Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:17:39 · Michael Moritz
[00:17:39] S2: I suppose I first came across it oddly in Detroit when I was a correspondent for Time Magazine. With a colleague, I wrote a book about the Chrysler Corporation, but more importantly, the person who turned around Chrysler at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. And a man who was for a time, the best known business figure in America, even though today most people struggle to pronounce his last name, but he was a gentleman called Nia Coker. He was the son of Italian immigrants. In writing this book, we spent a fair amount of time interviewing Ioaca. And what came through loud and clear was how much as the son of Italian immigrants who'd grown up in Pennsylvania, Lee grew up in Pennsylvania, he felt like an outsider. He worked in the automobile industry and obviously in the upper echelons of the automobile industry where I think he was always viewed with suspicion, most notably when he worked at the Ford Motor Company by Henry Ford II and the other people who obviously everybody had immigrated, but who were much more members of the establishment. And Iacocan never felt like a member of the establishment, and became very clear that all of that stemmed from his childhood. As the years went by, he began to interpret many of the slights that then fell upon him, including not getting the top job at Ford, to the fact that he was seen as an Italian immigrant. If you think about the people
00:19:17 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:19:17] S0: who have harnessed that outsider energy, a lot of whom you've backed with great success, have you seen people graduate out of it? And when they do, does their driving motivation [00:19:28] S2: go away or suffer? I wanna answer the previous question a little bit as well. You asked when I've met various people and various founders over the years, spent so much time on their backgrounds. Many of these people are only 20 years old or 21 years old. [00:19:43] S0: You're covering a big percentage. [00:19:44] S2: You're not exactly gonna be able to ask them about their life in their 50s. So it's just natural to try to understand that. I don't think people grow out of it. I think what happens is that people work with a certain intensity in their late teens and their 20s and maybe their early 30s. And that intensity for a whole variety of reasons diminishes over time. I think that's what changes. The inner being doesn't change, the outward intensity changes. [00:20:14] S0: When you were asking these questions, was there any one thing or set of things that you tended to be looking for? Was it you coming away feeling as though someone had extreme drive?
00:20:14 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:20:14] S0: When you were asking these questions, was there any one thing or set of things that you tended to be looking for? Was it you coming away feeling as though someone had extreme drive? [00:20:24] S2: I try to paint when I have some time. I'm not a good painter, but I really enjoy it. At least the way that I paint. You make marks in different parts of the canvas and the marks seem unrelated. Maybe it's a color blue here and the color brown there. You're putting these marks and dots on the canvas. There doesn't seem to be any composition there whatsoever. And then eventually, in my case, the picture comes out and it's bad, but there's a picture at the end of it. And it's the accumulation of all these different marks. And I think that's what happens when you're talking to people about their backgrounds. You're looking for these little dots here, and then eventually you put together this portrait for yourself of the individual. [00:21:09] S0: In searching for those dots, did you come to favorite questions that you always found yourself asking?
00:21:15 · Michael Moritz
[00:21:15] S2: There's one that comes to mind, which I've always found quite revealing is to ask somebody if they think back and had a chance to do one thing differently, one action differently, what is it that they would do? And I remember one person we interviewed for Sequoia who burst into tears when I asked that question. It turned out that he'd grown up as the son of an immigrant here in America. He was Hispanic. His father was very proud to have made it here and that his child was bright, his son was bright and he was getting good marks at school. And this fella, probably when he was 12 or so, had gone down to a corner grocery store with a pal of his and stolen some candy. The shopkeeper who knew his father complained to his father, And his father took him by the ear, took him back down to the candy store, made him apologize, made him empty his pockets. The man I interviewed was so chastened, so embarrassed by bringing shame upon his family and his father just burst into tears. What's your answer to the question? What would you have done differently? You're a good interviewer. People don't listen to answers very often when they interview people. I think every child of parents feels this in one way or another. I felt it as I was writing the book that I was embarrassed. If I could erase one thing, it would be some of my interactions and dealings with my parents, which I feel ashamed about today, but there's no going back. And I spent the first sixteen, seventeen years of my life with them. But there were many things probably that I wish. And also when I was a younger man and just encounters with them that I wished had gone differently because I didn't really understand who they were and so be it.
00:23:14 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:23:14] S0: Do you think that was mostly a natural drive to create your own independence like every child goes through with their [00:23:20] S2: Yeah, I'm sure that was some of it. Arrogance was probably another part of fail of comprehension of what they themselves had experienced, what had made them who they were, which I didn't understand. [00:23:35] S0: There's this notion of very small deeds in the book. I think the character's name was Anna. Yes. Can you talk about what you learned about the impact of small deeds?
00:23:43 · Michael Moritz
[00:23:43] S2: It was more than small deeds. So this lady that you referred to, whom I knew as a child, her first name was Anna. When my father and uncle were growing up in Munich in the 1920s and the early 1930s, every sort of middle class, lower middle class household had a family servant. These were the days before washing machines and vacuum cleaners and all the rest of it. Those individuals in these households, when children were born invariably became nannies as well. For my father and my uncle, this lady Anna, who was that person in my grandfather's house, she became a surrogate. She was a nanny. She was Roman Catholic. Eventually left the employment of my grandparents. She married a railway worker in Bavaria, who was also a Roman Catholic. They built their own house with their own hands. She and her husband never forgot the Moritz family. They, in the 1930s, opened their house to my grandparents and my uncle and father at a time when it became very unpopular to have Jews come stay in rural Bavaria for their holidays. But they did it for as long as possible. They didn't have children, these two. They were horrified by the Nazis. They did everything possible to help my grandparents and my father and uncle. And then after the war, because the feelings were so intense between my father and my uncle and this lady Anna, they went back to Bavaria very soon after the end of the war, developed this very strong connection with her until she eventually died. And I remember going and staying in her house and the story of this house features in the book as well. As a young boy surrounded by the specters of the Nazi past. But this lady was, I think what they say at Yad Vashem when they bestow acknowledgments on all the people who help Jews and others during World War II. She was one of the righteous and had this ethical compass that she wouldn't allow anyone else to alter.