Periodically, while surrounded by the fruits of our success, the profits, the power, the notoriety, I get frustrated and I dream of starting again.
But something stops me.
Perhaps I'm too old.
Perhaps I'm afraid it was all luck.
Or maybe deep down inside, I really do like the trappings that I've accumulated.
Nevertheless, when I find that we just have to clear it with legal or had a meeting to keep others in the loop, or we are justifying staff versus producers, I want to scream.
We used to have the Nike motto attitude.
We just did it.
Now there's a why we can't lurking in the background.
Keeping it from coming out while we grow is our number one management focus today.
What started simple with time has become complex.
A single straightforward policy has picked up exception after exception over time.
Products have grown to overlap.
No one's got an excuse, but everyone's got a reason.
Maddening.
Why not just quit then?
Chuck it all.
Sell the business.
Take the money and run.
Play it conservatively.
Relax a little.
Real entrepreneurs never do though.
And I haven't either.
Generally, real builders are so focused, one-dimensional and dedicated.
They'd have a nervous breakdown after two weeks of sitting around.
Their challenge, even their reason for living, would be gone.
Why would I swap fun influence, challenge and more money than you could ever spend for only a multiple of more money than you can ever spend?
I can't think of anything better than my current situation.
Should I take the company public and have to answer to more partners, stockholders and security analysts?
Why would we want to do that?
We're going in the other direction.
We've already bought back Merrill's 30% investment in our company.
The first 10% we bought back for $200 million in 1996.
And the second 20% we bought back for $4.5 billion in 2008.
Not a bad return on their original investment of $39 million.
Sell?
No thanks.
Answering to no one, is the ultimate situation.
So back on the treadmill I go.
Ratchet up the risk.
Enter a new medium.
Start another project.
Improve.
Develop.
Expand.
Go for it.
That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Michael Bloomberg's autobiography Bloomberg by Bloomberg.
And that is also an example of why this book moved up the queue.
He is unapologetically extreme, and he sets the tone from the very, very beginning.
This book had been recommended to me over the years.
And I wanted to push it up to the front because of something I saw somebody wrote.
So there's this writer who does – he studies great – history's great investors.
Like I study history's great founders.
But he does it in writing.
He's got this email newsletter.
It's called Necker, which is – it's like N-E-C-K-A-R.
I'll link to – he wrote a Twitter thread one of the – a better Twitter thread than I could ever write.
And it's on the lessons that are in Michael Bloomberg's autobiography.
And so I'll link to that Twitter thread if you want to read it.
It gives a great overview of the book and his unapologetically extremeness jumps out in that thread.
I was like okay, I love studying people like that, I want to read his biography or his autobiography, and so this is a short book.
I got a lot of highlights.
I'm going to jump into him before I have to tell you like where, how I came into this.
Like I knew Bloomberg's name.
I know he's got a really successful company.
I didn't know.
I just haven't really paid attention to him.
I don't know that much about him other than his name recognition.
I knew he was the mayor of New York and And I knew he was unbelievably wealthy.
I just assumed.
Okay, if you have a net worth of 50 billion and you did it in a very short amount of time, relatively speaking, I mean, I guess it's not a short amount of time.
But I have the updated version of this autobiography and he's been working for 50 years.
So there's a lot of information in here that's going to be useful to you and I, But I just assumed okay, this guy has a public company.
I didn't know Bloomberg was privately owned.
To this day, he owns around 80% of it.
They do around 10 billion in revenue and I've seen varying estimates of his profit margins, but they're somewhere around 30 to 40, which just blew my mind.
The idea that you could have a private company that is throwing off, let's say, 3 billion of profit every year, and then take into account the fact that he started the company when he was almost 40 years old.
Okay, so I'm gonna jump into the book right from, he sets the tone from the very first page.
This is in the preface of the book.
And he says what started in 1981, with four guys in a coffee pot and not one customer, has grown beyond our wildest imaginations.
The culture that we created at the very beginning continues to define who we are.
We are still a company that will outwork our competitors.
We will take more risks than they will.
We will serve our customers better.
We will invest more in the long term and we will place a greater emphasis on transparency and teamwork.
And on the very next page he makes one of the best points he makes in the entire book is that you cannot mistake your product for the device that delivers it.
And then, of course, we see right away just Michael Bloomberg, just like every other founder that we study.
They have deep historical knowledge about their industry.
They go back and they learn from the experience of entrepreneurs that came before them.
This helps them understand how they think, copy their best ideas and avoid their worst mistakes.
And so he's going to say, hey, we're not going to mess up like Kodak did.
OK, so he says the technology that we pioneered in the early 1980s has long been ancient history.
But we never made the error that so many others have.
We were mistaking their product for the device that delivers it.
So now he's going to give us an historical reference of a pitfall that he was able to avoid.
Kodak thought they were in the camera and film business instead of the photography business.
See, that's so easy to make that mistake though.
From Kodak's perspective, we're like, hey, we make money.
We make cameras and we make money developing film.
So that must be our business.
They didn't even understand that.
No, you're in the photography business.
This is also something we saw.
I did a couple like five podcasts on Edwin Land because his company overtook.
Like he was heavily influenced by Eastman Kodak.
He creates Polaroid.
Polaroid displaces Eastman Kodak.
So it says Kodak thought they were in the camera and phone 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.
At Bloomberg.
We got out of the business of building physical computers as soon as PCs began taking off.
We knew our core product was data and analytics, not hardware.
So I'm going to finish this paragraph, but again, I think the takeaway right there is hey, what is your core product?
Think about what is the service that you're actually delivering to your customers?
So it says, we knew our core product was data and analytics, not hardware.
Look ahead or fall behind.
When we started the company, we were refugees from Wall Street, motivated by an idea that we could build something new that just might make a difference in the world of finance.
So take part of that sentence.
We were motivated by an idea that we could build something new that just might make a difference.
A feeling is universal to founders.
People told me I was crazy to think we could overturn the status quo on Wall Street and challenge the giants of financial information.
So something Michael talks about a lot is the fact that getting fired wind up being the best thing that ever happened to him.
He loved his job.
He was comfortable in his job.
He would have stayed there forever if this didn't happen.
Obviously, he stays in that company.
He never builds Bloomberg.
And this is going to echo what I think it was in the commencement address that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford, I think back in 2005, where he talked about the same things like getting fired from Apple the first time.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
He says something like sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick, but don't lose faith.
And so we're going to go to this part in Michael's life.
So there I was, 39 years old, and essentially hearing Here's $10 million in your history.
So Michael was working at Salomon Brothers.
This guy's famous.
I never know how to pronounce his last name.
John Gutfriend, maybe.
I'm just going to call him John throughout the book.
So John was the managing partner of Wall Street's hottest firm.
He told me my life at Salomon Brothers was finished.
It's time for you to leave.
I was terminated from the only full-time job I'd ever known and from the high-pressure life I loved.
This, after 15 years of 12-hour days and six-day weeks, I was out.
Now, what's remarkable is this came the next day after a giant celebration.
They had just sold the company, so they have a huge party.
They're all partners, so they have actual ownership.
So that's where the $10 million is going to come from.
And so he says, after the meeting, we ate greasy steaks and drank hard liquor.
We shot pool.
We smoked Cuban cigars.
We played poker and we laughed.
It was a great, big, wonderful fraternity party, boozing and carousing into the wee hours.
No thoughts of others.
A moment just for us.
We had worked for it.
And whether or not we deserved it, we got it.
So he's talking about?
Hey, I was in here for 15, for 15 years, working six days a week, 12 hours a day.
This is something that he preaches over and over again.
He's like, people are just not working hard enough.
This is what I mean about him just being unapologetically extreme.
Kind of reminds me of what we learned in Arnold Schwarzenegger's biography, where he talks about trying to hire other bodybuilders.
He was trying to be the world's best bodybuilder.
And he needed to make money, so he starts this company, this construction company.
And he called the other bodybuilders lazy bastards because they wouldn't want to work every day.
And he's like, I was in a huge rush to get rich.
There's like that kind of energy from this book for sure.
So it says the next day with enormous hangovers, each partner sat down with two members of the executive committee.
Most of the 63 partners were asked to stay on as employees of the new company.
Not me, though.
A half dozen other guys were pushed out at that time as well.
And so he talks about, was I sad on the drive?
This is really actually smart.
He doesn't really linger over regrets or mistakes.
So it says, was I sad on the drive home?
You bet.
But as usual, I was much too macho to show it.
And I did have $10 million as compensation for my hurt feelings.
If they had told me we have another job for you, I would have done it in a second.
I was willing.
This is so important.
I double underline the sentence.
