Sequoia Legend Michael Moritz: Steve Jobs, Being an Outsider, and Investing in the Age of AI
In a Nutshell
Michael Moritz traces his relentless drive, self-doubt, and outsider mindset to his parents' refugee experience escaping Nazi Germany. He argues that the first 14 years of life shape character indelibly and that great achievements require monomania, even at the cost of relationships. His core lesson is that you must always keep a "bolt hole" ready and that building anything lasting demands total obsession rather than seeking external validation.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
The episode with Jobs and Time was fascinating but ultimately frustrating. The relationship with Steve never repaired after that incident. When asked if he had ever been in awe of anyone, the response was that people who have done incredible, remarkable things are also flawed individuals. Seeing them up close makes it difficult to hold anybody in awe because you see the flaws as well as all of their accomplishments and virtues.
A deep dive was taken into the impact of one's history, family history, and heritage on who a person is. The question "where does one person end and the next person begin?" emerged as central to understanding personal identity. After writing a book exploring family history, an unexpected gift came from discovering who the author had become and why.
Every parent leaves an imprint on a child, especially during formative years before age 12, 13, or 14. These imprints, absorbed consciously or unconsciously, remain throughout life. Both the angels and demons that a person deals with for the rest of their life originate from these early experiences.
Grew up in a family of refugees from Nazi Germany in Wales during the 1960s and 1970s. Jewish refugees in Wales were a further minority. The feeling of being an outsider comes from how an individual feels rather than how others might look at you. Parents had escaped Germany in the 1930s but were reluctant to use the word "survivor" because they felt it denoted people who had survived the camps. They were refugees who had survived in their own way.
The motive to survive no matter what the odds created a drive and grit that wouldn't have existed without that atmospheric backdrop. When thinking about surviving, it involves living by your wits, being suspicious of others' motives, wondering where and how bad things will occur, and guarding against them.
The transfer happened through daily behavior and reactions to events rather than through stories told. Parents didn't discuss the past in real detail—only broad sweeps of history were known. The sense that doom was never very far away and the need to be vigilant and wary about navigating daily life created an atmosphere of constant awareness.
Two grandfathers faced the same historical moment differently. The paternal grandfather was a civil servant and lower-level judge in Bavaria who fought in World War I, survived Verdun, received the Iron Cross, and believed in the German state and its security. When he lost his job in 1933, his conservative nature, belief in state durability, and pension made him reluctant to leave until it was too late. He and his wife were eventually shipped east and disappeared from history.
The maternal grandfather was a cattle trader, almost blind as a young man and completely blind by the time his grandson met him. He was more streetwise and entrepreneurial, not burdened by the need to remain and collect a state pension. He and his wife escaped by the skin of their teeth, getting out 72 hours before war broke out.
The big lesson from family history is the necessity of always feeling you have a bolt hole—someplace to go if the fire gets too hot. The conclusion is that you can never have enough passports.
The United States and Western Europe are uncomfortable places for minorities, whether Asian, Muslim, Black, or Jewish. Antisemitism has been around for 2500 years and will not disappear in 2026 or 2030. The simplistic view of who feels safe in America is white Christians who own guns—everybody else feels a degree of insecurity. This exists in America, the United Kingdom, France, and other European countries where far-right governments have come to the fore.
Victor Orban was booted from office despite riding high a couple of years ago. In some places there are pushes to the center, which would be consoling. The midterms in America in the next 18 months will shape how people will live in the next decade. In Britain, Nigel Farage may have had his best day behind him. The situation differs in France with Marine Le Pen and elections next year, and is potentially different in Spain and Germany.
The internet fundamentally changes the potential for civility and political moderation because it rewards extremes in attention. This has been true of every new form of media from the printing press onward, but the internet and mobile telephony have made it far easier to spread false memes and innuendo. It represents a much larger, more amplified version of what occurred in Germany when radio took off during the 1930s, with radio waves dominated by extreme propaganda, racist views, and loud lies told frequently.
