If you want to know what drives someone, ask about their first 14 years
Investor Michael Moritz says one question about regret can surface the outsider experience that shapes ambition.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.491]Michael Moritz, the longtime Sequoia investor, learned to size up founders not by asking about their business plans but by asking about their childhoods. Spend most of the conversation on the first 14 years, he says, and a portrait of what still drives the person will emerge.
He stumbled on the approach as a correspondent for Time magazine, when he and a colleague wrote a book about Chrysler and Lee Iacocca, the executive who turned around the automaker in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Iacocca, whose parents had emigrated from Italy, grew up in Pennsylvania, and Moritz came to see that his lifelong feeling of being an outsider, especially under Henry Ford II at the Ford Motor Company, traced back to those early years and colored how he interpreted later slights, including being passed over to run Ford.
The method fits young founders, Moritz says, because when someone is 20 or 21, childhood is most of the life there is to examine. He compares the interview to painting, where unrelated marks of blue here and brown there slowly accumulate into a picture. You are not hunting for one trait like drive. You are collecting small details until they form a whole.
His most revealing mark is a single question: if you could do one action differently, what would it be. One person interviewed for Sequoia, a Hispanic man raised in an immigrant family, burst into tears when Moritz asked it. At about 12, he had gone with a friend to a small neighborhood shop and taken sweets without paying. The owner, who recognized his dad, told the father, who took the boy by the ear back to the store and made him apologize and empty his pockets. He told Moritz how chastened and embarrassed he had been at bringing shame on his family.
Moritz says people do not outgrow that inner imprint. The inner being stays the same, he says, while the outward intensity of the late teens and twenties fades. The practical move is to ask about childhood and the one regret, and listen for the feeling of being an outsider.
Questions people ask
Is there science behind the idea that the first 14 years matter so much?
Moritz believes the early years leave a lasting imprint, and many psychologists agree that childhood shapes adult beliefs about belonging and competence. How much those early years determine later life, compared with later experience, is still debated.
How do you ask about someone's biggest regret without upsetting them?
Ask it late, after trust is built, and ask it plainly and briefly, then be quiet. Moritz notes that interviewers often fail because they do not really listen to the answer. Give the person time, and follow up only on what they offer.
Does every successful founder feel like an outsider?
No. Outsider experience is common among high achievers, but it is not required, and some people are driven by curiosity, love of craft, or security. Feeling like an outsider can also produce caution or withdrawal.