Back when telephone directories were distributed in, you know, in a fairly thick book, I always remember going through the pages hoping, hoping, hoping that we weren't the only Moritz listed in the Cardiff and South Wales telephone directory. But every year that I remember, we were the only Moritz. And that more than anything signaled to me, for some reason, that goodness, here we were, and the telephone directory was advertising the fact that we were outsiders.
Hi there. It's wonderful to see you again on the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast. Our guest today is one of the most successful investors of all time, a legendary venture capitalist named Sir Michael Moritz, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes at more than $7 billion. As you'll hear, he and his colleagues at Sequoia Capital racked up astonishing returns by investing very early in businesses like Nvidia, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, PayPal, Stripe, and LinkedIn. Moritz was incredibly far-sighted in identifying some of the most successful corporate founders of all time. But he also had another secret: the patience to hold on to his winning investments and never sell. Charlie Munger once told me that this temperamental advantage helped to explain why Moritz outperformed pretty much all of his peers.
But before we get to my conversation with Michael Moritz, I also wanted to mention quickly that I still have several open spaces in my Richer, Wiser, Happier masterclass, which begins in December. This is an opportunity to study with me over the course of a year in a very small, intimate group that's likely to be somewhere between 10 and 20 people. We'll meet once a month over Zoom, and we'll also get together in person at a couple of unique events. The aim is to create a year-long journey of exploration to help you move toward a life that is truly richer, wiser, and happier. We'll talk in depth about how we can actually apply in our own lives the lessons I've learned from great investors like Sir John Templeton, Charlie Munger, Howard Marks, Bill Miller, and Nick Sleep — not just lessons about how to build enduring wealth, but about how to think and how to live.
This will be the third year in a row that I've hosted a Richer, Wiser, Happier masterclass, and I'm planning to make this my final offering of the class. The first two groups include an amazingly accomplished selection of people from around the world, including some hugely successful hedge fund managers and mutual fund managers, asset allocators, wealth advisers, managers of family offices, a medical doctor, a management consultant, several CEOs and entrepreneurs, and even a renowned physicist turned quant manager. But what matters most to me is that they're an unusually thoughtful, soulful group of people who love learning from one another and sharing insights about investing, business, and life.
If you're a keen investor and a passionate learner and would like to know more about the masterclass, please feel free to contact my friend and fellow podcast host Kyle Grieve, and he can answer any questions you might have about dates, prices, and the like. His email address is kyle. That's k-y-l-e,
[email protected]. I'm totally biased, but I think this is a really rare opportunity to become a better investor, to think more deeply about how you want to live, and to build rich friendships with a very special group of people. If this idea appeals to you, please reach out to Kyle. And if the stars align, I'd love to see you in December. And now, back to the show.
Hi folks, I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome today's guest, Sir Michael Moritz, who's arguably the most successful venture capitalist of all time. He spent about 38 years at Sequoia Capital, playing an important role in the firm's investments in early stage businesses like Yahoo, Google, YouTube, PayPal, Airbnb, Zappos, Klarna, LinkedIn, Instacart, and Stripe. For good measure, he's also a terrific writer with an excellent new book that's just been published here in the US. I have the UK edition here, but it's a terrific book. A few years ago, I asked Charlie Munger who were the most interesting investors that I should try to interview, and Charlie named one person: Michael Moritz. As Charlie put it, several times he kept repeating the same phrase: 'I think you'll find Mike Moritz quite interesting.' So, welcome, Michael. It's wonderful to meet you finally.
Oh, well, thank you for a very generous introduction. I think Charlie must have been having one of his weaker moments.
He was not an easy man to impress. So we'll discuss some of the things specifically that he said later. Your new book is really fascinating. Ausländer. It's a German word that I gather means foreigner or outsider or alien. And I wanted to start by talking about your early life in Wales. I think you were born in 1954, if I remember correctly. And I'm wondering if you could paint a picture for us of what it was like there to grow up as a Jewish boy in Cardiff in the 1950s and early 60s. What it looked like, what it felt like, and why you as well as many other members of your family had this sense of being an outsider.
