Sir Michael Moritz on ‘Auslander,’ Identity and Life as an Outsider

As a longtime partner and former chairman of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia, Sir Michael Moritz had a direct hand in building the modern internet. His early investments in companies like PayPal, Google, and YouTube earned him a reputation as a kingmaker in tech and made him a billionaire a few times over. But after retiring in 2023, Moritz leaned on his early background as a journalist to investigate his own family’s story for his latest book, “Auslander.” He retraces his parents’ escape from Nazi Germany as children during the lead up to World War II and pieces together the stories of other close family members who were killed in the Holocaust. Kara and Michael talk about why his parents never identified as “survivors” of the Nazis, and the ways tragedy and grief are passed down through generations. They also reflect on the modern rise of authoritarian leaders around the world, and the parallels Micahel sees to the past. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  You British types are smart. Anyway.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Well, some of them are.

• 0:04Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, some of them are. That's true. Fair point. Even the dumb ones are smarter than we are.

• 0:20Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is the investor Sir Michael Moritz. For almost two decades, he led the Silicon Valley venture firm, it was legendary, Sequoia, and turned it into one of the tech industry's leading kingmakers. He was an early investor in companies all of us know today, like Google, YouTube, PayPal, and LinkedIn. I covered all of it, including all of his investments. His keen eye for opportunity made him a legend in the valley and a billionaire a few times over. But Moritz has a rather unconventional background in the world of venture capital. He was born in Cardiff, Wales. He's also the son of German Jewish refugees who escaped Nazi rule as children.

• 1:01Kara Swisher?

  And before his time in venture capital, Moritz was, wait for it, a journalist for Time Magazine. And he was a good one, and he's authored a handful of very terrific books, I have to say. That journalism background informs Moritz's latest book, Auslander: One Family's Story of Escape and Exile. It tells the stories of his own family, those who survived the Holocaust in exile, as well as those who did not. Auslander means outsider in German, and the book becomes a searing reflection on the ways grief and trauma are passed down through generations. It's a bit of a surprising book, and yet, at the same time, not. Michael, compared to a lot of people in Silicon Valley, is incredibly erudite. He's a student of history.

• 1:44Kara Swisher?

  Obviously, he's a beautiful writer, and you will find a pleasure to read this book, even though it's a very difficult topic. But one of the things I've always found interesting about him is he's willing to stand up. He's one of the few venture capitalists who stand up to Trump and continue to do so. At the same time, he can be more conservative. He's a complex guy, and so I think it's interesting to talk to him. All right, let's get into my interview with Michael. Our expert question comes from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie. Don't go anywhere.

• 2:20Kara Swisher?

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• 3:03Speaker 02

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• 3:35Speaker 03

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 4:13Kara Swisher?

  Michael, thank you for coming on On. I really appreciate it.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  It's very kind of you to have me. I'm flattered.

• 4:20Kara Swisher?

  So let me just say at the start, I texted you this last night, and I was finishing up your book. You were, one, a very good journalist when you were one, as I was reminded. And this is a beautifully written book. You have not lost any of your skills as a journalist.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  That is too kind, but thank you.

• 4:36Kara Swisher?

  I'm not sure you want to be known as a journalist.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm very happy. Oh, I'd fly the flag as an ink-stained wretch every day.

• 4:43Kara Swisher?

  Yes. Yeah. Well, it's beautifully written, and really, you should keep it up. Anyway, for people who don't know, besides you being a reporter, you basically helped fund the construction of the modern internet. Let's talk about that just a minute, so we can talk about where you're coming from here and your time at Sequoia. You invested and sat on the boards of huge companies, many, many huge companies. And you topped Ford's Midas 100 list of top tech investors twice. And as I noted before tech, you were a journalist. We've known each other a long time. Talk a little bit about that, so people understand what most of your career has been.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Well, I grew up in Britain, came here 50 years ago, and began life in America as a journalist for Time Magazine. And did that for about four years. And then, along the way, wrote a couple of books. One that I did with a Time colleague about the automobile industry, and the next one was a book called The Little Kingdom, which was a book about Apple's years as a private company, and the first book about Apple. And then, as a correspondent for Time, I didn't know anything about Silicon Valley when I moved to California, just literally didn't know it existed. And I got very interested in it. And I did a few stories about the venture business, which, again, was something that I didn't know anything about.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  And the venture business back in the early to mid-'80s was a world separated from the venture business that both of us know today. And I decided I wanted to see if I could get a job in the venture business. And I wrote to, this is pre-email, so these were actually typed letters, that I sent to the leaders of, well, the five firms that stood out.

• 6:31Kara Swisher?

  Klein and Perkins.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Klein and Perkins, and Merrill Pickett, and NEA, and a couple of others. And the leaders were all really kind. And, you know, they were kind. They opened their doors, and they gave me an interview, and I think just to be polite, and all brushed me off and said, "We wouldn't know what to do with you. You were a history major, you were a journalist, you have no technology background or education whatsoever." And one person, thank goodness, had a different point of view. And his name was Don Valentine, and he was the founder of Sequoia. And he was straightforward enough to suggest that he didn't know what made for a successful

• 7:17Speaker 01

  venture capitalist, because he'd watched some of his buddies from, you know, who'd held high positions in semiconductor companies or some of the computer companies, and they'd come into the venture business and had flamed out. And then he pointed to several people that he knew who had not identical backgrounds, but similar, you know, backgrounds that on paper wouldn't suggest that they'd be successful in the venture business. One was a guy called Tommy Davis, who started the Mayfield fund. But, you know, the big witness for the defense was Arthur Rock. And Arthur Rock became the first investor and chairman of Intel. And then, a few years later, became the first investor in Apple.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  And on paper.

