In the 1990s, Masayoshi Son, Hideo Sawada and Yasuyuki Nambu were counted among Japan’s most prominent entrepreneurs.
SoftBank.
H.I.S.
Pasona.
Three founders. Same country. Same era.
They were known as the “Three Musketeers of Japanese Entrepreneurship”.
Thirty years later, all three have built substantial businesses.
But the outcomes are radically different.
H.I.S. became one of Japan’s best-known travel companies.
Pasona became one of its best-known human resources groups.
Both survived multiple economic cycles and built brands recognized across Japan.
Son, however, played a different game.
He didn’t just keep building the business he started.
He repeatedly repositioned SoftBank — and its capital — around what he believed would define the next technological era.
Software distribution.
Internet.
Alibaba.
Broadband.
Mobile.
Semiconductors.
AI.
Some of those bets were spectacular successes, especially Yahoo Japan, Alibaba, Vodafone Japan (later SoftBank Mobile) and Arm.
Others were spectacular failures. WeWork alone made that obvious.
But the asymmetry is what matters.
As of September 25, 2026, SoftBank Group’s market capitalization was roughly $223 billion.
September 2026 figures put H.I.S. and Pasona each well under $1 billion.
They’re all successful but from a capitalist pov, SoftBank is in a league of its own. The rivalry is no more.
The difference is well over a hundredfold in market capitalization — not a comparison of shareholder returns.
That gap wasn’t created because Son was right all the time.
He wasn’t.
It was created because he kept risking capital on new technological waves — and when he believed he had found one, he was willing to bet at a scale large enough to change the trajectory of the entire company.
That is a very different model of entrepreneurship.
Most founders spend decades becoming better at the business they started.
Son kept asking a different question:
What is going to become exponentially more important from here?
And then he tried to put himself — and his capital — in front of it.
Over 30 years, those decisions compounded.
There is a broader lesson here.
Execution matters enormously.
But over a long enough period, what you choose to compound may matter even more than how efficiently you compound it.
A great operator in a stagnant industry can create an excellent company.
A great capital allocator positioned in front of a structural change can create something orders of magnitude larger.
The biggest outcomes rarely come from doing the same thing 10% better for 30 years.
They come from being positioned correctly when the world changes.
