The story of 3G Capital involves Roger Federer, Sam Walton, and Warren Buffett. It includes the biggest beer company on earth, the biggest footwear deal in history, and a ketchup bottle with Charlie Munger's face on it. It also involves accusations of 'chainsaw capitalism,' CEOs driving freight trains, and billion-dollar companies being handed to kids in their twenties. Buffett called it the best management culture he'd ever seen. But, until now, the story behind the culture has never been told by the people who carry it forward. In truth, 3G would prefer you had never heard of it. The firm began in New York in 2004. But the real story starts in the seventies, off the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, when Jorge Paulo Lemann bought a brokerage for $800,000 and built a model for running businesses unlike anything else in Brazil. The model has since produced the biggest investment bank in Brazil, the world’s largest brewer, the third-largest restaurant company, and turned hundreds of employees into multimillionaires. In 3G Capital, it has also produced a rare kind of investing partnership, one where each fund holds exactly one company, the partners are the largest investors in every fund, they work the businesses themselves, and they have never lost money on a deal. Almost everything written about the firm notes that managing partners Alex Behring and Daniel Schwartz did not respond for comment. For Colossus, they sat for hours of interviews at their Manhattan office. @domcooke tells the full story of how this secretive firm with fewer than 30 employees has built some of the world's biggest companies.
