Speaker 1So 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 Salomon 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 six-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 sales. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. 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I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. I was a little bit more of a fan of the company. money and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. And so even though he's going to make his first small fortune in finance, he never thought if he was going to be an entrepreneur that he would be an entrepreneur in finance. He wanted to actually have a real business that had a real service that made real people's lives better. And then he has this, I skipped over this part in his childhood and then also in high school and college. He has this love of history. So he's constantly consulting history when he has to make decisions and when he's going to start his own company. He's just like, well, okay, like, do I want to just be in finance? Like, well, how were all the great fortunes made? And so he says, Wall Street promised vast riches, although a few of the great fortunes had been made there. 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. We are not yet in the story, though, where he starts Bloomberg. He's still telling us essentially lessons that he learned at Salomon Brothers that he would use when he built his own company. So now this is in 1967. This is a year after he starts working at Salomon Brothers. And again, didn't grow up with money. Now he's exposed to people that have a lot of money. And it's just kind of like humorous and funny stories about him peeking into this world that he didn't even know existed. Now, fast forward to this day, he's rumored to be one of, if not the wealthiest person in America. I've heard a bunch of different stories about this, that he essentially been pulling out billions and billions in dividends out of his company for more than two decades. But back back at this point in story, he's in his early 20s, mid 20s. And he's going to a fancy dinner at a very nice New York restaurant. And he says, I couldn't stop gawking. It was my first time in such opulent surroundings. So he's talking about the person sitting next to him. He says her topics of conversation were equally incomprehensible. She asked, where did my family have vacation houses in Europe? In what country was our yacht registered? Where do we keep our plane? My late father, who never earned more than six thousand dollars per year, would have chuckled. In front of me was more silverware per place setting than my family owned in total. I thought I'd gone through the looking glass into another world. And so early in his career, he has a really great idea where he's like, OK, Billy's the boss. I'm going to make myself indispensable to the boss. Now, keep in mind, this is his first second year that he's working there. Let's say 14, 15 years in the future, he's going to wind up getting $10 million and then fired from this job. But this he would have never got the $10 million and then therefore the sea capital he needed to start Bloomberg, this, you know, this very valuable business that he still owns today if it wasn't for the things that he's doing at this point in his career. And he's like the great thing about this book is one, it's very simple language. Bloomberg is unapologetically extreme and he's also very, very direct. And so he'll tell you a story and he's like, I don't know, this seems like obvious. Everybody should just do this. And the moral of the story is like you should just if you have a job and you have a boss, like why aren't you automatically making yourself it's the fastest way to move up. I came in every morning at 7am getting there before everyone else except Billy. When he needed to borrow a match or 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. I would stay later than anyone else when he needs someone to make an after all hours call to a big client or someone to listen to his complaints about those who had already gone home. I was that someone making myself omnipresent wasn't exactly burdensome. I loved what I was doing and developing a close working relationship with those who ran the show probably didn't hurt my career either. I 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 is one of my favorite parts in the book. This part is absolutely amazing. I'm just going to read huge chunks of the book to you from here. It's really on the importance of showing up working hard, staying flexible, and then loving what you do. There's a handful of ideas that Bloomberg repeats throughout this entire book. 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 advantages you 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 all in perspective and not working too hard, but I've never met him or her. The more you work, the better you do. It's that simple. I've always outworked the other person, and if I hadn't, he or she would be writing this book. Still, I had a life. I don't remember being so driven or focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did. I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've always been driven by the fact that I was a person who was focused on the work that I did, but I've He left to advise his partners not to buy from Bloomberg. The reason we didn't show much interest in his views on how to run our company. He was sure right about that account at Bloomberg. And then he's talking about work on product and sales first and work on them in parallel. And then you can work on everything else after that. At Bloomberg, we'd always built the product first. We think about accounting and shipping much later in the process. Selling is the only process we run simultaneously with development from the start. And then he talks about the very humble first days of what