Founding Nihon SoftBank: a PC-software wholesaling business (1981)

A twenty-three-year-old builds his starting point on business-world credit and a gap in distribution

The heart of this founding lies less in the insight itself — that there was a gap in software distribution — than in the fact that the business built to exploit that gap was launched by a twenty-three-year-old founder underwritten by the credit of Japan’s business establishment. During his studies in the United States, Son Masayoshi set himself the discipline of one invention a day and wrung out some 250 ideas; back in Japan he spent a year and a half surveying several industries before narrowing in on PC-software distribution. That an ordinary student pitched a patent to the head of a major corporation, and through that connection drew out the personal guarantee of a Sharp vice-president and the recruitment of seasoned managers, reads less as inspiration than as meticulous design. A new company with neither a sales network nor a brand could make makers and retailers grant it the wholesaler’s position only because it was backed by that credit.

Within a few years of its founding, sales reached the ¥10 billion range, and the wholesaler’s position standing between software houses and retailers was secured. What Son gained here was not merely the immediate margin of distribution. It was a trading network binding retailers and software houses across the country, and the financing craft needed to keep it turning. The company that renamed itself SoftBank in 1990 and, by way of its 1994 over-the-counter registration, went on to buy and invest in American ventures took as its parent body the trading network and credit built in these founding years. The distance is long from the small hypothesis of moving PC software the way bookshops move books to a company staking capital-market money on ventures around the world — yet the founding pattern, of covering youth with business-world credit and seizing a gap by the shortest path, would surface again and again.