How Did Warren Buffett's Letters Lead to Claude Hopkins?

David Senra found Claude Hopkins by reading Warren Buffett's shareholder letters, where Buffett kept calling David Ogilvy a genius. Senra had nothing to do with advertising when he started those letters many years ago. He looked up Ogilvy, read what Ogilvy wrote, and followed the heroes Ogilvy named. Ogilvy, Senra says, built his agency on Claude Hopkins's work alone.

Ogilvy and Mather was a public company, and Buffett was buying the stock. Senra says Buffett made more money on Ogilvy's company than Ogilvy did, because Ogilvy got scared and sold his equity too early, before it appreciated. The agency was on a spree of buying other agencies. Buffett thought that did not make much sense. Instead of buying other agencies, he asked why they would not buy the best agency, their own, and told them to buy back their own stock.

Senra thinks the earlier Founders episode on the letters, from the 80s, ran about three hours and is still the longest episode he has made. He plans about two months on the next one, after Warren wrote his last shareholder letter, and he expects that one to be the longest Founders episode he ever does.