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0 pointsJudgmentality6y ago0 comments

The Vision Fund represents a huge share of the VC market though - at least 10%.

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/softbank-dealt-in-tenth-of-...

It could trivially collapse the VC market as companies are largely failing to IPO, and depending on how it's leveraged (I do not know nearly enough details) it could absolutely have serious economic shockwaves throughout the world.

> I can't imagine their failure hurting market sentiment overall.

I don't see why it would be any different than 20 years ago and the dot com bubble. Everybody says this time it's different, yet the overwhelming majority of tech companies IPOing are hemorrhaging money. Look at Uber - losing billions of dollars per year with no end in sight and their stock continues to decline. And of course Uber was a Softbank investment.

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freewilly10406y ago

The bubble inflating money coming from private markets rather than public like 20 years ago is a pretty huge difference. Vision Fund’s collapse is bad news for SV techies but ranks far below other things like trade wars in terms of reasons for concern

JudgmentalityOP6y ago

I agree with you the trade war is likely to have far more of an impact (at least an order of magnitude) than any of this, however as companies like Uber go public it no longer is only affecting private investors. And Softbank definitely propped up Uber for the IPO like they tried to do with WeWork, but I guess that was a one trick pony.

Also let's not forget how many pension funds are tied up in VC portfolios, so while it may not have an immediate crashing impact on everybody it can ruin people's retirements.

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