As you said, I was born in Cardiff. When you look at it fairly quickly after the end of World War II — seven or eight years — and both of my parents, they had married elsewhere, but when my father got a job at the University of Wales in Cardiff, they moved to Cardiff. Both my parents were refugees from Nazi Germany. My father had got out and was sent to school in Britain in 1937. My mother got out of Germany on something called the Kindertransport in 1939. And in the early 1950s in Britain writ large, and I think probably even more so in Wales, Britain was not the multicultural society that it is today.
There were a very small number of immigrants to Britain. There was obviously the Windrush generation in the early 50s from the Caribbean, but those mainly congregated around London. And the Welsh population was perhaps two and a half million or so — two and a half to three million — and there were about somewhere between 450 and 600 Jewish families in Wales at the time that I grew up. So I think as soon as I became conscious of the fact that I was different in some manner from the children that I went to school with, my friends at school, I became aware of the fact that we weren't like other people. And I can tell you one little story which for me has always highlighted and accentuated the difference.
There are plenty of other examples, but the one that always sticks in my mind is, of all things, the arrival of the annual edition of the new telephone directory. And back when telephone directories were distributed in a fairly thick book, and I always remember leafing through this. I was probably in my early teens at the time, going through the pages, and they were just packed with surnames that were associated with being Welsh. And the name may have been Davis or Evans or Edwards or Jones or Hughes or Williams or Lloyd or other surnames that were unmistakably of Welsh lineage. Morris was another. And then I would go to the M's in the telephone book, hoping, hoping, hoping that we weren't the only Moritz listed in the Cardiff and South Wales telephone directory. But every year that I remember, we were the only Moritz. And that more than anything signaled to me, for some reason, that goodness, here we were, and the telephone directory was advertising the fact that we were outsiders.
This whole issue of names is really intriguing. And your father, as you write in the book, was simultaneously Ludvig and Alfred. And so names sort of point to a little bit of a double life in a way, a change of identity. I wondered if you could tell us more about him, because he was clearly a remarkable man, kind of a solemn man, but with every reason to be solemn, and also very brilliant. And I'd love you to tell the story of his arrival in England, which also — I mean, I'm curious partly because he went to St. Paul's and I went to the preparatory school called Ludgrove, but also just the brilliance of the man, his ability to learn English and settle in, and also the generosity of the people who took a chance on him and made it possible for him actually to leave Germany in 1937.
So to give you a bit of background, he had one brother. Both of them were born in the early 1920s in Munich. Their mother was a homekeeper in the days when there wasn't much homekeeping to do because every sort of bourgeois family had a housekeeper. And their father, whose name was Max Maximilian, was a lower-level judge in the Bavarian judiciary. And Max had, like a lot of other German Jews, served in the German army in World War I and had been given an Iron Cross, and then after the end of the war he returned to the judiciary. Now come the 1930s, he lost his job. Being a Jew, he was dismissed despite the fact that he had served the state previously. And by the mid-1930s, the storms were obviously gathering for Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe, and Max and his wife decided to send both my father and my uncle, try to get them to school in Britain.
But the only way they could do it, because it was so hard and, you know, these people didn't have a lot of money anyway, and it was very difficult to get money out of Germany if you were Jewish back then, both of their boys had to get scholarships, otherwise they couldn't afford to be in a school in Britain. And as you mentioned, St. Paul's School provided my father with a scholarship. He arrived there at the age of about 14, 15, not speaking a word of English, and his handwriting was the copperplate handwriting that you associate with a German education of that particular era. And he had been brought by his father to England and deposited at St. Paul's, where, as I said, he didn't speak a word of English, nor did he know a soul. And he wasn't put up in a school dormitory. He was put up in what the British call digs, in a tiny little apartment. And I don't know how it survived the war, but I came across a postcard that he had written to his mother announcing that he was safely ensconced in this little room in West London. And I can't imagine the loneliness that must have accompanied the dispatch of that card.
