultimately weighed in at $98.6 billion, was more than thirty times larger than the biggest venture fund to date, and Son calculated that its sheer size would give him an edge.[23] Back in the 1990s, the ability to write a $100 million check had allowed him to muscle Yahoo.

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SoftBank insiders seem unsure how much that promise cost. However, the $58 billion payout makes it safe to say that this was the greatest venture bet ever. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26 Son’s Alibaba coup did not protect him from another round of disgrace in 2019–2020, when huge and hasty bets made through his Vision Fund turned sour. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27 The claims of preferred stock holders come before those of common stock holders in bankruptcy, and preferred stock can confer protection against ownership dilution when the company raises more capital. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28 Shirley Lin of Goldman Sachs was among the western investors who pushed for the novel legal structure.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

By 2017, SoftBank had been making serious turbulence in Silicon Valley by slinging money from the “Vision Fund,” an enormous $100-billion pool of capital formed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apple, Qualcomm, and SoftBank itself, along with a few others. Masa’s mandate was simple: by focusing the fund on technology investments—something he had done practically his entire career—SoftBank would finance the global tech infrastructure that would undergird the future. He designed the investment vehicle for speed; Vision Fund was required to invest all of its capital within five years of its closing date.

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., https://twitter.com/megwhitman/status/890754932990763008. 315 the firm filed a lawsuit: Mike Isaac, “Uber Investor Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud,” New York Times, August 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/technology/travis-kalanick-uber-lawsuit-benchmark-capital.html. 315 “We do not feel it was either prudent”: Mike Isaac, “Kalanick Loyalists Move to Force Benchmark Off Uber’s Board,” New York Times, August 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/technology/uber-benchmark-pishevar.html. 317 He bankrolled his college years: Cyrus Farivar, “How Sprint’s New Boss Lost $70 Billion of His Own Cash (and Still Stayed Rich),” Ars Technica, October 16, 2012, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/how-sprints-new-boss-lost-70-billion-of-his-own-cash-and-still-stayed-rich/. 317 He returned to Japan: Andrew Ross Sorkin, “A Key Figure in the Future of Yahoo,” Dealbook, New York Times, December 13, 2010, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/a-key-figure-in-the-future-of-yahoo/. 317 “crazy guy who bet on the future”: Walter Sim, “SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, the ‘Crazy Guy Who Bet on the Future,’ ” Straits Times, December 12, 2016, https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/softbanks-masayoshi-son-the-crazy-guy-who-bet-on-the-future. 317 He designed the investment vehicle for speed: Dana Olsen, “Vision Fund 101: Inside SoftBank’s $98B Vehicle,” PitchBook, August 2, 2017, https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/vision-fund-101-inside-softbanks-93b-vehicle. Chapter 31: THE GRAND BARGAIN 319 The storied corporation had lost: Steve Blank, “Why GE’s Jeff Immelt Lost His Job: Disruption and Activist Investors,” Harvard Business Review, October 30, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-ges-jeff-immelt-lost-his-job-disruption-and-activist-investors. 320 “There’s this chip you have”: Sheelah Kolhatkar, “At Uber, A New C.E.O.

