RWH073: Unstoppable w/ Sir Michael Moritz

In this episode, William Green speaks with multibillionaire Sir Michael Moritz, arguably the most successful venture capitalist ever. He spent nearly four decades at Sequoia Capital, which invested in early-stage companies like Nvidia, Google, YouTube, PayPal, Airbnb, LinkedIn & Stripe. Here, he talks about his unconventional path to success, the role of temperament in investing, & what he learned from observing Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jensen Huang & Elon Musk. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: (00:00:00) Intro (00:04:50) Why Michael Moritz has always felt like an outsider. (00:14:05) How his family’s survival was built on the kindness of others. (00:26:16) How his relentlessness became the key to his success. (00:29:26) How Oxford & Time magazine prepared him for investing. (00:38:27) How the novelist Philip Roth changed his life. (00:44:06) What Michael learned from observing Bill Gates up close. (00:57:28) What made Steve Jobs special. (01:02:46) Why it’s so hard to predict which founders will succeed or fail. (01:06:36) Why investors must be open enough to learn from younger people. (01:09:20) What Charlie Munger identified as Michael’s investing edge. (01:14:02) What soccer legend Sir Alex Ferguson taught Michael about leadership. (01:18:05) Why he views Elon Musk as the greatest industrialist in US history. (01:21:32) What Michael learned from his wife & children. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Inquire about William Green’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Richer, Wiser, Happier Masterclass⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Michael Moritz’s book, “Auslander.” Michael Moritz’s book “Return to the Little Kingdom.” Alex Ferguson & Michael Moritz’s book, “Leading.” Alex Ferguson & Michael Moritz’s book, “The Games of My Life.” Philip Roth’s book “Sabbath’s Theater.” William Green’s book, “Richer, Wiser, Happier” – ⁠read the reviews of this book⁠. Follow William Green on ⁠X⁠. Related ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠books⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mentioned in the podcast. Ad-free episodes on our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Premium Feed⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses through ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Intrinsic Value Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow our official social media accounts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TIP Finance⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Enjoy exclusive perks from our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠favorite Apps and Services⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our ⁠sponsors⁠: Monarch Plus500 Netsuite Plaud References to any third-party products, services, or advertisers do not constitute endorsements, and The Investor’s Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're listening to TIP.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Hi there. It's wonderful to see you again on the richer, wiser, happier podcast. Our guest today is one of the most successful investors of all time, a legendary venture capitalist named Sir Michael Moritz, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes at more than $7 billion. As you'll hear, he and his colleagues at Sequoia Capital racked up astonishing returns by investing very early in businesses like Nvidia, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, PayPal, Stripe and LinkedIn. Moritz was incredibly far sighted in identifying some of the most successful corporate founders of all time, but he also had another secret, the patience to hold on to his winning investments and never sell. Charlie Munger once told me that this temperamental advantage helped

• 0:48Speaker 01

  to explain why Moritz outperformed pretty much all of his peers. But before we get to my conversation with Michael Moritz, I also wanted to mention quickly that I still have several open spaces in my richer, wiser, happier masterclass, which begins in December. This is an opportunity to study with me over the course of a year in a very small intimate group that's likely to be somewhere between 10 and 20 people. We'll meet once a month over Zoom and we'll also get together in person at a couple of unique events. The aim is to create a year-long journey of exploration to help you move toward a life that is truly richer, wiser and happier. We'll talk in depth about how we can actually apply in our own

• 1:31Speaker 01

  lives, the lessons I've learned from great investors like Sir John Templeton, Charlie Munger, Howard Marks, Bill Miller and Nick Sleep, not just lessons about how to build enduring wealth, but about how to think and how to live. This will be the third year in a row that I've hosted a richer, wiser, happier masterclass, and I'm planning to make this my final offering of the class. The first two groups include an amazingly accomplished selection of people from around the world, including some hugely successful hedge fund managers and mutual fund managers, asset allocators, wealth advisors, managers of family offices, a medical doctor, a management consultant, several CEOs and entrepreneurs,

• 2:12Speaker 01

  and even a renowned physicist turned quant fund manager. But what matters most to me is that they're an unusually thoughtful, soulful group of people who love learning from one another and sharing insights about investing, business and life. If you're a keen investor and a passionate learner and would like to know more about the masterclass, please feel free to contact my friend and fellow podcast host Kyle Grieve, and he can answer any questions you might have about dates, prices and the like. His email address is [email protected]. I'm totally biased, but I think this is a really rare opportunity to become a better investor, to think more deeply about how you want to

• 2:57Speaker 01

  live and to build rich friendships with a very special group of people. If this idea appeals to you, please reach out to Kyle. And if the stars align, I'd love to see you in December. And now, back to the show.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  You're listening to the richer, wiser, happier podcast, where your host, William Green, interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. This show is not investment advice. It's intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. All opinions expressed by hosts and guests are solely their own, and they may have investments in the securities discussed. Now for your host, William Green.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Hi folks. I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome today's guest, Sir Michael Moritz, who's arguably the most successful venture capitalist of all time. He spent about 38 years at Sequoia Capital, playing an important role in the firm's investments in early-stage businesses like Yahoo, Google, YouTube, PayPal, Airbnb, Zappos, Klarna, LinkedIn, Instacart and Stripe. For good measure, he's also a terrific writer with an excellent new book that's just been published here in the US. I have the UK edition here, but it's a terrific book. A few years ago, I asked Charlie Munger, who were the most interesting investors that I should try to interview? And Charlie named one person, Michael Moritz. As Charlie put it several times, he kept repeating the same phrase, I think you'll find Mike Moritz

• 4:34Speaker 01

  quite interesting. So, welcome, Michael. It's wonderful to meet you finally.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Oh, well, thank you for a very generous introduction. I think Charlie must have been having one of his weaker moments.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  He was not an easy man to impress, so we'll discuss some of the things specifically that he said later. Your new book is really fascinating, Ausländer. It's a German word that I gather means foreigner or outside or alien. And I wanted to start by talking about your early life in Wales. I think you were born in 1954, if I remember correctly. And I'm wondering if you could paint a picture for us of what it was like there to grow up as a Jewish boy in Cardiff in the 1950s and early 60s, what it looked like, what it felt like, and why you, as well as many other members of your family, had this sense of being an outsider?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  As you said, I was born in Cardiff. When you look at it fairly quickly after the end of World War II, seven or eight years, and both of my parents, they had married elsewhere, but when my father got a job at the University of Wales in Cardiff, they moved to Cardiff. Both my parents were refugees from Nazi Germany. My father had got out in, was sent to school in Britain in 1937. My mother got out of Germany on something called the Kindertransport in 1939. And the early 1950s in Britain writ large, and obviously

• 6:06Speaker 02

  also, and I think probably even more so in Wales, Britain was not the multicultural society that it is today. There were very small number of immigrants to Britain. There was obviously the, you know, the Windrush generation in the early 50s from the Caribbean, but those, they mainly congregated around London. And the Welsh population was perhaps two and a half million or so, two and a half to three million. And there were about somewhere between 450 and 600 Jewish families in Wales at the time that I grew up. So, I think as