So that was how he came to arrive in Britain. And I remember, as you said, he had a fairly solemn demeanor. The exercise he undertook was mental, not physical exercise, but he was very active with mental exercise, and he was a man of the mind. And later on, he became a classicist. He had studied those subjects in the gymnasiums in Munich that were heavily tilted towards Latin and Greek and mathematics and philosophy. And I remember him saying once, in one of the few things that he said about his recollections of that era, that one of his proudest moments in life was when he was able to raise his hand in the classroom for the first time and participate in the classroom discussion and ask a question in English.
And he excelled at St. Paul's, to which I think he always felt deep association and enormously grateful that the school, this really wonderful school, had come up with the scholarship for him. And then a bit later on, he won the scholarship to Oxford to study classics. Again, a revelatory comment that my father made once when I asked him what was the happiest day of your life, thinking it would be when he married my mother or when perhaps I, as his firstborn child, was born. He said the happiest day of his life was hearing the news that he had been admitted as a scholar in Oxford. And the reason for that was, had he not won that scholarship to Oxford, he had no means of sustenance or support in Britain, and he would have been shipped back to Germany. And so that was the beginning of my father's life, where he wound up for many years later on as an academic.
I was very moved also reading the book, just seeing that there were these people like this largely forgotten British benefactor, Janet Franklin Cohen, who I think was not Jewish but had married a Jew, who basically was the British benefactor who initially guaranteed that your father's fees would be paid. And so I think what's kind of extraordinary, and that has a lot of resonance in your life as well as someone who's been a great donor to various universities, is the fact that there were these people who kind of came forward out of nowhere. I think your uncle as well, Ernest, your father's brother. I remember there was a lovely story where he's walking along Bond Street and has a chance meeting with another immigrant who's a vague family acquaintance, and that person pays for his first year at school, which I think you said made him believe in God for the rest of his life. Can you talk about that? Because I think that something really extraordinary about the fact that your family and your success is actually entirely built on these sort of random acts of kindness of strangers who stepped up.
Some random, some purposeful, but you're exactly right. And just to flesh out the story about my uncle, as I mentioned a moment ago, Max had deposited my father at St. Paul's in London. He then returned to Germany to do the same for my uncle. And there was a school in Brighton, on the south coast of England, that my father knew about. It was a school for Jewish boys, but they had no means of paying for the education there. And I think both my uncle Ernest and my grandfather Max were, as Ernest told the story, sort of out of luck, despondent, and for some reason walking down Bond Street, which is an unlikely place even then for a pair of refugees to be walking, when, as you said, they bumped into this acquaintance, and my grandfather explained the predicament that they had a slot at the school, a place at the school, but they didn't have the means to pay for it. And this gentleman, whose name I tried very hard to find out but couldn't find out, stepped forward and paid for it.
And then there were all these other people in Britain who in one way or another opened their hearts, their homes, their pocketbooks to these refugees. You mentioned this lady Janet Franklin Cohen who was very active in all of this. Many of these people were not Jewish. The one that the history books eventually caught up with, and perhaps the most notable, was this extremely modest, reticent man named Nicholas Winton, who organized the Kindertransport that I mentioned at the beginning of this interview, which transported about 10,000 Jewish children out of Nazi-threatened and Nazi Germany and the other territories that in the 30s the Nazis had conquered. And my mother came out on the Kindertransport. Now, Nicholas Winton also was not Jewish. And then my mother, she and her sister were taken in by a lady in Cambridge who took care of them during much of the war years.
