Meet the power players at the SoftBank Vision Fund, who are writing checks for billions of dollars and upending the technology business

Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group

Japan's richest man is something of an icon amongst tech investors.

Son is of South Korean descent and studied at UCLA Berkeley. He was an early investor in Yahoo and Alibaba and has since used his platform to invest in and acquire a variety of tech and telecom companies, including US wireless operator Sprint. He founded Softbank in 1981 and bet big on the internet, losing billions during the dot-com crash, but has remained committed and now plows billions of dollars into startups every year.

"I don't like No. 2. From my personality perspective, I can't accept No. 2. I need to be No. 1. I've been like that since I was a kid," Son is quoted as saying, according to TechCrunch.

Rajeev Misra, CEO, SoftBank Investment Advisers

Misra is SoftBank's executive vice president and serves as a director on SoftBank's board. He is also CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers, the group that oversees the firm's $100 billion Vision Fund.

The 57-year-old grew up in Delhi, India, before attending the University of Pennsylvania to study mechanical engineering. He has said his dream when he was younger was to work at Bell Labs, the famous R&D institution, and he spent time earlier in his career working at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

From there he made his way to finance, making his name as a top trading executive at Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and UBS, and hedge-fund Fortress Investment Group.

He joined SoftBank in 2014 and became CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers in May 2017. Since then he has helped oversee high-profile investments in several major tech startups including WeWork, and become the public face of the Vision Fund.

Ron Fisher, vice chairman, SoftBank Group

Ron Fisher founded SoftBank Capital in 1995, the investment arm of SoftBank Group that oversees the Vision Fund, where he has served as vice chairman and head of investment since stepping aside as Managing Partner in 2015.

Fisher has bet big on US based technology startups like mobile-device-storage company PogoPlug in December 2010, and workplace-rental company WeWork's parent The We Company in August 2017. He was also involved in the Vision Fund's $1 billion investment in sports apparel site Fanatics in September 2017.

Before joining SoftBank Group, Fisher served as the CEO of Phoenix Technologies, a system software developer for personal computers, and Interactive Systems, UNIX software company.

He sits on the board of Sprint, where he has been the vice chairman since SoftBank took majority ownership of the wireless carrier in 2013, and the chip manufacturer ARM, following an all-cash share offer in September 2016.

Akshay Naheta, managing partner, EMEA

Naheta joined the Vision Fund in 2017 from the London investment firm Knights Assets and Co., which he founded. His fund, which focused on arbitrage and value investing, made an annual return of 113% a year on $416 million in investments, according to VC Circle.

Before that, he followed a similar path to Misra. After studying electrical engineering at the University of Illinois and then studying for a doctorate at MIT, he took to finance, becoming a top trader at Deutsche Bank. There, he held roles across trading and structuring, including head of principal strategies, where he was responsible for proprietary trading and structured deals.

At the Vision Fund, he's been involved in investments in the car-dealing platform Auto1, the Brazilian e-commerce firm Loggi, the biotech Roivant, and the chipmaker Nvidia.

Colin Fan, managing partner, Americas, Asia

Colin Fan is one of the more storied members of the SoftBank elite.

Born in China, raised in Canada, and schooled at Harvard, Fan has said the odds of his becoming a doctor were "overwhelming." Instead, he went into finance, becoming a managing director at Deutsche Bank at just 28.

He rose to become head of Deutsche Bank's trading operation and made waves after appearing in an internal video warning traders "some of you are falling way short of our established standards."

He later left the German lender acrimoniously and subsequently sued the bank, before joining SoftBank in California in 2017.

He focuses on financial technology, given his background, and has been involved in deals including the recent $800 million financing of supply-chain finance funder Greensill Capital, which values the firm at $3.5 billion.

Deep Nishar, senior management partner, Americas

Nishar grew up in Mumbai without running water, according to a Bloomberg report, and after moving to the US he graduated from the University of Illinois and Harvard Business School.

He founded his own enterprise startup during business school and later moved to Google and then LinkedIn. He joined SoftBank Investment Advisors in 2015 as a senior managing partner sitting in the organization's San Carlos, California, office.

At SoftBank, he focuses his investments on startups in health tech and enterprise tech such as the workplace-communication tool Slack and the molecule manufacturer Zymergen.