• 6:48Speaker 02

  soon as I became conscious of the fact that I was different in some manner from the children that I went to school with and my friends at school, I became aware of the fact that we weren't like other people. And I can tell you one little story, which for me has always highlighted and accentuated the difference. There are plenty of other examples, but the one that always sticks in my mind is, of all things, the arrival of the annual edition of the new telephone directory. And back when telephone directories were distributed

• 7:28Speaker 02

  in, you know, in a fairly thick book. And I always remember leafing through, this, I was probably in my early teens at the time, going through the pages, and they were just packed with surnames that were associated with being Welsh. And the name may have been Davis or Evans or Edwards or Jones or Hughes or Williams or Lloyd or other surnames that were unmistakably of Welsh lineage. Morris was another one. And then I would go to the M's in the telephone book, hoping, hoping, hoping that we weren't the only Moritz listed

• 8:13Speaker 02

  in the Cardiff and South Wales telephone directory. But every year that I remember, we were the only Moritz. And that, more than anything, signaled to me for some reason that, goodness, here we were, and the telephone directory was advertising the fact that we were outsiders.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  This whole issue of names is really intriguing. And your father, as you write in the book, was simultaneously Ludwig and Alfred. And so, names sort of point to a little bit of a double life in a way, a change of identity. I wondered if you could tell us more about him, because he was, he was clearly a remarkable man, kind of a solemn man, but with every reason to be solemn, and also very brilliant. And I'd love you to tell the story of his arrival in England, which also, I mean, I'm curious, partly because he went to St Paul's and I went to the preparatory school, Collet Court, but also just the brilliance of the man, that he, you know, his ability to learn English and settle in, and also

• 9:16Speaker 01

  the generosity of the people who took a chance on him and made it possible for him actually to leave Germany in 1937.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  So to give you a bit of background, he had one brother, both of them were born in the early 1920s in Munich. Their mother was a homekeeper in the days when there wasn't much homekeeping to do because every sort of bourgeois family had a, had a housekeeper. And their father, whose name was Max, Maximilian, was a lower level judge in the Bavarian judiciary. And Max had, like a lot of other German Jews, served in the German army in World War One and had been given an iron cross. And then after the end of the war, he returned to the judiciary.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Now, come the 1930s, he lost his job. Being a Jew, he was dismissed, despite the fact that he had served the state previously. And by the mid 1930s, the storms were obviously gathering for Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe. And Max and his wife decided to descend, both my father and my uncle tried to get them to school in Britain. But the only way they could do it, because it was so hard, you know, these people didn't have a lot of money anywhere and it was very difficult to get money out of Germany if you were Jewish back then. Both of their boys had to get scholarships.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Otherwise, they couldn't afford to be in a school in, in Britain. And as you mentioned, St Paul's School provided my father with a scholarship. He arrived there at the age of about 14, 15, not speaking a word of English. And his handwriting was the copper plate handwriting that you associate with a German education of, of that particular era. And he had been brought by his father to England and deposited at St Paul's where, as I said, he didn't speak a word of English, nor did he know a soul. And he wasn't put up in a school dormitory.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  He was put up in, you know, in what the, the British called digs, in a, in a tiny little apartment. And I came, I don't know how it survived the war, but I came across a, a postcard that he had written to his mother announcing that he was safely ensconced in this little room in, in West London. And I can't imagine the loneliness that must have accompanied the dispatch of that, of that card. So that was how he came to arrive in Britain. And I remember he was not a, as you said, he was, had a fairly solemn demeanor.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  The exercise he undertook was mental, not physical exercise, but he acted, he was a very active with, with mental exercise and he was a man of the mind. And later on, he, he became a classicist. He had studied this in the gymnasiums in, those subjects in the gymnasiums in Munich that were heavily tilted towards Latin and Greek and mathematics and philosophy. And I remember him saying once, in one of the few things that he said about his recollections of that era, that one of his proudest moments in life was when he was able to raise his

• 12:58Speaker 02

  hand in the classroom for the first time and participate in the classroom discussion and ask a question in English. And he excelled at St Paul's and to which I think he always felt, you know, a deep association and enormously grateful that the school, this really wonderful school had come up with a scholarship for him. And then a bit later on, he won a scholarship to Oxford to study classics. And again, I hadn't a little bit of, again, a revelatory comment that my father made

• 13:41Speaker 02

  once, when I asked him, what was the happiest day of your life, thinking, hmm, it'd be when he married my mother or when perhaps I, as his firstborn child was born. He said the happiest day of his life was hearing the news that he had been admitted as a scholar in Oxford. And the reason for that was, had he not won that scholarship to Oxford, he had no means of sustenance or support in Britain and he would have been shipped back to Germany. And so that was the sort of, the beginning of my father's life where, where he wound up for many years later on as an academic.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  I was very moved also reading the book, just seeing that there were these people like this largely forgotten British benefactor, Jeanette Franklin Cohn, who I think was not Jewish but had married a Jew, who basically was the British benefact who initially guaranteed that your father's fees would be paid. And so I think what's kind of extraordinary, and that has a lot of resonance in your life as well, as someone who's been a great donor to various universities, is the fact that there were these people who kind of came forward out of nowhere. And I, I think your uncle as well, Ernest, your father's brother, I remember there was a lovely story where he, he's walking along Bond Street and has a chance meeting with

• 15:03Speaker 01

  another emigre, who's a vague family acquaintance and that person pays for his first year at school, which I think you said made him believe in God for the rest of his life. Can you talk about that? Cause I think that there's something really extraordinary about the fact that your family and your success is actually entirely built on the sort of random acts of kindness of strangers who stepped up.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Some random, some purposeful, but you're exactly right. And just to flesh out the story about my uncle, as I mentioned a moment ago, Max had deposited my father at, at St Paul's in London. He then returned to Germany to do the same for my uncle. And there was a school in Brighton that, on the south coast of England, that my father knew about. It was a, it was a school for Jewish boys, but they had no means of paying for the education there.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  And I think there was, both my uncle Ernest and my grandfather Max were, as Ernest told the story, sort of out of luck, despondent. And for some reason, walking down Bond Street, which is an unlikely place even then for a pair of refugees to be walking, when, as you said, they bumped into this acquaintance. And my grandfather explained the predicament, that they had a slot at this school, a place at the school, but they didn't have the means to pay for it. And this gentleman, whose name I tried very hard to find out, but couldn't find out, stepped forward and paid for it.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  And then there were all these other people in Britain who, in one way or another, opened their hearts, their homes, their pocketbooks to these refugees. You mentioned this lady, Jeanette Franklin Cohn, who was very active in all of this. Many of these people were not Jewish. The history books eventually caught up with was, and perhaps the most notable, was this extremely modest, reticent man named Nicholas Winton, who organized the Kindertransport