Now, there were obviously a whole bunch of Britons as well who had a different point of view and were less welcoming, but I think the immigrant population from the Nazi period that wound up in Britain is forever grateful for Britain. And you've got to remember that at that era, there were only two kinds of countries. The one kind wanted to get rid of the Jews, and the other kind didn't want to accept any Jews. And Britain, with some caveats, was a big exception to that. France was very hostile. Spain was hostile. Continental Europe as a whole was extremely hostile. It was very difficult. There was great anti-immigrant sentiment, not just for Jews but writ large, in the America of the 1930s. So all of these people who stepped forward, many of them without the means, to rescue these hapless people, I feel incredibly indebted to them.
And your mother literally arrived very shortly before war broke out. And she was a very intriguing and important character in your life. Your mother Doris, she had left school I think at 15. This is a lady who died in 2019. But she was obviously very formidable, defiant, resilient, but also really difficult. And I wondered if you could give us a sense of what it was like to grow up in a household with this father who had lost his parents in the Holocaust and was very, very smart but emotionally kind of detached, and this mother who you write about her verbal violence and her pessimism and the like. I mean, it must have been, as you wrote about your family in Ausländer, you must have started to understand, oh, that's the environment in which I grew up, and that's why they were as they were. Can you give us a sense of, as you look back now, what that environment was like, this sort of emotional territory, this landscape in which you were being reared?
As you said, my mother actually arrived in Britain on a Kindertransport. She arrived in Britain on April the 20th, 1939, which coincidentally was the same month and date that my father had arrived in Britain two years earlier. And the darker coincidence of that particular date is that it was Hitler's birthday. My mother's parents got out of Germany three days before war broke out in 1939. So my mother preceded them by a few months. And to address the question that you asked, William, I had not set out to write a family memoir at all. It was not what I ever thought about. But three things happened. My mother died shortly before the outbreak of COVID. My sister cleared out the house in Cardiff in Wales and put the documents and papers that she found — a few photograph albums, passports and ID cards, those sorts of things — she put them in, I think it was four cardboard cartons, and shipped them to me.
And I started sifting through that and through those papers, and COVID had given me a lot more time to indulge myself. And part of writing the book, again coming back to the question that you asked, was not just a discovery, because obviously I knew the broad arc of my parents' background, but discovering all the details about them, all the details that I hadn't heard, that they hadn't told me, but then as something of a benefit, understanding for good and for bad how I became who I am, very much shaped by what you were mentioning, which was the atmosphere in which I grew up. And I had no doubt whatsoever that my parents wanted the best for me and my sister. No doubt about it whatsoever. But they were heavily scarred by all the experiences of what they had gone through, which is I think natural for anybody who has had the rug on which they have grown up and which is familiar to them and on which they have trodden every day pulled out rudely and wickedly from underneath their feet. And then obviously the horrors of World War II, in which tens of millions of people were caught up and in which many of our family members perished, left an indelible mark on their psyche.
And this was also Britain of the 1950s and the Britain of the 1960s and 1970s, where seeking psychiatric help for depression and acute anxiety was considered beyond the pale and a sign of great weakness. So they never went on the journey exploring why they did certain things. But even though obviously World War II and what had come before were not subjects of daily conversation in the household, the sense of the fact that horror could recur, and if it had happened once it could happen again, colored their whole existence and never left. And it's hard to convey the sort of reverberations and vibrations of that tenseness and that anxiety and that suspicion of the motives of others, or the suspicion of others in general, that accompanies that sort of background emotional tapestry.
It was obviously hugely challenging in certain ways for you, and at the same time, presumably, if your parents had been more warm and nurturing and more emotionally available, you might well not have had the same fire. This sense of never being able to be enough for your mother, for example. And I'm wondering, like, when you look back on those early years and you think about the success that you would achieve later, to what extent it unconsciously set you up for success, but to what extent maybe it also set you up to have to do quite a lot of work to be happy and to be a good parent and the like.
