TSP063 | Guy Spier – Transcription

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John Livesay:

Hi, and welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Guy Spier, who is the author of The Education of a Value Investor. Guy went to both Oxford and Harvard, and had lunch with Warren Buffett. He had to spend $650,000 on a charity auction to get that lunch with Warren Buffett, which lasted 3 and a half hours, and totally changed Guy’s life, his attitude, and his network of people. Guy has a whole philosophy about life. He said, “Generate more value than you take and be humble with everyone you meet.” Guy is full of fascinating information. He currently lives in Zurich. You’re going to really enjoy hearing what Guy has to say about life and investing.

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Welcome to The Successful Pitch Podcast. Today’s guest is Guy Spier. Guy has run the Aquamarine Fund for the last 17 years. He is an ardent disciple of Warren Buffett. He launched the fund with $15 million in assets, very closely replicating the structure and approach of Buffett’s original partnerships. Guy has received his education at Oxford University, where he was a tutorial partner of the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, and came top of his class in economics. As if that wasn’t enough, after his stint in management consulting, he attended Harvard Business School, and then worked as an investment banker before starting his own fund. He’s a regular commentator in the media, and has appeared in CNN, in Bloomberg Television, as well as many other important places. So we’re obviously very thrilled to have him. He is also the author of an amazing book called The Education of a Value Investor. Guy, welcome to the show.

Guy:

John, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Hey, that Guy Spier sounds pretty cool. Can I meet him?

John:

Exactly. Isn’t it interesting when we hear our bio sometimes, you’re like, “Oh, I did all that?”

Guy:

Exactly.

John:

So you’re taking to — I’m in Los Angeles and you are in Zurich, which is fantastic and cool that we get to have this bicontinental conversation. I almost spit that out properly. What I love to always ask my guest is take us back before you went to Oxford. Did you have a personal passion for economics and investing as a child? What got you interested in all this?

Guy:

Oh, that wasn’t the case for me at all, John. The only time that I heard investing related, funnily enough, I remember the stock symbol. We were living in Iran. My dad was working for a German chemicals company, and my father had opened up a brokerage account with Merrill Lynch in the United States, and he was following IBM. He would pick me up and I would sit next to him, and he’d make me look in the newspaper to find out what IBM share price had done on a day-to-day basis.

But, other than that, I had no contact with the stock market until, really, my final year at business school. Then, actually, funnily enough, the guy who was interested in it was a classmate of mine that I was doing a project with, whom I write about a little in the book. He’s now really well-known. He’s the CEO of Zinger. He wanted me to go in with him to buy Philippine Long Distance, a Filipino telephone company, and I was like — yeah, that was the first time that I started talking about the stock market with somebody at business school.

So, it was really in my last year, and after I’d already seen Warren Buffett speak in my first year that I suddenly said, “Oh, I want to go into finance.” Now, I have to tell you, John, that it’s not like I started — I was like 26 at the time, so I wasn’t — you know, Warren Buffett was like a whole decade or more younger than me when he got going with investing the stocks. And I, in a certain way, it was, at the time, I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but it was all about greed. I fancied myself as a little Gordon Gekko, and I’m not proud of that.

John:

Well, you transformed yourself, so that’s fine, right?

Guy:

Yeah, it’s easier to talk about it when you’re something different. That’s true.

John:

Well, one of the things that I really want to ask you about is this fascination of where did you find the money? Did you find it was a good investment? And tell us about how you were able to, I believe, pay a fundraising charity event to have lunch with Warren Buffett, right?

Guy:

Well, you know, John, my story, I think, is far less inspiring in that regards in comparison to this other guy that I write about a lot in the book, this friend, Mohnish Pabrai. In my case, I’d gone to this investment bank, D.H. Blair, and it really ruined my reputation, because it was an unsavory place that was ripping off orphans and widows. It would be the short way of talking about it. And I really ought to have left within five minutes, but I actually stayed 18 months.

So, when I left, people did not want to offer me a job, and I went two or three rounds in a number of interviews, and then people just shut down, and I knew it was because they could see that I had those stain. I saw that in my book. I toyed with calling it a stain. A bloody stain like Mrs. Macbeth. It felt horrible to me. It felt like I couldn’t wash it off me, and nobody wanted to hire me.

