A Cold Call Got Todd Combs Breakfast With Charlie Munger, and It Lasted Six Hours

At 7 a.m. in the California Club in Los Angeles, hedge fund manager Todd Combs sat down for breakfast with 86-year-old investor Charlie Munger, and braced to be outmatched. He had cold called Munger on a long shot while he was going to be in town, telling Munger's assistant he wanted nothing except to meet him.

Combs had a reason to hurry. He had built his fund, Castle Point, to more than half a billion dollars and produced the record he wanted, but he was burned out on 80 to 100 hour weeks and monthly reports to clients. He knew the insurance business from earlier jobs and planned to buy an insurance company himself, to keep doing what he loved with permanent capital and without the fund pressures.

What started as a fan's request turned into a six hour test of endurance that quietly changed his career. Munger emailed back with the breakfast invitation, and Combs found himself struggling to keep up, the way he later put it, like missing every return against a much better tennis player. At the end, Munger simply said they would talk again sometime.

That talk became a dozen phone calls and visits in which they barely discussed investing at first. Then Munger told Combs he should talk to investor Warren Buffett. Combs still did not understand he was being evaluated, and flew to meet Buffett thinking they wanted to buy one of the stocks he owned.

It was, in hindsight, a job interview conducted without anyone calling it one. With no role on the table and nothing to pitch, Combs said, there was no act and no pretense, just a conversation, which he called a great way to interview someone.