Michael Moritz

Moritz was born in 1954 in Cardiff, Wales. His parents fled Nazi Germany as child refugees, first to London, and settled in Cardiff after the war; his grandparents and many other relatives were killed in the Holocaust. He attended the now-closed Howardian High School in Cardiff, leaving in 1973 as the only pupil in his year to go to Oxford. He recalled that his first job was delivering chickens in the South Wales valleys.⁠[1][2][3][2][4][4][5]

He recalled that as a teenager, looking through the phone book, he found that his was the only family named Moritz in Cardiff, which made him feel like an outsider.⁠[2][2]

Moritz studied history at Christ Church, Oxford, and moved to the United States immediately after graduating in 1976. He explained that in the mid-1970s Britain was beset by strikes and power cuts and the future seemed bleak, and that he had not expected to still be living in the United States more than 30 years later. With a Thouron Scholarship, he studied at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an MBA.⁠[4][4][4][6][7]

After earning his MBA, Moritz joined Time magazine as a journalist and later became its San Francisco bureau chief, which brought him into contact with the emerging Silicon Valley. In 1984, he published The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer, about the origins of Apple. He also wrote for publications including The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Sunday Times, and the Financial Times, and founded a company called Technologic.⁠[6][8][9][5][5]

In 1986, Moritz joined the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Sequoia founder Don Valentine later handed leadership of the firm to Moritz and Doug Leone jointly; Moritz was one of the firm’s leaders for about two decades.⁠[6][10][10]

In 1995, Sequoia began partnering with Yahoo, founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang, with Moritz in charge; Yahoo went public the following year, and Moritz served as a director of the company.⁠[11][7]

In 1999, Sequoia began partnering with PayPal, whose team included Max Levchin, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, with Moritz as the partner; PayPal went public in 2002 and was acquired the same year. Moritz served as a director of PayPal Holdings.⁠[12][7]

On June 7, 1999, Google announced that it had completed a $25 million round of equity funding led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, and that Moritz and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins had joined Google’s board of directors. Moritz said at the time that Google should become the “gold standard” for internet search. He was then also a director of companies including Yahoo, eToys, Quote.com, eGroups, PlanetRx, Flextronics, and Webvan. Google went public in 2004, and he later also served as a director of its parent company, Alphabet.⁠[13][13][13][13][14][7]

In 2003, Sequoia began partnering with LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry, the professional networking site founded by Reid Hoffman, with Moritz as the partner; LinkedIn went public in 2011, and Moritz served as a director of the company. That same year, he recruited Roelof Botha, formerly PayPal’s chief financial officer, to Sequoia; Botha later became managing partner of Sequoia Capital.⁠[15][7][10][10]

In 2004, Sequoia invested in the online shoe retailer Zappos, with Moritz and Alfred Lin as partners; Zappos was acquired in 2009.⁠[16]

Moritz saw YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry’s potential early. He recalled that in YouTube’s early days he gave the founders space in Sequoia’s offices, and that these twenty-somethings often did not start their day until two in the afternoon. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion.⁠[4][4][4]

In 2008, Moritz and his wife, the writer Harriet Heyman, donated more than £25 million to his alma mater, Christ Church, Oxford; as of 2012, this was the largest single gift in the college’s recent history.⁠[8][8]

In 2010, Moritz and his colleague Doug Leone founded the wealth management firm Sequoia Heritage, where he has been a founding limited partner and board member. Sequoia Heritage, an independent legal entity, was seeded with $150 million of Moritz’s own money, $150 million from Leone, and $250 million from outside investors; as of 2023, a large portion of Crankstart’s assets was held at Sequoia Heritage.⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

In July of that year, Moritz became a director of Klarna, a payments company that began operations in Sweden in 2005. In 2010, Sequoia also began investing in Stripe, the payments company founded by Patrick Collison and John Collison, with Moritz as one of the partners.⁠[7][7][17]

In 2012, Moritz and Heyman joined the Giving Pledge, committing to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. In their pledge letter of April 12, they wrote that their wealth, like all fortunes, rests heavily on the intelligence, work, and contributions of others, and so should be used to improve the lives of people they do not know.⁠[18][18][18]

In May 2012, Moritz stepped back from the day-to-day management of Sequoia for health reasons and became chairman. He said he did not want to retire. He no longer had day-to-day responsibilities after that but continued to provide support and counsel to Sequoia.⁠[8][9][4][10]

On July 11, 2012, Moritz and Heyman announced a £75 million gift to the University of Oxford to establish the Moritz-Heyman Scholarships, which with matched funding from the university and further fundraising would reach a total of £300 million; Oxford said it was the largest gift for undergraduate financial support in European history. The scholarships were for students from families with incomes below £16,000 a year, worth about £11,000 per student per year, with the first 100 awarded that autumn; the gift was to be made in three tranches of £25 million, each matched by an equal amount from the university’s endowment.⁠[8][8][19][19][8][8]