In my case, my dad – don’t ask me why he did it – he decided to gamble the substantial portion of his life savings on his son, and he came along and he said, “Look, I think you should try and start a business and I’m willing to be your key client to do it,” and it took me, actually — I think that I’m quite an entrepreneurial type, but with my dad and the proportion of his net wealth that I knew he was investing with me, unless he had something stashed away somewhere else that he hadn’t told me about, I knew that I couldn’t mess this up, and I was once in awe of his willingness to trust me, and at the same time, I was scared stiff. And I still, to this day, don’t fully understand why he did that.

But then I think, John, the thing is there are so many difficulties in life. What I realized now – I didn’t want to accept it then – but if you should take the help from wherever it comes, and there’s so many people who are using whatever advantage they have, and I realize now, in many ways, I had all sorts of disadvantages. I was an immigrant into the UK. I was kind of an immigrant into the United States. There are many people who had deep-rooted family and other kinds of connections that they were using.

So if my dad was going to help me, that was perfectly legitimate and that was alright, and I think it’s something that I didn’t realize at the time, but your listeners, and you guys out there who are starting businesses, do not accept help from close at hand if that’s the help that’s available. Believe me, the woman who’s beautiful is not going to dress herself up ugly, and then try and win the spot in the movie, or try and get that modeling spot. So, you take what you have and you use it.

But, what I would say, John, is that I think the fact that that was my original source of money delayed me for about five or six years in terms of really learning how to sell myself. I didn’t really understand how to do that. So, it came with that kind of disadvantage, if you like. It got me going, but then I didn’t know how to scale from there.

John:

Interesting. I love that insight. We’re going to tweet that out. “Accept help from wherever you can get it, and don’t be embarrassed about it.” So, tell us, one of the things describing your book is you had to spend a small fortune in $650,100 to have one meal to meet Warren Buffett? How’d you find the money and what’s that story?

Guy:

You know, that happened in the late — it was before the financial bubble burst, so I had two or three very, very good years. So I wasn’t spending money that I didn’t have, and it’s important that I was one-third of that sum, so I had this Indian friend, Mohnish Pabrai who came up with two-thirds of that, and I’d gotten to know him and he came up with this idea. Like you, I was like, “You want to do what? You want me to participate?”

And this is the thing, John, how can something that can sound so ridiculous, suddenly when you listen to the right person talking about it and their clearheaded thinking becomes actually something that’s quite obvious, and quite straightforward. My reaction was the same as yours, and then Mohnish Pabrai, at this breakfast at the Mandarin Hotel overlooking Central Park takes me through why it’s a really smart thing to do.

Before we can get into all the reasons why, but I can tell you that in terms of return on that $650,000, if you like, the people that I’ve gotten to meet. It’s not just you saw that photograph of my wife with Bill Gates, which is really wonderful. I can’t say we had a long conversation with him, but even just that photograph with Bill Gates is very special but below that, there are dozens of people that I would have never gotten to meet had I not gone to that lunch with Warren Buffett. It’s not that Warren Buffett introduced me to them, it’s that there are just a lot of people who wouldn’t mind meeting the guy who paid $650,000 to have lunch with Warren Buffett.

So, what I understood beforehand — and this was the saying that Mohnish Pabrai had explained to me, and it comes down to the very special personality of Warren Buffett. So, it wasn’t just a sort of, “Let me meet you for half an hour and then I’ll run off.” He’s hung out with us for about 3 and a half hours. He came determined in a degree. It was unnerving actually.

I mean, here’s a guy who’s the world’s richest man, or second richest at the time. He doesn’t have anything that we could give to him, and, utterly, all he wants to do is serve us. All he wants to do is make us feel like we got so much value for it. That came afterwards. we showed up in Omaha one year early for the Berkshire meeting, and he invited us up into his office. He gave us a tour of his office. We hang out. Then he introduced us to Tracy Britt, who is now one of these 30 under 30 women. She’s a rock star. She’s very heavily involved in the next generation of Berkshire Hathaway managers, and he kind of says, “Tracy, why don’t you just come for lunch with us?” So, he’s been delivering value, and he invites us to this brunch every year, where you get to hang out with people. I mean, one year, Charlie Rose was there. Bill Gates is there every year.

