Sir Michael Moritz on ‘Auslander,’ Identity and Life as an Outsider

13:33So that's how the book came about.

13:36Kara Swisher:Right, because of these boxes. And you wrote, quote, the entire heritage of what we knew about our shattered family was in them. Is there something that you pulled out? I just recently got a box. My dad died when I was very young, and my aunt recently died, and I got a box of stuff of his. And I pulled one thing out that was disturbing, which was that he was in a play where he was in blackface, which was astonishing. This was in West Virginia in the 1950s, early 1950s, so it's not a surprise. But is there something you pulled out that made you say, this is actually a book? I've looked through them, and I haven't thought, wow, I should write a book here.

14:13Sir Michael Moritz:Well, there were two or three things. Let me tell you about them. that made it much more vivid and helped me assemble some of the pieces. So I had the brother of my paternal grandfather. There was a photograph of him that had survived in the files of the Gestapo. And the Gestapo were not supposed to take photographs of what they were doing to the Jews that they rounded up. But some smart aleck had taken photographs to present to his commanding officer. And so there was a photograph of my granddaddy, Uncle Oscar. It was the last photograph, obviously, taken of him stepping off a bus after he had been rounded up with the other people who lived in his little village.

15:02So that was one thing that brought everything to life for me.

15:09Sir Michael Moritz:Right, that there he was. You can imagine. Can you just imagine? Even though the photo was in black and white, all of this stuff is about bringing color into the story. So that was one thing. Then a different scene was my father had been saved from the horrors because he was sent to school in England. And then in 1940, after the British government felt that they were in profound danger of being overrun by the Nazis after the Nazis had swept across Western Europe. They rounded up all the enemy aliens. And on the whole, these were people of German or Italian descent who hadn't been granted citizenry and were labeled enemy aliens, irrespective of whether they supported Mussolini or were Jewish or Nazis.

16:04Kara Swisher:Familiar in this country, Japanese, it goes on and on.

16:07Sir Michael Moritz:You're exactly right. You're exactly right. So my father had been rounded up and then shipped off to an internment camp on an island called the Isle of Man on the west coast of Britain. And again, I was sifting through archives and found, as you do in archival searches, one footnote leads you to another thing. And I found a trove of black and white photographs in the Tate archives in Britain. And I was, you know, really, you know, I was engrossed here. Because my father talked about being interned, but I'd never heard any of the details. And there, I found, in two of the photographs, pictures of my father behind a barbed wire fence.

16:55Kara Swisher:Right, in the internment camp.

16:57Sir Michael Moritz:In the internment camp. And then the other thing that really surprised me was after the—I had two sets of grandparents. Obviously, my paternal grandparents were murdered. My maternal grandparents got out of Germany three days before the outbreak of war. Right, right.

17:17Kara Swisher:Sally and Louise.

17:18Sir Michael Moritz:Yeah, and Louise. And after the war, there were copies of letters that my surviving grandfather sent to people that he knew in the farming village in which he had been born and grown up and, you know, had a small cattle. This is in Bavaria or Rhineland? The Rhineland, northwestern Germany, near the Dutch border.

17:46Kara Swisher:Okay.

17:46Sir Michael Moritz:And those letters moved me intensely because they were full of understanding, compassion, and forgiveness for what his friends had endured. These were non-Jewish friends. And thanking them profusely for the help that they had provided to him before the war. Now, he was clear-eyed about this. He knew who the bad people were. And, you know, I grew up in an era in Britain in the 60s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, where anything associated with Germany, anything, anyone, any individual, was considered an enemy. And so here to read my grandfather's letters within two, three years after the end of World War II, it taught me a lot about the need for understanding of others and the predicament that they were in.

18:49Kara Swisher:But they hadn't told you this. You say nothing about your parents' early lives, and they didn't explore their past, and here you are doing this.

18:59Sir Michael Moritz:I think for many people of that generation, the wounds were so deep. and even though obviously my mother had gotten out of Germany in 1939, my father in 1937. But they also didn't know whether they were going to get permanent residency in Britain or whether they were going to be shipped back to Germany, so there was an element of uncertainty about it. But I think it was a whole mixture of things that's probably very common. and I'm no expert in the psychology of grief, but I think it was a desire to move on, to assimilate.

19:44Kara Swisher:Right.

19:47Sir Michael Moritz:And to not get enveloped too much by the past. But it was always, for both of them, it was always, I think, mentally just a half step away, but they could never come to terms with it.

