As you've probably heard, Masayoshi Son, the cunning founder of SoftBank, announced last fall he was raising a $100 billion Vision Fund to back a broad set of transformative companies in artificial intelligence, robotics and other sectors. In Silicon Valley, the news is still resonating. Venture capitalists invested only $79 billion into startups in all of 2015 and were on track to do about the same in 2016. So Son is bringing a bazooka to a gun fight, and the effects will likely be felt here over the next few years. Now we're starting to learn a little bit more about Son's backers in this effort, thanks largely to some of my colleagues.