The Omaha Experience – attending the annual shareholders meeting of Berkshire Hathaway - Part 3

Previous part 2 of this series is here. Continuing further..

The BIG Day!

?Saturday morning, the day of the event, there is expected to be a long queue outside the centre, to get in. We had our passes and were ready, but we still needed to get there early and stand in queue, so we get good seats once we get in. We were to Uber it and had made a reservation for the Uber as well. However, the Uber app warned us that due to high traffic that day, the cab could come in late. Knowing that, we were exploring other options. Thankfully, the other investor group we had met on Friday evening, and who were also from the Bay Area, had rented a car. They were three of them, and they could accommodate two additional pax in me and my friend, Jawahar. So, when they offered to come pick us up, early morning on Saturday, we accepted their generous offer. It was important to have reliability, than to keep waiting for an Uber that could be running late. Moreover, the city of Omaha is fundamentally quite small. Most times, your ride from almost any point A to point B in the city would be no more than 15-20 min at most. Which is why we were okay to have those investor friends come and pick us up from our hotel.

Once we got to the event location at around 6.15 am, the CHI Health Centre, we saw long queues already there. Gates open at around 7 am. With rains the previous night, there was a slight chill in the air, and we bore up that cold, as we waited for 7 am to happen, and we go in.

?The pro-Palestine, anti-Israel protests that have been happening at different US campuses, also reached this venue. Considering a huge gathering of capitalism, of wealth, of investments that are made in very large amounts by people at the event, it was an appropriate event for these protestors to be seen. They were not present in very large numbers, but their message was heard loud and clear, as they had a captive audience of people waiting in long queues, while the message was being broadcast!

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Finally, by the time we were allowed in, there were perhaps a few thousand people already ahead of us. So, our expectations of getting really good seats were lost. However, thanks to the experience of the investor group with whom we had gone, they recommended that we sit in a location that faced the stage, and which way, we would not have to turn sideways to see the speakers. So, we settled into our seats across from the stage. The venue seemed like a basketball or ice hockey stadium otherwise, from the looks of it.

?There was a draft of cold air coming from somewhere and that kept us cold most of the day, even inside the arena.

?The arena was packed with people. All waiting for the big man to arrive and begin proceedings.

?The event went on from around 8.30 to 3 pm, post which there was some more formal proceedings of the AGM that we did not attend. There was just the small lunch break in between. But it was truly creditable to see Warren Buffett sit through the entire proceedings, without needing a break.

?At our end, even as we were waiting in the audience, we needed to step out for the bio breaks, and occasional snacks etc. That said, would wonder about Warren Buffett, as to how he manages to sit there for these long hours, talking, answering one question after another, on a wide range of topics, and at his age of 93!

?The people inside were a mixed bag. A large proportion were, Caucasian Americans, perhaps from ages of 20 to 80, and leaning to an average of around 55 or so, by my rough estimate. Most of them seemed like people who had been invested in Berkshire for many years and would have made good money on that stock itself, besides learning new things, from these events that they might have attended for many years. Yes, many of the folks looked like the kind who come year after year. ?But beyond this most common demography, there was a mixed bag – a lot of people of Asian origin, both Indian as well as Chinese / Singaporean / Thai / Korean / Japanese etc. Of these, maybe 80% were people of these origins but now based in the US, whereas the other 20% were those who had traveled to the event from their home countries (like me). There were few much younger folks too, including some kids, brought to the event by their parents, to get inspired, maybe! Unlike corporate events of this kind, where people hang out outside of the halls, networking and talking to each other, most people attending this event, were at their seats almost all day, listening with attention, to the proceedings.

?While morning breakfast in terms of coffee, water bottles and some muffins / doughnuts etc was provided free to all, lunch boxes were sold for a small price, as was other snacks and beverages.

?Other than the long queue to get inside, in the morning, for everything else, be it food or toilets, there were smaller and faster moving queues. In that respect, the event was quite well managed.

Read part 4 of the series: The Content - what I took away from the day's proceedings!

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