20:02Kara Swisher:You said they didn't view themselves as survivors of the Holocaust, and they rejected the label. And do you think it also contributes their inability to grieve, as you say?

20:11Sir Michael Moritz:Maybe. For them, survivor had a very specific connotation. And they recognized that they were very fortunate compared to the people that they call survivors. But a survivor was somebody like a cousin of my father's, who had the same name, coincidentally, as my dad. who survived Auschwitz and eventually escaped. A survivor was, there was a lady in South Wales where I grew up that my mother knew, who had been born on a cart being dragged out of Auschwitz at the end of the war. Those were the survivors.

20:57Kara Swisher:But they were survivors because your mother's parents, Sally and Louise, escaped. They got out just before the war started. Your father's parents, Max and Minnie, did not, even though Max had chances. And there were some practical reasons Max didn't ask on those chances. But also, I want to read this passage you wrote. Max may well have clung to the hope that his military service and long membership of the judiciary would render him invulnerable, or that more rational hands would wrest control from Hitler, or that foreign powers would not tolerate a barbarous regime in the middle of Europe. Talk about the idea you're getting to here that Max's faith in institutions betrayed him.

21:36Sir Michael Moritz:Well, you put your finger on it. My grandfather who escaped, as I just mentioned, he was a small-time cattle trader, which at the end of the 19th century was one of the few professions that was open for Jews in Germany. And I think, you know, in retrospect, I'm projecting some of this. He was entrepreneurial. He was street smart. He had to rely on his wits. He was never paid by the state. He was very, you know, he was almost blind at birth. And then so he didn't serve in World War I. My other grandfather, the one you referred to, he survived Verdun. So he had come out of that like all the other Jews that served in the German army, and he got his Iron Cross.

22:20Sir Michael Moritz:And then he'd been the first person in his family to get a higher education. He became, as you said, a member of the judiciary. And he had this misplaced faith in institutions. And it's exactly as you just said. Here was this man who had served the state. He was employed by the state. He was going to, he thought, get a pension from the state. And he had this false faith in, I suppose, the moral compass of the state.

22:50Kara Swisher:In that regard, two things. You know, you talk about your parents' trauma has been passed down through generations. And so telling the story allows you to do that. How does that manifest with you then? because there's a line that you write that I think is very important in this book. It says, it's odd to feel like an outsider when everyone considers you an insider. I want you to sort of spool this out. For people who don't know, Auslander means outsider. My own experience with Auslander was in Germany itself when I was covering the neo-Nazi riots right after the wall fell. The neo-Nazis sort of went into East Germany and tried to recruit because a lot of this had been barred in West Germany, and they were quite educated about the Holocaust in East Germany, they did no such education.

23:35Kara Swisher:And so they found a very willing population who, the Nazis were not blamed as much in East Germany. And so I was at a rally of neo-Nazis of all kinds following them. And there was one woman who stood in their way and said, shadow, which means shame, except as they were walking through the streets of this East German, formerly East German town in Eastern Germany, they were yelling, Deutschland für Deutschen Auslander aus, which means Germany for Germans, outsiders out. I never will forget that moment. It was really chilling. You talk about, you name the book Auslander, and you also say everyone does consider you an insider.

24:16Kara Swisher:I guess I do too, sort of an insider to Silicon Valley or the tech industry. Talk a little bit about this tension.

24:23Sir Michael Moritz:One of the results of writing the book, obviously, I discovered things about my parents that I hadn't really understood as a result of it. But I also discovered something about myself and why I am with all my various flaws who I am today. But I have never been able to get over the feeling of being an outsider, no matter where I've lived. It doesn't matter whether it was in Wales or whether I was in college or when I got into the venture industry.

24:59Sir Michael Moritz:It's always been there. And the Britain that I grew up in in the 1960s, I think to some extent, look, I owe Britain a tremendous amount. I wouldn't be here without the actions of the British government. But Britain in the 60s was not a multicultural society. And we lived in this area in Wales, in South Wales, where, I don't know, the population was probably about two and a half million. And there were maybe 500 Jewish families in Wales. And we were Jewish and German. So you know the feeling as a child. Every child wants to be accepted by their pals and their contemporaries. And we stood out. and you sort of internalize that feeling and carry it with you.

25:53Sir Michael Moritz:It's a very, very permanent mark.

25:56Kara Swisher:So not belonging in Cardiff, not belonging in England, and not belonging in the United States, meaning this idea of outside. Right.

26:06Sir Michael Moritz:But look, and I don't, Cara, I've been really, really lucky, so I don't want this to come across as self-pity.

