The economics on the Vision Fund are basically unprecedented. No one has ever managed a $100B "Venture" fund before so the fund economics are basically unknown at this point. That being said, it's much easier to return 100x on a seed fund than it is a late-stage fund. This is basically been proven over and over in the PE world.
> I'm not sure if SoftBank is suddenly performing worse than they have been in the past or if people simply just care more about the losses since they had such a major one recently.
The only reason people like talking about anything SoftBank is because (1) its so abnormal in the investing world...it's essentially an unproven model, (2) SoftBank's fund is basically "Masayoshi-son made the most significant investing venture bet ever in history with Alibaba and we want to try to do this 100x more" (3) the investing principles are so abnormal (Masayhoshi-son basically has to bless the founder/idea) that it makes for great headlines.
Masayoshi-son has proven he can throw he dice pretty well, however the jury is still out on whether this model will actually produce outsize returns.
> I'm not sure if SoftBank is suddenly performing worse than they have been in the past or if people simply just care more about the losses since they had such a major one recently.
The only reason people like talking about anything SoftBank is because (1) its so abnormal in the investing world...it's essentially an unproven model, (2) SoftBank's fund is basically "Masayoshi-son made the most significant investing venture bet ever in history with Alibaba and we want to try to do this 100x more" (3) the investing principles are so abnormal (Masayhoshi-son basically has to bless the founder/idea) that it makes for great headlines.
Masayoshi-son has proven he can throw he dice pretty well, however the jury is still out on whether this model will actually produce outsize returns.