becomes one of the most valuable private companies ever created. I rented a one-room temporary office. It was about 100 square feet of space with a view of an alley. I deposited $300,000 of my Salomon Brothers windfall into a corporate checking account. And 15 years later, I had a billion-dollar business. And before we get back into this, I want to tell you about Applovin. One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the book Zero to One. In that book, Peter Thiel writes, he says, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places. And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. And that is exactly what Applovin has done with their advertising platform. Applovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers in mobile games. Applovin allows you to capture undivided attention. Applovin ads are full-screen videos that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch them. You can launch on Applovin in minutes. You set the goal, and Applovin achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. And Applovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increase their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on Applovin. And you can do that by going to Applovin.com. That's Applovin.com. And then I want to tell you about Vodafone. Vanta helps your company prove you're secure so more customers will use your product or service. Vanta is an AI-powered security expert that scales with you. The more your business grows, the more complex your security needs get. And that complexity turns into chaos. Vanta tames that chaos for you. Vanta automates compliance, continuously monitors your controls, and gives you a single source of truth for compliance and risk. So whether you're a fast-growing startup or an enterprise company, Vanta fits easily into your existing workflows. Many companies won't sign contracts unless you're certified, and this is causing you to lose out on sales. That is why the average Vanta customer reports a 526% return on investment after becoming a Vanta customer. Automate your compliance, security, and trust with Vanta. Vanta will help you win trust, close deals, and stay secure faster and with less effort. Go to Vanta.com forward slash founders, and you'll get $1,000 off. That is Vanta.com forward slash founders. And so it's going to take him some time to figure out what product to build and then to build that product. And so in the meantime, he needs to bring in money. And so he has this idea. He's like, okay, try to do some kind of service-related business. Let's see if we can do some consulting. This brings in, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars. And so he writes, right after forming our company, we did some consulting. It brought in cash, gave us exposure, and helped provide us with some legitimacy that would later lead to work for more clients. And it bought us our first sale to Merrill Lynch. And then I love that he sold to Merrill Lynch before he had a product. When I came back from the meeting, my colleagues were elated into the reality of a six-month delivery. For something that didn't exist began to sink in. So it's like, okay, we sell this product, it doesn't exist. And we say, don't worry, it doesn't exist. You're going to have it six months from now. He just made up the day. As developers, we're magicians, not miracle workers. Month after month as we worked, our mood alternated between elation and the feeling of an 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 that we promised. At the time, he's also building. Hardware, which we'll talk about. He's got a lot of great ideas about that, by the way. Essentially, he looks at his businesses, just content like data and analytics. And he built hardware when he needed to build hardware. But once somebody came along that could build a better hardware than him, he just focused on what his actual business was and he never confused what his business was with the device that delivered it. He has some great lines on that, which we'll get to in a minute. 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. We took responsibility for the one we were best suited to do. And then he goes back to this idea, get action. We acted from day one. Others plan to plan for months. I must admit, I was worried. Remember, I started the company with 300,000 of his own money. Now he's 4 million into this thing. He only has 10 million to his name. We were spending what would grow to be a $4 million investment of my $10 million. Simultaneously, I was becoming responsible for families of almost two dozen company employees. I convinced these people to follow me. And if the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. And if the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If the venture had not been successful, I wouldn't have been able to do that. hired specialists I felt like I was losing a child to adolescence good for the kid but painful for the parent so then we get to one of my favorite parts of the book and this is where he starts building out the media part of his company starts with this guy named Matt Winkler who's a reporter at the Wall Street Journal keeps hearing about Bloomberg and this Bloomberg terminal and trying to figure out okay what's going on like he's hearing about it throughout the finance industry and he's like okay I'm going to go and like interview Michael Bloomberg and so in this part of the book this is where Bloomberg is describing this first meeting they have he says when they arrived in my office I offered them the same speech that I used to convince people to take jobs with us 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 information he needs to fight and he's saying you know one thing for him is that he's not going to be able to be able for him to say that he's got the you know the best product the best people but so you don't have to believe me here