Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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?
00:33:45 · Michael Moritz, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:33:45] S2: It's a painful part of the past. This is three years after I joined TIME. I'd taken a leave of absence. By then I was working in San Francisco in the bureau there, and had taken a leave of absence to write a book about Apple and for a variety of reasons, because the magazine didn't have room enough to tell the tale of the private days of Apple, which is what I was really interested in doing. And then I was on this leave and I got a call from Time asking me to contribute to a profile of Steve that they wanted to run-in what became a very famous edition of TIME, which was the computer of the year. I think it was the only time in TIME's history where they'd picked an inanimate object to celebrate for their big annual issue. I worked on this profile of Steve. Steve was convinced that he was gonna be named Man of the Year, even though nobody had told him that confirmed it, yes or no. But worst of all, the profile, which he hated, for very good reason, I might say in his defense. And I was appalled by, for different reasons, severed my relationship with Steve. Back then at time, these things went through an editorial combine harvester. So what came out in the bale at the end probably didn't resemble very much of the straw that got fed in. And so the whole tone of the piece was malicious and nasty and underhanded. As I said, Steve disliked it. And it was one of the reasons I left time. I felt very, very disenchanted by the treatment of it all. Sadly, as a result of that really never repaired the relationship with Steve. [00:35:30] S0: Were you in awe of him?
00:35:30 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:35:30] S0: Were you in awe of him? [00:35:31] S2: No. Have you ever been in awe of anyone? That's a difficult question. The people that I've known who have done incredible remarkable things are also flawed individuals. And if you get to know them well, you also see that aspect of it. So seeing that up close makes it difficult to hold anybody in awe because you see the flaws as well as all of their accomplishments and virtues. [00:35:58] S0: Why were you not in awe of Steve? It seems like he's the person that the most people in our world were in awe of in living memory. I wanna be careful [00:36:07] S2: here because I respected him. I admired him tremendously. I was well aware of the fact that he had achieved things later obviously as well, that I couldn't ever possibly have accomplishment. But I think I knew some of the darker shades of him, which made it difficult to hold him up as an object of unalloyed admiration. But he's a heroic figure, obviously. [00:36:38] S0: What's the role of monomania in all of these character studies? And I'm curious to tie it back to this idea of the outsider, the survivor.