Michael Moritz's Top 10 Rules For Success (@moritzKBE)

– People have a successful company

and they lose touch with the product.

When the time came to germinate their ideas

they were ready and poised and able to do that.

You could have put a chimpanzee in Silicon Valley in 1986

and they would’ve been successful in the venture business.

I don’t have any of these ornaments and plaques

that commemorate investments or companies from yester-year.

I just think they’re irrelevant.

There’s really only one thing that they care about,

and that care is deep.

Because starting a business, founding a company,

is the hardest act in business.

Imagine if you’re in your teens

and you become fascinated with something.

And nobody has, to best of my knowledge,

has ever addressed a graduating class

better than Steve did that day.

– He’s a Welsh born venture capitalist

with Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley.

He’s a former member of the board of directors of Google.

He has an estimated net-worth of three billion dollars.

He’s Michael Moritz,

and here’s my take on his top ten rules for success.

(woosh)

– People have a successful company

and they lose touch with the product

and making it very, very important

for the company,

just go back, and you know,

all this stuff that’s been written

about Apple and Steve Jobs

in the last few months

is well worth reflecting on

because this was a man who took over a company

that was essentially bankrupt in 1997

and he realized that the products that this company

was selling were embarrassing,

they weren’t doing anything for the customer,

they weren’t distinctive, they weren’t special,

they had nothing that captivated

the interest of the customer,

and for me, at Sequoia Capital it starts with,

we’re a research firm, not a product firm,

it starts with the service that we’re providing,

is it still relevant for our,

for our customers’, you know, entrepreneur’s logic.

For a product’s company,

I think people, they just loose touch with the product.

I think it helps if, um,

you try and enter an environment

where you think you can learn a lot,

and whether that’s inside an organization,

doesn’t have to be a company,

it could be a, some other organization,

or, around people

that you particularly admire

that you could learn a lot from,

and, I think that just helps

expand one’s horizons,

and also gives the individual a sense

of what excellence is really like,

if you picked the right setting

or the right set of individuals,

and done right, it’s a transformative set of experiences,

and massively expands your horizons,

and the sense that you have all the wonderful

array of opportunities that lie in front of you.

– What do you believe set apart people like

Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerburg, and Bill Gates.

– Apart from their character,

they happen to be in particular markets,

the personal computer market for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates,

and the Internet for Mark Zuckerburg,

where they had spent their youth and formative years,

assembling knowledge that,

and a deep interest in a particular topic

that the rest of the world didn’t know very much about,

so when the time came to germinate their ideas,

they were ready and poised and able to do that,

and obviously, then showed their metal as entrepreneurs

because there were lots of other people

who were there at the same time,

but who subsequently failed,

whereas these people succeeded.

– What is your advice to a young person,

or not so young person, who would like to become

a venture capitalist the way you did?

How should they go about doing it,

and should they do it?

– I think everybody should,

look it’s,

there’ve been a few other people

who have been extremely fortunate and lucky like I have,

and I think, you know, you could’ve put a chimpanzee

in Silicon Valley in 1986

and they would’ve been successful in the venture business.

(interviewer laughs)

And, um,

and, um, people just have to follow their instincts

and try and do what they think’s going to excite them,

excite them everyday,

I think it’s probably more fun,

more rewarding, more demanding, more taxing,

to go and start a company.

– As opposed to being an investor?

– For sure.

I don’t have any of these ornaments and plaques

that commemorate investments or companies from yester-year,

I just think they’re irrelevant.

And it’s about the past, and it’s about,

I was at Hewlett Packard the other day walking around

and they’ve got a museum, which is very touching,

it’s really interesting,

they’ve got all these old oscilloscopes

and computers and, and, and,

you know, these wonderful calculators from 1971,

fascinating, they should not be in the company

if you’re thinking about tomorrow,

and they should be in a museum someplace

off campus, or off the premises,

and that’s the way that I think about our own business,

I think, and it’s what I was alluding to earlier,

I think if we don’t stay ahead of everybody else,

gradually, it’s the story of every company

that began to go down,

unless you keep that fire up,

and keep worrying about losing tomorrow,

you’ll never reap all the wonders and benefits

that come from tomorrow,

which is why we try to,

obviously, you want to learn from the past,

and not repeat the mistakes from the past,

but you never, from my point of view,

want to roll in relish, in past triumphs.

– [Female Interviewer] You read about

finding the people who are obsessed.

How do you determine if somebody has an obsession.

– It’s, um,

it’s a good point and it’s one that,

you know, I wrote about with Alex in this book,

and I think it’s a characteristic

of the most successful entrepreneurs

which is that they certainly at the beginning

of their company, and often for a very good long time,

are able to shut out the rest of the world,

and just devote themselves to what they’re really

interested in doing, and shut off all the other distractions

because there’s really only one thing that they care about

and that care is deep, and it’s genuine,

and it’s the sort of thing that they go to bed,

you know, go to sleep thinking about,

and they wake up in the morning, thinking about.

The best advice I ever got was a set of three words,

which is follow your instincts.

By which I mean, if you’ve been studying something at HQUST

that fascinates you enormously,

and you have an idea about how you can build and create

something that maybe just a little bit better

than what’s on the market, go and do that,

and then see where it leads.

– I’m looking for your reflections as a board member,

as an investor, is what you do,

what do you advice entrepreneurs to do

when things aren’t working?

– I always think of it, and people are always very skeptical

about this response, but I always think about it

as if it’s a very close family member

whose involved running the business,

it’s somebody who has worked incredibly hard,

because starting a business, founding a company,

is the hardest act in business,

and people that haven’t done it don’t really understand

how taxing it is, how demanding it is,

the emotional costs and consequences, of it,

and, so, I always think gosh,

if this was a cousin, or a sister, or a brother

running this business,

(heavy sigh)

do I think it’s worth them spending the next

period of their life, two or three years of their life,

trying to salvage something, from what seems like

an incredibly distressing situation.

And if the answer is yes, then we’re all in,

and if it’s no, I will tell them that,

but invariably, and those sorts of conversations

come around when you’re thinking about

whether or not to sell a company,

you know whether the most prudent thing to do

is to sell it, or not sell it,

and on the whole, we really, really

dislike selling companies,

but there are some situations

where you think gosh, the way, that this person,

the best thing for them is going to be to sell it

and then move on to something fresh,

and new and more promising.

Imagine if you’re in your teens

and you become fascinated with something,

and you have that period of time in your teens

and perhaps early twenties,

where you don’t have distractions,

you don’t have a job, you don’t have a family,

you don’t have commitments,

and you can afford to indulge your passion,

your passion can be Bill Gates, circa 1973,

figuring out how to write programing languages

for micro-computers, it could be

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,

thinking about how to build single board computers,

it could be Chad Hurley or Steve Chen,

the founders of YouTube,

trying to figure out how to send video to one another,

it could be Max Levchin, this incredibly wonderful

Ukrainian mathematician who was one of the

co-founders of PayPal,

trying to figure out how to move money

between mobile phones.

Well all of these people,

in their particular spheres had thought a lot more

thought far more deeply about that particular topic

than any of the rest of us,

they may not have known a lot about other stuff,

they may not have known about how to read

a chart of accounts, or how to think about marketing,

or how to set up international operations,

or how to build a logistics center,

but all of that stuff,

you can hire people to do that,

what you cannot hire people to do,

is to have the wonderful spark

and founding instinct and deep fascination

and abiding passion for a particular topic.

Best advice that I could offer anybody is

to suggest that they go to YouTube

and watch a very touching, moving, and affecting

address that Steve Jobs gave several years before he died

to the students at Stanford University,

and nobody, to the best of my knowledge,

has ever addressed a graduating class

better than Steve did that day.

– Thank you so much for watching,

I made this video because willyoulaugh asked me to,

so if there’s a famous entrepreneur that you

want me to profile next,

leave it in the comments below

and I’ll see what I can do,

I’d also love to know which of the top ten rules

had the biggest impact on you and why,

leave it in the comments,

I’ll join in the discussion,

thank you so much for watching,

continue to believe, and I’ll see you soon.

(whoosh)

”

Michael Moritz’s Top 10 Rules For Success (@moritzKBE)

Be First to Comment

Leave a Reply Cancel reply