Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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.
00:10:24 · Michael Moritz, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
They got out seventy two hours before war broke out. Seventy two hours later, they too would have perished. [00:10:32] S0: What do you take from that? What is the big lesson from that instinct? How does that instinct imprinted on you and on the people you back throughout your life and career written about? I'm not [00:10:43] S2: sure that it's all that relevant to the people I've encountered in this journey through life, but it certainly has had consequences for me, particularly in times like the ones that we are living through at the moment and the atmosphere that is prevalent to some extent in The US and also in Western Europe. I think the necessity for always feeling that you have a bolt hole, that you have some place to go if the fire gets too hot, that's the lesson that I took away from my family history. Glibly saying that you can never have enough passports. [00:11:20] S0: Do you feel that especially true now? Say a bit about the state of the world, how you perceive the state of the world.
00:11:26 · Michael Moritz
[00:11:26] S2: It's an uncomfortable place for minorities, The United States and Western Europe at large. It doesn't matter whether you're Asian or Muslim or black or Jewish. I understand the reasons, and I wanna be careful as well. I am not whining about antisemitism. I'm not complaining about it. I long ago came to terms with the fact that it's just a fact of life. It's been around for two thousand five hundred years. It's not gonna disappear in 2026 or 2030. It's always gonna be with us. And in fact, as we were talking about a few minutes ago, I think the fact that antisemitism was around and has been around and has been something I've been conscious of all my life or all my sentient life, it's made me stronger. But I think it's disquieting if you're living in a society where in America, I think my simplistic way of thinking about who feels safe is the contingent of Americans who feel safe are white Christians who own guns. Everybody else feels a degree of insecurity, whether you're pursued by ICE or you go to a house of prayer that has to be guarded by police to ensure that that's safe. And that exists in America, it exists in The United Kingdom, in France, in other countries around Europe where far right governments have come to the fore. And obviously everybody has read about the recent elections in Germany of a far right party in Saxony province. And I think in times of economic distress, where you have millions of people who've been tens of millions of people who feel they've been left behind. That feeling of despair can easily be whipped up into a horrendous stew by leaders with authoritarian impulses.