• 8:03Kara Swisher?

  He didn't look like.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  He didn't look like a good prospect for the venture business. But that was the reason that Don was more open than the others.

• 8:13Kara Swisher?

  So was there something that you wanted to do? I know you had written the book The Little Kingdom, which I read and remember very well, beautifully written book, again. Steve called you the historian of Apple in a lot of ways, although I don't ever imagine you were in the tank for him. I think that of a lot of books, but I didn't think about that one. So you had some familiarity with technology.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Some, but it was, as it is today, very superficial.

• 8:41Kara Swisher?

  Right. But what made you see something like a Google in that garage? You and I have both been to the late Susan Majewski's garage. What did you see there at that time? Because that's what really made your fame, really.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Well, it was actually, it was pretty straightforward. Sequoia had a big advantage, because we had provided the original financing in, I think it was 1995, for Yahoo. And most people in Silicon Valley at that point, most of the investors, shied away from the idea that you could provide a service for free. They didn't understand how the economics would work. And for me, as a journalist, it was extremely straightforward. I remember having these conversations with a couple of the skeptics at Sequoia, that

• 9:36Speaker 01

  it was no different on the internet than it was in television or radio, where the consumer paid for their use of the service by enduring the advertisements that they were shown. And so we invested in Yahoo, and that's what played out at Yahoo. And then Jerry Yang called one day and said, you know, "We're thinking about changing our search engine, and we're thinking about using the technology from a couple of people that we knew a little bit at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey." And I'd met Larry a few years earlier. And he said, "But we're pretty apprehensive and nervous about it, because it doesn't have any venture financing around it, and I don't think we're going to license this

• 10:21Speaker 01

  unless it has venture backing." And that was the first time that I really heard about Google as a company. And so he encouraged us to invest in Google. And for me, it was very easy. It wasn't complicated. The results were just better. The search results were just better. So, again, it was a straightforward investment, save for one thing, which was the valuation.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And there was, I won't name names, but there was another character who participated through his partnership in the investment. And he said, when he heard about the valuation, he said, I've never paid so much for so little.

• 11:13Kara Swisher?

  That wasn't Dorr, because he was your

• 11:16Speaker 01

  No, no, but I'll protect the not so innocent.

• 11:19Kara Swisher?

  I can guess.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Well, you're such a close chronicler of all the scallywags out here, that you would know that.

• 11:27Kara Swisher?

  What a nice term for them, scallywags. So I want to start talking, I'll get back to Silicon Valley in a minute, but talking about the book, because what's incredible, it has nothing to do with Silicon Valley or venture capital. It's a personal exploration of your family history in Nazi Germany. It tells the story of your family who escaped the Holocaust and those who were killed by the Nazis. It's one thing to investigate your family history for your own knowledge. It's another to turn your research into a book. Talk a little bit about this, because you got a boxes after your mom died that caused you to do this. Talk about what made you pay attention to this.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  It was all very accidental. I never set out to write this book. And three things happened. My mother died slightly short of her 96th birthday. My sister, who lives in Britain, cleared out the house and put the documents and papers that she found. I mean, this was not the Rothschild archives, you know, in, in maybe four or five cardboard boxes and shipped them to me. And these were some old letters. There were some documents, old identity cards, passports, you know, and a few photo albums. And, and then COVID happened simultaneously. And we all remember COVID. And suddenly there was a lot more time on, on my hands anyway.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  I wasn't traveling, wasn't commuting. And I got engrossed in the story. Now, I obviously knew the arc of my familial history. What I didn't know were the details. And it's the details that make everything come to life. And so the papers that I received started me on this, on this mystery trail where I was trying to, you know, find the clues, find the traces, piece the bits and assemble the bits and pieces. And, you know, our family story is not unique. Obviously, there are tens of millions of other people in various ways

• 13:31Speaker 01

  who got swept up in this horrific whirlwind that, that occurred in Europe. But obviously, your own family's story tends to become the most important. So that's how the book came about.

• 13:44Kara Swisher?

  Right, because of these boxes. And you wrote, quote, "The entire heritage of what we knew about our shattered family was in them." What, is there something that you pulled out? I just recently got a box, my dad died when I was very young. And I, my aunt recently died and I got a box of stuff of his. And I, I pulled one thing out that was disturbing, which was that he was in a play where he was in blackface, which was astonishing. This was in West Virginia in the 19, you know, 50s, early 1950s. So it's not a surprise. But is there something you pulled out that made you say, this is actually a book? Because you can just, I, I've looked through them and I haven't thought, wow, I should write a book here.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Well, there were two or three things, let me tell you about them, that made it much more vivid and helped me assemble some of the pieces. So I had a, the brother of my paternal grandfather.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  There was a photograph of him that had survived in the files of the Gestapo. And the Gestapo were not supposed to take photographs of what they were doing to the Jews that they rounded up. But some, some smart alec had taken photographs to present to his commanding officer. And so there was a photograph of my grand uncle Oscar. It was the last photograph, obviously, taken of him, stepping off a bus after he had been rounded up with the other people who lived in his little village. So that was one thing that brought everything to, to life.

• 15:17Kara Swisher?

