Mike Moritz, the investor whose stake in Google lifted Sequoia to the pinnacle of Sand Hill Road venture firms, is resigning from the search engine's board. It would be tempting to suspect some backroom fallout. Here's a line: Google secretly furious that Sequoia, which was the lead investor in the online video site, landed Mountain View with its Youtube nightmare. But the real reason is more prosaic, and alluded to in Google's release. Moritz, various people have noticed, is no longer a lone-wolf investor. As the most powerful general partner at Sequoia, he's become a bureaucrat: dealing with the egos of other partners, many of them bruised by Moritz's impatience with intellectual inferiors; and acting as the partnerships email switchboard, routing external inquiries to the right partner. I can't think this is the best use of Moritz's time; but that's the burden of power. If there's any other explanation, drop me a line.

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