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Michael Moritz is leaving Sequoia Capital after almost 40 years leading the Silicon Valley firm’s investments in companies including Google, Yahoo, YouTube and PayPal.
The departure from start-up dealmaking of one of the tech industry’s best-known investors marks another shake-up for the US venture capital group, after Sequoia last month announced plans to split off its China and India units.
Moritz will from Wednesday focus on Sequoia Heritage, a $15bn wealth-management fund that he helped launch in 2010, according to a letter from Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital’s managing partner, to its investors.
“We are immensely grateful for all of Michael’s contributions. He helped establish Sequoia as one of the leading technology investment groups in the world,” said Botha in a letter to the firm’s limited partners. Moritz planned to “smoothly transition” from board seats at the firm’s investments “over time”, he added.
Moritz, a Welsh-born former journalist who was knighted in the UK in 2013, secured lucrative early stakes in some of Silicon Valley’s biggest and fastest-growing companies after joining Sequoia in the mid-1980s. He led the firm from the mid-1990s until 2012, when he stepped down citing an undisclosed illness.
Recent investments include in fintechs Stripe and Klarna, as well as ecommerce groups Instacart and Getir. In 2019, he stepped in to secure the future of the Booker Prize, sponsoring the literary prize for five years through Crankstart, the charitable foundation that he runs alongside his wife Harriet Heyman.
Moritz’s new duties will be a change of pace from the world of Silicon Valley start-ups such as Nvidia and WhatsApp that Sequoia has also previously backed.
Sequoia Heritage operates as a separate legal entity to Sequoia Capital but Botha described it as managing investments from “many members of the greater Sequoia community”.
The fund was founded in 2010 to help the venture capital firm’s partners and the start-up founders it backed to manage their wealth. It invests both in funds and directly in individual companies, making independent investment decisions to Sequoia Capital.
At its creation, Moritz and Doug Leone, another long-serving Sequoia partner, each invested $150mn, alongside $250mn from outside investors. Subsequent investors have included Stripe’s co-founder John Collison and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt’s family foundation, regulatory filings have shown.
The New York Times first reported Moritz’s move.