26:12Kara Swisher:No, I don't, but the name of your book is Auslan.

26:15Sir Michael Moritz:Yeah, I don't want it to come across as self-pity. But think how many people today, minorities who live in America, feel like outsiders.

26:25Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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29:34Kara Swisher:And you drew contemporary parallels to Nazis. And that's always fraught to do, trust me. Like, I worry when people say he's like Hitler. I'm like, not quite. But you write about how Trump's rise to power made you think a lot about the refrain you heard from your parents when you were a boy. If it did happen, it can happen. If it did happen, it will happen. If it did happen somewhere, it can happen here. Talk a little bit about this, because while Trump's hold on American politics may not be what it once was, and I think we're on the descending mountain of that. The forces that ushered him in are still alive and kicking and always have been.

30:09Kara Swisher:So talk about these parallels you draw right at the top of this book.

30:12Sir Michael Moritz:I have been very careful never to call Trump a fascist, never to label him a Nazi, never to equate him with what happened in Nazi Germany, never. But I do believe he has authoritarian instincts, the same authoritarian instincts that we've seen in others who've risen to the forefront of politics in their countries. And, you know, one of the things that happens when you have an authoritarian with a lot of control, no matter how many protections everybody feels there might be in the United States, But before you know it, you have the weakening and the hollowing out of the institutions of state with all of their force that people have come to rely on.

31:04Sir Michael Moritz:And to me, it's like, you know, termites or dry rot. It's imperceptible to most people. Obviously, these heinous ICE agents shooting people in the face in Minneapolis, those aren't invisible.

31:21Kara Swisher:Just this week again in Texas.

31:23Sir Michael Moritz:Those aren't invisible. And the cruelty meted out, those are very visible. But what is happening to various state departments, the tilt of the judiciary, all of that doesn't affect what happens in daily life until you confront it. And then before you know it, the state in which you placed great trust and emphasis is hollowed out.

31:51Kara Swisher:Very much like your grandfather, many were shocked how quickly some American institutions folded under pressures from the Trump administration at the start of the second term. You do, I will say, if I have a criticism, as you know, I'll make this, is you seem to give some of the tech guys a bit of a pass. And they're, quote, responding to an invitation they could not refuse. That's a godfather term. I feel like they could refuse some of those invitations, given they're wealthy, powerful. Talk a little bit about this, and the institutions themselves, because this is something that your grandfather missed, right?

32:24Kara Swisher:He thought, oh, well, I was a war hero. Oh, I was, you know, I'm in the judiciary. This can't happen here, which is, of course, what your parents said it can. Well, I think the leaders of the tech industry, their companies are so large.

32:45Sir Michael Moritz:their influence so great, their business all around the globe, that in many ways, the CEOs or the chairman of these companies are politicians. And they have to be. Maybe juggling pressure from China and juggling pressure from the US and dealing with the EU and other regulatory agencies around the world. And I think they play a very, have a very difficult balancing act to, I have some sympathy with them knowing that they are all cast from different cloth and maybe some lean more towards Trump than others. But I think they all have his number and they're doing what they need to do in order to protect the interests as they see it of all of their shareholders.

33:35Sir Michael Moritz:and are trying very hard to ensure that they're dealing with a capricious, vindictive character who wields a lot of power. And the last thing they want is his various flamethrowers torching their companies.

33:52Kara Swisher:I get that. I completely get that. But this is something you kind of addressed in the book about what happened to Germany, right? If the richest men in the world can't say no, who can? And were you surprised at that panoply at the inauguration? When I saw it, I was like, oh, good God. Like, you're kidding me. You've got to fucking be kidding me.

34:12Sir Michael Moritz:Well, I know for certain that a couple of them, at least, and obviously I'm not going to name them. That's the very last place they wanted to be.

34:20Kara Swisher:I am aware of that. I heard from them.

34:22Sir Michael Moritz:Yeah. And I'm sure all of them, or some of them anyway, wish that a great hole had opened up that just swallowed them up and made them invisible. I think some of them, again, you may not like this or feel I'm being too protective. I think some of them try to whisper in his ear privately.

34:44Kara Swisher:Yes, I do.

34:44Sir Michael Moritz:And quietly without, you know, publicly humiliating him or taking a stand. And, you know, maybe that's the most effective way to deal with this character. and throwing yourself on the pyre, I'm not sure does any good. But you're exactly right. You know, companies like Siemens and all these other – Mercedes, all these other vast companies, the Krups, that were very, very powerful in Germany, colluded. But they also –

35:23Kara Swisher:Or thought they could control him or thought he was a moron.

