Bloomberg on Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg was the mayor of New York when I first heard of him. My sister, a doctor in Staten Island, didn't like it when I asked about him on the ferry to Manhattan. He was, I understood, a very divisive figure. I didn't dig very deep then. The second time I heard of him was in 2020, the time of the presidential elections. In a year where billionaires were very unpopular, he was taken to the cleaners both by mass media and the social corners of the internet. However, I thought it was to his credit that he spent his own money on the campaign and refused donations.

His biography has provided me with a more fuller picture of the man. I should note that the version I picked up was published in 2019, most certainly reissued keeping his campaign in mind. There's a lot of policy discussion here and a few paragraphs about his effectiveness as a mayor. As all politicians are wont to do, the controversies of his term in office are passed over unremarked. This latter half of the book I couldn't bring myself to care much. It's 2024 now, and he is not contesting ever again. The first half is where I found useful lessons - in living, in building a career. Bloomberg after all lived a full life, coming from a working class Jewish background, making his way to Yale and Harvard, a storied career in Wall Street with the Salomon Brothers, and a second career as a entrepreneur. There is even a third, if you count his public office. His laurels as an entrepreneur rests on his Bloomberg Terminals, providing real time analytics to almost every trading firm on the planet, and the Bloomberg media empire.

So what's the path?

Bloomberg attributes his success to sheer hard work, working fourteen-hour days most of his life. He displays an awareness of his overwhelming ego, and is very unapologetic about it. After getting laid off Salomon Brothers, he started his own company because he couldn't imagine working for anyone else, and Goldman Sachs did not immediately approach him with a job. It's not all just bullheadedness. He's strategic about the choices he makes. For example, you usually can't make great, multi-generational fortunes on Wall Street. You get it by building.

The Street promised vast riches—although few of the great fortunes have been made there. From John D. Rockefeller to Sam Walton to Bill Gates, great financial success comes from starting businesses with concrete products in the real world, building jobs, creating value, and helping people.

When you are selling something, you must deliver value. Ask what your unique proposition is.

Why do some companies like Bloomberg, charging about $2,000 per month for electronically delivered information, keep growing when others can’t keep customers even when charging only pennies—or nothing at all? Simple: supply and demand. If you’re not providing something unique, you have no ability to impose charges. Most of what’s available electronically on one website is available on many others simultaneously. Most broadcast TV programs are just copies of earlier or other successful shows. No uniqueness: too much supply. Hence the success of original shows on on-demand services.

If you are going to do anything at all, first write down your plans. Only when the pen hits the paper do you really know for certain if you thinking about this the right way.

“Think logically and dispassionately about what you’d like to do. Work out all steps of the process—the entire what, when, where, why, and how. Then, sit down after you are absolutely positive you know it cold, and write it out. There’s an old saying, “If you can’t write it, you don’t know it.” Try it. The first paragraph invariably stops you short. “Now why did we want this particular thing?” you’ll find yourself asking. “Where did we think the resources would come from?” “And what makes us think others—the suppliers, the customers, the potential rivals—are going to cooperate?” On and on, you’ll find yourself asking the most basic questions you hadn’t focused on before taking pen to paper. As you discover you don’t know it all, force yourself to address the things you forgot, ignored, underestimated, or glossed over. Write them out for a doubting stranger who doesn’t come with unquestioned confidence in the project’s utility—and who, unlike your spouse, parent, sibling, or child, doesn’t have a vested interest in keeping you happy. Make sure your written description follows, from beginning to end, in a logical, complete, doable path. Then tear up the paper.

Yes, once you have done your due diligence, commit to the task and get to work. Real life will throw curve balls and all your plans will come to a nought. So you don't want to waste time and effort worrying about an infinite number of down-the-road possibilities, most of which will never materialize.

Bloomberg's influences seemed to be his parents and working class background, and what he learnt from the legendary Salomon Brothers CEOs, Billy Salomon and John Gutfreund. From his family, as a child, he learned to work hard, and to strive relentlessly for the goals he set. He had a great regard for Billy Salomon.

