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The title is a reference to this series of slides in the Softbank earnings presentation: https://imgur.com/a/90bxNjo https://imgur.com/a/90bxNjo https://group

The title is a reference to this series of slides in the Softbank earnings presentation: https://imgur.com/a/90bxNjo https://imgur.com/a/90bxNjo https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/ir/presentations/2019/earnings-presentation_q4fy2019_01_en.pdf https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/ir/presentations/201...

MattGaiser 6y ago
SoftBank could have saved money on all the high resolution graphics...
- jacquesm 6y ago
  They could have saved a lot more by not doing so many stupid investments.
  - blobbers 6y ago
    Think of all the stupid jobs that wouldn't have been created if they didn't make their stupid investments. There'd be a total collapse in the stupidity market.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    Pedantically, that statement isn't fair, an investment is only stupid or genius in hindsight, at the time it is just a choice. They could have saved a lot more by making better choices about what to invest in. :-)
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      Fair enough.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      I'm not sure I agree. I think some of them were stupid at the time of the investment. The larger the wishful thinking component, the more likely it's a stupid investment.
      - ChuckMcM 6y ago
        I hear you. I did an experiment post dot com crash which was to add notes in my journal about investments that were announced. I added my own evaluation next to it as 'makes sense' or 'doesn't make sense.' That helped me contextualize my looking back at things. I did this after I had turned down a high level engineering job at Netscape pre-IPO because, in my evaluation, every time they tried to charge money for their main product "Communicator" nobody would buy it, and I felt the market for their ecommerce server software was competing against a free alternative. That choice, leave Sun (an Internet powerhouse) or join a startup that couldn't sell its primary product, I considered the leave Sun choice 'stupid' at the time. It cost me about $7M in theory because that is what my options would have been worth (and yes they would have vested before the crash hit). Since I spent an unhealthy amount of time self criticizing my "choice mistakes" I took it upon myself to figure out if I was being realistic or not. My experience, based on my journal notes, was that I was wrong about half the time. So my criticism was unwarranted. It also helped temper any unrealistic feelings about my own abilities based on successes that were, largely luck driven.
        AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        That's... sobering. But were you wrong about Netscape? Or were you right, but it took the market long enough to catch on that you left a lot of money on the table? I think the latter, but would defer to your opinion if you disagree.
        blobbers 6y ago
        You can try to make better decisions, but it's hard to have better timing. While, a gut feeling or a statistic for the market's rationality curve might be possible, it certainly seems wiser to make better decisions. In today's economy Netscape's value would be in its user base in the same way one would expect chrome to be valuable. In the data marketing world, nothing is really free.
        ChuckMcM 6y ago
        I have since come to the conclusion that I was both right and wrong. If you analyze the meta-branching of that decision you can see at least three branches. 