Bloomberg by Bloomberg
- Strategy: get everybody hooked on your data; then sell terminals
- "Make lots of individual, spur-of-the-moment decisions. Don't Five-Year Plan or a Great Leap Forward.
- first sale was to front-run an internal IT team at Merrill Lynch
('if you don't give us anything new, we can start in six months')
- "after building the machines for Merrill, we had money coming in and a product to sell."
- Merrill was first customer & acquired 30% stake in Bloomberg (for $30m), helped Bloomberg rent terminals to Merrill's customers initially, gave Bloomberg data before they built their proprietary sources; in return, Bloomberg helped them establish themselves as a premier service provider
- had 2 choices:
- be nothing more than a small specialist, always vulnerable to Dow Jones cutting them off
- challenge the giants
- in 1987, convinced WSJ & AP that Bloomberg should be sole supplier of bond prices
- made a deal with NYT to give free terminals in exchange for the opportunity to publish in the NYT (thus NYT was first Bloomberg News subscriber)
Notizen:
- finished Harvard Business School in 1966; became partner at Salomon Brothers in 1973; from 1979, he supervised the computer systems area; was fired with $10m severance package in 1981
- started Bloomberg 1981 (he was 39); ~$100m revenues in 1989, ~$1.3bn revenues & 75 k terminals in 1997
- initially a bond product, later stocks, commodities, news, magazines, radio, tv
- he doesn't negotiate salaries or price reductions
- before they had a product, he already brought on salespeople
- memorable quotes:
- "We're going to be out of business if this continues!"
- "only speed and accuracy matter - and they are not most people's strengths"
- "we went against giants, and giants are usually easy to beat."
- "Well-run organisations (...) have conceptual goals stated long in advance."
- "Even now, decades later and a bit wiser, I still think the perfect day is one where I'm hopelessly overscheduled. Jog early in the morning and get to work by 7:00 A.M.; a series of rushed meetings; phone call after phone call; fifty or more voice messages and the same number of e-mails demanding a reply; a hurried business lunch between myriad stand-up conferences to solve firm personnel, financial, and policy problems; perhaps give an interview to some foreign newspaper where we get needed publicity; often make an image-building speech at some local conference in person or by satellte video-conferencing to the other side of the world; constantly welcome visiting clients; an early dinner with customers or a group of employees, followed by a second one with friends (...); fall into bed, exhausted but satisfied with the day's accomplishments. That's the best weekday one could ever have!"