Michael Moritz: Imprinting, VC, and Leadership

Michael Moritz has sat across from hundreds of founders over four decades at Sequoia Capital, and he says the most useful question he can ask has nothing to do with total addressable market or burn rate. It is about childhood, specifically about what happened before age twelve, thirteen, or fourteen (03:48). Moritz calls these the formative years, and he believes that whatever a child absorbs then, consciously or not, becomes what he calls the angels and demons that follow a person for the rest of life.

"Those imprints that you've absorbed in some manner, consciously or unconsciously, those remain with you and are both the angels and demons, I think, that you deal with for the rest of your life." Michael Moritz, [03:48]

Moritz did not develop this idea for other people's benefit first. He turned it on himself while writing a book about his own family, refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Wales in the 1930s (04:41). Growing up Jewish in Britain in the 1960s and 70s made him a minority twice over, he says, and refugee households carry a particular kind of weather: suspicion of others' motives, a habit of watching for danger, a readiness to move (05:36). "I think it gave me a sort of drive and grit that I wouldn't have had without that particular atmospheric backdrop," he says.

The clearest illustration in his family is a pair of grandfathers who took opposite paths. His paternal grandfather was a civil servant and a decorated veteran of the World War I battle of Verdun, a believer in the durability of the German state, and he waited too long. He and his wife were eventually deported and disappeared from history (07:29). His maternal grandfather was a nearly blind cattle trader with no state pension to lose and no faith in institutions to protect him. He and his wife escaped Germany seventy-two hours before the Second World War began (10:26). Seventy-two hours later, Moritz says, they too would have been trapped.

"I think the necessity for always feeling that you have a bolthole, that you have some place to go if the fire gets too hot. That's the lesson that I took away from my family history." Michael Moritz, [11:01]

The Weight of Inheritance

Moritz's interviewing method grew out of this family excavation, and he first noticed its power decades earlier, as a Time magazine correspondent writing a book about Chrysler's turnaround under Lee Iacocca, the son of Italian immigrants who never stopped feeling like an outsider inside the American auto industry (17:23). That outsider energy, Moritz says, does not disappear as people age into success. What changes is intensity, not identity: "The inner being doesn't change, the outward intensity changes," he says (19:45).

To find that energy in a stranger, Moritz relies on one question above the rest: if you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be? He recalls asking it of a Sequoia interview subject, the son of proud immigrant parents, who burst into tears remembering a childhood theft of candy and the shame of his father marching him back to the store to apologize (21:30). The technique works, Moritz says, partly because most founders he meets are barely into their twenties, with no later decades of adult life to draw questions from (19:28).

He extends the same lens to moral behavior under pressure. Watching Zoom grids full of colleagues during the pandemic, he sorted each face into categories borrowed from a French television series about a village under Nazi occupation: resistors, the silent majority, and collaborators (26:06). The people willing to actually resist authority, he concluded, are always a small minority in any room (27:30).

Moritz brought no technical background to venture capital when Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine hired him in 1985. Valentine had watched operating executives with impressive resumes fail as investors, while people with unlikely paths, such as former investment banker Arthur Rock, who financed Fairchild Semiconductor and later backed Intel and Apple, succeeded. That precedent, more than Moritz's journalism career, is what got him the job (40:41).

Moritz is candid that the industry that made him would not make him today. The main advantage he had, he says, was imperfect information: before the internet, insiders knew things outsiders did not, and Sequoia's small partnership could build real relationships directly with founders (44:55). Both edges have eroded. Nearly everyone now has access to roughly the same information, and layers of intermediaries, from micro funds to giant mutual funds, stand between investors and the people they back (45:37, 46:09).

"The venture business that I got into way back when is very different from the venture business today." Michael Moritz, [44:55]

What Endures

If information advantage fades, obsession does not. Moritz calls it monomania: complete absorption in one thing, at the cost of nearly everything else. He cites a British author capable of writing ten thousand publishable words a week, who said the greatest enemy of good art is the sight of the pram, the baby stroller, in the hallway (37:57). He points to painter Frank Auerbach, a fellow refugee from Nazi Germany, who painted every day of the year except one, taking a single holiday each Christmas at the English seaside town of Brighton, and who told Moritz he had never visited his own wife's house (38:57). The cost of that kind of focus, Moritz says, is relationships, and sometimes regret about the life not lived alongside it (37:26).

He carried these questions into a book he ghostwrote about Alex Ferguson, who managed Manchester United Football Club for twenty-six seasons (52:24). Moritz says Ferguson's real skill was not fear but earned respect: he showed up for players in their lowest moments, once meeting David Beckham at the airport after a humiliating World Cup dismissal, away from any cameras (50:17). Moritz says he learned tolerance from his own long partnership with Sequoia colleague Doug Leone, a person wired very differently from himself (49:28).

That same belief in outsized individual impact extends to Moritz's read on the present moment. He calls himself a believer in the great person theory of history, for better and worse, and names Elon Musk as its clearest living example, calling him possibly the greatest industrialist in American history for the range of industries he has reshaped (54:41). On artificial intelligence, Moritz is measured rather than alarmed. He notes that no major technological shift in the last two or three centuries has produced less employment overall, only disruption and reshuffling within it (59:19).

Writing, he thinks, becomes more valuable, not less, in a world flooded with machine-generated text. Extraordinary writing, he says, is simply the unmistakable voice of the author winning out over the pressure to sound like everyone else (60:11). He offers a small, telling data point: measured common vocabulary size, President Donald Trump's is about 2,400 words and President Barack Obama's is about 4,500 (70:29). A large vocabulary, Moritz argues, is what lets a person express a complicated idea simply.

Since stepping down from Sequoia's leadership in 2012, Moritz has tried to live without monomania rather than inside it: painting, running a family foundation, and co-founding a local news outlet, the San Francisco Standard, built to prove that local journalism can still be a profitable business (63:56). He says he does not miss the total command of his calendar that came with running Sequoia, only certain parts of the immersion (64:24).

Asked what parenting lesson follows from a book about imprinting, Moritz does not reach for a system. He says the job is to arm children with confidence and to avoid being censorious, then adds a darker corollary: history is full of long stretches where ordinary people became cruel, and very little separates a person from that outcome except the daily choice not to (67:05). In the end, he says, what matters is simple: the relationships a person cares for, the humility to know that no one's accomplishments are as significant as they feel, and the discipline to leave things slightly better than they were found (67:34).