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See also Uber becomes Uber, 63 rollout of, 59–63 Uber Cap Bill, 116, 116n Uber Eats, 338 Uberettos, 3, 3n, 7, 10 UberPeople.net, 248 “Uberpool,” 120 “Uber Super Duper,” 184 UberX, xv, 82–83, 87, 112, 114, 227, 244, 245, 250–51 UCLA, 20–22 University of California, Berkeley, 107 University of Florida at Gainesville, 66–67 University of Pennsylvania, 214–15 University of Texas at Austin, 67 Urmson, Chris, 110 US Department of Justice, 247 US Postal Service, 231n Utah, 246 VanderZanden, Travis, 188 Vanity Fair, 126, 163n, 230 VentureBeat, 55 Violation of Terms of Service (VTOS) playbook, 246 Virgin America, 93 Vishria, Eric, 283, 294 “Vision Fund,” 317–18 Von Furstenberg, Diane, 307–8 Voytek, Bradley, 136 Wahlberg, Mark, 286n Wall Street Journal, 55, 131, 199, 332 Walmart, 115 The Walt Disney Company, 23 Washington, DC, 84, 144 Waverly Inn, 126–28 Waymo, 233–35, 236, 255–56, 338–39 Webvan, 26 WeChat, 147–48 Weiner, Mark, 115 Weinstein, Harvey, 241 Wellington Capital Group, 300 Wells Fargo, 33 West, Tony, 332, 335–36 Westchester, New York, 93, 94 WeWork, 4 WhatsApp, 257, 295, 303 Whetstone, Rachel, 6, 224–25, 237, 239, 240, 252, 260, 262, 337 Whitman, Meg, 311–13, 311n, 314, 319, 320, 321, 322–25 W Hotel, 79 Wickr, 258 Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, 100 Windows, 37 Winfrey, Oprah, 193–94, 227 WIRED, 9, 26, 333 Wolf, Charlie, 67 Wolff, Michael, 128, 129, 129n Woodside, California, 64 “Workation,” 187–88 World Economic Forum, 31 Wozniak, Steve “Woz,” 39 Wuhan, China, 142 Xchange leasing program, 218–19 Xi Jinping, 141 Xooglers, 182 XS, 7 “X to the x” celebration, 1–8, 242 Yadav, Shiv Kumar, 149–50 Yarnell, Arizona, 213 Yoo, Salle, 124, 244–45, 310 You, Angie, 32, 264 YouTube, 96, 199 Yucaipa Companies, 23 Zalanick, Travis, 129n Zappos, 92n Zillow, 65 Zimmer, John, 85, 86, 88–89, 120, 132, 186, 187, 188, 189, 211 Zimride, 85–86 Zuckerberg, Mark, 9, 21–22, 34, 45, 74, 121, 165, 171, 199 China and, 140, 202 influence of, 77, 77n purchases Instagram, 96–97 Sandberg and, 239n warns Kalanick to keep an eye on Sidecar, 86 Zynga, 77

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

He’s probably done more to inflate the Silicon Valley bubble than anyone else, but after losing a fortune twice and gaining it back three times, he’s still making big bets that any company he takes a shine to can end up owning a sector thanks to the sheer amount of cash he pumps into it. Even so, it turns out he’s also using other people’s money to achieve great wealth. These days, most of Son’s investing is done through the Vision Fund, a $100 billion technology-focused venture capital fund that derives a large percentage of its capital from Saudi Arabia. “If a founder asked the Vision Fund for $40 million, Mr. Son might ask, ‘What would you do with $400 million?’” the New York Times reported.78 A senior executive reportedly told the paper, “Masa has his own style and others might choke, but Adam would be like, ‘$400 million?

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“What he did was he reset the market price for valuations because he had more cash to deploy than anybody else. But everyone calls the Vision Fund $100 billion fund. It’s not a $100 billion fund. It’s $40 billion worth of equity, $60 billion worth of debt, and then $60 billion worth of debt as a 7 percent interest rate. It’s a $30 billion fund that could run for eight years based on the interest cost and only repay the equity portion of the fund that was raised,” Wells said. “Does that make sense? It’s completely insane, this model that he did, and of course he was trying to go raise the second Vision Fund off of the strength of the markup and valuations at WeWork that he was providing in order for a justification to go raise another fund.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

People’s Republic of China, “13th Five-Year Plan on National Economic and Social Development,” March 17, 2016. Translation; http://en.ndrc.gov.cn/newsrelease/201612/P020161207645765233498.pdf. 9. “China’s New $15 Billion Tech Fund Emulates SoftBank’s Vision Fund, The Economist, July 5, 2018; economist.com/business/2018/07/05/chinas-new-15bn-tech-fund-emulates-softbanks-vision-fund. 10. Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DiuX), China’s Technology Transfer Strategy, January 2018; admin.govexec.com/media/diux_chinatechnologytransferstudy_jan_2018_(1).pdf. 11. “Global Venture Capital Trends, Analysis of 2010–2018 Data, London-Based Alternative Assets,” Preqin.

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The startup has collected $1.6 billion in venture capital, most recently $620 million in May 2018 at a valuation of more than $4.5 billion from several prominent firms including Silver Lake, Fidelity International, and Tiger Global. Just two months before, SenseTime pulled in $600 million led by Alibaba—its largest shareholder—with Singapore’s state investment firm, Temasek. The year before, SenseTime reeled in $410 million led by private equity firm CDH Investments and earlier backer IDG Capital. The huge SoftBank Vision Fund could be next to fund SenseTime. University Spinout Does Good SenseTime grew out of the computer vision lab at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, led by Professor Tang Xiaoou along with a group of students who developed facial recognition algorithms that had higher accuracy rates than human eyes.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

