The lessons from the Vision Fund

“IF I’M GOINGVCVCVC to do a fund it has to be big enough to disrupt the whole technology world.” So declared Son Masayoshi four years ago, on a trip to the Middle East to drum up cash for a new investment vehicle to take on Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists (s). His Vision Fund eventually raised $98.6bn and bought stakes in some of the world’s most exciting companies, including ByteDance and Uber. Yet as we explain this week, Mr Son’s mission has so far had mixed results (see ). Performance has been soggy, despite a boom in tech stocks, as the strategy of pouring money into private firms has at times become rather like spoiling perpetual adolescents. Instead, the Vision Fund’s most striking legacy may be that it has marked the start of a new era in which American capital and startups no longer call all the shots.For decades an elite of funds in San Francisco have spotted promising startups and nurtured them to adulthood, in the form of a stockmarket listing or a takeover. The Vision Fund played by different rules. It dragged out of its Californian cul-de-sac. Its anchor investor was a Saudi Arabian sovereign-wealth fund, it was controlled from Tokyo and it paid as much attention to Asia’s tech scene as to America’s. It viewed capital as a weapon in a winner-takes-all struggle. By channelling vast sums to startups you could speed up time and help them reach critical mass more quickly while intimidating their rivals. The Vision Fund also tried to reinvent governance. It let firms stay in private hands for longer, as part of its global family of startups which could share ideas and co-operate or fight it out—the fund has bought stakes in 92 firms, some of which compete with each other.