I was willing to do anything that they wanted.
It was a great organization.
I would have been happy to stay.
And this is another important sentence.
I would have never left voluntarily.
Afterward, I didn't sit around wondering what was happening at the old firm.
I didn't go back and visit.
I never look over my shoulder.
Once finished, gone.
Life continues.
And then he makes the point, okay, it's 1981.
I got $10 million.
It's a good amount of money.
I don't ever have to work if I don't want to.
I could play it easy.
Obviously, right from the beginning, we see that's just not his personality type at all.
And he does something that was considered odd at the time.
He decides, I'm going to start my own company, my own startup.
And a lot of people were obsessed with the prestige of working for a large company.
You have this expense account.
Michael goes into detail.
He's all throughout his 20s and 30s.
He's able to travel the world.
Salomon Brothers is picking up the check.
He's working 12-hour days, but he's also partying constantly, entertaining clients.
This goes back to this reoccurring theme in the book that he's unapologetically extreme.
He's like, no, they tell you don't burn the candle at both ends.
He's like, I burn the candle at both ends.
He's like, I want my life to be as full as possible, so the way to do that is to do more.
But the point being is OK, I'm going to do this even though people around me my peer group think it's odd.
Like that takes a sense of courage.
And it's obvious the guy's got a gigantic ego and superhuman levels of self-belief.
I don't think you accomplish what he's accomplished without those two things.
And so he says I was never embarrassed to say that I'd been fired and was now running a small startup.
I'm tougher than many others are.
Perhaps it's a psychological defense mechanism that I convinced myself not to care what others thought.
But he makes the point, he's like, I don't care what other people think.
But he's married at this point.
And I think he's got two small kids, if I'm not mistaken.
But he's like, listen, what other people don't think about me, I don't care about that.
But I do care what my wife thinks.
And he says but I was worried that Sue might be ashamed of my new, less visible status and concerned I couldn't support the family.
So I want to pause there.
Think about this.
This is not the Bloomberg we see today, which he's what?
He's got to be close to 80 years old, right?
This is 39 year old version of Michael Bloomberg.
He's sitting around and before him is this Vastly uncertain future.
Right.
And he's other people are saying, look at this poor Mike.
He got fired.
He's now like he goes from Solomon Brothers, this prestigious headquarters that we have, to this tiny little hundred square foot office, which I get to in a minute.
And it's like, oh I, I'm worried that my wife might be ashamed of my new, less visible status and concerned I could, and concerned I couldn't support a family.
So 39-year-old Mike does not know what 80-year-old Mike does.
And that's the fact that this little startup that everybody's making fun of, that you're worried other people might be ashamed of, is going to produce tens of billions of dollars for you and your family.
I think that's an important point to think about.
So I'm going to go into his early life real quick.
And he just talks about, you know, like came from like a middle class.
My dad never made more than like $6,000 a year, but they taught him important things.
And he says, from my parents as a child, I learned hard work. intellectual curiosity and the ambition to strive relentlessly for the goals i set so that's something he repeats over and over again he's just got this inner drive this fire in the belly that just cannot be extinguished so he talks about you know i was bad and really not really paying paying too much attention to school i was totally bored in high school until my senior year when the school started two honors courses one in history and one in literature So this is really important.
The history teacher made current events come alive.
The instructor made history real and relevant, not just something to read and memorize.
And then the English teacher helped us analyze the world's great books instead of teaching spelling and grammar, which are two things I never did learn.
What a great idea.
The english teacher helped us analyze the world's great books instead of teaching spelling, grammar two things i that i never did learn.
Discussing the meaning of the story versus memorizing the plot made the difference fast.
It made it fascinating versus boring.
But classes both classes brought in my perspective the exposure to history and culture opened my eyes to a whole new world.
What a shame all the preceding time was partially wasted.
It was an early lesson for me how we as a society must find a better way to engage our children in the joys of learning.
I developed a sense of history and its legacy and remain.
And this is such an important point that I think you and I talk about over and over and over again.
The fact that we are dedicated studying and learning from history just gives us a massive advantage over the people that don't.
And most people don't.
They're just going to go on repeating mistakes that we that we can easily avoid.
I developed a sense of history in his legacy and remain amazed at how little people seem to learn from the past, how we fight the same battles over and over again.
So I want to skip over his college, his time at college.
I want to get right to when he goes to business school.
He goes to Harvard and he he, he starts to learn about OK, what actually affects achievement in the future.
And so he says, my two years at Harvard were well spent.
The academic standards there were superior, but not what I'd call outstanding.
There were some very bright students in my class.
Some classmates I thought were not exactly intellectually gifted and a few that I considered total frauds who could only talk a good game.
So he's talking about the way he viewed his peers at Harvard Business School and then what happens to these people that he categorized later in life.
Those of whom I thought were smart generally did well later in life.
Those whom I considered dummies did less well.
The bullshitters faded away.
And then so he's talking about, you know, time is the best filter, right?
It's like you can fake the funk for maybe a year, maybe two years, maybe five years, but not over the course of your entire career.
You're either talented and hardworking and driven or you're not.
And so he realized what's the most important elements.
He says, street smarts and common sense, it turned out, were better predictors of career achievements.
So at this point in his life, he's 24 years old.
He just graduated from business school.
And I think what he's experiencing here is very similar to a lot of people go through this.
You're just not sure what you want to do after college for a lot of people aren't.
And he says this and this is such a crazy statement thinking about what the future is in front of him again.
I really hadn't pondered where my life and work would take me.
What would I do with my life?
And it's his friend that actually makes the decision for him because he's like, I don't know.
I figure I'll go into maybe manufacturing or work in some kind of business.
You know, I just started.
I just graduated from business school.
Isn't that what I'm expected to do?
And his friend Steve is the one who's like, hey, why don't you go to Wall Street?
So he says, my good friend Steve told me to call the firm, told me to call Salmon Brothers and Goldman Sachs to say that I was desperate to be an institutional salesperson, our equity trader.
This is 1966.
This is happening.
Okay.
Who are they?
I asked.
And what would I be doing?
Don't worry about it.
Scott said, or excuse me, Steve said, just do it.
And then he says, not having any better ideas of my own.
I made the calls.
And then he goes into there's like three paragraphs here that I'm going to quote from.
This is very interesting.
So there's two main points I want to make to you.
Number one, it was a mistake for others to overlook these jobs.
And number two, what he's learning there is transferable to many other domains.
And so he says securities trading and sales at that time were considered second class occupations.
And he says that's a mistake.
Both involve getting your hands dirty by actually picking up the phone and talking to customers.
Forget the fact that almost all occupations have a big selling component.
Selling your firm, your ideas, and yourself.
And that is really what he talks about later.
He was like the master salesman at the beginning of his own company.
Overlook the fact that a good trading mentality is synonymous with the ability and discipline to compartmentalize, focus and compete for success.
In those days...
No self-respecting research analyst or banker ever thought of working the phones, of actually bringing in business.
Soliciting was viewed as undignified.
This is exactly what he's doing.
And so he's like, I didn't look at it like that.
For me, I had college loans to pay off.
A good job was a good job.
And as I would learn later on in life, it is the doers, the lean and hungry ones, those with ambition in their eyes and fire in their bellies, who go the furthest and achieve the most.
And this is wild.
This is his financial situation.
At the beginning of his career, he winds up getting a job offer and he's telling him he's like look, I can't afford to work here.
I want to work at Salomon, but I can't.
I want to.
I'd love it, but I don't own another suit or clothes.
I don't have an apartment to live in.
I have no cash in the bank.
All I've got are these outstanding student loans I took for tuition when my part-time campus job didn't pay enough.
And so I think they wanted to give him like $9,000 a year and they gave him $11,500.
And so he accepts the job.
And he says, to say that I fit into Salomon and love the industry is an understatement.
I reveled in it every minute of the day.
So I really thought about this.
Okay, so obviously he's one of the wealthiest men on the planet right now.
That's his financial situation at the very beginning of his career, though.
Like, I don't have any money.
I don't have an apartment.
Like, I can't take this job.
It pays not enough.
And really what I thought about is like this is just a temporary poor person who is smart and determined, who found a job that he loved and he was good at.
He's not going to stay broke for long.
It's impossible.
He's smart, determined, found a job he loved and was good at.
You're not staying broke for long.
And so this is the beginning of his 15 years there.
I really like his insights where he compares and contrasts the different leaders that he worked under.
And you can clearly tell. how he thinks about leadership.
I would say by far, Billy Salomon was the guy running the place when he when Michael started there.
This is the person and he's going to compare and contrast him with that other guy, John.