Moritz spoke of his family’s debt to strangers when they were refugees from Nazi Germany: “I would not be here today were it not for the generosity of strangers.”⁠[19][19]

In 2013, Sequoia began investing in the grocery delivery platform Instacart, with Moritz as one of the partners; he later became a director of the company. Instacart (legal entity Maplebear Inc.) went public in 2023.⁠[20][7]

In the Queen’s 2013 Birthday Honours, Moritz was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to promoting British economic interests and for philanthropic work, and has since been known as Sir Michael Moritz.⁠[6][21]

On July 15, 2014, Aberystwyth University in Wales made Moritz an honorary fellow at its graduation ceremony. The citation noted that he had supported scholarship programs at Oxford and the University of California and had also supported the arts and the preservation of historic buildings.⁠[6][6]

On February 17, 2016, the University of Chicago announced that Heyman and Moritz had made a $50 million commitment to its Odyssey Scholarship program and challenged the university to raise another $50 million to match it, to support students from low-income families. Moritz said both of his parents had been given scholarships and that he himself had only been able to come to the United States on a student scholarship program.⁠[9][9][9]

In June 2016, Moritz wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times calling Donald Trump, then the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, a “loser” by Silicon Valley standards and arguing that Trump’s business talent was overstated: had he simply invested his inheritance in an index fund tracking the S&P 500, he would have been just as wealthy. Moritz also opposed Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, pointing out that many of Silicon Valley’s outstanding entrepreneurs were immigrants.⁠[22][22][22][22][22][22]

In October 2016, Moritz, the angel investor Ron Conway, and the hedge fund investor William Oberndorf each donated $49,999 to San Francisco’s Proposition Q, accounting for the majority of the measure’s campaign funds of about $270,000. The measure sought to ban homeless tent encampments on sidewalks, and opponents criticized it for not adding funding for housing or shelters. Moritz referred questions to the campaign.⁠[23][23][23][23]

On February 28, 2019, the Booker Prize announced that after the previous sponsor, Man Group, withdrew, Crankstart, the charity of Moritz and Heyman, would fund it for the next five years and would also fund the International Booker Prize; the prize would not bear his name and would revert to the name “The Booker Prize.” The couple founded Crankstart in 2000 to support and organize scholarship funds for university students from low-income families.⁠[24][24][24][24][24]

In 2020, Moritz’s family office invested in the Turkish instant delivery company Getir before Sequoia did, and he subsequently became closely involved with the company. In December of that year, he became chairperson of Klarna’s board of directors.⁠[10][7]

In March 2021, San Francisco announced that Crankstart was donating $25 million to help the city offer free summer school or day care programs for children. Because TogetherSF, an advocacy group also funded by Crankstart, was involved in the program, Supervisor Hillary Ronen questioned whether it might have a political agenda of promoting school privatization, and the Board of Supervisors voted 10–1 to delay a vote by two weeks; Ronen conceded that she had no hard proof, and TogetherSF’s founders said their work was non-political.⁠[25][25][25][25][25][25][25]

That same year, Hear/Say Media, a nonprofit digital media outlet earlier funded by Crankstart, became a for-profit company after questions were raised about its backers, received $10 million in seed money from Moritz and Heyman, and was renamed The San Francisco Standard. Moritz co-founded and finances this local San Francisco news outlet with its CEO, Griffin Gaffney.⁠[26][26][26][27][28]

On July 19, 2023, Moritz left Sequoia after nearly 38 years, effective immediately, to deepen his advisory relationship with Sequoia Heritage. In a letter to limited partners, Botha said Moritz had represented Sequoia at companies including Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Zappos, Instacart, Stripe, and Klarna, and that Moritz would continue to represent Sequoia’s interests in a handful of companies while his board seats were gradually transitioned to other partners; by then, Sequoia Heritage was a $15 billion global fund.⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10]

After leaving, Moritz would not make new investments. A little more than a month earlier, Sequoia had announced that its China and its India and Southeast Asia funds would operate independently as HongShan and Peak XV Partners, respectively. After his departure, he served as a senior advisor to Sequoia Heritage.⁠[10][10][7]

In late August and early September 2023, Flannery Associates, which had been buying large amounts of land near Travis Air Force Base, was revealed to be backed by Silicon Valley investors including Moritz, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and Chris Dixon. The new city idea dated back to 2017, when Moritz emailed potential investors about the project, raising money on behalf of the former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek to build a new city from scratch in Solano County, about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco.⁠[29][29][29][29]