  Right, that there he was.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  You can imagine, can you just imagine, even though the photo is in black and white, all of this stuff is about bringing color into the story. So that was one thing. Then a different scene was my father had been saved from the horrors because he was sent to school in England. And then in 1940, after the British government felt that they were in profound danger of being overrun by the Nazis after the Nazis had swept across Western Europe, they rounded up all the enemy aliens. And on the whole, these were people of German or Italian descent

• 16:02Speaker 01

  who hadn't been granted citizenry and were labeled enemy aliens, irrespective of whether they supported Mussolini or were Jewish or some, you know, or Nazis.

• 16:12Kara Swisher?

  Familiar in this country, Japanese, it goes on and on.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  You're exactly right. You're exactly right. So my father had been rounded up and then shipped off to an internment camp on an island on, called the Isle of Man on the west coast of Britain. And again, I was sifting through archives and found, as you do in archival searches, one footnote leads you to another thing. And I found a trove of black and white photographs in the Tate Archives in, in Britain. And I was, you know, really, you know, I was engrossed here. Because my father talked about being interned, but I'd never heard any of the details.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And there I found in two of the photographs, pictures of my father behind a barbed wire fence.

• 17:03Kara Swisher?

  Right, in the internment camp.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  In the internment camp. And then the other thing that really surprised me was after the, I had two sets of grandparents. My, obviously, my paternal grandparents were, were murdered. My maternal grandparents got out of Germany three days before the outbreak of war.

• 17:25Kara Swisher?

  Right, right, Sally and Louise.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, Louise. And after the war, there, there were copies of letters that my surviving grandfather sent to people that he knew

• 17:41Speaker 01

  in the farming village in which he had been born and grown up and, you know, had a small cattle.

• 17:49Kara Swisher?

  This is in Bavaria or Rhineland?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  The Rhineland, northwestern Germany, near the, near the Dutch border.

• 17:54Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  And those letters moved me intensely because they were full of understanding, compassion and forgiveness for what his friends had endured.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  These were non-Jewish friends. And thanking them profusely for the help that they had provided to him before the war. Now, he was clear-eyed about this. He knew who the bad people were. And, you know, I grew up in an era in Britain, in the, in the 60s, 50s, 60s and 70s, where anything associated with Germany, anything, anyone, any individual was considered an enemy. And so here to read my grandfather's letters within two, three years after the end of World War Two, it taught me a lot about the need for understanding of others and the predicament that they were in.

• 18:57Kara Swisher?

  But they hadn't told you this. You say nothing about your parents' early lives. And they didn't explore their pasts. And here you are doing this.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Well, I think for many people of that generation, the wounds were so deep. And even though, obviously, but my mother had gotten out of Germany in 39, my father in 1937. But they also didn't know whether they were going to get permanent residency in, in Britain or whether they were going to be shipped back to Germany. So there was an element of uncertainty about it. But I think it was a whole mixture of things that's probably very common. I'm no expert in, in the psychology of grief. But I think it was a desire to move on, to assimilate.

• 19:53Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  And to not get enveloped too much by the past. But it was always, for both of them, it was always, I think, mentally just a half step away. But they could never come to terms with it.

• 20:10Kara Swisher?

  They also, you, you said they didn't view themselves as survivors of the Holocaust and they rejected the label. And do you think it also contributes to their inability to grieve, as you say?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Maybe. For them, survivor had a very specific connotation. And they recognized that they were very fortunate compared to the people that they call survivors. But a survivor was somebody like a cousin of my father's, who had the same name, coincidentally, as my dad, who survived Auschwitz and eventually escaped. A survivor was, there was a lady in, in, in South Wales where I grew up that my mother knew, who had been born.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  On a cart being dragged out of Auschwitz at the end of the war. Those were the survivors.

• 21:05Kara Swisher?

  But they were survivors because your mother's parents, Sally and Louise, escaped. They got out just before the war started. Your father's parents, Max and Minnie, did not, even though Max had chances. And there were some practical reasons Max didn't act on those chances. But also, I want to read this passage you wrote. "Max may well have clung to the hope that his military service and long membership of the judiciary would render him invulnerable, or that more rational hands would wrest control from Hitler, or that a foreign powers would not tolerate a barbarous regime in the middle of Europe." Talk about the idea you're getting to here, that Max's faith in institutions betrayed him.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Well, you put your finger on it. My grandfather, who escaped, as I just mentioned, he was a small-time cattle trader, which at the end of the 19th century was one of the few professions that was open for Jews in Germany. And I think, in retrospect, I'm projecting some of this. And he was entrepreneurial, he was street smart, he had to rely on his wits. He was never paid by the state. He was very, you know, he was almost blind at birth. And then, so he didn't serve in World War I. My other grandfather, the one you referred to, he survived, they're done. So he had come out of that like all the other Jews that served in the German army. And he got his Iron Cross.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  And then he'd been the first person in his family to get a higher education. He became, as you said, a member of the judiciary. And he had this misplaced faith in institutions. And it's exactly as you just said. Here was this man who had served the state, he was employed by the state. He was going to, he thought, get a pension from the state. And he had this false faith in, I suppose, the moral compass of the state.

• 22:58Kara Swisher?

  In that regard, two things. You know, you talk about your parents' trauma has been passed down through generations. And so telling the story allows you to do that. How does that manifest with you then? Because there's a line that you write that I think is very important in this book. It says, "It's odd to feel like an outsider when everyone considers you an insider." I want you to sort of spool this out. For people who don't know, Auslander means outsider. My own experience with Auslander was in Germany itself. When I was covering the neo-Nazi riots, right after the wall fell, the neo-Nazis sort of went into East Germany and tried to recruit. Because a lot of this had been barred in West Germany. And they were quite educated about the Holocaust. In East Germany, they did no such education.