So, I think when you pay up to hang out in the presence of a guy who just wants to send so much love out into the world — and you know, I’ll tell you something else. First of all, he delivered enormous amounts of value, and it’s changed my life, it’s changed my network, but also just to witness that what does it say to you and me, and a whole bunch of other people that if Warren Buffett, at his level of success is humbly trying to deliver value to some guy who won a charity auction with him, can you imagine what he’s like with his friends? It’s not like I’m in his inner circle or anything, but I don’t think he’s any different, and so that really taught me that I had to have tremendous humility with all sorts of people, not just because it’s a good way to be, but because it’s incredibly rewarding, but it’s a smart business. I mean, look at what I’m doing now. I’m taking minutes and minutes just to talk about Warren Buffett.

So, here’s the ultimate. It just gets me so excited to think about it. The ultimate in being immense, being a good person, which will generate massive business rewards is to do stuff for people where there’s no way they could ever thank you, you know? Because it’s the kind of thing that they could not reciprocate.

So, I’ll just give one very short example. So, a guy writes an email to me. I was giving a talk a couple of weeks ago to the CFA society, and he asked me if he could come by and get my book autographed, and I said, “Sure,” except I didn’t realize that he didn’t mean at the CFA talk, he meant that morning in my office. So, I get a knock on the door at the office, and I had some other things going on, but I realized that weird crosswise and he actually wanted to come in the morning. Inspired by Warren Buffett, I said, “Alright, fine. I’ve met him. Now, I’m going to take half an hour. I made him a coffee, I took out of the office. I did the Warren Buffett thing.”

This is like an 18-year-old student from Oslo, or northern Finland, and it was the same motivation. I wanted to make him feel like he got just that surprising amounts of value asked of me. I hung out with him at the library, I took photographs with him, we hammed it up a little bit, and I know that he’s grateful to me, and he’ll talk about that, and I took photographs of it actually.

John:

It sounds like, to me, that you’ve passed on what you learned from Warren Buffett to the next generation, and we’re going to tweet that out. “Be humble with everyone you meet, regardless of who they are.”

Guy:

So, I would argue that the returns to the lunch with Warren Buffett, just the network that I got to be exposed to, but then seeing him up close and seeing some things that were really surprising that I didn’t really expect.

John:

Such as?

Guy:

Like that total humility, but then the other side of it, which was really quite hard for me was that, John, in spite of all this fake humility that I’m giving you, I have a certain ego, and I feel like I’m quite a smart guy, there was some part of me that thought, “I’m maybe as smart as Warren Buffett.”

Sitting with him, I just knew that I wasn’t. I knew that he had a clocked speed that was higher than mine, and it was painful to experience that, and as this friend of mine, William Green, says, “Weirdly liberating,” because it freed me up. I was investing a lot of energy in trying to be something that I was not, and it is a waste of energy, and I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. So I gave up that version of myself.

John:

Well, just the freedom to not have to be the smartest person in the room all the time, I would think, would be very liberating.

Guy:

Yes, it absolutely was, and not just liberating, I think that you use up brain cells. You use up brain cycles that could be better used doing something else, thinking about whether it’s your and your wife’s anniversary, which it was yesterday, I didn’t do very well with that.

John:

Well, we won’t let that ruin everything. You know, what you said to me, Guy, reminds me of this statement that I heard once, which is, “If you focus on being interested in the other person, as opposed to trying to be interesting to them, you’ll have a much better conversation.”

Guy:

Yes, yes, and you know that Disraeli quotes on that. I don’t remember who it was, but a woman meets two men. One was, I think, Isaac Newton who I believe lived the same time as Benjamin Disraeli, who was the British Prime Minister, and very Jewish by the way, and a very close confidant of, I believe, if my history’s not mistaken, Queen Victoria. Anyway, so this woman meets Disraeli and, I think Newton, and she says of Newton, she says, “Newton made me feel like he was the smartest guy in the room, but Benjamin Disraeli made me feel like I was the smartest person in the room.” It’s not how you feel. It’s how you make other people feel. Can you make other people feel good about themselves?

