Jaime Ocampo

I grew up in Colombia and got interested in business and entrepreneurship at an early age, as I watched my dad run his own business. After college, I did an internship at Goldman Sachs in Brazil at a time when the country was going through an economic boom. I got to see firsthand the high-growth potential of emerging markets. I then spent some time at Goldman in New York working with some of the largest technology and telecom companies in North America, before realizing that I wanted to find a career investing and helping build some of the transformational businesses that I had the pleasure of working with while I was at Goldman. SoftBank was deploying capital in a unique, untested way on a global scale. As someone who had lived on three continents, that was incredibly appealing to me.

I come from a strong quantitative background, so problem-solving using numbers is key to my approach. At SBIA, we are focused on figuring out what drives a business and, ultimately, what leads to strong returns. My team here spends a lot of time posing detailed questions to founders, trying to approach investing from a rigorous, numerical perspective. It’s important to find the ultimate truth through numbers. But in venture investing, that numerical perspective works best in combination with the unquantifiable work that goes into assessing founders and building relationships with them. That, of course, is not a numbers game, and that’s what makes it exciting. You can have your detailed Excel sheet, but in the end, you have to take the leap and make a judgment call.

AI is powered by real infrastructure. We’re at a very unique inflection point where the future companies that provide cloud or compute infrastructure will look very different in terms of capabilities and scale than the companies in the past. For AI to live up to its potential, the infrastructure that supports it needs to be able to scale. Investing in the companies building that infrastructure requires a significant amount of capital, and it allows us to be at the forefront of new developments in the sector. At SoftBank we think of problems from a blank slate and first principles approach, which allows us to find creative financing solutions to these types of companies.

I see technical or engineering chops, as well as a focus on ROI, as table stakes. Being mission-driven is also essential. Founders need to have a clear goal in mind and know how to realize it. But I also want to see that they allocate time to thinking about the long-term vision and strategy of their company. That means putting in effort to build culture from the ground up. Across the board, the founders I work with have built solid teams that are aligned behind a shared sense of purpose.