“He was decisive and consistent as a leader. If he ever harbored doubts after making a decision, I never saw it. And although he was easily approachable and willing to listen to everyone’s views, when he said we were going left, we went left, and when he said right, right it was.”

“He set the rules and even he conformed to them. Was it a rule to conduct one’s personal affairs so as not to embarrass the firm? His own private life was exemplary. When he thought another’s wasn’t, we had an instantaneous partners’ meeting to remove the offender—no matter how important that person was to the immediate bottom line. Did he decree each of us should be accessible to all? Anyone could come up to his desk, anytime. He was on a first-name basis with as many people at the bottom of the corporate ladder as at the top.”

He liked John Gutfreund and considered him a good enough leader. What made him ineffective was "he listened to too many people."

“John consulted all interested parties before making a decision. No matter how noble the motive, that resulting apparent indecisiveness eventually destroyed his constituency and led to his downfall.”

This style of working clearly carried over into his endeavors. He could motivate the people around him. The folks he started the company with are still there with him, over 30 years later. He co-wrote this autobiography with the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, who he poached from the Wall Street Journal. He too is an old Bloomberg hand.

Bloomberg acknowledges that one's success is the result of everyone around them, from the sacrifices of the spouses, to their working partners and employees, to the parents. He doesn't say as much, but he also had great luck to be where he was. He stuck with Salomon Brothers for fifteen years and started his firm only once he was fired. His payday from Salomon Brothers at that time, at 39 years old, was ten million dollars, half of which he invested in his new company. He only thought of the particular niche in which his company would first operate - real time analytics delivered via a custom terminal - because he his bosses asked him to digitize the records at Salomon Brothers. To his credit, he took the opportunities that came his way and ran with it.

He never confused his product with the delivery mechanism. The analysis was the product, not the custom computers.

“Executives at Eastman Kodak, for instance, thought they were in the camera and film business, instead of the photography business. The digital photography revolution passed them by, and after more than a century as one of the most innovative companies in the world, they filed for bankruptcy in 2012.”

Self-belief helps

His enormous ego - or to be charitable, let's call it self-regard and sense of fair play - clearly helped his business. It allowed him to dare to replace the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as the authoritative, impartial source for US Treasuries (the Fed had delayed for years on its promise to automate the delivery of US government securities price list). When Dow Jones & Co, the Wall Street Journal's owner, tried to enforce its monopoly on this information, he outcompeted them as a five year old start up. Before Bloomberg, the only real-time news organization in the United States for textual financial news was Dow Jones. There was only one news organization in Europe for following those markets in prose — Reuters. Both tried to put terminal on the desks of financial professionals and lost. He even got Matt Winkler of the Journal to build and run his Bloomberg News in the late 1980s. He forced his way into the Japanese business media scene, refusing to accept second fiddle status to local media. When he was advised not to send women while opening an office there, he sent two women to run the place (who were accepted and able to hire men to work under them).

Clearly this is a very driven man.

"Happiness for me has always been the thrill of the unknown, trying something that everyone says can’t be done, feeling that gnawing pit in my stomach that says “Danger ahead.” Would it be nice not to have uncertainty, to sit back and “veg out”? When the phone rings constantly, when people keep demanding attention, when I desperately need time to myself, it seems an attractive notion just to “chuck it all.” But then nobody calls, nobody stops by, and soon I’m nibbling my nails and getting irritable, and I realize that’s not what I want. It sounds good. In reality though, I want action, I want challenge."

Whatever his politics, these are words to live by.

"I’ve always loved my work and put in a lot of time, which has helped make me successful. I truly pity people who don’t like their jobs. They struggle at work, so unhappily, for ultimately so much less success, and thus develop even more reason to hate their occupations. There’s too much delightful stuff to do in this short lifetime not to love getting up on a weekday morning."

Start with a small piece; fulfill one goal at a time, on time. Do it with all things in life. Sit down and learn to read one-syllable words. If you try to read Chaucer in elementary school, you’ll never accomplish anything. You can’t jump to the end game right away, in computers, politics, love, or any other aspect of life.