New Delhi, July 17 -- Like many of America's buzziest commercial centers, Silicon Valley is mostly populated by people from away. Even those well-scrubbed Stanford University M.B.A. bros usually turn out to be corn-feed Iowans or some-such, nevermind the thousands of techies of Indian and Chinese descent trying to create the next new, new thing.

Michael Moritz isn't to the Bay Area born, either. More precisely, the freethinking, former head of prominent venture firm Sequoia Capital is, in his own words, "100% an Ashkenazi Jew" from Wales. Talk about a category of one. It's that otherness that has prompted Moritz to write a memoir, Auslander (German for "outsider"), about his family, some escaping Nazi Germany to the United Kingdom, other...