John:

That’s so useful for the audience, who is probably in the position of going to pitch investors that if you make the investors feel good about themselves investing in you as opposed to you trying so hard to impress them with how smart you are. You have to come across confident but not arrogant, and I think that’s really what you’re saying here. Let me ask you about the preparation you did. If you’re going to spend that kind of money, over $650,000 to have lunch with somebody, and I’m talking to my clients all the time about the importance of preparing and practicing their pitch before they get in front of investors, I’m imagining that you put some thought and effort into the kinds of questions you were going to ask Warren during the lunch, right?

Guy:

This is the funny thing, John. So, this is me to Mohnish Pabrai, who is way wiser than I am, and way smarter as well. I said, “Mohnish, shouldn’t we prepare? Shouldn’t we reread all of the publicly available information?” and he kind of said, “You know, Guy, we’ve been studying.” I mean, at that point, I’d been going to the Berkshire meeting for 10 years. I was reading every single annual report. At the time, there was one biography that I’d read at least a couple of times and it was like, “Don’t worry. The conversation will just flow.”

So I think what Mohnish did which was really brilliant, and this is something that may be really valuable for the listeners, is it was build us the power lunch, but we made it into family occasion. So, Mohnish came with his wife and his two children, I came with my wife, and Mohnish signaled beforehand. It was very clear in a couple radio and TV interviews we’re just there to say thank you to somebody who’s taught us a lot.

So, these were all things to kind of de-escalate the tension, de-escalate the sense of defensiveness that Warren might have. Here’s something that I just think doesn’t work anymore in a hyperconnected world where everybody can reach for just about anything through Google search, which is that the preparation of the pitch, in a certain way, it should be about saving the other guy time. It’s not about trying to force them to listen to you, because they can find whatever they want. We can all find whatever we want. All of it’s on sale on Amazon at a very low price.

So, to save them time and to think about, “How do I reduce their sense of tension, their sense of defensiveness that will come up if there’s something that’s being asked for?” So, something else that I learned from Mohnish was — well, I guess I won’t go to Mohnish. And this is what’s so wonderful about being around and studying somebody like Warren Buffett is that there are just so many valuable stories to land.

So, this guy Byron Trott, who’s the only investment banker that Warren Buffett deals with. So, this is told in, I think, a couple of newspaper articles. He said it in a couple of interviews. He’s got this one-off meeting with Warren Buffett, and he doesn’t get three and a half hours with him like us. Even better with Alice Schroeder, the author of the second book on him who had unlimited access to him, Byron Trott knows he’s got about half an hour, and he’s flown out to Omaha. So he says this, he says, “Warren, give me a problem that you’ve got that nobody else has been able to solve, and I can’t guarantee that I will solve it for you, but I’d like to try.”

So, here are all the things I love about that question. First of all, it says, “This meeting is about you. It’s not about me. I want to hear what you have to say.” So, it’s offering something. It’s offering your time to listen to what’s on their mind. The other thing that it does is, instantly, without having to go through, it says, “I know that you already have a lot of great service providers. I know that you’ve got a lot of great stuff on your plate, and guess what? I don’t want to compete with any of them because I’m sure that you’re happy. I want your unsolved problems. If you’ve already got people solving your problems, I don’t want to even start telling you that I can solve your problems better.”

I think that Warren Buffett is so brilliant. He heard that question and he knew that he had a guy in his presence that he liked, because this guy was about Warren Buffett and his needs, not about what he was trying to pitch. And Warren makes these decisions and, bang, Byron Trott was in his inner circle, and they’ve done I don’t know how many deals. What Warren gave him, what he said to Byron Trott was, he said, “You know, I’m going to –” I think I’ve got that right. He says, “Please, could you get me a security issues that pays a negative interest rate.”

So we are paid to issue the security. It actually didn’t work out financially. They had an embedded stock option in there that ended up costing Berkshire quite a bit of money. But, again, it got Warren’s mind churning, and it makes me think of one of the — at the time, I was graduating business — no, a couple of years out of business school, a guy got an internship with Warren Buffett. He wrote to Warren Buffett from Columbia Business School, and he asked for a job or for an internship, and then he included the check for his estimate of the amount of time that it would take Warren Buffett to read the letter. I don’t think that Warren ever cashed the check, but what Warren loved was that this guy was thinking in the right way. He was thinking about that Warren’s time was valuable and he didn’t want to waste Warren’s time, and he thought, “A guy who thinks like that is thinking in the right direction.”

