#433 How Michael Bloomberg Works

David Senra (0:00)

So there I was, 39 years old, and essentially hearing, here's $10 million and your history.

John Gutfried, managing partner of Wall Street's hottest firm, told me that my life at Solomon Brothers was finished. It's time for you to leave, he said. I was terminated from the only full-time job I'd ever known and from the high-pressure life that I loved. This, after 15 years of 12-hour days and 6-day weeks, out, fired.

Most of the 63 partners were asked to stay on as employees of the new company. Not me, though, and a half a dozen other guys were pushed out at that time as well.

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 said, we had another job for you, I'd have done it in a second, just as I did at an earlier career turning point in 1979, when Billy and John told me to give up my sales and trading responsibilities and supervise the computer systems area.

I was willing to do anything that they wanted. It was a great organization, and I would have been happy to stay. 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.

So, that's from the beginning of the book that we talked about today, which is the Autobiography of Michael Bloomberg. It is called Bloomberg by Bloomberg, and he's describing the fact that getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to him. There's a great line by Steve Jobs that comes to mind, where he says that sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick, but don't lose faith. And so, Bloomberg said, I didn't look back. He was going to take the $10 million that he got from the sale of the company and jump right back into the arena, this time as an entrepreneur. And so, Bloomberg grew up working class. His parents didn't have a lot of money. I'm going to skip over childhood. I want to go right into when he went to Harvard Business School. And this is right at the end of Harvard. Really, he's not sure what to do after college. Says, my two years at Harvard were well spent. Harvard's case method teaching honed my analytical skills and sharpened my communication abilities. The academic standards there were superior, but not what I would call outstanding. There were some very bright students in my class. Some classmates I thought not exactly intellectually gifted, and a few that I considered total frauds who could only talk a good game.

Those who I thought were smart generally did well later in life. Those who I considered dummies did less well. The bullshitters faded away.

Street smarts and common sense, it turned out, were better predictors of career achievements.

By this point, I hadn't really pondered where my life and work would take me. What should I do with my life? I talked to my good friend Steve. Steve told me to call the firms of Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs to say that I was desperate to be an institutional salesperson or an equity trader.

Who were they? Meaning who is Goldman Sachs and who is Salomon Brothers? And what would I be doing?

Don't worry about it, Steve told me. Just do it.

Not having any better ideas of my own, I made the calls. And then he makes the point that these jobs at the time were considered very, like, low status. He says, security, trading, and sales were considered second class occupations in those dates. Both involved getting your hands dirty by actually picking up the telephone and talking to customers. So essentially what he's describing at this point in his life and this point in this book, essentially he's learning the meta skill of sales.

I did this episode of Ken Griffin, I think last year, maybe the year before. And when one of Ken Griffin's mentors retired, he said, hey, come to my office. You can grab anything that you want. And what I thought was interesting is, Ken wanted this like $10 sign, this plaque that was in his mentor's office that said, if we're going to eat, someone's got to sell. And then in that episode, Ken was giving advice to college students, and he says, you're always selling, and if you don't like to sell, here's my advice, get over it. I think Michael Bloomberg would agree with what Ken Griffin was saying, talks a lot about the importance of selling and at this point in his life, was hugely beneficial in the future decades of him building his own company, one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world, by the way.