For all the attention the Chinese Great Firewall receives in blocking Twitter and YouTube, Alibaba’s Aliyun offers a way to bypass the Great Firewall, for a fee. Other well-known surveillance companies such as Hikvision and SenseTime have a slew of foreign investment. SenseTime’s investors include Qualcomm, Fidelity International, Silver Lake Partners (based in Menlo Park, California), and Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund. SoftBank’s Vision Fund has ties to Saudi wealth, and spans the globe in its international influence—investing in companies from Alibaba to WeWork and Slack. In one corner of the Megvii showroom is a display about Meitu, the beauty and cosmetics app with which you can quickly edit your selfies. The commercial is cheerful: a woman gives herself bunny ears, some blush, and lipstick.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

From June through August, the Nasdaq Composite had a strong rally, rising by 24 percent, and the big tech stocks that led the charge did even better than that. That wasn’t mere good luck, though, because the whale’s gamble was even bigger than believed. By early September it emerged that the buyer was Japan’s SoftBank Corp., led by the risk-loving billionaire Masayoshi Son. Reporters also learned that his $100 billion Vision Fund had simultaneously purchased billions of dollars of many of the underlying tech stocks. At face value that just sounds like two gigantic bets instead of one. There was a method to Son’s madness, though. As with short selling, options dealers are taking on a theoretically unlimited risk by transacting with you, and they aren’t in the risk-taking business.

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., 197 Trust Index, 143 Twitter, 11, 19, 24, 37, 39, 57, 88, 135, 152–54, 157–58, 161–63, 166, 172, 177, 187, 202 Gill’s Forrest Gump post on, 212 Musk’s use of, x, 60, 82, 83, 124, 144, 152–54, 161, 170 SEC and, 167–68 two-day period to settle trades, 204 U Uber, 105 unemployment, 71, 151 Ursus, 85 utilitarian products, 51 V Valeant Pharmaceuticals, 116–17, 120, 125 Van Bavel, Jay, 20, 36 VandaTrack, 139 VanEck, 158–59 Vanguard Group, 8, 32, 254, 257, 259 venture capitalists, 24 Vergara, Salvador, 172–73 Verlaine, Julia-Ambra, 171 Versailles, 9 Virtu Financial, 49, 55, 178, 202, 207, 218 Vision Fund, 105 Volcker Rule, 42 Volkswagen, 77–78, 81 Vrabeck, Kathy, 114, 223 W WallStreetBets, ix–x, xii, xiv, 2, 4, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 22–23, 36, 38–40, 43–47, 55, 57, 67, 69, 75–77, 88, 92–95, 97–99, 107, 111, 113, 115, 120, 122, 127–32, 135, 138, 145, 147–49, 152, 157, 159–61, 170–72, 181–82, 188, 190, 192, 193, 205, 213, 216–17, 220–22, 227, 229–31, 238, 243, 255, 259 AMC and, 225–26 “apes together strong” and, 135–36 bots on, 163–66 BTFD on, 69 DeepFuckingValue on, see Gill, Keith as hedge fund, 139 Jeffamazon on, 107–9 Kronos_415 on, 103, 107 Left and, 121–23, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 238 membership demographics of, 57 MoonYachts on, 97–98 number of members of, xi, 46, 136–38, 190, 199, 213, 229 Player896 on, 93, 109 proof of trade on, 47 racial slurs on, 190 Robinhood and, 22–23 Senior_Hedgehog on, 72, 73, 76, 79, 92 sharing of losses on, 144 Stonksflyingup on, 95, 109 taken off-line, 190 WeLikeTheStock and, 126, 242 see also GameStop, GameStop short squeeze Wall Street Journal, ix, 30, 50, 52, 61, 84, 118, 128–29, 132, 136, 152, 171, 179, 180, 210, 211, 223, 250, 253 Wall Street Week, 156 Walmart, 26 Wanda, Dalian, 225 Wang Jianlin, 225 warrants, 101 Washington Post, The, 161 Waters, Maxine, 3, 13, 64–65, 76 Wealthfront, 27, 257 wealthiest Americans, 234 wealth inequality, xi, 14, 71–72, 160, 182 Webull, 178, 200 Weissmann, Jordan, 175–76 WeLikeTheStock, 126, 242 West, Jack, 172 Western Digital, 46 WeWork, 105 When Genius Failed (Lowenstein), 260 Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

