Funding Secured
October 21, 2018·2 comments·In Brief
The Khashoggi murder didn't change what SoftBank's Vision Fund actually does. It changed what everyone knows that everyone knows about where its money comes from. When the narrative around a $100 billion investment engine shifts overnight, the question isn't whether the deals are still real. It's whether the story still holds.
• Before October, the Vision Fund was defined by the deals it was making. Saudi involvement existed in media coverage, but it was peripheral. The core narrative was about investment strategy and unicorn potential.
• After October 3rd, negative coverage of the Vision Fund more than tripled. Positive sentiment fell below 50% for the first time. But the more damaging shift was structural: Saudi involvement moved from narrative periphery to core.
• The money wasn't secret before October. Everyone in Silicon Valley already knew Saudi Arabia backed the fund. What changed wasn't the facts. It was which facts became the center of the story.
• When a funding source shifts from invisible assumption to explicit story, behavior changes even if the capital doesn't. Every Vision Fund investment now carries a narrative weight it didn't carry before. Association matters more than allocation.
• If narrative damage to the Vision Fund undermines the unicorn valuations built on its capital, the question becomes: what survives if this fund becomes untouchable. Can greed overcome story once the story has shifted.
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Comments
Awesome piece - and while not great for you, great for us that you are working hard on a weekend. It appears to me that a little of the air / the anger / the umbrage / the immediate outrage has gone out of the Saudi story in the popular press. Sure, as your map notes, it’s almost all still negative, but it seem to be less of a “full-on” media frenzy than it was five days ago (to wit, it’s fallen off my 85-year-old mom’s radar whose interest in news is completely main-stream-media headline driven). Almost as if someone at a high level said - “now tamp down the outrage a bit.” Ben, is there a way of looking the narrative map data to see if my finger-to-the-wind feel is reflected in the data? Thank you, Mark
Good question, Mark. Right now the Quid technology (and this is true for all Natural Language Processing routines, not specific to Quid) is very much a blunt tool. That said, Rusty and I are working on some tools to evaluate changes in the “density” of these narrative maps, which I think can give some insights on your question. We’ll keep you posted!
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