A FEW YEARS ago SoftBank rewrote the rules of venture capital (VC). The Japanese tech conglomerate was handing out cash left and right to startup founders. Leading venture capitalists held conferences to discuss how their industry could survive the SoftBank onslaught. As some of SoftBank’s biggest investments unravelled, culminating with the collapse in September 2019 of the initial public offering (IPO) of WeWork, an office-sharing firm, Valley veterans gloated. It seemed to be just another “tourist investor”, as one VC luminary dubs those who occasionally traipse through Silicon Valley looking to pick up sexy startups.
Now SoftBank is being upstaged by another brash outsider. Between January and May Tiger Global
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