SA国际传媒

Morning Markets:听SoftBank’s second Vision Fund is coming into sharper focus as we learn that Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and SoftBank are possible investors.

After indicating that the could be only the first of similar capital vehicles, it seems that dream of having more than one enormous investment fund is inching closer to reality. News had swirled that SoftBank was struggling to raise the money it needed to fill the coffers of a new Vision Fund, a tall challenge after the first installment raised around $100 billion over time.

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According , the investor list for what we’ve decided to call the Vision Fund II, include SoftBank itself (), (an active investor in its own right), and , which is a slightly odd cookie in the mix.

Microsoft has a somewhat atypical history as an investor, or, as an LP if it invests in Vision Fund II. Recall that Microsoft’s early venture efforts included , which later molted into a . Now Microsoft’s cuts checks, though it did take a while to get to the decision of taking equity stakes in smaller companies.

(Back in my Microsoft-covering days, Microsoft’s lack of venture activity was explained by Redmond staffers as an acknowledgment of the fact that VC deals wouldn’t impact its balance sheet in a material way.)

To see Microsoft written down as a potential LP for the new Vision Fund is notable. After all, Microsoft . Since then it’s been at war with the smaller company through its competing Teams product. In the meantime, the first Vision Fund invested in Slack, which is now a public company.

It feels gently odd to see Microsoft commit some billions of dollars to a vehicle so that it can get micro-stakes in certain businesses that it wouldn’t buy outright; I understand Microsoft investing on its own to purchase minority stakes as it can learn from those companies, and could secure board seats. An LP relationship is different, more remote.

There’s one final wrinkle to the possible deal that we should raise that could help us understand Microsoft’s interest. Here’s :

SoftBank executives told Microsoft they would encourage the fund鈥檚 roughly 75 companies to shift from听听Inc.鈥檚 cloud platform to Microsoft鈥檚, some of the people said. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.

Perhaps SoftBank could convince a minority of its investees to spend a minority of their marginal cloud spend on Azure, but I can’t imagine any company of scale switching clouds so that one of their investors could possibly raise funds from a particular LP. ( recently , showing that Microsoft’s Azure isn’t doing well among the user cohort, as a data point.)

So we’ll see. But Microsoft has its own venture arm, global operations, and checkbook for buys. What it gets out of being a Vision Fund II LP isn’t as clear as, say, what gets out of the deal; for the latter, petroleum incomes can be recycled through the Vision Fund, allowing the monarchy to reap returns on the liquid capital that supports .

Regardless, the Vision Fund II is being actively compiled. And if it does find enough capital to launch, we won’t have to wonder anymore what the world will be like without the Vision Fund’s epic checks.

PS. What I can’t get away from when considering a second Vision Fund is that it will push more capital into private companies, allowing them to hold off public offerings even longer. This, as even WeWork is racing to get public before the good times on the public markets end. Either SoftBank is right, to some degree, or WeWork is. That SoftBank owns bunches of WeWork makes for a slightly ironic moment. Surely it would be better to get some more unicorns public instead of doubling-down on crowning more startups with billion-dollar checks?

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