Sramek then publicly unveiled the new city plan under the name “California Forever”: its subsidiary Flannery had bought more than 78 square miles of farmland in Solano County since 2018 for about $800 million, but building a city on farmland would first require county voters to approve a ballot measure. Two local members of Congress were angered that the investors had concealed their identity for years.⁠[30][30][30][30][30]

In November 2023, it was reported that Moritz had spent about $336 million on social and political causes over three years, most of which appeared to have gone through Crankstart to charities in education, homelessness, immigration, and other areas; he also funded SF Parent Action, which pushed the 2022 recall of members of San Francisco’s school board, and the political advocacy group TogetherSF Action. Moritz said people questioning their agenda was their right, and that they were only trying to make San Francisco better for everyone.⁠[26][26][26][26][26]

In early December 2023, it was reported that the board list on Stripe’s website had been updated: Moritz’s seat had been taken by Sequoia partner Luciana Lixandru, and Stripe had added another seat for a partner from Sequoia Heritage; the exact timing of the change was not announced.⁠[31][31][31]

In July 2024, California Forever announced that it was withdrawing its new city ballot measure, which had been set to go before Solano County voters that fall; State Senator Bill Dodd, who represents the county, called the plan “fundamentally flawed.”⁠[32][32][32]

In September 2025, after celebrating its 200th anniversary, the National Gallery in London announced Project Domani, a £750 million transformation that includes expanding its collection into 20th- and 21st-century paintings and building a new wing. At the time of the announcement, £375 million had been pledged, including £150 million from Crankstart, the foundation of Moritz and Heyman; as of September 2025, this and the Julia Rausing Trust’s £150 million pledge were the two largest single cash donations publicly reported to a museum or gallery anywhere in the world.⁠[33][33][33][34][34][34]

On January 22, 2026, Profile Books published Moritz’s family memoir Ausländer, a title meaning “foreigner” or “outsider” in German. After his mother’s death, he sorted through the papers and photographs she left behind and traced the histories of close relatives murdered by the Nazis; in public archives, he found that two relatives had been photographed by the Gestapo as they were forced onto buses that took them to their deaths.⁠[3][2][3][2]

In March 2026, Moritz, who holds both British and American passports, said that Britain was today an uncomfortable place for Jews and more hostile than the United States, citing the 2025 attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester. He was applying for a German passport, which he called an “insurance policy” that would allow him to leave the United States or Britain if necessary. He also recalled that during a Welsh government trade visit to Silicon Valley in 2001, former Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan opened by asking “what’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in Silicon Valley?”, a remark that struck a nerve.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

He also argued that Britain and Europe lack the kind of unified large market available in the United States and China, and that British corporate boards sometimes lack the expertise to nurture new technology; he expected artificial intelligence to be highly disruptive for lower-skilled white-collar jobs.⁠[2][2][2]

Moritz’s term as an Instacart director expired at the annual meeting of stockholders on May 22, 2026, and he did not stand for re-election.⁠[35][35]

In August 2026, Crankstart and the national nonprofit Lever for Change launched Boundless San Francisco, a $150 million competition seeking proposals in any area to make San Francisco more livable: up to three awardees will receive $10 million to $50 million in late 2027, and another three to seven finalists will receive $1 million to $3.5 million. Since its founding, Crankstart has awarded more than $1.8 billion in grants, more than half of it to the Bay Area.⁠[36][36][36][36][36]

On August 30, 2026, the German magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Moritz. In it, he argued that there are parallels between the United States under Trump and Germany in the 1930s.⁠[37][37][37]

On September 30, 2026, Moritz appeared in conversation with Manny Yekutiel, then a candidate for the Board of Supervisors, at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to promote his memoir. He said that nobody gave The San Francisco Standard a chance when it started, and that it had recently moved to a subscription model and had 76 employees; Crankstart, which he runs together with his family, had about $4.3 billion and an 11-person team, and the Boundless San Francisco competition had received 850 submissions. Since leaving Sequoia in 2023, he had become one of San Francisco’s largest political donors, having given at least $8.5 million.⁠[27][27][27][27][27][27][27]

Moritz’s books include The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer (1984), about Apple’s early history; the bestseller Leading, co-written with former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson; and the family memoir Ausländer (2026).⁠[9][9][3]

As of February 2026, Moritz was chair of Klarna’s board of directors, a senior advisor to Sequoia Heritage, and chairman of Crankstart, and served as a director of several private companies including the pharmaceutical company Formation Bio; he had previously served as a director of companies including LinkedIn, Green Dot, PayPal Holdings, Alphabet, and Yahoo.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

Sequoia Capital: Official website: https://sequoiacap.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

Klarna: Official website: https://www.klarna.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

Crankstart: Official website: https://crankstart.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[38]

The San Francisco Standard: Official website: https://sfstandard.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[28]