We'll never see another $100 billion technology Vision Fund — from SoftBank or anyone else
The reports also didn't seem to spend a lot of time examining exactly how the Vision Fund would work in practice. It's one thing to have $100 billion at your disposal. It's another thing to figure out how to invest that much money., particularly in things like artificial intelligence and robotics, genome sequencing, semiconductors, and virtual reality. And its plan was to make investments of at least $100 million each — and often much bigger.
But SoftBank's strategy was also influenced by the terms under which it got some of the money for the fund. The Vision Fundto investors who provided $40 billion of the fund's capital. That commitment — which translates into coming up with about $3 billion in cash every year — seems to have been a big inducement to invest the money as quickly as possible and as much as feasible into companies that would either go public or be acquired soon.
To put those numbers in perspective, the average venture fund might invest in 10 or maybe 20 companies in a year. Meanwhile the entire global traditional venture industry — which excludes SoftBank — raised just $75 billion in new funds last year, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook. And the entire amount invested in venture-backed startups in the US last year — including by SoftBank — was $133 billion.
Likewise, with enterprise software companies, adoption of their software usually takes time, Murphy said. Companies adopt new software at their own pace, and potential customers often need to see their peers using new applications before they will buy into them. A massive funding round might allow a company to hire a huge sales team or to pour millions of dollars into marketing, but it can't really speed up that initial adoption rate, he said.
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