I love slide 18 with the implication that researchers don't create and engineers don't think.
vavos 17 hours ago [-]
Goose value 0?
Reubachi 7 hours ago [-]
Gosh that one got me good. I haven't had a genuine chuckle from a post on here in ages, nevermind one that's from a a CEO of a multibillion dollar firm, who's presentation I was up until that point more or less agreeing with.
IE; It went from "ya know, this is actual a reasonable take to provide investors from a 70+ y/o CEO" to "Goose value 0?"
sysguest 7 hours ago [-]
hmm g00se?
DANmode 7 hours ago [-]
“Is the value of the goose 0?”
NickC25 9 hours ago [-]
Skimmed through this hoping it was some sort of joke, and there was a genuine "gotcha" moment before diving into the stuff professional analysts spend lots of time examining.
Turns out, the joke was on me. I got pictures of fucking geese.
financetechbro 7 hours ago [-]
Really blurs the like between genius and crazy
throwup238 6 hours ago [-]
I think he left that line behind a long time ago.
esafak 20 hours ago [-]
I can't speak to the numbers, but the values it espouses sound reasonable.
donkey_brains 17 hours ago [-]
Preposterous. Clearly the goose is full of golden eggs
sysguest 14 hours ago [-]
translation: goose has constipation
akomtu 17 hours ago [-]
ASI as Alien Slop Intelligence is already here. The next phase is hardening the slop, I suppose.
drumhead 14 hours ago [-]
The baffling thing is how SoftBank still hasn't gone under.
zipy124 13 hours ago [-]
Lucky bets that paid off enough to cover thousands of bad investments.
yen223 10 hours ago [-]
That's the nature of most venture capital isn't it?
Downside is capped, upside is uncapped, why not bet on as many companies as you can?
zipy124 8 hours ago [-]
Softbank aren't really doing this any more though. They are making very large bets on relatively few companies. Their vision fund 1 was something like 100 billion spread between about 100 companies, so 1 billion each. This is rather different than the usual VC. It's hard to get data, but most data suggest smaller rounds have better success [1].
Is a small number of people with huge amounts of money investing in things nobody wants better than lots of people with small amounts of money investing in things they want?
JdeBP 15 hours ago [-]
One of Masayoshi Son's recent slideshows has been doing the rounds on the FediVerse this week. If you've seen people making odd comments about 'Goose was not valued.' or 'Goose value 71.' or 'eggs do not lay eggs' over the past few days then Son's 2026 presentation to shareholders is what they are going on about.
This is the context that a lot of us didn't have. Son has been doing this since 2010, the goose laying golden eggs going back to at least 2014, and the 2020 earnings report having a run of 23 slides of geese and eggs. Other weird things over the years have included dog telepathy and a representation of COVID-19 as flying unicorns jumping out of a ditch. As the Bloomberg people pointed out, this significantly came to the attention of the world outwith Japan, which largely boggled at some of the slideshows sans context, in 2019 and 2020. Part of the world is discovering this afresh in 2026.
Some of the criticism over the years has focussed not on the more oddball aspects of these slideshows, but on the stereotypical way in which the graphs with projections just suddenly make lines shoot upwards.
rendaw 9 hours ago [-]
TBF the presentation as a whole makes a lot more sense than the 4 slides out of context.
skeeter2020 9 hours ago [-]
This feels like the same PE theory / sell job: "Untapped value that can only be unlocked with PMaaS - Professional Management as a Service", only scaled up "because AI". They're trying to change the narative so that SB has a huge intrinsic value, while it's common knowledge that venture funding is a hit-driving business. I don't blame them but it's total bullshit. Funds do this when they're out of ideas and throw a lot of very expensive spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
Their 30 year plan slide deck was easily the best. That’s where the sorrow slide is from.
Wild that decks like that get produced and approved by such a big company
burnermore 10 hours ago [-]
Softbank is a codesmell. If u have worked for a Softbank startup, you'd know. I don't use any Softbank backed services. The employees are in extreme stress. Nothing good can come out of that environment than money printing for the big dogs.
fsh 10 hours ago [-]
I once has the displeasure of using a SoftBank SIM in Japan which relentlessly spammed my phone with unblockable ads. The continuing survival of this company is proof that billionares that got lucky once cannot possibly fail.
15 hours ago [-]
kencausey 3 days ago [-]
(2020)
aetherson 19 hours ago [-]
I mean, he was pretty vindicated on Uber. Which kind of hurts me to say, I was a long time Uber bear. But it did indeed emerge from the pandemic stronger.
nmfisher 16 hours ago [-]
Quick Google suggests Uber is up 66% on its IPO price, but the S&P index is up 85% over the same time period. I think Softbank also sold out around 2022, so the return (vs IPO price) would have been even lower. Didn't check for stock splits etc but I don't think Uber was a home-run for Softbank at all.
8 hours ago [-]
conception 18 hours ago [-]
They also spent a ton of money to get an unchangeable law passed in their favor to bypass employment regulations.
lmm 17 hours ago [-]
> unchangeable law
WTF do you mean by this? Even constitutions can be amended, and if an odious law cannot be changed through politics then that only means it will be changed by other means.
returnInfinity 18 hours ago [-]
yeah I was a uber bear too, some how it has turned around
I was betting on the taxi drivers revolting, but the capital markets have prevailed
CamperBob2 5 minutes ago [-]
No, their customers revolted. If a business based on "Get in cars with random strangers" beats you in the marketplace, your business model sucks and chances are good that you do, too. That's the taxi industry in a nutshell.
nl 17 hours ago [-]
In what country would taxi drivers revolt?
I think in most countries the drivers get paid by the taxi license holders and usually can make more money and/or more have more flexible working conditions driving for Uber.