He is particularly interested in artificial intelligence and genomics where it relates to health tech and bioengineering, with investments such as Guardant Health, Improbable, Petuum, Relay Therapeutics, and Vir.

Eric Chen, managing partner, Asia

Chen joined SoftBank in 2018, based in San Francisco, and oversees the Vision Fund's investments in Asian companies such as Alibaba and Guazi.

Born in China, Chen studied physics at Peking University and obtained a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford. Upon finishing at Stanford in 1998, he joined JPMorgan, working there for four years.

He then cofounded Brion Technologies, which specialized in computational lithography, serving as its chief executive and selling the company to semiconductor giant ASML in 2007. He then spent a number of years at private-equity firm Silver Lake, before taking the role of CEO at BaseBit Technologies.

Ervin Tu, managing partner, Americas

Ervin Tu joined SoftBank as the cohead of corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions in San Francisco with Alex Clavel after managing Goldman Sachs' technology, media, and telecommunications banking group, according to a Business Insider report.

Once he arrived, he helped get the Vision Fund off the ground, working with Rajeev Misra. Now the fund's set up, he's a managing partner for the Americas with a focus on sustainable investments.

He led SoftBank's $1.2 billion primary direct investment deal in Uber in December 2017, which valued the company above $70 billion, according to Crunchbase. And he also had a key role in the fund's investment in ByteDance, the company behind the popular TikTok app.

Greg Moon, managing partner, Asia

Tokyo-based, South Korea-raised Moon joined SoftBank in 1996 and previously ran the firm's early-stage capital business out of Seoul. Moon was the CEO and president of SoftBank Ventures Korea for 16 years before joining the Vision Fund as a managing partner for Asia in 2017.

He leads on the fund's business in the fintech and real-estate sectors out of Asia and is responsible for the firm's investment in OneConnect, a fintech that is a subsidiary of the Chinese insurer Ping An. OneConnect could be set for an IPO this year, according to Reuters.

"I grew up in South Korea when it was a military dictatorship," Moon said on the SoftBank website. "I read a lot of science fiction, which fed my imagination both about technology and offered a vision of just future."

Jeff Housenbold, managing partner, Americas

Housenbold was part of the inaugural group of McDonald's MBA intern program, and went on to lead business development and marketing at a variety of consumer and technology companies, including eBay.

Before joining SoftBank in 2017, he led online creative suite Shutterfly as president and CEO.

He's led the firm's investments in consumer startups like the dog-walking app Wag, the food-delivery company DoorDash, the e-commerce site Brandless, and the real-estate site OpenDoor.

Kentaro Matsui, managing partner, Asia

Matsui focuses on investments in fintech, health tech, transportation, and logistics, particularly in Asia. He also leads SoftBank Investment Advisers Japan, a subdivision of SoftBank Investment Advisers.

Originally a banker, Matsui helped oversee SoftBank's acquisitions of companies, including Vodafone Japan and Arm Holdings.

The Tokyo-based investor obtained his undergraduate degree from Keio University in Japan and holds a law degree from New York University.

One of Matsui's companies, Brain Corp., recently completed a deal with Walmart to implement 1,500 floor-cleaning robots in its stores. The robots run on BrainOS, Brain Corp's flagship artificial-intelligence software.

Michael Ronen, managing partner, Americas

Michael Ronen joined SoftBank as a managing partner for the Vision Fund in July 2017 after more than 19 years at Goldman Sachs.

While growing up in Israel, Ronen was selected to study astrophysics and computer programming at Technion, the country's highly esteemed technical university. He joined Goldman Sachs's technology, telecom, and media group after completing his MBA at New York University's Stern School of Business, where he advised clients such as Apple and his current employer, SoftBank Group, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He leads investment in media and transportation industries for SoftBank, including February's blockbuster $1 billion investment in the logistics-management startup Flexport.

Munish Varma, managing partner, EMEA, Asia

Varma is one of SoftBank's biggest players in the fintech business and another major figure in the vision fund who worked for Deutsche Bank.

Originally from India, Varma took an MBA from Cornell University in 1997 and then worked at Nomura and Deutsche Bank, rising to head of global markets for India at the latter. He joined SoftBank in 2017.

