Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:26:09 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:26:09] S0: What did you learn from these categories of people? I think you called them the resistors, the silent, and the collabos. [00:26:14] S2: This is a spectacular series that came out maybe twelve years ago, shot in France, maybe as a six series tale about life in a French village during World War II, and how some people resisted the occupation for as long as possible. Most people remained silent, and some became active collaborators with the Nazis. And during COVID, when we were all on these long Zoom calls with lots of little pictures of 10 other participants that were in the Zoom room, I always used to look at each individual whom I knew on the whole. And I kept asking myself, well, if these people have been living in the French village in the 1940s, who would have stayed silent? Who would have resisted? And who would have been collaboed? So I was judging people whom I know and whom I work with. And it was an interesting exercise. I didn't tell anybody else about it at the time, obviously, but I knew everybody on these calls well enough to know who had the sort of backbone that this lady that we were just talking about had. And they were always in the minority. [00:27:32] S0: How rare is it? Is it 1% resistors out of 100 people? How rare do you think that expression is? [00:27:38] S2: I think it's very rare because bad things happen in countries when most people stay silent. Very few actively resist. [00:27:48] S0: Do you think that most of the people that you've back in your career would be resistors?
00:27:48 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:27:48] S0: Do you think that most of the people that you've back in your career would be resistors? [00:27:54] S2: I'd have to think about that. I'd like to think so, but I'm not sure. [00:27:58] S0: Can you talk about the role that Bill Deeds played in your life? I'm always interested in these early moments of activation. And I'm curious when you first felt in life, whether it was with him or at some other time, when you first felt you were really good at something. [00:28:13] S2: I've never felt I'm really good at something. That's not false modesty on my part to this day. [00:28:18] S0: How can that be in face of the evidence? [00:28:21] S2: Well, I think everybody is plagued by doubts, maybe competitiveness. It's a failure on my part. I have a very difficult time celebrating good things and celebrating success. [00:28:33] S0: Given that you're self aware about it, have you ever
00:28:33 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:28:33] S0: Given that you're self aware about it, have you ever [00:28:36] S2: tried I to reverse think it's heritage. I think it's the fact that my mother always felt that disaster was always around the corner. Doom was always around the corner. She died a few weeks before COVID. My mother was the predictor of doom. I remember as a kid growing up, she would have listened to the radio and inevitably the talk When we're having breakfast would be about some natural disaster that had occurred or a plane crash or something dreadful around the world. She dined a few weeks before COVID. I felt sorry for her in a way that she missed COVID because this was the disaster that she'd been predicting or one of the natural disasters that she'd been predicting all her life. She was cheated out of COVID. But I think it's that sort of sense of being one step away from the precipice. [00:29:26] S0: Have you ever though been proud of a piece of work that you've done or created or felt that pride, like the emotion of it? [00:29:35] S2: I think I've always felt everything is unfinished and could be improved and none of it's ever been perfect. It's never a satisfied moment. Sometimes when I paint and compare a painting to what I might've been able to paint ten years ago or fifteen years ago, So I see a road to improvement, but then you go to MoMA or the Met. [00:30:00] S0: You're diminished. [00:30:01] S2: And you're reduced to being an insignificant speck.
00:30:01 · Michael Moritz, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:30:01] S2: And you're reduced to being an insignificant speck. [00:30:05] S0: What about feeling a pride for someone else, not so much for yourself? You've backed some of the most extraordinary people in business history, for sure. You've written about some of the most extraordinary leaders, Alex Ferguson and others. Have you felt proud of them? [00:30:19] S2: No, not necessarily. The relationship is different. And so those have been voyages of curiosity where they're the people who should feel proud of their accomplishments, not me as a bystander. [00:30:34] S0: I'm so curious about for someone that's been involved in so many fascinating things, unlikely things, what jumps out as the highest energy moments? What were the things along the whole journey that gave you the most energy? I know you're a deeply curious person, so maybe it's something there. [00:30:49] S2: I think it's family. Children. All the moments associated with Harriet, my wife and I, we have two sons, and they're now in their thirties, and one of them's got a couple of grandkids. I think it's deeply personal stuff. [00:31:03] S0: Back to Bill Dees, I lost my train of thought there for I'm a curious the impact that he had on you, and I'm always interested in early impact that people have on others.
00:31:13 · Michael Moritz
[00:31:13] S2: I grew up, as you know, in Britain. And when I left college, I really wanted to be a journalist. My goal was to work on one of the big, at that point, what we call the Fleet Street newspapers. This is a long time ago, it's fifty years ago, that everybody read. And there were papers for different sections of the population. And I wanted to work on one of the big, really well regarded newspapers. But there were trade union rules because the unions had a big clamp down on the way in which they held the operators of these newspapers in a straight jacket. And one of the consequences was the newspaper editors, they weren't allowed to hire college graduates directly from college because the fear of the unions was that it would impede their ability, interfere with their ability to hire 16 year olds straight out of high school. The result was that if I'd wanted to go and work on The Times or The Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, one of those papers, I would have to go and spend two or three years working on a small provincial newspaper. And I just didn't really want to do it. I was impatient, I was ambitious and all that sort of stuff. And I met this fellow, Bill Deeds, who was the editor of The Daily Telegraph and was a revered figure in British journalism and had actually in an earlier life been the figure on which Evelyn Waugh had modeled one of the characters in his famous satirical novel called Scoop. Bill Deeds very kindly responded to a letter that I'd written to him applying for a job at The Daily Telegraph. He gave me half an hour in his office in Fleet Street, and I remember it. It was in the winter, it was raining. And I asked him for advice. And he told me that what he had wished he had done as a young man was go to America. And he encouraged me to move to America. I think that really helped propel me in this direction.
00:33:12 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:33:12] S0: So when you arrived here, what was the first big break or big move that you made that kicked off this? [00:33:20] S2: Well, got very lucky. Got hired by time straight out of school without any work experience. They were very willing to take a risk on a 22 year old or 23 year old without any real prior experience. And that was my first big break. [00:33:36] S0: The episode with Jobs and Time was so fascinating in your history, and I'm sure frustrating for you. What happened and what did you learn through that episode?