After the conversation with Jerry Yang and the others wound down, John Leighton and Zach looked around at the busy people working throughout the garage and decided they had spent long enough watching a show they couldn’t contribute to.
Neither of them understood the technical side of the internet well enough to be useful, and standing around observing felt increasingly pointless.
Following the simple principle of out of sight, out of mind, the two checked into the Silicon Valley Garden Hotel near Stanford.
They booked a large suite with two small bedrooms, a living area, a bathroom, and a small balcony, at three hundred and fifty dollars a night.
Allen Francis’s two hundred thousand dollars was proving its worth.
After arriving and washing up, they settled onto the balcony in their bathrobes with snacks and fruit, talking without any particular agenda.
Then the doorbell rang.
…
“Who is it at this hour?” Zach muttered to himself as he pushed out of his chair and walked to the door.
John Leighton heard fragments of the exchange from the balcony.
“Hello, may I ask who you are?”
“Hello.
My name is Michael Moritz.”
“Michael.
What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for Saint John Leighton and Zach.
Are you Zach?”
“If there’s no other man named Zach in this suite, then yes, I suppose I am.
What do you need?”
“This isn’t really a conversation for the doorway.
Could we go inside?”
“Sure.
Come in.”
John Leighton watched Zach lead a middle aged white man through the door and into the suite.
…
“Zach, who is it?”
“This gentleman says his name is Michael Moritz.
Says he’s looking for both of us.” Zach shrugged with his usual casual ease.
“Michael Moritz.” John Leighton repeated the name slowly, feeling the faint pull of recognition without being able to place it immediately.
“Yes.
I’m Michael Moritz, from Sequoia Capital.” The man said it with the quiet confidence of someone who expected the name to do considerable work on its own. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
He was, in fact, one of the senior figures at Sequoia Capital, a firm whose reputation in the venture capital world was without equal.
Unfortunately for that expectation, he had walked into a room containing Zach, who had never paid particular attention to the venture capital industry, and John Leighton, who in his previous life had been an internet café manager from a mid-sized city.
He had heard of Sequoia Capital in passing.
Michael Moritz specifically was not a name he carried with him.
“Sequoia Capital.” John Leighton’s expression shifted the moment those two words registered.
“Yes.
Sequoia Capital.”
John Leighton stood up immediately, crossed the room, and shook Michael Moritz’s hand with the kind of enthusiasm that had nothing polite about it.
His eyes were bright in a way that, if Michael Moritz had looked carefully, would have suggested he was being appraised as a particularly promising investment.
…
There was no other way to explain it.
In John Leighton’s understanding of the world, Sequoia Capital was as close to a living God of Wealth as anything in the venture capital industry had ever produced.
To understand what that meant required a little context.
On Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, a stretch of road that was not particularly wide or impressive to look at, dozens of wooden two and three story buildings sat quietly among the trees, the kind of buildings that in another context might have suggested a peaceful residential neighbourhood from decades past.
Anyone passing through without knowing better would have seen nothing remarkable.
What they would have missed was that this short, unassuming road was home to hundreds of venture capital firms collectively managing hundreds of billions of dollars in assets.
It was, for that reason, known as the Wall Street of America’s West Coast.
And among all the firms that called Sand Hill Road home, Sequoia Capital stood apart.
Other venture capitalists described themselves, with genuine reverence, as its disciples.
…
Since its founding in the early seventies, Sequoia Capital had built one of the most extraordinary track records in the history of private investment.
In the mainframe era of the seventies, it had identified Apple and helped usher in the age of the personal computer.
In the eighties, when personal computers were proliferating, it found 3Com and Cisco and laid critical groundwork for the internet age that would follow.
In the nineties, it discovered Yahoo and Google and became one of the defining forces behind the internet wave, for better and for worse.
The numbers that the outside world used to describe Sequoia were striking by any measure.
Over five hundred companies invested in.
More than a hundred and thirty taken public.
More than a hundred additional projects exited through acquisition or merger.
In John Leighton’s view, Sequoia Capital was a mobile God of Wealth, and one had just knocked on his hotel room door.
Of course, because of John Leighton’s involvement, Sequoia’s relationship with Yahoo had already diverged from what it had been historically.
As for Google and whether Sequoia’s future would remain as golden, only time would tell.
John Leighton was, in the language of chaos theory, a butterfly whose wings had already started moving.
…
What John Leighton did not know, because he had never paid close enough attention in his previous life to learn it, was exactly who Michael Moritz was.
Had he known, his reaction at the door would have been even more dramatic.
Michael Moritz was one of the figures later generations would call one of the great names in venture capital history, a man whose reputation rested on two investments above all others: Yahoo and Google.
The Yahoo investment in particular, made in early 1995 in John Leighton’s original timeline, had involved one million dollars for a twenty five percent stake, generating returns measured in the billions and making Michael Moritz’s name overnight.
Google had cemented everything that followed.
In the original timeline, the story of Michael Moritz and Yahoo was one of the most celebrated in Silicon Valley history.
In this timeline, because John Leighton had arrived first, the terms of that story had already changed.
Whether Moritz would find another path to the same heights, or whether this butterfly had already altered more than just Yahoo’s trajectory, was something John Leighton had not yet thought to ask himself.
Perhaps the celebrated names of venture capital history would look different by the time this was all over.
Perhaps there would be room for one more.
…
“Mr.
Moritz, it’s a genuine pleasure.
Sequoia Capital’s reputation precedes it.” John Leighton said it with a warm smile, settling back into his chair with the manner of someone who had just remembered exactly how important the man across from him was.
“That’s very kind.
The pleasure is mine.” Michael Moritz accepted the compliment with the composed grace of a man who heard such things regularly, though something in the young man’s expression gave him a moment’s pause.
In truth, at this point in 1995, Michael Moritz was still building his reputation.
The investments that would make him legendary had not yet been made, or in the case of Yahoo, had been made differently than he had planned.
He was accomplished, serious, and very good at what he did.
But the version of Michael Moritz that future generations would speak of with such reverence was still, in a sense, ahead of him.
He had come to this hotel room because Yahoo had become impossible to ignore, and because the trail of the angel investor behind it had led here.
He had not expected to find a teenager eating fruit on a balcony.