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Meet the high bidder for lunch with celebrity hedge fund manager Bill Ackman: Andrew Wilkinson, the founder of the tech holding company Tiny.

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Wilkinson bid $57,500 on auction website Charitybuzz, for one hour of conversation over lunch at Marea in Manhattan to benefit the nonprofit BYkids. Wilkinson says he has followed Ackman’s career for years, reading his letters and presentations.

“I’ve learned a lot from his career at a distance and I’m excited to see what I can learn from him in person,” he tells Barron’s. “I’ve always found his willingness to speak out against fraud and mismanagement, often at great personal cost, highly admirable. It’s not a style of investing that I have the stomach for, but I’m glad there are people like Bill who are willing to do it.”

Ackman’s performance record is mixed, but Wilkinson is right about Ackman being unafraid to speak out. Ackman’s crusades can be bruising but ultimately successful: He highlighted MBIA’s guarantees of billions of dollars worth of asset-backed securities and was eventually proven right (for more, read Confidence Game). More recently he has been less successful, most famously in Bausch Health Companies (BSC), formerly Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, and his short bet against Herbalife Nutrition (HLF).

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Regardless, a midday meal next to him has outperformed. While bids ticked higher in the live auction, we compared the estimated value of $10,000 with a 2016 lunch-with-Ackman auction, which went for $4,500. Benchmarked against the change in net asset value at Pershing Square Holdings, the publicly traded vehicle that runs parallel to the hedge fund, we found that the assets in Ackman’s investment vehicle were performing exactly in line with experiencing time near his physical body. But that was using the estimated value; the high bid was about $4,250.

Wilkinson saw a column by Bloomberg Opinion’s Matt Levine, who did his own math, citing our post. With the annual Buffett lunch going for $3.3 million in June 2018 and $2.68 million in June 2017, and with Berkshire Hathaway’s market capitalization of about $498 billion and $8 billion for Pershing Square, Levine found that proximity to Buffett was about 60 times more valuable than proximity to Ackman.

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So, he wrote, keeping the ratio of assets-to-lunch-price constant, a $3.3 million lunch with Buffett implies that lunch with Ackman should be worth about $54,000. At the time, the top bid at the auction was less than half that.

“What prompted me to bid was Matt Levine’s analysis of the intrinsic value of lunch with Bill using lunch with Buffett as a comp,” Wilkinson says. He acknowledges that he “slightly overshot” Levine’s estimate, but adds that “hopefully I can compound my knowledge a little faster to make up for it.”

Read More: Ackman’s Comeback: How to Ride His Revival

One of Wilkinson’s companies is far from the same business as Pershing Square—it builds products and interfaces, a design business he has said he started “by accident” in 2006.

Even so, at his company, which includes MetaLab, Wilkinson says he applies “many elements of what Pershing does,” scrutinizing companies it acquires for operating efficiencies, or examining incentive structures and the quality of management. But in contrast to Pershing Square, that’s “typically as a majority or sole shareholder,” he says.”

“It’s a lot easier to be an activist when you’re the sole shareholder,” he says. “The only boardroom brawl I have to deal with is with my own psyche.”

Wilkinson resonated with the cause of BYkids, which matches teenagers with filmmakers “to tell their stories through film and share the realities of global inequality and injustice on the world stage,” because he says he started his career while still in high school, so he thinks “young people are generally underestimated,” and he’s “always looking for ways to support young entrepreneurs and creatives.”

Write to Mary Childs at mary.childs@barrons.com