Thank you, Warren: the letter that opened doors for me

“Father Time always wins. He has, however, been generous with me.”
Warren Buffett, in his letter of 18 September 2026

That’s how Warren Buffett, 96, signed off as Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway on 18 September 2026, more than six decades after he took control of a failing textile mill and began building it into a trillion-dollar company. His son Howard takes the chair.

The letter in this post is why that day felt like a significant moment for me. It opened doors I never expected to walk through.

The strange teenager with the wrong books

At 15, I was the strange teenager reading psychology and self-development books instead of doing my homework. Communication, habits, and eventually financial intelligence. And whenever the subject was money and investing, every book and every corner of the early internet pointed to one name. Warren Buffett. I read everything I could find and thought: this man operates on a different planet to mine.

The email I said yes to before I’d finished reading it

Fast forward 20 years. I’m running my own agency, and an email lands from a client at VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk’s agency, whom I’d worked with on a previous project.

“Are you free on these dates in London? We’d like to recommend you for a content marketing project for Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices. Their senior leadership is flying in.”

I said yes before I’d finished reading it.

Several days in London with Gino Blefari’s team

Mr Buffett himself wasn’t there; at his age he’d long stopped travelling like that. But Gino Blefari was, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, with his closest team. I spent several days with them filming and documenting their journey through London.

Sharp, kind, disciplined people. Exactly what you’d expect from the Buffett school.

A while later, this letter arrived. Mr Blefari wrote that because of his “own exacting standards”, he is “seldom afforded the opportunity to report about one’s clearly exemplary services”. I’ve read it more times than I’d like to admit.

I never pitched it

Here’s the thing. I never chased that work. Never pitched Berkshire Hathaway, never sent a single email in that direction. I just kept doing good work for the people in front of me, and one of them opened a door I didn’t even know existed.

What feels impossibly far away at 15 can become an ordinary Tuesday two decades later. Not because you chased it, but because you got good enough that it came looking for you.

The tools have changed. The principle hasn’t.

Today I’m still in marketing. It’s where modern communication happens; it’s how a brand gets closer to the people it wants to help. Since then I’ve worked with big companies and small ones and done pretty much everything marketing-related. Over the last year, I’ve added AI agents and automations to what I offer, which speed up the work and make it far more efficient for the businesses I look after.

The tools have changed. The principle hasn’t. Do the work, be findable, and let compounding do the rest.

Buffett would call it compounding. I call it the best career advice a 15-year-old ever stumbled upon.

Thank you, Warren.

The longer version of how I got from a camera to that week in London is in Why I built Pikul, and the launch film itself is on the Results page.

Common questions