Bloomberg's Fifteen-Year-Old Over-Night Success
Mike Bloomberg joined Salomon Brothers in 1966, fresh out of the Harvard MBA program. He counted securities for a while before he moved upstairs to the stock-trading department, working for Jay Perry, with whom he worked until Perry moved on the Dallas, allowing Bloomberg to take his job as head of Salomon's equities desk (Purnick, 26-32). Exile to the "information services" department in 1979 came as the result of serious in-fighting with the same man who was instrumental in exiling Perry to Dallas earlier (Purnick, 33).
Exile could have been the end of the story except for Bloomberg's interest in things any trader in his right mind in the seventies wasn't even considering: how to instantaneously use information to make more money. Manual was the norm. You made decisions based on gut feel and old data. No one was taking advantage of real time information very well. No one was making use of historical information at all. Enter Mike Bloomberg.
While still a trader, he started to figure out how to program the Quotron machines that Salomon had early on invested in. Ultimately, you could ask the machine "what if" questions, something no one had ever considered doing before (Purnick, 34). So Bloomberg's exile became a learning opportunity. The Quotron turned into desk top, personal computers for every analyst, something the rest of the firm still thought a foolish waste. Main frames staffed by staff in a back room were the norm. Bloomberg pushed and pushed and pushed for more personal computers. That pushing had an effect, just not the effect Bloomberg had expected. He still had enemies (remember the guy who exiled him to IT in the first place?) who, in a reorganization of the firm, finally pushed him out the door (Purnick, 36-37) for good in 1981. A nice thing was buried in the distaste of the firing: they handed him cash and securities worth $10 million and sent him on his merry (not too happy, probably) way (Purnick, 37). Bloomberg took two other Salomon values along with him: he didn't cheat, and he "wouldn't tolerate dishonesty" (Purnick, 37).
Drum-roll please! Enter opportunity.
Basically, we all know the story from there: Bloomberg and a small team sold their services to Merrill Lynch to program some computers. Merrill kept buying and investing in Bloomberg's firm long enough for him to reach the critical mass needed by an entrepreneur to succeed. Let's just remember that by the time he closed his first deals, Bloomberg had been working diligently not for a couple years, but for almost two decades. This was no over-night success.
Reference
Purnick, Joyce. Mike Bloomberg. Money, Power, Politics. PublicAffairs. 2009.