Reuters
SoftBank's Masayoshi Son
- Many of the top lieutenants at the SoftBank Vision Fund are former Deutsche Bank traders and bankers.
- Of the 29 investors listed on SoftBank Vision Fund's website, nine previously worked at Deutsche, while several more Deutsche Bank alumni have been linked to the fund.
- The group of former Deutsche bankers is led by Rajeev Misra, who is CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers, and managing partner Colin Fan, who ran trading operations at the bank.
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The SoftBank Vision Fund is most closely associated with SoftBank Group's CEO, Masayoshi Son.
But it's another executive, Rajeev Misra, who's CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers, the group that oversees the firm's $100 billion Vision Fund.
The former Deutsche Bank executive was a trader in group's fixed income division until a few months before the financial crisis. He stepped down as head of credit and commodities in 2008 having built a trading business known for its risk taking.
It was those qualities that brought him to the attention of Masayoshi Son, a doyen of the tech investment world. Misra joined SoftBank in 2014 having previously worked with the group when he was at Deutsche Bank where he helped them complete a complex transaction, as reported by the Financial Times.
And Misra's financial wizardry is seen as key to the development of the Vision Fund.
To help build the $100 billion Vision Fund, Misra and Son brought together a bevy of top investment bankers and technologists. Among that group: a bevy of former Deutsche Bank executives who worked with Misra at Deutsche Bank and/or Colin Fan, who's now a managing partner at the fund and is a former head of trading at Deutsche.
In fact, of the 29 investors listed on SoftBank Vision Fund's website, nine previously worked at Deutsche, while several more Deutsche Bank alumni have been linked to the fund.
For example, Ziyad Al-Ashaikh, formerly head of the bank's Saudi Arabian unit, joined the Vision Fund last year. And John Pipilis, Deutsche Bank's former head of fixed-income trading, was reportedly in talks to join SoftBank, per Bloomberg.
Here's what you need to know about the group of former Deutsche Bank execs now playing a key role in shaping tech investing: