What to learn from Buffett’s Early Investments, Brett Gardner?

Brett Gardner, the author of Buffett’s Early Investments, joined us to discuss his book.

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Easily discover all the topics of this interview transcript by clicking on the table of contents:

Introducing Brett Gardner – author of Buffett’s Early Investments

[00:00:00] Tilman Versch: Dear viewers of Good Investing Talks, it’s great to have you back, and it’s great to welcome Brett Gardner, the author of these wonderful books. It’s called Buffett’s Early Investments, and we are talking now about this book close to the Berkshire meeting in 2025. It’s one of the hot new books that’s out there for the Berkshire meeting.

How to meet Brett at the BRK AGM 2025 in Omaha

[00:00:20] Tilman Versch: And Brett is also holding an event there that you can join, or you have different events present, you present there, and you can maybe tell a bit about what you’re doing around the Berkshire meeting before we dive into the book.

[00:00:34] Brett Gardner: Sure. Thanks for having me, Tilman. So I’m going to be seeking a couple of events that weekend. The first is the Value Investors Conference, which I’m speaking at on Thursday. I’m also speaking at the Gabelli Breakfast on Friday morning, a private event with the entrepreneurs, organisation. Then Value X in the afternoon, as well as a fireside chat hosted by the Serine group and Red Eye in Friday evening. And finally, I will be selling books at the Markel brunch, Sunday morning.

The early reception of Buffett’s Early Investments

[00:01:13] Tilman Versch: So there’s a great opportunity for everyone to meet you in Omaha and also get a signed book copy if you still have some to sell. There will also be recordings of these events. I think for sure. And so if you search for Brett, you’ll find more in the book. If you want to learn more outside of this podcast. But maybe let’s get back to the book you’ve spent one year writing this book. Was it worth it, Brett?

[00:01:47] Brett Gardner: Absolutely. So, you know, not only did I find the experience of writing and researching this part about career rewarding, but it’s got me in touch with a ton of incredibly impressive people, such as yourself, Tilman, and many members of the Good investing community. I’m very lucky that sales have been good, the reception has been positive, and I’ve been able to meet a ton of incredibly impressive people over the course of marketing the book.

How does the book fit into the line-up of all the Berkshire Hathaway books?

[00:02:19] Tilman Versch: That’s great to hear. Why was such a book missing in the Berkshire Book universe? So there are so many books about Berkshire, but why do you see it dismissing?

[00:02:31] Brett Gardner: I think that there are kind of two main reasons why I wrote the book. One was that I thought that this period of Buffett’s career was misunderstood, and the reason why I thought it was misunderstood is that the documents are very difficult to come by. So in the book, I go through 10 case studies of investment profit made in the 1950s and 1960s, and I don’t think any other author has gone through each investment in the depth that I did, in part because the document is very hard to get. For example, Coastal Cone, which is one of the chapters in my book, was not a public company. I had to find their annual reports deep in the Maryland archives.

So that’s why I think these are kind of like under-studied companies, it’s just hard to get the research material necessary to do the work. The second reason I wrote the book is that I think to understand Buffett today, you have to understand these years and what led him to kind of gravitate towards the Better Business. What led him to create Berkshire Hathaway, and you kind of see these early lessons. And when he’s in his mid-20s, carry through the rest of his career, even you know, through today, when he’s approaching 95.

What to expect from reading Buffett’s Early Investments

[00:03:50] Tilman Versch: So, imagine a person who wants to go out after this podcast and buy the book. By the way, there’s a link in the show notes if you want to do this, and how can or should this person read the book? Is it more like a brunch buffet where you can pick out different snacks, or is it more like a nice dinner table where you should sit down and someone brings you the food in an exact order, and you have to follow this order? How have you designed the book to be read?

[00:04:21] Brett Gardner: So I designed it to be read chronologically, from beginning to end. The reason why I think it’s best is that you get to see how Buffett carries the lessons forward in the book. So, for example, the first three chapters are companies that were very cheap but did not really do that great due to capital allocation. And you see people kind of hone in on the importance of corporate governance and capital allocation. And you see that carried forward throughout the book.

The first three chapters are companies that were very cheap but did not really do that great due to capital allocation. And you see people kind of hone in on the importance of corporate governance and capital allocation. And you see that carried forward throughout the book.

So in my view, the lessons compound. However, you know, people are free to read whatever chapter they like and in whatever order they like. You can, Disney is the last chapter in the book, you can read that chapter and then hop around if you so choose. I don’t think you lose a lot by doing that.

Writing for value investing nerds

[00:05:13] Tilman Versch: With what kind of avatar or person did you write the book in mind? So Buffett writes his letters to his sister. And who were you thinking of when writing the book? The typical investing nerd who listens to this podcast? Or is it a different person?

[00:05:29] Brett Gardner: Yeah, so I wrote it, first and foremost, for value investing nerds, people who have kind of gone through material and kind of, you know, worship off in the same way I do. However, I want to write in a way that anybody can get anything out of it. Like anybody with a passing interest in business history or Warren Buffett would find it informative. I think finally, I want to write a book that I wanted to read. Especially when I was younger and like in college, where it’s not the essential metrics aren’t too intricate and the writing is the book is written in a way that it’s very easy to read and understand, so I was hoping that like anybody with accounting or finance background like maybe year one or two student would understand it.

[00:06:28] Tilman Versch: Is there any other group especially resonating with the book you were surprised about?

[00:06:38] Brett Gardner: I think that I’ve gotten a lot of inbound from people who are not investors but are kind of just like interested in Buffett that are these people reach out to me and so much like the book and that kind of surprised me was pretty much going to be like only the value investing nerds but industry folks have seemed to enjoy it as well.

Parts of the Buffet story that didn’t make the cut

[00:07:01] Tilman Versch: With the book, as with every other story, you have to put a start and an end, and you leave out some stuff from this history. Did you leave out something that could be worth investigating further, and if so, why?

[00:07:17] Brett Gardner: So there were a couple of investments that I wrote about that I ended up throwing out of the book for a couple of reasons. One was this company called Time and Close, which is a net at the poorly. And I took it out of the book because there’s even a fourth and net like that where it just didn’t work out. And I thought that he just got the point basically. The first three stories are kind of similar, and having a fourth one like that didn’t really do much for the reader in my view. The other company I wrote about was Lone Star Steel, which actually makes a quick appearance in the Philadelphia and Reading chapter. I had one of the initial manuscripts, and I took it out to swap it out for American Express. I didn’t feel comfortable writing about Lone Star Steel because there were a couple of facts that I couldn’t nail down. I couldn’t get certain documents. Generally, though, I think that there’s still a lot of ground to cover in this period about its career. The issue is that I think it’s hard because the relevant documents are not publicly available, so you know, I think Buffett has tonnes of archives that may become available one day. That might be worth digging into.

Brett’s favourite Buffett investments

[00:08:36] Tilman Versch: So you have these chapters that are kind of also like oriented around investment cases. I hope people can see this here, as Walt Disney, for instance, and which three cases are your personal favourites? It’s hard to ask such a question. So sorry for this, but where have you said, oh, I could spend another book just on this case and why?

[00:08:59] Brett Gardner: So my three favourite or Philadelphia and Reading, Walt Disney Productions and then Amex. So, Philadelphia and Reading to me are the inspiration of Berkshire Hathaway, where it’s Buffett’s larger position when he was 24 years old. His hero, Ben Graham on the board, and they quickly transformed the company into a diversified agglomerate from a dying anthracite coal company. They buy Fruit of the Loom, they buy Acne Boots, and they keep buying all these companies. And the stock, basically, goes from $9 a share when Buffett made his biggest position to over $200 by the time Mickey Newman is done transforming the company, and I think Buffett was 24 years old, sitting in his Graham Newman office, seeing what they were doing with the company and had the idea in his head that he was going to do this one day.

My second favourite investment in the book is Walt Disney Productions. The reason why I like this investment so much is that Buffett’s talked about it quite a bit over the course of his career. He’s written about his letter, so at the end of the meeting. But he’s left out the corporate governance risk that was critical to being a couple making the investment. So essentially, Walt Disney, the person, had a personal holding company that was cycling value from Walt Disney Productions, the company whose stock Buffett bought. And he was making all this money from things that really should have gone to the company; he had rights to get profits from some of the movies produced by the company, such as Mary Poppins, where he made about $1,000,000 personally, and Buffett really had to investigate and understand these risks. And he’s never really talked about them publicly. So I thought I covered new ground there that I actually love to hear Buffett comment on.

The third investment was American Express. So this was the most profitable partnership investment, and a couple of things I like the Chapter 1 is the history of American Express, the company. So trace it back from its founding in 1850 and talk about where it was when Buffett bought in 1964. From express business to money order business to travel, check business, then finally to the charge card in 1964. You know, I just kind of love studying history. And the second thing is, I dive pretty deeply into the cellar oil scandal, which was not getting cheap. I think there are a lot of intricacies around that scandal that are not necessarily understood by the investing public.

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What Brett learned about himself while writing

[00:12:19] Tilman Versch: Thank you to everyone who just stays there for information about the book. Now is a good time to maybe end the podcast and just buy the book, because the second part, I want to spend a bit talking about the writing of the book and the offer process. Yes, and the link is below. If you just want to go out and buy the book. I also have a few questions for Brett. So what did you learn about yourself when you were writing the book?

