Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn, two Iowa investors, attended every Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting from 1986 and kept detailed notes of what Buffett and Munger said from the stage. The result is the only continuous, year-by-year record of the Q&A sessions across three decades, capturing spontaneous answers on topics from acquisitions and succession to investing mistakes and the failings of corporate governance — material that never appears in the formal shareholder letters.
Where the shareholder letters are Buffett's prepared and edited writing, Pecaut and Wrenn capture the unscripted exchange — the offhand answers, the back-and-forth between Buffett and Munger, and the questions that reveal what Berkshire owners actually worry about. For founders, this is as close as most will get to sitting in on 30 years of board-level Q&A with two of the best capital allocators in history.
The book documents how consistently Buffett and Munger answered the same questions year after year without changing their answers. That consistency itself is a lesson for founders: their philosophy was not refined over time so much as stated early and defended against every temptation to abandon it. A founder who reads the 1986 Q&A and then the 2016 Q&A will see the same principles applied to different situations, not revised principles — which is the definition of a durable operating philosophy.