(Tracy Britt Cool Portrait by Madeline Cass for The New York Times)
By Anupreeta Das | The New York Times
Tracy Britt Cool always knew she wanted to work in business. So, not unlike the star of a high school musical asking Steven Spielberg for a part, she figured she should start at the top.
At 24, fresh out of business school with barely any formal work experience, Ms. Britt Cool mailed a letter to Warren E. Buffett asking the Oracle of Omaha if she could work for him. Soon, his office address became hers, too.
Ms. Britt Cool joined Mr. Buffett’s conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, in the fall of 2009 as financial assistant to the chairman — a title that Mr. Buffett, the chief executive and chairman of Berkshire, made up. She became one of his top lieutenants along with the Berkshire investment managers Todd Combs and Ted Weschler — Mr. Buffett called them “the three T’s” — and one of the company’s few senior female executives.
In early 2020, not long after people began to include Ms. Britt Cool on a short list of potential successors to Mr. Buffett, she left. The move surprised many because Berkshire executives rarely leave.
Now, Ms. Britt Cool, 37, is parlaying her nearly unparalleled access to the mind and methods of one of the world’s most renowned investors to build her own investment firm, Kanbrick. In doing so, she is perhaps the most direct inheritor of a style of investing that Mr. Buffett perfected over many decades and distilled into pithy principles.
