Letter #134: Michael Moritz and Robert Lacher (2023)

Mike Moritz was our board member from Sequoia. Anyone who has ever met Mike or read his writing knows that he has a special way with words. In this meeting, he delivered a simple and devastating message: if we didn’t change – immediately – we would go out of business. It was the single worst meeting of my career.

Roelof Botha brought up this same topic in a recent Invest Like The Best episode in an even more poignant way: "Imagine the venture business in a decade, and Sequoia is gone. We presided over the decline of Sequoia, this team, the people here in this room, it was us. What happened? What did we not do?"

First he approached Sequoia Capital, which had become king of the valley by being early backers of Atari, Apple, and Google. It was run by Michael Moritz, the wry and literate Welsh-born former journalist who had helped guide Musk and Thiel on the tumultuous ride of PayPal. Musk took him for a drive in a mocked-up Lotus prototype. “It was an absolu

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