This is the person that to me seems more like the Bloomberg's personal philosophy on leadership, seems to be heavily influenced by his boss, Billy Salomon.
So it says, the boss when I joined was Billy, as he preferred to be called.
He made the culture special.
He was decisive and consistent as a leader.
So again, this is something you and I talked about over and over again.
You can tell a lot about people by who they admire.
So we're going to clearly see...
This is Bloomberg saying, what is this?
He's writing these words, you know, 50 years after this happened, maybe 40 years, whatever the time is.
Clearly, this guy had a heavy influence on him.
So he says he was decisive and consistent as a leader.
If he ever harbored doubts after making a decision, I never saw it.
He was easily approachable and willing to listen to everyone's views.
But when he said we were going left, we went left.
And when he said right, right it was.
We didn't have to prepare for both directions.
He set the rules.
So he's open to discussion.
He wants to hear your ideas.
But he's the he's the buck stops with him.
He's the one that's going to make the decisions.
If I say left, we're going left.
This is, again, very, very common in the history of entrepreneurship.
But also what he does here is like there's this is a really important paragraph.
There were no different set of rules for him.
Leading from the front is essentially what Michael is telling us.
Right.
He led by example.
What he said, he what he said he did.
And the rest of us did as well.
And so now he brings in the second person he worked for, John.
John was a great leader too.
This is also the guy that fires him later on.
John was a great leader too, but I always thought he listened to too many people.
So this is crazy.
Really, I would summarize this as more egalitarian but less effective is John.
Billy trusted his own judgment.
I'm open to ideas, but I'm going to make the decision and we know founders have to trust their own judgment.
You've got to work yourself into a position.
It's very clear where you can actually trust your own judgment, because you're the ultimate person making decisions.
No one can do it for you.
It made running the firm much more difficult for him.
Smart people prepared for both left and right when John succeeded Billy.
This event, this split resources and made it harder to lead when the when the going got tough.
Unlike Billy.
So now here comes the contrast.
And we can clearly see from like if you read between the lines of what Michael saying, like he's clearly saying this is a mistake.
I'm going to be the ultimate decision maker at Bloomberg.
Unlike Billy.
John consulted all interested parties before making a decision.
No matter how noble the motive, the resulting apparent indecisiveness.
Excuse me, that resulted in apparent indecisiveness.
Comparing John to Billy on leadership, I always thought John was more egalitarian but less effective.
And so Bloomberg is kind of starting at the bottom of this organization.
And we see that he's really too embarrassed to tell his peers, his fellow graduates of Harvard, truth.
And so he says i worked my first summer there in the cage physically counting securities by hand.
It was a pretty lowly start.
We slaved in our underwear in an un-air-conditioned bank vault with an occasional six pack of beer to make it more bearable.
When my friends asked what i was doing at work to save face, i told them I was studying methods and procedures to simplify the workflow.
My friends were research analysts and investment bankers with lush private offices.
And I was what I can only be called a clerk in his underwear, no less.
Why didn't I quit?
I was too embarrassed to quit.
So Mike's learning the value of sales.
He also is learning the value of the thrill that you feel when you're really good at your job.
And then this is going to be really interesting that I've seen a couple times.
I'll get to it in one second.
I felt a great thrill when I had closed the deal.
They would walk away without a word.
There weren't any congratulations.
They weren't needed.
I was expected to make big trades.
So a few months ago I read this book, The General and the Genius, which is about the Manhattan Project, which I, before I read the book, thought Robin Armenheimer was J Robert Oppenheimer was the lead on that project.
I didn't know he actually worked for General Leslie Groves.
Leslie Groves was the same way.
He's like, I'm not giving you congratulations on something you're supposed to do.
I've been listening to a few of these interviews with – I read this article, this post that was really interesting by Frank Slootman, which I guess he's –.
Run like three different technology companies.
I think he's like either turned around or taken public in the last like 10 years, something like that.
Maybe 20 years.
I forgot the exact time frame.
But he has this great post called Amp It Up.
Well, I guess that post has now been turned into like this short book.
And he's going on these all these podcasts to promote the book.
And he realizes – he said something I just – I jotted down.
He's a very extreme individual just like Bloomberg is, and this is what Slootman said.
I don't believe in offering congratulations for something we are supposed to be doing.
We are supposed to win.
And it's really interesting to read Frank's post or listen to him speak because –
That's what he says.
Like, listen, there's all this slack.
Most people are just.
It's really.
He's identifying the like.
You can get drastically different results with different energy that you apply at different businesses, different tasks that you have to do.
Even if you have the same employees and the same assets, it's just under different leadership.
You get vastly different results.
There's a good chance.
I'm going to read his book, because I think it's like 150 pages and maybe I'll do like a short little bonus episode on it.
Okay, so this was something that was really interesting because I was like, wait a minute.
Bloomberg, if you study his – his career yes, he's going to eventually take on in salomon brothers trying to like uh, like create the latest technology for that for them to do their jobs the best.
So, like the second half of his career, maybe this to the third of his uh towards the end of his career.
Salomon brothers is kind of, in my opinion, where he got the idea, um to to build bloomberg, his company.
But i was like, wait a minute, if you're 39 years old you just made 10 million dollars.
It's 1981.
Why build a business?
You were just selling bonds and equities like you're in Wall Street.
Surprisingly, he didn't choose to be an investor.
And so what I realized, I didn't understand that until I got to this paragraph.
And really, what Mike is telling us is the surest way to get rich is to build a business customers love, which is exactly what he.
That's the route he took, instead of just being an investor.
And so he says Wall Street promise promises vast riches, although few of the great fortunes have been made there.
Now he goes back into history 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.
So he's saying the surest way to get rich is to build a business customers love.
OK, so we're still at the point in his early career.
He's still at Salmon Brothers.
This is, again, more of he preaches this over and over again.
He's like, you're just not working enough.
You don't want it enough.
Like you're going to lose to people like me who have a high pain tolerance, who get up every day.
I'm excited to do what I do.
And I've been like this forever.
So he says, I came in every morning at 7 a.m., getting there before everyone else except Billy.
And what he's doing here.
David Geffen I read his biography The Operator, I think is what it's called.
I think it's Founders Number 110, 111, something there.
David Geffen uses this same idea to get ahead when he started in the mailroom.
I think he was in his early 20s.
And he figured out.
He's like I'm going to build I'm going to intentionally build a relationship with the head of the company.
Because I know if the person making all the decisions thinks I'm smart, I'm motivated, I'm willing to do whatever he needs done, I will accelerate faster than my other peers in the mailroom.
Bloomberg's doing the same thing here.
So he says, I came in, I got there.
The only person that beat me there was Billy.
When he needed to borrow a match or he wanted to talk sports, I was the only other person in the trading room.
So he talked to me.
At age 26, I became a buddy of the managing partner.
David Geffen did the exact same thing.
So Billy's coming in early, but then he's going home.
John's the one that's staying late.
So he says, okay, I'll stay later than everyone else except for John.
When he needed someone to make an after-hours call to the biggest clients or someone to listen to his complaints about those who'd already gone home.
I was that someone.
And then I'd get a free cab ride uptown with him, the number two guy in the company.
So in the morning, I'm building a relationship with number one guy.
And at night, I'm building a relationship with number two.
Where's the other 26-year-olds?
They're gone.
They're not here.
And so he says, making myself omnipresent wasn't exactly burdensome.
I loved what I was doing.
He repeats this over and over and over again in the book, the importance of loving what you do.
If you love it, you'll do it more.
The more you do something, the better you get.
So we've talked about that over and over again.
I love what I was doing.
Developing a close working relationship with those who ran the show probably didn't hurt my career.
I've never understood why everybody else doesn't do the same thing.
Make himself indispensable on the job.
That was exactly what I did.
And then this might be my favorite part of the book.
This part is amazing.
It's going to go on for a little bit.
It's on the importance of showing up, working hard, staying flexible and loving what you do.
If you were able to see the book that i have in my hand, i would say 70, no 85 of my highlights come from the beginning of the book towards the end.
It's like i'm really rich and i give up, like it's cool that that you donate 750 million here and A billion to that.
That's amazing.
I'm interested in the climb, the early, who you were before.
Who was the version of you that made that wealth that's going to happen a few decades in the future possible?
Because that's where I think most of us are.
We're in the beginning, the climb, the middle, whatever it is.
And so for Michael to be able to sit down and say hey, this is what the things I was thinking about at this time, this is my approach.
This is what I learned in 50 I think he uses the word later on 50 years of toiling.
The fact that these books are widely available, you can pick up for $15 or $20, that's insane.
There is not a better investment on the planet.
So it says, it is said that 80% of life is just showing up.
