Michael Moritz

Michael Moritz says Elon Musk may well be the greatest industrialist in the history of America. He is a believer in the great person theory. Individuals, for good and for bad, have an enormous impact on what surrounds them. On the good side they persuade other people to do what had seemed impossible. He puts Elon Musk in that company with Lee Iacocca and Steve Jobs, and with figures in politics and on the battlefield. He also says some authoritarian leaders have cast black shadows over tens of millions of people, across decades and hundreds of years.

He knows Elon Musk is a controversial figure. He says he is looking through the lens of history and through an investor's lens, not joining th

Michael Moritz says Alex Ferguson understood what motivated each of his players. Ferguson had a reputation for being very hard and harsh. Moritz calls that reputation unfair, while granting that hardness was one part of how Ferguson managed. Ferguson did not want to be loved and did not want to be feared. He wanted the players' respect, and he showed up in their bleak, dark times, when they felt lower than a snake's belly and needed support. Almost none of that was written down, because it happened with no cameras around.

David Beckham had been sent off playing for England in a World Cup, and the British press was merciless about what it called Beckham's stupidity. Ferguson went to meet him

Michael Moritz says a Time profile of Steve Jobs severed their relationship, and he never repaired it. Three years after he joined Time he was on leave from the San Francisco bureau to write a book about Apple's private days, because the magazine did not have room for that story. Time called and asked him to contribute to a profile for the edition that became the computer of the year. He thinks that was the only time Time picked an inanimate object for the big annual issue. Steve Jobs was convinced he would be named man of the year, even though nobody had confirmed it.

The piece went through what Moritz calls an editorial combine harvester. What came out was malicious, nasty, and underhande

Michael Moritz says he has never felt he is really good at something, and he rejects false modesty as the explanation. He has a very difficult time celebrating success and calls that a failure on his part. He traces it to his mother, who always felt disaster was around the corner and doom was around the corner. He describes the result as being one step from the precipice.

He says a piece of work never feels finished. Everything could be improved, none of it has been perfect, and there is never a satisfied moment. Painting can show a road of improvement against what he could do 10 or 15 years earlier, until a visit to MoMA or the Met reduces him to an insignificant speck.

Asked about pride

Michael Moritz stepped back from Sequoia because he was sick, and he believes leaders should not stick around once they have decided, for whatever reason, not to lead. He went cold turkey. He still tried to help Sequoia and stayed involved with companies, but only as an individual contributor, not as leadership.

He got out of leadership meetings as quickly as possible because lingering there is not fair, and he had lived through that himself. Running Sequoia had been monomania and obsession: everything, every single day of the week. Leaving let him write. About 25 years ago he and his wife started a foundation and spent more time on it. He has lived in San Francisco for pushing 50 years, no

Michael Moritz says he is probably a bit more hopeful than others about AI. He is absolutely certain there will be enormous disruption in particular job sectors caused by AI, and he thinks AI is going to create more jobs than are going to be lost.

He is not an expert and does not mean to diminish the dark side of what may or may not happen with AI. A form of Armageddon was predicted when the first nuclear bomb was exploded, and close to a century later that has not occurred. Warnings from the mid-1970s about the genetic revolution said scientists were going to create legions of individuals they deemed suitable to walk on the face of the earth, and that has not occurred either. In the last t

Michael Moritz's plan for Sequoia had three parts: do not screw it up, make everyone who worked there feel the firm was only as good as its next investment, and take new market opportunities as Silicon Valley's share of startup activity became smaller.

Sequoia in 1995 was very different from the firm he stepped down from in 2012 and 2013. People there could not rest on the laurels of the past. The firm went to Israel and, most notably, to China, and started Sequoia Heritage, a very different business. Doing right by investors was essential. Most of the investors were nonprofits. He did not want a business where the firm still got paid very handsomely if it failed to perform. The same proble

Michael Moritz says the venture business he got into way back when is very different from the venture business today, with few parallels, and that it has become much more difficult. He does not know that he would flourish in today's venture business. Benefits from the 80s and 90s began to dissipate maybe 15 or 16 years ago and do not exist today.

