In a candid and wide-ranging talk to promote his new memoir, the philanthropist, erstwhile venture capitalist and owner of the San Francisco Standard, Michael Moritz, opened up about his career, his illness, his philanthropic projects — and his mother.
The conversation took place at the Sydney Goldstein Theater with the then-political candidate Manny Yekutiel moderating on Wednesday evening.
Just hours after the talk, Moritz’s own paper, the Standard, reported that two men, Ryan Clark and his partner, accused Yekutiel of sexual assault.
Yekutiel dropped out of the race for District 8 supervisor today, although he said he denies assaulting anyone. The report followed a similar allegation made in June by Brad Chapin, also published in the Standard.
Moritz has not responded to Mission Local’s query about the allegations. But on Wednesday evening, he bantered with Yekutiel and praised his civic engagement.
“Evening, boss,” he said to Yekutiel as the pair sat down on stage on Wednesday.
“How are you feeling?” Yekutiel asked. “Good! All the better for being with a fellow who has brought joy to San Francisco.” The audience applauded.
Yekutiel, along with Mayor Daniel Lurie, co-founded the Civic Joy Fund, a nonprofit that organizes a range of civic and social events like community trash pickups, night markets and outdoor concerts. Moritz gave money to the organization via Crankstart, his own nonprofit.
“Manny is one of my favorite people in San Francisco, and I think [he] has become an essential part of the cultural fabric of the city,” Moritz said.
The hour-long talk began with some of Moritz’s more recent endeavors.
Yekutiel asked Moritz about his news venture, the Standard, which he founded in 2021 with its CEO, Griffin Gaffney, and now employs 76 people, according to its website.
“I think at the beginning, just like every new venture, nobody gave us a chance. They thought it was going to be fly-by-night,” he said. The newspaper recently turned to a subscriber model.
“I think we far surpassed people’s expectations. I think both Griffin and I are pretty tough graders, so we feel we’ve got a long way to go, but I’m extremely happy with where we are today.”
Yekutiel asked about Crankstart, the $4.3 billion foundation that Moritz runs along with his family. It is one of the largest, if not the largest, in the city.
Crankstart recently launched a competition in which $150 million will be distributed to several groups with the best ideas on how to make San Francisco a better place to live.
Moritz said Crankstart’s 11-person team has received ideas they could not have possibly imagined. So far, they have received 850 submissions.
But more importantly, most of the conversation centered around Moritz’s new book, “Ausländer” (or “Outsider”) in which he recounts how his family was shattered by World War II.
Several of his family members were murdered by the Nazis in Germany, while others were forced to flee, including his parents, who arrived in the United Kingdom as child refugees.
The book, which was published in September, has been praised by various outlets, including the Financial Times and New York Times Book Review.
In the book, and during Wednesday’s talk, Moritz discussed how that heritage and his mother have shaped — and haunted — him.
“Probably a lot of people in this audience have mothers who haunt them,” said Moritz, who then proceeded to explain how his mother was “preoccupied with doom.”
She would eagerly round up morning news announcements from around the world: A bus collision in the Swiss Alps, a flood in Bangladesh, a railway workers strike in Britain, Moritz said.
In his telling, his mother never liked the attention her son brought to the family, nor his vast wealth. When journalists found her landline, he said “she was happy to spend as much time with them” and made every effort to convince callers that her son was actually once unemployed and without much money.
“Do you think that they would be proud of the person that you’ve become?” Yekutiel asked.
“Well, my mother thought I was a crook,” Moritz said. “She was convinced of it.”
Moritz, who is 72, first made a name for himself as the journalist who headed Time magazine’s San Francisco bureau and chronicled the rise of Apple in his 1984 book, “The Little Kingdom.”
He then experienced wild success as a venture capitalist who played a part in creating all the companies that would define the internet — think Paypal, Google, Yahoo and YouTube. He joined Sequoia Capital, a prominent venture capital firm, in 1986.
He left Sequoia Capital in 2023 and has since become one of the largest political donors in San Francisco; he has given at least $8.5 million.
Almost two decades before leaving Sequoia, after collapsing during a 2006 meeting, he discovered the episode was a symptom of a genetic abnormality that produces a rare form of blood cancer, one that is more common among Ashkenazi Jews.
He recounted the story of talking to a doctor at the Mayo Clinic about his diagnosis. “The question is, will I be alive when I’m 70?” Moritz asked him. “He said, it’s a two letter answer.”
“Fortunately, I just celebrated my 72nd birthday,” Moritz said. “Proving that you should never trust a weatherman or a doctor.”
he is disgusting. no more billionaires