Our final advantage is the hard-to-duplicate culture that permeates Berkshire. And in businesses, culture counts.

It seems to me Buffett’s themes in this year’s letter are “opportunities and culture.”

Founder Collective offers an average of less than $200,000. In exchange, it takes less equity. But it provides more in the way of personal support to the entrepreneurs than a VC would.

By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”.

The most innovative product for a financial firm is one that always has volume and, sometimes, always has volatility. Many investors would prefer neither, they would prefer their investments boring. So there’s a clash here.

Similar sentiments were what I gathered from my reading of The Big Short by Michael Lewis. While there was a lot of common sense ignored in some of the large investment firms, it seems that the more transactions you can skim fees off of the better (if you’re a banker) and little thought was placed on the outcome or the quality of investment vehicle.

To me, I take the Warren Buffett philosophy on investing when I think of finance; it should be boring.

One other “money” product to consider is Square, the mobile phone add-on device that allows anyone to take credit card payments on their phone. What’s interesting about Square and BankSimple is that both are founded by early Twitter employees.

Read Pioneering Portfolio Management and you see very quickly that his approach calls for constant thinking and retesting of assumptions and changing of allocations

Actually, shouldn’t our approach to life follow this theory?

A business owner submits a business plan, references, and a request in a specific amount, and LION distributes the application to residents who want to invest. From there, the business and the investor figure out the details of an equity investment or a loan. (…) When an investor helps a neighborhood business grow, the profits and jobs stay local as well. Investing in a corporation headquartered elsewhere, by contrast, merely increases profits in some far-flung corner office or helps open a new store in another part of the country.

Read the whole article for an interesting bit about how the community is “working around” the SEC.