The Investor Behind Google, PayPal, and Stripe on What He Learned From Studying Exceptional People

You know, sadly as a result of that really never repaired the relationship with Steve.

No.

You know, the people that I've known who have done incredible, remarkable things are also flawed individuals. And if you get to know them well, you also see that aspect of it. So seeing that up close makes it difficult to hold anybody in awe because you see the flaws as well as all of their accomplishments and virtues.

One of the things that came out of the book which I didn't really expect was discovering who I am and why I became whatever it is that I've become. And that was an sort of unexpected gift of the writing and it came from an exploration of this exploration of my family's past in particular my parents and going back and excavating the deep memories of childhood and the sort of atmosphere in our home and in the general milieu in which I grew up helped me understand a lot about why I am who I am and react to certain things in the fashion that I do because unwittingly obviously every parent leaves an imprint on a child and I think that's obviously especially true during the formative years, whatever the formative years are. I'm no sort of child specialist or scientist, but those you know before you turn 12, 13, 14 years old, those imprints that you've absorbed in some manner, consciously or unconsciously, those remain with you and both the angels and demons I think that you deal with for the rest of your life.

Well, I grew up as you know and as the book talks about in this family of refugees from Nazi Germany and Wales and refugees by definition are a minority. Jewish refugees in Wales during the 1960s and 1970s were a further minority. And I think if you grow although even if people look at me today and they think oh here's this old white man he's not a minority but and I can understand that but it's how an individual feels rather than how other people might look at you. But I think it touched me in a variety of ways. My parents had gone through these although they were never in the camps they got out they got out of Germany in the 1930s and they were loath to use the word survivor because they always felt the word survivor denoted somebody who actually had survived the camps but they were refugees and in their own way had survived and that motive to survive no matter what the odds were even though the odds that I faced growing up weren't like my parents I think the need to survive and when you think about surviving you're thinking about to some extent living by your wits being very suspicious of the motives of others wondering where and how bad things will occur and happen and guard against them. I think gives you well certainly gave me in retrospect I didn't understand it at the time a sort of drive and grit that I wouldn't have had without that particular atmospheric backdrop.

It was definitely not the stories they told because they didn't tell the stories and I didn't really get to know the stories until I sat down and began work on this book. What I did know was the general arc of history obviously and the world you know this miserable ferocious catastrophic whirlwind in which they and millions of others were caught up but they didn't talk about the past in the real detail that I much later when I said you know when I was thinking about the book became interested in it was just broad sweeps. So I think it was much more the daily behavior, the reaction to events, the reaction to things, the sense that the doom was not very far away. And the fact that if horrors had occurred in the past there was a real need to be vigilant and wary about navigating daily life.

Well, the two individuals, Patrick, that you referred to were my grandfathers, my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather. I'll start with my paternal grandfather who was a civil servant. He was a sort of lower level judge in the judiciary in Bavaria province in southern Germany. He had fought in World War I. He had somehow or other survived the horror of Verdun. He had been given his iron cross and he was I think a great believer in the German state and in the security that the state offered and then much later in 1933 he lost his job. But somehow I think because this is my assessment of the situation because he was a civil servant. He was by nature conservative by nature somewhat cautious but also had this great belief that in the state and the endurance of the state and the durability of the state and that eventually the storm would blow over. And he also had a pension and the pension was very important to him as a means for survival. And so I think it was a combination of all of those things that he wasn't oblivious obviously to what was happening around him. But it did make him more reluctant to leave Germany I think until it was too late. And people forget there are any even if you decided to somebody had decided to leave Germany there are all sorts of obstacles in the way. You had to find a place elsewhere that would accept you. You had to pay big taxes to the Nazi government in order to be able to secure your exit visas. So there are all these sorts of obstacles. So that was my paternal grandfather and he and his wife eventually were shipped off east and disappeared from history. And my maternal grandfather was cut from a different cloth. And he was again I was too callow as a youth to really understand this, but I knew him as a he died when I was about 16. And he had been a cattle trader, which was one of the occupations that Jews were really permitted to do in Germany. But he was almost blind as a young man and completely blind by the time that I met him. But somehow or other had been able to carve out a comfortable living for himself and his family by trading in cattle in a rural village in northwestern Germany. My assessment of him was again in retrospect was that he was more street wise. He was more entrepreneurial. He wasn't burdened by the need to remain and collect a state pension because he had always been able to sustain himself and look out for his future. And he got out with his wife, my grandmother, but they got out by the skin of their teeth. They got out 72 hours before war broke out. So 72 hours later, they too would have perished.