Well, I want to be careful because I've been so lucky and I've been so fortunate. I don't want any of this to come across as self-pity whatsoever. Not self-pity about, in a way, you know, obviously I was very fortunate. I grew up in a household where my parents valued education. They did everything possible within their means to, as I said, to help me. Nor do I want this to come across as self-pity for just happening to be a member of a minority. Not at all. I feel fortunate to have been a member of both. But I think you're absolutely right that like lots of people — I mean, you read about tiger moms today, and I have a lot of Asian-American friends who regale me with tales of their mothers in particular being just absolutely unrelenting. He's a first-generation immigrant from the mainland, or people from India where it was the same sort of emphasis on education and with the children never being good enough. So that was the culture and environment in which I grew up.
But I think you're absolutely right. There are two things that came out of all of that. One was the experience my parents had of getting through World War II, and then even though they took great exception to the word 'survivor' being used in association with them — and we can talk about that if you want — but having survived that, they were very focused on survival, number one. And then secondly, my mother had exceptional grit, and I think both of those things were imprinted on me. One, the need to survive, and then the second about never giving up. Never, ever, ever giving up, even if you've been rejected, even if something that you've tried hasn't worked the first few times, is just to have the grit, the staying power, the tenacity, the persistence to continue to believe.
I ran into someone at a birthday party last night who by chance had worked with you at Sequoia, and I was asking him, and he was very flattering about you. One word he used to describe you was relentless. And I was very struck when I was doing my research on you over the last week that there was this famous thing where you had asked your colleagues at Sequoia to print the phrase 'We're only as good as our next investment' on the back of their business cards. And so it does seem like that sense of relentlessness, drive, slight paranoia about the fear of disruption and the danger of complacency and hubris, that seems very central to your character.
Yes, absolutely. I don't have — my sort of little private office here in San Francisco — I have and never have had any of the ornaments of any of the companies or successes with which Sequoia or I have been associated. I've never displayed them anywhere. I haven't displayed them in my office. I haven't displayed them at home. Partly because I think they're — I mean, they're nice little trappings, but they're irrelevant. But this comes back to the notion of surviving and grit and what happens if you, to use your word, relent for a single moment. If you're in any sort of pursuit — I mean, you could be pursuing academic studies, you could be seeking to be a fine sporting star, you could be running a large company or heading an investment firm — you'll find that the tone and tenor of those organizations is set from the top, and they come to reflect the character of the individual who is there. You know it from all the interviews that you've done. We all know it, particularly people who've read books about the formation and the growth and maybe the collapse of particular companies, the importance of the leader setting the tone.
You went to this relatively ordinary state school in Cardiff and then managed to win a place at Christ Church College at Oxford, which is in many ways the poshest and most prestigious of Oxford colleges. I think you were probably the only student in your year to go to Oxford. And I wonder if I could get a sense of what that experience of leaving Wales around the time you turned 19 and never really coming back and going to Oxford was like — going into this new world, being vaulted into this new world, into a college that was particularly famous for history, having had professors like Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper and the like. And it must have been a very transformative period for you. And presumably in some ways the things that you learned at Oxford about how to distill information, how to gather information, how to learn would become hugely important to you later as an investor.
Several things. First of all, travel back in the 60s was a lot harder than it is today. In Britain, there weren't the equivalent of American freeways. Obviously, there was no low-cost airfare anywhere. My parents had done their very best. They had a little camper van to take my sister and myself to continental Europe, and we did that a few times. But for the most part, Cardiff was central to my existence. I think I've been to London maybe — before I went to Oxford, I think I've been to London maybe twice, and that was about it. So going from Wales to Oxford was a big leap geographically. Obviously it isn't very far, but it was a big leap in different ways. Number one was the milieu into which I was catapulted. And this is a long time ago now. This is more than 50 years ago. So the colleges have changed tremendously. But this was men only, or boys, teenagers, men only. Curfews at midnight where the college gates were shut to prevent the invasion of the other sex. So that was one aspect of it.
