n, you start to imagine the passengers and you know there will be department stores going up around the station," he says. "I had a feeling this was going to be big."
Always the outsider, Son didn't have much of a Silicon Valley Rolodex in 1995. But he did have several billion dollars to spend, the money practically handed to him by Japanese investors desperate for promising companies in which to put money. So he started shopping, scooping up the trade show group that organizes Comdex ($800 million), the computer industry's biggest convention, and then Kingston Technology, a memory board maker ($1.5 billion). After a dinner in New York with mega-dealmaker Ted Forstmann, Son bought Ziff-Davis Publishing, producer of PC Week, for $2.1 billion.
Since then, it's as if Son & Co. trained a firehose on Silicon Valley and pumped in a steady stream of cash. Softbank recently opened an incubator for start-ups called Hotbank. Hundreds of applications pour in each week, and out come the announcements of new Softbank allies: PeoplePC, Webvan, Global Sports, InsWeb. Softbank's rivals can take some solace in knowing that Son's mistakes have been spectacular. He wasted billions on Ziff-Davis, which he is now trying to sell off. Kingston was sold at a loss, and some of his start-ups went south. Son would argue that these failures represent the price of admission. If you don't play, you can't win. And in the end, only the best will survive. Perhaps to remind himself how tough the future world will be, Son practices his golf game at home, in an electronic range that reproduces the most difficult competitive conditions, including wind and rain. Anything to be No. 1.
Reported by Donald Macintyre/Tokyo and Michael Krantz/San Francisco
This edition's table of contents
TIME Europe home
More stories from TIME Europe and related links
E-mail us at mail@timeatlantic.com
COPYRIGHT © 1999 TIME INC. NEW MEDIA
|
|