Varma worked on the $440 million funding deal for British fintech OakNorth earlier this year, which gave the company a $2.8 billion valuation.

"We look for businesses that are addressing very significant pain points ... addressing markets that are massive, with a product that clearly satisfies their needs," Varma said at a fintech conference in London onstage with OakNorth in April.

Varma is also responsible for companies including Delhivery, FirstCry, Oyo, Paytm, and Policy Bazaar.

Praveen Akkiraju, managing partner, Americas, Asia

A former executive at Cisco Systems based out of San Francisco, Akkiraju is also an alumnus of Harvard Business School and has a master's in electrical engineering from Louisiana State University and a degree from the University of Madras.

Before joining SoftBank in 2018, he was CEO at two start-ups, VCE and Viptela. The latter was later acquired by Cisco while the former grew to a $1.2 billion company under his leadership.

One of Akkiraju's deals was intelligent automation company Automation Anywhere from India, which SoftBank Vision Fund led a $300 million funding for.

Akkiraju is a fan of roller coasters and regularly visits the biggest with his son.

Saleh Romeih, managing partner, SBIA EMEA

Romeih is a managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. He also serves on the SBIA investment committee, helping oversee its diverse portfolio of investments in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Born to a Syrian father and a Japanese mother, Romeih grew up in Japan and France and attended Georgetown University. After graduating from Georgetown, he obtained an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994.

Fluent in five languages, Romeih says his unusual background made him learn how to invent possibilities for himself as he had never been a natural fit in his surroundings.

After obtaining his MBA, he spent 18 years as a managing director at Deutsche Bank, before holding a similar post at Goldman Sachs from 2013 until 2016, when he joined SoftBank.

Brian Wheeler, managing partner, General Counsel

Brian Wheeler is the general manager and general counsel at SoftBank Investment Advisers, where he focuses on cross-border and venture-focused mergers and acquisitions.

Wheeler has had stints at international prestigious law firms like Shearman & Sterling LLP and Cooley LLP after graduating from New York University School of Law, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He started his career after college at Travelers Insurance, before deciding to quit to surf in Hawaii for nine months before moving to New York for law school.

Catherine Lenson, managing partner, global head of HR

Catherine Lenson joined SoftBank Investment Advisors as partner and global head of HR in October 2017 and was promoted to managing partner in April.

Based in London, Lenson graduated from Cambridge University with a master's in French and Italian. She joined UBS as an HR graduate in 2004 and worked her way up to head up reward for the bank's UK and European business during her 13 years with the organization, according to her LinkedIn profile.

One of Lenson's key objectives for SoftBank has been to build diversity within the broader organization.

Navneet Govil, managing partner, CFO

As SoftBank's managing partner and chief financial officer, Navneet Govil is one of the most important people at SoftBank Investment Advisers. His hand-selected 30-person finance team has a key role in the eye-popping investment amounts that grab headlines and propel startups into unicorn territory.

Govil was born in Zambia and attended a school his father started adjacent to his work at a university for refugees in their rural town.

He later attended the University of Rochester and Cornell University's SC Johnson School of Business before moving on to energy company SunPower Corp. as vice president and treasurer in San Jose, California.

Neil Hadley, managing partner, chief of staff

Neil Hadley operates largely behind the scenes as SoftBank Investment Advisors' chief of staff and managing partner on the Vision Fund, a role he took on in October 2017. Hadley works closely with Vision Fund CEO Rajeev Misra to develop procedures and processes that help the fund function as efficiently as possible.

Before joining SoftBank Investment Advisers, Hadley spent more than two decades with UBS in London and New York City. He held various roles during his tenure according to his LinkedIn profile, and worked closely with the then UBS CEO and COO during the financial crisis, helping to create a so-called bad bank for legacy assets the bank wanted to run down.

Ruwan Weerasekera, COO

Ruwan Weerasekera joined SoftBank Investment Advisers as the chief operating officer for the Vision Fund in October and is based in London. As COO, Weerasekera's self-reported short attention span helps him be intensely focused on a new challenge facing the firm every day.

