Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Michael Moritz shares a poignant story from his book about his two grandfathers, one who stayed in Germany and one who fled. His paternal grandfather, a civil servant who believed in the German state, was reluctant to leave and eventually disappeared. His maternal grandfather, a more entrepreneurial cattle trader, escaped Germany just days before the war.
“The two individuals Patrick, that you refer to were my grandfathers, my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather. I'll start with my paternal grandfather, who was a civil servant. He was a sort of lower-level judge in Bavaria, in the province in Southern Germany. He had fought in World War I. He had somehow or other survived the horror of Verdun. He'd been given his Iron Cross. And he was, I think, a great believer in the German state, in the security that the state offered.”
“My maternal grandfather was cut from a different cloth. I was too callous as a youth to really understand this, but he died when I was about 16. He had been a cattle trader, which was one of the occupations that Jews were really permitted to do in Germany. But he was almost blind as a young man and completely blind by the time that I met him. But somehow or other had been able to carve out a comfortable living for himself and his family by trading in cattle in the rural village in Northwestern Germany.”
“My assessment of him in retrospect was that he was more streetwise, more entrepreneurial, wasn't burdened by the need to remain in collector's pension because he'd always been able to sustain himself and look out for his future. And he got out. He and his wife, my grandmother, but they got out by the skin of their teeth. They got out 72 hours before war broke out. 72 hours later, they two would have perished.”