Michael Moritz

When I was trying to break into the venture business in the mid-1980s I went to meet the leaders of six firms. All, bar one, told me they did not know what to do with a history major and journalist who had never worked in a technology company, was poor at math and couldn’t tell a voltage regulator from an amplifier. The exception was Don Valentine to whom I owe the opportunity for joining and, eventually, helping build for approaching forty years, what is now known as Sequoia.

Curiosity. People who speak in complete sentences about a topic that absorbs them. When we first get involved with a tiny company, nothing is obvious. If you’re looking for certainty, you wind up with bores engaged in mundane activities. We have a fondness for obsessives on a mission. This was the case when we met the founders of what became Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Klarna and Stripe and we hope it’s true when we meet you.