Hathaway Field Notes
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Long-Term Thinking

3 notes

Echo ·

Berkshire Hathaway, despite a market value now approaching one quarter of a trillion dollars, is managed from a tiny office with a staff smaller than a soccer team’s starting roster. Buffett is not the slave to a corporate calendar jammed with the humdrum inanities of business life like performance assessments, facilities planning, analyst meetings, compliance training, budget reviews and travel. This leaves him time to read and think so that for Buffett the only real difference between a weekday and the weekend is that for two days the markets are closed. Buffett is no fan of spreadsheets or reams of analytical mumbo-jumbo. Facts, a pen, a sheet of paper and an agile mind are his tools.

— Michael Moritz
linkedin.com
The Collected Wisdom of Warren Buffett

There is no greater advertisement for the potent combination of formidable intelligence, commonsense, consistency and self-discipline than Warren Buffett. Tap Dancing to Work, Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966 – 2012, a collection of articles about and by Omaha’s most famous citizen, dr
FocusLong-Term Thinking
May 2013
February 2011
Artifact ·

Build a company to own it

The idea of building a company to flip it has always annoyed me. There is a fundamental flaw in that plan. When you are faced with the tough decisions, you tend to take the quick and easy road. That is not going to be the best choice for the long term health of the company or product. It takes time to develop a good company or product.

It’s not only good software that takes a decade to develop, good companies do too. If you agree that’s true, it follows that you wouldn’t want promising entrepreneurs to go chasing waterfalls before they know how to paddle in the pond. Or something like that.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I want to see evolution get a chance to work its magic, but if great products and companies keep getting abandoned or bought after 3-5 years, there’ll be less of that. And that’s a damn shame.

I’ve always thought you should build a company to own it. This leaves you with good options for the long term. If you decide to keep it, you have done things the right way without cutting corners. And if you decide to sell it, you have made it much more valuable. After all, if you built something that you want to own, someone else is likely to feel the same way and even pay more for it.

37signals.com
The obsession with next

The tech world is obsessed with what’s next. It has become so used to the constant flow of new products and new companies that newness itself has been placed on a pedestal. But outside of a few breakthroughs here and there, most things that are good are good because they got there slowly. …
EntrepreneurshipLong-Term Thinking