Better the taxi drivers revolt in Germany than artists!
porridgeraisin 15 hours ago [-]
The old taxi union+licensing+bully hybrid system common in many parts of the world was far worse than the cruelest thing uber could do.
protocolture 16 hours ago [-]
>I was betting on the taxi drivers revolting, but the capital markets have prevailed
Capital Markets found in favor of giant corporation Uber instead of giant corporation Cabcharge.
georgefrowny 14 hours ago [-]
They were right that economics is a dismal science, but to me these days it's not only about the ugly Moloch-like consequences, but also because these utter wierdos are in charge of it, and the medium of economic domination is a PowerPoint of nonsensical AI slop.
oersted 8 hours ago [-]
I assume that the PowerPoints can be absolute slop because they do not matter at all, the power is elsewhere.
It all comes to names here. The world puts waaay too much faith in successful people being successful again, and too much of the success is attributed to their inherent talent. It’s a classic fallacy of authority.
Ironically, because everyone thinks that everyone thinks that they will succeed, investing on them does yield good returns, because others are likely to invest after. And they do indeed continue to succeed!
It’s as arbitrary as tulips. Bubbles of names. That’s why it’s weirdos, because it’s quite random who is chosen, and I suppose weirdos have a more pronounced brand.
Of course it’s not completely arbitrary, there’s real merit in cracking the initial chicken-and-egg, depending on where you start in life. And there are plenty of ways of squandering the opportunities that come after. But still.
actionfromafar 13 hours ago [-]
True but these particular powerpoints predate AI slop by far.
camillomiller 16 hours ago [-]
Masayoshi Son for me has always been the best living example of survival bias. Got very lucky once, been taking terrible decisions ever since.
Zuckerberg is another great example.
piker 15 hours ago [-]
This makes no sense. Masa has at least 2 extraordinary investments and Zuck bought Insta for 1 billion USD.
camillomiller 14 hours ago [-]
And then spent 80 billion on the Metaverse, while actively making the world a worse place.
Masayoshi son has lost absolutely stupid amount of money on things like WeWork, which he deemed as revolutionary as "AGI", which he is still pushing as inevitable.
These are immensely stupid people, with a lot of capital and non-existen ability to self-reflect or care, both enormous advantages when you play a game that favors carelessness.
InsideOutSanta 11 hours ago [-]
It's like somebody winning the lottery once, constantly investing all of their money into more lottery tickets, and going "holy shit, look at how smart I am at picking lottery numbers; I've already won something four times!"
zemvpferreira 9 hours ago [-]
Given that the lottery has a typical expected value of -$1.00 per ticket you really should revise your opinion of how lucky/smart these people who repeatedly make tens of billions by pouring all their money into tickets are.
InsideOutSanta 5 hours ago [-]
Softbank's past performance seems pretty random, so I'll stick to my opinion.
camillomiller 9 hours ago [-]
David Walsh and Zeljko Ranogajec would beg to differ:
Interesting that you would use as an example two people who ingeniously built complex systems, through lots of hard and clever work, to turn the odds in their favour.
microgpt 7 hours ago [-]
What else can you do with your life after you're rich? Life is meaningless. Most of us strive for money - when you have money, what's left? You're the dog that caught the car.
IE; It went from "ya know, this is actual a reasonable take to provide investors from a 70+ y/o CEO" to "Goose value 0?"
Turns out, the joke was on me. I got pictures of fucking geese.
Downside is capped, upside is uncapped, why not bet on as many companies as you can?
[1]: https://carta.com/uk/en/data/vc-fund-size-performance-2024/
* https://discuss.systems/@dev/116807460725864716
This is the context that a lot of us didn't have. Son has been doing this since 2010, the goose laying golden eggs going back to at least 2014, and the 2020 earnings report having a run of 23 slides of geese and eggs. Other weird things over the years have included dog telepathy and a representation of COVID-19 as flying unicorns jumping out of a ditch. As the Bloomberg people pointed out, this significantly came to the attention of the world outwith Japan, which largely boggled at some of the slideshows sans context, in 2019 and 2020. Part of the world is discovering this afresh in 2026.
* https://vice.com/en/article/these-delusional-powerpoint-slid...
* https://trillium.substack.com/p/golden-geese-stirring-the-po...
* https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/ir/presentations/202...
* https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/presenta... (https://group.softbank/en/news/webcast/20100625_01_en)
Some of the criticism over the years has focussed not on the more oddball aspects of these slideshows, but on the stereotypical way in which the graphs with projections just suddenly make lines shoot upwards.
Wild that decks like that get produced and approved by such a big company
WTF do you mean by this? Even constitutions can be amended, and if an odious law cannot be changed through politics then that only means it will be changed by other means.
I was betting on the taxi drivers revolting, but the capital markets have prevailed
I think in most countries the drivers get paid by the taxi license holders and usually can make more money and/or more have more flexible working conditions driving for Uber.
See eg https://www.statista.com/chart/6971/fare-deal-taxi-drivers-e...
Germany.
Capital Markets found in favor of giant corporation Uber instead of giant corporation Cabcharge.
It all comes to names here. The world puts waaay too much faith in successful people being successful again, and too much of the success is attributed to their inherent talent. It’s a classic fallacy of authority.
Ironically, because everyone thinks that everyone thinks that they will succeed, investing on them does yield good returns, because others are likely to invest after. And they do indeed continue to succeed!
It’s as arbitrary as tulips. Bubbles of names. That’s why it’s weirdos, because it’s quite random who is chosen, and I suppose weirdos have a more pronounced brand.
Of course it’s not completely arbitrary, there’s real merit in cracking the initial chicken-and-egg, depending on where you start in life. And there are plenty of ways of squandering the opportunities that come after. But still.
https://www.championbets.com.au/betting-academy-article/tass...