Behind the helm of SoftBank Investment Advisers is Navneet Govil, who is the executive managing partner and investment committee member. Govil has been with the company since 2016, originally coming on board as Managing Partner and CFO. At SoftBank Investment Advisers, they believe the AI Revolution is underway. Through the SoftBank Vision Funds, they have invested $150 billion in the businesses and technologies that will help make it possible. They offer operational expertise, a global network, and the patient capital required to help exceptional founders build market-leading companies.
Navneet and I recently sat down for an engaging conversation, where we discussed how he supports SoftBank’s portfolio companies, growing up in Zambia, the value of mentorship, being a father, and lots more.
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As a kid of Indian descent who was born and raised in Zambia, Africa, Navneet Govil’s childhood was anything but typical. It provided him with many experiences to look at the world from a different perspective; Govil’s father ran a college for refugees from neighboring countries, and his parents sent him to a public school rather than a private or international school with other expat kids. But, more than anything, it gave him a foundation of humility.
“I benefited from getting an appreciation of the fellow students who were there, most of whom were not privileged,” he said. “I really got a sense of how important humility is. For instance, we had to take care of our school and classroom. We had to sweep our classrooms, and I used to slash the grass in the yard. That was a really great experience for me growing up.”
A commitment to hard work served him well when he graduated high school. Govil decided to attend college in the U.S., where he studied electrical engineering at MIT. He later attended Cornell University, where he received his master’s in engineering as well as an MBA.
The transition from engineering to finance might seem like a stretch to some, but not to Govil. He sees a connection between the subjects he enjoyed as a kid, always excelling at math and science, with a strong appreciation for being analytical and a problem-solver.
But the path to being a CFO was accidental and rooted in two internships – one at Motorola, where he worked in R&D, and another in manufacturing.
“I loved them both, but I always used to wonder about the big picture,” he explained. “How does a company make money? How does a company decide to allocate resources? How do they know how much to put into R&D and how much to put into marketing? After my internships there, I took my first job in investment banking in project finance. In those days, project finance used to be paper recycling facilities and power generation plants. It was all about how to take the cash flows from the project or the company revenues and provide a return to the equity holders. At the start of my career, it was super helpful to understand how to run a business, how to make money, how to do resource allocation, and that’s what led to my pivot from engineering to finance. I’ve been in finance ever since.”
Govil hasn’t just been in finance; he has worked at some world-class companies since his days as an intern at Motorola. He has worked at companies like Pfizer, HP, and CA Technologies, to name a few.
Although each company has its own culture and opportunities to learn, one theme across all of them was Govil’s access to high-quality, formative mentoring relationships. From emotional intelligence to Six Sigma leadership development, there were many lessons and takeaways. He learned to think strategically, how to frame problems, how to challenge the status quo, and how to constructively challenge people rather than go with the flow. It’s been a benefit to his career.
Govil has advanced his career to the point that he recently took on the position of joining the investment committee at SoftBank. SoftBank launched the first Vision Fund in 2017 and, over its investment period, has deployed nearly $90 billion. Vision Fund 2 launched as a successor in 2019 and, to date, has deployed around $50 billion. Navneet says Vision Fund investors have four main criteria that they look for when assessing investment opportunities.
“First, we are uniquely focused on looking at companies that are AI-led companies,” he said. “Second, the companies need to have positive unit economics. The third thing is that they really have to have a proven product market fit. Lastly, we’re looking for a track record of execution by the founders and the management team..”
Those decisions have led to investments in more than 470 companies, including giants like Uber, DoorDash, and Guardant Health. However, within a portfolio of such unprecedented scale, not all investments work out, which is why he takes a broader view of supporting the portfolio companies.
“I try to focus on supporting our portfolio companies and working with founders and CFOs, especially as they get close to going public,” Govil says. “There are a couple of things there that I think are really important. One is having the right processes and controls in place so you don’t end up going public, and a quarter or two later, you have a material deficiency. That’s the foundation. The other is trying to help them build the ability to forecast and give forward guidance.”
Additional support involves an event called FinConnect, where they invite the CFOs from all the portfolio companies to gather and share best practices.
A generosity of spirit and willingness to share is something Govil admires in Softbank Group Corporation’s founder, Masayoshi “Masa” Son. Son founded the company in 1981.
“He’s an inspiration,” Govil says. “That was one of the reasons that attracted me to SoftBank. I still remember the early days of 2017 when we were investing in rideshare companies. He has this remarkable ability as a visionary to think outside of the box. Founders would come and talk to us about the addressable market for ride-sharing. He starts brainstorming with them, and suddenly, he’s talking about not just ride-sharing but food delivery as well. Fast forward to today, Uber does both ride-sharing and it has Uber Eats. His ability to think big and be very creative simultaneously is always inspiring.”
Watching Son’s leadership style and approach to the business also informs how Govil manages his team; he believes that managers should make empowerment a top priority and will be able to watch how the team thrives.
“I like to use this tagline, which is not mine, but I borrowed it,” he said, laughing. “It’s empower, engage, and excel—the concept with the employees to empower them so they feel valued, challenged, and supported. Secondly, engage to understand what their needs are, how you can support them to be successful in what they are doing, and have transparent communication to build trust. Then, excel at whatever we’re doing–I want to make sure my finance function is best in class. These concepts help in building teams and retaining that talent.”
Central to SoftBank’s talent practices and high-performance culture is developing a sense of intrapreneurship. Govil believes in employees being able to innovate in their roles, as well as having autonomy and freedom.
A central element of the team’s work is how SoftBank incorporates generative AI–both on a broad business level and in its finance and accounting functions. For example, SoftBank was an early adopter of ChatGPT at the enterprise level, meaning that all functions–from Legal to Finance, HR, and more– embed this technology in their core processes to increase their efficiency and streamline efforts.
“They say that necessity is the mother of innovation,” Govil said. “In our case, we have 470 portfolio companies and all these companies send us their quarterly data and future projections. It’s imperative my team can assimilate these figures efficiently, but it’s an enormous data set that is unstructured and inconsistent. Some of the data is in spreadsheets, some of it is in PowerPoint, and some of it is in PDF documents. We built several tools so that we could take all that data and come up with a number of heuristics that provided actionable insights for our investment teams. It was essential for us in terms of making better investment decisions and helping our portfolio companies as they prepared to go public or to list. Those tools helped us outline what they needed to do to be successful and to be well received by institutional investors in the capital markets.”
In addition to finding areas of efficiency at work, Govil also looks at efficiency beyond his professional life. He is the father of two college-aged daughters, is family-oriented, and spends time contributing his talent and expertise to various corporate boards. His priorities have shifted over time.
“In the early days of my career, when I was single and just out of college trying to prove myself and gain credibility, it was all work, work, work,” he explains. “Then, life events happen. You get married, you have children. It was super important to go to my daughters’ school events–their performances, tournaments, and things like that. I didn’t want to miss them, and I’m glad I went.”
But, after the COVID-19 pandemic, he gained a different perspective on things like work-life balance. Prior to COVID, people were going to work five days a week, and post-COVID, Govil realized that it became more challenging to get people to show up one day a week. SoftBank decided to adapt, something that has worked well for its global culture.
“At SoftBank, we encourage our employees to come to the office three days a week,” he said. “We understand that work and life are intermingled and interrelated; it’s totally fine to go to your doctor’s appointments or haircuts during the week. We’re a global company with team members in Tokyo, London, India, Latin America, and elsewhere. We’re having calls at all times of the day, so we believe it’s about finding the right balance.”