How Did Michael Moritz Get His First Break?

Michael Moritz's first big break was Time hiring him straight out of school, with no work experience, willing to take a risk on a 22-year-old or 23-year-old. The path there started in Britain about 50 years ago. He wanted to be a journalist on a Fleet Street paper, the Times, the Financial Times, or the Daily Telegraph. Trade union rules stopped editors from hiring college graduates directly, out of fear that it would interfere with hiring 16-year-olds straight out of high school. A graduate had to spend two or three years on a small provincial newspaper. He was impatient and ambitious, and he did not want to do that.

Bill Deeds, editor of the Daily Telegraph, answered a letter and gave him half an hour in a Fleet Street office on a rainy winter day. Deeds said that what he wished he had done as a young man was go to America, and he encouraged Moritz to move. Moritz says that advice propelled him toward the Time hire.