• 23:43Kara Swisher?

  And so they found a very willing population who, the Nazis were not blamed as much in East Germany. And so I was at a rally of neo-Nazis of all kinds, following them. And there was one woman who stood in their way and said, "Schade," which means shame. Except as they were walking through the streets of this East German, formerly East German town in Eastern Germany, they were yelling, "Deutschland für Deutsche, Ausländer aus," which means, "Germany for Germans, outsiders out." I never will forget that moment. It was really chilling. You talk about, you name the book Auslander. And you also say everyone does consider you an insider.

• 24:24Kara Swisher?

  I guess I do too, as sort of an insider to Silicon Valley or the tech industry. Talk a little bit about this tension.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  One of the results of writing the book, obviously, I discovered things about my parents that I hadn't really understood as a result of it. But I also discovered something about myself and why I am, with all my various flaws, who I am today. But I have never been able to get over the feeling of being an outsider, no matter where I've lived. It doesn't matter whether it was in Wales, or whether I was in college, or when I got into the venture industry, or it's always been there. And the Britain that I grew up in, in the 1960s, I think, to some extent,

• 25:16Speaker 01

  look, I owe Britain a tremendous amount. I wouldn't be here without the actions of the British government. But Britain in the 60s was not a multicultural society. And we lived in this area in Wales, in South Wales, where, I don't know, the population was probably about 2.5 million. And there were maybe 500 Jewish families in Wales. And we were Jewish and German. So you know the feeling as a child. Every child wants to be accepted by their pals and their contemporaries. And we stood out. And you sort of internalize that feeling and carry it with you.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  It's a very, very permanent mark.

• 26:04Kara Swisher?

  So not belonging in Cardiff, not belonging in England, and not belonging in the United States, meaning, is what you're, this idea of outsider.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Right. But look, and I don't, Kara, I've been really, really lucky. So I don't want this to come across as self-pity.

• 26:21Kara Swisher?

  No, I don't. But your name of your book is Ausland.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't want it to come across as self-pity. But think how many people today, minorities who live in America, feel like outsiders.

• 26:34Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 26:43Speaker 04

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• 27:14Kara Swisher?

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• 28:33Kara Swisher?

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• 29:16Kara Swisher?

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• 29:37Kara Swisher?

  Most of the book is about your family story, but you also reflect on the present political moment, too. And you drew contemporary parallels to Nazis. And it's always fraught to do, trust me. Like, I worry when people say, he's like Hitler. I'm like, not quite. But you write about how Trump's rise to power made you think a lot about the refrain you heard from your parents when you were a boy. If it did happen, it can happen. If it did happen, it will happen. If it did happen somewhere, it can happen here. Talk a little bit about this, because while Trump's hold on American politics may not be what it once was, and I think we're on the descending mountain of that, the forces that ushered him in are still alive and kicking and always have been. So talk about these parallels you draw right at the top of this book.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  I have been very careful never to call Trump a fascist, never to label him a Nazi, never to equate him with what happened in Nazi Germany, never. But I do believe he has authoritarian instincts, the same authoritarian instincts that we've seen in others who've risen to the forefront of politics in their countries. And, you know, one of the things that happens when you have an authoritarian with a lot of control, no matter how many protections everybody feels there might be in the United

• 31:00Speaker 01

  States, before you know it, you have the weakening and the hollowing out of the institutions of state with all of their force that people have come to rely on. And to me, it's like, you know, termites or dry rot. It's imperceptible to most people. Obviously, these heinous ICE agents shooting people in the face in Minneapolis, those aren't invisible.

• 31:30Kara Swisher?

  And just this week, again, in Texas.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Those aren't invisible. And the cruelty meted out, those are very visible. But what is happening to, you know, various state departments that tilt at the judiciary, all of that doesn't affect what happens in daily life until you confront it. And then, before you know it, the state in which you placed great trust and emphasis is hollowed out.

• 31:59Kara Swisher?

  Very much like your grandfather, many were shocked how quickly some American institutions folded under pressures from the Trump administration at the start of the second term. You do, I will say, if I have to, a criticism, as you know, I'll make this, is you seem to give some of the tech guys a bit of a pass, and they're, quote, "responding to an invitation they could not refuse." That's a godfather term. I feel like they could refuse some of those invitations, given they're wealthy, powerful. Talk a little bit about this, because, and the institutions themselves, because this is something that your grandfather missed, right? He thought, oh, well, I was a war hero. Oh, I was, you know, I'm in the judiciary. This can't happen here, which is, of course, which your parents said it can.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think the leaders of the tech industry, their companies are so large, their influence so great, their business all around the globe, that in many ways, the CEOs or the chairman of these companies are politicians, and they have to be, maybe juggling pressure from China and juggling pressure from the US and dealing with the EU and other regulatory agencies around the world. And I think they play a very, have a very difficult balancing act to, I have some sympathy

• 33:25Speaker 01

  with them, knowing that they are all cast from different cloth, and maybe some lean more towards Trump than others. But I think they all have his number, and they're doing what they need to do in order to protect the interests, as they see it, of all of their shareholders, and are trying very hard to ensure that they're dealing with a capricious vindictive character who wields a lot of power. And the last thing they want is his various flamethrowers torching their companies.

• 34:01Kara Swisher?

  I get that. I completely get that. But this is something you kind of address in the book about what happened to Germany, right? If the richest men in the world can't say no, who can? And were you surprised at that panoply at the inauguration? When I saw it, I was like, oh, good God, like, you're kidding me. You've got to fucking be kidding me.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Well, and I know for certain that a couple of them, at least, and obviously, I'm not going to name them, that's the very last place they wanted to be.