Before joining SoftBank, Weerasekera held various roles across a wide variety of organizations including Accenture, UBS, and IV Capital. He started his own consulting business in 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also holds director positions on Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Standard Bank and the National Health Service Trust.

Andreas Hansson, partner, EMEA

Hansson is another of the technical experts leading the Vision Fund's pursuit of new companies. He holds a corporate doctorate undertaken with Phillips in the Netherlands in electrical engineering in conjunction with the Eindhoven University of Technology.

Hansson subsequently worked as CTO for Cambridge, UK-based ARM, the semiconductor engineering company, which was acquired by SoftBank in a $30 billion deal in 2016.

Based in London, Hansson focuses on sectors of "deep tech" including AI and Internet of Things technology.

He joined SoftBank as an investment director in 2017 before becoming a partner in April.

David Thevenon, partner, EMEA

London-based Thevenon is one of the key figures at SoftBank's Vision Fund on transport and works with major players in the ride-hailing space like India's Ola, China's DiDi, and southeast Asia's Grab.

The Frenchman is a Google alumnus, working there for 10 years as part of its Android development team. He joined SoftBank in 2014 before becoming a partner in 2016.

He focuses on the future of transportation, robotics, and fintech and is part of the Vision Fund team involved with online lender Kabbage.

Faisal Rehman, partner, EMEA

Based in the United Arab Emirates, Rehman helps oversee the company's investments in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Rehman graduated from the London School of Economics in 1992 with joint honors in economics, accounting, and finance. He then trained at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, before serving in managerial roles at Ernst and Young's Warsaw and Sydney offices.

In 2000, Rehman left EY to join Deutsche Bank, working his way up from an associate role to managing director over 12 years. Like his SoftBank colleague, Saleh Romieh, Rehman worked at Deutsche Bank for 18 years in total.

Rehman is a keen horse rider and can be spotted horse-riding in the Arabian desert during his time away from work.

Justin Wilson, partner, Americas

Wilson joined SoftBank Investment Advisers as a partner in November 2015 and focuses on investing in the real-estate and consumer-technology sectors. He was part of the Vision Fund's investments in e-commerce startup Brandless, storage company Clutter, real-estate company Compass, and home-buying app OpenDoor, among others.

The Stanford Business School graduate spent his first years in the workforce in finance at firms like Lehman Brothers, Monitor Ventures, and The Boston Consulting Group before joining Google as the head of global business strategy. He left his role as head of global top accounts at Google for SoftBank.

Wilson grew up in a military family and lived in Korea, Texas, California, and Washington.

Kirthiga Reddy, venture partner, Americas

Reddy joined SoftBank Investment Advisers as a venture partner in December and is the first female investment partner on the Vision Fund, which she says is proof that "dreams do come true."

Reddy was the first hire for Facebook India, where she oversaw the creation of the company's global operations center and cultivated relationships with advertising customers. She moved to the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in 2016 to lead Facebook's global marketing partnership for financial services, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Reddy cofounded F-7, a seed fund, with six other former female Facebook executives after leaving the company for SoftBank. She told Bloomberg that she is "actively recruiting" more female investment partners for SoftBank.

Lydia Jett, partner, Americas

Jett joined SoftBank four years ago and made partner earlier this year. She is predominantly focused on e-commerce, having previously sat on the board of Indian company Flipkart until its recent acquisition by Walmart.

Jett is responsible for Tokopedia and Coupang, major online marketplaces in Indonesia and South Korea.

Based in California, Jett holds an MBA from Stanford and previously worked at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. She's described the Vision Fund as "the most over-capitalized startup in the world," referring to its huge resources and major investors.

Murtaza Ahmed, partner, EMEA

Another Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs alumnus, Ahmed held senior roles at both institutions before joining the Vision Fund in 2017.

Educated in math at the University of Cambridge, Ahmed was a Goldman Sachs managing director at 30 and spent seven years at the firm. He previously worked as head of the EMEA emerging markets structuring and sales strategies team at the US bank.

He sits on the board of the nonprofit EMpower. Ahmed's background is predominantly in emerging markets with an emphasis on deal structuring.

Sumer Juneja, partner, Asia

Juneja is the head of SoftBank's operations in India and was previously a partner at Norwest Venture Partners before joining SoftBank in 2018.

