Michael Bloomberg - Founder of Bloomberg L.P. & Former NYC Mayor | Podcast | In Good Company

I'm very careful to not be a journalist. The one thing you can't do is get involved in the journalism if you're going to have good journalism. So, there's one guy, John Micklethwait, who runs it.

I was born at an early age.

I grew up in Massachusetts. Father was a bookkeeper, made $6,000 the best year of his life. I was a Boy Scout. I was a C student. I always made the top half of the class possible is my gag line. When I was getting out of school, I went from college to business school at Harvard. I was lucky enough to get in. But when I was ready to graduate, I thought I was going to go to Vietnam partially. We were involved in that war. This was in 1966. A very nasty war in very nasty ways. Americans treated the troops who we drafted and sent over to risk their lives. Some of them came back in boxes and some were lucky enough and didn't. But we were just treating people terribly. So I signed up to go. I could get a commission as a second lieutenant in the army. I thought you'd be safer as a second lieutenant than as a private. Turns out not because the second lieutenants led the charge over the barbed wire going out into the jungle and a lot of them were killed. It turns out at the last minute, one month before graduation, I have perfectly flat feet and they didn't take anybody with flat feet. So all of a sudden I wasn't going to go to Vietnam and had not thought at all about what I was going to do with my career.

I asked a friend of mine, Steve Foster, a very smart guy who unfortunately died of cancer. I said, 'What should I do?' He said, 'Go to Wall Street.' I said, 'Where is that? What do they do?' He said, 'Just do it.' I said, 'Who do I call?' He said, 'Call Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs.' I said, 'What's that? Who are they?' Just do it. So I called both. One sent me down with an airplane ticket. One sent me down with a train ticket from Boston to New York. Both of them made me an offer. One offered $14,000 a year, the other $9,000 a year. I liked the people at the $9,000 one better, just who I happened to meet that day. I said to the head guy, 'Look, here's my budget. $5 for subway and newspapers and food, $125 for rent every month. I can't afford to go to work for you for $9,000.' He said, 'How much do you need, kid?' I did the math quickly and split the difference. I said, '$11,500.' He said, 'Fine. $9,000 salary, $2,500 loan.' He got up and walked out of the room. I didn't know if I had a job or not, but I assumed I did. A month later when I finished school, there was a bonus at the end of the fiscal year, September 30th. I got a $500 bonus, forgiveness of the loan. The next year, I got a $2,000 bonus, forgiveness of the loan. In the end, it worked out fine. Don't feel sorry for me. But I'll never forget that people make the mistake of going to work for a place where they get paid the most. That's not particularly when you're young. That's not what life's about. You've got to get experience. You've got to build friendships. You've got to try things and see what works and what doesn't.

I had worked on a trading desk and we had a couple of screens. The screen showed the prices of either stocks or bonds and it showed the last sale or the valuation and it showed plus or minus an arrow or a different color. But there was nothing on your desk that let you do what you needed that data for. People never thought about that. Why would I need the data? I want to draw a graph. I want to do a calculation. I want to send a message. Any of those kinds of things. The computer could do it but nobody had put it together. So I thought, why don't we build a computer to do it? Keep in mind, when I was doing this, PCs had not been invented. Nobody believes that there was a date before Apple. I wanted to have a computer but they didn't exist. So I hired an engineer, Ron Harris, a very smart guy. I would go up on Saturdays and work in his barn. He had a little lab set up, and I'd solder in the capacitors and resistors and the circuit boards, and we made our own computers. Fast forward to two years later when PCs were invented, and they said, 'We're getting out of the PC business. That's not what we do well. We couldn't possibly compete in here.' So we just bought some of the first PCs and junked the other stuff. The rest is history.

I think we focused on building something that was useful. Didn't try to make it into something that it wasn't. There was a need. Nobody really thought that having that computer in the middle that I just described was useful. By the time it was done, which was three years before we really had a customer, it was too late for anybody to catch up. Since then, there are plenty of people who have good products, but they only do one or two of the 10 or 20 things that we do. The real world is you've got to have lots of different inputs and be able to adjust to different kinds of customers and different markets. We just focused on building the best thing we could and not necessarily always listening to what the customers want. I've always asked, and customers can be very valuable, but that doesn't mean they are able to think in terms of what we could do with a computer, for example.

In the case of a bond, the maturity date and maybe a call date, but at the beginning it wasn't even that, and a coupon, and today's date. Then there's a formula you can use to calculate the price of that security at a given yield or vice versa. We just kept adding functionality, didn't increase the price. Kept going, sitting with people, asking them what they wanted, and watching them try to use what we had. I'll never forget a good story. There's a guy, Glenn Walner, one of our employees, really smart, tall, nice guy. He was going to give a demonstration to somebody like you who headed a big organization and asked me to come along. Fine, I'd like to do so. We get there and in those days we were still using the Bloomberg-built hardware. So he brings in this box with a cathode ray tube in it, the picture thing. There was one that had the computer in it, one that had the keyboard in it, and one that had the power supply in it. He plugs in all these wires. Everybody's sitting around watching him do this. Then he turns to me and says, 'Darn it, I forgot the power cord.' I just wanted to take a swing at him. After all of this, we finally got an introduction to this bank, I forget who it was, and he was going to blow it. Don't worry about it at all. I've got my open briefcase and he took out printed copies of every single screen that we produced and could show it to them. Everybody had a good laugh about it. They bought in, ordered a couple computers, two or three maybe, right then and there. The point of the story is it's that kind of preparation, that kind of willingness to keep going and not let little things get in the way.

You don't say no. You don't give up. You put a balance in life. You still want to be able to go out and have a life, a family. So it's balancing hard work with enough time off to not get worn out.

83 and happy to be. My ambition is to be 84.

Most days. I've been taking some Fridays off, which is a little bit embarrassing, but yes, fundamentally I like to come in.

I get up at 5:15 automatically. If I didn't even set the alarm, I probably would. My girlfriend and I both get up. I take a shower, do some exercises with a trainer a couple times a week, and then go to work. I'm here by 7 at the latest, maybe a little bit earlier.

An awful lot do. People here, we have a very low attrition rate. People here like to be here. At least they tell me they do and I think it looks to me like they do. When I go to visit a customer, I'll always take along a few salesmen or maybe an engineer or two and I will say I am just impressed with how well-trained they are and how focused they are in nice ways.

You have to try things. It's a stupid idea, but maybe it might work. You can't do all the stupid ideas and not all of them will work. But just because it's not conventional doesn't mean you shouldn't take the shot and do it. When somebody comes to me and they want to try something, we'll try it. I can't believe it's going to work. I try to ask questions and explain to me what's going on. But if they have a gut feeling that it's going to work, you want to encourage them. Even if I'm right and it doesn't work, if you try something here and it doesn't work, you can go back and I'll make sure that you and I are seen walking together telling a joke to each other. I want people to understand there's no penalty if things don't work. Quite the contrary, the fact that you tried is a plus and that's going to help your career.

And you make great offices.