• 17:32Speaker 02

  that I, I mentioned at the beginning of this interview, which transported about 10,000 Jewish children out of Nazi threatened Nazi Germany and the other territories that in the 30s, the, the Nazis had conquered. And my mother came out on the Kindertransport and Nicholas Winton also was not Jewish. And then my mother was taken in by a lady in Cambridge. She and her sister were taken in by a lady in Cambridge who took care of them during much of the war years.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  And Britain of that era, now there were obviously a whole bunch of Britons as well who had a different point of view and were less welcoming. But I think the emigre population from the Nazi period that wound up in Britain is forever grateful for Britain. And you've got to remember that at that era, there were only two kinds of countries. The one kind wanted to get rid of the Jews and the other kind didn't want to accept any Jews. And Britain, with some caveats, was a big exception to that.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  France was very hostile, Spain was hostile, continental Europe as a whole was extremely hostile. It was very difficult. There was great anti-immigrant sentiment, not just for Jews, but writ large in the America of the 1930s. So, you know, all of these people who stepped forward, many of them without the means to rescue these hapless people, I feel incredibly indebted to them.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  And your mother literally arrived days, I think, before the war broke out. I mean, very shortly before war broke out. And she was a very intriguing and important character in your life. I mean, she, your mother Doris, she had left school, I think, at 15. This is a lady who died in 2019, but she was obviously very formidable, defiant, resilient, but also really difficult. And I wondered if you could give us a sense of what it was like to grow up in a household with this father who had lost his parents in the Holocaust and was very, very smart, but emotionally kind of detached. And this mother who you write about her verbal violence and her pessimism and the like.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  I mean, it must have been, you know, as you wrote about your family in Auslander, you must have started to understand, oh, that's the environment in which I grew up in. And that's why they were as they were. Can you give us a sense of, as you look back now, what that environment was like? This sort of emotional territory, this landscape in which you were being reared?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  As you said, my mother actually arrived in Britain on a Kinder transport. She arrived in Britain on April the 20th, 1939, which coincidentally was the same month and date that my father had arrived in Britain two years earlier. And the darker coincidence of that particular date is that it was Hitler's birthday. My mother's parents got out of Germany three days before war broke out in 1939. So my mother preceded them by a few months.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  And to answer, to address the question that you asked, William, I had not set out to write a family memoir at all. It was, it was not what I was ever thought about, but three things happened. Mother died shortly before the outbreak of COVID. My sister cleared out the house in Cardiff in Wales and put the documents and papers that she found, photograph, a few photograph albums, passports, ID cards, those sorts of things. She put them in a, I think it was four cardboard cartons and shipped them to me. And I started sifting through that and through those papers.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  And COVID had given me a lot more time to indulge myself. And part of writing the book, again, coming back to the question that you asked, was not just to discover, because obviously I knew the broad arc of my parents' background, but discovering all the details about them, all the details that I hadn't heard, that they hadn't told me. But then something of a benefit, understanding for good and for bad, how I became who I am, very much shaped by what you were mentioning, which was the atmosphere in which I grew up.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  And I have no doubt whatsoever that my parents wanted the best for me and my sister. No doubt about it whatsoever. But they were heavily scarred by all the experiences of what they had gone through, which is, I think, natural for anybody who has had the rug on which they have grown up and which is familiar to them and on which they have trodden every day, pulled out rudely and wickedly from underneath their feet.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  And then obviously the horrors of World War II, in which tens of millions of people were caught up, and in which many of our family members perished, left an indelible mark on their psyche. And this was also Britain of the 1950s and the Britain of the 1960s and 1970s, where seeking psychiatric help for depression and acute anxiety was considered beyond the pale and a sign of great weakness. So they never went on the journey exploring why they did certain things.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  But even though obviously World War II and what had come before were not subjects of daily conversation in the household, the sense of the fact that horror could recur, and if it had happened once, it could happen again, colored their whole existence and never left. And it's hard to convey the sort of reverberations and vibrations of that tenseness and that anxiety and that suspicion of the motives of others, or the suspicion of others in

• 24:45Speaker 02

  general, accompanies that sort of background emotional tapestry.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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• 27:58Speaker 03