The second aspect was the intake at Christ Church back then was different to what it is today. So that there were a lot of places earmarked for what in America are private schools, but what in Britain they call public schools. So the public schools being places like Eton and Rugby and St. Paul's and Westminster and a bunch of others. So all of these students who arrived at Oxford, they immediately had people that they knew who they'd been to school with, or if they weren't at Christ Church, they knew them from — or their pals were at other Oxford colleges. So they had this social circle that for them was built in, that was non-existent for me. I didn't know anybody else there. So there was that aspect of feeling pretty strange in this environment where the graces were said every night in Latin by a public school boy with a very, you know, British or English oratorical, upper-class accent. It seemed very, very strange. And this was also — Christ Church is a cathedral school, so it's got a cathedral in its grounds. So it was, you know, a highly Protestant establishment.
And then obviously there was the tutorial system, which I only came to recognize later all of the benefits I got from one-on-one tuition over the course of my three years at Oxford with probably half a dozen different tutors, and how well, in retrospect — I didn't realize it at the time — that set me up for life, both as a journalist and as an investor.
Is it mainly this capacity to tackle a new subject and get your hands around it? I went to Oriel, just my dad went to Christ Church. I was at Oriel, which was right next door to you, and I studied English literature. And for me still, I find, 40-something years later, the great benefit is that you were forced every week to go tackle a new subject that you knew nothing about and go read in the Bodleian library and the like, and just kind of try to figure it out and then try to distill information. And in a way, it's so much the opposite of what AI is developing in us.
Now, you're exactly right. I felt my life as an investor was helped immeasurably, as I said, even though I didn't realize it, by my time at Oxford and then my time as a journalist at Time magazine. And, you know, for listeners who are not familiar with the tutorial system at Oxford, a little bit of context: a student would go and visit his — back then, tutor — and have a meeting once a week, and the tutor would pose a question and prescribe a number of books that he suggested you read in preparation for writing an essay of maybe two or three thousand words, I forget, on addressing the question. And as you said, those essays were set about questions that I didn't know anything about. And the challenge was to try and absorb as much information as possible from the books that had been prescribed and perhaps other stuff that you tripped across, and then try to make sense of it in your own mind and then construct a plausible argument for the answer to the question that posed, based on imperfect information, based on the fact that at the beginning of the week you knew nothing about the topic at hand. And then coming back to, in those days, read the essay out loud to the tutor, who would then give you his responses and assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the answer.
And if you — for me, if I fast-forwarded a couple of years and think about my life at Time magazine, it was very much the same. I was a general assignment reporter. Every week there'd be a new story that would be assigned or I would need to dive into, invariably on a topic or subject or organization that I knew nothing about. And it was the exact same process, although there weren't prescribed books to read, but instead of which there were people to call and interviews to have and to make, and try to piece together the information germane to the story and then come up with a synthesis of it and try to distill it in a story that addressed the topic previously. And in both cases, the essay at Oxford, the story at Time, both of them were based on imperfect information. You could always do more research. You could always talk to more people, but at some point, based on the imperfect information that you gathered and collected, you had to sit down and write an essay or write a story.
And that is very — in my mind, that is very similar to the venture business, where if you're investing in a small company, in people that you don't really know, usually in a field that is new, that you don't really know, you're never going to — you will never wind up with perfect information before you have to make an investment decision. And I never really struggled with that for the reasons that we've just talked about. I think people — my experience anyway is that people with engineering backgrounds, and many of them are brilliant and spectacular investors, but they always had much more of a struggle with it than did I. There was always this piece of information that they were yearning for before they could make a decision about something. And I was liberated from that sense of imperfection. I was quite happy understanding that we're never going to have perfect information, and imperfection is what we traffic in.
I want to talk more in more detail about your time at Time magazine because it's really important, really formative, and as you know, in one of the odd overlaps in our career, I also went from Oxford and later I ended up being at Time magazine. But I'm curious also about the journey that took you to Time, because you moved to the US, I think, in 1976 as a 22-year-old kid to get your MBA at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, and went from there to Time magazine. But your path from Wharton to Time oddly involved the great Philip Roth. Tell us how this happened, because it's such a strange and unlikely turn of events.
