In 2006, a big event happened in Huang Zheng's life - having lunch with Warren Buffett, the god of stocks.
A photo of Huang Zheng and Buffett has been circulating on the Internet: Buffett's hand is closely on Huang Zheng's shoulder, and both of them are smiling. Huang Zheng, who was only 26 years old at the time, was still slightly restrained and green, and perhaps Buffett could not have imagined that more than a decade later, the supporting role of this lunch would create a company with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Huang Zheng and Buffett
Huang Zheng was able to have such an opportunity, but also thanks to Duan Yongping.
In 2000, at the suggestion and matchmaking of his wife, Susan Buffett, Warren Buffett began auctioning off opportunities for lunch in tone. Since then, the world's most famous lunch auction has been born. Every year, the auction of Buffett's lunch will attract a lot of attention, and people want to learn some investment skills from where to solve the puzzle of the stock god. Although the price of this lunch has soared year by year, there are still many bidders involved.
In 2006, Duan Yongping successfully photographed the opportunity to have lunch with Buffett for $260,100, becoming the first Chinese to have lunch with the god of stocks and chat face-to-face.
Lunch with Buffett takes place at a very famous steakhouse in New York, the Smith & Vronsky Steakhouse. It is one of the most famous high-end steakhouse chains in the United States, with branches in all major cities in the United States.
Smith & Vronsky Steakhouse
The "Charity Lunch" was arranged at a large round table on the ground floor next to the kitchen, which could seat seven or eight people, because the winning bidder could bring up to seven friends for a 3-hour special lunch with Buffett.
It is said that at lunch, Buffett said to Duan Yongping: Don't do things you don't understand, don't go short, don't borrow money. Such an investment concept deeply affected Duan Yongping and allowed his wealth to be continuously accumulated.
According to the rules, Duan Yongping can bring six people to the banquet together, one of whom is Huang Zheng.
At that time, Huang Zheng was still working at Google, and Duan Yongping only told him on the phone to let him come and have lunch together, and what Huang Zheng never expected was that the person sitting at the lunch table was actually Buffett, the "god of stocks".
Huang Zheng has a high evaluation of Buffett: "Buffett is an admirable capitalist, he is a pure capitalist. His whole business can be described as a tireless, focused, rational move of money to enjoy the fruits of compound interest. I loved reading his letters to shareholders, repeating the same simplicity for decades, repeating the simplicity of not being easy. In his empire, one hand is insurance, the other is investment; on the one hand, it sells anti-risk ability, and the other side is put into the moated orchard that can produce compound interest. ”
As a "supporting role" in this lunch, Huang Zheng has been sitting on the side and listening carefully to the conversation of the two "big guys". At this dinner, Buffett did not teach any professional investment skills, let alone talk too much empty words. He told Huang Zheng: "We must go with the flow and follow the objective facts behind the incident. People can be unwise, but they must have courage and persistence. ”
This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has become one of the best endorsement materials for Huang Zheng's future entrepreneurship.
In an exclusive interview, Huang Zheng recalled the lunch at that time:
Buffett has a lot of stories, and it's a lot of fun to talk to him. While he won't tell you the company's specific investment intentions, it doesn't stop him from talking about his own investment principles, which made him start with very little capital and eventually become one of the richest people in the world.
He also mentioned the biggest inspiration that Buffett's lunch brought to himself:
Buffett's words were actually very simple, something my mother could understand, but the biggest meaning of this meal to me was probably that I realized the power of simplicity and common sense. People's minds are easily polluted, when you make judgments about a thing, you need to understand the background and facts, and what you need after understanding is not wisdom, but whether you still have the courage to judge with reason and common sense when facing the facts. Common sense is obvious and easy to understand, but our various prejudices and personal interests formed by growing up and learning blind us.
To this day, Huang Zheng will occasionally recall the day of lunch with Duan Yongping and Buffett, and the two of them chatted happily. Buffett made him realize the power of simplicity and common sense, while Duan Yongping taught him duty and common sense.
In the subsequent life path, Huang Zheng often thinks about Buffett's life experience and benefits a lot from it. He wrote on his personal WeChat account that Buffett enjoyed the joy of the capital game on the one hand, and on the other hand, he clearly knew that money was not the goal, donated most of his money to Bill Gates, and advocated more taxes on the rich to complete the redistribution of wealth.
From Buffett's practice of "accumulating funds and then distributing them", Huang Zheng thought of the insurance industry. In his view, the insurance now is that the poor buy the anti-risk ability from the rich, which may lead to the result that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. He envisions that in the "post-capitalist" era, a new mechanism can be designed so that the poor can also sell "insurance" to the rich, and the poor can sell some of their "soft power", their own will, and their ability to resist risks to the rich, so as to achieve a cycle of shorter cycles of money flowing back from the rich to the poor.
An analogy given by Huang Zheng is:
If a thousand people think of buying a certain kind of down jacket in the winter in the summer, they write a joint order to a manufacturer and are willing to pay a 10% deposit at last year's price. In this case, it is very likely that the factory is willing to give them a 30% discount. Because the factory obtained from their joint order the certainty of a demand that the factory did not have before. This certainty can be translated into the convenience of taking advantage of the troughs of production plans, or it can be translated into steadfastness in sourcing raw materials. Factories can even further sell this certainty to upstream and supporting manufacturers in exchange for further reductions in factory costs. In terms of transaction form, this transaction is like a group of people spending 1 yuan each to buy 3 yuan of limited-time coupons, and then the factory can further buy similar time-limited coupons from upstream and supporting manufacturers because they have sold these coupons, such as spending a thousand to buy three thousand time-limited coupons. If this thousand people have a certain credit history, they place a joint order together, express their willingness but do not pay the deposit, is the factory willing to give them a discount? I think it's probably willing, just maybe not 30%, but 8% can? It's like a factory using its own limited-time discount coupons to buy an insurance plan from the average consumer that guarantees future purchases. If you think about it further, there are many forms of co-reality that can make ordinary people's wishes and ordinary people's future needs certain marketization, productization, and monetization.
Huang Zheng believes that capitalists and rich people are willing to buy this kind of "reverse insurance" from ordinary people and poor people. To some extent, Pinduoduo's later main "group bargaining" and "group preemptive booking" strategy actually allows mass consumer groups to provide "reverse insurance" to production enterprises. It can be seen that Huang Zheng's thinking has profoundly affected his entrepreneurial path.
Excerpt from "The Biography of Huang Zheng: Choice is More Important Than Effort"