  All right, back to the show.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  It was obviously hugely challenging in certain ways for you. And at the same time, presumably, if your parents had been more warm and nurturing and more emotionally available, you might well not have had the same fire, this sense of never being able to be enough for your mother, for example, or, you know, and I'm wondering, like, when you look back on, on those early years and you think about the success that you would achieve later, to what extent? It unconsciously set you up for success, but to what extent, maybe it also set you up to have to do quite a lot of work to be happy and to be a good parent and the like.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Well, I want to be careful because I've been so lucky and I've been so fortunate. I don't want any of this to come across as self pity whatsoever, not self pity about this. You know, I had, in a way, you know, obviously I was very fortunate. I grew up in a household where my parents valued education. They did everything possible to, within their means to, as I said, to help me. Nor do I want this to come across as self pity for just happening to be the member of a minority. Not at all. I feel fortunate to have been a member of both.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  But I think you're absolutely right that, you know, like lots of people. I mean, you read about tiger moms today, and I have a lot of Asian American friends who regale me with tales of their mothers in particular, being just absolutely unrelenting. These are first generation immigrants from, from the mainland or people from, from India, where it was the same sort of emphasis on education and never being, and with the children never being good enough. So that was the culture and environment in which I grew up. But I think you're absolutely right. There are two things that came out of all of that.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  One was the experience my parents had of getting through World War Two. And then having the, even though they took great exception of the word survivor, of being used in association with them, and we can talk about that if you want. But having survived that, they were very focused on survival, number one. And then secondly, my mother had exceptional grit. And I think both of those things have, were imprinted on me. One, the need to survive.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  And then the second about never giving up, never ever giving up. Even if you've been rejected, even if something that you've tried hasn't worked the first few times, it's just to have the grit, the staying power, the tenacity, the persistence to continue to believe.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  I ran into someone at a, at a birthday party last night who by chance had worked with you at Sequoia. And I was asking him, and he was very flattering about you, but one word he used to describe you was relentless. And I was very struck when I was doing my research on you over the last week that, you know, there was this, this famous thing where you had asked your colleagues at Sequoia to print the phrase, we're only as good as our next investment on the back of their business cards. And so it does seem like that sense of relentlessness drives slight paranoia about the fear of disruption and the danger of complacency and hubris. That seems very central to your character.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. I have a nice sort of little private office here in San Francisco. I have, and never have had any of the ornaments of any of the companies or successes with which Sequoia or I have been associated. I've never displayed them anywhere. I haven't displayed them in my office. I haven't displayed them at home, partly because I think they're, I mean, they're nice little trappings, but they're irrelevant. And, but this comes back to the notion of surviving and grit and what happens if you, to use your word, relent for a single moment if you're in, if you're in any sort of pursuit. I mean, you could be pursuing academic studies.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  You could be seeking to be a fine, you know, a sporting star. And you could be running a large company or heading a, an investment firm. You'll find that the tone and tenor of those organizations is set from the top. And they come to reflect the character of the individual who is that. You know it from all the interviews that you've done. We all know it, particularly people who've read books about the formation and the growth and maybe the collapse of particular companies, the importance of the leader setting the tone.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  You went to this relatively ordinary high school, state school in Cardiff, and then managed to win a place at Christchurch College at Oxford, which is in many ways the poshest and most prestigious of, of Oxford colleges. I think you were probably the only student in your year to go to Oxford. And I wonder if I could get a sense of what that experience of leaving Wales around the time you turned 19 and never really coming back and going to Oxford was like going into this new world, being vaulted into this new world into a, into a college that was particularly famous for history, having had professors like Sir Hugh Trevor Roper and the like. And it must have been a very transformative period for you.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  And presumably in some ways, the things that you learned at Oxford about how to distill information, how to gather information, how to learn would become hugely important to you later as an investor.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Several things. First of all, travel back in the sixties was a lot harder than it is today. In Britain, there were the equivalent of American freeways, obviously, and there was no low cost airfare anywhere. My parents had done their very best. They had a little camper van to open, you know, to take my sister and myself to continental Europe, and we did that a few times. But for the most part, Cardiff was central to my existence. I think I've been to London, maybe before I went to Oxford. I think I've been to London maybe twice, naturally, and that was about it.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  So going from Wales to Oxford was a big leap. Geographically, obviously, it isn't very far, but it was a big leap for, in different ways. Number one was the meteor in which I were, into which I was catapulted. And this is a long time ago now. This is more than 50 years ago, so the colleges have changed tremendously. But this was men only, or boys, teenagers, men only, curfews at midnight where the college gates were shut to prevent the invasion of the other sex. So that was one aspect of it.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  The second aspect was the intake at Christchurch back then was different to what it is today. So that there were a lot of places earmarked for what in America are private schools, but what in Britain they call public schools. So the public schools being places like Eton and Rugby and St Paul's and Westminster and a bunch of others. So all of these students who arrived at Oxford, they immediately had people that they knew who they'd been to school with, or they, they went to Christchurch, they knew them from, or they, they had their pals who were at other Oxford colleges.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  So they had this social circle that for them that was built in that was non-existent for me. I didn't know anybody else there. So there was that aspect of feeling pretty strange in this environment where the graces were said every night in Latin by a public school boy with a very, you know, British or English oratorical, high, you know, high, upper class accent. It seemed very strange. And this was also, Christchurch is a cathedral school, so it's got cathedral in its grounds. So it was, you know, a highly Protestant establishment.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  And then obviously there was the tutorial system, which I only came to recognize later, all of the benefits I got from one-on-one tuition with half of, over the course of my three years at Oxford with probably half a dozen different tutors. And how well, in retrospect, I didn't realize it at the time, that set me up for life both as a general West hand as an investor.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Is it mainly this capacity to tackle a new subject and get your hands around it? I, I went to Oriole, just, my dad went to Christchurch, but I was at Oriole, which was right next door to you. And I studied English literature. And for me, still, I find 40 something years later, the great benefit is that you were forced every week to go tackle a new subject that you knew nothing about and go read in the Bodleian Library and the like, and, and just kind of try to figure it out and then try to distill information. And in a way, it's so much the opposite of what AI is developing in us now.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  You're exactly right. And

• 38:14Speaker 02

  I felt my life as an investor was helped immeasurably. As I said, even though I didn't realize it, by my time at Oxford and then my time as a journalist at Time Magazine. And, you know, for viewers or for listeners who are not familiar with the tutorial system at Oxford, a little bit of context, a student would go and visit his back then tutor and have a meeting once a week. And the tutor would pose a question and prescribe a number of books that he suggested you read in preparation for writing an essay of maybe two or 3,000 words, I forget, on addressing the question.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  And as you said, those essays were set about questions that you, I didn't know anything about. And the challenge was to try and absorb as much information as possible from the books that had been prescribed and perhaps all the stuff that you tripped across and then try to make sense of it in your own mind. And then construct a plausible argument for the answer to the question that had been posed, based on imperfect information, based on the fact that at the beginning of the week that you knew nothing about the topic at hand. And then coming back to, in those days, read the essay out loud to the tutor who would

• 39:39Speaker 02

  then give you his responses and assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the answer. For me, if I fast forwarded a couple of years and think about my life at Time Magazine, it was very much the same. I was a general assignment reporter. Every week, there'd be a new story that would be assigned or I would need to dive into, invariably on a topical subject or organization that I knew nothing about. And it was the exact same process, although there weren't prescribed books to read, but instead of which there were people to call and trying to piece and interviews to have

• 40:18Speaker 02

  and to make and tried to piece together the information germane to the story and then come up with a synthesis of it and try to distill it in a story that addressed the topic previously. And in both cases, the essay at Oxford, the story at Time, both of them were based on imperfect information. You could always do more research, you could always talk to more people. But at some point, based on the imperfect information that you gathered and collected, you had to sit down and write an essay or write a story. And that is very, in my mind, that is very similar to the venture business, where if

• 41:03Speaker 02

  you're investing in a small company, in people that you don't really know, usually in a field that is new, that you don't really come on, you're never going to get, you will never wind up with perfect information before you have to make an investment decision. And I never really struggled with that for the reasons that we've just talked about. I think people who, my experience anyway, is that people with engineering backgrounds, and many of them are brilliant and spectacular investors, but they always had much more of a struggle with it than did I. There was always this piece of information that they were yearning for before they could make a decision about something.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  And I was liberated from, you know, that sense of imperfection. I was quite happy understanding that we're never going to have perfect information and imperfection is what we traffic it.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  I want to talk more in more detail about your time at Time Magazine because it's really important, really formative. And as you know, in one of the odd overlaps in our career, I also went from Oxford and later I ended up being at Time Magazine. But I'm curious also about the journey that took you to Time because you moved to the US, I think in 1976 as a 22-year-old kid to get your MBA at Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania, and went from there to Time Magazine. But your path from Wharton to Time oddly involved the great Philip Roth. Tell us how this happened because it's such a strange and unlikely turn of events.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Well, talk about, we were talking minutes ago about the kindness of strangers. So I never really intended to go to business school. What had happened was I won a scholarship, a very, very generous scholarship financed by a family called the Torods, who were descendants of the DuPonts, that was associated with the University of Pennsylvania. And I had gone there with the idea of doing a history master's degree. And I went to the history classes for a couple of weeks and compared to what I'd been used to at Oxford, these seemed so lame and so weak that I despaired. And the history master's was also only a one-year course.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  I thought, I can't, I just can't stick it out for a year here. But this scholarship is so wonderfully generous. And obviously, the business school at that point was a two-year course. And so I applied for a transfer to the business school and got into the business school. Now, I was hopelessly unsuited to go to the business school. I was 22 years old. Most of the people, all of the people who were at business school were several years older than me. They all had work experience. They were all up to their eyeballs in debt in order to be able to get through it. And I didn't like Wharton at all. It's a reflection on me, not the school. I was just ill-equipped and really uninterested in what it was that they had on offer.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  So to revert to how Philip Roth came into my life, there were a series of elective courses that you could do as an MBA student, and I signed up for as many in the English literature area as I possibly could. And lo and behold, I couldn't believe my good fortune. One of the giants of American letters of the 20th century, a fellow whose books I'd devoured when I was in Britain, none other than Philip Roth, author of, obviously, everybody knows, well, people used to know, Portnoy's Complaint, was teaching a small seminar class at Penn. And I signed up for that class.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  I did it twice. He was teaching different books in the subsequent class and had a wickedly wonderful time in it. And then when it was time to approach time for a job and I needed references, I asked Philip for a reference, not expecting him to say that he would give me one. And he said he would be happy to do so. I said, you know, oh, thank you very much. And if you, if you were just to type it out, I will go and get, I think the, I'll go and get a, I think the term in those days was a photo stat or a Xerox of it.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  He said, no need, I use carbon paper. And so among the references that I furnished Time was one from this distinguished man of letters, Philip Roth. And then later on, in an odd way, he came back into our lives through one of our closest friends in New York. So, so there was then this happy coincidence many years later of us for several years spending Thanksgiving with a group of friends of whom Philip was one.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  I could very happily spend the rest of the interview talking to you about Philip Roth, who I adore, and I think Sabbath Theatre is one of the great novels of the 20th century.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  It's just fantastic. I went to his 80th birthday party, which he held in the Newark Public Library, because he'd grown up in Newark. And it began with a high school Newark marching band marching down the aisle of this auditorium in the Newark Public Library. And then there were readings from a whole variety of, and Edna O'Brien is one of the writers that I remember, who read there and Philip was sitting dressed in black in the front row. And then to conclude the evening, he sat behind a table and read an excerpt from the

