Michael Moritz

Welcome to City Arts & Lectures, a season of talks and onstage conversations with some of the most celebrated writers, artists, and thinkers of our day, recorded before an audience at the Sidney Goldstein Theatre in San Francisco.

This week, we remember the life of poet, writer, farmer, and environmentalist Wendell Berry with a conversation with his friend and fellow writer, Michael Pollan.

Berry was one of America's most influential voices on agriculture and the environment.

and he wrote with a calm and compelling vision about our relationship with the land, our work, and our communities.

Barry was also an activist, protesting the Vietnam War, mountaintop removal coal mining, and nuclear power.

And he inspired generations of environmentalists, farmers, food activists, and writers.

Among them, journalist Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind.

Barry died on August 31, 2026, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.

There's that funny meme that was going around around one of the partners of Sequoia.

Was it Mike Moritz or was it...

I forget it was maybe it was Don Valentine with Jensen Huang was like, if you lose my money, I will kill you.

And that was what was at stake.

They are interviewed by these brilliant journalists from the Financial Times.

And I listened in to one of them, Michael Moritz, who was one of the original, uh, partners at Sequoia, who now came out with a book about his, uh, Jewish background.

And just to kind of put it together with what we talked about earlier today, it's interesting because he was asked, um, "What do you think about the latest political development in Germany?" And he said, "Well, you know, I've been looking at, uh, Asian technology for a long period of time.

They are becoming so powerful.

As the company spent close to a billion dollars anonymously gobbling up 70,000 acres, almost five times the size of Manhattan, the vacuum of information was filled with rumors that the buyer might be connected to foreign spies.

Those fears were not assuaged in 2023 when the New York Times uncovered the plan and its Silicon Valley backers, including the venture capitalists Michael Moritz and Marc Andreessen, the Lincoln founder Reid Hoffman, and Lauren Power Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective and the widow of Steve Jobs.

It also didn't help that California Forever's landholding subsidiary had begun suing a group of holdout farmers whose families have worked Solano's land for more than a century on the grounds that they were colluding for more money.

Since then, California Forever has become a political force, spreading money across Solano County and hiring high-profile consultants, including former legislative leaders.

And that was after a stint in investment banking, which I always thought that was gonna be my thing, and I was pulled back on, onto the team then to head the investor operations of the, of the, um, uh, the conference in twenty nineteen.

And then sort of in the first few calls, the first one I ever had was with Sir Michael Moritz, or, or Mike, as we close friends call him.

[chuckles]

Uh, was that, okay, this is, this is pretty special.

Is there anything from those initial kind of meetings that you took away from what makes a great investor that you look for today?

today?Ah, for sure.

Um, I, I would say that the connective, the connective tissue maybe i, is not something that I necessarily would say is, is a great investor per se, but it was a character trait of these people who, once again, the Michael Moritzs of the world, uh, and John Dorris and so forth, Chris Saccas, they were surprisingly approachable always.

They were very low ego as well.