Masayoshi Son and SOFTBANK

Masayoshi Son and SOFTBANK

Masayoshi Son was born in Kyushu, Japan in 1957. He is founder of SOFTBANK, Japan’s leading PC software distributor. Read his account of how he came to start the business and work out how long it took him to decide what to do.

I spent a long time doing research and making business plans before I started the company. I was living in Kyushu at the time. It was 1979 and I’d just come back from the States. I had no income and all my family and friends were worried. They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t doing anything, but I was thinking.

I’d gone to the States to study when I was sixteen I went to Oakland, California for a couple of years first, then transferred to Berkeley where I graduated. I met my wife while I was studying English in Oakland and by the time we came back to Kyushu we had a new baby. She was worried too. I had come up with 40 new business ideas – everything from creating software to setting up hospital chains – but I didn’t know how to start.

I wanted a business I could fall in love with. It had to be unique and original. It had to have great growth potential. I had about 25 points like this and I took a big sheet of paper and gave each business idea scores. Then I picked the best one. It turned out to be the personal computer software business. So in 1981 we finally moved to Tokyo and I started SOFTBANK.