1) The one I took which was to stay at Sun. In this universe my employee purchase options continued to grow, Sun's stock split again, and my net worth grew by more than my annual salary that year. 2) In this first alternate, I take the job at Netscape in May of 1995, and become a multi-millionaire (on paper) in August. Using historical data for Netscape, and knowing that when they went public they had a 1 year lockout on employee sales, if I were to have sold 1/4th of my option on the anniversary of the IPO in each of 1996, 1997, 1997, and 1998, my net worth would go up to roughly $9.8M net of income taxes assuming I didn't file an 83b election (not that I could of come up with the cash to vest all my shares anyway at that time but whatever) 3) I take the job at Netscape, I am holding multiple millions of dollars in stock which become AOL stock in 1998 and don't sell them, they become nearly worthless 5 years later. The illustration is that there is a path and different choices along the path end in different endings. As it turned out, after Netscape went public, realizing that I was not going to make a whole lot of money on Sun stock as an employee, I left and started a startup with some other ex-Sun employees. My take away from all of this was that decisions are neither "right" nor "wrong", rather they are just inflections in the timeline. Sometimes the timeline has given you additional advantage, and sometimes it has taken it away, the trick for me was to not get greedy. When there was "enough" advantage, lock in the benefit and move on, when there was "enough" disadvantage, stop digging the hole and move on. But most importantly for my mental health, as long as the slope was generally on the upswing, then don't sweat the choices that didn't work out. With all that being said, I'm also a big fan of learning from decisions and trying to put into my toolkit things that would have illuminated the upside and downside more clearly if I had done them at the time. Case in point, "Never join a startup where the two senior leaders are both in a relationship and their reporting relationship at home is different than the one they have at work." and "Never join a startup that has never had to defend its existence to a skeptical investor."
zacksinclair 6y ago
Holy shit. They actually put that into a slide deck? Wow
- gnicholas 6y ago
  I once saw a presentation with a slide that said “failure = success”. Yes, I am aware that this happened on HBO’s Silicon Valley, and no that’s not where I saw it.
- seph-reed 6y ago
  Check out the Pepsi logo design doc if you want a real laugh: https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
  - aunlead 6y ago
    Attraction Theory: The Pepsi Proposition Establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a “transactional” experience to an “invitational” expression. Is this for real!! I had to look up Pepsi's current logo to believe this. They paid $1 million for the logo (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign-document-1-million-for-this/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...)
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
So they're saying one out of every three unicorns infected with the novel coronavirus will emerge as a winged unicorn?
- pkilgore 6y ago
  "While reading a post on hacker news, a Softbank earnings call presentation caused me to google the difference between a unicorn and a Pegasus" is just one of those sentences that sounds Insane in prior to 2020.
  - bentcorner 6y ago
    | no wings | wings ---------+----------+-------- no horn | horse | pegasus ---------+----------+-------- horn | unicorn | alicorn
    - riffraff 6y ago
      Notice "alicorn" is actually the name of the unicorns' horn, historically. At some point people started using it for winged unicorns, presumably because "Ali" would be Latin for "wings" but this seems a recent development.
      - duaoebg 6y ago
        I wonder if it’s My Little Pony related
        egypturnash 6y ago
        MLP popularized this usage but it predates that.
    - m463 6y ago
      sudo pacman -S ponysay ponythink this is awesome
    - BerislavLopac 6y ago
rubidium 6y ago
And that wasn't even the craziest slide of the presentation. "Information Revolution - Happiness for Everyone" I had to wipe the coffee off my screen.
- aabhay 6y ago
  That’s not the first time that slide has appeared on a Softbank deck. In fact, that deck is nowhere close to being the most insane SoftBank deck.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Maybe they should hire someone to come up with normal slides, it can’t be good to be seen publicly losing money hand over first and making slides that look like they belong on Wait But Why.
  - tim333 6y ago
    I quite like the "Information Revolution - Happiness for Everyone" aspiration. Just needs a bit more work.
hiharryhere 6y ago
Slides 50-54 in that second link are wild.