According to Rakuten founder Hiroshi Mikitani, “The greatest business risk [Japan] faces is that of staying at home.”20 Japan is invigorating its already deep advantages in precision industries through new public-private alliances amounting to several trillion dollars devoted to the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, AI, 3D printing, robotics, biotech, health care, clean energy, enhanced agriculture, and other sectors—all ready for export to Asia’s high-growth markets. SoftBank has become Japan’s standout example of a bridge between Japan, Asia, and the world. SoftBank’s Vision Funds—in which Saudi Arabia is the largest investor followed by the UAE—are the largest technology portfolio in the world, making aggressive investments in semiconductors, satellites, artificial intelligence, and IoT companies around the world. SoftBank also has stakes in e-commerce companies in India and a nearly 30 percent stake in China’s Alibaba.

…

This has attracted the global private equity (PE) industry to Asia, which has already surpassed Europe as the second largest destination for private equity (just behind the United States), with one-fourth of all global PE capital devoted to the region.26 Four of the world’s largest PE funds are Asian—SoftBank’s Vision Funds in Japan, China State-Owned Capital Venture Investment Fund, the Sino-Singapore Connectivity Private Equity Fund Management Company, and the China Internet Investment Fund—each with $100 billion–plus in capital to deploy. Baring Private Equity Asia (BPEA) is the regional veteran and the largest Asian PE fund fully based in Asia, with forty companies in its portfolio.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

They promise to remake markets and reengineer society through mobile tech and killer apps and venture capitalists are enthralled. They could be getting a piece of the next Facebook, the next Slack (a popular workflow platform), the next Uber. Individual investors such as Carl Icahn, venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, and funds such as Softbank’s Vision Fund and the Collaborative Fund have dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into tech start-ups over the past decade. The Silicon Valley spirit is even bigger than the promise of its platforms to create value and success for individuals and firms, however. Silicon Valley, we’re told, is ushering in a new age—a digital age of limitless possibility.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Consequently, the company was forced to spend billions of dollars in venture capital and operating cash flow simply to maintain the status quo. Rapid growth in existing as well as new markets then required additional expenses and investments. Overall, Uber has grown mostly because of generous capital providers (largely sovereign wealth funds and SoftBank’s Vision Fund). Investors seem to be betting on a winner-take-all-or-most outcome where Uber outlasts both digital and conventional competitors, and then eventually raises prices or reduces costly subsidies. Second, transaction platforms “reduce friction” to facilitate interactions among platform participants.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

That dearth of innovation financing meant many good ideas likely never got off the ground, and successful implementation of the GPTs scaled far more slowly. Today, VC funding is a well-oiled machine dedicated to the creation and commercialization of new technology. In 2017, global venture funding set a new record with $148 billion invested, egged on by the creation of Softbank’s $100 billion “vision fund,” which will be disbursed in the coming years. That same year, global VC funding for AI startups leaped to $15.2 billion, a 141 percent increase over 2016. That money relentlessly seeks out ways to wring every dollar of productivity out of a GPT like artificial intelligence, with a particular fondness for moonshot ideas that could disrupt and recreate an entire industry.

Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic by Hugh Sinclair

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bernie Madoff, colonial exploitation, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, high net worth, illegal immigration, impact investing, inventory management, low interest rates, microcredit, Northern Rock, peer-to-peer lending, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Vision Fund

Center for Global Development, David Roodman’s Microfinance Open Book blog, January 31, 2011, http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/2011/01/compartamos-and-the-meaning-of-interest-rates.php. 7. Jonas Blume and Julika Breyer, Microfinance and Child Labour (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2011). Only one microfinance fund has explicit policies regarding child labor: World Vision, which operates a number of MFIs through its subsidiary Vision Fund International. 8. Marguerite Robinson, The Microfinance Revolution, vol. 2, Lessons from Indonesia (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2002). 9. See http://indiamicrofinance.com/bono-quote-microfinance.html. 10. Vivienne Walt, “Does Microfinancing Really Work? A New Book Says No,” Time, January 6, 2012. 11.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

And so nanotechnology researchers found themselves confronting persistent questions about nanomachines, building with atoms, and tiny robots that might run amok, all muddled together and attributed to the author of a book called Engines of Creation. And they attempted to squelch these questions, not by correcting misconceptions, but by wholesale rejection of a broad swath of ideas that they, too, had misunderstood. Visions, Funding, and a Perfect Storm The same fuzzy perceptions that enabled machines to become bugs in the public imagination also enabled a hodge-podge of nanoscale technologies—not molecular engineering—to appear to be the leading edge of the APM revolution—or something like that, though nothing was clear.

