Alok Sama: The Money Trap

Kelly sits down with Alok Sama, the former President and CFO of SoftBank Group International to discuss his new book ‘The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble.”

I read a lot of business books, and your book reads more like a thriller than your average business memoir.

“As I set out to to write this book, the one thing I was determined not to be was boring. And you talked about business memoirs: I never read business books, to be quite honest. And as I talk about in this book towards the end, I actually got myself a two-year graduate degree in an MFA program at NYU, which is a phenomenal experience. I didn’t go there with the intention of writing this book or writing a memoir. I actually wanted to write fiction. And as I experimented as one does in graduate school, it’s sort of an exercise in throwing up stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. I kind of realized what I experienced over 6 years before I got my MFA degree involved a lot of ingredients that would make for a really cool fiction type book?”

I mentioned that the book reads like a thriller and that starts at the beginning. Can you tell us that story.

“I say that twice someone desperately wants me out of the way. What happened specifically was, I was in this incredibly high powered job that was globally significant, systemically significant because my boss, Masayoshi San, had raised this Gargantuan 100-billion-dollar fund: the largest pool of private capital ever assembled. We owned things like Sprint, which we merged with T-Mobile; We spent 22 billion dollars in ride sharing; 8 billion dollars into Uber Door dash. I mean, a lot of household names. It was high profile because of my role as deal maker in chief and someone saw me as a target. This whole smear campaign of writing stories about me, writing nasty letters, accusing me of doing all kinds of nefarious stuff, a complaint filed with the Indian equivalent of the FBI. They were Completely garbage claims, but it was interesting in this day and age, how easy it is to trash someone’s reputation by just asking questions.”

In essence, the story of Masa Son and Softbank is a story as old as time itself, but the scale is different and it repeats itself.

“We’ve told ourselves these stories. Greek tragedy: Icarus flying close to the sun. Well, this is a case of an Icarus who flew close to the sun, and he got burned and he fell. But, you know, then he flew again, and he got burned, and now he’s flying higher than ever. So, it is like some of those stories, but this is the beauty of reality: It’s just much, much more complex than some of the stories we tell ourselves.”