My guest today is Michael Moritz. He started as a journalist at Time magazine. He then spent 35 years at Sequoia Capital backing Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and YouTube. And before any of that, he wrote The Little Kingdom, an inside account of Apple that caught Steve Jobs and the Macintosh team before the world knew who they were. His new book, Auslander, tells his own family story during the Holocaust. Michael Moritz, welcome to The Puck.
Well, yeah, it's very nice to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
One of the things that was really intriguing to me was that before Sequoia, you wrote The Little Kingdom. And looking back, what did you get right about Apple? And what did you come to understand years later?
I wrote The Little Kingdom an eternity ago. It's almost 40 years ago. And the book was the first book about Apple. And what I was really interested in was the private users of Apple. I was new to this part of California. I'd come out here to San Francisco as a correspondent for Time magazine, and I had no idea about people who started companies. I had no notion that very young people could start companies, and I was very intrigued by that. But the only thing that really interested me about Apple was where did this company come from? And where did these two fellows who started it have the moxie to be able to start a company when they were very young men? And I think on the whole, I mean, I've heard it from others, I think the actual chronology and reporting that I was able to do because I had unusual access to both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and others associated with the formation of Apple, actually, I think it was very accurate because I know when Walter Isaacson came to do his book on Steve later, he relied on The Little Kingdom for the early years of Apple as have others later. So, I think—and there was—the book which came out, I think, in 1984 offered no predictions about what Apple eventually would eventually turn into. It was much more just focused on the history of where Apple sprang from.
So, when you were invited by Steve to come as the unofficial historian, what do you think made him different before the rest of the world saw it?
Steve and I had different agendas. I wanted to write a book about Apple and where it came from; Steve wanted me to do a puff piece about the origin of the Macintosh computer. Because there was a very, very popular book that had come out a year or so before called The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder that documented the making of a minicomputer, and Steve was interested in creating an epic around the formation of Apple. Steve was a bit of a mystic and much more of a poet and artist than people generally understood. He was not another typecast, closeted fellow whose entire life was fixated around hardware and software and didn't have any external interest. He was an intensely curious guy. He had this affinity for aesthetics, for the arts, for music, all contemporary—Bob Dylan of the era—that people like Bill Gates and others who were involved with other companies around the time that the personal computer and personal computer software emerged, they just weren't interested in it. And I think that sense of the aesthetic and the demand and desire for perfection however it could be wrought was something that was very evident to me even 40 years ago, just getting to know Steve pretty well at that point. The others just didn't possess it whatsoever. They were monumental about their fixation.
So, as someone—and we're going to get into this obviously—that has seen a lot of entrepreneurs in your day, you use an interesting word to describe him. You said mystic. What does that mean for the rest of us?
Steve was I think always interested in exploring aspects of life that others might have considered strange or foreign. He experimented with drugs. He took a trip to India. He was on the fringes or verge, I think, of dropping out and exploring this universe that Ken Kesey and the other poets and balladeers of the era are well known for. And there was something intensely soulful about, I think, his quest for the inner meaning of life. I just don't think that that was something that many of his peers even gave a second thought to.
Coincidence or part of what made him as successful as he was?
I think it was integral to his success because it was what differentiated him, interestingly. And this alternate way of looking at everything, this immense questioning and pursuit of—whether perhaps it was in his inner life or as expressed through Apple—this quest for meaning and perfection that became very evident in the Apple products, particularly after he rejoined Apple in the late 1990s.
You talked about differentiation and being special and what makes somebody special with respect to Steve. You were a Time journalist, not a venture capitalist, when Don Valentine hired you. What do you think he saw? What did everyone else miss? Because if I'm not mistaken, you interviewed at other VC firms, and yet it was Sequoia and Don that gave you this opportunity.
Don, unlike others, didn't have a fixed sense of the attributes that somebody would need to be successful in the venture capital business. There weren't that many firms around at that point. It's not like today. And Don didn't have a fixed view of what it took to be successful in the venture business because, I remember asking him in an interview about what it took to be successful, and he said he didn't really know because some of the people he'd expected to be successful in the venture business because they had a very deeply technical background or because they'd worked in Silicon Valley companies or because they'd run something had turned out to be disasters. Whereas there were two or three people of renown, most notably a gentleman called Arthur Rock, who had no technical background, had never worked in a technology company, but had yet become very, very successful in the venture business. So, he wasn't fixated on a particular resume as the necessary background for success, and he was more open to somebody who's a complete outsider to Silicon Valley.
But then you switched roles and you, for 30, 35 years after that, were doing the judging. How do you recognize real leaders before everyone else does?