I believe that.
You can never have complete mastery over your existence.
You can't choose the advantage to start out with and you certainly can't pick your genetic intelligence level, but you can control how hard you work.
I'm sure someone someplace is smart enough to succeed, while keeping it in perspective and not working too hard, but I've never met them.
The more you work, the better you do.
It's that simple.
I've always outworked the other person.
Still, I had a life.
I don't remember being so driven or focused that my job got in the way of playing in the evenings and on weekends.
I dated a lot, I skied, I jogged, and I hit the town more than most.
The more you try to do, the more life you'll have.
Although I was serious about my career, this is when he gets into the point of like, don't, and again, something's over and over again, don't have these rigid plans.
The history of entrepreneurship is clear on this.
The best entrepreneurs that have ever lived.
The best investors I've ever lived.
They optimize for flexibility.
They adapt to the circumstances.
Although I'm talking about people like Herb Keller, Henry Singleton, Warren Buffett.
Now we have Michael Bloomberg in this mix.
Although I was serious about my career, I had never had a budget for my future.
Unlike so many of my classmates, I didn't set out to be a partner or vice president by age 30, or a trillionaire at 35.
Make a comprehensive scheme for the rest of my life?
Both at business and at home, I've never let planning get in the way of doing.
This is such a fantastic paragraph here.
Life, I found, works the following way.
Daily, you're presented with many small and surprising opportunities.
Sometimes you seize one that takes you to the top.
Most, though, if valuable at all, take you only a little way.
To succeed, you must string together many small incremental advances rather than count on hitting the lottery jackpot all at once.
Trusting to get great luck is a strategy not likely to work for most people.
As a practical matter, constantly enhance your skills.
Put in as many hours as possible and make tactical plans for the next steps.
Then based on what actually occurs, look one more move ahead and adjust your plan.
Take lots of chances and make lots of individual spur of the moment decisions.
I'm going to repeat that because I think he's summarizing.
That's his punchline here.
Take lots of chances and make lots of individual spur of the moment decisions.
Don't devise a five-year plan.
Central planning didn't work for Stalin or Mao, and it doesn't work for entrepreneurs either.
Damn, that's good.
And then he's going to go back into the fact that these are just small little steps.
Every significant advance I or my company has ever made has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Small earned steps, not big lucky hits.
Something that he did that vastly increases his odds of success is that he didn't quit.
He founded the company in 1981.
40 years later, that company is still operating.
It's not just money.
He understands just like Warren Buffett does.
It's not just money that compounds.
Knowledge and skills do too.
Stop quitting.
I stay flexible.
A reporter once asked me what we at Bloomberg had failed at.
My answer after some thought was nothing.
But what we accomplished wasn't always what we set out to do.
This is not as arrogant.
He actually said the very beginning of this all right guy like, come on, what are you talking about?
But his explanation makes sense, so let me read that to you before you.
You're like this guy's a whatever expletive you want to put in there.
Often in the process, things worked that we hadn't planned on.
Unforeseen uses arose for our products.
Customers appear appeared whom we hadn't known existed, And exactly the reverse occurred for those that we were dead sure of.
So planning has its place.
The actual thought process sometimes leads to great new ideas, but you can only accomplish what's possible when you get there.
Then whatever your idea is, you've got to do more of it than anyone else.
So this is defining.
Let's use Naval's.
I think Naval's way to describe this idea is the best, the most succinct.
That means find work that feels like play.
So he says whatever your idea is, do it more than anyone else.
A task that's easier if you structure things so that you like doing them.
Since doing more almost always leads to greater accomplishments, in turn you'll have more fun.
And then you'll want to do even more because of the rewards.
And so on.
So he's talking about this virtuous flywheel effect, right?
And so on.
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.
Now he's talking about the negative flywheel.
If you don't love what you do, that's actually really smart.
So let me go back to the beginning.
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.
Okay, so that's the end of that section.
I absolutely loved that.
I mean that took place on over three pages and I had a ton of highlights just from those three pages.
I really like the advice he's giving here.
Now he's got some advice for young people, which I thought was really smart, too.
Some young people starting their careers today are too impatient for current compensation at the expense of continuing their education and giving their jobs a chance.
Get back to work.
Forget the money today.
There's plenty of time for that later.
Novices should go to the best firm they can get into and then listen and learn.
So what is he saying there?
He's saying optimize for learning over money and you'll make more money in the future if you do that right.
This is very similar to what Steve Jobs told us, what he did in his early career.
There's a quote from him.
I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with.
So Michael Bloomberg is saying, do the same thing.
Go find the smart people and go listen and learn.
And in some cases you can't, maybe you don't have opportunity.
I would say for the vast majority of people, You're not going to be able to do this in person, right?
You don't maybe have the skills or the resume or whatever to get hired to be around these people.
So maybe you've got to find a different path to do so.
But one opportunity that's available to everybody is to pick up the biographies and autobiographies of these people that had remarkable lives and were able to accomplish things more in one lifetime than most people will in 100 lifetimes.
Right so, and again, this is a very similar to.
I talked about this before.
I'm not.
I'm not going to go into detail because I got a ton of highlights in this book, but the kernel of the idea that spawned me to serve founders was this interview I saw Elon Musk do with Kevin Rose on Kevin Rose's video podcast series foundation, I think back in 2012, and he said the same thing.
He's like I didn't have, you know, mentors.
I didn't have resources when I came from to California, and So I sought out mentors in historical context.
And he says, I read biographies and autobiographies.
And so when I pick up the bio... He was using the example of Benjamin Franklin.
So I pick up the biography and I study what Franklin went through.
And now he becomes...
To use Charlie Munger's word, I become friends with the eminent dead.
Elon says, I now have a mentor in historical context.
Ben Franklin's been dead for 200 years by the time I pick up his book, but he's still teaching me things.
So I think that's the same exact idea that he just put here.
He said, listen, forget the money today.
There's plenty of time for that later.
Novices should go to the best firm they can get into and then listen and learn.
When you read a book, you're having a one-sided conversation with somebody.
You can't do anything but listen.
A few pages later, just one sentence again demonstrates this theme I want to make sure I bring to attention.
Bloomberg is unapologetically extreme.
I would be tougher than the rest.
And so he says that over and over again.
I will be tougher.
I'll outwork them.
I'll be more competitive.
I won't give up.
I have an advantage.
He just told us 80% of life is just showing up.
He's making sure that he's building the strength both really mentally to not give up.
Eventually, he's going to switch jobs at Salomon Brothers.
And this is really, in my opinion, he doesn't say so explicitly.
I don't think he does, at least.
It gave him the idea to start his own company in the future.
He says, I started what would be my last job at Salomon running information systems.
This group was responsible for both keeping the firm's books and providing the analytical tools the traders and salespeople needed.
That's exactly what I think how he described what his company does today.
We provide analytical tools that traders and salespeople need.
He does make an interesting point here that all your previous life experiences are just preparing for an opportunity that you can't yet see.
So he says, listen, I spent my first 24 years getting ready for Wall Street.
Then I spent 15 years surviving on Wall Street.
And then at 39, all these experiences led me to the decision that okay, I'm going to start my own company.
And again, I feel like there's 17 notes in this book where I write down unapologetically extreme.
Listen to what he says here.
This is wild.
So he's talking about, listen, I could be in...
I could have went to Goldman Sachs, got another job.
I could be an investor, whatever.
He's like, no, I'm going to choose to be an entrepreneur rather than employee.
OK, and so this is crazy.
Did I want to risk an embarrassing and costly failure?
Absolutely.
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.
I want action.
I want challenge.
Even today, after toiling for 50 years, I wake up looking forward to getting in early practicing my profession.
I really appreciate he used the word practice there.
Creating something and competing against the best.
It is a real high to be a participant today. rather than a spectator.
Think about that.
Did I want to risk an embarrassing and costly failure?
Absolutely I did.
And so when he's figuring out okay, what I want my company to be, a good question to ask yourself is what do I do better than anyone else?
And so he says, I would start a company that would help financial organizations.
There were better traders than salespeople.
There were better managers and computer experts.
But nobody had more knowledge of the securities and investment industries and of how technology could help them.
He is telling you, before you start a company, ask yourself, what do I do better than anyone else?
Another main theme that he would tell you if you could sit down and talk to Bloomberg, which is what you're doing when you read his autobiography.
Stop with the overanalyzing, stop with your stupid projections, just go.
Take one step forward.
And why is he telling you that?
Because learning by doing is a faster process.
One of my favorite entrepreneurs I've ever discovered through this podcast Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia.
He's got this amazing book called Let My People Go Surfing.