I'm not sure that it's all that relevant to the people I've encountered in this journey through life, but it certainly has had consequences for me, particularly in times like the ones that we are living through at the moment and the atmosphere that is prevalent to some extent in the US and also in Western Europe. I think the necessity for always feeling that you have a bolt hole, that you have someplace to go if the fire gets too hot. That's the lesson that I took away from my family history saying that you can never have enough passports.

Yes.

It's an uncomfortable place for minorities, the United States and Western Europe at large. It doesn't matter whether you're Asian or Muslim or black or Jewish. And you know, I understand the reasons and I want to be careful as well. I am not whining about anti-semitism. I'm not complaining about it. I long ago came to terms with the fact that it's just a fact of life. It's been around for 2500 years. It's not going to disappear in 2026 or 2030. It's always going to be with us. And in fact, as we were talking about a few minutes ago, I think the fact that anti-semitism was around and has been around and it's been something I've been conscious of all my life or all my sentient life it's made me stronger. But I think it's disquieting if you're living in a society where you know in America I think my simplistic way of thinking about who feels safe in America is I think the contingent of Americans who feel safe are white Christians who own guns. Everybody else feels a degree of insecurity whether you're pursued by ICE or you go to a house of prayer that has to be guarded by police to ensure that that's safe. And that exists in America. It exists in the United Kingdom, in France, in other countries around Europe where far-right governments have come to the fore and obviously everybody has read about the recent elections in Germany of a far-right party in the Saxony province and I think in times of economic distress where you have millions of people who've been tens of millions of people who feel they've been left behind. That feeling of despair can easily be whipped up into a horrendous stew by leaders with authoritarian impulses.

Well, Viktor Orban was booted from office and he was riding high a couple of years ago. I think in some places there clearly are pushes to the center which would be I think very consoling for people and a return to some modicum of civility in the various societies in which you know people like us travel. So here in America, clearly the midterms in the next 18 months or after that are really going to shape how we're going to live in the next decade because the last decade has been there's been the imprint of one person on the last decade in America. I think in Britain, the person who's identified with the far right, Nigel Farage, may well have had his best day and his best day may well be behind him. I think it's different in France with Marine Le Pen and the elections next year. It's different in Spain and it's potentially different in Germany.

And I think the three-letter answer is yes. I think it's been true of every form of new media that from the beginning of the printing press. But obviously the internet and mobile telephony has made it far easier to spread false memes and innuendo. But it's a much larger, much more amplified version of what occurred in Germany when radio took off during the 1930s and where the radio waves were dominated by extreme propaganda and racist views and loud lies told frequently.

I suppose I first came across it oddly in Detroit when I was a correspondent for Time magazine and with a colleague I wrote a book about the Chrysler Corporation but more importantly the person who turned around Chrysler at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s and a man who was for a time the best known business figure in America even though today most people struggle to pronounce his last name but he was a gentleman called Lee Iacocca. He was the son of Italian immigrants. And in writing this book, we spent a fair amount of time interviewing Iacocca. And what came through loud and clear was how much as the son of Italian immigrants who'd grown up in Pennsylvania, Lee grew up in Pennsylvania, he felt like an outsider and he worked in the automobile industry and obviously in the upper echelons of the automobile industry where I think he was always viewed with suspicion by most notably when he worked at the Ford Motor Company by Henry Ford II and the other people who obviously everybody had immigrated but who were at some point in their family's history but who were much more members of the establishment and Iacocca never felt like a member of the establishment and became very clear that all of that stemmed from his childhood and then I think as the years went by he began to interpret many of the slights that then fell upon him including not getting the top job at Ford to the fact that he was seen as an Italian immigrant.

