Wednesday, July 6, 2016

The Seinfeld Influence on Bill Gates

This is a link to a post at Bill Gate's blog. The post is about his relationship with Warren Buffett. On that page there's a video titled "Philanthropists in Golf Carts Eating Dilly Bars." Though the video has little in common with Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," the name is certainly modeled on the name of Seinfeld's program.

From the post:
In 1991, when my mother called me to come out to our vacation home on Hood Canal to meet a group of friends, including Warren, I didn’t want to go. I told her I was too busy at work. Warren would be interesting, my mother insisted. But I wasn’t convinced. “Look, he just buys and sells pieces of paper. That’s not real value added. I don’t think we’d have much in common,” I told her. Eventually, she persuaded me to go. I agreed to stay for no more than two hours before getting back to work at Microsoft.

Then I met Warren. He started asking me some questions about the software business and why a small company like Microsoft could expect to compete with IBM and what were the skillsets and the pricing. These were amazingly good questions that nobody had ever asked. We were suddenly lost in conversation and hours and hours slipped by. He didn’t come across as a bigshot investor. He had this modest way of talking about what he does. He was funny, but what impressed me most was how clearly he thought about the world. It was a deep friendship from our very first conversation.

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