35:26Sir Michael Moritz:Or thought they could control him. But after the control phase passed, they colluded.

35:31Kara Swisher:Yes.

35:31Sir Michael Moritz:And they operated slave camps for him. They found it useful for their business that they could find cheap sources of labor in which to flourish. Now, I don't think we're anywhere close to that in the United States with the tech guys. But I know you would feel, and I can understand this, and I think a lot of people would feel better if some of them had stood up and said, I completely disagree with these following policies.

36:02Kara Swisher:Yeah, it's not so much that. It's that you can see they'll go to those dinners even if they disagree. And I get it. Listen, I had Elon Musk on the phone when he went to that first meeting in 2015, and he said, I can change his mind. And I said, listen, Jesus, I don't think it's happening. He's an old racist, and pay attention to this person. And one of the things that I think is the most surprising is it never stops, though. Like, especially when they want lack of AI regulation or they hand him some crypto money because he's so easily bribed, essentially. But where does that end from you? Because you have, in this book, you do not back off at all.

36:40Kara Swisher:I'm not surprised.

36:42Sir Michael Moritz:Well, ever since he started running. And, you know, in certain circles in Silicon Valley, I've been a loner. I have tried to persuade everybody that...

36:54Kara Swisher:That's the noise of someone coming for you right now. That's right.

36:58Sir Michael Moritz:All our presidents, all our political leaders are flawed, like all of us. Some have a lot more flaws than others. Trump is one of those characters. And what I've tried to do in the conversations that I've had with various people, although I'd given up on it because, you know, history is not going to, you know, we'll see what happens, was the number one thing that you want to look for in any leader is character. Number one. And I think a lot of, well, I know a lot of people in Silicon Valley held their nose or turned the other way and ignored what they knew. And shame on that. And you ignore character at your peril.

37:44Kara Swisher:I would agree. I would agree. Was there any worry for you? You spoke up really strongly. This book is very strong. I've not seen it, except I'm trying to think of even Cuban, who sort of tries to play it both ways many times, has been critical, but also is an on-the-other-hand kind of person. It's his nature, actually. Is there a price for you to being this way?

38:06Sir Michael Moritz:I think you have to be true to who you law.

38:09Kara Swisher:That's a good answer. You end the book by revealing you decided to apply for German citizenship, which is fascinating. And we're seeing Germany is also struggling with the rise of national sentiment and anti-Semitism. The far right alternative for Germany, or AFD, is surging in elections. Talk about applying for German citizenship. And I do agree with you, they spent a lot of time trying to push back on this stuff. Are you worried about the national vow of never again to lose resonance as the horrors of the war grow more distant there. That would be the danger, obviously. I'm not deluding myself.

38:44Sir Michael Moritz:I hope I'm not deluding myself. I hope I'm being fairly clear-eyed. I think this, whether it's the left or we haven't talked about the left, but - I'd be happy to. Whether it's the left or the right in the United States, in the UK, in France, in Germany, in Italy and other places in Western Europe. Extremism doesn't help. So do I think I will leave America? I don't think so. But I do place, and I think your analysis earlier on about when you were talking about your experience about after the Berlin Wall fall is exactly right. The one thing that the Germans have done is to institute, and it's, as you said, more pronounced in the Old West than in the Old East, is institute rigorous education about this period of the 20th century that is baked into the minds of the students.

39:45Sir Michael Moritz:That does not occur anywhere else in Western Europe, and it doesn't occur in the United States.

39:50Kara Swisher:No, not over the Civil War, so not enough, for sure.

39:53Sir Michael Moritz:And the ignorance of what happened in Western Europe and in the U.S. is part of today's problem. But you're right about the AFD and the rise of Ulrich Siegmund and the collapse of Mertz. But, you know, one of the big lessons I took away from writing this book is, and it sounds glib, but I mean it, is you can never have enough passports if you're a minority.

40:22Kara Swisher:Many passports. Yeah, I'm getting my Italian one, if you can believe it. My grandfather was born in Italy. But I feel the same way. And do you feel that in terms of emphasis on history is, I think, disappearing in Germany? Either it's been overtaught, right, where people just start to ignore it. Or like in the U.S., well, it wasn't us who did that to the Native Americans. It's not us who did it to slavery. It's not our fault. That's sort of Trump's version of it happening here in a lot of ways, which sort of has resonance to what happened to your grandparents.

