If you want to get a sense of what it’s like to sit at the top of the venture capital hill, take a look at Business Week’s recent interview with Michael Moritz.
Moritz is a former journalist who parlayed a book about Apple Computer into a job with the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital in 1986. He then persuaded his partners to invest in such little-known start-ups as Google, Yahoo, eToys and Flextronics. The Google investment alone turned $12.5 million into over $2 billion – 160 times the original bet – when Google went public in 2004. More recently, Moritz has scored with deals such as an investment in PayPal, which was later purchased by eBay.
Sequoia Capital, you may recall, was the author of the infamous leaked PowerPoint presentation last year that detailed the coming economic crisis and advised venture capital firms to hunker down and cut costs to avoid falling into a death spiral. The presentation was inadvertently leaked and went viral on the Internet.
The reports of the death of venture capital have been greatly exaggerated says Moritz, who remains fairly upbeat about the industry. Great companies can be built even in bad times, Moritz says. “Last time I checked Stanford hasn’t stopped producing wonderful 23-year-old graduates. And Silicon Valley houses many companies with frustrated engineers. Good ideas and brilliant people will find us very willing to step out into the cold with them.”
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