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Most people ask safe questions at shareholder meetings. One man in New York didn’t. He stood up at the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting and asked Warren Buffett what everyone really wanted to know:
“My question is, if you are starting out again today in your early 30s, what would you do differently or the same in today’s environment to replicate your success? In short, Mr. Buffett, how can I make $30 billion?”
The crowd laughed. But the question hit home. At the time, Buffett was worth roughly that amount. Fast forward to 2025 and he’s now sitting on over $145 billion, which makes the question seem even more justified.
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Buffett didn’t waste time. “Start young,” he replied. That was the first rule.
He credited his early start and long runway — not just skill, but time — for building what he called a snowball. “Longtime Buffett business partner Charlie‘s [Munger] always said that the big thing about it is we started building this little snowball on top of a very long hill. So we started at a very early age in rolling the snowball down. And, of course, the snowball—the nature of compound interest is it behaves like a snowball of sticky snow. And the trick is to have a very long hill, which means either starting very young or living very—to be very old.”
If he were starting again today with just $10,000, he wouldn’t change his method. “I would do it exactly the same way if I were doing it in the investment world. I mean, if I were getting out of school today and I had $10,000 to invest, I’d start with the As. I would start going right through companies. And I probably would focus on smaller companies, because that would be working with smaller sums and there’s more chance that something is overlooked in that arena.”
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That’s how he found Geico in 1951. And when he tried to bring the idea to major investment firms, they told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. That lesson stuck. “You can’t expect anybody else to do it for you. I mean, people will not tell—they will not tell you about wonderful little investments. It’s not the way the investment business is set up.”