Masayoshi Son.

• Author: Porter, Martin
• Position: Japanese businessman's membership in US corporate boards

A board seat at E*Trade Group is a new piece in this globally renowned entrepreneur's master plan.

When Masayoshi Son, then in his mid-20s, founded Tokyo-based Softbank Corp. in 1981, he called a meeting with his only two employees. Although Softbank had no clients, it didn't stop Son from climbing on top of a couple of apple boxes and, in a speech to his part-time staffers, loudly proclaim that Softbank would be the number-one PC software distributor in Japan within five years. Both employees, flabbergast listening to Son's fantastical vow, thought their boss had gone crazy and soon quit.

When that anecdote was recounted in a 1992 Harvard Business Review profile of Softbank, the company by then had 570 employees and annual revenues of $350 million. Now, six years later, it is indeed the largest distributor of PC software, hardware, and accessories in Japan, grossing $4 billion in annual revenues. Along the way, it has acquired several computer-related businesses in the U.S., including Comdex, the largest computer trade show operator, and Ziff-Davis Inc., the computer and Internet media and publishing giant, purchased for a whopping $2 billion.

In addition to making direct acquisitions, Softbank also owns significant stakes in several Internet-related companies, including Yahoo! Inc., a leading portal to the Internet, and Geocities, a community of Internet websites. With a $40 million investment, Softbank also has a major stake in E*Trade Group Inc., the second-largest U.S. online brokerage firm. Son's relationship with E*Trade began in 1996 when Softbank provided early venture capital. That relationship has grown closer now that Son joined E-Trade's board in July 1998.

Widely acclaimed as a successful global entrepreneur - Forbes magazine earlier this year ranked him ninth among the world's "working rich" - Son, age 41, believes he is learning the most about corporate governance through his participation on U.S. corporate boards. In 1995 he joined his first U.S. board at Cisco Systems Inc., a provider of computer networking systems. He has a board seat at Ziff-Davis, with its becoming a public company in April 1998. Through his participation on these boards, Son says he is "continually amazed" by how different U.S. boards are from Japanese company boards.

Some of the key differences - the composition of boards, the board/CEO relationship, and what actually transpires during board meetings - soon became apparent to him at his first Cisco...