E1035: SoftBank Managing Partner Jeff Housenbold on deploying the $100B Vision Fund, getting recruited by Masayoshi Son, counseling founders to manage massive capital, creating moats, reasons for shift toward profits, lessons from WeWork & more
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2020
⏱️ 93 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
2:16 What did Jeff do before joining the Vision Fund? How did he help scale eBay & Shutterfly?
4:15 How did he wind up at SoftBank? What was it like being recruited by Masayoshi Son? How did Masa pitch the Vision Fund to Jeff?
13:28 What was the timeframe for deploying the $100B Vision Fund?
18:10 How does SoftBank size their bets and how do they counsel founders to handle massive amounts of capital?
20:07 Coaching founders on using capital to create talent moats & build brand partnerships
22:17 Scaling their diligence alongside their capital deployment, understanding core customers & focusing on positive unit economics
28:30 How did the Uber & Didi deals go down? How close was SoftBank to investing in Lyft instead of Uber?
33:23 How SoftBank looks at investing in adjacent companies and mergers
38:42 Jeff's background & the importance of education in changing your lot in life
46:07 Changing focus from Growth to Profits, the effect of short-term thinking and its impact on Dara and Uber since their 2019 IPO
57:23 Thoughts on VTOL? Will we see VTOL vehicles or self-driving first?
1:02:16 Jeff's take on Coronavirus and its impact on the markets & how founders and CEOs can combat market volatility
1:09:38 Portfolio Review: Zume Pizza
1:11:32 Portfolio Review: Katerra
1:14:03 Jason guesses the toughest 4 industries to penetrate
1:15:03 Portfolio Review: Plenty
1:19:29 Portfolio Review: Memphis Meats
1:23:05 What happened with the WeWork investment? What % does SoftBank now own, and can they turn it around? What are some lessons learned from the entire saga?
1:27:13 Jeff shares some "Jeff-ism's of Business"
1:27:52 How is the Vision Fund II raise coming along?
1:28:36 How the scale of the Vision Fund impacts people's ability to understand their investments
1:32:05 For founders: When is the right time to engage with SoftBank?
Transcript
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| 0:41.2 | Every five or ten years somebody comes into Silicon Valley with a bold new vision and they |
| 0:45.9 | change the funding landscape and how we do business here. |
| 0:49.6 | Venture Capital we've heard of, angel investors you've heard of, that's basically the foundation and the |
| 0:53.5 | fabric of what we do in Silicon Valley. |
| 0:55.9 | And then about 10, 15 years ago, White Combinator started, a new way to fund startups in a very |
| 1:02.2 | large way. An incubator, but wholly unique in its approach and now doing |
| 1:07.2 | three, four hundred investments a year. Tech stars as well at the same time they both deserve equal credit. Then you had Angel |
| 1:14.1 | List and Sequoia Scout program taking angel investing and democratizing it |
| 1:19.2 | something we've worked on with the syndicate.com and many of you read the book. Then Yuri Milner came into town and he started putting large bets on speculative companies like Facebook and Twitter and everybody thought, well he's the sucker at the poker table sure |
| 1:34.8 | enough he made the best bets or some of the best bets in the history of our industry. |
| 1:40.3 | Three four years ago we started to hear about Soft Bank creating a vision fund a hundred billion dollar fund |
| 1:47.4 | Something that has changed the landscape and that people have a lot of questions about. We're very lucky to have Jeff |
| 1:53.4 | Housenbold on the program today. He is a managing partner at the Soft Bank |
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