John:

Well, it’s a classic case of empathy, isn’t it?

Guy:

Yes.

John:

You put yourself in Warren Buffett’s shoes and you realize how valuable his time is, and you did a gesture that acknowledged that. The thing I love about the story you just told us of how he picked that investment banker, “Give me a problem that you haven’t been able to solve.” That is what everybody wants to hear in a pitch, “Tell me a problem that you’re solving that no one else has solved yet, or that you’re solving it in a way that is unique.” It’s disruptive, it’s going to change the world, make the world a better place. So, on a one-to-one basis, if you can help somebody solve a problem and, of course, on a global basis, if you’re looking for investment. That’s such a great story and so helpful. I really want to dig in a little bit about what you wrote earlier in your book about “the more you understand yourself, the better of an investor you become”. Can you share that?

Guy:

Even before we get to investing, I’m sure that you’ve done it, many of us have done it. I’ve been in small teams. It’s usually people who work for me, and there’s a commitment that they’ve made and then they failed to meet it, and I realized that it’s not for lack of desire. It’s because they didn’t understand who they really were and they didn’t understand, and it’s not that their communication with me was bad, they were being dishonest or not trustful. It’s that they didn’t understand their deepest desires or they didn’t understand their own capacities.

I think that when you have somebody who shows up at work, when I have somebody who shows up, it’s so much nicer to hear somebody say, “You’ve asked me to set up this computer. I’m not very good at it. I’m not sure I’ll succeed, but if you really want me to try, because it’s actually not my strong spot,” that really breeds trust and I think, in a certain way, if we come to investing, it’s the same thing.

If I identify with my rational brain, I’m going to trip up. So I feel like I have these teammates inside me that I have to bring along. So, there’s the rational brain, but then there’s this emotional thing going on, which is raging around all over the place, and that, unfortunately, it’s a member of my team and I can’t — it’s one of those members of the team that you really wish you could lose but can’t sometimes. So, I can’t ignore that person. It’s like you try and ignore that teammate and you try and put them in the corner and shut them up, but then they go and really wreak havoc.

John:

Then they get mad, yeah.

Guy:

Yeah, so you have to find a way to involve them in a certain way, and I think that just being honest with myself, one of the examples I write about is that, unlike Mohnish Pabrai, I have this inordinate fear of loss. I don’t want to have to start from scratch, and I’m more fearful, I think, than many people of losing money. So, I don’t think that it would have made sense to ignore that. I think I had to be honest with myself and with my investors and say, “You know, if I was utterly rational, this is a great investment. But you know what? It scares the shit out of me, and I can’t sleep with that.” So, I’m not going to worry about it, even if it means that my returns will be lower.

John:

Right. Know yourself and then know your own risk. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, you have to be comfortable with your own risk. Risking not having a steady paycheck for a while, and what if your company doesn’t do well or whatever it is, you have to know yourself and your own comfort zone, and I love what you say about thinking of all the different parts of our brain, left brain, right brain as members of a team as opposed to fighting ourselves. We’re all on the same page, we’re all on the same team here, so let’s figure out how we can best work together instead of shutting everybody up.

Guy:

It’s like I think that we’ve all been through these times where we fight with the forces that are arrayed around us in the universel. Like Jacob struggling with the angel, it just doesn’t work very well. It works much better when we align ourselves with those forces. Then, in a strange way, actually, when you talk about — if you don’t embrace the risk or you don’t embrace the fear saying, “You’ll do this, this is great. I’m fearful or you’ll do this. This is great.” It’s like because I see the risks so clearly or because I feel the fear so much, this is motivating me to take all these actions.

So, if we’re not honest with ourselves, if I’m not honest with myself about my fear of loss, or if an entrepreneur is not honest with himself about the very real possibility of failure, we’re not going to be motivated to do everything we possibly can to make it succeed. The strange thing for me is that the times when I’ve been in those kinds of circumstances, on the one hand, I feel utterly alive. You know, actually, writing the book was a bit like that.

