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from the partnerships and business opportunities that
come with being a part of the SoftBank family.
This is a global network that includes Apple,
Qualcomm, Sharp, Alibaba, Sprint (the fourth-largest
carrier in the US), Yahoo! Japan (which, unlike its
US parent, remains the most popular website in its
country) and SoftBank Mobile, whose $23.5 billion
IPO last December was the second biggest market
listing of all time. The Vision Fund is also one of the
biggest foreign investors in India, China and Europe.
It has a presence in Mumbai, Singapore, Riyadh and
Abu Dhabi. “When you think about investment, when
you look at most of the American firms, they don’t do
global, very few of them do true global stuff,” Thévenon
says. “SoftBank, however, is everywhere.”
Companies have autonomy to pursue these
partnerships, but these are often win-win synergies
that can accelerate growth globally. Consider the
example of Ping An Good Doctor, an AI provider of
first-line healthcare, which signed an agreement
with south-east Asian ride-sharing company Grab. In
China, a trip to the doctor can last three hours for only
90 seconds of consultation, so Ping wants to use
Grab’s geolocation platforms to accelerate the initial
triage and screening process of patients.
Oyo Rooms, has, through deploying a machine
learning platform, managed to standardised its hotel
experience globally – from tech-enabled check-ins to
housekeeping. It ran a partnership campaign with
DiDi in China using the slogan: “Ride comfortably
with DiDi and stay comfortably with Oyo.”
Paytm, an Indian mobile wallet startup that
processes 450 million transactions a month, recently
launched PayPay in Japan with Yahoo! Japan.
And then, of course, there is Arm. In collabo-
ration with Mapbox, Segars’ chip-design firm has
already developed software that allows Arm-enabled
devices automatically to classify road boundaries,
lane markings, curbs, crossings and traffic signs.
Boston Dynamics is also deploying Arm processors in
the motor control of its latest robots.
These are the sorts of partnerships SoftBank has
fostered, and they will allow Arm to remain at the
centre of gravity of Son’s vision of the singularity,
enabling a future that is populated by robots, drones,
autonomous vehicles and a trillion connected devices.
“I think another very common theme that runs
through all of our investments is really around data,”
Jeffrey Housenbold, a managing partner at the Vision
Fund, says. “It’s really about data and the merger of
human and machine in this notion of the singularity
and artificial intelligence. How do we process that
data in order to make the world a better place – to
make people happier, to enrich their lives, to provide
better products and services? It doesn’t matter
if it’s by using data to enable drug discovery or trying
to make food delivery more efficient. Data runs
across almost every one of our companies.”
That’s Masayoshi Son’s vision: a future where every
time that we use our smartphone, or call a taxi, or
order a meal, or stay in a hotel, or make a payment,
or receive medical treatment, we will be doing so in a
data transaction with a company that belongs to the
SoftBank family. And, as Son likes to say: “Whoever
controls data controls the world.”João Medeiros is features director of WIREDPH
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Rajeev Misra,
CEO of the $100
billion SoftBank
Vision Fundprocess that can take months to complete. At a later stage,
the deals are submitted to SoftBank’s Investment Advisor
Committee, which includes Son and Misra. If there is consensus
about an idea, the entrepreneur is then invited to sit down with
Son, who meets every single founder before a deal is closed.
“When I met him, in early 2017, I explained how my
company had become a leading hotel company in India,”
says Ritesh Agarwal, chief executive officer of Oyo Rooms,
India’s largest hotel network. “I didn’t think the timing was
right to expand to China. He told me that I should absolutely
expand to China – and consider spending a lot of time there.
In November, we set up our first hotel in Shenzhen. We are
now among the top five hotel chains in China. His ability
to think far ahead is unparalleled.”
The lower limit for a Vision Fund investment is $100 million,
but most are between $500 million to a few billion, typically
for 20 to 40 per cent of the company. “It’s changed the game
for investing in a dramatic way,” Michael Marks, CEO of the US
construction startup Katerra, observes. “Tech companies are
becoming billion-dollar businesses. I think that SoftBank was
just the first to see that it could deploy much more capital and
get big returns. It over-invests to anoint the winners. It may
turn out it’s a colossal risk and doesn’t work out, but I think
it will. It’s a fascinating experiment,” Marks says.
Of course, investments alone and the abundance of capital
don’t reveal the true nature of SoftBank’s underlying strength:
Son’s “cluster of number ones” strategy, the complex network
of affiliated and portfolio companies whose whole is theoreti-
cally greater than the sum of its parts – an added value derived