e-commerce – Samidha Sharma

Having returned from my annual trip to Silicon Valley, I’ve been assimilating all the talking points that emerged as I went about meeting investors and founders. As was expected, the conversation starter this time around at most of these meetings was SoftBank.

Softbank’s $93 Billion Vision Fund ( which may swell up to as much as $900 billion) started deploying slugs of capital this year in various Silicon Valley and US tech startups arresting everyone’s attention. Considering the average size of these cheques, which typically are upwards of $500 million, the investment vehicle is obviously the new hot thing to unravel for everyone there. Some call the whole SoftBank phenomenon “unreal”.

The tech media is evidently hopped up, trying to put out as many stories as they can about the Japanese telecoms and internet group which was so far largely known in the US for its acquisition of Sprint, the telecoms company in 2012. But SoftBank is a different beast today.

Steered by its maverick founder Masa, who is on a world altering mission through what he says are investments in future technologies, and famous for his maiden bet on the Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba back in 2000.

What struck me amid all of this, as I read reams on SoftBank and Masa ( and continue to read some more) and met people in the Bay Area tech fraternity, is how similar all of this is to when the Indian tech press and the larger ecosystem was in the process of discovering the group back in 2014.

What added to the storyline at the time was the flamboyant ex-Google hotshot executive Nikesh Arora who was hired by Masa as his trusted lieutenant. The two swooped down on India, sprayed capital in startups like Snapdeal, Ola, Housing, Oyo and Grofers, all in a span of about a year. Even then, the same worries were being highlighted about SoftBank spending very little time in due diligence before closing deals and about the dizzying valuations at which money was being raised by startups with no real business models.

I’d met and interviewed Masa and Arora twice between 2014-16. Arora was this flamboyant deputy and the perfect foil to Masa. Who’d have known that by mid of 2016, Arora would abruptly leave the group because he wouldn’t become Masa’s successor as announced publicly. He told me in an extended interview just a few days after stepping down that waiting for the top job didn’t make sense for him.

I asked myself if there’s any difference in how SoftBank approached investing in 2014 in India and what’s happening now in Silicon Valley? For starters, three years ago SoftBank did not have a gargantuan sized Vision Fund, and was investing out of its balance sheet. Also the focus of investing was mostly on consumer internet and a bulk of its wagers were in the south east Asia and India region (Arora’s presence was partly the reason for that). With the Vision Fund, the canvas is far bigger and the mandate from Masa is to invest behind a wide range of future technologies like robotics, biotech and artificial intelligence.

Recently when I spoke to Rajeev Mishra, another Indian who is heading up the Vision Fund, it was apparent the fund was aware its mammoth size was a big advantage for it to win deals.

A VC told me the other day, “No other investor can match them (SoftBank) in the near future. They are also looking to add another $200 billion. It remains to be seen how this will play out,” he said.

This is again similar to what happened in India three years ago when SoftBank became the hottest investor in town, no one knew what was the long-term effect of this windfall of capital into companies.The questions around SoftBank are still the same— a massive pool of capital which can distort valuations, an investing team which is not known for scoring technology deals, and the large stakes they hold in companies along with favorable terms that come as a result of it.

But like in the period of 2014-15 when Indian founders took money from SoftBank as it was readily available, so are their counterparts in the US.
What’s the choice really, would you let them back your rivals, asks an entrepreneur while talking about the current Softbank driven tech investing market.
And with the cross over funds and mutual funds (folks like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price) more or less having disappeared from the investing landscape, Silicon Valley has only one giant backer of the size of SoftBank to go to for private money in the near future. I wrote a piece about how SoftBank emerging as the new IPO for many tech companies and providing secondary sale options to early VCs.

It remains to be seen how things pan out over the next few years and whether or not these billions of dollars being pumped into hot Silicon Valley startups by SoftBank would lead to unfortunate fallouts like the ones we saw in India between the fat cat investor and its portfolio companies like Snapdeal and Housing.

For now though SoftBank is stirring up Silicon Valley and no one is complaining.

It’s been overwhelming, exhausting and consuming in equal proportions to cover the tech startup ecosystem in India over the past two years. I’ll take the liberty of assuming, a majority of you reading this blog post would be familiar with the frenetic and never-seen-before pace of activity that took place among startups, investors and everyone else involved in this current boom cycle.

As a journalist I may not have gone through the pressures of running a business or of taking investment decisions in a period which was fraught with wild exuberance. But, as someone covering this space and having an inside track, I felt the heat of keeping up with the pace at which things were evolving. This period also got the focus of many publications- offline and online- onto this sector bringing about competition among journalists on who gets what first. I’d first written about the media euphoria and boosterish coverage in January 2015, but the headiness only got amplified post that.

This year though has started on an extremely sombre note and one that made me write this post. I know it’s a little late in coming but it’s here!

Things have perceptibly and very evidently changed over the past five-six months. The media has been writing about that , too, in equal doses as when the times were exceptionally good.

But beyond the skittishness there’s a big shift that’s happening. IMO, the most important change from the peak of the go go times to the situation that we are in today has been the way entrepreneurs talk to me now. Some of them are in the midst of their toughest test, trying to wade through a period which they never saw coming. Many of them may not be able to survive this phase but they would have learnt a huge lesson and will hopefully comeback with an ever better business which will be far more efficient and sail through the storm. I can already see acceptance among the smart founders. Some of them are admitting that they got carried away.

They are taking the right strides in the right direction, after having gone astray, they say. I don’t want to point to who was responsible for these egregious mistakes. Bill Gurley’s post from a few days back encapsulates very elaborately on that topic.

I can only tell you from knowing about the goings-on in the ecosystem that some of the founders are in this not-so-envious place where they are shuttering operations, laying off employees and have literally hit the brick wall, because they had no one to guide them on what was the right way to steer a business. They were only guided to grow and grow faster. This applies to not all founders, though. I hope as I write this post, they are surrounded by people who can tell them that even if their chips are down, no one is judging their calibre to bounce back successfully.

In the meantime, as a journalist I want to tell founders, investors & all and sundry, that I don’t derive pleasure in writing about the bad times. But just the way we covered the euphoria, we are in the business of disseminating news which is not as good, too.

Being transparent serves us all good especially now. Just the other day I was with a founder who told me unabashedly how difficult it was to raise money and that it took him over eight months to do so. Like Gurley said in his post, don’t bother too much about the wrong things– image/ego/perceptions. Ultimately, all of this is not what gets you success, it will be what you make of your company.

Good luck, everyone. And let’s all be honest.

Tag: e-commerce

SoftBank’s Silicon Valley play resembles India tech market of 2014-15

Taking stock-Through the journalist’s lens.