And he says in that book, the entrepreneurial way is to immediately take a forward step.
And if that feels good.
Take another.
If not, step back.
Learn by doing.
It's a faster process.
This is now Bloomberg.
If you're going to succeed, you need a vision, one that's affordable, practical and fills the customer need.
Then go for it.
Don't worry too much about the details.
Don't second-guess your creativity.
Avoid overanalyzing your new project's potential.
And that's really important.
Think about all the waste of time and energy when he's first building his company.
There's no way you can sit there and predict.
Can sit there and predict at the very beginning like, think about steve jobs in his garage making the first 50 apple computers.
He's not gonna.
One day there's gonna be a two trillion dollar company.
Same thing like bloomberg had a lot of confidence, but when he's in a hundred square foot office with four people in a coffee pot he's not gonna be like oh, i'm gonna have 60 billion dollars in a couple decades.
Just you wait and see.
So I think that's just really good advice.
Stop second guessing.
Just go.
At Bloomberg, he's got more advice.
If you're working on product, he's like listen, you should work on your product and sales first and then everything else after.
At Bloomberg, we always built the product first.
Selling is the only process we run simultaneously with development from the very start.
And then this is just what a paragraph.
I rented a one room temporary office.
It was about 100 square feet of space with a view of an alley.
A far cry from my previous place of employment.
Salomon had a multi-acre 41st floor trading room overlooking the New York Harbor.
I deposited $300,000 of my Salomon Brothers windfall into a corporate checking account.
15 years later, I had a billion dollar business.
And I don't know if I mention it later, but just in case I don't.
Again, think about the confidence and the borderline arrogance this guy has.
And it wound up working out for him.
But he's got $10 million.
He winds up putting $4 million.
So 40 of everything he's got into the company, which also helps him retain so much ownership to this day.
And he's doing that when he's got a wife and two little kids to support as well.
To spread out the risk, he's going to find his first customer, which is going to be Merrill Lynch.
They're going to make an investment as well a little later on.
The one he referenced earlier, where they bought like 30 of the company and then he buys them out.
Two separate parts later on.
But I want to get to this point.
They agreed.
He essentially has an idea for a product, but it's not built.
So it's him, a bunch of programmers salespeople, and this is the thing that you and I talk about all the time.
Running a company, running a startup, I think is the actual term Mark Andreessen uses for the quote.
It's like when you're running a startup, you only experience two things uh motions, euphoria and terror.
And then he says i find a lack of sleep enhances both and so he's gonna uh to alter between states of euphoria and states of terror.
When i came back from the meeting, my colleagues were elated until the reality of a six-month delivery for something that didn't exist began to set in, as developers were magicians, not miracle workers.
Month after month, as we worked, our mood alternated between inhalation and the feeling of impending disaster.
We weren't just putting out fires.
We were adjusting to major earthquakes when some new software bug forced us to start over.
But every day we got closer to building the machine we'd promised.
And he's also building hardware at this time, which he mentioned earlier.
He's like, okay, well, my advantage is not in hardware.
I did that because I was trying to create – the device I wanted to create didn't exist.
Once the hardware manufacturers –
It exceeded my talent.
It doesn't make any sense.
If there's PCs everywhere, let me use that platform and realize.
This is what he's referencing about, what my business actually is, what Kodak failed to realize.
Bloomberg understood what his business was.
It's the information that I'm giving you that's valuable.
It doesn't matter how I transmit that information to you.
It's also probably my main takeaway for myself for the book, because he talks about repurposing your information later on.
Remember, I didn't know why, like before I read the book, why the hell does he have a news service?
Why does he have all these other things?
Everything he does goes back to selling subscriptions to Bloomberg.
It's freaking genius.
We'll get there in a minute.
So he says, a month after more, I just read that part.
We weren't just putting out fires.
We were adjusting to major earthquakes when some new software bug forced us to start over.
But every day we got closer to building the machine we promised.
Our style then was pretty, and this is a good idea on problem solving right here.
Our style then was pretty much the same as today.
We took the problem and broke it down into little, manageable, digestible pieces.
Then each of us took responsibility for the ones, for the part that we were best suited to do.
So just a few lines for you here.
This reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt.
He is fantastic.
I like the idea of a life motto, a family motto.
This has come over a couple times with Stan Lee, the guy that created Marvel, Marvel Comics.
His motto was excelsior, which means ever upward.
Ernest Shackleton, one of the greatest polar explorers who ever lived.
He's actually my.
I've told you this before, but my lock screen on my phone is just a picture of him with like snow in his beard.
Just looks like hell, and because when i look at him it's reminding me of his motto, which was by endurance we conquer.
So i see that like, all right, he didn't give up, he was going to freeze to death.
You can keep going david, stop it.
And then the um, then the one that what bloomberg's about to say here is theodore roosevelt.
He took the, the family motto, from his father, which is get action, and so he says we act from day one.
Others plan how to plan for months.
Something Bloomberg is going to repeat to you over and over again.
He's like, you're sitting there planning.
I'm already out running.
So you think you're going to catch up?
Good luck.
Then he talks about still in the early days of product development.
This is more about the terror.
I must admit I was worried.
And why was he worried?
We were spending what would grow to be $4 million of my $10 million Salomon Brothers windfall.
Simultaneously, I was becoming responsible for the families of almost two dozen company employees.
I convinced these people to follow me.
And if the venture had not succeeded, I would have failed them, their spouses and their children, as well as our customers.
And then the sentence you'd not expect to see after he just said that.
We plowed ahead.
From the beginning, I was convinced we were doing something nobody else could do, nor was anyone else trying.
Those are two wild sentences.
And really what he's telling us is, hey, you've got to differentiate your product.
That's where all the profits are in.
It's an idea that's been spread throughout startup culture.
Peter Thiel's book Zero to One.
He says listen, you want to create and capture lasting value, then you don't build an undifferentiated commodity business.
And so what is Michael telling us?
From the beginning, I was convinced we were doing something nobody else could do, nor was anyone else trying.
So one of my favorite, or I would say most unique ideas I've ever come across was in the founder of Sony, his autobiography Akio Morito.
I think his founder is 102.
And they're producing audio equipment in the early days of Sony, well before.
Like, they're not successful.
They have no money.
And they find a music student who loves their product and kept sending them hey like like basically, critiques on what you could do, like how he thinks he could uh, they could be improved.
He had like a very like uh, advanced ear, like good hearing, as a music student probably has to have right, and so akio kept getting these these um, these suggestions from him.
He's like hey, you want a job, and so he winds up hiring him.
Literally all his job is critique our products.
So then when you do that, you're helping them get better.
And then like a decade or two later, that guy winds up being the president of Sony.
It's one of the most remarkable things I've ever read in any of these books.
And we're going to see a similar situation, kind of like the same idea here.
Merrill's not only their customer, but they're giving Bloomberg an investment.
And so they put on two traders.
Because the traders are the ones that are using the product.
And he says, well, when we first installed it, Merrill assigned two traders to work with us.
I thought they'd be real pains and they would second guess us every step of the way.
Was I wrong?
It turned out both of them were as responsible for our success as anyone.
And why is that?
Because they were nitpickers, but not in a nasty way.
They wanted us to succeed.
When they said something didn't work, they could show us it didn't work.
So we knew for sure it didn't work.
And, more important, they would help fix the problem because they would tell us under what specific circumstances it didn't work.
Every day our system got better as we fixed each problem they pointed out.
I'd always rather have a smart, fair, honest, demanding client than a nasty dummy.
So he says for our first and this is really just a reminder that at the beginning you're going to be doing everything yourself.
For the first three or four years in business, I did all of these functions.
I worked full-time selling our services.
I negotiated all of our contracts.
I was running the company.
Never before or since did I have as much fun or as challenging a time in business.
Back when we started, the original half dozen of us, after finishing our regular jobs, would go into clients' offices on the weekends.
We'd have to climb under the desks where we had to lay our cables.
We dragged wires, stuffing cables through holes that we drilled in other people's furniture, all without permission, without giving any thought to any fire law or building code.
It's amazing we didn't burn down some office or electrocute ourselves.
At the end of the day, at 10 or 11 o'clock at night, we'd turn it on and watch what we created come alive.
It was so satisfying.
We improvised everything as we went along.
I used to write all the checks myself.
I signed every contract.
I paid every bill.
I did all the hiring and firing.
I bought the coffee, the soda, the chips.
I emptied the wastebaskets.
I dusted the windowsills.
I wrote and handed out every paycheck personally.
Those were the best days.
The very first few years in the early 1980s.
We were involved in running every aspect of the company.
As we grew and turned these functions over to newly highly specialist, I felt like I was losing a child to adolescence.