• 47:04Speaker 02

  book that you just mentioned, Sabbath Theatre, which is a wickedly funny book.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  And devastating and deplorable and decadent and all the other, distressing. I mean, it's interesting to me, I have to resist going further into this because I'll get so sidetracked. But yeah, I mean, he's an extraordinary writer. So you end up at Time with the help of the great Philip Roth. And you end up there from, I think, 1979 to 84, working as the San Francisco bureau chief, covering companies like Microsoft and Apple in their infancy. And I worked at Time from 2001 to 2008, so a very different era. But I fell down this rabbit hole over the last couple of days and was reading some of your old stories for Time. And I was really struck by your coverage of Bill Gates, first in a shorter 1981 story

• 47:55Speaker 01

  when Gates was about 24 years old, and then much more significantly in a 1984 profile called A Hardcore Technoid. And in a way, it's a really important period because it's, it's your introduction through him and then through Steve Jobs, who you also wrote about, who we'll talk about more in a few minutes. It's your introduction to this generation of extraordinary, trailblazing founders, and which very much will lead us to your career at Sequoia. So I wondered if, looking back on your experiences of interviewing Bill Gates back in those early days, if you could just give us a sense of what it was like, like not least your extraordinary story of being driven to the airport by him.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  When I started at Time, I didn't start in San Francisco. I started as a correspondent in Detroit and then spent a year or so in Los Angeles. I spent a year in Detroit and around a year in Los Angeles and then came to, came to San Francisco. And given everything that came later, he, I think my-

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Experience in writing about him and then with a colleague from Time, writing a book about the way he was the central character, Lee Iacocca, actually is a more important part of, as I look back anyways, a more important part of my investment education than may seem obvious on the surface. But so I wound up in San Francisco. I really, I knew nothing about Silicon Valley whatsoever. I mean, I knew a little bit about it, but I really had disliked living in Los Angeles and really wanted to get out of there and ask for a transfer to San Francisco. And the magazine kindly permitted me to do that. And then,

• 49:43Speaker 02

  you know, San Francisco was very different in the early eighties to what it is today when it comes to technology companies today. You know, driving down to the office today, every single bus in San Francisco, every billboard is plastered with AI advertisement. Back in the early eighties, this was not a techni-, San Francisco was not a center of technology whatsoever. I mean, the companies of significance in San Francisco were companies like Chevron and Bank of America and Wells Fargo and McKesson and all state companies.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  The youngest company of any kind was the Charles Schwab Company. So all of the interest in vibrant new companies was south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley. And then we had this outlier, obviously up in the Northwest called Microsoft. And I had no idea, I mean, growing up in Cardiff, going to Oxford, I didn't know anybody who started a company, let alone the idea that a young person or young people could start a company. This was utterly new to me, beyond my comprehension. I'd never thought about people who started companies. And then obviously, that my timing was so fortuitous, if I'd arrived five years

• 51:08Speaker 02

  earlier, if I'd arrived five years later, it all would have been very different. But I don't, you know, I don't know when, I think Steve Jobs was born in 55. I think Bill may have been born in 55 or so. So we were weirdly all the same age, except I came from a very different background, obviously, to the two of them. And, but I think the contemporaneous nature of our age have been a little bit of an advantage. I mean, these, I'm not putting myself for even the slightest moment comparing that. The only thing I had in common with

• 51:51Speaker 02

  them was, you know, I was really roughly the same age.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  I think that's not entirely true. I think you had a fanaticism, that you would turn out later to have a fanaticism. I think that in reading your story, the 1984 profile of Bill Gates, that that's what really came through to me. I mean, you, you know, there's a lovely description at the start where you say he looks like an undernourished grad student as, as he waits for his, his plane at Seattle Tacoma International Airport. But then you just describe, you know, there's this really lovely portrait of just a fanatically focused guy. And I, I wonder if you could talk about that, is that, that really comes through?

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Bill intellectually and on every other level occupies a very different place in the galaxy to, to little me, I gotta tell you. So anyway, let me take, let me take you back to the, to the question you posed, Bill Gates circa 1982, 83. So this is a sort of an odd recollection. I remember being at, this was all about the same time. So you've got to put everything here in perspective. I had been at an offsite that Steve Jobs had hosted for a group of people he was working with at Apple. And a guest speaker one evening

• 53:17Speaker 02

  was a gentleman called Ben Roethlis, who was an early venture capitalist, a wonderful human being, and who very sadly died just a few weeks ago in his early nineties. And Steve had asked Ben, how long do you think it will be, Ben? Before there's a personal computer software company that crosses one million, and Ben paused and didn't, and thought, well, this is, it's going to take some time. The company then, closest to that magical million dollar threshold was this company called Microsoft up in the Northwest. So

• 53:59Speaker 02

  I went up to do a story about Microsoft and a story about Bill. And I didn't spend anywhere near as much time with him as I did with, with Steve Jobs. I spent a lot of time with Steve Jobs. But there he was in the Pacific Northwest with his company. And I got an intro-, you know, an introduction to that world. Bill obviously had grown up in the Pacific Northwest, as is well known. He had, I think the company, Microsoft, had actually been formed, its first home, I think was in Albuquerque in New Mexico. And then Bill

