Welcome back to Inside the Corner Office. In this episode, I'm joined by Mike Bloomberg, an entrepreneur and philanthropist whose leadership has shaped global finance and one of the world's greatest cities, New York. After a pivotal moment early in his career, following 15 years at Salomon Brothers, Mike built Bloomberg into a trusted global data platform. He later applied the same data-driven approach to leading New York City and supported public health and philanthropy. Welcome, Mike.
Thank you very much. And that was a very nice introduction, and I'm glad you gave it just as I wrote it for you.
Yes, you deserve it. Do you remember the first time when we met?
Back in 2015 or thereabouts, on some flights where I can't remember where it was or with whom, but it's been a long time.
Yeah, let me help you. It was in Paris for the One Planet Summit, and at the time we were working on the TCFD task force, the Task Force on Financial Disclosure. What's interesting, I mean, I called the podcast at the time Inside the Corner Office. Whenever I go into your office, I see there are no corner offices. Why is that the case?
I'm a believer — not everybody runs a business the way I do — but I'm a believer that you want to have management with everybody they manage. And the typical corporation is that the CEO is on the 50th floor with a large office that he or she can practice their putting game on, and then all the workers are down below, and they don't see the workers. They don't get close to the workers. The workers don't know them. I think that's the wrong way to run a business. I think the management should be interspersed with the people they manage. I got to know the Ford guy, and we walked around the big Ford plant, and I watched him. He was pretty good. He walked over and shook hands with...
Yeah. I mean, I always do that. I take pictures with every single one of the people as I go around the country, particularly with the people that work for Bloomberg, on a first-name basis. I snap at them when they say, 'Mr. Bloomberg,' and I say, 'No, it's Mike.' And I wear my badge, and I expect them to wear their badges, and I want to be down in the middle of them. When somebody comes into this company to visit with me, they take them to my quote office. My quote office is the desk I was sitting at, right in a long line of other desks. And they always say, 'Where's your private office?' And I say, 'We have 26,000 employees. All of them have the same size desks, all around the world, and that's the way you should run a company.'
Yeah. If you were to describe the culture at Bloomberg, what are the three words that I should be thinking about?
Good place to work. We pay well because the employees do a great job, and that's how we make our money, so we can afford to pay well. Everybody's on a first-name basis. I wear my badge, so does everybody else. And when something goes wrong — and with 26,000 employees that we have, there's something in some family among them every week, sometimes multiple ones — I make the call to the family saying, 'I'm sorry, I heard of the problems, or anything we can do to help.' And our HR department will invariably have already talked to them, because that's how I found out.
And it just sets a tone. People want to work here, I hope, I think, because they're respected and because there's opportunity to move up. Almost all of our management started out at the bottom and moves up. But fundamentally, I want everybody to think it's the same. I go to the sales meeting in the morning and listen to them. 'Hi, who are you? What do you do here? Where'd you go to school?' Am I interested in it? Yeah, it's interesting to listen to people. Will I remember? No. With 26,000 people, I can't.
Yeah. But it's a culture of care. What struck me once, I was in your London office and I was admiring the desks, and they said, 'Oh yeah, Mike Bloomberg designed these desks, and he pays attention to how our workspace looks.'
We hired an architect, Norman Foster, who I think is one of the great architects of the world, and he and I sat down to talk. In terms of designing something, no — in terms of what I needed: how do you run the business? What do you want in terms of people interactions and access and that sort of thing? And what's always bothered me is in companies where the middle of the building is one place there aren't people, and so you can't see across from one side to the other. What's in that stack? It's the sewage system, it's the hot water, it's the air conditioners, it's the elevators, it's all that sort of stuff. I didn't want that there. And so Foster came up with the idea of having five — just because of the relative size and design of the building — corners where they had a small set of all of those things, but you could see across in the middle and walk back and forth and bring in customers, and people can see who's there.
