Marketing, you know, information, all of the Sales Information that an organization has, they have to be able to share that very effectively. And we built a solution that lets you have no software and no hardware and be able to share, collaborate and get your information from any device like an ipad, an iton, an android device, a mac, anywhere in the worlts. Rose moritz and levie when we continue. Funding for charlie rose was provided by the following captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Mike more sits here, the chairman of Sequoia Capital it is one of Silicon Valleys most prominent Venture Capital firms it has made successful investments in google, and linked in, among others he started his career as a journalist at Time Magazine. Im pleased to have him here at the table for the first time. Thank you. Rose it he is a pleasure to you have at the table. Likewise. Rose i want to go back to europement tell me about your grandfather and your father and coming here. So my both my parents were born in nazi, germany. Or they were born in ger nanny. Like a lot of other jews obviously the future wasnt there for them. And their parents organized their depar ture in the mid 1930s to britain. My mother and father didnt know each other at that point. They met later in britain. And both my mother and my father were lucky enough to get scholarships to attend high school in the case of my mother and then high school and university in the case of my father. And my mothers parents escaped from germany right at the end of august of 1939. And my fathers parents, like a lot of the rest of the family never escaped. They were murdered. And like millions of others. But then my mother and father both made their lives after the end of world war ii in Great Britain which is where i was born and educated and raised until i came to america. Rose well, raised where . I was. Rose in cardiff. In cardiff, in south wales, which is a city of its the largest city in wales but its about 200,000 people on the welsh coast about oh, 40 miles away from where dylan thomas and Richard Burton were born and about 15 miles from where that other famous welshman tom jones was born. Rose and what got you to oxford . How did you get to oxford . My, i went to a regular high school in britain. And there were teachers who were encouraging of students to try their best. And also my father had been educated at oxford on a scholarship. So it, while it seemed unattainable for oxford or cambridge seemed unattainable for most of my contemporaries when i was at high school, it seems within reach at least for me. So i gave it a shot. And wound up there in the early 1970s. But i enjoyed the extra mural life there and got involved with the University Magazine. Rose yes. And enjoyed that a lot. And liked to write . And also it was people were very kind, politicians in particular were very kind and they, it was easy to get an interview with fairly illustrious people. So with the University Magazine we used to chuck around. We would see all these wellknown people and then write about them it was sort of my first entree into that world and i loved it. Loved journalism. Yes, absolutely. Because every, this little magazine appeared fort nightly and every fort night we had 32 pages which we didnt know what to do with except we had four pages of advertising from a chain called mother care. Whose owner very kindly took care of the sort of rinky dink financial side of this magazine and we had to fill it up with editorial copies. What made you decide to go to the united states. I had one of these weird coincidences of life. There was a gentleman who, is today unknown in america and isnt very wellknown in britain any more because he died some years ago. But his name was bill deeds. And he wased editor of the Daily Telegraph newspaper. And he was a giant in british journalism. He had been the character on which evelyn war had rested his novel scoop. And i went to see him to apply for a job on feet street. After, for after i left university. And the trouble was that they were very strict union rules. And the union rules in britain forbad the broad streets of fleet street from hiring undergrads directly from university. And you had to go and work for several years on a small provincial newspaper before you could be allowed to work on feet street. And deed said were he my age he wouldnt waste his time with feet street. We go to america. And that was what convinced me to try my luck here. Rose i know some people who are saying, you know, if i was a young entrepreneur coming out of Business School today i would go to asia. I think most entrepreneurs dont come out of Business School, they come out of engineering schools. Rose what skills do you wish you had that would enable you to better do your job in Venture Capital . Oh, any number of skills. And more particularly, knowledge that i wish that i had that i dont possess. And we invest across, in a fairly broad with ther front of technology. But to be really well educated and a specialist in any one of those things, requires a very deep immersion, deep Immersion Software or bioinfomatics or the various underlying sciences. And i wish i had had a better formal scientific education when i was younger. That more than anything would have helped me, i think. Rose heres you what said, my undergraduate degree was in history. I wish i would have been smart enough to excel in math, fitics physics or biology because the voyagers and adventurers come from there. Thats where they start from. And yes, i dont quarrel with any part of that sentiment. I think those are todays voyagers. And they start off with a grounding in those particular