40:57Sir Michael Moritz:Oh, absolutely. I have a lot more sympathy for the people who were in America or the descendants of the people who were in America before the Mayflower arrived or all the people who were shipped here in slavery. And I think every country has sins of the past. Some are bigger than others. Right.

41:25Kara Swisher:That's a very good point. Now, speaking of a zin, you write about the events of October 7th, and Israel made you feel emotionally connected to the country's fate for the first time. Israel's subsequent destruction of Gaza, the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and now the war in Iran have led to massive political shift in Americans' feelings towards Israel. The numbers are astonishing, actually. I've never seen anything like that. That's especially true for younger Americans. I have two older sons. They've shifted rather dramatically. My wife happens to be Jewish, but I would call neither of them anti-Semitic, but it's something's happening.

41:56Kara Swisher:there. Talk about this emotional connection you felt to Israel, which you hadn't felt before. I mean, and you rightly attack some of these settlers. I think you call them heinous settlers or violent settlers. Talk a little bit about your shifting feelings because you hadn't been, you know, particularly, this was not part of your identity, again, as an outsider.

42:16Sir Michael Moritz:No, you're exactly correct. And look, there are aspects of, I cannot abide Netanyahu. And I think people like Smotrich and Ben-Gavir should be imprisoned, you know, two of his most influential cabinet ministers. And the settlements in the West Bank are, again, something that I find impossible to support. Gaza is more complicated. Mm-hmm. Imagine if in America, in the course of a few hours, 45 ,000 people had been killed.

42:57Kara Swisher:Mm-hmm.

43:00Sir Michael Moritz:What the response would have been of this country? Or a just - 9-11. 9-11.

43:07Kara Swisher:I mean, I think - No, I'm saying that. You know what I'm saying? I think we moved, that was one of those shocker moments. Yeah, but this is 9-11, and I don't mean to belittle 9-11.

43:19Sir Michael Moritz:This is 15 times the size of 9-11.

43:28And I,

43:31Sir Michael Moritz:look, this is a long freighted conversation about Gaza. But I have more sympathy for the Israeli feeling towards Gaza. I have no sympathy towards that feeling on the West Bank. But my goodness gracious me, everybody in Israel knew somebody who was wounded or killed. And so it's this visceral reaction. And, well, several things, Kara, realizing that I'm going to get a whole load of abuse for this.

44:06Kara Swisher:It's a complex topic.

44:08Sir Michael Moritz:It is a very complex topic. But, you know, 800 ,000 Jews were pushed out of the Arab lands in 1948, out of Iraq, out of Syria, out of Morocco, out of Algeria, out of Egypt, out of Tunisia. No United Nations support whatsoever. Mm-hmm. My guess is that most of the people who are on the far left today have no understanding of that.

44:37Kara Swisher:Mm-hmm.

44:39Sir Michael Moritz:Nor do they have an understanding of, you know, the fact that the Jews were also pushed out of their country by the Romans a long time ago. Yes. Or the fact that since 1948, there's been no Palestinian government or faction that has done anything to benefit its people. And contrasted with Israel. So there's a lot in there. Sure. And as I said, look, I'm sure terrible things have been done by the Israelis in Gaza. Right.

45:16Kara Swisher:I mean, 70 ,000 Palestinians.

45:18Sir Michael Moritz:It's war. It's war. And, you know, you look at, I doubt whether there's anybody, all of these protesters, if you ask them, what happened in Dresden? What did the U.S. do to Dresden towards the end of World War II, to Hamburg, to other cities and towns in Germany? It makes the Israeli response look mild. Look at the firebombing of Tokyo. So I think we underestimate the emotional reaction in this country of what happens if such a significant portion of your population was taken away.

46:00Kara Swisher:Now, some of the protesters, let me use the devil's advocate, don't know the history. But they are seeing what's in front of them, especially in a highly social media-fueled, image-conscious world we now live in. Can you imagine if you saw Dresden today or you saw the bombing of Japan? It's a very different world in that regard.

46:25Sir Michael Moritz:I completely agree with you. And that to me is the difference. Israel, there is no way you're going to win a political debate about this when on one side you have hapless, hungry, wide-eyed babies and on the other side you have a tank. Mm-hmm. There is no way you're ever going to win that. And they haven't.

