Gates and Buffett

Just watched a fascinating show on PBS called Buffett & Gates Go Back to School. It was a forum discussion with a group of University of Nebraska business students dialogging with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. These two guys are brilliant and rich (worth $52B and $56B respectively) and both are hugely philanthropic (each giving away all of their money before they die). Warren Buffett is fascinating as the founder of Berkshire Hathaway (currently trading at $101,000/share) and Gates as the founder of Microsoft is equally fascinating. The cool thing about the show is that only students were allowed to ask the questions and they asked questions about everything from playing Halo to time allocation to charity to faith. One of the best questions was, "If you dropped a $100 bill on the way out, would either of you bother to pick it up?" The answer from Warren: "If Bill drops a dime on the floor on the way out and doesn't pick it up, I'll pick it up." I'm fascinated by these guys and it's so amazing hearing them in a candid setting like this. The other, "Mr. Gates, I received an e-mail saying that if I forwarded an e-mail 20 times, I'd receive $10k from you. Where's my money"? The special is like An Evening with Kevin Smith without the profanity.

Another nugget came out of the discussion what kind of employees they look for. They spoke about the ideal individual in an organization that stands out for them and how rare those are with the combination of these three skills:

1. Great individual contributor
2. Great leaders of people
3. Great at strategy
4. Combined with working at something you love doing at an organization you feel good about.

Two Great quotes from Buffett about philanthropy:

"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil... I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well - disproportionately well. Mike Tyson, too. If you can knock a guy out in 10 seconds and earn $10 million for it, this world will pay a lot for that. If you can bat .360, this world will pay a lot for that. If you're a marvelous teacher, this world won't pay a lot for it. If you are a terrific nurse, this world will not pay a lot for it. Now, am I going to try to come up with some comparable worth system that somehow (re)distributes that? No, I don't think you can do that. But I do think that when you're treated enormously well by this market system, where in effect the market system showers the ability to buy goods and services on you because of some peculiar talent - maybe your adenoids are a certain way, so you can sing and everybody will pay you enormous sums to be on television or whatever -I think society has a big claim on that."

"I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die."