[00:12:47] Brett Gardner: That’s a great question. I think I learned that I like researching more than writing. I kind of love going through the old files and reading books on the companies, but the writing process is really hard for me. So I had a lot of the research done before I took a year off to write, to actually do the writing. And I thought that was the most difficult part of the book is actually writing in a way that people might find interesting and also figuring out how to cut things out and I like to think I got a lot better as a writer and part of that is understanding that all the information you have in your head is not that interesting to a reader, and also you need to present it in a way that they’re able to understand your point rather than just throwing facts at them.

And I thought that was the most difficult part of the book is actually writing in a way that people might find interesting and also figuring out how to cut things out and I like to think I got a lot better as a writer and part of that is understanding that all the information you have in your head is not that interesting to a reader, and also you need to present it in a way that they’re able to understand your point rather than just throwing facts at them.

[00:13:35] Tilman Versch: How did writing the book transform you as a person? So, if you think about you without the book, and now, how are you different?

[00:13:48] Brett Gardner: Being a lot more patient when reviewing other people’s creative endeavours because I know how much work goes into it. And for example, if I go to see a play, I’m not as harsh a critic as I was a couple of years ago, so I think it got a little nicer.

[00:14:07] Tilman Versch: And how did it also change your social capital, your network and people you know?

[00:14:14] Brett Gardner: Yeah. So I’ve got a lot of outreach over the book from people who obviously wouldn’t have known me otherwise. I’ve gotten invitations to speak at events that I wouldn’t have, you know, for example, Belly Coffers, Guy Spears and Value X. Just put me in touch with a ton of like incredibly thoughtful investors, which I’m very lucky to have had happen.

Insights into the publishing process of Buffett’s Early Investments

[00:14:40] Tilman Versch: What are your key learnings about the publishing process of a book you took away from this endeavour?

[00:14:48] Brett Gardner: That’s a great question. So I actually initially had an agent who was going to sell the book to publishers, and I didn’t think that he was selling the book properly. So I ended up doing it myself, and I got an introduction to Harriman House, which eventually made an offer. I think the thing that I took away was that you have to fight for your book, meaning, I had an offer from another publisher who wanted to change the tone and slant the book in ways that I was unwilling to do. I really want to write the book that I wanted to write, and I was kind of inflexible about the inclusions and things like that. The other thing is that I think I learned that it’s all pretty much on your shoulders. So I talked to other authors about this process, including some who have sold millions of copies, and they’ve also the same thing that, like, everything is kind of on your shoulders from like the marketing and even the editing to a large extent, I worked with the great editor at Harriman House. But it’s all on you. It’s 100% your work and responsibility to make sure it’s a product you like and to make sure people know about it. The marketing I think, is a heavier lift than I anticipated. My sort of writing is where you think that you make a couple of LinkedIn posts or Twitter posts, and everybody knows who you are, but you don’t have to keep at it and go on podcasts and speak at events as much as you can.

[00:16:21] Tilman Versch: What kind of false estimate did you have before you went through this whole process, or you kind of answered this a bit, but maybe there’s more?

[00:16:32] Brett Gardner: Yeah. I thought the marketing process would be a little bit easier, where I thought that, like, once you did five or six podcasts, you were kind of done, and everybody knows about you. I thought that. I thought that more people would buy the book without meeting to mark it, like it was kind of a silly assumption that, like everybody, you make a couple of tweets and everybody sees it. So I think that that’s probably the big one, is that the marking just a little bit harder than you think and making sure that the books get into people’s hands is more difficult, more challenging and more work than you anticipate.

The difficulties of writing & publishing a book

[00:17:19] Tilman Versch: So maybe we framed this a bit differently. How hard is it to sell a book?

[00:17:29] Brett Gardner: So that’s a tough question. So I’m honouring my sales monthly obviously, and the biggest thing that drove sales was the Welfare Journal article on the book by Jason Wig that led to a big gap up. And then there’s another thing that has been really beneficial, for example, Michael Robison tweeted about it. Very grateful that I’ve heard some people, some investors, have talked about conferences, so it’s always very hard to tie sales to a specific thing other than the Wall Street Journal article, which I think they clearly gave me a big boost.

So it’s more about just keeping at it and being tenacious and key finding interesting things to post like up to in the lead up to the release, I would say for the first the prior six weeks to the November 5th release I was posting about the content I thought was interesting but didn’t make it to the book, two or three times a week. And I was found like there are new people who found it like, and I also was surprised at the unpredictability of success, meaning I would post something that I thought was absolutely fascinating. Thought would go viral, and it got like 500 views. And then I post something that I thought was not that interesting, and I got like 24,000.