Good for the kid, but painful for the parent.
In addition to selling customers, he also sold recruits.
He wanted the best, the most talented.
He wanted to work with the smartest people.
He really understood.
Bloomberg understood like Estee Lauder before him. that everything has to be sold all the time.
I'm pretty sure that's a direct quote from Estee Lauder.
Everything has to be sold all the time.
And so this is a pitch.
I'm just going to give you an example of a pitch that he would give to prospective customers or, excuse me, prospective employees about why they'd want to work there.
We've got the best people in the world working here.
All of them think they walk on water.
All of them are workaholics.
Once they come, they stay for the rest of their lives because they love it.
They've built the better mousetrap.
They're doing something important.
They're giving the little guy the information he needs to fight.
Okay, so now we're going to get into what I think might be his most applicable idea for us in the age that we happen to live in.
Because we're talking about what is in the Almanac of Naval, put together by Eric Jorgensen.
It documents Naval Robicon's wisdom.
It's in, I think, Founders...
I'll leave in the show notes, but you can find an archive.
I'll tell you the number.
But it's about he says something in the book.
It's like it's not white collar versus blue collar.
It's it's unleveraged versus leverage.
And so how the hell does Michael Bloomberg get himself into a position where he is like he gets his leverage through media?
I guess that's what I'm trying to tell you here.
And there's many ways for us to do the same thing today.
We don't have to go down the route he did.
And again, I think these ideas scale up and down.
It could be like a one-person business up into a giant company like Bloomberg.
It still works.
And so he's having a conversation with a reporter.
And again remember Michael's goal I'm going to make money by selling.
I think the subscription is like 22000 a year.
Because his sales pitch is interesting.
It's in the book.
He's like, listen, people say, oh, Bloomberg's terminal is too expensive.
It's $22,000 a year.
He's like, that's $88.
Hopefully I'm remembering the numbers correctly.
I don't have them in front of me.
But he's like, he says something like, that's $88 a day.
If you can't make more than 88 a day with the information I'm giving you, then you have bigger problems.
And I think that's just a really interesting way, because 22000 a year, it's the same number, right.
$22,000 a year sounds a lot to me.
$88 a day sounds less, even though it's the same.
It's like this weird hack of our brain, right?
So really I'm going to read this conversation he's having with this reporter.
That gives him an idea that helps greatly expand his business.
This is why I'm telling you all this.
And really the note I left myself is your company has information no one else has.
How can you repurpose it to benefit other people and achieve your objective?
And so let's go to this conversation he's having in the early days of his company.
I want to make our terminal indispensable to stock as well as bond traders.
Should we get into the text news business?
His answer this other reporter who's eventually going to be hired to run this part and, I think, might still work there, if I'm not mistaken.
His answer wasn't what I expected, although it encouraged me to keep the conversation going.
Mike, he said, remember this is a financial reporter talking to Mike, okay?
I think he might have been from the Wall Street Journal.
I can't remember, unfortunately.
Mikey said, you and the people you work with have created a terminal that explains more about why bonds fluctuate each minute, day and week than any collection of reporters ever could.
You already provide charts and graphs that influence the major debt trading decisions worldwide.
If you add text to that information, you'll have something that doesn't exist anywhere else.
No one in debt or equity would be able to live without it.
And so if you stop and think about what he's saying, he's like Mike you have information no one else has.
You just happen to present it in picture form, in graph form.
Why don't you just hire a bunch of people to then add text written narrative explanation about what's going on?
That is useful information.
Useful information is known as news.
Put that news out.
Say this news comes from Bloomberg.
People read it for free.
They're like, what the hell is Bloomberg?
Let me look into it.
A percentage of the people that discover your – you can have 99 of the people that don't ever pay you a dollar, and that could still be a profitable line for you.
When I read Sid Meier's book, that's the guy that wrote – he wrote a computer game or made a computer game called Civilization that winds up selling like 53 million copies.
It was amazing.
I love his book.
I think it teaches you a lot about building like a modern like.
If you want to build like a highly leveraged business, how do you do so?
Game gaming being a successful game being a great example of that.
But in that book he's like listen, 70 of the users of Candy Crush don't pay, have never paid a dollar.
Yet that game still brings in millions of dollars every day.
So that idea that Sid picked up on is very similar to what this guy – I can't remember his name.
Mike?
No.
No, he's talking to Bloomberg.
I don't know what this guy's name.
Matt.
Sorry, his name is Matt.
But Matt is telling him, you already have this information.
Make it easily publicly available.
Share the information that you have with other people.
They'll know about you, and then you can offer those same people what you want them to buy.
And even if millions – I think tens of millions of people is like the reach of Bloomberg today –
But yet they have like, I can't remember, I want to say it's like 300,000 subscribers.
So again, millions of people are familiar with the name.
I was familiar with the name, never subscribed to the Terminal.
Millions of people will read the analysis and the information that your company produces, and a tiny, tiny percentage of them will actually give you money for your other product.
And that is going to allow you to have this giant leveraged media business that is just funneling in subscription customers.
And so this idea.
I'm going to spend some time here, because this goes over many, many pages that I'm about to read to you.
This is all separate, but I feel this is a very powerful idea.
I want to point out before I get into this idea to expand on that with you.
This is what he does.
So it takes some convincing.
Matt's like, yeah, you should do this, of course.
And Bloomberg's not sure.
So what does he do?
He consults history when trying to decide if she should enter the news business.
And so again, this guy has, it's rather impressive that he's able to know all this stuff.
I mean, he's been alive for a long time.
And it doesn't sound like he's a guy that's ever going to stop learning.
But listen to what he does.
He goes, history shows that any gutsy entrepreneur can enter the news business anytime.
And he lists off all these people he studied.
Joseph Pulitzer, you know I did a podcast on him.
William Randolph Hearst, did a podcast on him.
Henry Luce, don't know who that is.
B.C.
Forbes, Ted Turner, Ruber Murdoch, and Oprah Winfrey.
So he just gave me a bunch of ideas for different people to pursue biographies of.
So he just lists off, what is that, like seven, eight people.
I'm like, well, they did it.
Why can't I?
So then he talks about, oh, this is the advantage.
Okay, so I need to pause and tell you what I wrote before I read this to you.
The question to ask yourself, what advantage do you have that existing companies in your space lack?
There's a million other media companies.
Why does Bloomberg think you can do it?
One, history shows that if you're a gutsy entrepreneur, you can pull this off.
But two, I don't have to worry about it turning a profit.
This has been run over and over again by different companies to introduce different product lines that don't need immediate profits.
Best of all, we had revenue from terminal rentals, which meant we didn't have to worry about a new service paying for itself as a standalone product.
This is one heck of advantage, he says.
Fundamentally, at Bloomberg, we're builders, not buyers.
So it never occurred to me to acquire a news organization as a starting point.
It's always more fun to create from scratch, and it's a lot less risky.
So that's another thing he repeats over and over again.
He's very anti-acquisition, even though there are a couple examples that he buys.
Was it business week?
He buys one of them.
They're almost close to bankruptcy.
So he does point out, when he does the few times that he's done acquisitions, at least when the book was published, he points out why he did that.
But in general, he repeats over and over again.
He's like, just build it yourself.
It's more fun.
It's less risky.
And you can do it exactly how you want to do it from the very beginning.
Okay, so now he's full on on this idea.
This is going to be this gigantic customer acquisition strategy form.
I'm going to read this to you.
Really the note I left myself.
So when I go back and reference these ideas in the future, I need to understand, instead of reading this whole page, what is the compressed idea here.
Each news story is a product demo.
More demos lead to more revenue.
More revenue leads to more stories and then even more revenue.
This is why I meant like this is really my favorite idea in the book.
I handed him a three page list of what Bloomberg News should be doing.
Our purpose was to do more than just collect and relay news.
It should also advertise the analytical and computational powers of the Bloomberg terminal by highlighting its capabilities in each news story.
Each news story is a product demo.
This is wild.
With our terminal functions included, each of our news stories would be more informative than the competitions and more people would want access to them, which meant more revenue, which in turn meant we could afford more reporters and have more news, and so on, and so on.
Each news story is a product demo.
More demos lead to more revenue, more revenue leads to more stories, and then even more revenue.
And then he just gives us a simple formula.
As an entrepreneur, I've learned to know what I don't know, to get access to the people who do know, and then study hard.
And then he goes back to this idea of knowing what is the purpose of your business.
What is the actual product or service that you provide your customers?
So I referenced this earlier.
Let's go over it again.
When we first began, we manufactured computers and keyboards because we had to.
Personal computers didn't really exist in order to deliver our product.