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Lyft, Mikhail Gorbachev, NetJets, obamacare, offshore financial centre, post-materialism, proprietary trading, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, rolodex, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vision Fund, yield curve

“Indian ‘bond junkie’ ” : The Economist, “A Giant Hedge Fund,” August 26, 2004. Misra’s industry awards : Nicholas Dunbar, The Devil’s Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . and Are Ready to Do It Again, 2011, 100. Removing smoke detectors : Tom Braithwaite, “SoftBank’s $100bn Vision Fund Needs Wall St Trader to Come Good,” Financial Times, August 25, 2017. “Mr. Basis Point”: Suzi Ring, Gavin Finch, and Franz Wild, “From a $126 Million Bonus to Jail,” Bloomberg News, March 19, 2018. Leverage ratios : Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, 2018, 88.

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

For instance, he felt such kinship with other polio victims that he pushed for Warm Springs to be more than a treatment center—he wanted it to be a springboard for a cure. He enlisted the help of his friend George Allen, a businessman, to raise money (later through the March of Dimes) to fight for a cure for polio. Another ripple effect of FDR’s vision funded the work of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the heroes whose efforts have nearly wiped the disease from the face of the earth. Like most evolutionaries, FDR had some enemies, but his public expression of his natural optimism and his radical New Deal programs won the confidence and hearts of the majority of Americans.

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market by Steven Drobny

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital controls, central bank independence, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Greenspan put, high batting average, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, inventory management, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, land bank, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Maui Hawaii, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, panic early, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vision Fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Although there will always be a hotshot hedge fund manager who produces attractive results for a period of time through a focused portfolio approach, the key to consistent perfor- WHY GLOBAL MACRO IS THE WAY TO GO 349 mance over time is diversifying smart bets. Global macro’s mandate affords the latitude to achieve such diversification. For consistent superior riskadjusted returns, global macro is the way to go. Dr. Lee R. Thomas III is the chief investment officer of Alpha Vision Capital and the Vision Fund Group, a suite of global macro absolute return products offered by Allianz Global Investors. Prior to Vision, Dr. Thomas was managing director and the chief global strategist at Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO). Prior to PIMCO, Thomas worked for Investcorp, Chase, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs.

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

For instance, he felt such kinship with other polio victims that he pushed for Warm Springs to be more than a treatment center—he wanted it to be a springboard for a cure. He enlisted the help of his friend George Allen, a businessman, to raise money (later through the March of Dimes) to fight for a cure for polio. Another ripple effect of FDR’s vision funded the work of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the heroes whose efforts have nearly wiped the disease from the face of the earth. Like most evolutionaries, FDR had some enemies, but his public expression of his natural optimism and his radical New Deal programs won the confidence and hearts of the majority of Americans.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In less than a decade, the value of a 10 percent stake—which cost Thiel half a million dollars and Accel $12 million a year later—had risen to more than $10 billion. At the other end of the spectrum is a case involving Japan’s SoftBank Group. Its risk-taking chairman, Masayoshi Son, set up the $100 billion Vision Fund, which came to be known for undertaking private equity investments in technology companies in their infancy. Early investments in companies such as Alibaba, Yahoo!, and Uber yielded substantial profits. Son acquired the reputation of a visionary investor in technology start-ups. In 2016, Son met Adam Neumann, the cofounder of WeWork, and soon became enamored of Neumann’s business idea.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

He put $380 million in Twitter, and in 2011 he teamed with famed Silicon Valley angel Ron Conway to offer $150,000 to each and every start-up in the Bay Area tech accelerator Y Combinator, laying down a bet on the whole regional ecosystem.29 When it came out in 2017 that a significant amount of DST’s capital originated with the Russian state, the news yielded shrugs in the industry.30 No one could suck that kind of money out of the country without close ties to the government.vii And besides, sovereign wealth funds invest in Silicon Valley all the time. Saudi prince Al Waleed bin Talal made a crucial nine-figure investment in Apple in 1997.31 SoftBank, one of the biggest investment funds hunting in Silicon Valley, got most of its game-changing $100 billion Vision Fund from Gulf monarchies.32 Why wouldn’t Putin want to put money in Facebook? As far as the gangster state was concerned, there was no better place to allocate the nation’s cash. Based on the numbers, it’s hard to disagree, and in Silicon Valley, which Milner now calls home, he’s in good standing in the highest reaches of the capitalist elite.