Sir Michael Moritz

Sir Michael Moritz was born in Cardiff, studied Modern History at Oxford and began his career as a journalist at Time magazine in the US in the late 1970s. It was during this period that he met the young Steve Jobs and wrote the first book about Apple, The Little Kingdom: the Private Story of Apple Computer, which was published in 1984 and has become an industry classic. Moritz co-wrote a second business book, Going for Broke: The Chrysler Story, before joining Sequoia Capital in 1986.

Sequoia Capital’s close alliances with young founders have been transformed into companies now worth nearly $1.5 trillion – the most of any private, investment firm in the world. These include the first investments in companies such as Apple and Cisco and, more recently, YouTube, AirBnB, Dropbox and WhatsApp. Sir Michael has been a member of the Board of Directors of a variety of companies including Google, Yahoo!, PayPal and LinkedIn.

While Moritz was at the helm of Sequoia Capital, the firm started and developed its business in China, India and Israel and also formed two industry leading funds – Sequoia Heritage, a long term, globally diversified asset management business, and Sequoia Capital Global Equities, a public market fund. Sequoia remains, as it did in the 1970s, a driving force of Silicon Valley and has successfully transported its business to today’s technology hotspots. Moritz remains deeply engaged with Sequoia Capital’s investments including next generation companies such as Instacart, Klarna and Stripe.

In 2009, almost thirty years after it was first published, Moritz revised and expanded his book on Apple in The Return to the Little Kingdom. In 2012 he became chairman of Sequoia Capital. In 2013 he was appointed KBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for his services to promoting British economy and his family’s philanthropic work includes the formation of Europe’s largest scholarship programme for low income university students. The son of refugees from Nazi Germany, he lives in San Francisco with his wife, Harriet Heyman.

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