• 34:28Kara Swisher?

  I am aware of that. I heard from them.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm sure all of them, or some of them, anyway, wished that a

• 34:34Kara Swisher?

  Not all.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  A great hole had opened up that just swallowed them up and made them invisible. I think some of them, again, you may not like this or feel I'm being too protective. I think some of them try to whisper in Isiah privately.

• 34:52Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  And quietly, without, you know, publicly humiliating him or taking a stand. And, you know, maybe that's the most effective way to deal with this character. And throwing yourself on the pyre, I'm not sure does

• 35:10Kara Swisher?

  Well, I

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Does any good.

• 35:12Kara Swisher?

  I get it.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  But you're exactly right.

• 35:14Kara Swisher?

  I get that.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  You know, the companies like Siemens and all these

• 35:19Kara Swisher?

  Mercedes.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Mercedes, all these other vast companies, the Krups, that were very, very powerful in Germany, colluded. And, but they also

• 35:31Kara Swisher?

  Or thought they could control him, or thought he was a moron.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Or thought they could control him. But after the control phase passed, they colluded.

• 35:38Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  And they operated slave camps for him. They found it useful for their business that they could find cheap sources of labor in which to flourish. Now, I don't think we're anywhere close to that in the United States with the tech guys. But I know you would feel, and I can understand this, and I think a lot of people would feel better if some of them had stood up and said, I completely disagree with these following policies.

• 36:10Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it's not so much that. It's that you can see they want, they'll go to those dinners, even if they disagree. And I get it. I had, listen, I had Elon Musk on the phone when he went to that first meeting in 2015, and he said, I can change his mind. And I said, listen, Jesus, I don't think it's happening. He's an old racist, and like, pay attention to this person. And one of the things that I think is the most surprising is it never stops, though. Like, especially when they want, lack of AI regulation, or they hand him some crypto money, because he's so easily bribed, essentially. But where does that end from you? Because you have, in this book, you do not back off at all. I'm not surprised.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Ever since he started running, and, you know, in certain circles in Silicon Valley, I've been a loner. I have tried to persuade everybody that, no, all

• 37:02Kara Swisher?

  That's the noise of someone coming for you right now. No, so I'm kidding.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  That's right. All our presidents, all our presidents, all our political leaders are flawed, like all of us. Some have a lot more flaws than others. Trump is one of those characters. And what I've tried to do in the conversations that I had with various people, although I've given up on it, because, you know, history's not going to, we'll see what happens, was the number one thing that you want to look for in any leader is character, number one. And I think a lot of, well, I know, a lot of people in Silicon Valley held their nose or turned the other way and ignored what they knew. And shame on them.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  And you ignore character at your peril.

• 37:52Kara Swisher?

  I would agree. I would agree. Was there any worry for you? You spoke up really strongly. This book is very strong. I've not seen it, except, I'm trying to think of, even Cuban, who sort of tries to play it both ways many times, has been critical, but also is, on the other hand, kind of person. It's his nature, actually. Is there a price for you to being this way?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  I think you have to be true to who you are.

• 38:17Kara Swisher?

  That's a good answer. You end the book by revealing you decided to apply for German citizenship, which is fascinating. And we're seeing Germany is also struggling with the rise of national sentiment and antisemitism. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AFD, is surging in elections. Talk about applying for German citizenship. And I do agree with you, they spent a lot of time trying to push back on this stuff. Are you worried about the national vow of never again to lose resonance as the horrors of war grow more distant there? That would be the danger, obviously.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  I'm not Deluding myself. I hope I'm not deluding myself. I hope I'm being fairly clear eyed. Um, I think this, whether it's the left or we haven't talked about the left, but

• 39:02Kara Swisher?

  I'd be happy to.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Whether it's the left or the right in the United States, in the UK, in France, in Germany, in Italy, in other places in, in Western Europe, extremism doesn't help. So do I think I will leave America? I don't think so. But I do place, and I completely, I think your analysis earlier on about when you were talking about your experience about the, after the Berlin Wall fall is exactly right. The one thing that the Germans have done is to institute, and it's, as you said, more pronounced in the Old West than in the Old East, is institute

• 39:45Speaker 01

  rigorous education about this period of the 20th century that is baked into the minds of the students. That does not occur anywhere else in Western Europe, and it doesn't occur in the United States.

• 39:58Kara Swisher?

  No, not over the civil war. So I agree, not enough for sure.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  And, and the ignorance of what happened in Western Europe and in the US is part of today's problem. But you're right about the AFD and the rise of Ulrich Segman and the collapse of Moritz. But you know, one of the big lessons I took away from writing this book is, and it sounds glib, but I mean, it is you can never have enough passports if you're a minority.

• 40:30Kara Swisher?

  Many passports. Yeah, I, I'm getting my Italian one, if you can believe it. My grandfather was born in Italy. But I, I feel the same way. And do you feel that in terms of emphasis on history is, I think, disappearing in Germany? Either it's been over taught, right, where people just start to ignore it, or like in the US, well, it wasn't us who did that to the Native Americans. It's not us who did it to slavery. It's not our fault. That's sort of Trump's version of it happening here in a lot of ways, which sort of has resonance to what happened to your grandparents.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. I, I have a lot more sympathy for the people who were in America or the descendants of the people who were in America before the Mayflower arrived, or all the people who were shipped here in slavery. And I think every, every country has sins of the past, some are bigger than others.

