Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Michael Moritz was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1954, to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany. He studied history at Oxford, got an MBA from Wharton, and went to work as a journalist, eventually becoming Time magazine's San Francisco bureau chief. He wrote the first book ever published about Apple's history. In 1986, he joined Sequoia Capital.

That background matters more than it might seem. Journalists who become investors tend to ask different questions. They're trained to understand narrative before numbers, to separate the companies that have a compelling story from the companies that merely have compelling metrics. Moritz brought that instinct to Silicon Valley at precisely the right moment.

The Investment Record

Michael Moritz investments at Sequoia represent one of the most consistent track records in venture capital history. The core highlights:

Sequoia invested $12.5 million in Google in 1999 at a $100 million valuation. Google's 2004 IPO valued the company at $23 billion, making Moritz one of Wales' wealthiest people overnight. He topped Forbes' Midas List in 2006 and 2007. Before Google, he had backed Yahoo at its founding in 1995, where Sequoia's $1 million investment preceded a company that briefly reached a $125 billion market cap.

He backed PayPal in the early days, was on the board through its IPO and eBay acquisition, and was the partner who recruited Alfred Lin to Sequoia after the Zappos sale. He led Sequoia's investment in LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired in 2016 for $26.2 billion. He wrote Klarna's first check in 2010 and stayed on as the buy-now-pay-later company's chairman even after leaving Sequoia.

Then there is Stripe. Sequoia backed the Collison brothers early, and Moritz served on the board as Stripe became one of the most valuable private fintech companies in history, with a peak valuation of $95 billion in 2021.

The Health Diagnosis and What Came After

In 2006, Moritz was diagnosed with a rare, incurable blood cancer. In 2012 he stepped back from Sequoia's day-to-day management, though he remained an active partner. He co-founded Sequoia Heritage in 2010 as a wealth management vehicle for partners and founders. By the time he fully departed Sequoia in July 2023 after nearly 38 years, Heritage had grown to $15 billion in assets under management and had become fully independent.

His departure created an awkward moment with Klarna. After Moritz left Sequoia, the firm tried to replace him on Klarna's board, sparking a public dispute with CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Sequoia eventually retracted the request, apologized, and added a new board member separately. It was a rare public tension inside the normally guarded world of late-stage company governance.

The Klarna IPO landed in September 2025, raising $1.4 billion. Sequoia's $500 million total investment was worth roughly $3.5 billion at IPO, a 7x return over more than a decade. Moritz had stayed on as Klarna's chairman through the listing.

What His Career Teaches About Prepared Mind Investing

Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund has written about the difference between investors who follow consensus and investors who form independent theses. Moritz's career is a consistent example of thesis formation well before market consensus. He backed Yahoo when the web barely existed, Google when internet advertising wasn't yet a proven business model, and Stripe when most fintech money was flowing to established players.

This pattern of conviction before consensus is central to how Angel Squad members are trained to think. The community of 2,500-plus investors across 50-plus countries co-invests alongside Hustle Fund GPs like Eric Bahn, Elizabeth Yin, and Shiyan Koh in companies where the thesis is early and the market hasn't yet agreed. That's where the returns are. That's what Moritz spent 38 years demonstrating. Learn more about the Angel Squad approach at hustlefund.vc/squad.

The Philanthropy and the Civic Work

Moritz has donated over $300 million through his Crankstart Foundation to San Francisco-based causes, with particular focus on civic reform, homelessness, and local journalism. He co-founded the San Francisco Standard in 2021. He pledged £150 million to the National Gallery London in 2025 for a new extension. He is a signatory of the Giving Pledge. His net worth sits around $7 billion as of early 2026.

Shiyan Koh of Hustle Fund has noted that the best investors think seriously about what they want their capital to accomplish beyond returns. Moritz's philanthropic record, across journalism, education, and civic infrastructure, reflects a consistent point of view about where capital is most useful when the financial goals are already met.

The Takeaway

Moritz bet on Google when the idea of paying $12.5 million for a company with no proven revenue model looked reckless. He bet on Stripe when the fintech landscape was already crowded. He backed Klarna when buy-now-pay-later was a Swedish idea that hadn't yet crossed over to global markets. Each of those bets was made from a prepared mind that had been building its thesis for years before the specific opportunity appeared.