I think it's much harder today than it used to be. Simply because, in 1984 and 1985 when I got into the venture business, it was a very small business, and this is a long time ago in the evolution of Silicon Valley. Before the internet, before almost perfect dissemination of information, when there was more time to get to know somebody that you would form a business relationship with. And because of the nutty aspect of the venture business today, there's very little time to do that. And so, we had back then the luxury of time in order to find out about somebody. But let's be very straightforward: I also made a lot of mistakes. And it's very difficult, and there's a huge element of chance and luck, I think, associated with it in trying to figure out whether a young person—perhaps he or she is 19 or 22—how are they going to evolve? They may know a tremendous amount about a particular idea that they want to turn into a company or into a product or service, but they may not have the faintest clue about the attributes required to build a management team and develop a company. And so, you're trying to forecast: How are they going to evolve? Are they going to be able to attract the necessary talent? Are they going to have the temperament to be able to corral these different personalities, provide the leadership that is necessary, and all the other attributes required in first building and then leading a company over a very long period of time? And look at the people of the current era. I know he sort of stepped back to a chairman's role, but look at the length of time that Jeff Bezos ran Amazon, and look at how old he was when he started the business. And I'm sure many people at that point thought, or his backers may have had big questions about, how is this young man going to evolve? Is he going to be able to take it all the way? So, I think there's a huge amount of uncertainty associated with it, and you just, at the end of it, have to follow your instincts.
And following your instincts, but also just looking back over this long period of time, I'm interested in character and how character develops, and I think we could use a little more of it in our system today. Do you think character reveals itself more in the area of success or from adversity?
You asked about Steve Jobs earlier. And I think he became a far better leader having gone through his wilderness years after he got booted out of Apple, and then struggled with both Pixar and with NeXT against all odds, and found both a very humbling experience. And he came out of that period—obviously Pixar became a big success with Toy Story at the end of what was a very long journey where it looked as if the company would fail, and then NeXT got bought by Apple—I think he was a much wiser man naturally having gone through all of that, and also he was by then 10, 12 years older. He was a far wiser man and a far better leader at that point than he was when he got booted out of Apple.
Interesting. So, let's pivot a little and talk about—I know you have Auslander coming out in the States. I believe it's already been released in Britain, but as we move into that, as I understand it, certain things changed after your mother's death and you uncovered certain things about your family story. What changed in you?
Well, it's nice of you to bring it up, and you're right. Auslander, which is a family memoir that I wrote, came out in Britain some time ago and is now appearing in the United States. It was a combination of circumstances. Both my parents were refugees from Nazi Germany, and I had obviously been aware of the broad brushstrokes of their story and of the horrors of mid-20th century Europe. I had grown up with those in the background. But then my mother died shortly before COVID and shortly before her 96th birthday, and my father had died many years earlier. And a couple of months later, my sister, who lives in London, sent me four boxes of documents, papers, photographs that she had cleaned out of my parents' house. And I had no intention whatsoever of writing a book, none whatsoever. It hadn't really crossed my mind about writing a family memoir. And then, I think partly because of COVID, because I had more time on my hands—there was no commuting, there was no travel, and the days seemed longer—I began going through these materials and became absorbed by the story and all the little bits, all the nitty-gritty facts that my parents hadn't really talked about, nor had I had the intelligence to pose and ask when I was much younger. So, I kept uncovering bits of the story. It doesn't really matter what the backdrop is—these big sweeps of human history, maybe what's going on in any particular country right now, whether at peace or at war—I think the way to bring it to life for regular people is to tell the story of the big political and social upheavals and changes through the tale of a few individuals. So, I think it just brings it to life. And obviously for me, because it was my family, it was intensely personal and therefore a matter of great interest, at least to me. But our family was just one little, the tiniest of fragments caught up in this human whirlwind. But it became something of a mystery tour and dozens of rabbit holes I went down as I began researching the real detail, because it's the detail that makes these stories vivid.
I want to get into a little bit about detail, but before we do, I think you said Auslander was an emotional experience for you. What do you think surprised you about yourself?
It was uncovering the past of my parents and beginning to understand also—the fact that I'm now in my 70s and that I'm at a different stage of life—beginning to understand what shaped them and the forces that shaped them, and the emotional turmoil that they themselves had gone through that I don't think that they were ever able to resolve. This was Britain in the '50s and '60s, and therapy was considered something for complete basket cases and not something any normal person would do. So, they never had the benefit of therapy or anything like that. And so, they were always, I think, without realizing it, tormented by their past. And so for me, understanding that torment and then how imprinted on me just growing up in that environment with those sorts of parents as role models made me understand myself a lot better.
Unpack that for us. If you feel comfortable sharing it when you said it helped you reveal certain things. You made the comment that you're in your 70s now. I'm in my late 60s and also from Jewish descent, and remember my grandparents telling me stories about getting out of Germany, and those people that had diamond rings, for instance, were able to get out because they had a currency they could use to get out. I know you talk about passports. But from your perspective, what do you think in this more introspective period of your life did it reveal to you?
