$150 million to reinvent a city: Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman open their checkbook to San Francisco

On Aug. 5, 2026, a venture capitalist who spent the first act of his career interviewing other people for a living opened his checkbook and asked San Francisco to pitch him back.

Michael Moritz’s family foundation, Crankstart, announced Boundless San Francisco, an open-call competition that will hand out as much as $150 million to as many as three organizations — anywhere in the world — for “bold, durable ideas” built primarily to help the city he has called home for more than four decades.

Each winner could walk away with $10 million to $50 million, an award size organizers say eclipses any other privately funded, single-city philanthropic competition ever.

Moritz’s own explanation for why he is willing to send that kind of money to a stranger with a good idea was characteristically spare.

“The best ideas rarely come from where you expect them,” he said in an emailed statement announcing the contest. It is a line that could have come from a pitch meeting at Sequoia Capital, where Moritz spent nearly four decades hunting for the unlikely bet that turns into the obvious one, and that is, by design, exactly the point.

Crankstart’s chief executive, Missy Narula, framed the whole exercise as an attempt to import venture-capital instincts into civic life — funding “out-of-the-box ideas” the way a VC funds an unproven founder, rather than the way a city government funds a familiar program.

To understand why a Welsh-born billionaire is running what amounts to a $150 million talent search for his adopted city, it helps to know that Moritz has always thought of himself, in some fundamental way, as an outsider looking for the story other people missed.

He was born Michael Jonathan Moritz on Sept. 12, 1954, in Cardiff, Wales, to Ludwig Alfred Moritz and Doris Rath Moritz, Jewish refugees who had each fled Nazi Germany as children and eventually settled in Wales, where his father became a classics professor and, later, an administrator at Cardiff University.

Moritz has said that as a boy he would scan the Cardiff phone book, uneasy at finding his family the only Moritzes listed among pages of Evanses and Thomases—as if the name itself, set off from everyone else’s, announced something.

That inheritance surfaced again this year in “Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile,” the memoir he published in January after sorting through papers left behind when his mother died and discovering how many relatives the Holocaust had actually taken from his family.

This spring he told the BBC he was applying for German citizenship as “an insurance policy” against rising antisemitism, calling Britain an increasingly “uncomfortable place for Jews” — a strikingly candid admission from a man who has spent most of his public life letting his checks, not his opinions, do the talking.

He studied history at Christ Church, Oxford, then earned an MBA at Wharton as a Thouron scholar, and it was journalism, not finance, that brought him to America.

He joined Sequoia Capital in 1986 and, over the next thirty-seven years, became one of the most consequential investors in Silicon Valley history — writing Yahoo’s first check in 1995, putting $12.5 million into Google in 1999 at a $100 million valuation ahead of a 2004 IPO that valued the company at $23 billion, backing PayPal through its sale to eBay, leading Sequoia’s investment in LinkedIn before Microsoft bought it for $26.2 billion in 2016, and staying on as Klarna’s chairman through the fintech company’s 2025 IPO.

He topped Forbes’ Midas List of top tech dealmakers in 2006 and 2007.

That same year, 2006, he learned he carried a genetic abnormality behind a rare, incurable blood cancer; in 2012 he disclosed it publicly and stepped back from Sequoia’s daily operations, telling colleagues in a memo that “life has assumed a different meaning” and that he was making adjustments accordingly.

He has since said the disease is in remission, “touch wood.”

He fully departed Sequoia in July 2023, after Google’s IPO and a Welsh knighthood in between had turned a Cardiff comprehensive-school kid into Sir Michael Moritz, KBE.

None of that, though, quite explains Boundless San Francisco without his wife.

Harriet Heyman, an American novelist, sculptor, and former writer for The New York Times and Life magazine, co-founded Crankstart with Moritz in 2000, and she has been its philanthropic conscience ever since, serving as a director while he serves as president.

The couple signed the Giving Pledge in 2012, committing to give away at least half their fortune, and have since directed hundreds of millions of dollars to causes that read like a map of their combined instincts — his toward institutions (Oxford, the University of Chicago, UCSF, Juilliard, a $20 million gift to the ACLU that was the largest single donation the group had ever received) and both of theirs toward the arts and toward San Francisco specifically.

Crankstart quietly bankrolled the Booker Prize for literary fiction starting in 2019, on the express condition that its name not be attached to the award, and this year committed £150 million toward a new extension of the National Gallery in London. By 2024, the foundation held more than $4.3 billion in assets, ranking it among the largest family foundations in the country.

But San Francisco has become something closer to a personal project than a line item. Moritz has lived there for more than forty years he and Crankstart have funneled north of $1 billion into Bay Area nonprofits and civic initiatives since 2020 alone — scholarships, museums, reproductive-care access, a $14 million pledge to train two thousand residents for health care careers at UCSF, even $9.2 million in June to combat illegal dumping in Oakland after voters rejected a tax measure meant to pay for it.

He co-founded the San Francisco Standard, a local news outlet, in 2021 to backstop what he saw as a collapsing local press, built a civic-engagement operation and a political action committee, and has poured money into school-board recalls and mayoral campaigns for a city he has openly said “lost its way” amid post-pandemic population decline and an affordability crisis that has hollowed out its downtown.

Boundless San Francisco, built in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation spinoff Lever for Change—which has already steered more than $2.6 billion to over 500 organizations through similar contests focused on Chicago’s South Side and mental health in Texas—is simply that instinct scaled to a size no single city-focused giver has attempted before.

The mechanics are deliberately open-ended.

Entrants can be based anywhere on Earth and propose a solution in any discipline—housing, transit, public safety, homelessness, anything—as long as the benefit lands primarily in San Francisco.

Registration closes Sept. 11, and full applications are due Oct. 9, after which fellow applicants will score each other’s proposals in a “participatory review” this November and December, before an expert evaluation panel judges finalists on transformative ambition, viability, evidence of results, and durability.

Between three and seven finalists will share $1 million to $3.5 million in project-development funding and technical support before Crankstart names up to three ultimate winners in the fall of 2027. An applicant webinar is scheduled for Aug. 18.

Crankstart’s team, in its own announcement, described the contest as an extension of something they see as woven into the city’s DNA: “The story of San Francisco has always been one of exchange—of ideas born here that have spread throughout the world, and of people and ideas from elsewhere that have shaped this city.”

It is, in other words, a bet—the kind Moritz has been placing his entire adult life, first with a notebook and now with a nine-figure checkbook, on the theory that the person with the answer is not yet the person anyone is looking at.