David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…We should say Facebook generates $70 billion a year in revenue, but they get to keep most of it. Pretty good decision, pretty good business. Yup, definitely pretty good. I'm very fascinated by this Tencent decision because they let a thousand flowers bloom because they really have gotten to see and invest in all of these companies that are getting built. Let’s just take PDD, Meituan, and DiDi—those are the big three. Tencent is I believe the largest shareholder in all of them, the largest or one of the largest. Compare that a few years ago when they started down the strategy. They were neck and neck with Alibaba and Baidu and very unclear what the strategic future of the company was going to be. Fast forward to—nobody certainly cries for Alibaba. Baidu has fallen on somewhat harder times. But Tencent just seems to me to be so much better strategically positioned to capture all of the internet economy happening in China via their strategy. There is some work to be done here to compare Tencent as an investor to SoftBank as an investor. My guess here is that they actually did a better job at SoftBank strategy than SoftBank did to go and basically back all the unicorns and be in the most successful unicorns as they grow from billion dollar companies to hundred billion dollars companies. I think they are in 15%-20% of the unicorns and they got in early. I would guess they made $12-$15 billion—of course in illiquid value. But just from this investment in PDD, I think they've done that four, five, six times.…

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