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Buffett declined, sent two tickets
The two tickets
The CEO was a gifted networker who wrote letters to famous people and usually got a yes. He invited Ho Nam, who ran a small venture firm and knew Buffett only as some man in the textile business who was supposed to be famous, and Ho Nam went just for the heck of it. It was May 1999, the peak of the dot-com bubble, when venture investors were sure they were brilliant.
Following Buffett's footsteps
They spent the whole weekend as total Buffett fanboys. They looked up his address in the white pages, found his house, walked around it, talked to his neighbors, and traced his steps to the little place where he gets his newspaper and sits down with a Coke.
Returning every year
They went back to the meeting every year. Friends kept telling him he was missing out by not investing in internet companies, while the shareholders he met had held their stock for decades and were nothing like the people in Silicon Valley.
Why do thousands attend Berkshire's shareholder meeting?
Berkshire Hathaway holds its annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, where Warren Buffett and his late partner Charlie Munger took questions from shareholders for hours. Attendance has been reported at around 40,000 people, which led to the nickname Woodstock for Capitalists. Shareholders can also visit an exhibition hall with products from Berkshire's businesses. The weekend has its own traditions, including a shareholder shopping day at a local furniture store that Berkshire owns.
Why were venture investors so confident in 1999?
The Nasdaq Composite rose about 85 percent in 1999, its best year on record, as internet stocks soared. Investors who had backed internet companies saw paper gains that seemed to prove their judgment. The index peaked in March 2000 and then fell by about 78 percent by October 2002. Many companies funded during the bubble never reached profitability.
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