Nice profile of Micheal Moritz…

Michael Moritz has a few simple rules for investing in internet start-ups: look for people who are pursuing their own ideas for doing something better; prefer youth to maturity; ignore business plans looking a few years ahead; and avoid anyone wearing Armani T-shirts, loafers with no socks or who uses words like ‘synergy’, ‘no-brainer’ or ‘slam-dunk’.

Moritz is worth listening to. The 51-year-old Welshman is one of the duo running Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has just made an estimated $480m profit in less than a year by backing YouTube, the video-sharing business this week acquired by Google. And it is not the firm’s only success: it was one of the only two venture capital firms to back Google itself, investing $12.5m in the start-up business; its 10 per cent stake is now worth more than $12bn. Its other investments read like a who’s who of the technology business: PayPal, Yahoo, eBay, Apple, Cisco.Small wonder that Moritz tops the list of technology deal-makers produced by Forbes, the US business magazine – or that his own wealth, estimated at £518m in the Sunday Times Rich List, makes him the sixth richest internet millionaire….