BILL RUANE

Bill Ruane was born in 1925. He served in the US Navy during World War II, then attended Harvard Business School.

The moment that defined his career came in 1951, when he attended a seminar by Benjamin Graham at Columbia University. Warren Buffett was in the room.

The two men connected and stayed in each other's orbit for the rest of their lives. Ruane absorbed Graham's framework — buy great businesses below intrinsic value, hold them — and never wavered from it.

For most of the 1950s and 1960s, he worked at Kidder, Peabody and Co. as an investment analyst.

He was exceptionally good at it. When Buffett dissolved his investment partnership in 1969 and 1970 — declaring he could no longer find enough bargains in an overvalued market — he did not point his clients toward a bank or a large fund.

He pointed them toward one person. 'I know only one person I'd trust with this money,' Buffett said.

That person was Ruane. Ruane founded the Sequoia Fund in July 1970, partnering with Richard Cunniff to form Ruane, Cunniff and Co.

(later Ruane, Cunniff and Goldfarb). From 1970 to 2005, Sequoia compounded at roughly 15% annually, beating the S&P 500 over that full period.

He died in October 2005 at age 79, still running the fund.

Ruane's career was almost entirely synonymous with the Sequoia Fund and the firm Ruane, Cunniff and Goldfarb. Sequoia is a concentrated, long-term value fund that holds a small number of high-quality businesses for years or decades.

At its peak the fund managed over $10 billion. Notable long-term holdings included Berkshire Hathaway — bought when Buffett's company was cheap and barely known — as well as Capital Cities Communications, TJX Companies, and various other well-run American businesses.

He was not a trader or an empire builder. He was a business analyst who understood companies deeply and held them patiently.

Ruane was a pure Graham-and-Buffett disciple. Buy great businesses at reasonable prices.

Hold them. Do not diversify across dozens of positions — Sequoia often had its top five holdings representing 60-70% of the portfolio.

This sounds terrifying until you realize each of those five positions was a business Ruane had studied for years. He would wait until he found something he genuinely understood, buy it, and then sit on it for as long as it deserved.

Selling was not the default.

The biggest win was the Sequoia Fund itself — the full 35-year compounding record from 1970 to 2005. For clients who invested at the start and held through the entire period, the outcome was life-changing.

More specifically, the early position in Berkshire Hathaway — bought when Buffett's holding company was cheap and widely misunderstood — paid off enormously over decades. Ruane trusted Buffett's abilities and held the position for years.

That trust was spectacularly well placed.

Ruane's record at Sequoia was clean enough that it's hard to point to a catastrophic call under his personal watch. He underperformed during the dot-com bubble years from 1997 to 1999 because he refused to buy tech stocks without earnings.

Clients who left for hot tech funds during that period paid dearly after 2000. The Valeant debacle that severely damaged Sequoia's reputation came after Ruane's death in 2005 and had nothing to do with his decisions.

Ruane believed in concentration, patience, and quality — in that order. Diversification was, in his view, a hedge against ignorance.

If you truly understood what you owned, you didn't need 50 positions to protect yourself. He also cared deeply about management character.

He wanted to invest in companies run by honest, capable people. Business quality and management quality were both non-negotiable.

He held Berkshire Hathaway partly because he understood its business and partly because he trusted Buffett completely.

Ruane was intensely private. He was married and had a family, but he rarely spoke about personal matters publicly.

His legacy at the firm was the culture of intellectual rigor and client-first thinking he built. Many of his long-term employees stayed at Ruane, Cunniff for their entire careers.

He is remembered by colleagues as principled, brilliant, and genuinely uninterested in fame.

Ruane graduated from Harvard Business School. The more formative education came at a Benjamin Graham lecture at Columbia University in 1951, where he met Warren Buffett and absorbed the framework that governed his investing for the next 54 years.

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