Well, I want to answer the previous question a little bit as well about, you know, you asked why I when I've met various people and various founders over the years, spend so much time on their backgrounds. Many of these people are only, you know, 20 years old or 21 years old. You're covering a big percentage. You're not exactly going to be able to ask them about their life in their 50s. So it's just natural. It's to try to understand that. I don't think people grow out of it. I think what happens is that people work with a certain intensity in their late teens and their 20s and maybe their early 30s. And that intensity for a whole variety of reasons diminishes over time. I think that's what changes. The inner being doesn't change. The outward intensity changes.

No, I think it's I try to paint when I have some time and I'm not a good painter, but I really enjoy it. And when you can when at least the way that I paint, you make marks in different parts of the canvas and the marks seem unrelated and you know, maybe it's a color blue here and a color brown there and you're putting these marks and dots on the canvas and there doesn't seem to be any composition there whatsoever. And then eventually in my case the picture comes out and it's bad but there's a picture at the end of it and it's the accumulation of all these different marks and I think that's what happens when you're talking to people about their backgrounds. You're looking for these little dots here and then eventually you put together this portrait for yourself of the individual.

There's one that comes to mind which I've always found quite invariably found quite revealing is to ask somebody if they think back and had a chance to do one thing differently, one action differently, what is it that they would do? And I remember one person we interviewed for Sequoia who burst into tears when I asked that question. And it turned out that he had grown up as the son of an immigrant here in America. He was Hispanic and his father was very proud to have made it here and that his child was bright, his son was bright and he was getting good marks at school. And this fellow probably when he was 12 or so had gone down to a corner grocery store with a pal of his and stolen some candy. And the shopkeeper who knew his father complained to his father and his father took him by the ear, took him back down to the candy store, made him apologize, made him empty his pockets, and the man I interviewed was so chastened, so embarrassed by bringing shame upon his family and his father just burst into tears.

You're a good interviewer. People don't listen to answers very often when they interview people. I think I would have and you know I think every child of parents feels this in one way or another and I felt it as I was writing the book that I was embarrassed and if I could erase one thing it would be some of my interactions and dealings with my parents which I feel ashamed about today. But there's no going back you know I was you know and I spent the first 16, 17 years of my life with them. But there were many things probably that I wish and also when I was a younger man and just encounters with them that I wished had gone differently because I didn't really understand who they were and so be it.

I'm sure that was some of it. Arrogance was probably another part of it, a failure of comprehension of what they themselves had experienced and what had made them who they were, which I didn't understand.

Well, it was more than small deeds. So, this lady that you referred to whom I knew as a child, her name was her first name was Anna. And when my father and uncle were growing up in Munich in the 1920s and the early 1930s, every sort of you know middle class, lower middle class household had a family servant. You know these were the days before washing machines and vacuum cleaners and all the rest of it. Those individuals in these households when children were born invariably became nannies as well. And for my father and my uncle, this lady Anna who was that person in my grandfather's house, she became a surrogate. She was a nanny and she was Roman Catholic and eventually left the employment of my grandparents and she married a railway worker in Bavaria who was also a Roman Catholic. They built their own house with their own hands and she and her husband offered they never forgot the Moritz family. They in the 1930s opened their house to my grandparents and my uncle and father at a time when it became very unpopular to have Jews come stay in rural Bavaria for their holidays. But they did it for as long as possible. They were horrified by the children, these two. They were horrified by the Nazis. They did everything possible to help my grandparents and my father and uncle. And then after the war, my because the feelings were so intense between my father and my uncle and this lady Anna, they went back to Bavaria very soon after the end of the war. And developed this very strong connection with her until she eventually died. And I remember going and staying in her house and the house and the story of this house features in the book as well as a young boy and surrounded by the specters of the Nazi past. But this lady was I think you know what they say at Yad Vashem when they bestow acknowledgements on all the people who help Jews and others during World War II. She was one of the righteous and had this ethical compass that she wouldn't allow anyone else to alter.