It's a very complicated question, or it's a question that I think stirs up a whole bunch of more questions. I think the real central issue is about being different, and what it feels like not to be part of the mainstream. Because my parents, in particular my mother, always had a fear of standing out. And I grew up—my parents had settled in South Wales in Britain, and there were not very many Jewish families in Wales. And Britain was not at that point a multicultural society as it is today. So, we stood out, and we were different. And obviously, when you're a child, you have this impulse and need to be like every other child. And the thing that really made it stand out for me, if you'll bear with me here, is this: Many moons ago, before cell phones and everything else, there were things called telephone directories with everybody's name in them. And once a year, we got a new telephone directory in Cardiff. And if you wanted to find out a telephone number, you went to the directory and you looked up somebody's name and you found their telephone number and then you called them. Once a year, we got a new telephone directory. And I remember there was this period in my early teens when I rushed to the door, found the telephone directory, and riffled through the directory. And this being Wales, there were dozens and dozens of pages of people with Welsh last names like Jones or Edwards or Hughes or Evans or Williams or Lloyds. There were just dozens and dozens of people with these last names. And then I'd go to the M's and look down the list, hoping, hoping, hoping, hoping, hoping that we were not the only Moritz in the telephone directory. And every year, we were the only Moritz in the Welsh telephone directory. This is a little preposterous, but even as I tell that story, I sort of have chills even just thinking about it. And to me it highlighted, even though it's so trivial obviously, it highlighted what it meant to be different, and everything reverberated and was amplified as a result of that. I remember going to school, people asking me, "Moritz, well, what sort of name is that? It's not a Welsh name, is it?" And in the 1960s, I used to say, "No, no, it's not a Welsh name, it's from Switzerland." You would ask, "Why Switzerland?" Because if you said a German name, it's a German name. In the 1960s, I was going to school with the kids of parents who'd fought against the Germans. So, the Germans were still in the popular mind, as I was growing up in Cardiff, persona non grata. And no one, if you were my age, could really tell the difference between a German and the son of German Jewish refugees. So, I think that was the main thing that sprang out of it all.
Well, what's fascinating to me is that was at a very young age. And when I look at my career in America, when I started at Gibson Dunn in the '80s, half my class was Jewish. But in 1960, you didn't tell people you were Jewish. The big firms were not hiring Jewish people. And I have a German last name too. We went through this golden age, and all of a sudden, if you look at the last several years, there's been a shift in this country. How has that affected you, and when you think about your paternal grandfather who was a judge and a World War I veteran, how does all of that play together with this zeitgeist of being a minority, so to speak?
Well, it's more pronounced today in America and also in Britain where I spend a fair amount of time, because of what's happening in the Middle East and because of what's happening between Israel and Iran and Israel and Gaza. And I think we are both well aware, and most people are well aware, of the strains of antisemitism that are in the air today. I don't delude myself. Antisemitism, for me—I'm not complaining about it, I think it's just a condition of humanity to some extent. If I look at my own life, I think I've benefited from feeling like an outsider. But I can understand—I don't agree with it, but I can understand—how people get everything muddled up. The Shoah, the Holocaust, is now close to 100 years ago. So, if you are somebody who was born in the last 30 years, it seems a very, very distant memory. The association of genocide with in particular the Holocaust doesn't make any connection, doesn't mean anything for young people. And there's great confusion in this country and elsewhere, I think, that associates every Jew, no matter where they live, with being a fervent supporter of everything that Israel is doing. And many people aren't capable of making the difference. They don't understand that there are a lot of Jews, both in Israel and outside Israel, who do not agree with all of the policies of the current government in Israel. Not a day goes by without a reminder of that. And for me, the great sadness is the lack of general understanding of the history of not just the 20th century, but the history of the Jews in the Middle East. And there's a very low degree of comprehension of that. I think in most European countries and certainly in the United States, there's just nothing taught in the school curriculums about that. So, a lot of what emanates today, I think, is just because of lack of knowledge.
I know, for instance, you've talked about applying for a German passport. And I think one of the reasons you've talked about is that their educational system is different. When you think about fighting antisemitism and you think about how, just like a venture capitalist has to see where the puck is going and how to build a company and actually evolve and change, when you look at the evolution of antisemitism, if you look at Germany today, what can we learn from this? And is there a hopeful way to address this as opposed to just saying it's going to always be with us?
No matter how much you and I and others may wish that it disappears, I don't think that's ever going to happen. I actually have become a naturalized German citizen, and I did so for two reasons really. The first is just being aware of this rising current of antisemitism, particularly actually in Britain where it's quite pronounced. You have Jewish children going to schools who get abused or physically assaulted. I have cousins in Manchester who live within half a mile of where there were murders at a synagogue a few months ago. So, it's very apparent there, and I feel unsettled. I think it comes back to the lack of education in both Britain and America. And I'm not blind to what is happening with the rise of the right in Germany, but the one thing that the German educational system has stressed—and it's a core part of the curriculum, even though it may be beginning to fade today—is the education about the Shoah and the Holocaust, the rise of the Nazis, and the persecution of Jews in particular, but also a lot of other minorities. There's far greater recognition of that and therefore tolerance in Germany, I think, than there is in the West. That was one reason. And the second reason is having understood how vital passports are, and the fact that the relatives of mine who got murdered 80 years ago, the reason that they couldn't get out of Germany was the lack of a visa, the lack of a passport. So, one of the lessons that I took away from exploring my family's background was—and it sounds trite, but I think it's true—that for a Jew, you can never have enough passports because you just don't know when people are going to start coming after you.
