I’d never have described him as a friend. Three years older than me, Michael was somebody I looked up to and admired, but I had too much respect for him to ever feel really close. I remember him as an Enid Blyton sort of schoolboy like Julian from The Famous Five – serious, upstanding, clever and principled. Back in the early Seventies with flower power exploding around us and Ziggy Stardust clambering into his platform boots, Michael seemed to embody a slightly earlier age, one that was more formal, definitely more Simon & Garfunkel and Stevie Wonder than David Bowie. The phone call we had that day would have been very businesslike and earnest, not much small talk.
He had the foresight to invest in startups, called Google, Yahoo, Skyscanner, PayPal and YouTube among others
Roger Golten who was in the same class as Michael at selective boys’ grammar Howardian High School, says: “He was pretty smart, a bit more studious than I was and we always vied for the top spot in our class.” A Ner Tamid committee member remembers him being “friendly, energetic and clearly very bright and quick-witted. Confident but not supercilious.”
So how did he go from being head boy at a provincial high school to a supremely successful venture capitalist owning a hamlet in Italy, and a philanthropist who donates millions to educational and cultural causes including sponsorship of the Booker Prize?
After graduating from Oxford, Michael did an MBA at the Wharton School in Pennsylvania then moved into journalism, remaining for many years at Time magazine. After writing about Steve Jobs and becoming Apple’s historian, he seems to have developed an interest in the fast-growing world of tech, leaving Time to found a newsletter and conference company in the sector before joining Sequoia Capital and having the foresight to invest in startups called Google, Yahoo, Skyscanner, PayPal and YouTube, among others. In 2013 he was knighted by the late Queen.
Normally quite reticent, Michael is back in the spotlight again with the publication of a memoir, Ausländer, which traces his family’s path through repeated exiles. But back in 1972 we were looking forward not back, and during our long heart-to-heart, Michael and I discussed the option of a joint chairmanship of the club. He agreed with my suggestion that none of the three contenders (including me!) quite had the stature to fill the gap alone. He was concerned that giving the post to two people would leave one of us disappointed, and I was more worried about keeping my “bossy” cousin out of the running.
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My 1972 Letts page-a-day desk diary is full of chatter about parties, tracking my yo-yoing weight and the spectre of double German lessons
My 1972 Letts page-a-day desk diary is full of chatter about parties, tracking my yo-yoing weight, and the spectre of double German lessons. There’s also lots about Ner Tamid – organisational details such as the night we forgot to order the sandwiches, discussions about leadership and organising weekends away. A quiz evening was “great fun”, even though some participants left for the chippie.
On April 22 the results of the election were out, and it was good news for me. I had become joint chairman with Howard Bogod. But worried about the future, I returned to my favourite theme, “Our trouble is that we have very little authority or respect which Michael had.” I consoled myself by collecting money to buy suitable leaving gifts for Michael and Claire. I wanted to give them something that reflected our esteem. Much to my chagrin, fellow board members did not share my enthusiasm. One of them instructed me, “Don’t make it too expensive!” and was in a hurry to get off the phone. On April 23 we held the first committee meeting of the new regime, and my fears about our management skills turned out to be well-founded. It was a disaster. Somebody brought along an unruly younger brother, girls acted stupidly and nobody knew what they were doing. For some reason, Michael was also in attendance, and he shared my disgust at the goings-on.
Maybe as a distraction from all the chaos, I continued with my gift campaign, thinking it was quite reasonable to ask everybody to donate 50p, even though it had become clear now that nobody backed me in this. I decided that the perfect tribute for the admired ones would be fountain pens.
One Saturday I met Susan Goodwin outside Boots in Queen Street, which then had an excellent stationery department. I bought two Parker pens for £2.40 each and took them to Mr Grimes the engraver in one of Cardiff’s famous shopping arcades, to be inscribed with the recipients’ names. I declared myself quite shocked by his prices which had gone up from 2.5p to 4p a letter. Later I noted very briefly that “Michael and Claire were both very pleased with their pens” but soon after that my 1972 diary peters out, with only one further reference to “Mike” Moritz. He went off to Oxford and from there made his fortune in California while Claire became a lawyer. I stayed where I was and spent most of the next few decades working for the BBC.
Over the years, I hear snippets about Michael through the Cardiff grapevine, and as a journalist was extremely impressed that he was working for Time, one of the world’s most respected English language periodicals. It is many years later when I heard that he had gone even further and a become California billionaire, which blows my mind.
But I am proud that I saw it coming. I understood at the tender age of 14 just how much Michael outstripped us even then as a leader and thinker. Though I obviously had no idea that he was destined to achieve such an extraordinary level of wealth and success, the evidence of my diary shows that I could see how many leagues he was above the rest of us. And I sometimes wonder if he still has that fountain pen.
