The future of the office, how we'll shop and pay, and Masa Son's biggest challenge
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Matt Turner
May 3, 2020, 20:00 IST
Floor plan of the 11th floor of building X, site of a coronavirus disease outbreak, Seoul, South Korea, 2020. Blue coloring indicates the seating places of persons with confirmed cases.Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
For some of you, that seating plan might look a little like your bank of desks at the office. It certainly looks like mine.
A number of Business Insider reporters this week delved in to what a return to work might look like, and how offices will have to be reconfigured to make a return possible:
And Ashley Stewart reported on a guide to reopen your workplace, that's based on best practice at Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and Costco.
How we'll shop and pay
There are other questions beyond whether we'll go back to the office, when, and what it might look like. How will be shop? How will we pay? What felt normal in February — queueing for Chipotle in a packed restaurant and paying by bank card — now feels anachronistic.
In 2017, Son, the founder and CEO of SoftBank, upended the tech establishment with the creation of the $100 billion Vision Fund, the largest venture-capital fund in history. Over the next two years, it would deploy $75 billion across 88 investments, with Son holding an outsized voice on the three-person investment committee.
Son earned a reputation among some venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who saw him pressuring founders into taking more money than they needed, elbowing aside coinvestors, and warping markets by seemingly pushing for growth at all costs. Venture capitalists kept investing alongside him, and founders took the money as valuations rose. The fund earned some wins, selling a stake in India e-commerce company Flipkart to Walmart and making money on an investment in publicly-traded chipmaker Nvidia. But as more than one company with billions of dollars in Vision Fund cash and no profits began to crater last year, the Silicon Valley community quickly turned against him.
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