John:

I’m sure.

Guy:

And then, on the other hand, it’s like once I’m through it, I’m like, “I don’t want to go through that again.”

John:

I understand. In fact, I wrote a whole blog about starting a podcast and the three faces of fear that I had to overcome. The fear of rejection, the fear of failure, and then the fear of the unknown. For me, identifying those fears into three faces helped me deal with them. So, it wasn’t just any kind of fear. I would go, “Which fear is this?”

Guy:

But there’s something else that I think is so incredibly critical is that – and I learned this from a friend of mine who’s a psychologist – emotions are a call to action, and if we don’t feel those emotions, we’re not going to take the action that we need to take. So, I would argue, I feel like, I felt it as you were saying it that the fears that you were dealing with, it wasn’t that you were just dealing with them, they were motivating you to do stuff. If you didn’t feel that, you wouldn’t have done as good a job in setting up your podcast. The one comes with the other, and if we try numbers, feelings. We tried numbers, emotions, we won’t be taking the course of action, actually.

John:

That’s a great word. Yeah, we’re going to Tweet that out. Emotions are a call to action. I love it.

Guy:

Yeah, and they’re two sides of the same coin, you know. I was just listening to the Brené Brown TED talk with a couple friends the other day.

John:

Oh, love her. Her and Liz Gilbert, yeah.

Guy:

The vulnerability is what gets the healing, is what gets the result and we just can’t have the one without the other.

John:

It’s so true. Now, you and I were speaking before the show started about your sense of liking to help people, especially founders, possibly even get funded so that when they sell their company, they’ll remember you. Tell us a little bit about how that all works in your world.

Guy:

Yeah, I’ll tell you because it’s just amazing the way it started. John, it started out of a really venal place, which wasn’t generous at all. I’d read the Cialdini book, The Psychology of Influence, and it’s got this great story there about these Hare Krishna money raisers who would hand out plastic flowers in airports and the human reciprocation tendency is so strong that even if you hand out plastic flowers, then you still will feel obligated to give something is very effective.

So, I’m like, “Damn, I can use this.” So, I’m in New York and I’m finding all sorts of — I’m sort of giving the doorman a sweet side, carry sweets or chocolates around with me. I’d be giving stuff to people all the time, but I wasn’t coming out of a place of love for humanity or of generosity. I was coming out of a place of pure manipulation. I was like, “Let’s see how I can manipulate people to do stuff for me,” and all sorts of things happened as a result of that.

But, really, what was – and it’s part of why I wanted to write the book – I suddenly found that I actually enjoyed it not because I could manipulated them into doing something, because I realized that people genuinely responded, even to my fake giving. I know, over time, I think my fake giving turned into something which was much, much more genuine.

Then, over time, what happened was that I started wanting to do it on a larger scale.

So I realized that as my network improved — I have a friend who starts medical technology companies in Minnesota, and I suddenly realized that I was coming across people that he would be interested to meet, and it sort of tapped into the same idea of finding a way to be generous because good things come back to me if I’m generous.

Actually, the funny thing is, so I’ll give you a story. So I’m a member of this organization called the Entrepreneurs’ Organization which, by the way, is a fantastic organization. So, I helped start the Israel chapter. Again, this was my idea of wanting to help people but, with the idea that, at some point, these guys — some of them might build big businesses and have money to invest and then they might send some of that to me.

So, one of the members is a woman who’s looking for funding, and actually, you could invite her on, she could talk about it. Her name is Mikhail Lodski. She’s a lovely person that I really wanted to deliver value to the chat car. I wanted people to know that if they join EO, good things happen to them. So, she is looking for funding. I hadn’t even met her.

So I did this. This is hilarious. It’s not hilarious. It’s so much fun. So, I wrote up something, which said, “Dear, First Name, I’m a member of an organization called EO, and EO’s got this — one of the members is somebody called Mikhail Lodski, and she’s got what looks like a great business plan and I would be really grateful if you take a look at it. Then I wrote, “Look, I don’t understand a lot about it, but if you were to at least take a look and see if you can help, it would mean a lot to me, and I would be grateful to you for that.”