he does something really smart and he actually it's a good idea whether you're talking to I guess a reporter or even trying to recruit somebody to join your company and he comes into leaves the the room comes back with this big thick printout and he goes here's every customer we have by name by firm and by phone number call them yourself and essentially verify everything I just told you is true and so as Michael Bloomberg builds a relationship with Matt Winkler he starts seeking Matt's advice and really the main point of this section I think is really important it's like hey your company likely has information that no one else has start thinking about how you can repurpose it to benefit other people and then achieve your objective so he's on the phone with Matt and he goes hey I want to make our terminal indispensable to stock as well as bond Traders should we get into the text news business his answer wasn't what I expected although it encouraged me to keep the conversation going Mikey said you and the people who work with you have created a terminal that explains more about why bonds fluctuate each minute each day and each week than any collection of reporters ever could you already provide charts and graphs that influence the major debt trading decisions worldwide add text to that information and you'll have something that doesn't exist anywhere else no one in debt or Equity will be able to live without it and then we see he goes back to this habit he has he consults history when trying to decide if he should enter the news business right so he says history shows that any gutsy entrepreneur Joseph Pulitzer William Randolph-Hartley Kearse Henry Luce B.C Forbes Ted Turner Rupert Murdoch and Oprah Rimfrey can enter the news business any time and then he compares his advantage that he has that these other historical figures did not 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 one hack of an advantage fundamentally at Bloomberg were builders not buyers so it has never occurred to me to acquire a news organization as a starting point it's always more fun to create from scratch and a lot less risky and so this is the initial idea of this media business that he begins to build 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 with our terminal functions included each of our news stories would be more informative than the competitors and more people would want to access them this meant more revenue which in turn meant we could afford more reporters and have more news and so on so think about it each new story is a product demo more demos lead to more revenue more revenue leads to more stories and even more revenue and so this is the part I mentioned earlier about really understanding what the actual business that you're in 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 but we never made the mistake of believing that we were in the business of producing and distributing the world's most accurate reliable comprehensive up to the second information and analysis this has been our mission from day one and it has never changed technology will continuously revolutionize distribution but our product is content it remains consistent much of that content sits behind the media world's most expensive paywall a subscription to Bloomberg costs about twenty two thousand dollars a year this book I think is almost 20 I think the the price is over thirty thousand a year if I'm not mistaken that works out to be about eighty to eight dollars per workday when customers complain that it's expensive we tell them if you can't make eighty eight dollars a day using Bloomberg you have a bigger problem than our bill I mean he's got some great advice on how to make your product or your company stand out I should say at this point in the story his company is not called Bloomberg it's called innovative market systems and he's about to change that so he says entrepreneurs in the booming 1980s were commonplace my company was small and virtually anonymous our product the market data terminal that we were selling was called Market Master and it could have been confused with a kitchen appliance 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 the people who pitched them that's actually a very old idea uh you and I have talked about David ogilvy Albert Lasker Claude Hopkins in any case they tried to get away from the company and basically have like a spokesperson even if it wasn't the founder but they wanted they said people identify with people not products and not companies and essentially were what 60 years later than you know Albert Lasker and Claude Hopkins uh we're applying that same exact idea to all kinds of different products he just happens to apply to his own product so you need a spokesperson for mass appeal consumers and the media identify products and policies with people who pitch them sneakers it pushed them with the 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 me our competitors founders were all dead I on the other hand were alive and out making speeches and sales calls every day in City after City around the world turning my name and work into a great weapon that others in the financial and since I'd spent so much time demonstrating our product people had begun to mentally interchange me with the terminal so they would already they were already before they were called Bloomberg terminals they say hey give me instead of saying what was his name Market Master terrible name by the way or even they're using word terminal they're just like hey give me some of these bloombergs I acquiesced to a decision that the Marketplace already had made henceforth the product and the company itself would be Bloomberg and then he has a hilarious line here I would become the Colonel Sanders of the United States and then he has a hilarious line here I would become the Colonel Sanders of the United States and then he has a hilarious line here 