So we made them because that's how we delivered our product.
But we never made the mistake of believing that we were in the hardware business.
We are in the business of producing and distributing the world's most accurate reliable, comprehensive information and analysis.
That has been our mission from day one, and it has never changed.
Technology will continuously revolutionize distribution.
But our product is content.
And much of that content sits behind the media world's most expensive paywall.
And so that's where he says it's $22,000 that works out to $88 a day.
So now he's going to give us advice on how do you make your product or your company stand out.
And his advice is you've got to be you.
You know more about your business than anyone else.
You think about it more.
You care about it more.
You're in the best position then, if those facts are accurate, to tell other people why it's valuable.
And you don't have to be this polished speaker.
Charisma definitely helps.
There is some kind of weird...
Like, you know, hypnotic effect that charisma has on on people.
We see that throughout history.
Right.
Good and bad people.
But you just tell them why people want to know why.
Like, why did you make it?
Why is it valuable?
What does it do?
And so he says entrepreneurs in the booming 1980s were commonplace.
My company was small and virtually anonymous.
Our product. which was the terminal that was called the Market Master.
It could have been confused with a kitchen appliance with that name.
No one knew us.
No one cared about me.
But by 1984, this was about to change.
Those were the days when Ronald Reagan proved how marketable ideas could be when they were peddled with charisma.
You needed a spokesperson for mass appeal.
Consumers and the media identified products and policies with people who pitched them.
So again, as an example, Nike didn't just make sneakers.
It pushed them with a mystique that could only come from Michael Jordan.
To have the best mousetrap wasn't enough.
Success was delivered by people promotion.
If we were going to build our business, we too needed a personality.
The obvious choice was me.
Our competitors' founders were all dead.
I, on the other hand, was alive and out, making speeches and sales calls every day, turning my name and work into a great weapon that others in the financial news and market data businesses could not match.
And since I spent so much time demonstrating our product, people had begun to mentally interchange me with the terminal.
So that's why he changes it from Market Master Terminal to the Bloomberg Terminal.
And then the company also had a different name.
It was some basic name like Innovative Market Solutions or something like that.
So he's like, well, that doesn't make sense.
We'll just call it Bloomberg, too.
And then he says one of the funniest lines or one of the most unexpected lines in the entire book.
I would become the Colonel Sanders of Financial Information Services.
As the owner, by definition, I spoke with authority.
And to make good copy, I gave the press a colorful personality to focus on.
So we talked about starting.
The news started with print and then he's like I don't care about the medium.
He produced a magazine.
A magazine might take an hour to read.
I will give you 30-second news audio, like radio clips, 30-second news clips on the radio.
Pardon me.
I'll do that.
I will write articles that take five minutes to read.
I will get into TV.
I will do anything and really...
What I'm trying to explain to you is he's got a lot of these roundabout ways to get in front of potential customers and everything that has to do with the fact that he's repurposing the information that his unique business collects.
So he talks about this here.
He's like, people often ask me, why did Bloomberg get into radio and TV?
Why does he want that?
More people know whose company he is.
They're going to buy his product.
Really, I'm telling you this because...
This is how you did it in his time, right?
You had to maybe start your own TV network.
He winds up buying a radio station.
He does some crazy stuff, right?
But we have a lot more access and easier ways to run the same playbook today.
We don't have to buy a radio station.
You can start a podcast.
It's the same thing, right?
You don't have to buy a TV station.
You can start a YouTube channel.
You can start making vertical video on TikTok or anywhere else, right?
It's the same exact thing.
It's the same idea.
It's just like he just warned us early in the book.
It's like technology is always going to revolutionize distribution.
Just ride those waves.
Just stick to your core thing.
And so he says, we have the necessary information.
Radio and television provide our company with instant visibility.
The media like nothing better than writing about themselves.
The more exposure Bloomberg had to the media... the more they promoted us to the general public.
So really the way I think about that is there's roundabout ways for you to get in front of potential customers.
Just think about it.
Clear your schedule.
Spend half a day just thinking where are these things that I could be doing and I'm not currently doing?
Just some more like specific ideas for you.
This is a great way to how to pick the person.
So your company's launching a new project, okay?
Who are you gonna put in charge of it?
This is what Bloomberg, how he made that decision.
I've always believed in markets rather than the central planner's ability to make efficient selections.
In many of our new ventures, we don't appoint a manager at the beginning.
We simply throw everyone interested into the deep end of the pool and then stand back.
It becomes obvious very quickly who the best swimmers are.
We just watch who people go to for help and advice.
And later when we formalize a management appointment, No one is ever surprised.
That's really smart.
The leverage we gain from employing creative people and letting them do their own thing is incredible.
I've now skipped ahead a couple pages.
We're back at that same idea.
Everything they do increases the likelihood of selling Bloomberg subscriptions.
So I'm just going to pull out one sentence out of this whole thing.
It goes in more detail but it says TV stories relate to magazine articles that relate to computer data.
So every piece of media that we're producing comes from the data that we happen to have, the computer data that we have, that very few people, if anybody else in the world has.
And I'm going to repurpose that data.
I'm going to put it in a TV story and have a narrative around that.
I'm going to write a magazine article.
I'm going to give you 30 seconds on the radio.
I'm going to give you 1,500 words on Bloomberg.com or in a newspaper.
And every time you're listening to a little radio, you're watching TV, you're reading an article.
It's just a demo of what my product is capable of.
Oh, you read that article.
That was very interesting information.
You didn't know that.
Where'd the information come from?
This information is helpful to my business.
Let me go look up this.
Oh, Bloomberg Terminal.
A few pages later, he hits this again.
And this is why I say you should read the whole book.
So he's like, listen, our business is information.
It's not the information that... excuse me, not the medium that that information is delivered.
That's really what he's about to tell us.
Why use all media forms rather than focus on just one?
What business are we in?
Again he's asking you to.
I love the fact that he's constantly telling you just ask yourself these questions.
If you pause for a minute, ask yourself some of these questions.
The answers are valuable.
They're going to crystallize your thinking and make sure that you're actually headed in the right direction of what you want to do.
So he said, what business are we in?
Some companies declare themselves to be in radio or in television or in newspapers and so on.
We have a greater vision.
Bloomberg is in the business of giving its customers the information they need, in whatever form is the most appropriate.
With all methods at our disposal, we do better.
We create or adopt a new medium.
We don't ask our customers to accept less.
They're writing down trading slips and keeping track of stuff literally by pen and paper and notebooks.
And so he's like, this is ridiculous.
We should automate it.
He starts working on that when automation is, you know, kind of like a science fiction.
This is the 1960s.
I think maybe the very beginning of 1970s when he's doing this.
But I want to pull out one paragraph for you here, because I think this is really important and it's what you and I are both doing right now.
You've got to spend as much time learning as possible, because you never know what opportunities that knowledge will open up in the future.
He is talking about the education he gets in the 1960s and 70s.
That will make him billions of dollars three decades in the future.
But it would not have made him that money if he didn't have that experience.
So it says, my education in the 1960s.
And then he talks about something you and I talk about over and over again.
History does not repeat.
Human nature does.
Human nature is constant.
It's not changing.
My education in the 1960s and 1970s era of horse and buggy computer systems formed the basis of what I did more than a decade later, when I bought the Bloomberg terminal to financial desks worldwide.
What I discovered then about data management, about people management, still serves me well today.
People have a need for information and once confronted with it, They can exhibit bravery jealousy, adventurousness and fear of the new.
No matter what systems we create in the next decades, these two statements will remain true.
So there's a lot more detail.
Some of it was confusing to me, because he's talking about essentially what they built.
When he's automating these systems at Salomon Brothers before Bloomberg.
He goes through a lot of detail like what it meant.
So I just need to give you the punchline, and I'm going to tell you why.
This is an idea that's been in existence for at least 129 years.
So it says Solomon needed an edge, and that's exactly what having the only useful data retrieval and analytical tool in the industry gave them in the 1970s.
This is what he was in charge of.
With the closed proprietary system we built, Solomon got for a period what no one else had.
Solomon jumped way ahead and stayed that way for a decade.
In a sense, for 10 years, when Solomon went to a knife fight, it carried a gun.
And so Andrew Carnegie founded Carnegie, his steel company, 129 years ago.
And he used this idea.
He talks about it in his autobiography.
You can go back in the archive.
I did a three-part series on him and Henry Cully Frick that's worth listening to.
Those books are worth reading.
Because what Andrew Carnegie realized is an idea that I've seen used by almost every founder after the fact.
That came in the last 129 years.
And so Andrew Carnegie, even though when he was younger, the older people in the industry chastised him, criticized him for doing this.