The method of interrogating someone's first 14 years originated from writing a book about Lee Iacocca and the Chrysler Corporation while working as a Time magazine correspondent in Detroit. Iacocca, son of Italian immigrants who grew up in Pennsylvania, always felt like an outsider in the automobile industry, particularly at Ford Motor Company under Henry Ford II, where he was viewed with suspicion by the establishment.
When interviewing founders who are only 20 or 21 years old, asking about their backgrounds is natural because their early years cover a big percentage of their life experience. People don't grow out of their outsider energy, but the outward intensity changes over time. People work with intensity in their late teens, twenties, and early thirties, but that intensity diminishes for various reasons. The inner being doesn't change.
When asking questions about backgrounds, the approach resembles painting—making marks in different parts of the canvas that seem unrelated, with colors and dots that don't initially seem to have any composition. Eventually the picture emerges from the accumulation of all these different marks, creating a portrait of the individual.
A revealing question is to ask somebody what one thing they would do differently if they had a chance to do one action differently. One person interviewed for Sequoia burst into tears when asked this question. As the son of an immigrant, he had stolen candy from a corner grocery store around age 12. His father made him return, apologize, and empty his pockets, bringing shame upon his family.
The personal answer to what would be done differently involves interactions and dealings with parents that feel shameful today. There is no going back after spending the first 16-17 years of life with them. Some things wished had gone differently during younger years, but there was a failure of comprehension of what parents had experienced and what had made them who they were.
Anna was a family servant who became a nanny for the father and uncle in Munich during the 1920s and early 1930s. She was Roman Catholic and eventually left employment to marry a railway worker in Bavaria. They built their own house and never forgot the Moritz family. In the 1930s, they opened their house to the grandparents and the two boys when it became unpopular to have Jews stay in rural Bavaria. They were horrified by the Nazis and did everything possible to help. After the war, the family developed a very strong connection with Anna until she died. She was recognized as one of the righteous gentiles by Yad Vashem for having an ethical compass that wouldn't allow anyone else to alter.
A French television series about life in a village during World War II showed how some people resisted the occupation, most remained silent, and some became active collaborators with the Nazis. During COVID Zoom calls, each participant was mentally categorized by who would have resisted, stayed silent, or collaborated. Those with backbone were always in the minority.
Resistance is very rare because bad things happen in countries when most people stay silent. Very few actively resist.
Moritz reflected on whether most entrepreneurs he has backed would be considered resistors. He acknowledged that he has never felt he is really good at something, describing this not as false modesty but as a persistent sense of doubt and competitiveness that has plagued him throughout his career. He finds it difficult to celebrate good things and success, a trait he attributes to his heritage and his mother's outlook. His mother always felt that disaster was around the corner, and he recalled her listening to the radio during breakfast, inevitably discussing natural disasters, plane crashes, or other dreadful events around the world. She died a few weeks before COVID-19, which Moritz described as one of the great disasters she had been predicting all her life, suggesting she was cheated out of witnessing the pandemic she had long anticipated.
Moritz explained that he has always felt everything is unfinished and could be improved, with none of his work ever being perfect. This leaves no satisfied moments. When he compares his current paintings to those from 10 or 15 years ago, he sees a road to improvement, but visiting MoMA or the Met reduces him to feeling like an insignificant speck. He does not necessarily feel pride for the extraordinary people he has backed, viewing the relationship differently and considering those accomplishments their own voyages of curiosity rather than something for him as a bystander to claim.
When asked about the highest energy moments across his journey, Moritz identified family and children as the deeply personal sources of energy. He and his wife Harriet have two sons now in their 30s, with one having a couple of grandchildren.
Moritz provided context about Bill Deeds, the editor of the Daily Telegraph who was a revered figure in British journalism and had been the model for a character in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop. Growing up in Britain, Moritz wanted to be a journalist and work on one of the big Fleet Street newspapers 50 years ago. However, trade union rules prevented newspaper editors from hiring college graduates directly, as unions feared this would interfere with hiring 16-year-olds straight out of high school. This meant Moritz would have needed to spend two or three years working on a small provincial newspaper before accessing papers like the Times, Financial Times, or Daily Telegraph, which he was too impatient and ambitious to do.