Yes. Well, I watched this. This is a spectacular series that came out maybe 12 years ago, shot in France. Maybe it's a six series tale about life in a French village during World War II. And how some people resisted the occupation for as long as possible. Most people remained silent and some became active collaborators with the Nazis. And during COVID when we were all on these long Zoom calls with lots of little pictures of you know 10 other participants that were in the Zoom room. I always used to look at each individual whom I knew on the whole and I kept asking myself, well, if these people had been living in the French village in the 1940s, who would have stayed silent, who would have resisted and who would have been collaborating. It was a private exercise. I didn't tell anybody else about it at the time, obviously, but I knew everybody on these calls well enough to know who had the sort of backbone that this lady that we were just talking about had. And they were always in the minority.

I think it's very rare because bad things happen in countries when most people stay silent. Very few actively resist.

I'd have to think about that. I'd like to think so, but I'm not sure.

I've never felt I'm really good at something. That's not false modesty on my part.

Well, I think everybody is plagued by doubts and maybe competitiveness and no, I've and everything that I may have done and it's a failing on my part. I have a very difficult time celebrating good things and celebrating success. But anyway, back to...

I think it's heritage. I think it's the fact that my mother always felt that disaster was always around the corner and doom was always around the corner. I mean, she died a few weeks before COVID and this, you know, my mother was the predictor of doom and I remember as a kid growing up, she would have listened to the radio and inevitably the talk when we're having breakfast would be about some natural disaster that had occurred or a plane crash or something dreadful around the world. So in a way she died a few weeks before COVID and that was one of the great disasters. I felt sorry for her in a way that she missed COVID because this was the disaster that she'd been predicting or one of the natural disasters that she'd been predicting all her life. So she was cheated out of COVID but I think it's that sort of sense of being one step away from the precipice.

I think I've always felt everything is unfinished and could be improved. And none of it's ever been perfect. So, never a satisfied moment. Sometimes when I paint and compare a painting to what I might have been able to paint 10 years ago or 15 years ago. So I see a road to improvement, but then you go to MoMA or the Met and you're diminished and you're reduced to being an insignificant speck.

No, not necessarily. I think I've because the relationship is different. And so those have been voyages of curiosity where they're the people who should feel proud of their accomplishments. Not me as a bystander.

I think it's family and children and all the moments associated with, you know, and I have Harriet, my wife and I, we have two sons and they're now in their 30s and one of them's got a couple of grandkids. I think it's deeply personal stuff.

So I better give a bit of context to you. I grew up as you know in Britain and when I left college I really wanted to be a journalist and my goal was to work on one of the big at that point what were called the Fleet Street newspapers that this is a long time ago it's 50 years ago that everybody read and there were papers for you know different sections of the population and I wanted to work on one of the biggest, really well-regarded newspapers. But there were trade union rules because the unions had a big clamp down on the way in which they held the operators of these newspapers in a straight jacket. And one of the consequences was that the newspaper editors, they weren't allowed to hire college graduates directly from college because the fear of the unions was that it would impede their ability, interfere with their ability to hire 16 year olds straight out of high school. So the result was that if I'd wanted to go and work on the Times or the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, one of those papers, I would have had to go and spend two or three years working on a small provincial newspaper. And I just didn't really want to do it. I thought it, you know, I was impatient, I was ambitious and all that sort of stuff. And I met this fellow Bill Deeds who was the editor of the Daily Telegraph and was a revered figure in British journalism and had actually in an earlier life been the figure on which Evelyn Waugh had modeled one of his characters in his very sort of famous satirical novel called Scoop. Anyway, Bill Deeds very kindly responded to a letter that I'd written to him applying for a job at the Daily Telegraph and he gave me half an hour in his office in Fleet Street. And I remember it. It was in the winter. It was raining and he told me I asked him for advice and he told me that he what he had wished he had done as a young man was go to America and he encouraged me to move to America and I think that was the most salient I think that really helped propel me head in this direction.