• 54:40Speaker 02

  had looked at a map of the United States, trying to figure out where the, geographically the best place would be to locate Microsoft and had landed on Dallas because of airplane connectivity all over the place. And that this was the easiest place to be. And then he had second thoughts about that and decided that he wanted to establish Microsoft in the Northwest. Big part of the reason being because the weather was so bad. And that unlike Silicon Valley, the sun didn't shine all that often. There were far fewer external

• 55:18Speaker 02

  attractions to divert the interests of his engineers. And that's a first glimpse into how much Bill wanted to squeeze out of every single minute of every day in his existence. And I think, you know, you go and see, and there's some founders here in San Francisco, within a mile of where I am today, who were of a similar age today, and who behave exactly like Bill did decades ago. And so, as you said, he was monomaniacally focused on ensuring

• 55:55Speaker 02

  that Microsoft would flourish as a maker of personal computer software. And so he eliminated every single distraction from his life. I think he chose an apartment that was as close as possible to the, the first Microsoft headquarters. I don't think there was a girlfriend in his life at that moment. Every single moment of the day, he was enveloped in making Microsoft better. And the two things that stand out to me, and so he was very jealous of allocating any time to anything else outside of Microsoft that he considers secondary, including interviews

• 56:39Speaker 02

  with reporters from Time Magazine or elsewhere. But the two things that stood out for me were, well, one I learned about later was that he had taken the tuner out of his television. So the only thing he could watch on the screen were instructional videotapes about topics that were of interest to him, you know, Freeman Dyson lecturing on some form of mathematics or physics or, or things that, you know, he was such a great sponge for knowledge and had such enormous curiosity. But I think the thing that you were referencing was, after we finished our interview, we were both flying back to, or I was flying back

• 57:19Speaker 02

  to San Francisco and he had a meeting with Intel and with Antequo. And I got into the car and he offered me a ride and he had this, you know, he had this Mercedes sedan. And there was no radio in it. There's a gaping hole in the dashboard, which looked just like every gaping hole in the dashboard of a, of a radio that had been ripped off from a car. So I said, Bill, you know, what happened? Where'd you get ripped off? And he said, I didn't get ripped off. I had it removed. Why did you have it removed? Well, I'm in the car between my apartment and the office, and then between the office and the airport.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  And I don't want to have a radio that I can switch on, that takes my mind away, because I'm listening to some program, that takes my mind away from Microsoft. And I thought, you know, maybe that story should be a definition of the word obsession in the Oxford English Dictionary.

• 58:21Speaker 03

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• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really fascinating. I think I was very struck as I was going through those old stories that you wrote about him of how many, in how many ways he sort of established a prototype for what you would see again and again with great founders, right? So you would write about the fanaticism and the focus, the early obsession with technology, right? So the fact that back when he was in seventh grade in 1967, you know, he, you know, he just becomes obsessed with this computer that I think that was bought with the proceeds of the Mother's Club rummage sale. And then, you know, he says to you that basically he's taken 15 days of vacation in six years. And then, you know, you describe the fact that he has this home 14

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  minutes drive from Microsoft's headquarters, and it has a swimming pool, but basically he just spends his whole time in the den that has an IBM PC. And you talk about his uncomfortably high standards, right? The fact that this guy, Town, I think he'd hired in some very senior position, had left within a year. And one of the other colleagues says, you know, Bill isn't going to explain everything twice. And also the knack for making money, right? You talk about how, working as a congressional page in 1972, he and this friend get all of these McGovern-Eagleton campaign buttons for a nickel each. And he sells them years later as mementos for $25 each. So again, like the, the talent, the knack for making money. So I was just really struck by how many of the

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  things that you saw again and again were actually really evident from the very start.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Bill was not the very start when it comes, obviously, to technology in America. And he'd be the first to say that, I would have thought. But, you know, it depends how far back you want to go in the, in the family history of the evolution of different technologies in America. But,

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  But the very start of your career of seeing founders and the right stuff.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  That's very fair. Because by the time I got to know people in the semiconductor industry, say for the founders, but the people I first got to know in the semiconductor industry were in their 50s. So, you know, when I met them, you know, people like Bob Noisel, Gordon Moore, huge Titanic figures like that. So it was very difficult for me to imagine them as an 18-year-old or a 19-year-old. But you read about their teenage years, and it echoed the obsessions of Bill. And I think it's a characteristic, as I was saying, I think it's a characteristic of every

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  successful founder. Elon Musk, maybe Dario over at Anthropic these days, a whole bunch of incredible entrepreneurs in China and elsewhere around the world. So I think that monogamyical obsession, being captivated early on by something about technology, the something varies over the decades as technology has progressed, being captivated at a very early age, being extremely, insatiably curious, being willing to shut out every possible distraction, having an extreme,

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  having a well-endowed mercantile sensibility. Those are characteristics of every great entrepreneur. And with Bill, obviously, they were writ large and became of great interest to many people, and dwarfed the accomplishments of others, simply because of the extraordinary journey and success over this company over which he presided.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Steve Jobs, obviously, was a very seminal figure early in your career, more important really than Bill Gates. And Jobs, who had co-founded Apple Computer, which hadn't gone public that much earlier than you started to meet him, I think, if I remember rightly, was another great obsessive and fanatic. And, but there was something different in him because he was also not just a great capitalist, but a great aesthete and a great storyteller. Can you give us a sense of what it was like spending enormous amounts of time with him back in the early 80s? And again, how he sort of established, established a kind of prototype in your own mind of some of the characteristics, while also being totally unique, that some of the characteristics

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  you would look for in great business leaders?

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  I wrote decades and decades ago, I wrote a book about Apple. And it was called The Little Kingdom. I think it came out in 1984. And what had interested me about Apple wasn't the notoriety it was beginning to get in the mid 1980s. What had interested me was answering this story and this question that I had never thought about before, which was, had a couple of very young people ever imagined how to start a company? And so as I began to investigate that and talked

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  to as many people as possible who had known Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, back when they were extremely young, when they were at high school, or maybe there were one or two that had known him when, known them when they were even, even younger, either through school or through computer hobbyist circles and all the rest of it. That began to give me an introduction to why Steve was the man he was back then, and the man that he later became before he was so rudely,

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  rudely taken from us. And one of the things that I do remember was...

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  How even as this eighteen, nineteen year old running Apple, he drove everybody nuts with his desire for perfection. And one little anecdote I remember, you know, it's a long time ago now, so I'm struggling a little bit to remember all the, all the various bits of color was how he drove the people responsible for providing the printed circuit board that sat inside of the very first Apple. It was a single board computer. And how Steve just drove the printed circuit board manufacturer nuts

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  until he was happy with the aesthetic manner in which the little thin wires were traced across the printed circuit board. It didn't affect the functionality of the computer, but Steve was determined to make it look as attractive as as possible. And the same, I knew the fellow who came up with the original Apple logo, which was this multi-colored Apple. And again, Steve driving the logo designer absolutely crazy in his desire for for perfection. But I think you put your finger on it.