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 you kind of see you obviously I think if you're listening to this you already know you've heard his name you know about his business but you can see he's you know he likes that he has a colorful personality he's unapologetically extreme he talks a lot of throughout this book he has a perspective a point of view and he used that perspective that personality that point of view to build his company and so then he talks about this very important extension for his media business where he expands into television and radio and the interesting part about this and it goes against his idea that he doesn't want to buy things he wants to build them so one he didn't want to do television or radio I think the person had asked him three times and then two he realizes oh it's actually smarter in this case I can buy something that I kind of jump start this process and again it goes back to this flexibility that you know he has this goal this end goal he has a basic idea of where he's going to go but he doesn't know how he's going to get there he's going to go to the right there and he's willing to be flexible every day this is gonna name John Fram calls him John was an employee at the FNN the FNN was the financial news Network it was a television channel whose parent was in bankruptcy he told me I should buy FNN Mike what you really need to do is get into television it will create synergies with everything else you're doing what a dumb idea I said cutting him off my operating principle has always been billed don't buy besides what did I have to do with television and I think the price of this uh this television network at the time was 200 million dollars she's like listen we're not gonna buy I'm not spending 200 million dollars on this no matter what you say you're crazy guy calls him back the next day starts talking to him as if we're old friends he suggested now instead of he goes so you should buy this but then you also need somebody in-house to develop audio and video programming at Bloomberg and you should hire me and two other guys to do this once again I said television and radio makes no sense for Bloomberg and I hung up the phone a few days passed and then I got another call from him and as I listened to a longer version of the pitch he made a few days earlier it occurred to me one of us is stupid and it isn't him so I hired the three of them that day and so the first thing they do is they start going out and buying radio stations and then from radio they start pushing and extending into television and he talks about this and again this is I think one of the most important parts of the book he's got like a lot of these like roundabout ways to get in front of potential customers I think this is maybe one of the most genius things he's ever done is obviously the media component of his business he says people often ask me if I want to buy something I'm not going to buy anything I'm not going to buy anything I'm not going to buy anything I'm not going to buy anything I'm not going to buy anything and asked me why Bloomberg ventured into radio and TV was there some hidden motive and the motive wasn't hidden the motive was to sell more subscriptions that it was that's the what his entire business runs on and he talks about why he has an advantage doing this he says we have the necessary information and the technical know-how so broadcasting is an easy extension of what we're doing elsewhere radio and television provide our company with instant visibility the media like nothing better than writing about themselves the more exposure Bloomberg has to the fourth estate the more the promote us to the general public to reach potential customers who don't yet subscribe to our print products radio and TV help us get our message out the people who lease our terminals are part of radio and television's masses. They need news while jogging, showering, driving, or sitting at home. And we've got to give them what they need, where they are. Radio and television simply became another delivery mechanism for the same content. And every piece of content he produces is a ad for the Bloomberg subscription. And he talks about the same idea a few pages later. Again, everything they do increases the likelihood of selling Bloomberg subscriptions. TV stories relate to magazine articles that relate to the computer data. And he's got a great idea on how to pick the person that should lead the project, any new project inside your organization. As a true capitalist, I've always believed in the market's ability to make efficient selections. In many of our new ventures, we do not appoint a manager at the beginning. We simply throw everyone interested into the deep end of the pool, as it were, and 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, we'll see who the best swimmers are. And later, we'll see who the best swimmers are. And later, we'll see who the best swimmers are. When we formalize a management appointment, no one's ever surprised. The leverage we gain from employing creative people and letting them do their own thing is incredible. A few pages later, it goes back again to that idea. Everything we're doing is just increasing the likelihood of selling more Bloomberg subscriptions. Our business is information, not the medium that the information is delivered into. You see, he's already been flexible about this multiple times. Why use all forms of media rather than focus on just one? What business are we in? Some companies declare themselves to be a media company. Some companies declare themselves to be a media company. Some companies declare themselves to be a radio or in television or 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 most appropriate. With all methods at our disposal, we do better. We create or adopt a new medium. We do not ask our customers to accept less. And then I think this paragraph