Moritz wrote to Bill Deeds applying for a job at the Daily Telegraph, and Deeds gave him half an hour in his office in Fleet Street during winter when it was raining. Deeds advised him that what he wished he had done as a young man was go to America, and he encouraged Moritz to move to America. This advice proved to be the most salient moment that helped propel Moritz in that direction.
Upon arriving in America, Moritz got very lucky when he was hired by Time straight out of school without any work experience. The organization was willing to take a risk on a 22 or 23-year-old without prior experience, which became his first big break.
A painful episode occurred two or three years after joining Time when Moritz took a leave of absence while working in the San Francisco bureau to write a book about Apple. He was interested in telling the tale of Apple's private days, which the magazine lacked room to cover. During this leave, Time asked him to contribute to a profile of Steve Jobs for what became the famous Computer of the Year edition—the only time Time picked an inanimate object for their big annual issue. Jobs was convinced he would be named Man of the Year, though nobody had confirmed this. The profile, which went through an editorial combine harvester that changed its tone to become malicious, nasty, and underhanded, severed Moritz's relationship with Jobs. Moritz was appalled by the treatment and felt disenchanted, leaving Time as a result. The relationship with Jobs was never repaired.
Moritz stated he was not in awe of Steve Jobs. When asked if he had ever been in awe of anyone, he noted that people who have done incredible, remarkable things are also flawed individuals, and seeing this up close makes it difficult to hold anybody in awe. He respected and admired Jobs tremendously and was aware that Jobs achieved things Moritz could never have accomplished, but he also knew some of the darker shades of Jobs that made it difficult to hold him up as an object of unalloyed admiration, though he recognized Jobs as a heroic figure.
Moritz discussed monomania in character studies and its connection to the idea of the outsider and survivor. He explained that when creating anything of value—whether a piece of music, book, painting, or company—complete obsession with the topic at hand, locking out the rest of the world, and eliminating every unnecessary distraction is essential. He acknowledged the downsides: people get hurt along the way, and there is not enough time for families, others, or friends because of this monomania, though great things sometimes come out of it. He suspected that relationships are typically the primary cost of monomania.
Moritz referenced Evelyn Waugh, a famous British author capable of writing 10,000 good words a week with ease, who said the greatest enemy to good art is the sight of the pram in the hallway. Regarding painter Frank Auerbach, Moritz noted that he has never received the recognition he deserves in America, though a retrospective is coming to significant museums. Auerbach was a refugee from Nazi Germany who died about five years ago. He was completely obsessed with his art, painting every day except for one holiday a year on Christmas Day when he would go to Brighton Pier. He had never visited his wife Julia's house on the English coast. In a conversation around 2012-2013, Auerbach mentioned loving New York City and its bustling energy, but when asked when he was last there, he said 1967. He had a regular coterie of sitters who posed for him once a week for 30-40 years for his figurative work, with one subject flying weekly from Venice to London for sessions. Auerbach would go into an utter meltdown if a sitter was late. He painted the same landscape repeatedly and lived for art, with no time for anything else, though he had a son named Jake.
Moritz stated it is nice to have a mixture of friends and acquaintances, some tied to a particular mast and others prepared to wander around and live life more casually. He has found it more difficult to be around people who appear to be doing nothing, though he likes and enjoys being with them.