Well, I got very lucky. I got hired by Time, right? And straight out of school and without any work experience and they were as an organization again 50 years or so ago they were very willing to take a risk on a 22 year old or 23 year old without any real prior experience and that was my first big break.

It's a painful part of the past. I had this is a maybe two three years after I joined Time. I'd taken a leave of absence. By then I was working in San Francisco in the bureau there and had taken a leave of absence to write a book about Apple and for a variety of reasons because the magazine didn't have room enough to tell the tale of the private days of Apple which is what I was really interested in doing. And then I was on this leave and I got a call from Time asking me to contribute to a profile of Steve that they wanted to run in what became a very famous edition of Time which was the computer of the year and I think it was the only time in Time's history where they had picked an inanimate object to celebrate for their big annual issue. So I worked on this profile of Steve. Steve was convinced that he was going to be named man of the year. Even though nobody had told him that, confirmed it. Yes or no. But worst of all, the profile which he hated for very good reason, I might say, in his defense, and I was appalled by for different reasons. Severed my relationship with Steve back then at Time these things went through an editorial combine harvester. So what came out in the bail at the end probably didn't resemble very much of the straw that got fed in. And so the whole tone of the piece was malicious and nasty and underhanded. And as I said Steve disliked it and it was one of the reasons I left Time and I felt very disenchanted by the treatment of it all. And you know sadly as a result of that really never repaired the relationship with Steve.

No.

That's a difficult question and I think it's tilted to I'd really have to think about that, Patrick, to give you a really considered answer. You know, the people that I've known who have done incredible, remarkable things are also flawed individuals. And if you get to know them well, you also see that aspect of it. So seeing that up close makes it difficult to hold anybody in awe because you see the flaws as well as all of their accomplishments and virtues.

I think I was I want to be careful here because I respected him. I admired him tremendously. I was well aware of the fact that he had achieved things later obviously as well that I couldn't ever possibly have accomplished. But I think I knew some of the darker shades of him which made it difficult to hold him up as an object of unalloyed admiration, but he's a heroic figure obviously.

You see it now and this goes in generations. The monomomania when it comes to creating anything of value, it could be a piece of music, it could be a book, it could be a painting, it could be a company, complete obsession with the topic at hand and locking out the rest of the world and eliminating every unnecessary distraction I think is what and I think those are and again there are downsides to this people get hurt along the way there isn't enough time for families or others or friends because of the monomomania that you refer to and but then great things sometimes come out of it.

I suspect the answer is yes. Or maybe for some of these people feeling that they may have like lived life differently if they had to live it over again because there were consequences to this monomomania. But yes, clearly relationships. Evelyn Waugh this you know people don't really know him today but a very famous British author who was capable of writing 10,000 words a week with ease which 10,000 good words not rubbish. He said the greatest enemy to good art is the sight of the pram the stroller in today's parlance is the sight of the stroller in the hallway.

Mhm.

Frank Auerbach has never got the recognition in this country that he deserves. Although there's a retrospective of him coming here in the next two years to very significant museums around the country here. So he was a refugee from Nazi Germany. He died maybe 5 years or so ago and I didn't know him.