And the building that Foster designed and the construction company built, people come from all over to see it. It's a building where I've said I don't want to build a building that is out of proportion to the neighborhoods. We are guests in London. I shouldn't forget that, and I want to try to fit in and accommodate and participate. And our foundation supports a number of museums and cultural events in the UK, and we try to do it around the world. But I'm a big believer everybody should be as equal as you can. No argument about what the chain of command is, but we generally don't even have titles. You supervise these five people, each of them supervise five more, and that sort of thing. But the way most companies do it, they flaunt the fact that it's them and not you.
And I think that's the wrong way. And you know, is it the right way? Not the only way to run a business. But we've been in business for I don't know how many years — 44 years I think it is — and the company continues to go well. So we must be doing something right.
What shaped your thinking? Because I mean, I was talking earlier that you spent quite a bit of time at Salomon Brothers. You actually got laid off at some point.
Years, and it was time for me to go, and they thought so too.
Okay. But I mean, for example, you could have at this time said, 'Okay, I'm going to the next bank.' Why did you say, 'No, I'm starting something from scratch'?
Didn't they have done that? The whole history of the company is: I was a trader, and on your desk is a couple of computer screens, and they showed the prices of a few securities with an up or down arrow, or maybe they changed color if they went up or down, whatever. And it occurred to me that you take data from those computers and you do something with it, but nobody's helped to give you the tools for the something in the middle. So why do we have this? We designed a computer that could read and write and do arithmetic. We designed a computer, and we had to build our own computer because the PCs had not been invented, and we wanted a PC on every desk. But we did it in trying to address a real need. And I would go down and talk to people in the trading rooms or the customers we hoped we'd someday have and ask them what do they do and that sort of thing. And 'What do you mean, what do I do?' Well, you know what? What about that piece of data on the screen? 'Oh, I use that over here.' And when they stop and think about it, hey, that is right. We need some help there. And now you see people talking about AI and using computers in ways they didn't do before. I guess that's something like what we did 44 years ago.
You found ways for them to take what they have but turn it into a value proposition. But how did you — I mean, you decided at the time, okay, this is an unmet need. How did you then start building the company? Did you start programming by yourself? Did you have to get a team together? How did you do it?
I picked three guys who had worked for me at Salomon Brothers. One was the technical genius of designing the computer — a design which, incidentally, 44 years later is still the fundamental design of what we have. My job was to sell, and it took me three years to find a customer, but it took us three years to build the system because we had to go and build the actual computers. And I used to, on Saturday afternoon, go and solder the resistors and capacitors into these big circuit boards, and then I would pull — at night I'd go in and drag cables under all the desks. We couldn't afford an electrician to do it. But it was thinking about what do people need, and then talking to them and watching them. And today we have some of our employees — two or three typically — on the trading floors of virtually almost all of the big banks in the world.
And they're there to walk around and help people. Now, you'd say, 'Well, wait a second. In these banks, they don't want to have strangers from outside.' But we've built a reputation of being careful and making sure that security is the biggest issue, and we can help them make their security better.
And so the customers, the public, whatever, benefits from us doing this. If we didn't, you couldn't get in there and help as much as you could. But if you turn around and say, 'Joe or Sally, help me with this. How do you do that?' And then they come back and say, you know, they wanted to do this and we can only do halfway, and what about — and then some will do it by next week or whatever.
So this principle of being close to your customer, like you did at the time being on the trading floor, understanding what was missing, is still the case. I mean, you mentioned earlier that we are in another pivotal moment now around AI. So what does AI mean for the terminal? Is it the end of the terminal, the beginning of the terminal?
The terminal itself, nothing changes. The computer — it goes back to from any place in the world, and there's more than one in case something goes wrong with it. That's where AI gives you things. For example, our system, we have 20,000 functions, some number like that, and you can't possibly use all of them. And for some people that aren't used to using a computer on their desk, they're never going to learn how to do that. The nice thing with AI is you can take your handheld Apple phone, touch a button, and say, 'How does IBM stock compare to Microsoft stock?' Thank you. Bang. It appears on your handheld screen and also appears on your desk on a much bigger one. Now, not everybody is going to want to do it by voice. Most traders, they have their fingers on the keyboard all the time. Bang, bang, bang. And they can do it faster than you can talk. But once again, it's trying to find the things that our customers use. And our salesforce and technology people and people on the help desk — those are the ones that are really dictating the future of the company and the direction we're going in, because they are the ways we find out what our customers need. And companies that don't satisfy their customers go out of business, and companies that do grow.