Moritz discussed joining Sequoia around 1985 when Don Valentine, the founder, took a risk on him. At that time, Sequoia was a very small firm, with the current studio table likely large enough to accommodate all employees. Moritz had been a journalist wanting to get into the venture business after becoming interested and meeting people running these small firms. He wrote letters to five firms and met with each. All except Don said they did not know what to do with him because he lacked a technical background, engineering degree, technical knowledge, work experience in a Silicon Valley company, and had been a journalist—suggesting he find a role in public relations or marketing instead. Don was more willing to take a risk because he had seen people with big operating backgrounds in technology companies come into venture and not be very successful, while others without such backgrounds had carved out successful lives as investors. Don pointed to Arthur Rock, who had organized the original financing of Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950s at Hayden Stone, helped finance Teledyne and Scientific Data Systems in the 1960s, became an original investor in Intel, and later backed Apple. Don noted there was nothing in Rock's background that would have suggested he would be successful.
Moritz explained that Don did not believe in teaching but had a survivalist instinct of throwing people into the deep end to see if they drowned. Moritz learned a lot by observation and listening, both good things and bad things. Pierre Lamond at Sequoia, who played a huge role in the rise of the semiconductor industry, was also a formative influence. Being in the middle of that mixture and watching good and bad things happen helped Moritz gradually form his own opinions.
Moritz noted that the venture business he entered is very different from today, with few parallels, and he does not know that he would flourish in today's venture business. The benefits that existed in the 1980s and 1990s began dissipating about 15-16 years ago. One was imperfect information—before the internet, unless you were very close to things, you did not know what was happening, whereas today everybody around the world has access to the same information. There are also many more entities involved, from individuals banding together in small firms to huge mutual funds pouring money in, making the early-stage private market very different. Forty years ago, it was possible to form a real, close relationship with people you were getting into business with, but today there are too many intermediaries, particularly for venture firms. Moritz was also catapulted into the middle of Silicon Valley where everything was happening, a huge competitive advantage. He suggested that a moderately intelligent 14 or 16-year-old with their wits about them would have been able to succeed in the venture business in the mid-1980s.
Moritz's favorite investment was taking over Sequoia. When he did this with Doug, what was going through his head was not to screw it up. The Sequoia around 1995 was very different from the one when he stepped down in 2012-2013. The goals were to ensure everybody felt they were only as good as their next investment and could not rest on past laurels, and to take advantage of new market opportunities, including going overseas to Israel and notably to China, and starting Sequoia Heritage, a very different business. He felt doing right by investors was really important, noting that most investments and investors were not-for-profits, and he did not want to be in a business where if they did not perform well, they still got paid very handsomely. He fought hard to get one fund back to par over 10 years rather than telling investors they had to accept a fund that would not make money.
Moritz learned that when working in a team, you have to adjust to others, try to understand what they need and what is important to them, and feed that need. This is the most important thing he has learned about building or leading a team, and he would be much better at it today than 25 or 30 years ago. He learned a lot of that from writing a book with soccer manager Alex Ferguson about 10-11 years ago. Ferguson had the ability to understand what motivated each individual player. Despite his reputation for being very hard and harsh, Ferguson did not want to be loved or feared but respected. He was there for players in their bleak, dark times when they needed support and were feeling lower than a snake's belly, an aspect that does not get written about. Moritz recalled an incident involving David Beckham being sent off while playing for England in a World Cup competition.
Moritz was approached by people asking him to write a book about Silicon Valley. He was interested in understanding what it took to build an enduring business both for Sequoia itself and for the companies they invested in. He wanted to explore this through a non-Silicon Valley lens, choosing Manchester United Football Club and Alex Ferguson as his subject. Ferguson took over the club in 1986 and retired in 2013, establishing a record of astonishing success over 26 seasons.
When Moritz showed a draft to a Sequoia communications person, the person said they couldn't tell what was Moritz and what was Ferguson. Moritz replied "precisely," indicating his success in capturing Ferguson's voice.
Moritz is a strong believer in the "great person theory" of history. He believes that whether discussing Elon Musk, Leia Koker, Steve Jobs, or political and military leaders, great leaders have enormous impact on what surrounds them. Capable leaders can persuade others to achieve what is perceived as impossible. He views Elon Musk as potentially the greatest industrialist in American history, describing himself as "gobsmacked" by the scale of Musk's achievements across multiple industries.