Well, but I got to know him a little bit and he was a complete obsessive, completely obsessed with his art. He painted every day except he treated himself to a day, one holiday for many, many years. He treated himself to one day off a year. And every year he'd go to Brighton where there's a famous pier, it's on the south coast of England, and take the day off on Christmas Day. Every other day of the year, he worked. And I remember once talking to him, his wife had a house out on the English coast. And I asked him once at a dinner. I said, 'So, do you ever go out and visit Julia, your wife?' He said, 'I've never been to the house.' And then now this is probably 10 years ago.

We were chatting and he was asking me where and we were talking about New York came up and he said, 'I love New York City. I just love it. It's so bustling with energy and going to Times Square and all the rest of it.' And so this conversation was maybe in 2012, 2013. And so I said, 'Oh, Frank, when was the last time you were in New York?' Because he said, 'Oh, yeah. I went there in 1967.' And he had this routine where he had, and I knew some of these people who posed for him or know some of these people that actually I think that all of his subjects are still alive. They posed for him once a week. He had this regular coterie of sitters and he painted these same individuals for his figurative work over the course of 30, 40 years. And there's one of the subjects who lived in Venice of all places who once a week flew to London for his session with Frank because I think the sitters found it like therapy sitting for Frank. But he'd go into an utter meltdown if the sitter was late. And then similarly with his landscape paintings, he painted the same landscape over and over and over again interpreting it. But he lived for art and really there was no time for, he had a son Jake, but there was no time for anything else.

It's nice to have a mixture of friends and acquaintances, some of whom have tied themselves to a particular mast, others who are prepared to wander around and live life more casually. But I've always found it difficult, more difficult to be around people who, and I like them and enjoy being with them, but who appear to be doing nothing.

So Don was the founder of Sequoia and he took a risk on me in around 1985 and hired me to join Sequoia when Sequoia was a very small firm. I mean, we're sitting around this table here in your studio and it's probably large enough to accommodate all of the people who worked for Sequoia at that point. And I was a journalist, had been a journalist, but wanted to get into the venture business because I'd become interested by it and had met some of the people who were running these firms, all of which were very small at the time, and had written to five of them. This was in the days when you didn't send emails, you actually wrote letters and had gone to see each of them. They were kind enough to give me some time. All said, 'We don't really know what to do with you because you don't have a technical background. You don't have an engineering degree of any sort. You don't really have any technical knowledge. You don't have any work experience in a Silicon Valley kind of company and you've been a journalist so maybe you should go and find a role in public relations or marketing or something like that,' which was not exactly what I wanted to do. And Don was more willing to take a risk and the reason was fairly straightforward because he had seen people that he expected because they had big operating backgrounds in technology companies, a few of them come into the venture business and not be very successful. And then he was aware of some who had carved out very successful lives as investors. There was a fellow called Tommy Davis, I think, who started a fund called the Mayfield Fund. There was another guy who'd been an insurance actuary, but the one that Don pointed to more than anybody else was a gentleman called Arthur Rock who just celebrated his 100th birthday. And Arthur had organized, he was a banker, commercial banker or investment banker at a small boutique here in New York called Hayden Stone. This is back in the 1950s. He had had the moxie to organize the original breakout and financing of Fairchild Semiconductor. And then in the 1960s, people won't know the names anymore, but he had helped finance Teledyne, scientific...

Huh?

Henry Singleton and scientific, Henry Singleton who later became one of the early board members at, first board members at Apple, scientific data systems and then became the chairman and original investor in Intel day one and then a few years later backed Apple. And Don said, 'Look, there's nothing in his background that would have suggested he'd be successful.' And so that was the main reason.

A job.

Don didn't believe in teaching. He believed in throwing people into, he had a survivalist instinct. So he just believed in tossing people into the deep end and see if they drowned. But I learned a lot by observation and listening and good things and bad things. And there was another gentleman at Sequoia named Pierre Lamond who was a very formative, who played a huge role in the rise of the semiconductor industry. And he too was something of an influence, but it was being in the middle of that milieu and watching good things happen and bad things happen and gradually trying to form my own opinions about things.