Word: sons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...perhaps the only--reason to believe in Son's ambitious plan is that it already seems to be working. Yahoo, E*Trade and GeoCities, among others, are not only dominant among U.S. customers but lead a long list of Softbank companies that Son and his lieutenants say account for more than 90% of all Internet commerce in Japan. As the world's second largest economy has caught on to the power of the Net in the past year, Softbank's stock, which is traded on the Tokyo exchange, has soared. The company's market capitalization is a stunning $79 billion...
...Son's grand vision of the world's Internet future has been gestating since he was a very determined little boy in Kyushu, Japan. Born of Korean heritage in a place with little tolerance of foreigners (particularly Koreans), Son has fought the battles of an outsider all his life. He bore the boyhood name-calling stoically and tried to toughen himself physically by inserting weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs (the better to play soccer). He left for the U.S. when still in high school, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with an economics degree and, upon...
Still, it wasn't until after he signed a deal to represent hardware maker Cisco Systems in Japan in 1993 that Son's grand Internet vision began to fall into place. "When you have the railroad being laid, you can see the train, you start to imagine the passengers, and you know there will be department stores going up around the station," he says in the midst of one of his characteristic soliloquies. "I had a feeling this was going...
Always the outsider, Son didn't have much of a Silicon Valley Rolodex in 1995, when he returned to the States. But he did have nearly a billion dollars to spend, money practically handed to him by Japanese bankers desperate to breathe life into their country's sagging economy. Son lured a couple of Silicon Valley veterans to run Softbank Technology Ventures, the San Jose partnership that has become the heart of his Internet empire. And so the shopping spree began, as Softbank scooped up the trade-show group that organizes Comdex, the computer industry's biggest convention, and Kingston...
Since then, it is as if Son & Co. trained a fire hose on Silicon Valley and pumped in a steady stream of cash. President Gary Rieschel figures that in 1996, with Softbank Technology Ventures still an unknown in the valley, it invested $200 million in 55 companies in four months-- although "investing" hardly describes the act of writing checks as fast as you can. Last month Softbank opened Hotbank, an incubator for start-ups. There has been no need to advertise. Each week hundreds of applications pour into Hotbank; out come announcements of new Softbank allies: PeoplePC, Webvan, Global Sports...