46:49Kara Swisher:No, and they lost it. So one of the things, let me bring it back because it's a longer discussion, which I don't want to get into right now. But when you're writing about this and what you took away from your book, how do you get back to it? Because, for example, your former company, Sequoia, is still investing in Israeli companies despite the war. It includes defense startups that integrate AI into military hardware. There are several partners there that are a little close to Trump and loud, Sean, I'm thinking of. Now, you're not at Sequoia any longer, correct?

47:20Sir Michael Moritz:Correct. And I haven't been for quite a long time.

47:22Kara Swisher:Quite a while after you got sick. But when you think about where we are now and the links to what was happening in your book, are you surprised by Silicon Valley's aggression here in that regard, especially in these investments? And where does it level out given all the pictures, all the social media, all created by tech incredibly, has created what is a very impossible situation for anyone to agree, right? Even reasonable people. Yeah, I agree. And I wish I had great answers, Cara.

48:04Sir Michael Moritz:That's okay. I don't have great answers. It's a horribly complicated situation. I wish these people who had been protesting Gaza had come out in the streets and protested what the Iranians did to their people earlier in the year. Or various other awful regimes have done to murder members of their own population. Syria. Crickets.

48:38Kara Swisher:Mm-hmm. You know, yeah.

48:40Sir Michael Moritz:Well, think about Syria.

48:44Sir Michael Moritz:When the former ruler of Syria was deposed, there were, or during his regime, how many of these people protested against the atrocities he was inflicting on his people? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people killed in Syria. I don't know. I'm not picking on your two sons, but I don't know if they know about that.

49:08Kara Swisher:They do. I made sure they did. Good. Well done, you. Yeah, they do. They protest all this stuff. One of them is much more conservative than the other, I would say. I'm going to get away from this for a second, but when you think about sort of the lessons that you took away, because one of the things in this is you are, like, it's very similar to Scott Galloway, who I do my podcast with. After October 7th, he changed. Did this experience writing this book change you in that regard? Feeling like an insider maybe? No. What did it do to your psyche?

49:45Sir Michael Moritz:Well, it's what I mentioned earlier. I think it made me understand why I became, for good and for worse, what I became. And I'm not complaining about anti, you know, it's weird given the discussion that we just had. I'm not whining about anti-Semitism. anti-Semitism is a reality. It's been with us for 2 ,500 years, and nothing will change. And in a way, I think feeling the need to survive has really helped me and has given me considerable strength to persist. So I'm not complaining at all about that. I think what this did to me was to be far more alert to, and you know, the damage has done probably Both our boys are in their 30s now, but I wish I had known this about myself and understood it when they were growing up because one of my fears is that I unwittingly, unconsciously transmitted these feelings of fear to them.

50:55Sir Michael Moritz:Right. Yeah. And so, but all of that's in the past and done. I can just make sure I don't do it for my grandchildren.

51:04Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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52:45Sir Michael Moritz:Focus Features invites you to the social event of the season, sense and sensibility. Man who loves me must burn with it, if such a man exists. From the producers of Pride and Prejudice, experience Jane Austen's iconic masterpiece. Perhaps we ought to dance. And feel everything you've been yearning for.

53:05Kara Swisher:Does it not move you? Excite your senses, stir your soul.

53:10Sir Michael Moritz:Sense and Sensibility. Rated PG. Parental guidance suggested. Only in theaters October 16th.

53:16Kara Swisher:All right, I want to finish up talking about San Francisco. You've lived there for decades. I love you and I both love San Francisco. You never lived in Silicon Valley. You're running a competition where you're offering up to$50 million to organizations with ideas to improve the city. You also run a terrific newspaper. I have to tell you the SF Standard. And I just had lunch with Kevin Delaney, who is the editor, who is a very good friend of mine, who is a wonderful, wonderful journalist. Talk about why you've put all this money into San Francisco. And I know I have just interviewed Chris Larson.

53:50Kara Swisher:There's a lot of people who feel that, and you have said recently that San Francisco had been hijacked by a small group of political extremists, I think made it hard to build businesses. I am very aware of what I think Chris called the homeless industrial complex, among other things. But talk about why you have stuck with San Francisco. And by the way, now with AI wealth, it's back again.

54:13Sir Michael Moritz:Oh, it's very straightforward. This is, even though we talked about being an outlander, this is home. It's where Harriet and I live. It's where our kids were born and grew up. And I know that none of the fortune that's come my way, none of the good fortune, none of the good luck, would have happened had I not lived in San Francisco. Now, if I'd lived in Palo Alto, maybe it would have happened as well. But it turns out that for close to 45 years or so now, I've lived in San Francisco. This is home. And so I'm at the point in life where this is about giving back to others. And San Francisco has been well publicized, went through a really, really bleak period.

