
Notes From a Meeting with Warren Buffett - hhm
http://undergroundvalue.blogspot.com/2008/02/notes-from-buffett-meeting-2152008_23.html
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misterbwong
Excellent article. It seems what he said about classmates would also apply to
choosing a startup founder:

What if you could buy 10% of one of your classmates and their future earnings?
You wouldn't buy the ones with the highest IQ, the best grades, etc, but the
most effective. You like people who are generous, go out of their way,
straight shooters. Now imagine that you could short 10% of one of your
classmates. This part is usually more fun as you start looking around the
room. You wouldn't choose the ones with the poorest grades. Look for people
nobody wants to be around, that are obnoxious or like to take all the credit.
If you have a 500 HP engine and only get 50 HP out of it, you'll be beat by
someone else that has a 300 HP engine but gets 250 HP output. The difference
between potential and output comes from human qualities. You can make a list
of the qualities you admire and those you despise. To turn the tables, think
if this is the way I react to the qualities on the list, which is the way the
world will react to me. You can learn to turn on those qualities you want and
turn off those qualities you wish to avoid. The chains of habit are too light
to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. You can't change at 60; the
time to look at that list is now

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alaskamiller
"If I wanted to do something wild & crazy I could do it, but Anna Nicole Smith
is gone. Reminds me of the story of the 60 year old man that got a 25 year old
to marry him. When his friends asked how he did it, he replied, “I told her I
was 90.”

And that, people, is how that guy is rich.

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Eliezer
This is excellent stuff.

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prakash
Berkshire Hathway's letters to their shareholders is a great read as well.

Also, look up Charlie Munger and his essays, the #2 guy after Warren buffet.

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lowfat
Buffet's investing record puts him on a league of his own. But his humility
and compassion, in spite of all the wealth, now that's exceptional.

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tlrobinson
_"If you want a great business, take Coca-Cola. The product is unchanged, they
sell 1.5 billion 8 ounce servings per day 122 years later."_

1.5 BILLION servings of Coke a day?! That's 1 for every 4 humans on this
planet. Now that is a crazy stat (and I thought Starbucks opening 7 stores per
day was crazy)

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Xichekolas
Well he is talking 8 ounce servings, which means I had eight servings myself
today (medium coke at Taco Johns for lunch, with one refill). So I'd guess
Americans make up about half of those servings, since our drinks are so
absurdly large.

Was an interesting aspect of living in Spain. I had to get used to making an
11 ounce bottle of coke last a whole meal, or pay another $3 for a 'refill'.

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yagibear
The paragraph at the end of the notes is possibly the most relevant to
startups:

"After a talk at Harvard, I told them to work for who they admired the most,
_so they all become self-employed_. It’s important to go to work for someone
or some organization you admire."

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far33d
I think that's a dig at Harvard...

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Olgaar
Can Warren Buffett be my hero?

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ovi256
Can we share him? Please. Pretty please.

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ldambra
Disturbing. I find it strange that no one reacted to this part yet :

"I had nothing to do with my own success. [...] I was born with the wiring for
capital asset allocation. I had the right wiring at the right time.
Temperament is a large part of my wiring. I was naturally good at it, and I
used some feedback to develop it better.[...]"

Do you realize the logical assumption behind such statement ?

It means that if you fail, you're not responsible either, because you weren't
born in the right place at the right time with the right "wiring". So
basically Mr. Buffet doesn't believe in free will, and if you're on the lucky
side, "there is no reason to feel guilty about it.". If you're on the unlucky
side, there is really nothing you could do about it but try to be happy anyway
with what you have.

But isn't the american society based on individual merit ? "Anyone can succeed
if he really wants to", wich leads to the logical implication that "if you
fail, it's also your fault". Mr. Buffet's philosophical conclusions can be
summed up by his "ovarian lottery" metaphor that comes up a lot of times in
the interview : you won in the vagina, should you apologize to the others ?
Then why should it be different in the society, son ?