• 41:33Kara Swisher?

  Right. That's a very good point. Now, speaking of a sin, you write about the events of October 7th, and Israel made you feel emotionally connected to the country's fate for the first time. Israel's subsequent destruction of Gaza, the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and now the war in Iran have led to massive political shift in Americans' feelings towards Israel. The numbers are astonishing, actually. I've never seen anything like. That's especially true for younger Americans. I have two older sons. They've shifted rather dramatically. My wife happens to be Jewish, but I would call neither of them anti-Semitic, but it's something's happening there. Talk about this emotional connection you felt to Israel, which you hadn't felt before. I mean, and you, you rightly attack some of these settlers. I think you call them heinous settlers or violent settlers.

• 42:16Kara Swisher?

  Talk a little bit about your shifting feelings, because you hadn't been, you know, particularly, this was not part of your identity again as an outsider.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  No, you, you're exactly correct. And look, there are aspects of, I cannot abide Netanyahu. And I think people like Smotrich and Ben-Gavir should be in prison, you know, two of his most influential cabinet ministers. And the settlements in the, in the West Bank are again, something that I find impossible to support. Gaza is more complicated.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Imagine if in America, in the course of a few hours, 45,000 people had been killed.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  What the response would have been of this country or adjust?

• 43:13Kara Swisher?

  9/11.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  9/11?

• 43:16Kara Swisher?

  I mean, I think, no, I'm saying that, I, I, you know what I'm saying? I think we move, that was one of those shocker moments.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is 9/11, and I don't mean to belittle 9/11. This is fif- 15 times

• 43:30Kara Swisher?

  Yes, agreed.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  the size of 9/11. And I, look, this is a long freighted conversation

• 43:43Kara Swisher?

  Certainly.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  about Gaza. But I have more sympathy for the Israeli feeling towards Gaza. I have no sympathy towards their feeling on, on the West Bank. But my goodness gracious me, everybody in Israel knew somebody who was wounded or killed. And so it's this, this reaction. And well, several things, Cara, realizing that I'm going to get a whole load of abuse for this, but.

• 44:15Kara Swisher?

  It's a complex topic.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  It is a very complex topic. But, you know, 800,000 Jews were pushed out of the Arab lands in 1948, out of Iraq, out of Syria, out of Morocco, out of Algeria, out of Egypt, out of Tunisia. No United Nations support whatsoever.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  My guess is that most of the people who are on the far left today have no understanding of that. Nor do they have an understanding of, you know, the, the fact that the Jews were also pushed out of their country by the Romans a long time ago.

• 44:59Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Or the fact that since 1948, there's been no Palestinian government of, or faction that has done anything to benefit its people. And contrasted with Israel. So there's a lot in there. And as I said, look, I'm sure terrible things have been done by the Israelis in Gaza. It's, it's war.

• 45:24Kara Swisher?

  I mean, 70,000 Palestinians.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  It's war. It's war. And you know, you look at, I, I doubt whether there's anybody, or all of these protesters, if you ask them, what happened in Dresden? What did the US do to Dresden towards the end of World War II? To Hamburg, to other, other cities and towns in, in Germany? It makes the Israeli response look mild. Look at the firebombing of Tokyo. So I think we underestimate the emotional reaction in this country of what happens if such a significant portion of your population was, was taken.

• 46:08Kara Swisher?

  Now, some of the protesters, let me use the devil's advocate, don't, don't know the history, but they are seeing what's in front of them, especially in a highly social media fueled, image conscious world we now live in. You know, can you imagine if you saw Dresden today, or you saw the bombing of Japan? It would, it's a very different world in that regard.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  I, I completely agree with you.

• 46:36Kara Swisher?

  And that to me is the difference.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Israel, there is no way you're going to win a political debate about this, when on one side you have hapless, hungry, wide eyed babies, and on the other side you have a tank. There is no way you're ever going to win that, that.

• 46:56Kara Swisher?

  And they haven't. And that, I mean.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  No, and they lost it.

• 46:59Kara Swisher?

  So one of the things, let me bring it back, because it's a longer discussion, which I don't want to get into right now. But when you're writing about this and what you took away from your book, how do you get back to it? Because for example, your former company, Sequoia, is still investing in Israeli companies despite the war, includes defense startups that integrate AI into military hardware. There's several partners there that are a little close to Trump and loud, Sean I'm thinking of. Now, you're not at Sequoia any longer, correct?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Correct. And I haven't been for quite a long time.

• 47:30Kara Swisher?

  Quite a while, after you, you got sick. But when you think about where we are now and the links to what was happening in your book, are you surprised by Silicon Valley's aggression here in that regard, and especially in these investments? And where does it level out, given all the pictures, all the social media, all created by tech incredibly, has created what is a very impossible situation for anyone to agree, right? Even reasonable people?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I agree. And I don't, I wish I had great answers, Cara.

• 48:12Kara Swisher?

  That's okay.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  I don't have great answers. It's a horribly complicated situation.

• 48:20Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  I wish these people who'd been protesting Gaza had come out in the streets and protested what the Iranians did to their people earlier in the year, or various other awful regimes have done to murder members of their, members of their own population and.

• 48:44Kara Swisher?

  Syria.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Crickets. You know, yeah. Well, think about Syria, there, when the former ruler of, of Syria was deposed, there were, or during his regime, how many of these people protested against the atrocities he was inflicting on his people? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people killed in Syria. I don't know. I'm not picking on your two sons, but I don't know if they know about that.

• 49:17Kara Swisher?

  They do. I made sure they did.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Good. Well done, you. Well done, mom.

• 49:20Kara Swisher?

  They do. They protest all this stuff. One of them's much more conservative than the other, I would say. I'm going to get away from this for a second. But when you think about sort of the lessons that you took away, because one of the things in this is you are, like, it's very similar to Scott Galloway, who I do my podcast with. After October 7th, he, he changed. Did this experience, writing this book, change you in that regard? Feeling like an insider, maybe? Or?

• 49:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 49:51Kara Swisher?

  What did it do to you, your psyche?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Well, it's what I mentioned earlier. I think it made me understand why.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Why I became, for good and for worse, what I became. And I'm not complaining about anti, you know, it's weird, given the discussion that we just had. I'm not, I'm not whining about antisemitism. Antisemitism's a reality. It's been with us for 2,500 years and nothing will change. And in a way, I think being, feeling the need to survive has really helped me. And has given me considerable strength and to persist. So I'm not, I'm not complaining at all about that. I think what, what this did to me was to be far more alert to, and you know, the damage is done.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Probably my, my, both our boys are in their thirties now, but I wish I had known this about myself and understood it when they were growing up because my, one of my fears is that I unwittingly, unconsciously transmitted these, these feelings of fear.

• 51:02Kara Swisher?

  To your own kids.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  To them.

• 51:03Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  And so, but all of that's in the past and done. I can just make sure I don't do it for my grandchildren.

• 51:13Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 51:21Kara Swisher?

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• 52:03Kara Swisher?

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• 52:54Speaker 05

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• 53:24Kara Swisher?

  All right, I want to finish up talking about San Francisco. You've lived there for decades. I love, you and I both love San Francisco.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:31Kara Swisher?

  You never lived in Silicon Valley. You're running a competition where you're offering up to $50 million to organizations with ideas to improve the city. You also run a terrific newspaper, I have to tell you, the S F Standard.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 53:44Kara Swisher?

  And I just had lunch with Kevin Delaney, who is the editor, who is a very good friend of mine, who is a wonderful, wonderful journalist. Talk about why you've put all this money into San Francisco. And I know I have just interviewed Chris Larson. There's a lot of people who feel that, and you have said recently that San Francisco have been hijacked by a small group of political extremists. I think that made it hard to build businesses. I understand, I'm very aware of what I think Chris called the homeless industrial complex, among other things, but talk about why you have stuck with San Francisco. And by the way, now with AI wealth, it's back again.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Oh, it's very straightforward. This is, even though we talked about being an outsider, this is home. It's where, where Harry and I live. It's where our kids were born and grew up. And I know that none of the fortune that's come my way, none of the good fortune, none of the good luck, would have happened had I not lived in, in San Francisco. Now, if I'd lived in Palo Alto, maybe it would have happened as well. But it turns out that for, you know, close to 45 years or so now, I've lived in San Francisco. This is home. And so I'm at the point in life where this is about giving back to others.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  And San Francisco is, you know, it's been well publicized, went through a really, really bleak period. And about nine years ago or so, I began to get very interested in how with others, because this isn't, you know, this is going to be a grand community effort. We could improve life in San Francisco. And with the idea that if we could show the way in San Francisco, a very deep blue city, it would be something of a template for other deep blue cities of, of greater size that are confronting similar issues. But I felt it really important that people in the city who cared, had a trusted source of information that they could count on, number one.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Number two, we have a family foundation that 60% of its giving is in the Bay area, the bulk of it in San Francisco. And then the third leg of it is getting involved in the political debate in San Francisco. So that's what I've tried to do.

• 56:01Kara Swisher?

  So when you think about what's happening in San Francisco, a lot of the tech people didn't do that. They took their stuff and left, right? Or they kicked it on the way out or egregiously kicked it on the way out. No, not necessary. Many of them are back, by the way, FYI. But is there a responsibility of people with significant resources who have become better for a community to give back? I mean, it goes back to Sutro, Adolf Adolf Sutro. There was obviously the Bank of America founders, very involved in the city, the Geddys, very involved. Tech is, you're pretty much it. You and Chris Larson are pretty much it from tech.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Well, a couple of other things. There were also, you know, a lot of members of the, of the Jewish community, the Haas.

• 56:45Kara Swisher?

  The Haas, I'm sorry.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  And the Strauss family and the Dinkel spiel's and Flash hackers and Goldman's, lots of other people.

• 56:51Kara Swisher?

  The Flash hackers, yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  And who came here, made their fortunes in the 19th century and gave back. I mean, they're something of inspiration for me. It's also a question of, you'll think I'm giving everybody in the tech industry hall passes, but it's also Kara, I think, issue of age. You know, I'm not running a company day to day. I'm not 35 years old, caught up entirely in my business and without time to think about anything else. I'm at a, you know, I just turned 72, so I've got time in my life to reflect on this. And I think, I think part of it is age, actually.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  And I've always been very sympathetic to Bill Gates's argument that he conveyed in the 1990s when he was asked why he wasn't giving more away to philanthropic causes. And he said, he felt that the best thing that he could do is to increase the value of Microsoft and then give subsequently, and that's what he did.

• 57:51Kara Swisher?

  That's what he did.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  And I think many of the increasingly wealthy tech founders will, will follow a similar path.

• 57:59Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I just don't love them kicking on the way out. And then they moved to Miami and they moved back. I'm like, just keep, just leave.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:06Kara Swisher?

  Just move along. Like I saw one of them at a restaurant in San Francisco and I was with another big tech founder and we both went over and said, you need to leave because this food is too delicious for you to enjoy here in San Francisco.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  I see.

• 58:19Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you know, I was just like, don't kick it.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  There's that contention.

• 58:23Kara Swisher?

  So every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Yours comes from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.

• 58:29Speaker 07

  Kara, I miss you. I hope you are well, Sir Michael Moritz. Thank you for your investments into San Francisco. My question to you, because you give to a lot of nonprofits and we all appreciate that, but how do we make sure to hold the sector accountable while lifting up the groups that are doing incredible work in our city and in our country? So that's my question to you. How do you focus on lifting up the good ones while making sure that we hold the sector accountable?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  I think it's, you evaluate each organization. And we, we try to do that at Crankstart without being onerous towards the organizations. And for those that don't meet the goals that we have agreed upon when we've given them a grant, we don't continue. And then inevitably there are some bad apples here. And as there are in any sector. And those, those people should be run, maybe they should be sent to Miami and run out of town. And again, it's like making investments in, in companies to some extent.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  You'll be surprised positively in some cases, and then you'll be totally distressed in others. Fortunately, we haven't had much of that, where you have to say goodbye to them and you don't want to see them again.

• 59:54Kara Swisher?

  Right. And I know you do that, you know, two people in my life, you've had, you've had beefs with. One is my ex-wife, Meghan, who is, you said to her, she's an engineer and you said, you talk too much for an engineer, which made me laugh.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Oh dear, how rude. I'm sorry, would you apologize to her?

• 1:00:11Kara Swisher?

  I shan't, I think you weren't inaccurate. And then Scott Galloway, of course, we won't get into that. I don't want to, I don't listen to him when he goes on about, but I'm like all venture, everyone has a beef with a venture capitalist.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:00:22Kara Swisher?

  And on two very quick questions on the state of venture capital. You, obviously Sequoia was a legendary firm. Where is venture going right now? Especially since these AI companies are drawing huge investments, attracting enormous IPOs. Anthropic is looking for potential valuation of $2 trillion. OpenAI is considering another funding round to double its roughly $800 billion. These numbers are eye popping, Mike, from when we were around. If you were a young venture capitalist, say, how would you look at this situation?

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  I'd find something else to do.

• 1:00:52Kara Swisher?

  Would you? Because?

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  I think it's just become part of the establishment. And perhaps when I got into it, you know, I'm 85 or so.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Most people wanted to go and work at whatever it was McKinsey or Bain or Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. I think it's that generation or their descendants now, those generations, they all want to be in the venture industry. Join a seed fund, join a pre-seed fund, join a first round fund, join a et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, to some extent, when I got into the venture business, it wasn't undiscovered, but Sequoia had a fund that just finished investing the third fund. It was $45 million. And there were, you know, if we'd had our whole holiday party, we could have for everybody who worked at Sequoia, including, you know, the assistants.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  And we could get a table for 12 and that'd be it. And I just like, I think it was much more of an outsider's business then. It was not part of, uh, part of the, of the fashion and the establishment.

• 1:02:06Kara Swisher?

  Is that a bad thing? What comes out of this then? Is it possible to create that again?

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  I think the genie's out of the bottle. And, you know, the other thing that's really changed is that we lived in an age of pre-internet of imperfect information. So if you were close to things that were happening, we talked in a different context about Gaza and Israel and the social media and images and all that stuff. Today, it's a world of perfect information. A company gets started here, there'll be 20 knockoffs in China tomorrow. And you'll have everybody in the valley trying to finance a similar company. So I think it was easier in a way. It had its own challenges when business plans were tight. They weren't six slide PowerPoints

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  that you had five minutes in which to decide whether or not you wanted to issue a term sheet. It was not an auction business, which I think many aspects of it are today. And you don't want to be in an auction business. It's too much of a, of a perfect market. So the quiet backwaters are the places that I've always thought would be more profitious.

• 1:03:19Kara Swisher?

  Where does innovation come from then? The kind of innovation you saw in that garage at Google or Yahoo or wherever. Where does innovation come from now? Real innovation?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  I think there are very few real innovations. And I realize it's part of the myth of Silicon Valley that it's just dotted with all sorts of extraordinary innovations. I think Silicon's Valley's advantage is that it's evolutionary. And it's capitalizing on evolutionary steps along the way that have allowed these companies to flourish. Yes, they all have their patent libraries. Many of them have extremely creative and wonderful engineers, but all of them are building on the foundation that's been built up over the last hundred years. And so I think

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  we should pay tribute to evolution more than innovation.

• 1:04:17Kara Swisher?

  All right. And my last question, you spent your career betting on the future through your work in venture capital and your philanthropy. And now you have a book that's very much about how the past shapes future generation. After everything you've built, funded, and now written, what are you hoping to pass down? And what do you hope will outlast you?

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  I, I don't believe in legacies. I, you see these, we all see names on buildings. We don't know who the, who the names were. They passed away. I think, so I'm not worried. I think you've got to live for the moment and do what you can while you're here and not worry about, and, and try to do what you can to help those who've been less fortunate and leave it like that. And we're all insignificant little specks.

• 1:05:10Kara Swisher?

  And yet you've written a book about your family. It's not that insignificant, right? And what lesson did you learn from your family through doing this?

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Tenacity, the power of persistence, the power of tenacity and of not giving up.

• 1:05:24Kara Swisher?

  All right. On that note, well, and Michael, thank you so much for your time.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Kara, you've been incredibly generous.

• 1:05:35Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Vicky Vergolina, Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, and Megan Burney. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Eamon Whalen, Jim Mackel, and Manolo Moreno. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

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