Mike Bloomberg, the Pope, and Me

Crazy how life works sometimes

In 1997, Michael Bloomberg met me for lunch and teed up a plot twist in my life that I finally discovered 23 years later.

Bloomberg sat across from me wearing – I swear – a Batman-themed tie with his formal suit. By then his company, Bloomberg LLC, was already 16 years old, raked in annual revenue of about $1 billion, and had 73,000 of its proprietary terminals entrenched in financial institutions. Yet outside of financial circles, he wasn’t that well known. Which was one of the reasons he wrote his autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg.

Publicity for the book was the reason for our lunch. I wrote a weekly column about tech for USA Today, and somebody in PR at Bloomberg figured Mike Bloomberg should talk to me. The tech sector, in the middle of dot-com mania, was just beginning to appreciate Bloomberg as a tech pioneer. He got a keynote speaking slot that year at the Consumer Electronics Show, and showed up on a panel at the annual clubby tech insider gathering PC Forum. I was at that PC Forum and wrote that Mike was “the funniest, most talked-about speaker at that gathering of computer CEOs.”

But hardly anybody in 1997 thought Bloomberg – the company or the guy – would go on to even greater super-sized success. Bloomberg LLC rented out proprietary, “walled-garden” terminals chock full of data and communication tools for traders – a business model informed by the older era of mainframe computers tied to dumb terminals. In 1997, the future seemed to belong to non-proprietary personal computers tapping into endless information over the internet. Surely this would chew through and collapse Bloomberg’s model like termites in a support beam.

And yet today Bloomberg LLC brings in about $12 billion a year and sucks up a 33% share of the “market data” category. Mike Bloomberg, of course, ended up mayor of New York City for 12 years and took a shot at becoming president.

I imagine there are a number of reasons for this outcome, but now that I work with startups on strategy and category design, I think a big factor is the power that comes with creating a category and winning its dominant design. Before Bloomberg, market data came from scattered sources that ranged from stock tickers to pieces of paper to talking with a buddy. Bloomberg designed the market data category and set its rules so every newcomer had to follow it.

As economists have shown and we (at Category Design Advisors) have witnessed, category winners are almost impossible to beat. One reason is that those winners get embedded in our cognitive biases. We collectively believe they are the best whether or not they are. Chrysler created the minivan market in 1983. Forty years later, despite competition from the likes of Toyota and Honda, Chrysler has 50% to 60% of the minivan market. That’s the way these things go.

The other factor about many category winners is that they benefit from a data flywheel that others can never catch. For Bloomberg, the more customers and usage it got, the more data it had about customers and usage, which it could use to improve the data and services it offered, which brought in more customers and usage…and around and around. Once that flywheel gets buzzing, it’s hard for others to catch up.

Anyway, back to 1997 and the plot twist.

Mike Bloomberg and I sat down to lunch and he started telling me the story of how he tried to get a blurb for the back of his book from the pope, who at the time was John Paul II. The Vatican, he explained, had a couple of Bloomberg terminals just outside the papal office.

Here’s what I wrote in my column: “One of Bloomberg’s representatives stopped by the Vatican, and Bloomberg had her ask – seriously – about the book blurb. ‘Wouldn’t it have been great?’ Bloomberg asked, grinning devilishly over a plate of linguine with marinara sauce. ‘And I’d have done it in Latin! But the pope didn’t come through.”

In 2020, during the pandemic, I was introduced by a mutual friend to my now-partner, Katherine Oliver, who has worked for Mike Bloomberg in one capacity or another for almost her entire career. I figured she’d be amused that I wrote a column about Mike back in the ‘90s, so soon after our first date I dug up it up and sent it to her.

I quickly got a text back: “Guess who ‘the representative’ was.”

This is the column as it ran on May 12, 1997. This clipping is from The Idaho Statesman. It had first run in USA Today and then was distributed to local newspapers via the Gannett News Service.