sciences. Rose and do the Business School grads become transactional people and go to wall street and go to Financial Institutions . Its obviously, charlie, unfair to paint a broadbrush here. And theres some very talented people who come out of the Business Schools. But and who join these companies. And a very vital parts of helping the Companies Get off the ground. And there are a number of them who have started companies that became significant. But the germ of an idea, of a breakthrough in technology, of, you know, an evolution in a realm of science does not come out of a Business School curriculum. It come its out of a laboratory or a math lecture or physics tutorial of some sort. And i think thats where, where all say in the case of somebody many years ago like bill gates from an avocation that he had as a teenager, that he just deeply immersed himself. Yeah. And decided that it was more do it than stay in college. It was his calling. He was not unlike a lot of other, or a number of other remarkable people in their teens. Whether they went on to become a musician or an artist, or perhaps an entrepreneur. They discovered their, or perhaps like warren buffett, without discovered investing when he was 11 or 12. These people, whether they were using piano key, paintbrush or computer keyboard, pencil paper in the case of warren buffett, they discovered their calling at a young age and they fell in love with it. And that is a very common theme for the people that we encounter as they then start to develop idea its. Rose your job is to find them and test their idea. Yeah. Rose and rigorous examination of its potential. And then to be Business Partners with them for a very long time. Because i dont think its an accident that many of these people who start something when theyre very young then spend decades building those businesses. Rose i will come back to that. Because that all came after you were, went to sequoia. So youre in london. You talk to the man at the daily times and he says i would go to america. That is where i would go. Yeah. Rose so you come here. I came here and i couldnt afford to come here. So i applied for a bunch of scholarships to american universities and luckily enough got one that took me to tversity of pennsylvania. Rose wharton. Well, actually, no. Not originally. It was for a masters in history. And then i wasnt too happy with the first few weeks of that program. And was wondering what else to do. Because i knew i wanted to be in america. And they were very kind and let me transfer into the Business School. But the very best thing that happened to me there was having being in a class with the author philip roth. So my binding memory of the university of pennsylvania is being introduced to philip roth and he had these people like Norman Mailer and other people who would come through the class and that was just fantastic. Rose you make your way to Time Magazine. Yes. Rose and you write about steve jobs. Actually before that, i did write about steve jobs. Before that i went to detroit, for a year of battle hardening in 1979 as the Automobile Industry was collapsing. And it was and that was where, actually, i coauthored a book about the Chrysler Corporation and lee iacocca who was this largerthanlife figure who obviously was a house hold name 25, 30 years ago. And that was my introduction to mainstream journalism. And then i moved to california. First to los angeles. And where i found myself gravitating to Northern California to do stories about all these little companies that nobody had heard of, you know, genentech was private. Apple was just about public. Microsoft was still private company. And i started writing about them and gradually got more interested. And then eventually wound up moving to San Francisco with time. And what was steve jobs like then . Its probably, steve is probably an example of like many, many people, of the truism that you never take the boy out of the man. And so many of the traits that people became familiar with in the last few years of his life were on full display 30 years ago. Spectacular communicator, a wonderful salesman. A man on Messianic Mission when he set his mind to srtion, a task master, a disciplinarian, a man who is difficult to please. But also and very difficult, obviously as well. But also an extraordinarily mesmerizing figment captivating figure. Probably without doubt the most interesting person i met, ever in your life. Clearly. It was, yes, no doubt, no doubt. Rose you became friends . No, we had a he wanted me to write a flattering book about apple. I had approached him about writing a book about apple in the early 1980s when nothing had been written about it. But i was interested in trying to get into really understanding how difficult it was to build a company. And i wasnt interested in the public aspects or apple as a public company. I was interested in the private years from when they had the idea to going through all the ups and downs, all the stuff that was outside of the public view. Steve really wanted a piece of puffery about the birth of the macintosh computer. Which i understood that. But thats not the book that i wanted to write. So i wrote a book about apple. And the along the way there were a couple of stories about him that had appeared in Time Magazine that more than irritated him. And so after that relationship became distant. And you know, in the last decade or so it was interhittant and just related to business, to business things. But we werent friends. Rose why did you go to Sequoia Capital. Youre a journalist. Youre a writer. There was some you were interested in the way things work and how things happen. I dont