A member of the top 100 from the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist
Ron Fisher, managing partner at SoftBank Capital, had been president at Japan-based internet conglomerate SoftBank until 2014, when Nikesh Arora joined from Google.
As well as being president, Arora, who also has the chief operating officer and vice-chairman titles at SoftBank Group, has ultimate responsibility for corporate venturing investments.
Last year after he was promoted to president in June, he led a strategy shift that meant the 20-year-old SoftBank Capital investment arm will not raise any new funds going forward and that future SoftBank investments will come for the most part from the balance sheet of the parent SoftBank Corp. SoftBank Capital transferred management and administration of its 2010 and 2014 early-stage funds to Lerer Hippeau Ventures.
This involved dislocation for the team with some people, such as Marissa Campise, a Global Corporate Venturing Rising Star, relocating from east to west coast America to work with David Thevenon, managing director and a former colleague of Arora at both Deutsche Telekom and Google.
But it also gave them promise that what SoftBank’s founder, Masayoshi Son, had called a hobby, according to a Bloomberg profile, would be be more ambitious and invest about $3bn into startups each year. Arora told Bloomberg he planned to make five to 10 investments a year of $100m to $1bn to back startups that have proven products and need to expand – the rapid phase of growth Arora helped manage at Google where he had risen to chief business officer after joining in 2004 from Deutsche Telekom.
SoftBank invested $1bn in Korean mobile commerce company Coupang and the same again in US-based online lender Social Finance, and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Indian companies Snapdeal, Ola Cabs, Housing.com and Oyo Rooms.
“As we look at the future for the next decades, we believe that the way to preserve the long-term sustainability of SoftBank is to be large minority shareholders of many assets,” Arora told news provider Recode in an interview. “We believe that it is less crowded in the large-cheque marketplace, and it is a smaller universe of companies we have to understand and support.”
It is risk worthy of some of the group’s early investments in China-based Alibaba or US-listed Yahoo.
However, such large, later-stage deals carry risks. In January, department store chain Hudson’s Bay Company agreed to acquire US-based e-commerce company Gilt Groupe for $250m, providing an exit to SoftBank.Buthe deal came less than five years after Gilt raised $138m at a $1bn valuation, in a round in which SoftBank invested $62.5m, and Gilt has raised about $290m in total implying at least some shareholders were under water in the exit despite it being one of the largest of the year so far.
And Arora has faced criticism. Last month a group of SoftBank investors called on the company to investigate and possibly dismiss Arora over perceived bad deals and potential conflicts of interest.
SoftBank, however, is his largest commitment. He has borrowed money to become the second-largest shareholder in SoftBank after its founder, Son, and he is seen as an heir apparent.