is interesting because he talks about the necessity for having a lot of self-confidence, having a big ego, but not making sure your ego is not too big. And so he talked about, you know, the fact is he was a micromanager. He had a really hard time delegating. And so he says, I was there in the beginning, and I too think I could do everything better than anyone else. I believe in my design instincts and my sales savvy and my management skills are the best around. Still, my ego does allow for the remote possibility that someone might be as good at one or two little things. I've admitted there's a slim chance that ideas coming from others could be valuable as well. In other words, I'm the same as every other entrepreneur, but at least I know what I don't know. And then it goes back to this aggressive personality that he has, the fact that he's unapologetically extreme. He considers his competitors as if they're trying to starve his children. 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 there are the startups that want to destroy everything that we've built. Another thing that he repeats he has in common with Edmund Land and Peter Thiel, this idea that you should not be making Me Too products. Edmund Land says, don't waste your talents on Me Too products. He says, don't waste your talents on Me Too products. He says, don't waste your talents on Me Too products. Peter Thiel says, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business. Michael Bloomberg says, what can we do that our competitors can't? There's no reason to do a copycat product. Consumers can just as easily buy from others. And then he goes back to what he was saying at the beginning of the book, that he prefers a lot of these small bets with limited downside and uncocked upside. Our modest 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 a 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 we can't handle other additional experimental ventures simultaneously. And so then there's some hints in the book of just this unreal financial performance. Again, I think he was like 98 or he might own 100% of the business now or like something like 98%. And he was like wildly successful almost from the beginning. So a few years after founding Bloomberg, I think it was in the 90s, he was making so much money in cash, he was giving away $200 million a year at charity. I think in the early 2000s, he was donating like $700 million a year. I think he's given something like over $10 billion a year to like philanthropic different like charities and philanthropic endeavors that he was interested in. At the same time, scattered throughout the book, he's got these just like very, again, unapologetically extreme people in the book. And so I think that's one of my favorites. He says, 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 ever be even. At Bloomberg, we do not want fair fights. We want to go into contests with an advantage. And so this made me think of when I got to this section, Jeff Bezos said something that's very similar. So I asked Sage about this. And I asked like, what did Jeff Bezos say about not wanting to fight a competitor as strong as you are? And it pulled a quote from one of his past episodes. And it says, when it comes to competition, you have to be able to fight a competitor as strong as you are. And it says, this is Jeff Bezos now. 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. Bloomberg is saying the exact same thing. We want to go into all these contests with an unfair advantage. I do not believe that business battles should be even. And then he talks about the importance of persistence, of resourcefulness. He says, most fortunes are built by entrepreneurs who started with nothing and generally got fired once or twice in their careers. And through history, the vast majority of great writers, artists, musicians, dancers, and athletes have come from the less financially secure families. The CEOs of many Fortune 500 companies went to a state university rather than an Ivy League school. 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. Communists tried to eliminate any form of meritocracy for 70 years. And in addition to wrecking their economies, they starved millions of people to death in the process. And then finally, he has some great advice for the future generations of entrepreneurs. Periodically, while surrounded by the fruits of our success, the profits, the power, the notoriety, I get frustrated and 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 we have to clear it with legal or had a meeting just to keep others in the loop or a 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 gotten an excuse, but everyone's got a reason. This is maddening. Why not just quit then? Chuck it all. Sell the business. Take the money and run. Why not cash in? Play it conservative. Relax. Real entrepreneurs never do. And I haven't either. Real builders are so focused 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 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. And why would I take the company public? Why would I have to answer to more partners, stockholders, and security analysts? I know why the investment bankers want me to issue stock, but why would we want to do it? We're going in the other direction. We've already bought back Merrill's 30% investment in our company. The first 10% for $200 million in 1996, and the second 20% for $4.5 billion in 2008. Not a bad return on their original investment of about $30 million. So why not sell? No thanks. Answering to no one is the ultimate situation. So back on the treadmill. Ratchet up the risk. Enter a new medium. Start another project. Improve. Develop. Expand. Go. And that is where I'll leave it. For the full story, I highly recommend reading the book. That is 433 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.
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