54:59Sir Michael Moritz:And about nine years ago or so, I began to get very interested in how with others, because this isn't, you know, this is going to be a grand community effort. We could improve life in San Francisco. And with the idea that if we could show the way in San Francisco, a very deep blue city, it would be something of a template for other deep blue cities of greater size that are confronting similar issues. But I felt it really important that people in the city who cared had a trusted source of information that they could count on, number one. Number two, we have a family foundation that 60 % of its giving is in the Bay Area, the bulk of it in San Francisco.

55:46Sir Michael Moritz:And then the third leg of it is getting involved in the political debate in San Francisco. So that's what I've tried to do.

55:52Kara Swisher:So when you think about what's happening in San Francisco, a lot of the tech people didn't do that. They took their stuff and left, right? Or they kicked it on the way out or egregiously kicked it on the way out. Not necessary. Many of them are back, by the way, FYI. But is there a responsibility of people with significant resources who have become better for a community to give back? I mean, it goes back to Sutro, Adolf Sutro. There was obviously the Bank of America founders very involved in the city. The Gettys, very involved. Tech is, you're pretty much it. You and Chris Larson are pretty much it from Tech.

56:30Sir Michael Moritz:Well, a couple of other things. There were also, you know, a lot of members of the Jewish community, the Haas. The Haas, I'm sorry. And the Strauss family and the Dinkelspiels and Fleischhackers and Goldman's, lots of other people.

56:43Kara Swisher:The Fleischhackers, yeah.

56:44Sir Michael Moritz:And who came here, made their fortunes in the 19th century and gave back. I mean, something of inspiration for me. It's also a question of, you'll think I'm giving everybody in the tech industry hall passes. But it's also, Cara, I think issue of age. You know, I'm not running a company day to day. I'm not 35 years old, caught up entirely in my business and without time to think about anything else. I'm at a, you know, I just turned 72. So I've got time in my life to reflect on this. And I think part of it is age, actually. And I've always been very sympathetic to Bill Gates' argument that he conveyed in the 1990s when he was asked why he wasn't giving more away to philanthropic causes.

57:35Sir Michael Moritz:And he said he felt that the best thing that he could do was to increase the value of Microsoft and then give subsequently. And that's what he did.

57:42Kara Swisher:That's what he did.

57:43Sir Michael Moritz:And I think many of the increasingly wealthy tech founders will follow a similar path.

57:51Kara Swisher:Yeah, I just don't love them kicking on the way out. And then they move to Miami and they move back. I'm like, just leave. Just move along. I saw one of them at a restaurant in San Francisco, and I was with another big tech founder. And we both went over and said, you need to leave because this food is too delicious for you to enjoy here in San Francisco.

58:10Sir Michael Moritz:Ah, I see.

58:11Kara Swisher:Yeah, you know. I was like, don't kick it. Don't kick it. So every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Yours comes from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.

58:21Sir Michael Moritz:Cara, I miss you. I hope you are well. Sir Michael Moritz, thank you for your investments into San Francisco. My question to you, because you give to a lot of nonprofits and we all appreciate that. But how do we make sure to hold the sector accountable while lifting up the groups that are doing incredible work in our city and in our country? So that's my question to you. How do you focus on lifting up the good ones while making sure that we hold the sector accountable? I think it's you evaluate each organization. And we try to do that at Crank Start without being onerous towards the organizations.

59:03and for those that don't meet the goals

59:07Sir Michael Moritz:that we have agreed upon when we've given them a grant, we don't continue. And then inevitably, there are some bad apples here. And as there are in any sector, and those people should be run, maybe they should be sent to Miami and run out of town. And again, it's like making investments in companies to some extent. And you'll be surprised positively in some cases, and then you'll be totally distressed in others. Fortunately, we haven't had much of that, where you have to say goodbye to them, and you don't want to see them again.

59:46Kara Swisher:Right. And I know you do that. You know, two people in my life you've had beefs with. One is my ex-wife, Megan, who is—you said to her, she's an engineer, and you said you talk too much for an engineer, which made me laugh. Oh, dear.

59:59Sir Michael Moritz:How rude.

1:00:00Kara Swisher:I know. I'm sorry.

1:00:01Sir Michael Moritz:Would you apologize to her?

