Notes on The Reading Obsession
Reading Neckar Substack, The Reading Obsession
(This substack seems very insightful in general about investment — I’ll probably dive more into his stuff in the future…)
Sources
Neckar Substack, The Reading Obsession -
Summary
Buffett did not just sit around in the comfort of his home and read all day
He developed a network of people who for the sake of his friendship and his wisdom, helped him and also stayed out of his way
Buffett today owns all of GEICO, but he first learnt about the company by travelling to Washington DC and asking a guard to meet someone who could teach him about the company
He met vice president of GEICO for four hours, then sold three-quarters of his personal account to buy GEICO shares
Going out into the world to find an experienced teacher is an excellent shortcut
Buffett was constantly travelling to visit companies and maintain his New York network
Every two years he gathers a group of friends, the Buffett group, to discuss investment, philanthropy, public policy, etc.
Bill Gates joined the group in 1991, where he correctly argued, two years before the Mosaic browser existed, that Kodak was doomed by digital technology. When someone said Gates would claim that about anything e.g. television networks, he correctly argued that television networks were different, that the networks owned the content which could be repurposed for the internet, but physical film could not
What Buffett developed was a way to get people to give him ideas, which he leverages to get more people to give him ideas. I especially liked this bit which gives a flavour of what was happening at the atomic level of interaction:
“From then on,” says Gottesman, “every time I had a good idea, I would call Warren. It was like vetting. If you could get Warren interested in something, you knew that you had the right idea.” The quintessential New Yorker, Gottesman valued his time with Buffett highly enough to be willing to travel to Omaha often. “We’d stay up till late at night talking about stocks,” he says, “and then I’d go back the next morning and go to work in New York. We also talked every Sunday night at around ten o’clock for maybe an hour and a half about stocks. I was looking forward to that conversation all week, thinking about what are the stocks I’m going to talk to him about. No matter what I talked to him about, he knew as much as I did about them, most of the time. After I hung up,” says Gottesman, “I used to go to bed around midnight or afterward, and I couldn’t go to sleep for a couple of hours, I was so charged up.”
In other words, you know you're doing alright when anytime someone has a good idea, they want to share it with you, they want to talk about it the late hours with you, be so excited that they can't sleep after talking with you, and when they're not talking with you, they're thinking about what next they can talk with you about
Which is easier said than done 🙃