Sebastian Mallaby: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why has Mike Moritz been so good at VC? That’s a great question. I think he was willing to do two things. When it came to company founders, he had the ability to enlarge their sense of themselves. He could intuit what they were doing. He could get on people’s wavelength and not only understand them, but understand them better than they understood themselves, and see more potential in their project than even they saw when they looked at it. The first example of this is Yahoo, where Jerry Yang and David Filo were in their port-a-cabin on the Stanford campus. They thought they were building a hobby-type thing, and they were proud of Yahoo as a directory of the emerging internet. But Moritz showed up, listened, understood, and said, “This is the new Apple. You are going to make something with a quirky name. Apple was quirky, Yahoo is quirky. You’re going to have a brand, and you’re going to be the face of a new phase in tech history.” He enlarged their sense of themselves. He was just great at delivering that kind of call-to-greatness speech. He sat down at PayPal with one of the founders of PayPal, who was resisting the idea of a merger with the Elon Musk rival, which was called X.com. He said to him, “Listen, if you do this merger, I will never sell stock in the company, and you will build something that makes history in the Valley.” That call to greatness was inspiring. That’s one thing, that EQ [emotional quotient] to get the best out of people and make them be even more ambitious than they already were. The other thing Mike Moritz did is, he risked the franchise of Sequoia. He did, a bit, what I was talking about before. He was willing to go into China, which was a whole different challenge, go through a period when he had to fire the co-founder of Sequoia China because it wasn’t working out, but stick with it. If you ask the question, what is the top venture capital company in China, the answer is Sequoia China. It’s the same as the answer to the question, what’s the top venture capital company in Silicon Valley? It’s Sequoia. Mike Moritz was able — But that’s a bit anti-clustering, that point, right?…

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