Alok Sama, Author and Former President of Softbank Group
Today, my guest is Alok Sama, Former President & CFO of SoftBank Group International (“SBGI”) and Chief Strategy Officer for SoftBank Group (“SBG”) where he led the $59B merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, the $34B acquisition of ARM Holdings Plc, the $10B disposition of SoftBank’s stake in Alibaba Group Holding, the $8.6B sale of Supercell Oy to Tencent Holdings, and the restructuring of SoftBank’s holding in Yahoo! Japan.
Alok currently serves as a Senior Advisor to Warburg Pincus LLC, Chairs the Advisory Board for Valhalla Ventures and is a director of Baer Capital Partners. He is also the author of the bestselling literary memoir The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble.
Alok has over 30 years of investment banking, capital market and investment experience in New York, London and Hong Kong. Alok was formerly a senior Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. While at Morgan Stanley, he led the firms communications practice in Europe and the TMT practice in the Asia-Pacific region. Alok was formerly a Board member at Arm Holdings, Fortress Investment Group, SoFi, Brightstar Corp, Softbank Energy, SoftBank Group Capital, and Airtel Africa. He holds an MBA in Finance from Wharton Business School and an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU.
In this candid conversation, Alok shared the real stories behind his unlikely pivot from pure mathematics to global finance, his front-row seat to the creation of the SoftBank Vision Fund, and his later-in-life pursuit of creative writing.
1. The Accidental Financier. Alok revealed that growing up in India, he loved reading but pursued pure mathematics because it was the most straightforward path to a prestigious college for a middle-class student. He was so deeply fascinated by number theory that he genuinely thought he could crack Fermat’s Last Theorem. However, his career trajectory completely changed when his father mistakenly introduced him to a Wharton School professor he thought was a mathematician; this professor surprisingly convinced Alok to get an MBA in finance, launching his accidental career on Wall Street.
2. The Monolith of Sand Hill Road. Brought into SoftBank by his close friend Nikesh Arora, Alok eventually found himself working intimately alongside Masayoshi Son. Together, they drove massive global deals like the ARM Holdings acquisition and the creation of the monumental Vision Fund. Alok compared the Vision Fund’s sudden arrival in Silicon Valley to the mysterious monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, noting that its unprecedented scale completely shocked the ecosystem and single-handedly forced traditional venture capitalists, like Sequoia, to drastically increase their own fund sizes just to compete.
3. A Later-in-Life Pivot. Despite a highly successful nearly 40-year career in finance and technology, Alok realized that if he ever wanted to fulfill his lifelong dream of writing, it was a case of “now or never”. At age 58, he enrolled in an MFA program at NYU, amusingly finding himself—the “great capitalist”—surrounded by 20-something, fiercely left-leaning classmates. Rather than writing a dry executive memoir, he applied techniques learned from literary greats like Hemingway and Nabokov to turn his wildly intense SoftBank experiences into a fast-paced, highly entertaining book that flows like a thriller.
4. The Freedom of Fiction. While Alok is incredibly proud of his book The Money Trap, he admits the true reward hasn’t been financial gain, but rather the profound messages he receives from readers—including immigrants and Wall Street titans who tell him the story made them deeply question their own life choices. Looking to the future, he plans to dabble significantly more in writing fiction. He jokingly noted that creating fictional characters will be much more fun and freeing, simply because he won’t have to constantly worry about how real people—like Mark Zuckerberg—might react to his writing.