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  The thing that separated Steve from everybody else was that he was an aesthete. And there was part of him that was a mystic and a poet and a man open to exploring other religious thoughts or journeying to India. I think he once, you know, it's a well-known story. He once said, you know, he often wondered whether Bill Gates with, and he had a long up and down relationship with Bill over the years. Sometimes they were collaborators, sometimes they were competitors, but

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Steve was no admirer of the aesthetic quality of any of the of the Microsoft products. And, you know, he said at one point, well, Bill would have been a lot better if you'd taken some LSD.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  It seems like a lot of the success that you achieved at Sequoia could be traced back in certain ways to your journalism career. And various people have told me that one of the things that's made you stand out is your ability to take the measure of a person, to size a person up. And I'm, I'm wondering if you could bridge for us this part of your career where you were, you were going into the homes, I mean, literally going into the master bedroom of Steve Jobs' house and sort of going into the second bedroom and seeing his laundry, sort of, you know, his dry cleaning laid out perfectly on the floor. Going from that to then becoming a venture capitalist who's looking at very young founders often and trying to figure out,

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  is this person going to be absolutely indomitable, relentless? Are they trustworthy? Can you talk about how you took those skills that you had developed as a journalist and applied them to help you as an investor?

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, you're being absurdly generous because I made so many mistakes. But people tend to, I have a hat that I've kept from, and every now and again, one of these caps with the company logo on it that I've kept ever since we made the investment in a spectacularly disastrous investment called Webvan. And I wear my, all the little hats I've got, my Webvan hat is the one that I would, is the only one that I would be seen in public with as a reminder to myself that that how frail my grip is on judgment. But I think it's very difficult.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  Who the devil would have thought that a sixteen year old who started a company in Albuquerque is going to build Microsoft or, you know, this fellow in Mountain View who had a beard and was unkempt and had long hair and walked around in Birkenstock was the essence, both in the first coming and the second coming of Apple. How do you make that judgment when somebody is seventeen or eighteen? Because there are a lot of people who get backed by investors at that age with a similar hope that they will go the distance, run the cause.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  But you never know. And some people, I can think of a whole bunch, severely disappoint where our judgment, our collective judgment was wrong for some reason. They didn't have the product sensibility you thought they had. They didn't have the ability to hire, entice and hire really high caliber people. They didn't have the desire to look after all of their stakeholders. All of these less salubrious aspects of founders who began, but eventually petered out. And so it is the, look at Jensen Huang.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  One of my all time heroes. And Jensen, Sequoia backed Nvidia in, I think it was nineteen ninety-two. Here we are, what, thirty-four years later? And Jensen is still running the company that he founded with as much gusto and energy and determination as on the day that he founded it. Who would ever have imagined? And who has been in the wilderness with this company and has walked across the desert and whose company has been close to oblivion of a couple of times? And now is at the center of the universe. Who would have known when, even though we had really glowing references on Jensen, that the Nvidia story would have played out in the manner in which it has?

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  Ditto for Google, ditto for, for, you know, all of these other companies that go the distance. But for every company like Microsoft or Nvidia or Google or Alphabet, there are dozens and dozens and dozens that fall by the wayside for whatever reason. And so whatever guess one's trying to make about the nineteen year olds that you've spent some hours with and you've talked about their upbringing and how they came to be nineteen. Because I've always believed that the first fifteen years of life really shape,

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  you know, put the imprint on everybody. No matter how deep the investigation is, it's easy to be misled, it's easy to be wrong. And fortunately, every now and again, we get it right.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  How important was it for you whether you liked them or simply thought they were unbelievably tenacious and determined? Or actually just trusted them, that you thought that they were somebody who would look up?

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  I think for me, and you know, particularly either if you're the same age or particularly when you become older. And, you know, the investment universe, whatever sector it is, is is infested with so much arrogance. That I think one of the hardest things for an investor to do, especially one who invests very early in companies, is that you're looking for people younger than yourself who can educate you very deeply about something about which you know little. And one needs as the investor to overcome the vanity associated with thinking, my goodness, this

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  lady, this, this man is ten years younger than me, twenty years, thirty years younger than me, how, what do they know? Turns out they know a lot about something that you know nothing about. And it turns out sometimes that they know something about a topic in great depth that the rest of the world doesn't know anything about. Go back to Bill Gates.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  On paper, there was no reason in nineteen seventy-eight that Microsoft should ever have stood a chance about, against IBM. I mean, this stuff has been written about a lot, or Apple against some of the computer companies. But Bill, Steve, Jensen, Dario, pick your favorite name. They were, had been deeply immersed in a particular topic that the people running these companies at the top of IBM or in the senior level of IBM had no frigging clue about. So Bill Gates' monomaniacal attention to the prospects of the software for the personal computer.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  He knew more about, he had thought more about it, more deeply about it than anybody at a senior level at IBM. And then IBM had all the money in the world. They had the big balance sheet. They had thousands of employees, had bazillion, you know, bazillion customers all over the place, established relationships with them, but they're a big slow-moving company and therefore Bill eventually provided them a very bitter education about how.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  A seventeen, eighteen, twenty year old who knows a lot about something that is fresh and something that is new, if harnessed with the right management team, with the right business outlook, can outmaneuver, outrun and conquer incumbent companies. But for an investor, it's all about being open and being willing to be educated by somebody a lot younger than you are.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Charlie Munger said a couple of really interesting things about you that I wonder if I could run by you and see if you agree with them or just if they stir interesting reactions from you, interesting thoughts from you. One of them, he said, the trouble, these are exact words from a conversation I had with him a few years back. He said, "The trouble with venture capital, with every new fund, you've got to go out and create another miracle. Sequoia has been able to do it and a few others have done fairly well. But basically, most people in venture capital have lousy records. It's difficult." And then he talked about how extraordinary Sequoia's returns were, even after those huge fees and profit sharing, the goddamn investors have made something like 25% per annum.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  And then he said something really interesting where he started talking about your temperament and the importance of holding winners. And this was particularly interesting to me. He said, "Everybody who looks back, all of these successful investors, they all think they should have held on to their winners, including the people at Sequoia. Of the early guys at Sequoia, the guy that did best was Mike Moritz, and he was not the leading intellect. But temperamentally, he was able to hang on to everything. He did better than all his brighter partners." And I just thought that was a really interesting insight. I don't know if that's accurate. What's your reaction to that insight?

