IRL’s Users Were Not IRL

Jun 25, 2023

Also hedge fund accounting, Icahn Enterprises, Yellow, the cage match thing and CEO pranks.

To overstate things only a little bit, for a while, SoftBank Group Corp. put up a sign saying “hi, we have $100 billion, we want to invest it in tech companies that are growing their user bases quickly, we don’t care that much about profitability, we make decisions quickly, we’ll give you way more money than you need, so if you want some of it show up at our offices and pitch us.” People showed up. SoftBank wanted to hear a particular sort of tech story, and it was pretty open about the exact elements of the story it wanted to hear, and when it heard that story it would start gushing money. People are motivated by incentives. They learned how to tell SoftBank the story it wanted to hear.

The funniest person who ever told SoftBank that story is surely Adam Neumann. The robot pizza delivery guy is up there too. Maybe, like, the ninth-funniest is Abraham Shafi: