Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Michael Moritz, legendary investor and author of 'Ausländer,' reflects on his family's history as Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, explori

Key takeaways

• Early childhood experiences, especially those rooted in survival and displacement, create enduring psychological imprints that shape decision-making and resilience.
• The unspoken behaviors of parents—vigilance, suspicion, caution—are often more influential than their stories in shaping a child's character.

Main topics

• Family history and refugee trauma
• The impact of early life on adult behavior

Notable quotes

"One of the things that came out of the book... discovering who I am and why I became whatever it is that I've become."

"It was much more the daily behavior, the reaction to events, the sense that doom was not very far away."

Conclusion

Moritz's journey reveals how deeply personal history—especially trauma, displacement, and

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Ramp is the only platform built to make your finance team leaner, faster, and better, saving businesses 5 % annually on average so you can stay focused on growth. Ramp customers grow revenue 3.2 times faster than the average American business. Visa, Vercel, Kersher, Stripe, Notion, 11Lab, Shopify, and 70,000 other businesses all now run on Ramp. Mine does too, and so should yours. Learn more at Speaker 3 (0:22) ramp.com slash invest. Speaker 2 (0:25) Felix by Rogo is a personal finance agent that turns a single prompt into finished, client-ready work using your firm's own templates, context, and standards. Send Felix an email like, take these comments and turn them for me. Or update my tracker with the context of these emails. And Felix sends back finished PowerPoint decks, Excel models, and sourced research. Felix works the way your team already does, delivering work quickly and accurately around the clock. Learn more at rogo.ai slash Felix. OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Vercel all have something in common. They all use WorkOS. To achieve enterprise adoption at scale, you have to deliver on core capabilities like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and audit logs. Instead of spending months building these mission-critical capabilities yourself, you can just use WorkOS APIs to gain all of them on day zero. That's why so many of the top AI teams you hear about already run on WorkOS. WorkOS is the fastest way to become enterprise ready and stay focused on what matters most, your product. Visit WorkOS.com to get started. Speaker 2 (1:27) Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com. Speaker 1 (1:51) Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. Speaker 2 (2:18) When I was reading your book, one of the lines or the ideas that has really stuck with me ever since is where does one person end and the next person begin? And this deep dive that you took into the impact of one's history, family history, heritage on who a person is. I'm interested in this from so many angles as a parent, as a person interested in history, as a person interested in genetics, nature versus nurture. If I were to sum up the book in that question, what is your answer to that? What did you come away thinking after this deep study of your own family's history? Speaker 3 (2:54) One of the things that came out of the book, which I didn't really expect, was discovering who I am and why I became whatever it is that I've become. And that was an unexpected gift of the writing. And it came from this exploration of my family's past, in particular. My parents. Going back and excavating the deep memories of childhood, the sort of atmosphere in our home and in the general media in which I grew up, helped me understand a lot about why I am who I am and react to certain things in the fashion that I do. Because... Unwittingly, obviously, every parent leaves an imprint on a child. That's obviously especially true during the formative years. Whatever the formative years are, I'm no sort of child specialist or scientist, but before you turn 12, 13, 14 years old, those imprints that you've absorbed in some manner, consciously or unconsciously, those remain with you. and both the angels and Speaker 2 (4:12) demons, I think, that you deal with for the rest of your life. 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 14 years. What new understanding of yourself came out of this exercise? I grew up in this family of refugees from Speaker 3 (4:34) 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, oh, 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. Speaker 2 (6:02) without that particular atmospheric backdrop. 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? It was definitely not the stories they told Speaker 3 (6:14) 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 Speaker 2 (7:04) wary about navigating daily life. There was a couple stories in 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. The two individuals, Patrick, that you referred to were my Speaker 3 (7:32) 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, a province in southern Germany. He had fought in World War I. He had somehow or other survived the horror of... Verdun, he had 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... were shipped 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 Speaker 2 (9:31) had Speaker 3 (9:31) 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 streetwise, he was more entrepreneurial, wasn't burdened by the need to remain and collect a state pension because he'd always been able to sustain himself. look out for his future. And he got out with his wife, my grandmother. But they got out by the skin of their teeth. They got out 72 hours before war broke out. 72 hours later, Speaker 2 (10:27) they too would have perished. 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 sure that it's all that relevant to Speaker 3 (10:42) the people that 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 U.S. 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. Do Speaker 2 (11:17) you feel that especially true now? Say a bit about the state of the world, how you perceive the state of the world. Speaker 3 (11:22) It's an uncomfortable place for minorities. The United States and Western Europe writ large. It doesn't matter whether you're Asian or Muslim or black. or Jewish. I understand the reasons, and I want to be careful as well. I am not whining about anti-Semitism. 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 2,500 years. It's not going to disappear in 2026 or 2030. It's always going to be with us. And in fact, as we were talking about a few minutes ago, I think the fact that anti-Semitism was around. and has been around and has been something I've been conscious of all my life, 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 Speaker 2 (13:22) authoritarian impulses. It forced you to put on your optimistic or hopeful hat and thinking about the future as it relates to this problem. Speaker 3 (13:31) Well, Victor Orban was booted from office. He was riding high a couple of years ago. In some places, there clearly are pushes to the center, which would be, I think, very consoling for people and a return to some modicum of civility in the various societies in which, you know, people like us travel. So here in America... Clearly, the midterms in the next 18 months after that are really going to shape how we're going to live in the next decade, because there's been the imprint of one person on the last decade in America. I think in Britain, the person who's identified with the far right, Nigel Farage, may well have had his best day, and his best day may well be behind him. I think it's different in France. With Marie Le Pen and the elections next year, it's different in Spain and it's Speaker 2 (14:22) potentially different in Germany. Do you think that the internet fundamentally changes the potential for civility and political moderation because it so rewards extremes and attention? Speaker 3 (14:34) I think the three-letter answer is yes. I think it's been true of every form of new media from the beginning of the printing press. But obviously the internet and mobile telephony has made it far easier to spread false memes and innuendo. But it's a much larger, more amplified version of what occurred in Germany when radio took off during the 1930s and where the radio waves were dominated by extreme propaganda and racist views and loud lies told frequently. Speaker 2 (15:12) Vanta automates security and compliance for over 16,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, keeping them audit-ready around the clock. It's the number one agentic trust platform, and it now helps companies like yours watch for the risks that show up between audits, across your vendors, your AI tools, and your whole environment. Every new tool your team signs up for, every vendor that turns on AI features, is an opportunity for something to go wrong, and most security programs weren't built for AI's pace of growth. The Vanta agent works like a 24-7 GRC engineer in the background, finding issues, drafting fixes for you, and cutting vendor assessment time by up to 50%. 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Speaker 2 (16:40) Going back to your family's history, one of my favorite topics is this idea that you can learn so much about a person from what happens in their first 12, 13, 14 years, as you said. Carl Jung had this great idea of studying the unlived life of the parent. Another way of framing it would be, this is a little trite, but you should be like who your father was supposed to be. You should live the life that he was unable to or didn't quite. And that part of that imprinting is... children observing their parents, what they're not going after, the risks they're not taking, and maybe running in that direction is a great way to explore. Back to the point about where does one person end and the next begin, like the break from the parents is really important. I'm curious how you arrived at this method of yours, this first 14-year interrogation method. When you first did it, how you do it, like what the method is and why you find it just so impactful in understanding a new person. I suppose I first came across it, oddly, in Detroit Speaker 3 (17:39) when I was a correspondent for Time magazine. With a colleague, I wrote a book about the Chrysler Corporation, but more importantly, the person who turned around Chrysler at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, and a man who was, for a time, the best-known business figure in America, even though today most people struggle to pronounce his last name. But he was... a gentleman called Lee Iacocca. He was the son of Italian immigrants. In writing this book, we Speaker 2 (18:11) spent Speaker 3 (18:12) a fair amount of time interviewing Iacocca, and what came through loud and clear was how much as the son of Italian immigrants who'd grown up in Pennsylvania, Lee grew up in Pennsylvania, he felt like an outsider. He worked in the automobile industry and obviously in the upper echelons of the automobile industry where I think he was always viewed with suspicion, most notably when he worked at the Ford Motor Company by Henry Ford II and the other people who obviously everybody had immigrated, but who were much more members of the establishment. And Iacocca never felt like a member of the establishment and became very clear that all of that stemmed from his childhood. As the years went by, he began to interpret many of the slights that then fell upon him, including not getting the top job at Ford, to the fact that he was seen as Speaker 2 (19:12) an Italian immigrant. If you think about the people who