Oyo’s investor is the Hanuman of startup world
Mayayoshi Son plans to keep investing more than $ 50bn for the next three years.
Masayoshi Son plans to keep investing more than $ 50bn for the next three years.
Softbank’s owner Son is like Hanuman. He does’t care how big a start up is. He just gobbles them down, if he likes them. Ask Uber or Paytm or Oyo. Other than Oyo, he has routinely invested more than $ 1bn in other startups.
Show some numbers please:
He recently invested $ INR 32bn for ARM chip.
He invested $ 4bn or INR 28,000 crore in Wework.
He had invested $ 2bn or INR 14,000 crore in Flipkart and $ 1.4bn in Paytm.
He had invested $ 1bn in Sofi.
He invested $ 9.3 bn in Uber and $ 5bn in Didi.
How did he start?
He founded Softbank in 1981. He started by selling PC softwares in Japan.
Initially he invested in businesses and startups such as Yahoo and Alibaba. Both the investments paid him back many times. For example his $ 20mn investment in Alibaba is worth 34% of Alibab.
In 2006 he bought Vodafone Japan, and turned it around. It also became his vehicle to invest big in startups.
He has invested in eight Indian startups; Housing.com, Inmobi, Snapdeal, Hike, Flipkart, Ola, Paytm and Oyo.
How does he operate $ 100 billion dollar fund?
The Vision Fund is now run by nine managing partners — five at the fund’s Silicon Valley outpost, two in Japan, and two in London. Son says he personally trained these “hunters” on how to find the best investments and plans to increase the number of dealmakers to 300 over the next few years.
Fun facts:
He had lost $ 70bn in the dot com bust. He nearly went bankrupt.
He bought the most expensive house in USA for $117.5 million.
He buys his clothes and shoes from low cost retailer Uniqlo.
Recommended reading: