Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.491]
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'ShaughnessyShow Notes
Michael Moritz led Sequoia Capital for nearly two decades and backed some of the defining companies of the internet era.
In his new memoir, Ausländer, he turns his attention to his own family, Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany and rebuilt their lives in Wales.
We discuss the imprint his parents left on him, the method he used for decades of asking founders about their childhoods and the Time profile that ended his relationship with Steve Jobs.
We also also cover Lee Iacocca, why Don Valentine hired him, Alex Ferguson's approach to managing players, Elon Musk, and why Mike still struggles to feel proud of anything he has done.
Please enjoy my conversation with Michael Moritz.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
-----
Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at colossus.com/subscribe.
-----
Ramp’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus.
-----
Trusted by thousands of businesses, Vanta continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/invest.
-----
WorkOS is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.
-----
Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest.
-----
Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit ridgeline.ai.
-----
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best
(00:02:16) Where Does One Person End?
(00:11:15) The State of the World Today
(00:15:08) The Unlived Life of Parents
(00:17:33) Lee Iacocca, Eternal Outsider
(00:21:03) His Most Revealing Question
(00:26:03) Resisters, the Silent, and Collabos
(00:33:30) The Profile of Steve Jobs
(00:38:04) Frank Auerbach's Total Obsession
(00:41:04) Why Don Valentine Hired Michael
(00:46:44) Building Sequoia
(00:49:49) What Michael Learned from Alex Ferguson
(00:52:57) The Great Man Theory
(01:00:36) Defining Extraordinary Writing
(01:03:40) Stepping Back From Sequoia
(01:06:54) A Philosophy of Parenting
(01:09:00) The Next Book: Iran
(01:11:44) The Kindest Thing
More from Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
My guest today is Christina Cacioppo, founder and CEO of Vanta, which helps more than 16,000 companies manage security and compliance.
David Vélez is the founder and CEO of Nubank, which serves 140 million customers across Latin America.
Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford, the host of the Huberman Lab podcast, and the author of Protocols.
My guest today is Noah Shinn. Noah is the founder of Instinct, a personal assistant that you text, call, or email the same way you would a person. It has its own phone and its own computer, and it can do almost anything on your behalf that you would do yourself online. Instinct is about a year old, still invite-only, and growing roughly 10% day over day without any marketing spend.
Gabe Stengel is the co-founder and CEO of Rogo, the AI platform for finance. He believes the best investors will spend the next several years reinventing their firms around AI, and Rogo is trying to build the infrastructure that allows them to do it.