And how do you design — I mean, reinventing yourself as a company is very difficult, certainly once you've been very successful. How do you feel, okay, now is the moment to change and change the offering?
Well, I don't know the design. I worked at Salomon Brothers in a big trading room. I knew the managing partner of Salomon Brothers, Billy Solomon. One time, the first day I was there, I went in at 6:30 in the morning because I didn't know what time they started. And then Billy comes in — or who already didn't know — an older gentleman at the far end of the trading room and yelled, 'Hey kid, who won the game last night?' And I stood up and said, 'I don't know what game. Who are you?' And he walked down towards me around all the trading desks with a very stern look on his face, and he said, 'Well, before I tell you who I am, you tell me who you are.' And I said, 'I'm Mike Bloomberg. This is the first day of my first job out of school. Who are you?' And he said, 'Well, my name's Bill Solomon, and I own the company.' He sat down. He had a couple of daughters, I think it was roughly my age, so he knew how to talk to a 23-year-old. And we talked for about half an hour. And then for years, when he'd come in, he'd yell out, 'Mike, how are you?' And everybody would look at me, 'How do you know the managing partner on a first-name basis?' And the answer to that is I was in early. And the way I got customers was to be the first one in early in the morning. And if you're not willing to make that investment, you don't get the rewards. People go towards people. Getting the right people and making sure they have the tools they need, making sure that they see some opportunity to grow, making sure that they are proud of the company they work for. Bloomberg — I give most of the company's profits to my foundation, and the foundation works on health issues and artistic issues and a whole bunch of things, and a lot of money that we spend. And when we go out to recruit at a school, we can say, 'Go to work for the other person. You're just going to make rich people richer. Go to work for Bloomberg, and we're going to cure cancer.' And it may not help after their five years there — they want to — but it certainly does help getting them when they're much more idealistic at the beginning. And that is what we do, and I'm very proud of that. I think when I look in a mirror, I say, you know, you're helping to cure cancer, and we still have a long ways to go, and that...
But all of these things — what's nice is you can also then put something very concrete and something very societal around a company purpose, because enticing somebody to come to work for a data company or terminal company is very different to say, 'Look, we are trying to cure cancer.'
Well, what we're looking for is somebody who — it's a great story. There's a caddy who I took a few lessons from, and he wanted to leave that business, and I said, 'Well, come and work for us.' And he knew nothing about finance or technology — two things he never used the words for, I'm sure. And he's been with us for two years. Was the top of his class on the two-year training program which we have for everybody that comes in. Now he's in his third year. I happened to run into him the other day. He's going gangbusters. Right guy, has the right attitude, wants to learn, wants to work, knows how to get along with people from his old job. And it's much more important than whether they already have technological skills or selling skills. Technology in this day and age — if you were a programmer two years ago, three years ago, you could get a job instantly. Today, no. If you're an AI guy or woman, you can get a job right away. And so this changes. Will AI change the world? It'll do some, but we've gone through revolutions before. You know, at one point 98% of the public was in agriculture. Today it's 2% in agriculture. You know, go back to the '70s, into the '50s even, when I was a young guy. It is so different now. We've managed to accommodate and change.
So you say talent recruitment and talent development is important. How do you manage on a daily basis? I mean, do you get very involved in the details or...
Well, with 26,000 employees, I can't get to every one of them. One of the things I do is I go around — I was in LA last week for two days. I get there, we go to visit six or seven different big customers, banks, money managers, whatever. And I sit down with senior management, talk to them about the future of our company, and I try to assure them and tell them what we're doing and how we do it. We have three buildings here — our customers here, and our engineering and sales group here in New York. Three different buildings. If one building went down, didn't have electricity or something, the other two could take over. And I would bug about making sure we do that. But you've got to go and give people an opportunity to grow and move them around too. That's the other thing we do — giving them more opportunity to move around.
