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EVIOUS^ SPREAD:RYAN^ PFLUGER/^ AUGUST$117.5 million mansion in Woodside, California. Most describe
the legendary investor – known as Masa – as soft-spoken, a
man with a modest bearing and a prescient vision of the future:
a reputation substantiated by his achievements.
In the 1970s, Son emigrated to America to study. At the time,
he had only a rudimentary knowledge of English, and made
his first million by importing Japanese arcade games such as
Space Invaders. It was Son who, in 1996, offered budding
entrepreneur Jerry Yang, then CEO of a struggling startup
called Yahoo!, $100m in investment. His insight paid off.
By 2000, Yahoo! had become the dominant web search
engine in the pre-crash era of the internet.
That was the year Son met a young Chinese teacher
and founder of an e-commerce firm called Alibaba. He
told Jack Ma to accept $20m in investment, with the
promise that he would transform Ma’s company into the
next Yahoo! Today, when Son makes a new investment,
he sometimes tells founders that they too can be as big
as Alibaba, as big as one of the biggest companies in the
world. “In 2000, he already knew that China was going to
be big so he just decided to invest,” Eugene Izhikevich, CEO
of the AI startup Brain, says. “After the dot.com bubble
collapse, he was investing in China. You had to drive on a
dirt road between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. He has a gift
of seeing things before they become reality. What’s obvious
to him becomes, ten years later, obvious to everyone else.”
At the event in Tokyo, Son proceeded to introduce CEOs to
the stage. First, he welcomed the founder of robotics company
Boston Dynamics, Marc Raibert, a man who wants to changeFuturistic cameras such
as the pocket-sized L16 –
which, at a price of $1,950,
uses 16 lenses to capture
52-megapixel photos –
put Dave Grannan and
Rajiv Laroia’s startup
on SoftBank’s radar. It
views Light’s technology,
which uses software to
combine images from
multiple lenses into one
high-quality image, as
a potential replacement
for laser-based sensors
in self-driving cars.Vivek Ramaswamy’s Swiss
startup buys experimental
drugs that have been
dropped from tests by large
pharmaceutical firms.
Its subsidiary, Datavant,
uses A I to aggregate and
analyse healthcare data
and accelerate clinical
trials. Put all that data
together, says SoftBank
partner Akshay Naheta,
and you “create a smart
brain that can be a better
predictor of the probability
of success in a clinic trial.”RADICAL INVESTING:
SoftBank’s less
well-known venturesthe morning of July 20, 2017, at the luxurious Prince Park Tower
hotel in Tokyo, Masayoshi Son emerged on stage in front of
a packed conference hall, his diminutive silhouette backlit
by bright white lights. Son, the CEO of Japanese internet,
energy and financial conglomerate SoftBank Group, was
dressed simply, as is his habit, in a grey suit and a striped shirt.
He smiled and introduced himself in Japanese.
Son is known for his fanciful analogies and long speeches. In
2010, his talk about his “300-year plan for the future” opened
with a reflection on the nature of sorrow, with Son asking
rhetorically, “What is the saddest thing in life? What gives
you utmost happiness?” In 2016, he equated the Internet of
Things (IoT) to the Cambrian era’s explosion of life, comparing
the evolutionary advantage conferred to the first species with
eyes to the combination of sensors and AI enabled by the IoT.
Addressing hundreds of technologists and entrepre-
neurs, he compared SoftBank to the gentry of the Industrial
Revolution, a privileged class that invested in technology
and science for the common good. Two months earlier,
SoftBank had launched a $100 billion investment arm,
the Vision Fund – the biggest tech fund in history. In Son’s
metaphor, the Vision Fund was the gentry of the information
revolution. “I really don’t want to go to sleep,” he said.
“I don’t want to waste time. These are very exciting times.”
Many of the CEOs in the audience that day were recipients
of the fund’s investment. Without exception, they had all met
Son privately, either in his office in Shiodome, Tokyo, or in his
Left: Masayoshi Son addresses
entrepreneurs in 2017
Right: Helmy Eltoukhy, chief
executive of Guardant Health