1:00:02Kara Swisher:I shan't. I think you weren't inaccurate. And then Scott Galloway, of course. We won't get into that. I don't want to, I don't listen to him when he goes on about. But I'm like, all venture, everyone has a beef with a venture capitalist. Of course you do. And on two very quick questions on the state of venture capital. You, obviously, Sequoia was a legendary firm. Where is venture going right now, especially since these AI companies are drawing huge investments, attracting enormous IPOs? Anthropic is looking for a potential valuation of$2 trillion. And OpenAI is considering another funding round to double its roughly$800 billion.

1:00:34Kara Swisher:These numbers are eye-popping, Mike, from when we were around. If you were a young venture capitalist, say, how would you look at this situation?

1:00:42Sir Michael Moritz:I'd find something else to do.

1:00:43Kara Swisher:Would you? Because?

1:00:45Sir Michael Moritz:I think it's just become part of the establishment. And perhaps when I got into it, you know, in 85 or so, most people wanted to go and work at whatever it was, McKinsey or Bain or Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. I think it's that generation or their descendants now, those generations, they want to be in the venture industry. Join a seed fund, join a pre-seed fund, join a first round fund, join a et cetera, et cetera. And to some extent, when I got into the venture business, It wasn't undiscovered, but Sequoia had a fund that just finished investing the third fund. It was$45 million. And there were, you know, if we'd had our whole holiday party, we could have for everybody who worked at Sequoia, including, you know, the assistants.

1:01:41Sir Michael Moritz:And we could get a table for 12 and that'd be it. and I just like, I think it was much more of an outsider's business then. It was not part of part of the fashion and the establishment.

1:01:58Kara Swisher:Is that a bad thing? What comes out of this then? Is it possible to create that again?

1:02:04Sir Michael Moritz:I think the genie's out of the bottle and you know, the other thing that's really changed is that we lived in an age of pre-internet of imperfect information. So if you were close to things that were happening, we talked in a different context about Gaza and Israel and social media and images and all that stuff. Today, it's a world of perfect information. A company gets started here, there'll be 20 knockoffs in China tomorrow. And you'll have everybody in the valley trying to finance a similar companies. So I think it was easier in a way. It had its own challenges when business plans were tight.

1:02:45Sir Michael Moritz:They weren't six-slide PowerPoints that you had five minutes in which to decide whether or not you wanted to issue a term sheet. It was not an auction business, which I think many aspects of it are today. And you don't want to be in an auction business. It's too much of a perfect market. So the quiet backwaters of the places that I've always thought would be more proficient.

1:03:10Kara Swisher:Where does innovation come from then? The kind of innovation you saw in that garage at Google or Yahoo or wherever. Where does innovation come from now? Real innovation.

1:03:21Sir Michael Moritz:I think there are very few real innovations. And I realize it's part of the myth the Silicon Valley, that it's just dotted with all sorts of extraordinary innovations. I think Silicon Valley's advantage is that it's evolutionary. And it's capitalizing on evolutionary steps along the way that have allowed these companies to flourish. Yes, they all have their patent libraries. Many of them have extremely creative and wonderful engineers. But all of them are building on the foundation that's been built up over the last 100 years. And so I think we should pay tribute to evolution more than innovation.

1:04:09Kara Swisher:All right. And my last question, you spent your career betting on the future through your work in venture capital and your philanthropy. And now you have a book that's very much about how the past shapes future generation. After everything you've built, funded, and now written, what are you hoping to pass down? and what do you hope will outlast you?

1:04:28Sir Michael Moritz:I don't believe in legacies. You see these, we all see names on buildings. We don't know who the names were. They passed away, I think. So I'm not worried. I think you've got to live for the moment and do what you can while you're here and not worry about, and try to do what you can to help those who've been less fortunate and leave it like that. And we're all insignificant little specks.

1:05:01Kara Swisher:And yet you've written a book about your family. It's not that insignificant, right? And what lesson did you learn from your family through doing this?

1:05:10Sir Michael Moritz:Tenacity, the power of persistence, the power of tenacity and of not giving up.

1:05:15Kara Swisher:All right, on that note, we'll end. Michael, thank you so much for your time.

1:05:20Sir Michael Moritz:Cara, you've been incredibly generous.

1:05:27Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Vicky Vergolina, Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, and Megan Burney. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Eamon Whalen, Jim Mackle, and Manolo Moreno. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On With Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

1:06:20Sir Michael Moritz:And feel everything you've been yearning for.

1:06:24Kara Swisher:Does it not move you? Excite your senses. Stir your soul.

1:06:29Sir Michael Moritz:Sense and Sensibility. Rated PG. Parental guidance suggested. Only in theaters October 16th.

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