Now let me be clear : I'm not emitting a moral judgment about what Mr Buffet
says, that he should believe something else or whatever. I just find it
paradoxal that Mr. Buffet, wich is one of the icon of the american society,
tends to not believe in what makes the heart of the american society paradigm
: free will & individual merit.

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anewaccountname
Plenty of people don't believe in free-will; in fact as computer scientists,
many times with interests in AI, I'd suspect the majority of us are complete
mechanists.

~~~
ldambra
Free will has always been a very disputed notion since the Greeks, but the
debate took another dimension with Freud's discover of subcounscious. As I
said in my conclusion, I did not intend to open such a vaste debate here, I
just noticed the paradox of Mr Buffet stance on this matter considering the
core values of the society in wich he lives (and what he represents).

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mberning
I always like it when a billionaire says "To focus on what you don’t have is a
terrible mistake. With the gifts all of us have, if you are unhappy, it’s your
own fault."

Is it so much for a person to want to own their home, have a personal savings,
have health care, and be able to retire at a reasonable age? I don't think it
is a 'mistake' to want for any of these things, and sadly, there are a good
number of people in the world that this is not accessible to.

~~~
Xichekolas
"and sadly, there are a good number of people in the world that this is not
accessible to"

This was (and has always been) Buffet's point. Everyone in America has won the
'ovarian lottery' (as he calls it) because we were born here with the
opportunity to achieve all those things and more. He's not implying it's only
possible here, and he is not implying everyone should be happy where they are.
He is just saying we should be thankful that we live in a country that
generally makes it possible, and even probable.

~~~
mberning
Replace 'world' with 'US' and the statement still stands. In fact, being born
into poverty in the US is very unlucky because it is highly unlikely that you
will achieve a fraction of the success of your more well funded peers. It is
possible, but unlikely.

The fact that you have the opportunity to become super rich is no 'gift' when
you consider that the most likely outcome is that you will work a shit job
making shit money so some asshole like Buffet can squawk about how grateful
you should be.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people getting rich. But please
realize that the gap between the average Joe and the Warren Buffets of the
world has been growing larger for quite some time.

~~~
Xichekolas
"it is highly unlikely that you will achieve a fraction of the success of your
more well funded peers"

Just goes to show that the human psyche cares more about relative prosperity
than absolute prosperity. This is well documented in research. Still, I have
to question why you would prefer to be 'rich' in a place without running water
rather than be 'poor' in America (where the poor people only have one TV and
have to drive used cars).

Of course, there are a lot of people worse off than my above glibness
suggests, and I think we should definitely be doing all we can to help those
people out, but don't try and claim being poor in America is somehow worse
than being poor anywhere else just because people like Warren Buffet live
here.

"Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people getting rich."

The fact that you called Warren Buffet an asshole shows that you do. If you
knew anything about the guy, you'd know he doesn't rate anywhere on the
asshole scale. My guess he is just a soft target because he happens to be so
rich that he is a statistically anomaly.

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mberning
You seem to consider quality of life as something you can measure by material
gain. Nobody cares about televisions and cars when they come down with cancer
and can't afford treatment.

Being rich in America is certainly great. Being poor in America is not that
much different than being poor in the developing world, aside from the better
hand-me-downs.

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pchristensen
I'm speechless. Now I finally understand why all of those poor Americans in
makeshift boats are sailing to Cuba or south across the Rio Grande.

~~~
rms
I think you guys missed the point of this downmodded guy's argument because he
focused on the wrong thing. In the world economy today, if you're born poor,
whether in America or the third world, you're not going to end up like Warren
Buffett. It's impossible to go from the lower class to being an uber-
capitalist.

~~~
Xichekolas
You are probably right... I think all the opportunities to pull a Andrew
Carnegie or Bill Gates or Sergey Brin/Larry Page in our current economy
require education, (some) resources, and free time to tinker, which is really
hard when you are living hand to mouth.

The ability to social climb probably requires several generations at this
point. First getting into the middle class, then the upper middle class, then
finally into the owner class. I still say it's possible, but yeah, it'd
require a brilliant mind and a lot of luck to do it all in one leap.

