Sequoia partner Michael Moritz explains why Bill Gates had the radio removed from his car dashboard

When asked what founder obsession looks like, Sequoia partner Michael Moritz gives two examples.

The first is Apoorva Mehta, founder & CEO of Instacart, which is valued at more than $7 billion today. Before investing in Instacart, Michael asked Apoorva how he got into the business of grocery delivery.

Apoorva responded that after toying with a variety of other businesses, he decided Instacart was the one for him when the idea of the business was the last thing he thought about when he went to sleep and the first thing that he thought about when he woke up in the morning.

Michael comments:

“To me, that was as good a definition of obsession as any I’ve heard… it’s sort of that full on experience that you can never stop thinking about and you don’t switch off.”

His other example is Bill Gates.

When Microsoft was still private and quite small in the 1980s, Bill gave Michael a ride to the airport. When Michael asked him why the radio was missing from the dashboard, Bill said he had it taken out. And his reasoning was:

“If I’ve got the radio, I’m afraid that I’ll switch it on and I won’t be thinking about Microsoft.”

That’s obsession.

Full video: Stanford Graduate School of Business “Michael Moritz, Partner, Sequoia Capital” (Feb 2019)