Gambling Man

Gambling Man backs two of Tom's lessons and argues with two. Under each of his lessons, what the book says about it, and on which pages.

• A brand that compounds has a mission and an enemy

  Masa chose NTT as the biggest enemy to make it a fair fight and framed SoftBank's 30-Year Vision as happiness for everyone, which shows a mission plus an enemy rallying people. pp. 150, 196 and 198. In the book: The Vodafone Japan turnaround, Whole-company securitisation, The 30-Year Vision brainstorm, The Sprint turnaround under Claure.

• Assumptions made too fast, and risk avoided

  Masa's let's do it instinct and his willingness to jump into the pool back the idea that fast action beats over-worrying, although WeWork shows the cost when the stakes are large. pp. 62, 78 and 110. In the book: Masa's market filter, The Yahoo! formula, Kitao's bond liberalisation play.

Where it disagrees with Tom

• Move the people you have before you hire

  Masa kept hiring outside stars such as Omori, Arora, Misra and Claure at high prices, and the results included feuds, exits and a failed succession. pp. 69, 72, 217, 220 and 261. In the book: The Yahoo! formula, Kitao's bond liberalisation play, The 30-Year Vision brainstorm, The Sprint turnaround under Claure, Elliott's SoftBank playbook.

• Macro and micro at the same time

  The book shows a leader who stayed at the macro, became the bottleneck and was told he was being asked to do too much, so the team never became self sufficient. pp. 236, 285 and 295. In the book: Elliott's SoftBank playbook.

Barber argues that Masayoshi Son is a gambler by inheritance and temperament, the son of a pachinko king who learnt that outsiders win by betting big when the odds are bad. Son built SoftBank as a conjurer of capital with a single repeatable formula: find the leading American business, take control of the Japanese version, list it and recycle the cash. His fortune comes from a few huge calls, notably Yahoo!, Alibaba and the Sprint and T-Mobile merger, and his losses come from the same trait, with leverage, private vehicles and a refusal to take advice. The record of WeWork, the Vision Fund and Northstar shows how a founder with no check on him can mistake vision for evidence. Barber's conclusion is that Son has been right about the direction of technology and wrong about timing, and that SoftBank has never been about profits, only growth and the moonshot.

• Pick a market where you can be number one, find the bottleneck, and pitch as the specialist with no evidence except belief (pp. 59-62).
• Borrowed credibility opens doors: Sasaki putting up his own house as collateral won the first bank loan (pp. 63-64).
• Put it in writing. Handshake deals with Mozer, National Semiconductor, Jobs and Goldman produced rows or luck, and Masa learnt the lesson once and forgot it (pp. 54, 182, 186).
• The Yahoo! formula is a repeatable deal format: find the US leader, own the Japanese version, list it and recycle the proceeds (p. 108).
• Overpaying for position is a strategy with a cost: Comdex $842m, Ziff $2.1bn and Kingston $1.5bn were bought for access and cash flow, and Kingston was sold back for $450m (pp. 97, 102, 111).
• Leverage is addictive and structures that blur the founder's personal interest, like MAC and Northstar, are where the trouble starts (pp. 122, 176, 249, 282).
• Pick the biggest rival and the price war that grows the whole market, but know you need cash to fund it (pp. 150, 153).
• Growth stories beat profit and loss accounts until the market turns, so track the number the market watches, not the one you like (pp. 129, 304).
• A one-man show without a succession plan or a strong board is the central risk, and the best board interventions came from Yanai, Kimiwada, Kawamoto and Elliott (pp. 185, 203, 270, 292).
• Fast hires of stars with vague titles breed feuding barons, and Masa's refusal to intervene made it worse (pp. 218, 261, 287).

• What makes a format repeatable, as opposed to a hit that happened once?

  Masa spent twenty years chasing a second Alibaba (p. 144) while the Yahoo! formula (p. 108) was the repeatable part of his model, which is the same gap between a one-off hit and a format that can be run again.

• How do you build a personal brand that generates inbound rather than requiring outbound?

  Masa built his reputation as the gateway to Japan by cold calling Fujita (p. 37), earning a press profile through an Asahi reporter (p. 64) and repeating a signature story dozens of times (p. 60), so that famous people sought him out.

• Which of my stories travel, and which only feel like they should?

  The tangerine box speech was reproduced dozens of times (p. 60) while parts of the pocket translator story are contested by Mozer (p. 55), which shows how a story can travel because it is told, whatever the evidence behind it.

• How do you price and sell a tool you built for yourself?

  Masa sold the pocket translator prototype to Sharp for a package worth about $1m (p. 51), and later said he should have charged a higher price (p. 114), which is a lesson in pricing a tool built for yourself.

• What is the smallest team that can produce at the volume I am used to?

  Small teams can carry huge amounts of money: SoftBank had 75 people and 75 per cent of the market in two years (p. 67), Buffett manages $110bn with twelve people (p. 249) and Sprint's zero baseline budget cut 800 lawyers to 200 (p. 213).

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