Well, talk about — we were talking minutes ago about the kindness of strangers. So I never really intended to go to business school. What had happened was I won a scholarship, a very, very generous scholarship financed by a family called the Tuds, who were descendants of the DuPonts that was associated with the University of Pennsylvania. And I had gone there with the idea of doing a history master's degree. And I went to the history classes for a couple of weeks, and compared to what I'd been used to at Oxford, these seemed so lame and so weak that I was despaired. And the history master's was also only a one-year course. I thought, I can't — I just can't stick it out for a year, but this scholarship is so wonderfully generous. And obviously the business school at that point was a two-year course, and so I applied for a transfer to the business school and got into the business school.
Now, I was hopelessly unsuited to go to business school. I was 22 years old. Most of the people, all of the people who were at business school were several years older than me. They all had work experience. They were all up to their eyeballs in debt in order to be able to get through it. And I didn't like Wharton at all. It's a reflection on me, not the school. I was just ill-equipped and really uninterested in what it was that they had on offer. So to revert to how Philip Roth came into my life, there were a series of elective courses that you could do as an MBA student. And I signed up for as many in the English literature area as I possibly could. And lo and behold, I couldn't believe my good fortune. One of the giants of American letters of the 20th century, a fellow whose books I devoured when I was in Britain, none other than Philip Roth, author of — obviously everybody knows, well, people used to know — Portnoy's Complaint, was teaching a small seminar class at Penn, and I signed up for that class. I did it twice. He was teaching a different, subsequent class, and had a wickedly wonderful time in it.
And then when it was time to approach Time for a job and I needed references, I asked Philip for a reference, not expecting him to say that he would give me one. And he said he would be happy to do so. I said, 'Oh, thank you very much. And, you know, if you were just to type it out, I will go and get, I think the term in those days was a photostat or a Xerox of it.' He said, 'No need. I use carbon paper.' And so among the references that I sent to Time was one from this distinguished man of letters, Philip Roth. And then later on, in an odd way, he came back into our lives through one of our closest friends in New York. So there was then this happy coincidence many years later of us, for several years, spending Thanksgiving with a group of friends of whom Philip was one.
I could very happily spend the rest of the interview talking to you about Philip Roth, who I adore, and I think 'Sabbath's Theater' is one of the great novels of the 20th century. It is just fantastic. I went to his 80th birthday party, which he held in the Newark Public Library because he had grown up in Newark.
And it began with a high school Newark marching band marching down the aisle of this auditorium in the Newark public library. And then there were readings from a whole variety of distinguished writers — Edna O'Brien is one of the writers that I remember who read there — and Philip was sitting dressed in black in the front row. And then to conclude the evening, he sat behind a table and read an excerpt from the book that you just mentioned, Sabbath's Theater, which is a wickedly funny book and devastating and deplorable and decadent and all the other — all the other — and distressing. All — I mean, it's interesting to me. I have to resist going further into this, because I'll get so sidetracked. But yeah, I mean, he's an extraordinary writer.
So you end up at Time with the help of the great Philip Roth, and you end up there from, I think, 1979 to '84, working as the San Francisco bureau chief, covering companies like Microsoft and Apple in their infancy. I worked at Time from 2001 to 2008, so a very different era, but I fell down this rabbit hole over the last couple of days and was reading some of your old stories for Time. And I was really struck by your coverage of Bill Gates, first in a shorter 1981 story when Gates was about 24 years old, and then much more significantly in a 1984 profile called "A Hardcore Technoid." And in a way, it's a really important period because it's your introduction through him and then through Steve Jobs, who you also wrote about, who we'll talk about more in a few minutes. It's your introduction to this generation of extraordinary trailblazing founders, which very much will lead us to your career at Sequoia. So I wondered if, looking back on your experiences of interviewing Bill Gates back in those early days, if you could just give us a sense of what it was like, not least your extraordinary story of being driven to the airport by him.
