Why Did Don Valentine Hire Michael Moritz?

Don Valentine hired Michael Moritz around 1985 because Valentine was willing to take a risk that the other venture firms would not. Sequoia was a very small firm. The table in Patrick O'Shaughnessy's studio, where he and Moritz sat, is probably large enough to have held everyone who worked at Sequoia around 1985.

Moritz had been a journalist and wanted to get into the venture business after he became interested in it and met people running the firms, all of them very small at the time. He wrote to five of them. In the days before email, he sent letters and went to see each firm. They gave him time. Everyone except Valentine said they did not know what to do with him. He had no technical background, no engineering degree, no technical knowledge, and no work experience in a Silicon Valley company. He had been a journalist, so they suggested public relations or marketing, which was not the work he wanted.