His role is to leverage the incredible opportunities available to investors in India, a country which has seen a huge leap in tech accessibility in recent years and boasts a huge, young population. "Technology has made geographic barriers meaningless, but cultural differences are still very real," according to Juneja.

A graduate of the London School of Economics, Juneja has lived in London, Mumbai, and Hong Kong and used to work at Goldman Sachs as an investment banking analyst. He sits on the board of ride hailer Ola.

Ted Fike, partner, Americas

Ted Fike joined SoftBank Investment Advisers as a partner in October 2017 to focus on consumer and real-estate investments for the Vision Fund. He is on the board of the dog-walking app Wag and travel startup GetYourGuide.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Fike went after a traditional financial-services career with stints at major institutions like Credit Suisse, the Boston Consulting Group, and Bain Capital.

He went on to join Google during the 2008 financial crisis as a senior business lead and worked up to corporate development principal in just under four years. After a stint at CapitalIG, he joined the payments startup Tilt as CFO before it was acquired by Airbnb in 2017.

Tom Cheung, partner, Americas

Tom Cheung started as a partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers in January 2018 and led the Vision Fund's investments in UK-based finance startup Greensill Capital and smart-window manufacturer View.

The Harvard alumnus spent the first two years of his career analyzing corporate finance mergers and acquisitions for Credit Suisse before joining Insight Venture Partners as principal focusing on enterprise investing. He then spent 10 years at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong and New York where he focused on equity investing and structured finance across the Asia Pacific region and later the firm's global business, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Cheung credits his work ethic to growing up as a restaurant employee and says that he is a "pretty good cook" as a result of years in a professional kitchen.

Vikas Parekh, partner, Americas

Parekh joined SoftBank Investment Advisers as a partner focusing on enterprise investing in March 2016 and has since worked on the firm's blockbuster deals in the workplace-chat app Slack and coworking company WeWork.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Parekh received his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and relocated to New York City for a career in finance after graduation. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School and rejoined the Boston Consulting Group in 2011 as an ambassador to the group's Mumbai-based team.

He appreciates working with founders because they never quit, something he learned by cultivating a running habit.

Penny Bodle, partner, head of EMEA IR

Based in London, Bodle is a partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers and its head of investor relations in the EMEA region. She also works alongside the Vision Fund's major limited partners to help them develop their businesses.

Her finance career began in asset management at Morgan Stanley, where she was a divisional director on distribution, working across asset classes.

Bodle then became a managing director at Raptor Group, a holdings firm investing in a range of tech, entertainment, and real-estate assets. Since 2015, she has also served as senior adviser to Oakpoint Advisers, a third-party capital-raising business based in the US.

Bodle describes SoftBank Investment Advisers as "a place where the best idea wins, but if that idea is yours, you have to own it. There's no passing the buck."

Shivana Lala, partner, head of tax

Lala is a partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers and has served as its head of tax since July 2018. She originally joined SoftBank in January 2017 as its international tax manager, just three months after Masayoshi Son first announced SoftBank's Vision Fund.

Managing taxes has been a passion of Lala's from age 16, when she helped prepare tax returns for small businesses in Mumbai. From 1998 until 2001, Lala trained as an accountant at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.

Before joining SoftBank, Lala spent 12 years as a senior international tax and treasury manager at KPMG, the US financial services giant.

She is an Indian classical-dance enthusiast and has ambitions of starting a Bollywood dancing school for kids in London.

Yosuke Sasaki, partner, head of CEO office

Sasaki has served as a partner and head of the CEO office at SoftBank Investment Advisers since 2017. In that role, he assists SoftBank Investment Advisers' CEO, Rajeev Misra, with managing and operating the Vision Fund.

Sasaki's ties to SoftBank stretch back to 2003, when he was appointed manager of its finance department in Tokyo. During his time as finance department manager, Sasaki led SoftBank's $15 billion acquisition of Vodafone Japan in 2006.

Other previous roles Sasaki has held at SoftBank include an 18-month stint as manager of its holdings in China and India, two years as vice president of SoftBank Telecom America, the US arm of SoftBank in charge of internet and telecoms services, and two years as head of the company's global finance group.