MattGaiser 6y ago

SoftBank could have saved money on all the high resolution graphics...

jacquesm 6y ago
They could have saved a lot more by not doing so many stupid investments.
- blobbers 6y ago
  Think of all the stupid jobs that wouldn't have been created if they didn't make their stupid investments. There'd be a total collapse in the stupidity market.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Pedantically, that statement isn't fair, an investment is only stupid or genius in hindsight, at the time it is just a choice. They could have saved a lot more by making better choices about what to invest in. :-)
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Fair enough.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    I'm not sure I agree. I think some of them were stupid at the time of the investment. The larger the wishful thinking component, the more likely it's a stupid investment.
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      I hear you. I did an experiment post dot com crash which was to add notes in my journal about investments that were announced. I added my own evaluation next to it as 'makes sense' or 'doesn't make sense.' That helped me contextualize my looking back at things. I did this after I had turned down a high level engineering job at Netscape pre-IPO because, in my evaluation, every time they tried to charge money for their main product "Communicator" nobody would buy it, and I felt the market for their ecommerce server software was competing against a free alternative. That choice, leave Sun (an Internet powerhouse) or join a startup that couldn't sell its primary product, I considered the leave Sun choice 'stupid' at the time. It cost me about $7M in theory because that is what my options would have been worth (and yes they would have vested before the crash hit). Since I spent an unhealthy amount of time self criticizing my "choice mistakes" I took it upon myself to figure out if I was being realistic or not. My experience, based on my journal notes, was that I was wrong about half the time. So my criticism was unwarranted. It also helped temper any unrealistic feelings about my own abilities based on successes that were, largely luck driven.
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        That's... sobering. But were you wrong about Netscape? Or were you right, but it took the market long enough to catch on that you left a lot of money on the table? I think the latter, but would defer to your opinion if you disagree.
        blobbers 6y ago
        You can try to make better decisions, but it's hard to have better timing. While, a gut feeling or a statistic for the market's rationality curve might be possible, it certainly seems wiser to make better decisions. In today's economy Netscape's value would be in its user base in the same way one would expect chrome to be valuable. In the data marketing world, nothing is really free.
        ChuckMcM 6y ago
        I have since come to the conclusion that I was both right and wrong. If you analyze the meta-branching of that decision you can see at least three branches. 1) The one I took which was to stay at Sun. In this universe my employee purchase options continued to grow, Sun's stock split again, and my net worth grew by more than my annual salary that year. 2) In this first alternate, I take the job at Netscape in May of 1995, and become a multi-millionaire (on paper) in August. Using historical data for Netscape, and knowing that when they went public they had a 1 year lockout on employee sales, if I were to have sold 1/4th of my option on the anniversary of the IPO in each of 1996, 1997, 1997, and 1998, my net worth would go up to roughly $9.8M net of income taxes assuming I didn't file an 83b election (not that I could of come up with the cash to vest all my shares anyway at that time but whatever) 3) I take the job at Netscape, I am holding multiple millions of dollars in stock which become AOL stock in 1998 and don't sell them, they become nearly worthless 5 years later. The illustration is that there is a path and different choices along the path end in different endings. As it turned out, after Netscape went public, realizing that I was not going to make a whole lot of money on Sun stock as an employee, I left and started a startup with some other ex-Sun employees. My take away from all of this was that decisions are neither "right" nor "wrong", rather they are just inflections in the timeline. Sometimes the timeline has given you additional advantage, and sometimes it has taken it away, the trick for me was to not get greedy. When there was "enough" advantage, lock in the benefit and move on, when there was "enough" disadvantage, stop digging the hole and move on. But most importantly for my mental health, as long as the slope was generally on the upswing, then don't sweat the choices that didn't work out. With all that being said, I'm also a big fan of learning from decisions and trying to put into my toolkit things that would have illuminated the upside and downside more clearly if I had done them at the time. Case in point, "Never join a startup where the two senior leaders are both in a relationship and their reporting relationship at home is different than the one they have at work." and "Never join a startup that has never had to defend its existence to a skeptical investor."

zacksinclair 6y ago

Holy shit. They actually put that into a slide deck? Wow

gnicholas 6y ago
I once saw a presentation with a slide that said “failure = success”. Yes, I am aware that this happened on HBO’s Silicon Valley, and no that’s not where I saw it.
seph-reed 6y ago
Check out the Pepsi logo design doc if you want a real laugh: https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
- aunlead 6y ago
  Attraction Theory: The Pepsi Proposition Establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a “transactional” experience to an “invitational” expression. Is this for real!! I had to look up Pepsi's current logo to believe this. They paid $1 million for the logo (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign-document-1-million-for-this/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...)

eli_gottlieb 6y ago

So they're saying one out of every three unicorns infected with the novel coronavirus will emerge as a winged unicorn?

pkilgore 6y ago
"While reading a post on hacker news, a Softbank earnings call presentation caused me to google the difference between a unicorn and a Pegasus" is just one of those sentences that sounds Insane in prior to 2020.
- bentcorner 6y ago
  | no wings | wings ---------+----------+-------- no horn | horse | pegasus ---------+----------+-------- horn | unicorn | alicorn
  - riffraff 6y ago
    Notice "alicorn" is actually the name of the unicorns' horn, historically. At some point people started using it for winged unicorns, presumably because "Ali" would be Latin for "wings" but this seems a recent development.
    - duaoebg 6y ago
      I wonder if it’s My Little Pony related
      - egypturnash 6y ago
        MLP popularized this usage but it predates that.
  - m463 6y ago
    sudo pacman -S ponysay ponythink this is awesome
  - BerislavLopac 6y ago

rubidium 6y ago

And that wasn't even the craziest slide of the presentation. "Information Revolution - Happiness for Everyone" I had to wipe the coffee off my screen.

aabhay 6y ago
That’s not the first time that slide has appeared on a Softbank deck. In fact, that deck is nowhere close to being the most insane SoftBank deck.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Maybe they should hire someone to come up with normal slides, it can’t be good to be seen publicly losing money hand over first and making slides that look like they belong on Wait But Why.
- tim333 6y ago
  I quite like the "Information Revolution - Happiness for Everyone" aspiration. Just needs a bit more work.

hiharryhere 6y ago

Slides 50-54 in that second link are wild.