Today, a bunch of analysis on stories we have been covering the last few weeks. You’re reading the Extra Crunch Daily. Like this newsletter? Subscribe for free to follow all of our discussions and debates. SoftBank wants to spend more billions Three inter-related stories today on SoftBank and…
Today, a bunch of analysis on stories we have been covering the last few weeks.
You’re reading the Extra Crunch Daily. Like this newsletter? Subscribe for free to follow all of our discussions and debates.
Three inter-related stories today on SoftBank and its Vision Fund. First, an analysis from my Bangkok-based colleague Jon Russell, who notes that controversies surrounding the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi hasn’t deterred the Vision Fund from its investments in the Asia-Pacific region:
You should read the rest of Jon’s data analysis of where the Vision Fund is investing and why.
I want to comment though on this incessant framing of Khashoggi and SoftBank by the press. By now, we all know that Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi are the plurality of the Vision Fund’s capital. It’s a bit of an unfortunate circumstance, as I wrote in my year-end report on SoftBank:
The murder of Khashoggi was heinous and wrong. Yet, there is a whole spectrum of bad LPs. Chinese government funds are among the heaviest investors in Silicon Valley as well, and of course, its record on human rights is hardly out of sync with Saudi Arabia. Many family offices with ties to unsavory industries and corruption permeate the LP lists at prominent venture capital funds.
I’d love to see less money laundering in Silicon Valley and cleaner capital sources. Until founders, VCs, and employees jointly work to make clean capital a priority though, I think the constant focus on one-off cases is shrill and mostly unhelpful.
The second major story is that SoftBank is launching another multi-billion dollar fund, this time in Latin America. The Innovation Fund, as my colleague Ingrid Lunden wrote, has $2 billion in capital to invest in the region. From the article:
We will have more on global expansion of the internet to the next billion users tomorrow, but suffice it to say, major investors are opening their checkbooks to regions outside the West as billions of consumers join the digital economy and become targets for investment. The first wave was around the seed stage in places like Latin America and Africa, but as that initial wave of startups mature, we can expect growth-stage VCs to start to intensely search for deals.
Finally, we have been tracking SoftBank’s horrifying debt situation for some time, which is complicated by the Japanese government’s goal of increasing competition among the country’s mobile service operators in a bid to lower prices.
