He just told the Omaha crowd he’ll hand the CEO keys to Greg Abel at year-end, keeping only the chairman seat. After six decades and a 5.5-million-percent share-price gain, the “Oracle” is finally moving upstairs. The press covered the succession drama; what slipped through the cracks is how a kid who once peddled chewing gum built the most efficient compounding machine corporate America has ever seen. Let’s open the casing - and his diet.1
Pic. “I eat like a 6 year old.” Warren Buffet about his diet. Why? - “The lowest death rate is among six-year-olds.”
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*Unlike the other three, all we know is that Taylor Swift likes Chardonnay; she’s not yet committed to a daily quota- probably still too young to lock one in.
The Quirks That Power the Engine
Buffett’s results look super-human, but the inputs are stubbornly human—small, repeatable habits that free his brain for the only task that matters: capital allocation. Below is a curated rundown of the seven routines that keep the Berkshire machine humming, plus the founder-centric reason each one matters.
Reads ≈ 500 pages a day — annual reports, classic texts, local papers
Knowledge compounds exactly like money. A stuffed circle of competence lets you move fast where others guess.2
Plays bridge ~12 h/week — often online with Bill Gates
Real-time reps in probability, pattern-recognition and patience—identical muscles to capital budgeting and product bets.3
Pic. BFF: Bill Gates & Warren Buffet
Has sent one e-mail in his life (to a Microsoft exec in 1997)
Radical focus. No inbox chaos, no dopamine loops, no discoverable paper trail. Guard deep-work blocks the same way.4
Kept a flip-phone until 2020 — only upgraded when Apple had become Berkshire’s #1 holding
Proof you can understand an economic moat without chasing every new gadget. Resist FOMO; adopt tech when the value is undeniable.
Pic. Tim Cook & Warren Buffet at Apples Headquarter
Lives in the Omaha house bought in 1958 & draws a $100 k salary
Frugality keeps ego from hijacking strategy and signals skin-in-the-game: if Berkshire stumbles, he feels it first.
Maintains an “empty calendar” rule — rarely more than three fixed appointments a week
Unstructured hours are where asymmetric ideas appear. Cull meetings so your best thinking isn’t relegated to weekends.
Breaks out a ukulele at meetings & AGMs
Low-status behaviour from a high-status person flattens hierarchy and relaxes negotiations—humour is a culture accelerant.5
Pic. Warren & music
Take-away: none of these quirks are cosplay; each one is a design choice that buys Buffett bandwidth, clarity, or trust. Borrow the principle, swap in your own flavour (chess instead of bridge, yerba maté instead of Coke), and keep the operating system light enough to tap-dance to work.
Next up: how those habits feed the larger mental models—float, owner’s manuals and public post-mortems—that founders can lift straight into their own playbooks.
Five Mental Models That Run Berkshire While Buffett Sleeps
From daily quirks to durable strategy: the next five mental models are the hidden architecture that lets Berkshire keep compounding even when Buffett is asleep. Steal the logic, swap in your own context, and you’ll gain leverage no cap-table tweak can match.
1 | The Owner’s Manual (1996)
“We delegate almost to the point of abdication.”
Back-story. Buffett printed a 19-page pamphlet listing 15 rules—once, never revised—so shareholders always know the game he’s playing. Berkshire now fields ~390 000 employees with a head-office of ~25 in Omaha.67
Why founders care. Write your own “How We Decide” doc; it kills 1 000 future FAQ e-mails and scales judgment faster than you can hire.
2 | Reputation as Non-Negotiable Collateral
Annual memo: “Lose money and I’ll be understanding; lose a shred of reputation and I’ll be ruthless.”
Back-story. Buffett treats trust as cheaper than any compliance system. A clean record lets Berkshire win deals even when it’s not the highest bidder.8
Why founders care. A strong reputation lowers cost of capital and recruiting friction; ethics isn’t overhead, it’s a margin enhancer.
3 | Public Post-Mortems
Dexter Shoe, 1993: 25 000 Berkshire A-shares traded for a factory that later died—opportunity cost ≈ $18 bn.
Back-story. Buffett autopsied the blunder in the same shareholder letter that celebrated Coca-Cola’s triumphs. Lesson: moat mis-read + paid with stock.9
Why founders care. Owning mistakes in public makes it safe for the team to surface problems early—cheap tuition for everyone else.
Pic. Warren as a star
4 | Willingness to Update Priors
No tech for decades → Apple buy in 2016 → biggest winner in Berkshire history.
Back-story. After years of saying he “couldn’t value Silicon Valley,” Buffett changed his mind when Apple morphed from hardware to services ecosystem—a moat he understood.10
Why founders care. Intellectual humility beats ideology; revising your map faster than rivals is an edge, not an embarrassment.
5 | Float & Optionality 101
1951: college kid Warren cold-calls GEICO on a Saturday and learns policy-holder float.
Back-story. Insurance customers pay today for claims due tomorrow. Buffett invests that cash meanwhile—effectively borrowing at negative rates. Berkshire’s float now sits near $170 bn, funding every “elephant” acquisition.11
Why founders care. Find your version of float—customer pre-payments, recurring SaaS, marketplace escrow—and you can scale without d
Founder Playbook — Five Buffett Moves You Can Copy Tomorrow
From mental blueprints to Monday-morning tactics: here are five Buffett moves you can slot straight into a startup without a single share of Berkshire stock.
1 | Circle of Competence
Buffett’s move. Won’t touch biotech or crypto because he can’t “draw the economics with crayons.” He buys only what he can sketch on a napkin.12
Founder translation. Write one sentence on who your product is not for. Pin it in Slack so sales and BD stop chasing shiny objects and marketing kills vanity features.
2 | Write an Owner’s Manual
Buffett’s move. A 19-page pamphlet (1996) killed 1 000 future FAQ e-mails; investors have known the rules ever since.13
Founder translation. Draft a “How We Decide” doc in Notion: values, veto rights, spending limits, release cadence. Onboarding gets faster, trust goes up.
3 | Compartmentalise Risk
Buffett’s move. Dexter Shoe debacle hurt ego, not Berkshire’s solvency—he insulated the core balance-sheet from experiments.
Founder translation. Sandbox new products behind feature flags; finance them with rev-share or capped SAFEs. Worst-case is a bad branch, not a company-killing down-round.
4 | Autonomy with a Cash Umbilical
Buffett’s move. Subsidiary CEOs run free, but every night excess cash wires back to Omaha; capital allocation stays central.14
Founder translation. Give teams P&L autonomy yet route all payments through a single treasury account. They ship faster; you still see runway in real time.
5 | Loud Post-Mortems
Buffett’s move. Wrote about the $18 bn Dexter Shoe mistake in the same letter that celebrated Coca-Cola—public autopsy before critics could pounce.15
Founder translation. Run quarterly “failure demo days.” Publish a short memo on what broke, why, and the patch. Normalises learning loops and kills blame games early.
Pic. Annual shareholder meeting in Omaha
Steal the logic, swap in your context, and you’ll compound judgment faster than any cap-table tweak.
Capitalism, Skin-in-the-Game & Why Europes Socialists Should Relax
1 | Skin in the Game
He keeps 99 % of his net worth in Berkshire stock. If Berkshire tanks, he hurts first. That’s why he despises execs who draw mega-salaries while owning tiny stakes. “Managers and investors alike must eat their own cooking.”
2 | Capital Allocation as Civic Duty
Buffett argues capitalism has lifted more people from poverty than any other system—but only when profits get reinvested in productive assets, not financial engineering.
3 | Cathedral-with-a-Casino Metaphor
Yes, markets sometimes look like casinos, yet the underlying “cathedral” (entrepreneurship + property rights) is what pushes living standards up. Kill the casino if you must—just guard the cathedral.
Why founders should care
Venture is capitalism on fast-forward. If you ignore the score-keeping (equity, ROIC, opportunity cost), someone else will—and they’ll price your round.
Democracies need the tax base created by profitable firms; virtue-signalling can’t pay for healthcare.
Owning a big stake keeps decision quality high: you weigh dilution, culture, and burn rate with your own wallet.
Pic. Warren Buffett’s famously modest home in Omaha, purchased in 1958 for around $31,500, exemplifies his frugal approach to wealth.
Succession = System > Superstar
Greg Abel isn’t expected to mimic the Oracle; he inherits a rule-book: decentralise ops, centralise cash, enlarge the moat, talk straight. Culture by design outlives personality.
Founder takeaway — Document processes so clearly that the machine runs even when the original designer walks away.
Just in case you are still reading:
“Day-One” Context — Back when Stocks Were Printed on Paper
Picture Wall Street in the 1940s: trades were written on chalkboards, price quotes drifted over telegraph lines, and ownership arrived as an engraved certificate you stuffed in a safe-deposit box. If you lived in Omaha — as 11-year-old Warren Buffett did — you took a train to the nearest brokerage office, signed triplicate forms, and waited days for your Cities Service Preferred shares to be mailed back.1617
Markets looked even wilder than the crypto chart you scrolled this morning. Memories of the 1929 crash kept volumes thin; every rumor yanked prices five or ten percent before lunch. Into that chaos stepped Benjamin Graham18, a Columbia professor whose 1949 book “The Intelligent Investor”19 argued that a stock is not a lottery ticket but “a share of an actual business, with a knowable value.” His core hack—buy at a big discount to that value—was called margin of safety.
Pic. Graham (left)
Buffett devoured the book, enrolled in Graham’s class, and later called Chapter 8 (how to stay sane when Mr. Market is manic) “the best 20 pages ever written on investing.” Everything you see in Berkshire today—patience, discipline, buying dollar bills for 50 cents—starts with that chalk-dust classroom.
Key Take-aways
Read > React — compound knowledge before capital.
Write It Down — an owner’s manual or failure memo pays perpetual dividends.
Float Mindset — find cheap, patient capital (customer pre-payments, rev-share, insurance float) so time is on your side.
Be Proudly Capitalist — it just means betting on your own decisions first; skin-in-the-game is the noblest risk filter we have.
That’s my take - now over to you.
Which Buffett move will you steal first? Drop a comment below and let’s trade notes.