One benefit was imperfect information. Before the internet, unless you were very close to things, you did not know what was happening. Because of the internet, everybody around the world knows exactly what is happening and has more or less the same information.

Far more entities now pour money into the very early stage private market: individuals,

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 bac

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

Michael Moritz says the Roman Catholic nanny from his grandfather's house in Munich later opened her own house in rural Bavaria to his grandparents, his father, and his uncle when letting Jews stay for holidays had become very unpopular.

His father and uncle grew up in Munich in the 1920s and the early 1930s, when middle class and lower middle class households had a family servant. Before washing machines and vacuum cleaners, the person already in the house became the nanny once children were born. She left his grandparents' employment, married a railway worker in Bavaria who was also Roman Catholic, and she and her husband built their own house with their own hands. In the 1930s they never

Michael Moritz has always found one question quite revealing in an interview: if a person could go back and do one action differently, what would they do? A man interviewed for Sequoia burst into tears when asked it.

The man had grown up in America as the son of a Hispanic immigrant. His father was very proud to have made it here, and proud that his son was bright and getting good marks at school. Probably around age 12, the boy and a pal went to a corner grocery store and stole some candy. The shopkeeper knew the father and complained. The father took the boy by the ear back to the candy store, made him apologize, and made him empty his pockets. So chastened, and so embarrassed by bringing

Michael Moritz does not think people grow out of feeling like outsiders. He thinks what happens is that people work with a certain intensity in their late teens, their 20s, and maybe their early 30s, and that intensity diminishes over time. The inner being does not change. The outward intensity changes.

He first came across the pattern in Detroit as a correspondent for Time magazine. With a colleague he wrote a book about the Chrysler Corporation and about Lee Iacocca, the man who turned Chrysler around at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s and who was, for a time, the best-known business figure in America. Iacocca was the son of Italian immigrants and grew up in Pennsylvan

Michael Moritz's maternal grandfather left Germany with his wife 72 hours before war broke out. Another 72 hours and they would have perished. His paternal grandfather stayed until it was too late, and he and his wife were shipped east and disappeared from history.

The paternal grandfather was a lower-level judge in Bavaria, in southern Germany. He fought in World War I, survived Verdun, received the Iron Cross, and believed in the security of the German state. In 1933 he lost his job as a civil servant. He was conservative and cautious, expected the storm to blow over, and counted on his pension to survive, which left him reluctant to leave until it was too late. Anyone leaving still had t

Michael Moritz inherited drive and grit from the daily behavior of his parents, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Wales, rather than from stories they told. Jewish refugees in Wales during the 1960s and 1970s were a further minority. People look at him today and think of an old white man who is not a minority. He understands the look, but how an individual feels matters more than how other people might look at him.

His parents got out of Germany in the 1930s and were never in the camps. They were loath to use the word survivor, because they felt the word denoted somebody who had actually survived the camps. They were refugees and, in their own way, had survived. The odds he faced growin

David Senra reads Michael Moritz, then Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, on Steve Jobs returning to Apple. Jobs founded Apple twice, and the second time he was alone. A founder had not come back after being pushed out and engineered a turnaround as complete as Apple's. Turnarounds are hard in any business, and doubly hard in a technology company.

In 1985 Apple's board effectively kicked Jobs out. The eccentricity had backfired: a college dropout who walked around barefoot, refused to shower, and could act charismatic or crazy. Hired as interim CEO in 1997, twelve years later, he arrived after credentialed executives had steered the company nearly to bankruptcy. He introduced the iPod in 2001,

David Senra says Bill Gates took the radio out of his car so the drives between home, the office, and the airport could be spent thinking about Microsoft.

For many years Gates had also refused to own a television, and he used the time to read books and magazines. Michael Moritz, interviewing him, thought someone had broken in and stolen the radio. Gates had taken it out himself. The drive from his house to the office was seven minutes. The drive from the office to the airport was about 11 minutes. Added up, that was an extra five hours a month of thinking about Microsoft instead of listening to music.

He kept a top-10 list of mistakes and reread it so the same mistakes would not be made ag