BRITAIN IRELAND SCOTLAND YOUNG PEOPLE WOMEN Michael Moritz* RESULTS 2005 Ranking Worth Industry 24 £1,350m Finance The Welsh-born venture capitalist has helped to shape the internet as we know it, spotting the potential of search engines Google and Yahoo! and providing finance when they were mere ideas. "You didn't have to have an IQ in three digits to work out that people were going to want to search for more and more stuff on the internet," he says from his office in California's Silicon Valley. He also saw the value in PayPal, which now leads the way in secure online transactions. Moritz, 51, was brought up in Cardiff and studied history at Oxford. He was an early convert to the information technology revolution during a youthful incarnation as a journalist; he headed Time magazine's San Francisco bureau in the late 1970s, as Silicon Valley began to blossom. In 1986 he joined Sequoia Partners, a venture capital firm that became an original investor in Google. Google was floated last July and Sequoia's stake stands at about £2.7 billion. Partners can expect to share up to 30% of its capital gain — a cool £800m in this case, of which we assume Moritz, as Sequoia's star performer, will take the lion's share. We assume he has done equally well out of previous investments in Yahoo!, Cisco, Apple Computers and PayPal. Adding property worth £50m, our sighting shot for Moritz at £1,350m makes him the richest Welshman on our list. RESULTS 2004 Ranking New entry Worth £m

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