Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:02:22 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:02:22] S0: When I was reading your book, one of the lines or the ideas that has really stuck with me ever since is where does one person end and the next person begin? And this deep dive that you took into the impact of one's history, family history, heritage on who a person is. I'm interested in this from so many angles as a parent, as a person interested in history, as a person interested in genetics, nature versus nurture. If I were to sum up the book in that question, what is your answer to that? What did you come away thinking after this deep study of your own family's history? [00:02:58] S2: One of the things that came out of the book, which I didn't really expect, was discovering who I am and why I became whatever it is that I've become. And that was an unexpected gift of the writing. And it came from this exploration of my family's past, in particular, my parents. Going back and excavating the deep memories of childhood, the sort of atmosphere in our home and in the general media in which I grew up, helped me understand a lot about why I am who I am and react to certain things in the fashion that I do. Because unwittingly, obviously, every parent leaves an imprint on a child. That's obviously especially true during the formative years, whatever the formative years are. I'm no sort of child specialist or scientist. But before you turn 12, 13, 14 years old, those imprints that you've absorbed in some manner, consciously or unconsciously, those remain with you. And both the angels and demons, I think, that you deal with for the rest of your life.
00:02:58 · Michael Moritz, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:02:58] S2: One of the things that came out of the book, which I didn't really expect, was discovering who I am and why I became whatever it is that I've become. And that was an unexpected gift of the writing. And it came from this exploration of my family's past, in particular, my parents. Going back and excavating the deep memories of childhood, the sort of atmosphere in our home and in the general media in which I grew up, helped me understand a lot about why I am who I am and react to certain things in the fashion that I do. Because unwittingly, obviously, every parent leaves an imprint on a child. That's obviously especially true during the formative years, whatever the formative years are. I'm no sort of child specialist or scientist. But before you turn 12, 13, 14 years old, those imprints that you've absorbed in some manner, consciously or unconsciously, those remain with you. And both the angels and demons, I think, that you deal with for the rest of your life. [00:04:19] S0: What were yours? I'm so curious that you're performing on yourself the exercise that you're famous for doing with others that you invested in or hired, focusing on these first fourteen years. What new understanding of yourself came out of this exercise? I grew up
00:04:19 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:04:19] S0: What were yours? I'm so curious that you're performing on yourself the exercise that you're famous for doing with others that you invested in or hired, focusing on these first fourteen years. What new understanding of yourself came out of this exercise? I grew up [00:04:35] S2: in this family of refugees from Nazi Germany and Wales. Refugees by definition are a minority. Jewish refugees in Wales during the 1960s and 1970s were a further minority. People look at me today and they think, here's this old white man, he's not a minority. And I can understand that, but it's how an individual feels rather than how other people might look at you. It touched me in a variety of ways. My parents, they were never in the camps. They got out of Germany in the 1930s. And they were loath to use the word survivor because they always felt the word survivor denoted somebody who actually had survived the camps, but they were refugees and in their own way had survived. That motive to survive no matter what the odds were, even though the odds that I faced growing up weren't like my parents, I think the need to survive. When you think about surviving, you're thinking about to some extent living by your wits, being very suspicious of the motives of others, wondering where and how bad things will occur and happen and guard against them. I think it gave me in retrospect, I didn't understand it at the time, a sort of drive and grit that I wouldn't have had without that particular atmospheric backdrop.
00:04:35 · Michael Moritz, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:04:35] S2: in this family of refugees from Nazi Germany and Wales. Refugees by definition are a minority. Jewish refugees in Wales during the 1960s and 1970s were a further minority. People look at me today and they think, here's this old white man, he's not a minority. And I can understand that, but it's how an individual feels rather than how other people might look at you. It touched me in a variety of ways. My parents, they were never in the camps. They got out of Germany in the 1930s. And they were loath to use the word survivor because they always felt the word survivor denoted somebody who actually had survived the camps, but they were refugees and in their own way had survived. That motive to survive no matter what the odds were, even though the odds that I faced growing up weren't like my parents, I think the need to survive. When you think about surviving, you're thinking about to some extent living by your wits, being very suspicious of the motives of others, wondering where and how bad things will occur and happen and guard against them. I think it gave me in retrospect, I didn't understand it at the time, a sort of drive and grit that I wouldn't have had without that particular atmospheric backdrop. [00:06:09] S0: When you study it and you think about your own childhood, how did that transfer from your parents to you? Was it the stories they told?
00:06:09 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:06:09] S0: When you study it and you think about your own childhood, how did that transfer from your parents to you? Was it the stories they told? [00:06:16] S2: It was definitely not the stories they told because they didn't tell the stories. I didn't really get to know the stories until I sat down and began work on this book. What I did know was the general arc of history, obviously, this miserable, ferocious, catastrophic whirlwind in which they and millions of others were caught up. But they didn't talk about the past in the real detail that I much later when I was thinking about the book became interested in, it was just broad sweeps. I think it was much more the daily behavior, the reaction to events, the reaction to things, the sense that doom was not very far away. The fact that if horrors had occurred in the past, there was a real need to be vigilant and wary about navigating daily life. There's a couple stories in [00:07:13] S0: the book, one in particular where you talk about two separate people, one who decided to stay in Germany and one who decided to leave. Quite a poignant and interesting on this topic of survivor outsider early instinct when things are changing to take notice and not double down and stick around. Maybe tell that story and explain what you learned.
00:07:32 · Michael Moritz
[00:07:32] S2: The two individuals, Patrick, that you referred to were my grandfathers, my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather. I'll start with my paternal grandfather, who was a civil servant. He was a sort of lower level judge in the judiciary in Bavaria province in Southern Germany. He had fought in World War I. He had somehow or other survived the horror of Verdun. He'd been given his Iron Cross. And he was, I think, a great believer in the German state, in the security that the state offered. And then much later in 1933, he lost his job. This is my assessment of the situation because he was a civil servant. He was by nature conservative, by nature somewhat cautious, but also had this great belief in the state and the endurance of the state and the durability of the state and that eventually the storm would blow over. He also had a pension and the pension was very important to him as a means for survival. It was a combination of all of those things. He wasn't oblivious obviously to what was happening around him, but it did make him more reluctant to leave Germany, I think until it was too late. And people forget, even if somebody had decided to leave Germany, there are all sorts of obstacles in the way you had to find a place elsewhere that would accept you. You had to pay big taxes to the Nazi government in order to be able to secure your exit visa. So there are all these sorts of obstacles. So that was my paternal grandfather. And he and his wife eventually worshiped off East and disappeared from history. My maternal grandfather was cut from a different cloth. I was too callow as a youth to really understand this, but he died when I was about 16. He had been a cattle trader, which was one of the occupations that Jews were really permitted to do in Germany. But he was almost blind as a young man and completely blind by the time that I met him, but somehow or other had been able to carve out a comfortable living for himself and his family by trading in cattle in a rural village in Northwestern Germany. My assessment of him in retrospect was that he was more street wise, he was more entrepreneurial, wasn't burdened by the need to remain and collect a state pension because he had always been able to sustain himself and look out for his future. And he got out with his wife, my grandmother. But they got out by the skin of their teeth.