When SoftBank announced its first Vision Fund back in 2017, TechCrunch gawked at the size of the fundraising vehicle and its $100 million minimum check size. Noting a few of its early deals, we wrote that “the party is just getting started.”
Little did we know how accurate that quip would become. The Vision Fund poured capital into a host of companies with big plans, or what could at least be construed as grandiose hypotheses about the future. And after deploying $98.6 billion in a blizzard of deals, SoftBank left the venture capital market changed.
“Strange” may be the best way to describe …