know whether or not this is true. But somewhere i remember reading that earnest hemmingway said journalism, and i beg your pardon here, charlie, but journalism is not a place to be for people over the age of 30. And i think he was wrong about that but for some reason it lodged in my 29yearold brain. Rose yeah. And i had got very interested in all these young and private companies and all the people surrounding them. And i met a lot of them thanks to Time Magazine. And decided that i wanted a change. And i left time not to join Sequoia Capital but to start a company with a friend of mine from the wall street journal. And we started a little Publishing Company which was what you expect two former journalists without didnt know anything. So we just did what we knew. And i did that for a time. But then it was clear to me it was going to be a nice little business am but never a large business. And many, many years later dow jones wound up buying it. But hi gone, by then had gone on and joined Sequoia Capital. So when you joined Sequoia Capital its been hugely successful. Its now legendary from several other Venture Capital firms. Whats made it successful . Google, linkedin, youtube, pay pal, yahoo , zappos. And you, very rich. I think weve always been afraid of going out of business. Rose really. Fear an competitive drive, really. Only ot paranoid survive. Someone famous said that. But theres a lot of truth to that. Because when we become a Business Partner of a young company, and it doesnt always work out like this, but we go into it with the hopes that this company can endure for we can, it can be built and then it can be one of these rare enduring companies. Now obviously the majority of companies dont attain that. But thats given us the opportunity to think very hard about what it is that causes some companies to prosper for a very long time. And others to have their moment in the sun and then fade away. And what happens to a company can happen to a firm like Sequoia Capital as well. So weve worked very, very hard to think about what does it take to excel in every decade of the business that weve been in. Because its hard to have a fellow called Don Ballantine started Sequoia Capital if 1974. Thats a long, long time ago. Its before apple, before atari, before many of the companies that have in the interim come and gone. And so we have worked hard on trying to figure out how we make Sequoia Capital endure. And i think thats been the reason why weve been able to do what weve been able to do. Because weve assumed that tomorrow isnt like yesterday. We cant afford to rest on our laurels. We cant be complacent. We cant assume that yesterdays success translates into tomorrows good fortune. Rose is Venture Capital as attractive today as it was ten years ago . Its probably more attractive oddly enough. And is it doing as well today as it was doing when you were bringing onstream google and Companies Like that . Its a businesses thats always had the return of, the investment returns concentrated in very few hands. So many of the companies dont succeed. They dont flourish, they dont become one of these enduring companies. Many the firms, venture firms associated with these companies dont succeed. Theyre around for five years or 10 years but not for 40 or 50 years. But for people who know what theyre doing in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, where in good pockets of Venture Capital around the world, the business is actually oddly enough better. And its better because the investment menu is longer than its ever been. And the investment menu is longer than its ever been because technology has seeped into more and more crevices and nooks of the economy. Because when i started at Sequoia Capital theres no way that we would have considered investing in a payments company, a Financial Services company, a media company. An advertising company. All of those sorts of things weve invested in quite happily in the last 15 years. It was technology and seeping out everywhere. Rose at the core of every business. Exactly. And where technology goes, we follow. Rose youve been outspoken or at least youve made public statements saying wait, dont be so critical of apple because of the decline in the stock price. You believe in the future of apple and theres nothing, no reason not to be excited about the continued growth of that company. Im not a soothsayer. All i was trying to do in the pandemonium after they announced their results recently was just try to paint a picture of realistic expectations for a company that is now as large as apple is. And. Rose Second Largest Company in the world. And the point that i was making was that if the growth rate of the last five years was to continue, by 2020 it would be equivalent in size to somewhere between between the gdp of france and gdp of germany and people should be realistic about their future growth expectations, for the company. Rose and you think that their growth expectations their growth expectations were unrealistic. You cannot, you know, apple in the last quarter was running at a 200 200 billion dollars a year annualized sales rate. One fifth of a trillion dollars. You cant grow that at 45 a year add infinite up. Its physically impossible. The physics of it. That was the only point i was trying to make was just to help give people a sense of perspective. I want to take a look. I want you to talk about google and how you see it this is roger here on this program talking about the challenge for google, a company that probably has given you as good a returns youve ever received. If you look at what theyre trying to do with android which is their mobile operating system,