Moritz observes that founders in China and South Korea often have imperial ambitions for their companies. He cites Xiaomi as an example - a company that began as a phone maker in 2010 and now manufactures cars exceeding the quality and performance of Porsches. He believes creative people armed with extraordinary tools will be able to accomplish far more than was possible in the past.
Moritz acknowledges he is not a technologist or AI specialist. He notes that the growth rates of today's AI companies are "beyond comprehension." He recalls Tom Seel wistfully noting that when his company sold for $10 billion, that amount was worth a lot of money, and reflects that even a $100 billion valuation now seems quaint compared to six-year-old companies worth trillions.
Regarding concerns about AI, Moritz is more hopeful than others. He draws parallels to predictions of nuclear Armageddon and genetic engineering disasters that never materialized. He believes AI will create more jobs than it eliminates, noting that throughout history, major technological improvements have ultimately led to employment growth rather than decline. He suggests the value of extraordinary writing will increase as AI produces vast amounts of text, allowing exceptional writing to "cut through the sea of slop."
Moritz defines extraordinary writing as "hearing the unmistakable voice of the author." He believes the toughest challenge for individuals is being in touch with their inner feelings and inner voice to overcome external pressures and expectations.
Moritz references Joseph Campbell's statement that "The privilege of a lifetime is becoming who you are," acknowledging this is also the hardest thing to do. He admits he hasn't fully achieved this himself, describing his weakness as being "too prone to live up to the pressures or expectations from the outside or from others than to let myself run free."
Moritz attributes some of his self-criticism to his mother's influence. Despite arousing his interest in art and other subjects, she would always find fault no matter how well he performed. She was convinced he was a crook when Yahoo went public and believed the police should arrest him, as she couldn't imagine his success could be legal.
Moritz believes leaders should not linger after deciding to step down. He went "cold turkey" from Sequoia leadership, helping in advisory capacities but not remaining in leadership meetings. This transition allowed him to pursue other interests including spending more time on a foundation he and his wife started 25 years ago, working to help San Francisco flourish, co-founding the San Francisco Standard media business with Griff Gaffne, and serving in an advisory capacity with what was Sequoia Heritage.
Moritz misses aspects of his Sequoia role but knows he wouldn't want to return to that lifestyle. He finds flow state in painting, describing it as simpler because the calendar isn't commanded by external forces. He contrasts having his calendar dictated by others versus being in complete control of his own schedule.
The media business was established as a for-profit entity to demonstrate that local journalism can be profitable. The goals include providing vibrant, interesting, diverting but reliable information for San Francisco and the Bay Area. Moritz emphasizes there is no editorial thumb on the scale for news coverage, though the opinion section takes a center-right perspective, which he sees as a needed voice in San Francisco.
When asked about lessons from writing his book for parenting, Moritz emphasizes the importance of arming children with confidence and instilling feelings of self-confidence and freedom. He advises parents to avoid being censorious.
Moritz warns against taking positive progress for granted, noting history is filled with terrible events affecting millions across Russia, China, Iran, Africa, and India. He believes little separates humans from beasts, and remaining human rather than becoming the beast is everybody's challenge.
Moritz says the book helped him understand himself a little better. In the final analysis, he believes what matters are relationships with people you care about, knowing we're all insignificant regardless of accomplishments, and trying to leave things a little better than before we engaged with them.
Moritz has been considering a book about Iran in the 1940s, exploring the collision of individuals from inside and outside Iran that explains much about today's world. He envisions a blend of fiction and non-fiction examining how personalities from different backgrounds failed to understand each other.
Moritz credits his journalistic training and college education for his ability to distill complex ideas to their essence while keeping communications short. He notes this skill has served him well throughout his career. He suggests vocabulary breadth enables expressing complicated ideas simply, citing studies showing Trump's vocabulary at approximately 2,400 words compared to Obama's 4,500 common words.
When asked what the kindest thing anyone ever did for him, Moritz simply replied "Marry me." Regarding what he learned from his wife, he answered "Tolerance."
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