So the way I summarize Andrew Carnegie's idea is that you need to always invest in the latest technology for your business.
This is why.
The savings compound...
It gives you an edge over your slower-moving competitors and can be the difference between a profit and a loss.
And so think about what he just said.
For a decade, Solomon had a tool, a technology no one else did.
So they're showing up to a fight.
You got a knife.
I got a gun.
That's the second part of Carnegie's thing.
It gives you an advantage over slower-moving competitors.
It's the same idea.
Something that Bloomberg is going to preach to you about management is find the very smartest people that you can.
Find the most talented people in your company and then give them freedom.
And he says I always believe that management's ability to influence work habits through edict is unlimited.
And then he just has one sentence here, and really this sentence spawned a thought.
I was like, oh, he's given us a blueprint for a modern company.
We should combine software, sales, and content marketing.
And so this one sentence says we have phenomenally low turnover for a company employing many young programmers, salespeople and reporters.
So those are the three areas in terms of humans, like human capital, human resources, he's investing in.
Software gives you leverage.
Sales gives you leverage.
Content marketing gives you leverage.
And then he goes right back into this aggressive warlike posture that he has throughout the book.
Every day at Bloomberg, we face challenges that jeopardize our comfortable life.
We constantly have to fight established competitors trying to take food out of our children's mouths.
And then they're the startups that want to destroy everything we've built.
And again, it's just good to know.
This is why history is so beneficial to study.
It's because these people usually don't speak.
If you watch an interview of a founder now, very rarely will they talk the way they talk in these books.
The extremeness.
They keep that under wraps.
So again, he's just a borderline crazy person in his approach.
And the reason.
Even if you don't want to emulate that approach, it doesn't matter, it's.
I want to be aware that these people are out there, so I can avoid them.
All right, so a couple pages later, this is another idea that we see over and over again.
More questions to ask ourselves.
What can we do that our competitors cannot?
There's no reason to do a copycat product.
Consumers can just buy that from others.
Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid, says, don't waste your talents on Me Too products.
And I already used that other quote earlier.
Peter Thiel, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business.
Bloomberg, Land, Thiel, they're all telling you the same idea.
Let's go back to this idea that Bloomberg repeats a lot.
I don't want, like I want. a lot of small bets with limited downside and uncapped upside.
I'm not going to sit here and put all of my resources... We're talking about buying another company.
I spent almost all my money buying another company.
What if it doesn't work out?
Why don't I just have these opportunities, these little miniature bets?
And this is something that's very similar if you go back and read about what Jeff Bezos is thinking on this.
He's very willing to invest 10 million a pop in multiple different businesses and then giving them time to see what they grow into.
And he's had multiple different product lines that grew from 10 million to billion-dollar-plus and even 10 billion businesses.
He talks about that in Marketplace, AWS, Echo, all these other examples.
And so it's a very similar line of thinking here.
And so Bloomberg says, our modus operandi remains building from within, which avoids the bet-the-store high-risk gambles that often characterize large takeovers such as the disastrous Time Warner AOL deal.
Maybe I'm just not that smart.
When I'm looking to expand, I prefer starting with little capital that we can afford to lose and a few people we can always reassign to other projects.
This way, we never feel we've committed to stay with our mistakes.
Nor are we so overextended that we can't handle other additional experimental ventures simultaneously.
So a lot of little small bets, limited downside, uncapped upside is what he's telling us there.
And then he's got this great historical analogy that I found very interesting.
And this is why I favor audio over video.
Because one human talking to another is as old as time.
And I'll watch videos, I'm not going to be wrong, I love movies and stuff like that.
But I like the fact that podcasts let you do other things while you listen.
The fact that you could buy a subscription to Founders, listen to two of these a week...
And over a year.
While you're driving your car, you're commuting, you're going for a walk, you're at the gym, you're washing dishes, you've just downloaded the ideas the best ideas to copy and the worst mistakes to avoid of over 100 of history's greatest entrepreneurs.
Podcasting, to me, is an absolute miracle.
And so this is what Bloomberg says.
We exchange ideas more than information.
And we do most of that orally.
Having text and visuals to add to understanding is nice, but we're men and women, not machines.
Face-to-face or even over electronic media, we need to transmit and receive sound.
When Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, he gave us electronic interactive digital text communication.
Nevertheless, we flock to Alexander Graham Bell's analog voice telephone instead, because it better mirrors the way we live.
We talk to each other.
So now we're going to see another idea from Bloomberg that Jeff Bezos says exactly the same thing.
I'm pretty sure it's in shareholder letters.
I'm going to read that to you in a minute.
Since Bloomberg was always up against companies many times our size, we had to enter each commercial fight with an advantage.
I don't believe that business battles should be even.
We don't want fair fights.
We want to go into contests with an advantage.
Bezos says when it comes to competition, being one of the best is not good enough.
Do you really want to plan for a future in which you might have to fight with somebody who is just as good as you are?
I wouldn't.
And then I think they're both making points.
I guess next to this idea that they're saying is the fact that our world is dominated by power laws.
And so the best in your category as opposed to the second best...
You might talk the difference of, you know, thousands of percentages of more profitable or wealth created, or whatever metric you want to use.
But they're talking about OK, not only for survival.
You want to be into fights where you have an edge, right?
This is very similar to what Ed Thorpe told us.
Excuse me.
He said his 50 years of as a money manager taught him one thing.
He's like, only play games and make investments where you have an edge.
Very similar to what Bloomberg and Bezos are saying is like I don't want to, I don't want to plan for a future, to fight somebody who's as good as me.
I have to be the best, not one of the best.
And Bloomberg saying, I don't want a fair fight.
I want to go into a contest with an advantage.
And then I want to talk because again, this is we're always thinking like we're setting these people's lives.
Part of having a great life which I think is what you and I are after is the fact that we have to be good at our work.
Our work is a third of our lives.
If you don't enjoy it, if you're not good at it, you're losing a lot on the table.
Your enjoyment of life is going to be diminished.
You have to learn how to be a capable craftsman professional, whatever it is that you choose to do during the day.
But that's just one part.
The main goal is how do we have a great life?
How do we get to the end of our life and not have regrets?
And that's why we have to learn from the intelligent dead that came before us, because these people were formidable smart driven, and yet they got to the end of their life with regrets.
So we are foolish if we do not learn from their examples and be like, okay, how do I avoid that?
And this is about the fact that the relationships we have with people is more important than chasing an extra dollar.
And that is.
If history teaches us anything, it's that these type A driven personalities, these people with fire in the bellies, these really smart people, make that mistake.
And so given the choice, we've got to be smarter about this.
Given the choice between optimizing for an extra dollar, which we can make later, or spending time with a loved one that may not always be here.
You've got to choose the loved one.
And so he's talking about The note I have myself here is dad would have been proud.
And so I've heard from people like I have mother and daughters that listen to founders together.
I have father and sons.
I have married.
I've heard from married couples to do this.
And these relationships are special.
They impact us for the rest of our lives.
I've seen this over and over again in these books.
And so if you have kids, you already know this, but if you don't have kids, you have no idea how much your parents love you.
They love you more than they love themselves.
And, as we're about to see here, the impact a parent can have on their child.
It affects them for the rest of their life.
It is an important job.
There is no slacking, because we're going to get to a sentence that Bloomberg writes that gives you chills.
So first he talks about his mom.
His dad dies early.
Unfortunately, his dad died when he was still in school.
So his dad never got to see the success that he had, but his mom did.
So he says until my mom died at age 102.
I called her first thing in the morning when I got to work.
Taking care of your family was a given, something I hope my own children have learned.
The person who would have been really thrilled was my father, who had died earlier.
And he's talking about the fact that he'd be thrilled not only with the success, but the fact that he got into Harvard Business School.
For dad, an average working class guy, Harvard was a rarefied and almost unattainable waypoint on the trail to the great American dream.
The business school, the Salomon partnership and our notoriety today all would have meant even more to him than to me.
And this is the most powerful sentence in the entire book.
Today, 55 years later, I still miss him.
And then Michael has some parting advice for us.
The importance of being persistent and resourceful.
Most fortunes are built by entrepreneurs who started with nothing and generally got fired once or twice in their careers.
And, throughout history, the vast majority of great writers artists musicians, dancers and athletes have come from less financially secure families.
The rewards almost always go to those who outwork the others.
The time you put in is the single most important, controllable, variable determining your future.
And that is where I'll leave it for the full story.
You've got to read the book.
If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.
I also leave a link down below if you want to give a gift subscription to a friend or a family member.
That is an option as well.
That is 228 books down, 1,000 to go.
And I'll talk to you again soon.