So then I went into my LinkedIn profile and I did a search for 100 people who, in some way, were involved in the world that she was looking for funding in. They were either venture capitalists, or they were angels, or they were in that business, and I just cut and pasted that message like I don’t know how many times, and you know what was interesting was unlike if you ask for it yourself, the fact that I was asking for it and they knew me, there was some connection, I’d met them at a conference or something. Even if they had no interest, they could see that I was doing this out of the desire to help somebody, so they accepted it in a way that if she’d gotten in touch with them directly, they wouldn’t have, and then one of them actually took a close look, it was in their space, they liked it. They ended up funding her business.

John:

What a great story. Yeah, you can never underestimate the importance of a warm introduction. It’s everything. It’s been so wonderful having you on this show and hearing your stories and your personal transformations. I want to know how can people follow you on social media and, obviously, we’re going to list The Education of a Value Investor in the show notes for people to click and buy your book. But, what is the best way for people to follow you? What’s your Twitter? All that good stuff.

Guy:

Yeah, so my Twitter account is it’s my first initial and my last name, so it’s GSpier, all one word. So @GSpier, very, very short. I also just started a LinkedIn group called The Education of a Value Investor and I’m actually there, there’s a couple of others there. The Aquamarine Fund has a LinkedIn group and I’m actually really enjoying LinkedIn groups. I think it’s a great place to be. I’m also really enjoying Twitter, I have to say, because I just like the random conversations with all sorts of people from all over the world that show up there.

John:

Now, your LinkedIn group, is it the name of your book, The Education of a Value Investor?

Guy:

Yes.

John:

Okay, got it.

Guy:

That’s the easiest place, and it’s nice of you to do that.

John:

Of course, perfect. Thank you so much. Is there any last piece of advice you have for someone who’s in the world of starting a business, looking for funding, or about life or business, in general, that you want to share as a closing thought?

Guy:

You know, John, the one thing that I need to tell you is that I’m just getting warmed up. You’ve psyched me. I’m all psyched up. It’s 10:15 at night here but I want to go straight to work since you’ve really inspired me. What I would say, and the thing that I feel I’ve learned that is so important is always leave a little on the table, always generate more value than you take, always leave people wanting more. Then, just keep doing that for a decade.

I told that guy who came and did an internship with me, I said, “If you help ten people, you’ve got a few friends. If you help a hundred people, you probably find a job. If you help a thousand people, you can probably start a business. If you help ten thousand people, you’ll have quite a successful business, and if you start being in the range of helping a hundred thousand people, then you’ve got a substantial business. When it gets to a million, you’re like Warren Buffett, and when it gets to ten million, you’re like Mahatma Gandhi.” But that’s approximately the order of scale, and it’s just about having how many people out there just feel grateful that you’re on the planet.

John:

Oh, what a great philosophy. I love it so much.

Guy:

You know, when you do that, good things will come to you. They may not be what you wanted. God might have other plans in store for you, but good things will happen.

John:

It’s just having that as the intention. That will be our final Tweet. “Generate more value than you take.” Guy, thanks again for being on the show.

Guy:

I want to reach out and give you a hug. John, this has been wonderful.

John:

Aw, thanks. Cross the ocean. Alright, thanks again.

Thanks for listening to The Successful Pitch Podcast. If you liked the show, please go to iTunes and write a review, and encourage your friends to write reviews too. It really helps get the word out. You know, people say that the longest distance is between someone’s mouth and their wallet. People can tell you they’re going to invest but when it comes time to write the check, they don’t do it. So how do you get people to say yes and then follow through? Visualize yourself on the left side of a riverbank and you have to cross the river and on the other side of the river is where the funding happens.

So, first, you make up your idea and then you make it real and then you make it reoccur. Once you start dipping your toe into the water to get to funding, that’s where I can help. I get you across that river faster than you would on your own with a lot less frustration than you will get when you hear a bunch of no’s and you don’t know why. So, if you want some help getting funded faster with less frustration, go to my free funding webinar, sellingsecretsforfunding.com/webinar and sign up and get in depth information on how you can get funded fast. Thanks.