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  Most investors are incapable of doing nothing. Well, first of all, I'm incredibly flattered that he's right about the intellect. I'm incredibly flattered that he would even remember or have said that. Most investors, doesn't matter what arena, Berkshire Hathaway is a standout in this regard. Most investors are congenitally incapable of doing nothing. They just, they have to do something. Now, if you're a venture investor and you have shares in a private company, until the last five, 10 years, when the secondary market has kicked in in a big fashion. If you have in shares in a private company, you can't do anything. But when it becomes public, you immediately have the opportunity to sell

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  it. And, you know, people buy a stock because, whether it's private or public, because they think it's going to go up. People sell a stock for all sorts of different reasons. They got all sorts of different motives. Maybe they need some money. Maybe they've got ailing parents. Maybe they want to buy a house. Maybe they are getting divorced. Maybe they're just apprehensive and nervous. And maybe they're thinking about the past and the fact that this company is now trading quota at an all time high and find it impossible to transport themselves into a decision of today, not the decision of yesterday, a decision of today

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  about what does the future opportunity for this company look like from today forward, rather than thinking about how we got to today. So the question I always ask people is, when somebody says to me, "Well, don't you think we should sell it? It's trading at an all time high?" My question to that person is, in the thirty years or so, that Amazon has traded as a public company, how many days has that stock traded at an all

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  time high? That question always stops people in their tracks. And for me, if one can do it, which is so difficult with all these other pressures going on, you know, let's say a company misses a quarter, or there's some bad news that comes from it, or a senior executive departs, the people get antsy and make the wrong decision. But I think the best thing that you can possibly do in the world is to be lucky, or from an investment, if you're in the investment universe, is to have the good fortune to be an investor in a company that offers the prospect of compounding at whatever rate you want, 15%,

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  18%, 20% for many, many years. Because there is nothing that beats the compounding power of a well-positioned company. But most people are unable to recognize that and capitulate, give up, run away, are frightened, pick whatever one that you want, and then look back many years later and say to themselves, "I bought a $400 million house because that was what the $3 million that it cost me 20 years ago is now worth had I not sold the stock to buy the house."

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  It's an amazingly important insight, I think, typical of Charlie, that he homed in on something so important. You led or co-led Sequoia for many years, I think 16 years or so before you stepped down as the official leader, day-to-day leader. I'm very curious about the, what you learned about being a leader, not least from having watched all of these, these great corporate leaders, but in particular, actually from your relationship with Sir Alex Ferguson, the great Manchester United manager for 26 years. It was absolutely extraordinary. I think most people who would look at your career would assume that the Gateses and the Jobses and the Iacocas and the like were the people you would really

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  want to emulate. But actually, Ferguson may be the greatest model of all. Unpack that a little for us.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  I wish I'd known him earlier in my, and you know, I didn't really get to know him until about 20 years ago. And coincidentally, and can't resist this, we have another book that's coming out. It's getting published in Britain at the end of next week called The Games of My Life, and which we worked on for the last couple of years, and it's now coming out. But that's by the by. Well, first of all, I think he was a much, I don't think I was particularly, if I had to lead Sequoia again, I think I'd be a much better leader today than I was when I was actually in that position, much better for a whole variety of different reasons. One of which is learning about the way in which Sir Alex

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  led and managed Manchester United for, you know, pushing 27 seasons, which is an extraordinary, and becoming the most successful manager in professional soccer in history. Enormous desire for perfection, relentless work ethic, absolutely relentless, unsentimental about quality, unforgiving of laziness, poor performance. But, and he's not given enough credit for this, being enormously sympathetic, empathetic, warm to players in his case who needed an

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  arm around the shoulder. And balancing that sort of yardstick of human emotion, knowing when to, what individuals needed in order to be able to nourish them and bring the best out of them. And I remember, you know, when we wrote this book called Leading about 10 years ago, that was, you know, about leadership and business and that sort of stuff. And I thought, and you know, there were two things that really stuck with me from his lessons of leadership, and there are a bunch of, and there are a bunch of them. The two that

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  stuck with me are, I never sought out to be loved. I never wanted to be feared. I just wanted to be respected. I thought that was extremely shrewd and wise way for a leader to think about how he or she wanted to be perceived by the others in the organization. And the second was those three magical words, never give up.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  I was very struck by a story you've told before about after David Beckham once again ruined our chances in the World Cup and got sent off for some ridiculous.

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Sir Alex and, you know, David, he would have been tarted and feted if he had walked through the streets of London at that point. And Sir Alex went down to Heathrow, I think that's, to meet him as he got off the plane, to protect him and to say that he was there for him and offer the avuncular arm around the shoulder at a time when Beckham was one of the more vilified people in Britain. So.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  You've talked a lot about great management involving persuading people to succeed at what's impossible. And I'm guessing when you look at someone like Elon, who you've described as the greatest industrialist in the history of America, that's, you know, he or Jeff Bezos or Zuckerberg or Larry Page, presumably that's kind of a common denominator here. It's just this, I mean, because Musk's ability to keep succeeding at what seems to be impossible and to keep persuading people somehow, bludgeoning them, seems almost unrivaled, almost inhuman.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Well, it's the job of every leader. Elon obviously has written it in fluorescent letters across the, you know, across the skies. But if you're thinking about starting a business or starting a company, you have to, and this is, I think, one of the strengths and virtues of every great leader, is to be able to tell the story about what's going to be possible and paint a picture of the future. Because whether you're doing it with the early employees, why should I join your company, Mr. or Miss so-and-so? You have to convince them about the future.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  If you are talking to a customer, you have to be able to convince them that your company has a future and is solid. And they won't be embarrassed if they purchase a product from you. If you're talking to investor, you have to be able to paint the picture and tell the story of what their investment might become if the company flourishes. And in Elon's case, obviously, he does all of this at a completely different scale because he's also talking to, in many cases, governments about either assistance for a program early

• 1:28:36Speaker 02

  on in Tesla, early on in the development of SpaceX, assistance to get something off the ground and convincing government entities to do something that they don't particularly, may not particularly want to do. It's painting the possibilities of a future that most people can't see and then convincing them to join you on their, on your merry caper.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  You've been incredibly generous with your time and I know you have to go in a minute. Before I let you go, I'm curious, we started by talking about you as an outsider and obviously the title of your book, Auslander, is about being an outsider. And in some ways, you've become sort of the consummate insider. I mean, here you are at 72, I think, and you've spent the bulk of your career at the most prestigious venture capital firm and Forbes has estimated your net worth at many billions of dollars. And you've become a really important philanthropist at places like Oxford and the National Gallery and the Booker Prize and the like. And I'm, I'm just wondering if, if you've put to rest that sense of being an outsider or if you still have the same sense of relentlessness and the slight discomfort, the slight sense

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  of your mother behind you saying, it's not enough. And you're probably still a total rogue and loser and a pervert, you used to think.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Once an outsider, always an outsider.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Really, there's no escape.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Again, I'm not complaining about it because it's just my, it was the condition I was born with and it's the condition I will die with.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  And one final thing, in the dedication to the book, you write for Harriet, who's your wife, and Jake and Will, your kids, who opened my eyes. And I just wanted to ask why, what it, what it meant, how did they open your eyes?

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  I think they taught me that I didn't need to be like my parents.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  That's a good lesson. Michael, it's been such a delight. I've loved talking to you. I wish we had longer, but I'm hugely grateful for the time you've spent with me.

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  You're very, you're most generous.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  And I hope it's the, the first of many conversations. Lovely to meet you.

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Take care, stay well.