So it was more about the consistency of the post than what I view as the quality, and obviously, as a balance, you shouldn’t just be, you know, engagement farming, but you do have to keep posting, keeping it on people’s minds. And a funny a couple of funny interactions on Twitter where, like, people who would engage with the post would be like I said about your book yet. And I’m like, I thought you really liked stuff I was posting, and if you do, you should buy the book because that’s much better than Twitter posts. So you have Twitter keep being tenacious and trying to be top of mind, like, I think everybody knows that you’re trying to promote, and you don’t want to be overly promotional, but people are going to forgive you for making five posts a week, I think.

The time needed

[00:19:37] Tilman Versch: Good with Twitter interactions; you sometimes have interesting interactions there. How much do you have a rough estimate of how much time you’ve spent, percentage-wise, on researching, writing, selling, promoting, or distributing the book?

[00:19:58] Brett Gardner: So it’s a cumulatively probably about 75% researching, 15–20% actually writing. Now I’m saying out probably a little bit more writing, so probably researching 60%, writing 20% to 30%, the rest is selling. But obviously, like selling over the past six months has been all of it. So, look, I found that I had to carve out time during the week and usually on weekends because I work a full-time job just to mark it to respond to emails to make sure I’m posting something on LinkedIn or Twitter. You know, finding things to post. So I don’t think it’s something that happens naturally. I think something that I had to set time for on the weekends in order to do it properly.

How to gain traction on Amazon

[00:21:01] Tilman Versch: How did you get 101 reviews on Amazon? What is your metric formula there?

[00:21:08] Brett Gardner: So I asked people to. Meaning like if somebody, so I have an e-mail in the book that I encourage people to reach out to, and if they say nice things about the book, I ask them to review on Amazon. That’s pretty much it. And then also would tweet and LinkedIn make a post on LinkedIn about it, and ask people to do it. That’s really it.

Is writing a book about investing worth it?

[00:21:32] Tilman Versch: But it’s a nice hack, and you should just copy it. If you can. And what would you recommend to everyone who’s thinking about writing a book, an investing book right now?

[00:21:48] Brett Gardner: So I think that people should spend all their time thinking about what they want out of it in order to figure out if it’s, if it’s worth it, meaning I don’t think a lot of people write books about investing just for love, but I think they also have an idea about how they will help their career. And I think people should think hard about that too, and how that’s going to be worth it, because I don’t think generally the money from publishing a book makes it worth the time investment for most books statistically. And therefore, if you’re to spend like a year or two years or weekends writing it, I think you should think about the pros and cons of writing a book and then the amount of work you have to put in order to sell it.

I think that you have to be very clear-eyed about that, too and understand the probabilities are that most books fail and most books are not successful. Most books don’t sell that well. And then I think you have to spend a lot of time thinking about what makes your book different.

I think that you have to be very clear-eyed about that, too and understand the probabilities are that most books fail and most books are not successful. Most books don’t sell that well. And then I think you have to spend a lot of time thinking about what makes your book different.

Meaning, I tried to write a book that was. Different from the other buffet books, a lot of the stuff that I talk about might be in the public domain, but I try to take a different angle or use documents that people haven’t referenced in order to do something different. I think that an issue in business and investing books is that they’re very repetitive, so I think you have to be clear-eyed and honest with yourself about what you’re doing differently, and that will lead to like commercial success. And give you a ton of other benefits and as well as being a very interesting book to readers, I don’t think readers want to read the same thing over and over again, it’s something different. So I recommend people spend a lot of time thinking about what is different about their book and why.

So I recommend people spend a lot of time thinking about what is different about their book and why.

Closing thoughts

[00:23:54] Tilman Versch: Great. Thank you very much for sharing the insights at the end of our interview. I want to give you the chance to add anything we haven’t discussed that might be interesting to the listener. Is there anything you want to add?

[00:24:09] Brett Gardner: No, I think as Charlie said, I have nothing to add. I guess one thing is people can reach out to me on LinkedIn or on X. My username on X is brettgardner_10, and on LinkedIn, if you search.

Reach out to Brett via brett@buffetsearlyinvestments.com

[00:24:25] Tilman Versch: Where’s this e-mail you mentioned in the book, on which page do people find it?

00:24:32] Brett Gardner: I actually don’t remember, but it’s in the, I could pull it up for you and get that. It’s brett@buffettsearlyinvestments.com.

[00:24:42] Tilman Versch: Great. That’s great. There’s also an email if you want to use this, and he might refer you to Amazon to write a review. Maybe. Yeah. Great. Thank you very much for your time, Brett. Uh, you can get the book if you want to wire the link below. And thank you very much for listening here, and bye-bye.

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