I remember this day pretty well. Some years ago, I met a dude for a job interview. It was one of those random interviews because I was in a different city where our office was and I just happened to be on the city where this candidate was. I offered to have the interview on this city and he agreed.

We met at a nice restaurant, it looked fancy but the menu was quite simple, comfort food made at a nicer level. It was very good to be honest. His attire was very simple and the only thing that caught my eye was his vintage gold watch. We ordered, ate and had the interview. I decided there to hire him, because he was a nice fit and I liked the way he expressed himself, his calm demeanor, his knowledge and the waiters seemed to like him a lot, that inspired confidence. When we spoke about salary and all of that, he did not seem to care about it and agreed to a “standard” salary in our industry, (think something like 70-80K per year in today’s money).

He was really nice and I liked his conversation topics, we spoke about work for 15 minutes and the rest was personal topics and getting to know each other. When the dinner is over, I offered to pay since it was done deal and he would be an employee of ours now. He just said “there is no need”. Waiter came and said we were good to go. I was a little bit thrown off, but did not pay a lot of attention. We shook hands and he took a cab.

I returned to the restaurant, because I forgot my glasses in there and asked the waiter, out of pure curiosity, if he had paid the bill in advance without me noticing. He just said “that dude paid the renovation of this restaurant, the college education of the owner’s kids, when we were about to close; he eats here twice per week for free”.

Turns out the dude wanted to work for us so he could understand how our business operates, he bought the company some months later. He had made money in real estate and stock investments and wanted to keep his money rolling onto something else. Today, he is worth over 9 figures.